Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone
And beyond voting, it helps explain why the left is always promoting youth culture, notwithstanding that its leaders, from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to the likes of Noam Chomsky, are mostly so old. Leftist politics, as noted above, is something that the manipulative old sell to the gullible young. Hence leftists nonstop efforts to produce more gullible young people.
Young people are susceptible to socialism for a number of reasons. One is that families, by and large, actually do operate along more or less socialist lines. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, is a fair description of how most families work. Parents have jobs, earn, pay bills, care for their young, provide clothes, education, medical care and more, without the children being expected to pay their way or, nowadays, even contribute. (That last was quite different a few generations ago, when teenagers provided, on average, about a third of the household income.)
Since this works at home certainly for the children who are the recipients of their parents largesse it seems natural to expand it to society as a whole. People who have been looked after for their entire lives are likely to be comfortable with the idea of being looked after in the future.
Of course, it works at home because the parents feel an attachment to their children, and a loyalty to them, that people don t feel for strangers. In ethnically homogenous countries, one sees a greater support for generous social benefits, because the populace is in some sense related; support for such benefits tends to drop when immigration renders those countries more heterogenous. Without such filial bonds, socialism works much less well. Except for the people at the top, of course, who look for young people to support their agendas because middle-aged people mostly know better.
But to retain the support of the younger people, they must be insulated from the objections of the middle-aged. This is done by cultivating youth culture. Don t trust anyone over thirty is a famous example. The reason you re not supposed to trust them is that they are likely to tell you that the exciting new socialist ideas you re being fed have in fact been tried over and over again for more than a century, generally with disastrous results.
Glenn Reynolds makes good points.