In Defense of Beach Idiots

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, March 26, 2026

 

There is no great need to berate clueless adolescents for enjoying the tail end of their childhoods.

 

The New York Post is mightily upset to discover that a bunch of half-drunk spring breakers in Florida do not answer political questions in the same learned style as did Milton Friedman:

 

Fox News managed to find some of the most clueless revelers in America in a series of Florida beach interviews on “Jesse Watters Primetime” Monday.

 

The ayatollah? These kids never heard of him. Is the US at war in Iraq or Iran? Who can say?

 

And the most pressing issue facing the US?

 

“What bikini I’m gonna wear next,” one scantily clad partier on the Fort Lauderdale beach obtusely remarked in the jaw-dropping video.

 

Ugh. If this is how political junkies are required to treat their fellow citizens, you can count me out of the guild.

 

For a start, it’s not at all obvious to me that the people on that beach are any less knowledgeable about current affairs than those of a similar age who spend their days being indignantly political on social media and beyond. It is true that the figures whom Fox interviewed do not know anything useful about immigration or foreign policy or economics. But, frankly, neither do most “engaged” 18-year-olds, many of whom, by dint of their peculiar obsessions, have talked themselves into holding some of the stupidest ideological opinions ever witnessed by the tired eyes of man. I am not, as a rule, an advocate for ignorance, but I am willing to bet, for example, that the median beachgoer in Fox’s video has a better instinctive understanding of American politics than the median attendee of a Brooklyn DSA meeting. Now, as ever, intensity does not wisdom create.

 

I’d also be willing to bet that those beachgoers are far happier than most political obsessives — and, at age 20, happy is a pretty important thing to be. When you read the various judgments that have been rendered in this case, it is impossible to miss the whiff of Puritanism, which was famously defined by H. L. Mencken as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Left unspoken in every condemnation is the insistence that, rather than remain ignorant in their bliss, those people should be serious, focused, vehement, and miserable. But there will be plenty of time for that. A few years after they have left the beach, those “revelers” will have jobs, mortgages, and children. Life, as the meme has it, will come at them fast. And, when it does, they will learn about politics — or, in many cases, not learn about politics — in much the same pattern as human beings typically do. There is no great need to berate them now for enjoying the tail end of their childhoods.

 

Properly understood, politics exists to create the conditions within which civil society can thrive. In consequence, it is extremely important. But it is not — and it must never be allowed to become — an end unto itself. We must get our politics right so that we may do other things with our lives: things such as build families, form businesses, attend churches, join associations, organize sports leagues, create art, and, yes, enjoy spring break. C. S. Lewis once wrote that “the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of the spirit.” This is true in Florida today, as it was in England in the middle of the last century, as it was in the time of the Romans. To interrupt a trip to the shore with rote sand-plowing is, ultimately, to forget why one has a plow in the first instance.

 

At age 18, both of my grandfathers were prised from their levity by the call of the British Armed Forces. When the war started, one of them was an apprentice carpenter, and the other worked in an apple orchard. They went voluntarily and with pride, but had either been asked in the early summer of 1939 whether they wished to trade their situations for the deserts of North Africa and the chaos of the Atlantic Ocean, both would have politely declined. Historically, it is a great privilege to live in a time and place in which one’s primary concern can be “what bikini I’m gonna wear next.” To see young and unencumbered people with such habits is not a national disgrace or a societal failing or a civilizational problem to be solved, but a sign that our system is ticking along nicely. If one accounts for the changing fashions, the videos from Fox’s beach party could have been taken in 2005 or 1990 or 1975 or at any time in the modern era in which the United States was not engaged in a totalizing catastrophe. If, in our passion, we are determined to censure the oblivious, then let us do it within more appropriate climes. Harvard, say. Or Congress. Or, dare I say it, the press.