Democratic prudence and the youth suffrage debate.

• Author: Amsden, Brian
• Position: Report

The 1968 film Wild in the Streets depicted a dystopian future in which youth were extended the right to vote at age fourteen. With their newfound political power (and a little LSD hidden in Washington, D.C.'s drinking supply), they forced through a constitutional amendment lowering the age required for holding elected office. Soon thereafter they promoted a rock star and megalomaniac to the White House, established compulsory retirement at age thirty, and confined all U.S. citizens to concentration camps at age thirty-five. The film, which became something of a minor cult classic, appears to contemporary viewers as more comedy than drama. Nevertheless, as outlandish as the script was, argumentation scholars should not discount its message. It spoke potently, albeit hyperbolically, to fears that have animated U.S. politics since the birth of the nation. Robert Ivie (2005) has referred to these fears as "demophobia" (p. 191). They are based on a caricature of the people as an irrational mob or disease threatening to undermine the stability of the nation's republican institutions, and they are stymied only to the extent that the qualities of irrationality and depravity are localized in the persona of a scapegoat. Wild in the Streets worked this way, by replacing generalized fears of "democratic distemper" (Ivie, 2005, p. 46) with a localized threat that could be more easily contained, if not purged. And at least one critic took the film seriously. Renata Adler (1968a) of the New York Times described it as an "instant classic" (p. 21) that

sees with gay clarity ... the absolute tyranny at the hands of the young to which adults in this country seem determined, for fairly odd reasons, to subject themselves. What it knows is what every Brownie troop leader and new kid on the block used to know--that there is no more violent, demagogic, elitist, vicious and totalitarian society than a group of children. (Adler, 1968b, p. D1)

Adler's tone was atypically vitriolic, perhaps, but there is little doubt that hers was a fear widely shared in her time.

The relationship of U.S. democracy to youth is far more ambivalent than Wild in the Streets would suggest, however. In point of contrast, TIME magazine declared youth--the generation twenty-five and under--"Man of the Year" in 1966. This generation, TIME predicted, would "land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war" (para. 8). Although the sentence's coda suggested a degree of irony, the article offered, on the whole, an incredibly flattering portrayal of the young generation. Describing youth at various points as diverse, idealistic, skeptical, committed, alienated, and shrewd, the article had little to hold it together except for a profound sense of optimism in its subject.

In reality, of course, youth are neither devils nor prophets; rather, they are (among other things) a screen upon which U.S. citizens project their hopes and fears for the future of democracy. And if Jeremy Engels (2011) is correct that U.S. democracy exists in a tension between demophobia and demophilia--between fears of democratic volatility and hopes that democratic deliberation can transform that volatility into consensus--then the way that the U.S. public culture talks about youth could say far more about democracy than it does about youth. Consequently, debates concerning the role of youth in the public culture offer an extremely productive site for diagnosing the health of American democracy, and for understanding the processes by which it balances hopefulness and fears of unrest. The congressional debate over the voting age, which occurred between 1942 and 1971, is ideal for these purposes, not only because it came to fruition at the height of the generation wars, but more importantly, because it was concerned less with the substantive qualities of youth than it was with the formal qualities of deliberation and judgment in a democracy. Proponents and opponents of suffrage were not altogether inconsistent in their characterization of eighteen to twenty year-olds. Both sides described youth as idealistic, willful, passionate, and impractical. Moreover, the anti-suffragists' baleful predictions that immature citizens would submit passively to indoctrination (or worse, actively foment rebellion) were not rejected altogether by the suffragists. Indeed, at the culmination of the debate, those proposing a lower voting age relied greatly on (largely imaginary) fears of a generation in open rebellion against its elders. Ultimately, the debate was shaped less by the nation's estimate of youth than that of democracy's potential to negotiate plurality and domesticate dissent.

The importance of demophobia/philia to the youth suffrage debate is evidenced first and foremost in the historical organization of its topoi. The first twenty-four years of the debate (1942-1966) were organized around the question of whether individual youth were qualified to discharge the duties of citizenship with care and prudence. During this period, suffragists and anti-suffragists alike conceived of the electorate as an aggregate of rational individuals, and of political judgment as an individual techne. The debate shifted fundamentally in 1967, not because either side revised its appraisal of youth, but because the political upheaval of the period demanded an appreciation of the complex and organic relationship between individual citizen and democratic collectivity. After 1967, suffragists began to argue that it was not rational individuals who made the electorate prudent; rather, the electoral process itself was prudent because it was the most efficient means of managing the irreducible heterogeneity of the collectivity. In other words, even though the nation continued to regard youth as a source of unrest, even more so in the later years of the debate, suffragists managed to put forth a vision of public deliberation and judgment that accommodated that risk, at least to some extent. It was their vision of democratic prudence--a mode of political judgment located in the complex interactions of a heterogeneous collectivity--that made it possible for suffragists to have faith in democracy even while confronting the rise of a seemingly forbidding new left.

Conceptually, this essay draws on the work of Kirt Wilson (1998), James Jasinski (1992, 1995), and Robert Terrill (2001), who have demonstrated the capacity of historically, geographically, and socially localized public cultures to contest the form and function of prudence. Their work has shown that prudence is not only a series of maxims for good judgment, but more importantly a site on which advocates query, and if necessary challenge, the normative assumptions by which judgment is legitimized. In order to highlight this dimension of prudence, I draw also on Kathryn M. Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight's (1994) analysis of social controversy. They have defined social controversy as "an extended rhetorical engagement that critiques, resituates, and develops communication practices bridging the public and personal spheres" (p. 249). In other words, a social controversy is a moment when public attention is drawn to a fissure in established models of communication. And insofar as every model of communication presupposes a model of judgment, social controversies are also opportunities for the public to challenge accepted notions of prudence. Accordingly, I contend that the youth suffrage debate evolved into a true social controversy in its latter years, as arguments shifted from the capacities of individual youth to the best disposition of a democratic collectivity facing intense social conflict. This shift offered a unique opportunity for the nation to reconsider the relationship between individual and social judgment.

In order to examine this conflict and consider its implications for prudence and U.S. political deliberation generally, I begin by analyzing the arguments advanced by proponents and opponents of suffrage in the period 1942-1966. I argue that until 1967 the anti-suffragists were successful at focusing the debate on the question of whether individual youth possessed the capacity to judge. Next, I examine the debate as it developed during and after 1967, attending particularly to the suffragists' new focus on the organic relationships between disparate elements of the electorate. I maintain that their arguments presumed a new conception of prudence, one that opened up the possibility for different modes of reason and affect to participate in the process of enacting an irreducibly collective judgment. Third, I consider the limitations of the suffragists' vision, and particularly their tendency to domesticate the radical potential of democratic prudence by establishing a hierarchy between its normative and calculative elements. Finally, I conclude by arguing that social controversies, such as those which concern the form and function of prudence, have a special role in liberal public cultures, insofar as they problematize the imaginary distinction between right and good.

LIBERAL PRUDENCE

On October 19, 1942, Senator Arthur Vandenberg suggested, "if young men are to be drafted at 18 years of age to fight for their Government, they ought to be entitled to vote at 18 years of age for the kind of government for which they are best satisfied to fight" (p. 8316). Thus was inaugurated a twenty-nine year long conflict over the proper role of college-aged youth in political decision-making, a conflict that would disturb the seeming consonance and unity of the nation's liberal-democratic conception of citizenship. Although the conflict certainly was not limited to the halls of Congress, the speeches recorded in the Congressional Record and in the various congressional committee hearings documents provide the most sustained historical archive...