By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 07, 2016
The Hillary Clinton campaign is deploying former vice
president Al Gore to rev up the youth vote, the Washington Post reported this week.
Stop laughing.
The announcement elicited a lot of mockery from various
corners of the right. Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) scoffed on Twitter that he
heard Gore is hosting a Clinton campaign event for Millennials “sponsored by
Alta Vista & featuring Ace of Base. It’s gonna be the bomb . . . ” For
those of you too young or too old to remember, those used to be things.
Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt played an extended clip
from the TV series South Park in
which Al Gore pompously warns of the threat from ManBearPig, a “creature that
is half man, half bear, and half pig.” Hewitt went on to suggest that using
Gore was a mistake because Millennials were raised on South Park and can’t stand Gore.
Now, as the columnist who wrote the first (and still most
important) piece addressing the vital question of whether or not Gore is an
alien — he was born about nine months after the UFO incident in Roswell, New
Mexico, for what that’s worth — I take a back seat to no one in the
time-honored practice of Gore-mockery. Indeed, the idea that the Clinton
campaign has tapped the one major political figure who makes Hillary seem
relaxed, easygoing, and hip is funny on its face. If the two appear together,
some might even respond, “Huh! I never noticed until now how surprisingly
lifelike Hillary Clinton is.”
But there are a couple of problems here. The first is a
narrow point. The Clinton campaign has activated Gore to woo Millennials who
are worried about global warming, not young people generally. That makes a lot
of sense.
The headlines about Clinton’s “Millennial problem” can be
misleading. Yes, she has a problem with them, but it’s not that she’s losing
the youth vote to Trump. She’s crushing Trump among young voters by double
digits. An ABC News/Washington Post
poll showed her beating Trump among people ages 18–39 by a margin of 51–27.
Another recent poll of likely Millennial voters ages 18–30 had Clinton leading
Trump by a 74–2 margin among blacks, 71–6 among Asians, 64–9 among Latinos, and
41–31 among whites.
Clinton will crush Trump among young voters. Her problem
is that there may not be a lot of young people who vote. Democrats need young
voters. If the legal voting age in 2008 had been 35, John McCain would have
beaten Barack Obama.
Then there’s the broader point: It’s silly to talk about
Millennials as a homogenous group, not just racially but in most things. Sure,
some generalizations are possible about a cohort that grew up with the Internet
versus one that didn’t. But generational stereotyping is the first refuge of
lazy journalists and people with low self-esteem. Reporters love to reduce
large segments of the population to neat categories because it’s easier to
write broadly that way.
It’s funny: When writers over-generalize about race,
ethnicity, or gender, controversy usually follows. But if you pretend you
“know” someone’s beliefs and desires just by looking at their date of birth, no
one blinks an eye. As a matter of logic, that’s a form of prejudice, too.
By no means am I suggesting that young people should take
knee-jerk offense at ageism. Nor am I saying that young people are no different
than old people. Anyone who was young — which includes every non-dead non-young
person in the world — knows that youth has its good points and bad.
But being young is no accomplishment. Which gets me to
the point about self-esteem. People who take excessive pride in being a member
of a generation — any generation — are basically declaring that they have nothing
better to brag about. There was no heroic “greatest generation.” Rather, there
were a bunch of individual people who did heroic things. If you spent D-Day
drunk at a bar in Cleveland, you get no more credit for storming the beach at
Normandy than I do.
Gore may help Hillary with Millennials who consider him
the pope of the Church of Environmentalism (just as septuagenarian socialist
Bernie Sanders might help with Millennial socialists). Millennials who think
Gore is a plodding, sanctimonious huckster might say, “Hey it’s the ManBearPig
guy!”
That’s as it should be, because any group of 74 million
Americans is going to defy the secular astrology that passes as generational
analysis.
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