Paul Waldman writes that young voters are particularly important in this election, not because they alone will pick the next president, but because of what their increasingly progressive attitudes suggest about the evolution of politics.
In short, it isn't just that young people take the progressive side in the culture war; for them the war is over. And because of demographic shifts and the enormous effects of the Internet, today's young people have an outlook on the world that is more open and cosmopolitan than it was even a decade or two ago. As Rick Perlstein recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture -- and those hip baby-boomer parents -- take care of the problem."Though it may not be reflected yet in national polls, the candidate generating the most enthusiasm among the young is unsurprisingly Barack Obama. As others have noted recently, if Obama were to become president, the symbolic value of him taking the oath of office -- a multi-racial man who was partly raised overseas in a Muslim country -- would provide such an extraordinary contrast with his predecessor, the very embodiment of what many see as the worst of America in all his ignorance, arrogance, and parochialism, that it would instantly suck the life out of a good portion of the anti-Americanism that has presented such an obstacle in recent years.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
