Only if the selective service age is raised to match. Morally the age to vote and the age you could be drafted in the future need to match. It’s the entire reason the voting age was lowered. They were sending 18-20 year olds off to Vietnam to fight in the most godforsaken environment possible and they didn’t even have the right to vote for or against the politicians who were sending them there.
The draft doesn’t exist anymore, but it could easily be reinstated with an act of Congress. If the voting age is to be raised then a law needs to be passed stipulating that the potential draft age must match.
We can deal with that issue when it comes up. However, I’m entirely ok with allowing service members the ability to vote regardless of their age. Most military people are conservative, so those are the right type of people we want voting.
I am not sure if I have become more liberal the older I have become or that the GOP has moved away from what they were in the late 80’s/early 90’s when I identified as a Republican.
It’s probably a little of both but I don’t discount the latter point.
On a more serious note, I think that raising the voting age to 25 unless you are either on active military service or honorably discharged would be good for the country. There is simply too much nonsense bouncing around inside the head of a typical 18-25 year-old.
There’s a lot of nonsense bouncing around inside the heads of a lot of elderly people who haven’t learned how to use Google. Maybe we should have an upper age limit too. Maybe 70? The founders never intended for people that old to vote.
Both parties have changed. Both parties are more extreme to the left and right than they were in the 80s and 90s. I bet if you would really examine your own political philosophy you will find that it has changed very little since your mid to late twenties.
I first registered as a Democrat when I became eligible to vote, but switched to non-partisan at the first opportunity in ‘68 (thank you Lyndon Johnson.) Since that time, I have voted for candidates representing Rs, Ds, Ls, Gs, and Independents, but tend to vote against liberals rather than for conservatives. For the most part, they all stink.
Why is a search engine part of the problem? As a lover of knowledge, I appreciate how easy it is to learn something new. Sometimes the hardest part sometimes is knowing the right search string in order to find what you’re looking for.
I preferred peer reviewed articles when I was writing papers.
I also sought out sources which challenged my beliefs on a subject, so as to develop my own arguments. Someone who doesn’t do that is really nothing more than a talking parrot.
Google is really good for searching for contrary points of view too.
Actually, many college kids are still discovering their political leanings and their “identity” as a whole. Their minds are young and malleable. I used to have a friend in high school who was pocket constitution-carrying Conservative. But when I met up with her my sophomore year of college, I sensed she had changed. A lot. She’s now a third-wave feminist, smokes pot, and has a history of drug abuse (I know this because my mother and her mother (used to) work within the same healthcare system, and they know each other professionally and personally). Someone had to convince her, and I’m pretty certain it was the college pol. sci. professors, as well as her friends. We’re now not friends.
I wasn’t even completely informed when I first joined here the second semester of my freshman year of college, when I was 18. Yeah I payed attention to the politicians’ stances, as well as what the stances mean, but I still had some questions. In threads like gun control I sat back and watched the arguing take place, and commented little. They may be mature academically, but most of them are voting for freebies because that’s what is most important to them at that time in their lives- college is expensive, but they haven’t come to the realization that taxes can’t solve everything. Some may never come to it. With age, comes wisdom. And I’m still not as mature as I should be, especially socially. But academically I know how to “play the game.” I still have a lot of life lessons to learn. And that’s partially why I still stick around here.
I do agree with you that both parties stink overall. And we end up choosing one evil over another. We simply decide to choose which one is more evil over the other in our minds.
But in several cases to say “vote against liberals rather than for conservative.” is simply saying you’re a moderate, and can’t make up your mind to some degree. We both know that while voting for one party or the other, both parties won’t let in someone in the middle. They won’t let in the green party or the tea party into the mainstream stage when debating publicly national wise on television. So ultimately it is a mute point, is it not? Because at the end of the day, you’re either on the left, or the right, and anyone in the middle can easily be considered a fake, and a traitor, just like John McCain was to the Republican Party. And if you look up enough information about McCain, you would easily find that he was more than likely a closet Democrat, acting like he was a Republican.
Well, many on the right don’t believe everything the government tells them, that they need the government to solve all their problems. Political lefties aren’t exactly smart, either. Neither the kids nor the adults.
