If you're not going to be around in 20 years, don’t understand the issues that will impact working people today and into the next generation, maybe you shouldn’t be voting.
I’m not sure I could fully express how foul I consider this recent memeplex that older people shouldn’t be allowed to participate in democracy.
We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
People try to raise the voting age limits all the time to curb the political influence of the younger voters. It’s a situation like class wars where one side is playing hardball and the other side isn’t even aware they were playing.
Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) for “ageism” despite ageism already being written into the rules, and despite the elderly here (in the US) are continually trying to shift those rules even further in their own favor.
The hand of the dead should not bind the living, nor should the hand of transient populations bind those with a long-term stake in the society. And there will inevitably be some edge-cases where people slip around the edges of the rules (citizens with deadly illnesses, immigrants who own homes and settle, etc) but those are just the guiding principles society has agreed upon, except when it comes to the elderly.
This is not why we don't allow migrants who have not yet become citizens the ability to vote. They have not (yet) been granted a place in society because they have not yet demonstrated commitment to the country, nor contributed, and the country has not yet decided they are valuable enough to allow into the society.
> We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
Yes, due to inexperience of life, ignorance of politics and the wider world, and brains which are not yet fully formed, reasons that people below these ages are denied full autonomy in a number of areas. These reasons are not applicable to most older people.
> People try to raise the voting age limits all the time
In the context of the UK, which this discussion is about, this has literally never happened, not once. The elections are comparatively well run, you seldom have to wait more than a few minutes to vote there because polling stations and staff are not limited, gerrymandering doesn't exist, voter suppression is pretty universally regarded as evil. You seem to be in the US, one of your political parties appears to have effectively become cancerous and is trying to kill US democracy, I wish you luck in dealing with it but inter-generational hate is unlikely to help.
> It’s a situation like class wars where one side ... Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) ... those are just the guiding principles ...
There are no sides here. There is no war between the young and the old. These are not principles that society has agreed on at all. It's hard to see how you could be more wrong. I 'pounced' upon these views because they are gross.
At what age do you think people have no stake in the long term future? Do you only have a stake or guidance to give if you personally will be affected? Do you not get to vote on the short term matters that do personally affect you? Should people in general only be able to vote on things that affect them personally and directly? I don't have kids, should I be denied a vote because we might be deciding eduction policy and school funding?
Besides naked prejudice, you seem to have a very transactional view of democracy - you assume people will obviously only vote in their own short-term self interest, not use their knowledge and morality to guide their choices for their own good and that of others.
I wish you luck in fixing the US, but don't project its flaws onto everyone else. And don't just blame old people for your woes. Those steering the ship over there are not all ancient and there are plenty of young people involved in all sorts of terrible stuff.
Moreover, you can be 18, not be around in 20 years and don't understand the issues that will impact working people today.
Or you can be 40 and never have worked a single day.
Or you can be 80 and have a lot of experience and understand plenty about history repeating and see things coming before anyone else.
Age is one of the worst proxies for human intelligence
A lot of the rhetoric around "old people not getting it" sounds to me a lot like that classmate that never studied, but blamed the professore for the bad votes, "he hates me" they usually say.
Whoever suggested it was a good one? I would never support any attempt to block older voters from participating in democracy, but it can be an issue if a particular demographic, particularly one that might have the least direct motivation to vote for policies aimed at long-term system wide improvements, has outsized representation. Interestingly we allow that governments are determined currently by the number of seats (representing a particular area) they can win, maybe it's not so crazy to consider the number of age brackets they can win...that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome.
that's democracy working as intendend.
Besides: don't underestimate the fact that older people have much more motivation than adults, because they are at rest, they can think about the past, they actually have a past to think about and can draw conclusions on what their generation did and what the results were and how that affects the people they love and are worried about, particularly their nephews, who represent the real "new hope" for them. Most elderly were too busy working and taking care of their families when they were younger to focus on the long term results of their actions.
While younger people lack either the motivation, the experience or the tools to make such an analysis.
> that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome
You are assuming that all the old people vote against the interests of the 20-25 years old people and vice versa, but actually it's very far from the truth.
The tension between equal representation and fairness of the outcome has been studied for a long time.
See the Arrow impossibility theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
Not at all - but we already accept that the fact there are so many more voters in concentrated in a few cities that a pure one-person-one-vote system would lead to virtually no representation of voters in sparsely populated areas. If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age seems like it might be breaking down anyway, and the concentration of voters in the "boomer" bracket is a somewhat temporary thing, so there's probably not enough justification for overhauling our electoral systems simply to counter the current demographic distribution, however I do think we're unnecessarily reluctant to at least seriously debate and ideally trial different electoral systems rather than assume what was put in place hundreds of years ago is still the best we can do in this day and age.
We do not accept the pure one-person-one-vote system because we live in representative democracies, were the elected represent a community. We solve the problem by designing dynamic voting areas of varying dimenions containing more or less the same population, so any representative is the spokeperson of the same amount of people (more or less). At least that's what we do here in Europe AFAIK.
> If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
You are saying that you don't like democracy then.
Which is an argument, we can discuss about it, but, for the sake of the argument, in Russia there are 86 men every 100 women. In that case what should we do? Limit the representation of women? What about people with disabilities, should we create a "people with no disabilities bracket"? How should we address the fact that the majority of the population has received no form of higher education, they are ill-educated if not uneducated hence they lack the tools to make an informed decision to the detriment of the entire society? etc. etc.
> As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age
That's a cool quote, but it's never been proven. The word you're looking for is not conservative, but prudent.
Anyway, if we look at the voters now in Europe, where I am from, we can clearly see that the far right is very popular among young people, they are having good if not extremely good outcomes in many countries (Germany, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Poland). It never happened before the last generation had the right to vote. In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
What should we do about it in your opinion?
"Democracy" says nothing about ensuring every single vote counts equally. While I am inherently skeptical of systems that decide some votes are worth more than others, personally, the idea that my vote should count for more when I'm part of a smaller but younger demographic bracket and less when I'm older and part of a bigger bracket doesn't bother me too much. Whether it would actually produce a better result is almost impossible to know.
> In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
That's certainly quite interesting, and different from the pattern I'm aware of occurring elsewhere, and it would be fascinating to do a deeper dive into why that might be. It certainly suggests to me that whatever the "left" in your country is offering, younger voters are not seeing it as representing the policies they feel the country needs over the coming decades. Though I did just come across an article that suggested this trend is possibly because younger voters in Europe have no first-hand knowledge of how awful things became under far-right leaders in the early 20th century. Or perhaps because they've seen first hand that welfare-state-type policies associated with left have benefited older generations far more than themselves.
we found that casting a vote is the best way to make that possible.
In that system everyone is an island, everyone should think about their personal interest, because there are more differences intra-group than extra-group.
If some demographic group is more numerous than others it also mean that that group will have statistically the most variations
There are more poor old people, marginalized old people, frustrated old people and unhappy old people than younger ones. Most of all old people have literally no future, they have no time to recover from mistakes, they simply have gained enough experience to not risk everything for the sake of trying something new.
Doesn't mean their interest do not align with the interests of younger generations, it's just that younger generations can afford to lose everything and come back from the consequences.
One explanation of what is happening in my country is that the far right can sell themselves as outcasts that for a long time haven't participated in the decay we are experiencing and can look to the untrained and unexperienced eye as "revolutionaries' that fight against the establishment, while the people who have known them their whole life can see through the facade.
But in the end the real problem is that last time the elections were won by a movement supported in majority by young people that wanted to flip tables and disrupt the status quo and, guess what, the elected members were such incompetents that 5 years later even the far right seemed a better option to many.
It's the exact opposite.
When you are retired you paid all of your life for those things trough taxes.
It's the youngsters that are getting them for free, having contributed a lot less if not zero.