This little piece of nonsense comes to us via Tucker Carlson and Foster Freiss' Daily Caller by way of Raw Story. It features Jonah Goldberg, arrogant insider and Editor-at-Large of the National Review Online, a conservative repository for neocon ideas.
Mr. Goldberg admits in this interview that Mitt Romney just isn't going to play with the younger set, so instead of thinking through reasons for that failure, he spends some time trashing younger people. He might have made some arguments for why young people feel so alienated from the Republican party right now -- student loans, health care, and corporate elitism -- but instead he suggests that their ignorance should be beaten out of them. That beating, by the way, should be physical if necessary:
GOLDBERG: Personally, I think the voting age should be much, higher, not lower. I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest….[I]t is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth. We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing in this culture where, ‘Oh, young people are for it so it must be special.’ No, the reason young people are for it because they don’t know better. That’s why we call them young people. [...]
The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity and their ignorance. And that’s something that conservatives have to beat out of them. Either literally or figuratively as far as I’m concerned.
Isn't this the guy who devoted an entire (albeit fraudulent) book to the supposed fascist tendencies of liberals?
Mr. Goldberg also thinks young people should not have the right to vote at age 18 but doesn't have a peep to say about sending them off to die in a country thousands of miles away for the oligarchs' pleasure.
Goldberg specifically takes issue with young people's contention that socialism is better than capitalism. This is where he contends they most need their beating, because there is "no other system that creates wealth better than democratic capitalism." Repeat after me: Conservatives believe bullying is the answer.
What if we were to rethink that statement? What if we were to say that democratic capitalism thrives in a culture where the constraints of health care, education, and an aging workforce were the platform to launch capitalistic ventures? I can't help thinking that true wealth creation, the kind that involves tangible benefits like job security, a better quality of life, a healthy population and community priorities, would thrive in an environment where it wasn't constantly bogged down under the constraints of unbridled, greedy capitalism.
Let's be honest here. We do not live in a country with democratic capitalism anyway. We live in a country where consumption and growth are the holy grails of financialism, which is an entirely different way to accumulate wealth than democratic capitalism. Anymore, it more resembles a classic oligopoly.
Mitt Romney isn't wealthy because he went out into the world and made things that made the world a better place. He's wealthy because he had money that he used to make more money. In Romney's case, his wealth wasn't the product of him being particularly smart or particularly creative. It was the product of money equating to power, and that power being used to strip others of their wealth and power, which had a handsome payoff for him at the expense of others.
Young people are clear-headed enough to recognize that their constraints are the result of greed and an unrelenting need to feed the financialist beast. It's hard to imagine any of them being particularly excited about that.
Though I must say, I'm enjoying the spectacle of conservatives alienating the next generation of voters. So un-Reaganlike. To Jonah Goldberg, I offer this indictment written by one of those 18-year olds you'd like to slap around. She's my daughter. Get near her with your open hand and I'll call the dogs out on you.
America is running in circles, and pushing solutions that will never work. It’s not a race with China or Korea or Japan that we’re running, but a race to understand that the world view we currently hold is warped. We will continue to fight ourselves and drive our sheeplike children to this school and that school in a desperate hunt for that ever elusive “excellence”, yet forever stand away from it as long as we fail to recognize the importance of the integration of our education, that we are not machines but instead organisms functioning in unison. That we are not simply a sack of organs, skin over bone, but instead transcend pieces of ourselves into a bigger painting, united in our journey of life, understanding and progress.
When did the goal of our lives become "democratic capitalism" and a constant quest for wealth? What happened to living contentedly in our communities, raising children, painting, making music, dancing, working together for a greater good? When did we decide young people were ignorant idiots?
We didn't. Jonah Goldberg is the ignorant bullying idiot here, and his financialist greed is showing.
