Category Archives: 2012 election

where should college students vote?

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(Chicago) I am here for a meeting about voting and education laws and how they affect youth. One issue is college students’ voting. If your family home is in one community, but you reside in another town while you attend college, you generally have a legal right to choose either of these places to vote.

Sometimes state officials try to discourage students from voting in their college towns by disseminating scary messages about the consequences. For instance, Maine warns that voting in that state means establishing residency there, and if you are a resident, you must transfer your driver’s license to Maine. “Driving without a Maine license more than 90 days after you have established residency in the state is a crime.” I am very suspicious of these messages, especially when they come without any notice that you have a right to vote where you attend college and that voting is a valued civic act.

But even though you have a legal right to choose where to vote, you should make the choice responsibly. Voting is always an ethical decision, because it doesn’t actually pay off for the individual. (Too many other people get to vote as well.) It only makes sense to vote for what you think is right. And for residential college students, a preliminary question is: where is it right to vote?

One approach would go like this. First, pick the party and candidates that are best for the country. Then cast your vote wherever is (a) legal and (b) most effective. For example, vote in a swing state if you have that choice. The core ethical question is whom to support; where to vote is just a means to that end.

If you do not happen to be a college student who has a choice about where to register, you should advocate for students on your side of the political debate to vote where it counts most, and you should hope that students on the other side are not so sophisticated.

That’s one way of looking at the matter. It neglects a different set of considerations. People are eligible to vote in their communities (not anywhere they choose) because they have a stake there. Decisions made at the community level affect them. They are supposed to exercise their citizenship in full—not just voting for presidential and congressional candidates but also following the local news, discussing issues, and participating in public work so that their experiences inform their political decisions.

If that’s your view of citizenship, then the primary question is where you are most informed and committed. This may either be your hometown or your college town. Which one is in a battleground state should not be a major consideration.

A 2004 survey suggested that undergraduates shift from generally registering at home in their freshman year to generally registering in their college towns as seniors. If they should vote where they are most committed and knowledgeable, that is an appropriate trend.

Edmund Burke would vote Democratic

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Edmund Burke stands for the proposition that the status quo is likely better than any ambitious reform. Even if current institutions are based on unjust or foolish general principles, they have gradually evolved as a result of many people’s deliberate work, so that they now embody some wisdom. People have accommodated themselves to the existing rules and structures, learned to live with them and plan around them, and have woven more complex wholes around the parts given by laws and theories. Meanwhile, proposed reforms are almost always flawed by limited information, ignorance of context, and downright arrogance. In politics, as in medicine, the chief principle should be: “First, do no harm.”

In any debate, the Burkean conservative position is worth serious consideration. I come down on that side pretty often. And given the alternatives, I almost always vote for the Burkean political party in the United States, which is the Democratic Party.

It is the Democrats, after all, whose main goal is to defend the public institutions built between 1900 and 1960: neighborhood public schools, state universities, regulated capital markets, federal health programs, science funding, affirmative action, and the like, against untested alternatives based in the abstract theories of neoliberalism. Importantly, Democrats defend existing institutions without heartily endorsing them. A typical Democratic position goes something like this: Neighborhood public schools are inequitable and sometimes oppressive, but they need our support because lots of teachers and families have invested in them, they are woven into communities, and the radical critiques of them are overblown.

What about health care reform? The actual reform of act of 2010 is classically Burkean in that it weaves together existing private and public institutions in an effort to prevent change (in the form of cost inflation) and fill a fraying gap in the existing system. To be sure, many grassroots Democrats wanted a more radical reform, a single-payer system. But that was an official plank of the Democratic Party platform starting in1948; it is unfinished business from a time when the party was still “progressive” in the root sense of pushing for progress.

What about gay rights and the redefinition of marriage? First of all, this is one of very few exceptions to the general Burkean inclination of the Democratic Party: a case where the Party does want something new. But the President himself holds an almost perfectly Burkean position on gay marriage: It will be OK when it comes, he doesn’t have a principled objection to it, but he doesn’t want to push it from Washington because society needs time to adjust to it, state by state. Local norms vary and deserve some deference.

The Burkean conservatism of the Democratic Party is not merely tactical, a way of staving off undesired change by playing defense. It has philosophical roots. On the center-left, after all, is where you encounter the strongest endorsements of indigenous cultures and traditions, of deference to community norms and assets. It’s also on the Democratic side where “sustainability” (i.e., preserving something that is) seems most attractive as a guiding principle, and where people are highly sensitive to fragility, unanticipated consequences, human arrogance. Conservation, preservation, and respect for tradition are in tension with the technocratic inclinations of the Party, but they represent a powerful current in center-left thought.

The most reflective and consistent recent American Burkean was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He opposed the War on Poverty in the 1960s because he thought it would destabilize communities and was based on arrogant abstractions dreamed up in academia. He then opposed the Reagan-era cuts in those programs on the same grounds. Another politician might have been blowing in the political winds, but Moynihan wrote rather extensively against both reforms on Burkean grounds. In the 1960s, he was marginal as a Democrat, excoriated by liberals and hired by Nixon. By the time he voted against Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, he stood right at the heart of a now-Burkean party.

Aren’t the Republicans also conservative, in a Burkean sense? Maybe some are at the grassroots level, but the national party’s leaders seem eager to revolutionize America by adopting libertarian experiments. They often characterize their reforms as a return to the American past, but they mean the relatively distant past and its forgotten principles. The Paul Ryan budget would take us back to before the New Deal. Rick Santorum would move us back to before the sins of the 1960s. Burke never argued in favor of radical backward steps or original principles. It was the messy status quo, not the distant past, that attracted his respect.

I do not mean this post as a critique of the Democratic Party. I am often inclined to support the Burkean side in an argument. I do lament that our two parties are (respectively) Burkean conservative and right-radical. We would be better off if an ambitious, reformist left also existed to press for change. At least, we would be better off if people realized how the current political spectrum is arranged and voted accordingly. The choice is not really between left and right but between Burke/Hayek/Niebuhr conservatism and Milton Friedman/Antonin Scalia/William F. Buckley conservatism.

advocating voter modernization to a FOX News audience

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In lieu of a substantive blog post today, here’s a link to my op-ed on
FoxNews.com, “Why the GOP’s future could depend on Romney’s ability to connect with young people.” I float an argument for modernizing the voting system that I mean (sincerely, and not just for tactical reasons) to appeal to a Fox-News-reading audience:

Most states prevent eligible voters from registering during the very period when interest in a campaign reaches its height, the last month before an election. What business would require you to sign up for its service months in advance and then appear in person at a particular location during limited hours to obtain it?

That is no way to encourage political participation in a great democracy, and it’s one reason that U.S. turnout is usually the lowest among all the developed democratic countries in the world.

a snapshot of Millennials

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A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University offers some intriguing findings about Millennials (defined in this instance as ages 18-24).

Self-image as a generation: Asked how their generation differs from their parents’, a total of 27% give critical answers (lazier, entitled, more selfish, or generally negative). A total of 21% say they are more more tech-savvy or better educated than their parents. And 17% say they are less religious/moral, or more tolerant, or more liberal. Looking at the historical data, I would say that they are more liberal on some social and economic issues than their parents were at the same age. They spend considerably less time reading and studying, which could be a sign of laziness, although that trend alone doesn’t support a holistic indictment. They are more tech-savvy and perhaps somewhat better educated, although trends in educational attainment have plateaued during their lifetimes. The negative responses may reflect a general tendency to assume that things are declining.

Race: An important respect in which young people are not very liberal is race. Almost half (48%) of the respondents think that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Fifty-eight percent of white respondents think that’s the case. Note that they are demonstrably wrong: discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities remains a powerful force. And we now live in a time when the Supreme Court will strike down almost any affirmative efforts to reduce racial segregation.

Ideology: Responses are a little mixed, reflecting the ambivalence that people of all ages feel. A significant majority (56%) say that government has grown over the years because it has “gotten involved in things people should do for themselves.” More than two thirds think (either agreeing or mostly agreeing) that poor people have become too dependent on government assistance. This is interesting since the federal government has in fact withdrawn from providing welfare and housing directly and no longer intervenes in other prominent ways, such as by desegregating local schools.

On the other hand, nearly two thirds think that inequality of opportunity is a big problem. These responses are not contradictory if substantial numbers of Millennials want to see more equality but distrust the government as a means to that end. Trust in government has eroded badly.

Asked to rate their feelings for various groups on a 1-100 scale, survey respondents respond very positively about Christians, Jews, and African Americans, less so about Muslims and Mormons. The Christian Right scores in positive territory at 54.1; Occupy Wall Street is below the midpoint at 44.5. The Tea Party is a little lower at 41, and the federal government in Washington scores worst of all at 40.9.

the changes in voting laws

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Craig Newmark has a nice graphic illustrating the rapid changes in state voting laws since 2010, most of which make voting more restrictive. I’ve been thinking about this issue in various ways all week, meeting with key experts in DC on Monday, writing a short op-ed for the Tufts student paper, addressing the issue on a public panel today, and thinking about various forms of useful research we might do during this cycle.

We should worry about the effects of the new photo ID laws and other new restrictions. Perhaps most troubling to me is Florida’s requirement to be licensed before you can register voters; the state also threatens high fines if you don’t submit your lists on time. As a result, a lot of nonpartisan voting organizations are withdrawing from Florida. CIRCLE’s contribution will be some research on the effects of these new policies.

But we shouldn’t allow the new restrictions to occupy our whole attention, because the state laws already varied enormously before 2010. Some were friendly to voting. Election Day Registration is allowed in some dates and has been found to raise youth turnout by some 14 percentage points. Other rules were already very onerous, far more so than in other democracies. As I wrote in my op-ed, “our system is complicated, cumbersome, uneven and easy to tweak for partisan gain.”

It needs a fundamental overhaul, and we should be challenging  basic assumptions. Why, in this day and age, should individuals have to register at all? (There are other ways to verify eligibility.) Why should partisan elected officials get to administer local elections? Why should the voting age be 18?