Libs’ Latest Big Idea: Give Children — Even Babies — Voting Rights

By Selwyn Duke

“Liberals Are Such Children,” read a 2009 PennLive headline. “These people act like children,” the article states, “even though they may nominally have been adults for many years.” Perhaps this helps explain why many liberals feel a kid is mature enough to “choose his sex.” And perhaps it sheds light on an even newer left-wing effort: giving children the vote.

Oh, we’re not just talking about extending suffrage rights to 16-year-olds, which British prime minister Keir Starmer plans to do. (Any guesses as to whom Starmer thinks they’re going to vote for?) No, I mean actual little, crumb-cruncher, toy-train territory children — even babies, according to The Telegraph.

You can be forgiven if assuming this is satire. Alas, it isn’t. In fairness, this movement certainly hasn’t gained enough traction to become part of any major party’s platform. Nonetheless, the idea is advocated by pseudo-elites with advanced degrees and “respectable” positions in society. And U.K. paper The Guardian took up the cudgels for it just recently. The arguments in favor of child suffrage, it proclaimed, are “hard to refute.

Idea From the “Upside Down”

This isn’t the first time The Guardian has touted this agenda. In 2021, it published a piece by Cambridge University professor of politics David Runciman titled “Why we should give six-year-olds the right to vote.” (Some are still waiting for the article “Why We Shouldn’t Give Professorships to Childish People.”)

As to The Guardian’s recent effort, it cites “experts” such as political philosopher John Wall. He asserts that it’s “unjust that up to a third of the population [is] excluded from the democratic process.”

Next there’s Frenchwoman Clémentine Beauvais, a “teacher-researcher in educational sciences.” She says that children are good at asking pressing questions about hot-button topics, such as “money,” “meat,” and “war.” She also laments that children are excluded from voting “without any clear justification ever being provided.”

Then there’s researcher Harry Pearse. He believes that having five-year-olds cast ballots would introduce “some healthy chaos” into “the system.”

Now, it’s hard knowing how serious these people are. There’s a saying, “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bushwa.” (Yes, I cleaned that up.) Many “researchers” merely want to make their “mark” and get published. Yet so many of man’s actual intellectual triumphs have already been registered by people such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Chesterton. So these “scholars,” bereft of true insight, are perhaps relegated to delivering the NASCAR auto-crash version of intellectual endeavor. Hey, smash-ups do make an impact.

Then again, as George Orwell noted, “Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

Crashing the System

There has already been a lawsuit over children’s suffrage here in the U.S. (where else?), do note. In 2023, eight-year-old prodigy Alisa Perales sued California and the federal government for denying her voting rights. (Her father is a lawyer, surprise, surprise.)

So some are serious about this movement, and The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon thinks he knows why. The main reason “so many progressives are eager to enfranchise children,” he writes, is because

they’d overwhelmingly vote for Left-wing parties. Children, after all, are natural socialists. From birth they’re provided with food, housing, clothing and much else, without having to work or pay for it. So of course they’re attracted to an ideology which promises to extend this arrangement into adulthood.

Deacon adds, however, that some miss “a key argument against giving children the vote.” This is

that it would undermine the mantra of “stranger danger”. Come election time, politicians would be constantly lurking outside playparks and primary schools, in the hope of buttering up infant voters with pledges of later bedtimes and free sweets on the NHS [Britain’s health service].

Others also poked fun at the academic-spawned folderol. An MSN respondent wrote:

I’m upset because my dog wasn’t able to vote[. He] lives in this country and decisions made by our elected leaders could have significant impact on his wellbeing, yet he is unable to make his bark heard.

(Actually, dogs could conceivably register better election outcomes than tots. For if their votes end up being the result of chance, they could possibly get it right 50 percent of the time.)

Then there was a Facebook commenter reacting to the Guardian article on children’s suffrage. “If they can become President of the US,” she noted, “they can vote too.”

(Really, though, it’s unkind beating up on poor ailing Joe Biden.)

And the Childish Shall Lead Them

Now, responding to that last quip, some might say, “If leftists can vote, why not children?” Late journalist P.J. O’Rourke likely would’ve gotten the point. As he once wrote:

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless.

There is a truth here, too, one on which researchers and theologians both agree. For example, famed psychologist Erik Erikson promulgated his “Stages of Psychosocial Development.” These are essentially phases of moral development a child (hopefully) proceeds through. And as I once heard a clergyman put it, “Everyone is in a different stage of conversion.” (“Conversion” here means “turning from oneself, to God.”) Yet the reality is that not everyone reaches a higher stage of psychosocial development, of conversion. Many remain stunted.

What do we call such people in our time and place? Well, we know children are more emotion-driven than adults are. In fact, with infants, emotion is all they have. Now note that “[l]iberals are more emotion-driven than conservatives [are],” Israeli researchers found in 2014, stating what many consider obvious.

In other words, if O’Rourke and others claiming that liberals are children are correct, leftists’ child-suffrage efforts are entirely explainable. It’s called group patriotism.

                 This article was originally published at The New American.