Toddlers

This tweet has been living rent-free in my head.

I think it’s best to give minors a partial vote each:

Age 15 to 17: 80% of a vote.

Age 12 to 14: 70% of a vote.

Age 9 to 11: 60% of a vote.

Kindergarten to age 8: 50% of a vote.

But not anything younger than that. Let the kids learn to read and write first.

What exact problem is this trying to solve?

They’ll vote for the funniest-looking candidate. They’ll vote for the party with their favourite colour. They’ll just vote for who their parents tell them to vote for.

Right. And how exactly do you think adults decide how to vote?

I often despair of democracy, because for all the performative obesiance to the principle, hardly anyone is willing to confront the core idea. This shows up exactly as this kind of hair-splitting as to who should have political rights and who should not.

When considering whether to expand the franchise to a new group of people, the immediate reaction of most existing voters is to say “hmm, I dunno, do these people deserve it?” It seems people instinctively don’t want their votes to be diluted by people who will use their votes less responsibly than they do.

This is short-term thinking. The problem is you, whoever I’m addressing here, the you who thinks that giving toddlers the vote is absurd: I guarantee you that there is a powerful clique who perceive themselves to be above you, more far-sighted, more responsible. And these people despair of a democracy in which important opportunities are squandered due to the knee-jerk self-interest of people like you.

This reaction, of wondering whether other people truly deserve the right to vote. If this is allowed to become the normal psychological framework to think about political rights. Inevitably, this is exactly how you will lose yours.

Except: this is the normal psychological framework to think about political rights. This is how almost everybody thinks. Western societies are built on a morality that requires privileges to be earned. A privilege that one holds simply for existing strikes most people as deeply wrong. And so those of us who have privileges, including the right to vote, need to see others less deserving being visibly denied those privileges.

That’s why the clear majority seem so hell-bent on removing my political rights, that they are happy to risk having their own political rights confiscated in return.

Democracy is, obviously, not a good way to make important collective decisions. In everyday decision-making, we rarely accept a 51% vote as binding on the group. That’s a fragile and hostile approach. If 51%/49% is the result, that’s a chance to stop, re-evaluate the assumptions of the discussion, try to find another way that can generate a proper consensus.

But that doesn’t scale. At a national level, there is no direct communication between political actors that could facilitate such a natural consensus. Instead, power blocs emerge, with professionals at their head devoting their entire careers towards assembling the coalitions necessary to getting things done. Those professionals inevitably come to see themselves as having more in common with each other than with the people they represent. And so the consensus that emerges naturally skews towards the concerns and interests of that group, rather than representing the interests of the entire society.

Which works, until it doesn’t. Then you get a violent revolution.

The true purpose of democracy is not that there is anything morally or intellectually superior about the wider society. It’s just that sooner or later the wider society does have the power. If you wait too long to acknowledge their concerns, that power will be exercised destructively. Better to defuse the bomb, and suffer government by a poorly-prepared opposition instead.

The core idea here is that inevitably, it is the demos of a country that wields the power, so it is the demos that ought to constitute the electorate.

But the demos has to mean the people. All of the people. Any attempt whatsoever to limit the electorate to the deserving or the responsible, means the electorate is no longer the demos. The commitment to putting the power in the hands of the people has been lost. And how can that be called democracy?

Of course, I don’t really care much about whether children can vote. I don’t believe that will significantly change our society. Like, have you seen our population pyramid lately? How many voters do you think we’re talking about here? This is a stalking horse. The question I care about is: should non-citizens be allowed to vote? And that’s something where the political consensus could not possibly be more clear. Voting rights for non-citizens is massively unpopular, everywhere. Usually, a serious crime. It would cause an outcry for any prominent politician to advocate extending the franchise in this way.

I take this personally. I am an Australian citizen. Does this give me the right to vote in Australian elections? No, because I live in Germany. Australia only allows foreign residents to vote if they are “temporarily overseas”. There’s a certain logic to that: I truly am no longer a part of the demos of Australia. But living in Germany doesn’t give me the right to vote in German elections. There are quite a lot of countries (including Germany) that allow citizens to vote regardless of where they live. But I don’t know of any countries that allow non-citizens to vote. There is a gap, and my political rights fell straight into it.

And while I am hardly an oppressed minority, you would have to be blind not to see how non-citizens are consistently taken for granted, their concerns ignored. They are expected to be grateful for being allowed to live their lives at all. Most voters would be offended if visa-holders demanded the right to participate in elections as well. But there they are, living amongst us. They have no rights, and their patience is being tested to the limit.

This is not safe.

So why should toddlers be given the vote? Because democracy means nothing if it does not mean that people who patently ought not to vote vote anyway. If you are asking, how qualified do you need to be to qualify as a voter, the answer is, as qualified as the person over there shitting in their nappy. If you do happen to see a parent leading their 2 year-old into the ballot box, that should send a powerful signal to you about what democracy truly means.

I fear that in fact the vast majority understand this lesson about the meaning of democracy perfectly well. That is precisely why they are working so hard to end it.