The Adolescent Citizen
California State Senator Henry Stern introduced Senate Constitutional Amendment 2 allowing 17-year-olds to vote in California elections based on the precedents of 17-year-olds being able to join the military (with parental permission), the driving age of 16, youth's expanding demographics, and their supposed greater interest in political action. This is part and parcel of a progressivists’ movement to create the Adolescent Citizen.
In the Constitution, voting was initially limited to "responsible" citizens such as the Framers, namely adult male property owners. Eventually the vote was wisely extended to all adult males, then those adult males who had been property themselves, and belatedly to adult women. All had achieved the condition of born or naturalized citizenship. The central thesis of suffrage for all these groups was the personal responsibility that must accompany individual liberty. This was reflected in clear public recognition of each voter’s potential or realized economic independence. These two conditions are not a common asset of those under age 18 then and especially in modern times. The civic construction of our society, our Constitution-based country, is not the limiting factor. Those two conditional barriers are set by recognizing common natural limits.
Scientifically our brains have not completely matured until age 25. Our frontal and prefrontal cortices are not yet the controls of our behaviors or beliefs. Eighteen has been the age of military service based on completing a basic education, a cultural history of being able and expected to establish an economically independent life, maximum physical quickness and strength, but recognition of the ongoing need for further external training and discipline in the “new” family of the military. No advanced nation uses resources younger than 18 except in extremis. The political resources of those under age 18 are unfortunately often expressed in extremis.
The ostensible greater political interest of this younger age group is not accompanied by a demonstrated adequate training in rationally obtaining and evaluating information. Social media has dissocialized personal experience and knowledge. This is why we have prevented youth, until recently, from giving "informed consent" for risky medical procedures. Now in many venues those who are physically capable of inducing or carrying pregnancy are empowered to end that pregnancy regardless of age or family culture. In many of these same venues adolescents with minimal concept of adulthood, or even pre-pubertal, are encouraged and empowered to make permanent and potentially damaging changes to their born biologic status. Despite the unknown conscienceless potential damages to their future, perhaps they too should be granted suffrage?
The excess risk of drivers below age 25 due to poor judgmental abilities is economically recognized in market insurance rates. Average general knowledge and civics knowledge is shown to be far less in today's college graduates than prior generations of high school graduates. After catapulting our Greatest Generation into the harshest of adulthoods we have spent subsequent generations infantilizing our youth with social, cultural, educational, and economic deferrals of adulthood. Far better we return to educating 17-year-olds in the aspirational civics history of our country than turn them loose to vote for the latest Twitter Troll or Snapchat Senator.