Why Do Young People Vote for Economic Dependency?

A longer answer at RCP.

[C]ollege students’ induction into the lifestyle and worldview of the left hits them in their formative years, and this has an effect that goes well beyond the actual number of votes cast by college students. It is not just that they lean left but that they identify themselves as being on the left by virtue of having gone to college. The ideas of the left are so dominant among college students that they become associated with youthful idealism and with being educated and (supposedly) sophisticated, as opposed to those unenlightened bumpkins who stayed back home and became plumbers instead. By this process, leftism becomes part of the cultural class identity of college-educated people—which is the only real class distinction that this country has.

Charles Murray has been writing recently about the increasing tendency of Americans to sort themselves into two classes, the college-educated and the non-college-educated. So to lean to the right and to support, say, lower taxes and entitlement reform, is to risk a certain degree of social ostracism from one’s professional and social peers.

And a shorter one from Instapundit:

The family is communist — from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs — and it takes a while to realize that the rest of the world doesn’t work that way, because only parents are willing to make that sort of sacrifice, and then only for their own kids.

I think they begin to realize it when they move out of the category of People Living On Someone Else's Dime to the category of The Guy With the Dimes.

I'm taking a three day weekend but I'll post some short things so the cobs don't feel obligated.

posted by Ace at 02:27 PM

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