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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I endorse this proposal. Some people express concern that it may benefit the Left instead of the Right. Others are chiming in to offer alternatives more carefully contrived to achieve a desired outcome. To these concerns I would say, that this proposal is the best for the following reasons:

The idea that the government should represent the interests of children makes intuitive sense and will appeal broadly to the public. Every law should start with a broad sales pitch, and follow it up with addendums that compromise on the initial idea. The fact that children will not actually be voting is the compromise, and it should be sold to the public as a necessary compromise to achieve a desired ideal. By contrast, a proposal to give more voting power to rich people is a harder sell, because the ideal it strives for is less intuitive and won't appeal to most people. The Left would sniff it out immediately.

The fact that many here believe this proposal will benefit the Left is a good thing, because it means the proposal can be sold to the Left. I cannot say what the actual effects will be. I would say it is coinflip that could backfire or succeed. The Right is in desperate straights as we know, and should therefore seek out these kinds of coinflips. Call it a wager with Moloch, if you will.

I don't think the direct impact will be that great. It's true that people with the most children are poor, and it's equally true that poor people don't vote. The votes of a lot of children won't matter because their parents won't bother to cast them. The main selling point of this proposal for the Right is the symbolic impact, rather than its direct impact. The law is sort of two-faced. To the general public and to the Left, the law can be sold as the apotheosis of egalitarianism, the final form of equal suffrage. But it's not really equal suffrage, because the children can't actually vote, and their parents are getting extra votes. It's essentially a sly way to foist upon the Left a system of unequal suffrage in which heteronormative family values are symbolically endorsed by the government as deserving a greater voice in government than the voices of the various childless constituencies.

You can't sell it to the left. The idea that it can be sold is based on the anti-left's imagination of what the left cares about and conflates outcome with intention. It is assumed that because poor minorities have more children, they will line up to support this. Which may certainly happen, but selling it broadly to an ideologically anti-family (at least, not pro-nuclear-family) left is a non-starter.