One of the greatest impediments to authoritarian government is the parent. It always has been, and it always will be.
Parents are a barrier between the government and the child, which is very unfortunate for governments, because if they can brainwash the child early, then they'll have a loyal citizen who enthusiastically follows the rules, votes how they're told, believes what they're sold, and if it all goes well, hates whoever they're convinced to hate with such a burning passion that they're willing to do inhumane things to the "other" in question.
You've seen it before. It happened in Nazi Germany and Revolutionary eras in China and Russia.
Today, the modern left is constantly trying to get at your children. Schools are introducing all sorts of curriculum or leftist agenda items that parents are consistently having to fight against. It's such a massive problem that entire organizations have been created to push back against this issue. Everywhere this battle is fought, the left loses ground.
So what to do?
During a New York Times interview with Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn, author of the book "Gerontocracy in America," host Ross Douthat heard Moyn pitch an idea that was so absurd that he had to interrupt him and tell him so. A surprising moment of sanity to come from the New York Times, but the idea is so "daft," as Douthat says, that it absolutely should be laughed off the stage.
I try to keep an open mind about new ideas and opinions, but this take on parents and children is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Douthat’s response is perfect: pic.twitter.com/tx26XZxpxw
— Caleb Wait (@calebwait) August 4, 2026
To recap the suggestion, the idea Moyn presents is that young children who can't vote should have a vote, but that vote should be held by post-graduate 20-somethings and not the parents. The "logic" he's using is that parents, grandparents, or anyone two or three generations removed won't have the ability to see the younger generations' needs of the era in mind.
To be clear, I can partly understand the issue. A boomer and a millennial do not live in the same world, despite living in the same world. Their experiences, methods, and understandings about the world around them are broadly different in many ways, so a boomer cannot understand the world according to Gen Alpha. The argument is that even Gen Alpha's Millennial parents wouldn't get it either.
So the solution is to hand Gen Alpha's vote to a member of Gen Z.
I'm sure you can already see the issue with this. Gen Z is a generation that was hit with the political bug hard. As I wrote on Tuesday, through various pressure points, leftism infected Gen Z to the point where a good majority of them see personal preference as morality, and should you create or say something that they find personally distasteful, then the fighting starts.
Read: Gen Z's Morality Problem
I'm not trying to pick on the entirety of Gen Z here, but even Gen Z acknowledges this is a problem within that generation, and it highlights my point. I wouldn't trust my three-year-old's vote to a member of Gen Z whom I don't know and who, frankly, would likely hate me if they talked to me about anything substantial. Moreover, Gen Z is at a politically volatile age. They're more likely to buy slogans and dynamically delivered talking points, and adopt beliefs based on a TikTok they saw more than any other generation.
The left wants you to believe that the youth are wise enough to vote for the best person. I'd argue that any generation is susceptible to solid marketing, and even people who've been paying attention to politics for decades can still be misled and duped.
It's a stupid idea all-around, but notice the ideal underneath it.
It's a communist one.
Communists have always hated the parent, and they view the parent/child relationship as something akin to a hostage scenario the child must be freed from. Try as they might, they can't seem to get the state, or even the culture, wedged between the two reliably enough, so the strategy here is to get the vote away from the child and out from the protective shadow of the parent and hand it to a youthful voter that can more reliably be turned.
I want to point out that this is dehumanizing for the child, who is effectively a political prop at this point. Not only are the parents being disrespected and likely having their own family produce votes that will be used against their best interest, but their child is being used as a tool to accomplish that end.
This idea isn't just awful because it's stupid; it's awful because it dehumanizes people, disrespects the family dynamic, and at the end of the day, destroys the cornerstone of a free nation by giving and then stripping an individual of the vote.
So, my solution?
