Commentary

Democrats' Newest Old Idea: Bash Youth

by Mike Males, 11/20/05

Just as voters show signs of tiring of the right wing's culture war, Democrats are champing to revive it. If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee 2006's chair, Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois--and liberals who lustily cheered his ideas at the Robert F. Kennedy memorial last week--prevail, the party's 2006 "values" strategy will feature tough "moral values" sermons trashing young people as out of control, requiring more curfews, V-chip censorship, uniforms, and discipline crackdowns.

Liberals' infuriating self-destructiveness rises yet again. In fact, few groups offer more hope for Democrats and progressive causes than young people--especially poorer ones taking renewed interest in politics. News networks' exit polls during the otherwise dismal 2004 presidential election revealed that had 18-24 year-olds (whose turnout leaped 50 percent from 2000 to 2004) been the only voters, Democrat John Kerry would have swamped President Bush by a thunderous 17-million vote margin. The 22-point nationwide gap between liberal-leaning younger voters and increasingly conservative, older Baby Boomers opened up gaping chasms in key states: 30 points separated younger and older voters in California and New York, 36 in North Carolina, 56 in Mississippi.

Suddenly, younger voters are making a difference. In the November 8 election, conservatives suffered sweeping defeats, led by California's 400,000-vote crushing of a right-wing culture-war centerpiece--forcing parental notification for teenagers' abortions. Pre-election polls indicated California's conservative ballot issues lost only because younger voters overruled older ones. Voters ages 18-34 rejected the anti-abortion initiative by a 16-point margin and Gov. Schwarzenegger's union-shackling measure by 26 points, supplying progressives' margins of victory.

Surveys find younger voters much more favorable than older voters to gay rights and strong government action to enforce social and economic justice--speaking of "values" Democrats should be championing. Teenagers are even more progressive than 20-agers.

Emanuel and Democrats' new "morals" crusaders have learned nothing from the "Democratic family values" disaster forged by former President Bill Clinton' s Republican-envying Welfare Reform Task Force. As Clinton's presidency relentlessly demonized young people as welfare queens, druggies, thugs, and morals sewers, Democrats lost 64 House and Senate seats (forfeiting both houses of Congress), 12 governorships (losing once-solid statehouse control), and a dozen state legislatures. A big reason: Clinton's youth-bashing demagoguery drove young-voter electoral participation to an all-time low. Now, liberals once again are poised to perpetuate their own decline by viciously attacking the young in a futile effort to lure hopelessly reactionary baby-boom voters.

In response to National Youth Rights Association president Alex Koroknay-Palicz's question, Emanuel declared that restrictions on youth cut crime. He's wrong. Accumulating research shows "values" quick fixes don't work. Study after study found curfews, school uniforms, "back to basics" and "zero tolerance" schools, student drug testing, boot camps, trying youths in adult courts, and other Clinton panaceas did not reduce youth crime, drug abuse, truancy, school violence, or other ills.

Research "fails to support the argument that curfews reduce crime or criminal victimization," a 10-study review by Indiana University public policy professor Kenneth Adams found. In particular, analysis of curfew enforcement shows police waste time removing law-abiding youth (disproportionately of color) from public places, resulting in more dangerous streets. San Francisco, which abolished its curfew in 1992, had the nation's biggest drop in violent crime and youth homicide during the 1990s, much larger than cities such as Chicago that enforced curfews.

Systematic studies by staid Educational Testing Service and Notre Dame education department researchers found school uniforms and "zero tolerance" policies do not improve students' discipline, attendance, or drug/alcohol compliance and may have negative effects on academic performance. Challenging another Clinton (and now Republican) cure-all, the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future researchers' 900-school study found school drug-testing programs, whether focused on athletes or all students, have no effect on student drug use--except possible increases in use of drugs other than marijuana.

But forget politics and science; the biggest reason for Democrats to affirm younger people is our national interest. America's rapid racial transition is led by youth. In 1970, eight in 10 teens were white; today, 60 percent. Over the next three decades, census projections show, youth will become all minority. Democrats' attacks on the racially-diversifying younger generation to pander to aging, fearful whites are dishonest and destructive.

Democrats should be celebrating the fact that racial change among the young has accompanied not disaster, but improved youth behaviors. Rather, it is older Baby Boomers, overwhelmingly white and more affluent, that show the biggest increases by far in rates of drug abuse, serious crime, violence, HIV infection, family breakup, personal greed, and amoral political behaviors that menace our social fabric. It's no accident that the older generation's worst youth-bashing "Bills"--Clinton, Bennett, Cosby, Maher, O' Reilly, and the like--also display the worst personal irresponsibilities.

In sharp contrast to Franklin Roosevelt's and John F. Kennedy's ringing affirmations of youth, modern Democrats and progressives see only dark menace in rising generations and push anti-youth repressions with mindless hostility. As Democratic youth-bashers pursue a sleazy strategy to exploit aging America's irrational fears of youth, minorities, and social change, they demonstrate yet again that Democrats' "new ideas" mean resurrecting the worst old ones.

Mike Males, senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz