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Spectator
6 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Raise the age of suffrage to 25
If I had been given the vote at the age of 16, I would have put my cross beside the name of the Communist party candidate, assuming that he was not a tankie. If he was, I would have had to think long and hard; a left-wing Labour candidate might well have been preferable. I was a moderate within the CP, you see – a fan of the Italian Communist party leader, Enrico Berlinguer – and I had no time for the wretched Stalinists who, swaddled in dystopian nostalgia, comprised a broad rump of the British party. They were nicknamed tankies because they thoroughly approved of Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). I was what was then called a Eurocommunist. I knew my stuff too. I'd read Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto and Marx's Grundrisse, desperately dull though they were, as well as Edmund Wilson's brilliant history of the left, To the Finland Station. And yet of course, I still knew less than nothing. My vote for whatever bitter and deluded old oaf was standing for the CP would have been an act of radical-chic performative attitudinalising and far more fraudulent than even my mother's vote for the National Front in the first general election of 1974 because she couldn't stand Asians. All Asians. At least she meant it. Luckily, if 16-year-olds had been enfranchised in 1974, I would have still been more than two years too young to vote, thank the Lord. Sense took some time to work its way into my skull. In the 1979 general election I voted Labour and compounded that mistake by then voting for Tony Benn as the party's deputy leader in 1981. But my direction of travel was evident, at any rate. I was 25 before common sense properly dawned, which – no coincidence – is exactly the age at which the medical profession assesses a human's brain to be properly developed. It is the age at which I would grant suffrage now, providing there were also a property qualification, if I were running the country. It is the prefrontal cortex, the bit of the brain responsible for decision-making, that's the last to form. This is why, in Scotland, people under 25 are not treated as full adults when being sentenced for crimes in a court of law. But they are still allowed to vote in Scottish parliamentary elections from the age of 16. This clear contradiction in terms used to make me laugh, but not now, seeing as the whole UK is on a similar trajectory. I am a little surprised that there has not been more outcry about the government's decision to lower the voting age to 16: it is political gerrymandering of the very worst kind. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are about 1,500,000 16- and 17-year-olds in the UK and these wretched, entitled little shits may well decide the result of the next election. Don't attempt to console yourself with the notion that they won't bother voting, they'll be too busy scrolling through their phones, ha ha. The lesson from Scotland is that they vote in very great numbers – a larger proportion than for any age band until you reach the mid-fifties. And they will vote for whatever jackanapes provides them with the most unrealistic, utopian vision of the future. They will slouch towards the polling booth determined to make the world a 'kinder' place and in so doing will fuck us over completely. Nor is there any logical reason why 16 should be the end of it. I think 18 is too young to vote, but at least it has a resonance as the age of majority; 16 does not. Already, in Scotland, one can register to vote at the age of 14 and there was an article in the Guardian recently (which I blogged about for The Spectator) which suggested that babies should be allowed to vote. That's the way we're going, and it would not surprise me if one day the left attempts to win back the foetal vote by assuring the unborn that, while they are probably going to be killed a few hours before birth, they still have full voting rights. The counter-argument, parroted by all those who support lowering the age of suffrage, is that while the brain may not be fully formed at 16 (or anywhere near being so), there are plenty of people in later years with cognitive impairment, such as those suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia. Yes, indeed – but they tend not to vote. I mean, I suppose they may venture out of the booby hatch intending to, but they will almost certainly find themselves half an hour later standing in Halfords asking if they can buy some gravy granules. And yes, of course, there are plenty of people over the age of 17 who are fantastically stupid, pig-ignorant of almost everything, scarcely able to draw a breath without becoming intellectually challenged, like the woman on the quiz show Tipping Point the other night who located Singapore in Europe. But broadening the spectrum of stupidity is not, to my mind, a means of redressing the problem. My clarion call is 'no representation without taxation', and to the ninnies who insist that 16-year-olds would be liable to pay tax if they earned more than about £12,000 per annum, I say: how many actually do so? Nine? But if that's the chief objection, then by all means allow voting only for those who pay tax – which would handily remove from the electoral roll around half of those in the next generation band, the 18- to 24-year-olds. I was 13 at the time of that first 1974 election, and my comprehensive school held a mock election which, as the Communist candidate, I won by a landslide. I think an end to exams and the school uniform were the central planks of my manifesto.
Wall Street Journal
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Meet MAGA's Favorite Communist
Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S. Last year, he led the campaign that pressured Harvard University into replacing Claudine Gay as its president. His crusades against critical race theory and DEI in higher education have shaped President Trump's aggressive policies toward elite universities like Harvard, which the administration targeted this week with a $2.26 billion funding freeze. For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called 'How the Regime Rules,' which he describes as a 'manifesto for the New Right.' At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. 'Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,' said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
