The Liberty Papers

I saw popping up in my Facebook feed a discussion on Kevin’s Facebook regarding the comments that Fox News’ Kimberly Guilfoyle made during a forum on what Democrats offer young women, a typically liberal voting bloc. Her controversial comments noted that she believed “millennial” women (and men, as she later clarified on Twitter) should stay out of the voting box and “go back to Tinder and Match.com”.

I was left with a pressing question… what the hell is “Tinder”? After doing some research, I found it was like a GPS-based Hot or Not. Kind of creepy if you ask me, but I wish it was this easy to get laid when I was in my 20s. There were no free sex dating sites or apps like Tinder back then! After my research, I instantly dismissed the initial comments. After all, if I wanted to get emotional any time a Fox host said something stupid, I’d be writing for Media Matters instead of The Liberty Papers. But the discussion on Kevin’s page – largely involving younger conservative women, many of whom were critical of the remarks themselves – gave me an epiphany regarding “millennials”.

I remember when I was a teenager – I’m 34 – everyone was making a big deal out of Generation X. We were these new breed of teenagers, and we were Everything Wrong With Americaâ„¢: we were uncouth, undisciplined, and uncontrollable. We were, in short, animals who were going to destroy America, said a generation of Americans who, before we were born, engaged in free love, did LSD by the bucket, and wore bell-bottom pants. The new generation isn’t so different, they just have the technology, like these hook-up apps (click here), that means they can do free lovin’ better than we ever could!

That generation of children that slammed my own generation – the Woodstock generation – was rebelling against their own conservative parents, who… wait, wasn’t Rock and Roll music going to destroy America, too? That Elvis Presley and his gyrating hips and oh my goodness are those black singers on my radio!? Help a young buck out. This is a conservative site, I know my readers here are old enough to remember.

I don’t know if their parents had anything that was Destroying Americaâ„¢ – between the Great Depression and World War II, they seem like they were too busy not dying to worry about how Jazz music was affecting our future – but there’s a history, through multiple generations of kids being dumb, getting older, becoming comparatively less dumb, and then railing at the dumbness of their own children. Add in a few hack journalists – old people, what did we call “clickbait” in the 80s? – and it’s always a case of The Youth Destroying America.

We’re no different. Many of my associates from my youth, possessed with a combination of strong libido, poor impulse control and even poorer sex education, have had children who are now either in or approaching their teens, and many of these people naturally rail against what children and millennials have become, forgetting that in many cases, they were even dumber when they were that age.

Where this ties into Guilfoyle’s comments is that I don’t necessarily think this is a consequence of ageing. I don’t think people just automatically go from being dumb to being smart as they get older. The only difference is how their vapid, narrow-minded worldview affects arbitrary political views, and who that happens to align with at the time. Voters aren’t absent-minded because they’re young, or because they vote for one side or the other; it’s an issue that stretches across all ages.

Poorly educated younger voters – who don’t read the news, don’t consider alternative worldviews, and generally only care whose bed they’re going to spend the night in – tend to vote liberal for many narrow reasons, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll boil it down to “screw the man”. They support Operation Wall Street, favour income redistribution, are against the drug war and support higher property taxes because it boils down to more for them, less for everyone else. Forget nuance. Forget learning the issues. Damnit, the world is burning, and they don’t have time for that shit!

Eventually, those kids will get older, and get married and have kids of their own. Now, with the burden of that higher tax on their shoulders, and scared for their children, they slam into the other extreme. Ban all drugs! Put away criminals! Lower taxes! End social safety nets! Lock up potential predators (even if guilty of nothing more than thought crimes)! All because If It Only Saves One Child!â„¢ Forget nuance. Forget learning the issues. Damnit, Timmy has to get to football practice, and they don’t have time for that shit!

Soon, my generation, like those behind us, will get old. Now, the same people who railed for school spending in their 20s will want to pull it back. What do they care? Their kids are graduated. Instead, it will be about protecting their social security, their Medicare, and their freedom, no matter how poor their understanding of that word is. People who couldn’t stop putting drugs into their bodies as youths will continue to rail against those that do so now, because it’s their property that could be TP’d as some youth’s prank. Forget nuance. Forget learning the issues. Damnit, they’re old, they’re running out of time for that shit!

Low information voters go across generations, and across virtually any boundary one can think of, be it race, gender, age, income, etc., and despite the protests from people who usually are older, the margins are far thinner than people think. The difference is that we’re willing to tolerate the idiots who happen to align their views with our own. When Kim Guilfoyle slams millennial women, she’s not slamming a generation – young Republican voters are surely her equivalent to how a racist refers to his Black Friend – she’s slamming people who vote Democrat. Likewise, young people are more willing to tolerate Occupy, no matter how noxious it gets, because old people don’t get it, despite the many, many of them that actually do, if anyone took the time to talk to someone instead of yelling at them.

The kind of voters who don’t read, don’t learn, and ultimately just fumble their way through life, and still vote in who gets to run the country, are an issue and a problem that needs to be dealt with, no matter the political persuasion. Our democracy is a chain, and that chain is as strong as its weakest link. Whether that link is concerned about getting laid on… uh, that get laid app thingy… or is foolishly buying gold coins because someone on TV told them the economy was going to crash, is irrelevant.