When Youth Was King: But the “Youth Vote”, even in the 1960s, was never much more than journalistic shorthand. It was born out of liberal wish-fulfilment and made vaguely plausible by left-wing academics. Discovering that many of the Left’s supporters are young does not mean that the young support the Left.
DO YOUNG NEW ZEALANDERS vote in ways that diverge markedly
from the voting patterns of older New Zealanders? Does it still make sense to
talk about winning the “Youth Vote”? And, if it does, which of our political
parties stands the best chance?
There was a time when people took the notion of a Youth Vote
very seriously indeed. By the mid-1960s, the early cohorts of the Baby Boom
Generation were entering their late teens and early-twenties. Middle class
children in unprecedented numbers were pouring into new and expanded university
campuses. By the end of the decade, the impact of decolonisation and the
Vietnam War had transformed, “students” into an important political category.
The oft-demonstrated political activism of college students,
when combined with the explosion of what Time
magazine called “Youth Culture” (forever associated in the minds of “anyone
over thirty” with popular music, long hair, sexual licence, recreational
drug-taking and Dr Timothy Leary’s infamous formula: “turn on, tune in, drop
out”) encouraged the notion that “anyone under thirty” shared a common set of
generational expectations and interests. Without this “Youth Vote”, it was
suggested, the electoral success of mainstream political candidates could not
be guaranteed.
This was by no means as fanciful as those living fifty years
after the watershed year of 1968 might think. Had not President Lyndon Johnson
been routed by Senator Eugene McCarthy’s “Children’s Crusade”? Supported
overwhelmingly by young anti-Vietnam War student activists, McCarthy had run
the President embarrassingly close in the New Hampshire primary of January
1968. Days later, Bobby Kennedy, also running on an anti-war platform, entered
the race for the presidency. By March, Johnson was telling Americans that he
would not seek, nor would he accept, his party’s nomination. The “Youth Vote”
had driven LBJ from office.
Four years later, right here in New Zealand, the “Youth
Vote” was being taken just as seriously. Mass demonstrations against the
country’s involvement in the Vietnam War had been a feature of the early 1970s.
University students comprised the overwhelming majority of these anti-war
protesters. Few political scientists questioned the importance of the anti-war
movement in securing the Norman Kirk-led Labour Party’s landslide election
victory of 1972. Two years later, Labour attempted to lock-in the Youth Vote by
lowering the voting age to 18.
But the Youth Vote has always been a political illusion.
Middle class university students in the 1960s and 70s made up only a small part
of the Baby Boom Generation. Most young Americans and New Zealanders of that
era did not go to university. By the time many of them turned 18 they had been
working full-time for two or three years. Factory workers and shop assistants
had much more in common with their parents and co-workers than they did with
placard-waving varsity students. If they voted Labour it wasn’t on account of
the Vietnam War, but because voting Labour was what Mum and Dad, Grandma and
Grandpa, had always done.
And even among the university students themselves there were
sharp divisions. The long-haired, left-wing radicals might be the ones
everybody saw on the television news, but back on campus there were thousands
of politically conservative students who thought and voted very differently. A
university education was – and remains – a middle-class rite-of-passage. And
most middle-class people then, as now, support National – not Labour.
In truth, the “Youth Vote” has never been much more than
journalistic shorthand. It was born out of liberal wish-fulfilment and made
vaguely plausible by left-wing academics. Discovering that many of the Left’s
supporters are young does not mean that the young support the Left.
So, why the Greens believe that positioning
twenty-somethings Jack McDonald and Chloe Swarbrick high on their Party List
will attract the support of “Millennials” (the latest journalistic coinage) is
anybody’s guess. To be young does not necessarily make one Green – just ask
David Seymour and Todd Barclay!
The best evidence for something called the “Youth Vote” is,
paradoxically, the large number of young people who do not vote at all. Whether
out of ignorance, indolence, or principled resistance to a perceived lack of
credible electoral alternatives, tens-of-thousands of 18-25-year-olds simply do
not make it to the polling booths on Election Day.
Of those who do make it, the vast majority come from voting
households. Ballots, like apples, seldom fall far from the family tree.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 April 2017.
