One Among Many

A self-described "southern journalist who is tired of a lack of common sense" says: "Let's talk about a GOP constitutional amendment...." Sure, okay... but it's worth pointing out that the policy which would require said amendment was not advanced by the Grand Old Party. Rather it was put forth by Vivek Ramaswamy. Vivek Ramaswamy is not the Republican Party. He's simply a businessman and author who is running for Vice President.

And his idea is that people younger than 25 don't value the United States enough to be automatically granted the right to vote. So his proposal is to raise the overall enfranchisement age to 25. For those people in the 18 to 24 range, they would be allowed to vote if they either a) had been in the military or some sort of "first responder" job for six months, or b) passed the civics test that immigrants seeking citizenship need to pass.

This is described as: "straight out of a movie that was satirical [...] and making fun of fascist governments." Now, I've never seen Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. But I have read the Robert Heinlein novel. Now, I will admit that I wasn't particularly interested in what the story may have said about Mr. Heinlein's politics. I was interested in the book as the genesis of the modern idea of powered armor, something that was left out of the original movie due to special effects budget constraints. In the Starship Troopers novel, birthright citizenship has been eliminated across the board. Only those people who have served in the military are full citizens, with the right to vote. If I remember correctly, there was a bit in the book about attempts to expand the allowable service to other things. But, there was one important concession; because military service was a requirement for citizenship, the military was not allowed to turn anyone away. If a person wanted to enlist, the military had to accept them, and had to find some job they could do. At the end of the book, the main character's parents enlist, and are leaving for their training. I've heard that that Mr. Verhoeven was satirizing the setup that Mr. Heinlein had put forth, in the same way that Mr. Heinlein took some pot shots at modern liberalism (and society in general, for that matter), but if Mr. Ramaswamy's proposal actually matches what's in the movie, then Mr. Verhoeven also took some liberties with the setup.

The video purports to explain "Why the GOP would want this" - but no evidence is ever offered that "the GOP" as a party is interested in advancing Mr. Ramaswamy's idea. The amorphous "they" is thrown around, but again, this is the idea of one person. At the end of the video, the commentator notes that people are going to ask who made the proposal. But, even then, rather than name Mr. Ramaswamy, he simply sidesteps.

It's this sort of thing that leads to the term "extremists" being thrown around as often as it is. The fact that Vivek Ramaswamy is (allegedly) seeking seeking the Republican nomination for President of the United States, and is polling above 0% (he's at about 7%) is not the same as the Republican party having decided to add his idea to their current policy platform in the name of disenfranchising young voters because it's somehow too difficult to indoctrinate them into Conservative ideology. There is no rule that states that in order for a person to run for a major party nomination, their views must line up with some idea of how the party views the world. Otherwise, people like Senator Bernie Sanders (who is an Independent when he's not running for President) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would have been preemptively frozen out by the Democratic Party apparatus. While I'm not particularly highly engaged in politics as a matter of day-to-day life, I try to avoid being completely out of the loop; enough so that I would like to think that I would have heard of something as consequential as the Republican National Committee formally moving to adopt Mr. Ramaswamy's position, especially given the level of effort that changing the United States Constitution would require.

The unwillingness to make the determination between anyone claiming membership in a group and the group itself is common, especially in a situation like American political parties. This commonality, however doesn't make taking some statement made by a person and passing it off as the policy of some group to which they belong any less disingenuous. There are a number of corrosive elements to modern American politics, and this is one of them. But it's also corrosive to social trust, and that is also in a bad state. Democrats and Republicans are far enough apart, in both style and substance, that one doesn't need to play fast and loose with how one represents the other side to drive the two of them further apart. So I'm not sure why it's worth creating higher levels of distrust to do so.

(Aside: Other than Donald Trump, there are no people actually running for the Republican nomination. They're either running to be Mr. Trump's pick for Vice President, like Ramaswamy, to raise their profile for a 2028 or maybe 2032 run, like Governor Ron DeSantis or Senator Tim Scott, or they're simply hoping to score some of the few anti-Trump points that are left out there, like Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson. Sure, out the current field of more than 250 people, some of them may be deluded enough to think they can swing it; however, no-one with enough name recognition to be included in a poll is that far out of their mind. And many of the very dark horse candidates are likely running simply to call attention to some cause they favor. For the big-name candidates, this assessment is based more on their actions than their words; the way the field is acting now, it's hard to believe that they're serious about unseating Mr. Trump.)