rationally BASED
Welcome to rationally BASED, a podcast about law and politics, on the edge. Law professor Ilan Wurman, with co-host Kathryn Johnson, cover cutting-edge, and edgy, legal and political news, ideas, and developments.
rationally BASED
Episode 33 | Give Parents the Vote
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Parent proxy voting for children is in the news and it's gone viral!
On Ross Douthat's podcast, Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn proposed giving 20-somethings extra votes, rather than parents, because “young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children” and “Part of our goal as a society is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents." Douthat responded: "I think that’s daft. I think it’s absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do." And a meme was born!
It happens that THE leading article on this subject -- "Give Parents the Vote" -- was written by Rationally Based’s very own Joshua Kleinfeld! So in this episode, Josh and co-hosts Kathryn Johnson and Ilan Wurman examine the proposal that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their minor children — and why the Left wants to give that power to anyone BUT parents.
Some highlights:
- Children are nearly a QUARTER of the citizenry, and parents and children together are nearly half of the citizenry — but have just 19% of the vote. Adults without children are just over half the citizenry but have about THREE-QUARTERS of the vote. The result is policies — like COVID school closures, debt-financed entitlements, and more — that systematically shortchange the young.
- Children ALREADY count for apportionment: they determine each state’s seats in Congress, electoral votes for the President, and the drawing of legislative districts. But because they can’t vote and their parents can’t vote for them, their voting power is simply redistributed to all the adults in their districts. The most powerful voter in America is a childless adult in a district with plenty of children.
- Parent proxy voting is purely a matter of state law. Any state could independently adopt it tomorrow for both federal and state elections without violating the Constitution or any federal statute. It is also feasible. And it is consistent with the role parents have in every other context — defending their children’s interests in contexts from the schools to hospitals to courtrooms.
- The world-historic fall in the birth rate means that, for the first time in American history, most adults are not parents. The collapse in the birth rate has made the political divergence between parents and the childless newly consequential. Arguably there is NO other intervention that would have more far-reaching effects on American politics than giving parents the vote.
This is the rational — and based — discussion of who should speak for the next generation that you won’t hear anywhere else.
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Welcome back to Rationally Based, a podcast about law and politics on the edge. I'm your host, Elon Werman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
SPEAKER_00I'm Catherine Johnson with Center of the American Experiment.
SPEAKER_01I'm Josh Kleinfeld, Rouse Professor of Law at Scalia Law School. Catherine, what's on deck?
SPEAKER_00Well, a little bit different today. We typically talk about developments in cases, but today we thought we would cover some legal scholarship instead. Specifically, an article that Josh wrote called Give Parents the Vote, proposing the idea of parent proxy voting. This is an idea that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their minor children. And if this sounds off the wall to you, you may be surprised to know that it's an idea endorsed by everyone from JD Vance to Cornell West. But we'll uh talk about if it's feasible, constitutional, and if it would be good for America. And of course, what I care about most, which is is it based?
SPEAKER_04Well, if Cornell West and JD Vance agree on something, then it's certainly on the wall. Well, let's figure that out. Let's dive in. All right. Well, as always, please hit that like and subscribe button. Please give us a rating on Apple and Spotify. Leave a review if you can. They are so important in these early uh days of a podcast, and we've appreciated the tremendous support that we've had. So, uh, Catherine, I think we should start with that viral clip. So there's a reason we're actually talking about this today. Josh's article uh with co-author uh Steve Sachs at the Harvard Law School, uh, I don't know, made some waves at the time, and uh I think it should get a lot more attention today as well. But the reason we want to talk about it now uh is because there was a viral clip. Um the New York Times podcast, which I guess Ross Daltit uh hosts, the New York Times podcast. Uh, he's conservative, conservative-ish, conservative, I think uh he would describe himself as conservative. And he had this um podcast uh appearance with Sam Moyne, who is a professor at Yale Law School. And uh this clip uh and we we I saw it, uh Caleb Waite uh posted it, uh, and it was viewed three million times uh as of uh yesterday. And in this clip, uh Sam Moyne basically says we should give 24-year-olds extra weight at the voting booth. But it almost sounds crazy just even saying it. So 24-year-olds should get extra weight at the voting booth because they are the best representatives of the interests or preferences, I guess, of children. Uh and so they should be given more weight. Uh Ross Dowthit said this is crazy, this is uh daft. Let's take a listen.
SPEAKER_03I've gotten in some hot water for proposing we consider overweighting the the votes of younger people or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country. Um so those are edgy. Why not uh why not assign them to those children's parents? Well, because there's there's a divergence of interests between parents and children. And I think it's likier that young people, not people uh who are raising families, will have the best insight into the uh interests of children. Whereas you, if you were awarded five.
SPEAKER_02I think that's I think it's absurd to imagine that a uh 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do. And I say this with all due respect to 24-year-old recent college graduates, of whom I hope to be the parent of in nine years or so.
SPEAKER_03I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. And part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren't the hostages of their parents as much as we rely on parents to raise them.
SPEAKER_02Aren't aren't in my experience, parents are more likely to be the He says the hostages of their children.
SPEAKER_04Oh, oh my. Okay. So the reason we have to talk about this on the Rationally Based Podcast is because you heard that response from Ross Dalton, who said, I think this is daft. I think why not give parents the power to vote on behalf of their children if we're already talking about that. Well, here on the Rationally Based Podcast, we have the leading expert in the legal academy on this issue, our very own Joshua Kleinfeld, who has this piece. Hi, Josh. Good to see you again. Uh, who has this piece with Steve Sachs at the Harvard Law School called Give Parents the Vote, which came out, I think, last year in the Notre Dame uh Law Review. So Doubthet presents sort of your proposal very briefly without necessarily uh defending it in detail. Moyne presents who's right, like give us some background here.
SPEAKER_01Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I just want to say Doubthet, to his credit, did acknowledge us um at the time the article came out. He shouted it out and endorsed the article when it came out. So that was very nice of him. And um and actually, the thing that Sam Moyne said there is some, so Nick Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who is an election law professor, well to the left of us, uh, but a terrific scholar at Harvard Law School, wrote a response to our piece a year ago. And in the response, he said there is a problem with children not being represented in democratic politics. It is distorting politics, it is causing children's interests to be underrepresented. But he said the answer is not to give parents the vote, it's to inflate the votes of 18 to 29 year olds. And it would depend on the exact size of the district, but essentially what Stephanopoulos proposed was multiplying the vote of every 18 to 29 year old by 1.7 in order to model the future preferences of children 1 to 18. And um, and Samuel Moyne, uh, I don't know if he acknowledged Nicholas's uh contribution elsewhere, but at least in that clip he didn't. Uh Sam Moyne is essentially proposing the same thing, inflate the votes of young people. So what do I think about this? I think it's crazy, but in a way, it's it's usefully crazy because it acknowledges the problem, right? Like what Sam Moyne is implicitly doing, and what Stephanopoulos explicitly did, is say outright, not representing the interests of children, not having votes for children or for their parents or for anyone else who can represent them is causing children's interests to be observably distorted or disserved by American policy. It is a problem. They're acknowledging the problem. They've just got a crazy solution to it. And um uh I think it's a crazy solution for a few reasons. The first one is it denies all agency and individuality to actual persons. It treats like like one to 18-year-olds, children, as if what you should do with their vote is just model their future preferences by inflate, like like a perfect stand-in for them or an adequate stand-in for them is 18 to 29-year-olds. Or I think Sam Moyne focused on 24-year-olds or something. That's crazy, right? I mean, first of all, we don't do that in American politics. We don't have polls instead of elections because you can just model the electorate by using some poll group. Um it is not the case that 18 to 29-year-olds are a perfect proxy for one to 18-year-olds' future preferences. And we've just seen, like, polling is a very inexact science. We just saw like El Saeed winning Michigan by 13 points, according to the pollsters, and by half a point or something in actual fact. We saw exaggerated poll numbers for Kamala Harris, for Hillary Clinton. Like, polling is not a substitute for actual vote voting their own views. But second, the even crazier thing is that it assumes the best person to defend a child's interests is a 24-year-old or a 21-year-old or something, which is not just like untrue. It might be the opposite of the truth. That's why Dowttic calls it daft, right? It's the opposite of the truth. These are the people who are the least interested and the least knowledgeable and the least capable of substituting their views for a child's views and defending the um the views of children. There's also like a transparent kind of left-wing self-interest here. The most reliably progressive left portion of the population are 18 to 29-year-olds. So like multiplying their votes by 1.7 is obviously a ploy to just make sure Democrats win. I also think there's something, there's something revealing, illuminating about this crazy proposal. Um first of all, it shows how necessary our parent proxy voting suggestion really is. Because it's like, okay, you you you've we've got a problem. Um we need someone to defend children's interests at the voting booth if they're going to be fairly uh counted. Uh, but children really are incompetent to do the it themselves. I mean, even if you think the voting age should be lowered to 16, there's one to 15 year olds. And if you think it should be lowered to 14, there's one to 13-year-olds. So children at some point at age seven or whatever, they really are incompetent. Someone else needs to represent their interests. We propose parents, if you don't agree with that, who? And so you have the progressive saying, well, we have a substitute, young people, and it's so obviously crazy that it's like, well, the only good solution here is to have the same people represent children's interests who represent them in the in the school room, in the hospital room, um, you know, in in litigation. Uh, this the people who represent them are their parents, and that's the natural choice. And and finally, uh last thing, and then I'll stop. I think what Sam Moyne said really reveals the left's deep distrust of parenting. Um, he says it outright. He says there's a divergence of interest between parents and children. It's likelier, he says, that young people will have the best insight into the interests of children. I'm quoting here. And then he says, part of our goal as a society is trying to make sure that children aren't the hostages of their parents, the hostages. That's that came apparently spontaneously to him. It's a sort of shocking term for the parent-child relationship. Um and it harkens back to quite an ancient tradition in the left. You know, decentering parents in the rearing of children has been the project of the left in Rousseau, in Mao, in Lenin. I mean, actually, what Mao and Lenin did with respect to children and parents is understudied. They were really quite intent on alienating children from their parents.
SPEAKER_04Um, which is what schools do today with transitioning children. Like, don't tell your parents you do X, Y, and Z, even if it's just social transitioning, right?
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's absolutely what's going on in schools is very much sort of the left saying, let's use an instrument of the state, school teachers, to try to influence children because we don't trust their parents to do it. And what the right is insisting in return is no, this power belongs to parents. Parents have opt-out rights, parents should be informed, parents should have transparency into what's going into school. So this ancient fight over the nature of the parent-child relationship is resuscitated here. And um, you know, I'm I'm a right-wing guy in this respect. I think that uh uh the parent-child relationship is unique in law and life. It is the greatest relationship of love and jeopardy that we know in the world, in the natural world, in law, it's totally unique. There is no other relationship with the same scale of duty and the same scale of authority. And um, and the left is really uncomfortable with it as these proposals, um, as these proposals suggest. So, Catherine, is that based enough for you?
SPEAKER_00I think that's pretty based. I think the number one block to total left-wing control of our country is parents, basically. They're like the retaining wall holding up the flood from you know that meme, like going over the city. It really is, it's parents being able to um guide their kids and to teach them lessons that lead them to understand that, you know, the the the consequences of left-wing positions, really, and being able to choose things for their children, like private schools or homeschooling or things like that. Like you say, Elon, the the schools is where you know the left has concentrated so much of their attention because they know that that's a way to separate kids from the beliefs of their parents. And so I think it's interesting that you give that history to Josh, because I see that all the time here in Minnesota, different ways that, you know, the the left tries to intervene on that relationship. And it's interesting to know that, yeah, they've been doing this forever, and it's a technique that clearly, when it works, uh is good for the left.
SPEAKER_04Do you remember? I love that analogy, Catherine, this retaining wall analogy. When we talked about, I think it was welfare, and I know Josh, you and I disagreed about welfare, but we've talked about this before, and I think you agree with the general point that I made, which is free societies really have two foundational pillars, right? One is the family, and the other is sort of economic independence, like a free market in a way, some degree of a free market, not necessarily a total free market, don't get me wrong, but you must have in other words, you can't have collectivism. You can't have the government controlling the means of production. Why? Well, because if the government controls the mean of production, then you'd better toe the party line, right? If you want to survive. And this is the problem with cancel culture. Like people lose their jobs if they say things, right? Whether it's private power or public power, it doesn't matter. You have to have some way of sustaining yourself and supporting yourself economically and your family, notwithstanding the fact that you have dissenting views about politics and the good life, right? The family is the other important institution. Why? Well, because the family creates this, again, pocket of independence from the state. If the state reared children, if the state had a monopoly on rearing children, well, then the state will just mold them into whatever the party line is, right? It's no different than controlling the means of production. And what the left tries to do, it seems to me, is undermine both pillars of a free society. And this example uh is one of them. Again, this distrust of parents, this idea that somehow 24-year-olds know more than the parents. Again, it's just all a way of giving more state power uh to this over children to the state, right, as opposed to parents. Okay, so let me ask you a question. It seems to me, and then we should talk about like where you got this idea from, Josh.
SPEAKER_01But first, just while we're on while we're on the We sort of have jumped ahead, right? Because we're we're in the response to the proposal instead of in the meat, nuts and bolts. We'll get to that. We'll get to folks who are listening. We will get back to the nuts and bolts of the proposal, but of giving the parents vote.
SPEAKER_04That's the thing is interesting. Yeah, but right now we're just trying to also analyze this alternative, right? That that Moyne proposed, which is I've I think I've never heard a better argument for disfranchising 18 to 29 year olds than Sam Moyne gets. Disfranchising? Disfranchising. I think there is a constitutional amendment about that. Uh yes, because eight eighteen-year-olds, I I forget the constitution for a moment, okay. I'm saying that that was a mistake, right? Probably. Giving constitutionally mandating that 18-year-olds have the vote is insane to me for any number of reasons. Like, why can't states actually experiment uh about this? It's I I don't understand that, but constitutional amendment aside, okay, 26th amendment, or am I messing that up? 26th Amendment. I'm sort of uh uh embarrassed that it uh I I think it's a 26th Amendment. But the whole premise of what Moyne just said is the following is that parents don't actually know what the best interests of their children are, that the parents' interests are anathema to the children's interests. And I think what he's saying is preferences, right? And it's like the whole thing is crazy. The whole point about parents, right, is that we do know what is better for our kids than they do. Like, you know, Josh, you said, you know, we were talking about this a bit earlier, like, okay, I want two ice creams for dessert. Like, no, actually, you get one or you get nothing, right? The whole premise is that kids don't know what's good for them. The parents know what's better. And to say that 24-year-olds are more aligned with children and the children's preferences than the parents suggests to me that 18 to 29-year-olds are just like children and shouldn't be allowed to vote. Am I crazy?
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm not I don't join you on the um yeah, I think you're joking, but the idea that uh 18 to 29 year olds shouldn't vote, I'm not sure if you're not gonna be able to do it. Half joking. Half joking. Half joking. Okay. Only half. But I do agree with you that the very nature of parenting is asserting a child's interests against the child's preferences. I mean, you have young children. It's like go to bed, do your chores, don't eat another dessert, turn off the TV. You are constantly like it's just like that's everyday parenting. That's that's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through through every day of 10 years is asserting their interests over their preferences. And um that's the nature of the parent-child relationship. It's a parent's duty to do that. Uh, it's a huge responsibility because you don't know. You we pretend we know what's really good for the children, but we don't always know. So it's like, you know, you can't quit the sport you want to quit because I want to teach you perseverance. Well, maybe, maybe he should be able to quit. She should be able to quit the sport. I don't fully know. So that's that's just that's just parenting is constantly being, you know, the best guard you possibly can of the child's interests against preferences. And it gets more complicated as they get into teenage years, partly because they have more insight into their own interests and and you could be wrong about them, but also because what one of the things you're trying to teach them is to be a free person. That's the first and foremost uh parental responsibility is to teach them to be an agent who can make choices for themselves. And sometimes you're like, well, you think this is in your interest. I think that's in your interests. I'm gonna give you the choice so that you can see how it turns out and learn to be responsible for yourself. So this is a very, very, you know, raising a person who is capable of freedom is a very, very complex thing. By the way, often in childhood, asserting their um interests over their preferences is how you teach them to be a free person. I mean, um, if they don't have the self-control to turn off the TV or resist the dessert or go to bed, they'll never be free. They'll be slaved to their appetites, right? So our our first duty to children is is to protect their interests. It's it's what this relationship is all about. And I don't think 18 to 29-year-olds have any insight into that at all. That's that's really something that you learn in the course of parenting.
SPEAKER_00Well, and it's one of these examples of things that I hear and just laugh. Like that's an academic conversation that would never enter the mainstream because you just laugh. Any person or parent would be like, okay, funny, whatever. Like there wouldn't be a debate, you know. But as you mentioned, Josh, um This is a real problem, actually, which I didn't I had never thought about before reading your paper. It's a real problem that children are a big percentage of our um country and our populace, and they have no voting power, yet they also are represented in in Congress and things like that. So um we'll get into that more, but I think we should start with you just telling us what interested you about this in the first place. Because, like I said, I never once thought about this until I read your piece. So, how did you get interested in this issue?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, I think one way in which scholars can make a contribution to public life uh is to think through big foundational ideas that aren't part of everyday political discussion, that maybe initially strike people as I never thought about that, that's off the wall, that seems crazy, and then to um and then to try to get people to really think about them. So often those those contributions to thinking big and thinking theoret um fundamentally are theoretical contributions. You know, I'll write about the nature of law, the nature of democracy, or something of that nature. But sometimes they're policy ideas, and some of those policy ideas will be crazy, some will be unsound, but some will land, and a few will really move the needle in American public life. And it's important to have a division of labor where one group of people who do not have political power, it's important that they not have political power precisely so that they can be imaginative and think freely and speak freely. And you need another group of people who have to be sober and cautious because they do have political power. It's it's a sort of division of labor in a large complex society over coming up with political ideas. And I've, you know, I've been fortunate to be on both sides of this. I've had this very unusual career, almost unique career, as a kind of philosopher statesman where I'm in, I'm uh a professor, I'm a law professor, but also a professional philosopher. But I also had the privilege. Of serving as the chief counsel and acting general counsel of the Department of Education. So I have this sort of role as a philosopher, statesman in my history. And I'll tell you, when you're in the statesman role, the job is to be more cautious. It's to be more sober. The role is to, you know, discharge real political responsibility. My scholar role is to think big. And that's that's what I'm trying to do here is put a big idea on the table. And I think this is especially important on the right.
SPEAKER_04What which is all I humbly submit, I was trying to do with my taxing and spending discussion about how federal welfare is probably unconstitutional under the best original meaning, which you attack me for a little bit. I'm just saying, I'm not saying I would do that as like a judge, because there is a difference between scholarship and judging, just as like there's a difference between scholarship and statesmanship.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, I 100% agree. I hey, I love that discussion. I mean, the job is for you to have big ideas and for me to attack them and for you to attack mine back, like that's that's this job, right? It's not the job of being a statesman or a judge.
SPEAKER_00Well, that conversation relates well to this one, I think, because of the welfare state now that we have and the amount of voting power that people in the older generations have condensed, while the youngest generations who are paying now and will pay in the future for things like Social Security, they have that burden and they have no voting power. So I think this conversation and that one actually tie together super well.
SPEAKER_01I'll tell you, Catherine. I think that we on the right particularly need big policy ideas. We've got a shortage. I mean, you hear big policy ideas on the left, especially these days with the emergence of the DSA, right? Abolish the Senate, you know, pack the court, open the borders, make Puerto Rico a state, socialize healthcare, socialize grocery stores, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. On the right, the tendency is just to be like, don't do that. Don't pack the Senate. Don't abolish the Senate. Don't pack the court. Don't socialize the economy, whatever. You know, we just say no, right? Um, our own policy ideas tend to be small bore or medium bore, not structural. And I think that might be in the nature of conservative thought. You know, I go to conservative conferences, and um it's almost like people complain a lot about the direction of the country, but but uh when it comes to actually coming up with policy solutions, it's almost like there's something disreputable about thinking about how to solve a problem. And I think that some of that comes from the conservative temperament, um, the preference for incremental change, uh maybe the deep distrust of state power and governmental power, but it puts the right at a major disadvantage in real politics because the effect is we're not bringing policy ideas to the table. So in the case of parent proxy voting, the idea is not totally new. It's been floating around for years. You know, as you said earlier, J.D. Vance endorsed it, uh uh Cornell West endorsed it, but it's never been fully fleshed out. And my co-author and I, Steve Sachs, this um, you know, the Scalia professor of law at Harvard, who is, by the way, one of the most brilliant people I have ever like sat next to in any project whatsoever. This is a remarkable, remarkable human being. Uh, we thought we had some original ways to flesh it out. And also that this was an idea whose time had come because of world historic changes in the birth rate. For the first time in American history, and maybe in human history, most adults are not parents. Historically, being an adult, you know, most people had kids. The overwhelming majority of people had kids. And to be an adult was also to be a parent. As late as the 1990s, uh, most American adults had minor children at home. That is not the case anymore. We've seen a massive decline in the birth rate. Uh, it's really, this is the kind of demographic change that changes human history. And I think what this demographic change has done is make front and center for the first time the different political perspectives between parents and non-parent adults, and especially never parent adults. To the extent those two groups have real political differences, they are for the first time extremely visible. And what really brought this home for me was the COVID experience. So that was when Steve and I started talking about this. I had a student who became one of the primary people in the Laurie Lightfort administration. Lori Lightfoot was the mayor of Chicago uh during the pandemic. And I asked, and there was a point where Lori Lightfurt announced when schools were still closed, the bars were opening. And I was sitting with my student and I said, why is the Tinder life of 20-something-year-olds hooking up at bars more important than my kids going to school? And needless to say, he could not answer that question, right? He could not provide an answer that would convince any reasonable person. And I realized COVID made vivid something that is always true. Politics involves balancing interests. And in COVID, the situation was, you know, some pieces of society get to open, but others have to stay closed. We're trying to balance having a functional society with uh limiting the spread of the disease. And when that balancing happened, which was just balancing the interests in society, guess what? Kids always lost. When it was clear that kids were the least likely to get sick, kids lost. When it was clear that kids were the least likely to spread the disease, kids lost. When it was clear that kids were the most harmed by the shutdowns because they actually need to learn in school and socialize in school, kids still lost. Every other piece of society came first. It's horrible, right? And don't let it be forgotten. Because the most important political lesson of the entire COVID experience is the weak political power of children. And so Steve and I started thinking this is a structural problem. It actually shows up in lots of policy issues. You know, it folk shows up in entitlement programs that are basically benefiting the present at the cost of the future. It shows up with public debt, right, which is the same time structure. Shows up with general good school policy. I mean, we have these really low-performing public schools and we have solutions on hand, but we can't implement them. You think they might be implemented if parents could vote on behalf of their children? I think they might, right? Uh you see it with public safety policy where you have homelessness endemic epidemics that um uh make public parks unusable and playgrounds unusable. Uh, but there's a whole lot of people who have no kids and they don't really care and they get a sort of moral self-esteem from saying, look how tolerant I am, which is really saying I've ruined a playground for kids, but I get to think I'm being kind to the homeless. So when you look at the numbers, it's actually staggering. Kids are a quarter of all citizens. 23% of American citizens are one to 18, or one to one through 17, but they have no vote. Parents with children at home are 19% of the American electorate. So they vote with 19%. They vote with one-fifth of their power. But kids and children together, or sorry, parents and children together are 42% of the population. Adults without kids at home are 58% of the population, but three-quarters of the vote. So let me just round these numbers for simplicity, because it's a lot of numbers. Essentially, half the country is kids and parents, and the other half are adults with no kids at home. But the first half gets a quarter of the votes. The second half gets three-quarters of the votes. Well, those numbers are just staggering. If kids, if parents could vote on behalf of their children, it would transform American politics. What I was saying earlier about this being like a big structural intervention and scholars having the role of bringing big ideas to the table. This is as big as big gets. This is the biggest enfranchisement of American citizens since the 19th Amendment enfranchised women. This is 23% of the population being added to the voting rolls through their parents.
SPEAKER_04The lack of this if we if we adopt your proposal of giving parents power to vote on behalf of their children, you're saying that would be the greatest enfranchisement?
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that parent proxy voting, if you want to talk about big changes in American politics that would move the needle, not just, you know, let's fight the immigration issue, let's fight the trans issue, let's fight the uh those ones are pretty big too, but um, you know, let's try to reform banks, let's try to whatever. Like think of your policy dispute of the moment. Nothing is bigger. Nothing would have more profound, far-reaching effects on every policy issue than letting parents vote on behalf of their children and thereby putting, you know, taking that 19% of America that is parents at home with their children and um expanding them so that it genuinely is one person, one vote. I mean, it the kids, the the kids right now represent a quarter of America, but don't have the vote. If you added them to their parents, that would be 42% of the American public. Politicians would chase those votes. It would have profound effects on how politics goes. So, anyway, to sum up, my co-author and I, Steve, um uh proposed parent proxy voting in this article in the Notre Dame uh law review. We tried to flesh it out, we tried to get to the very bottom of it philosophically and legally and historically. We tried to answer the relevant objections, we tried to think through implementation. And two uh election law scholars, well to the left of us, very kindly, you know, agreed to uh write responses. So that's Joey Fishkin and Nicholas Stephanopoulos. Uh Stephanopoulos proposed the idea of inflating the votes of uh young adults in his response. But thankfully, both of our responses acknowledged that we were 100% right on the law. Well, Nicholas said we were right 100% right on the law. Joey reserved some disagreements, but that was very gratifying. And they acknowledged the problem. They both acknowledged the problem, they just had different solutions. So we wrote a response to the responses, and now the issue has been put in the public discourse, and here we are.
SPEAKER_00You said in the paper, under the status quo, the most powerful voter in America is a childless adult in a district with plenty of children. And that gave me chills because that what a scary thought. You know, the people I know that say I went to college with who have opted not to have kids, they usually did so because they're worried about climate change. They're worried about coming into a world where you know Trump can be president or they call him dictator or something. Um, the reasons that people are choosing from my generation, for example, not to have children are um completely insane, right? I mean, they're disillusioned. And you compare that with the people I know who are already having kids and they're making choices for their families instead of just themselves. And you get these very different groups of people. So that absolutely made me shudder. Um, but I wanted to ask you, what about what we do with children now? Like under the status quo, do children just not exist for voting purposes, or what does it look like now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And by the way, your first point, I I just want to address that because you know, I said earlier that as as we see for the first time in America and all over the world the this transformation in the birth rate, so that you're starting to see for the first time like, are there differences in political outlook and political perspective between adults who choose never to have children and adults who choose to have children? And I think there are. I think there are some differences in perspective. That isn't the root of my argument. I'm not saying people who choose to have children are like wiser. I'm saying that it's I mean, that's a reasonable perspective. It is not my argument. My argument is, and Steve's argument is um, one person, one vote. If you've got five citizens, three of whom are underage, make sure that you represent the interests of the three people who are underage. It's it's a it's a pure one person, one vote, not a you know, superior virtue kind of argument. So, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah, I was gonna just follow up on the question. So to be clear, like children are represented already, right? In the sense, so the status quo, they already counted, right? They're counted for house seats, they're counted for the electoral college. So someone is representing them. It's just not their parents, right? So why don't you get that above?
SPEAKER_01So so let me let me explain that a little bit. So the 14th Amendment says that seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned to states based on, and I'm gonna quote, their respective numbers counting the whole number of persons in each state. Whole number of persons, that includes children. And that is in fact what we do. When we figure out how many house seats, you know, California gets relative to Alaska or something, we do count children. Children are used to determine house seats. And now think about electoral college votes. That's voting for the president, right? The Constitution, this is in Article 2, says that the number of electors is equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in Congress. So you take, like, let's say you have a big state like California, it's got tons of representatives. You take the total number of representatives, the two senators, combine them, and that's the number of electoral college votes they have for the president. So the presidency already takes into account children. Congress already takes into account children. It's the same with drawing district lines. For both Congress and for state legislatures, constitutional law requires apportionment on a population basis under Reynolds v. Simps. So children already count for their numbers. They swell the population, they affect district lines, they determine how many seats in Congress you get and how many electoral college votes you get for the president. But they don't exercise that power. It is just divided up among all the adults in their district. That's why we say the most powerful voter in America is a childless adult in a district with plenty of children. Because the adults in that district are exercising the political power of other people's children. And our argument is actually that this status quo doesn't make any sense. It might make sense to discount children altogether from everything, right? You don't count them for their numbers, you don't count them for their interests, you just pretend they don't exist. That would at least be intellectually consistent. We think the best way to do it is to count them for their numbers and their interests. They're citizens, they're members of we the people, they're part of the demos that is the root of democracy. So treat them as members in the fullest sense. But don't do this inconsistent thing where you count them for their numbers, swell the number of house seats, and then give their political power to unrelated adults who are just strangers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, when a state grows, they gain another representative. If the people of that state have a ton of kids, they might gain another representative. And the the kids that have been added to the state have no say in who is going to actually go represent them. I think that's probably the strongest argument for your um proposal that I heard. I think that makes complete sense to me.
SPEAKER_04I just want to emphasize. So you've said, by the way, in the paper, Connecticut has a whole extra seat because of the number of kids there. But who's voting for that seat? Well, the other progressive without parents, you know, without kids, you know, are exercising that extra vote in the House of Representative. I just want to make it clear uh for our listeners, because what Catherine just said, I think is right, which is this is the most compelling argument, is that we are already casting votes on behalf of children, right? It's just not the parents doing that. And so, I mean, the status quo is it's not that far off from what you're saying, right, Josh?
SPEAKER_01Right. It's funny. Um This is Steve's favorite argument in the paper. But not mine. But that's okay. Yeah, I'll I'll go with whatever you find compelling. It's compelling. It is compelling.
SPEAKER_04It's the clincher. I think it's the clincher.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, the other thing you say in the paper that I'd like you to explain, because I don't quite understand. Say Connecticut or whatever state wants to implement this parent proxy voting in their state. You think they could do that by state law? So a state like Connecticut could be like, well, our children deserve representation. We're going to implement parent proxy voting, but here in Minnesota, they wouldn't want to do that, maybe. And so they went. Is that seriously how they could do it state by state?
SPEAKER_01100%. 100%. It is very clear that each state could make an individual choice. Listen, folks, what I am proposing here does not require an executive order from President Trump. It does not require Congress. Any state could do this. Ohio could do it tomorrow. You know, pick your red state. They could do it tomorrow. They could do it as a matter of state law. Okay, maybe that surprises folks. Here's why it makes sense. The founders' vision from the time they wrote the Constitution was to give power to define who votes, even in federal elections, to the states. And they wrote the Constitution accordingly. The states get to define who the voters are and how they vote. And that is still the law. Now, the Constitution has some rules regarding voting. They basically police discrimination against certain groups and time, place, and manner restrictions in voting. So, for example, you can't deny the vote to people for reasons of servitude, former condition of servitude. That is the 15th Amendment. That's to prevent discrimination in voting against former slaves. You can't deny the vote to women, that's the 19th Amendment. You can't deny the vote to people over the age of 18, that's the 26th Amendment. An equal protection law creates further protections, a sort of court-developed layer of protections against discriminating in how a state distributes the vote. But this is all policing discrimination. Beyond those minimal conditions, it is up to the states to define who votes and who doesn't. So states abolished property qualifications in the 1830s, right? When the Constitution was written, people had to have property to vote. It wasn't abolished by federal law, it was abolished by state law one state at a time. New Jersey let women vote as early as 1776 and then took it back in the 1800s. But who votes is a matter of state law. In fact, it is a fascinating feature of the Electoral College, which I didn't actually appreciate before I began working on this paper. States can change who gets the vote, who's enfranchised without changing federal representation. Because go back to that 14th Amendment point about the number of whole persons, right? When New Jersey enfranchised women before the 19th Amendment, it didn't get extra representation because women were already counted. Well, actually, I guess back then I don't know what they were doing before the 14th Amendment. But if you listen, if New Jersey were to enfranchise cats today, right? That's not persons. Let me start over. If New Jersey were to uh enfranchise children today, um they're already counted for purposes of determining the number of representatives. So all it changes is the influence on who gets elected in New Jersey, but it doesn't change their number of representatives, their number of senators, obviously, which is two per state, or their influence on the presidency.
SPEAKER_04Josh, can I jump in here? Uh, because I knew you know something about the uh electoral college. This is actually why, in my view, you can be in favor, it would be idiotic, but you can be in favor of lowering the voting age to 16. So some people propose this, okay? But what's the problem? If California lowered the voting age to 16, uh and we didn't have an electoral college, suppose we had a national popular vote. Well, all of a sudden, a bunch of 16-year-olds in California increase California's voting power and political power with respect to the rest of the nation because it's absolute numbers that matter. The incentive would be a race to the bottom. Literally have five-year-olds, you know, cast something. And the way the electoral college solves this is by saying you can experiment with your voting population however you want, but your effect on the electoral college will not change, right? So even today, I think you can be in favor of lowering the voting age of 16, but you can't also then be in favor of abolishing the electoral college, right? Unless you're prepared to nationalize uh all of these rules. And the reason the electoral college does this, by the way, the reason we have the electoral college is partly for this reason because in you know uh the slave states, uh, they had very few people actually voting uh relative to the population. In the north, they had more people voting. And the Southerners rightly said, look, we have this variation, it advantaged them at at the beginning. Don't don't get me wrong about that. But what are we going to do about this difference in voting population? And the Electoral College was part of the solution for that. It solved a bunch of other things, like you know, the president wouldn't be obsequious to Congress and so on. But this is why Alexander Hamilton said it is the one part of the Constitution that has escaped any. Criticism at the time, right? Is the for this very reason.
SPEAKER_01So the bottom line, Catherine, is as a matter of constitutional design, voting is really state law-based. And any state, probably a red state, could establish parent proxy voting by an action of the state alone. Now, in some states, it would require a state constitutional amendment. In some it would require a referendum. And in I think most, it would require just an ordinary statute by the state legislature. But this is really a matter of state law. And that should give us some hope for this proposal because it's pretty hard to get the federal Congress to do things, but things really do get done in state legislatures. And now, I don't want to minimize that there would be litigation. I think what you'd quickly see is a lawsuit. And I think the argument would be that parent proxy voting violates equal protection because it constitutes, I think the argument would be it constitutes extra votes for parents, thereby giving an undue advantage in violation of equal protection to parents as opposed to non-parents. But I think the answer to that litigation is obvious. One vote per citizen can't possibly violate equal protection. It doesn't make sense to say that, you know, you have five citizens, two are parents, three are kids, and now each one has one vote. It's crazy to say that violates equal protection. And it reminds you of the old Saw, when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like uh oppression. So I was very gratified in the responses to our article by two of the leading election law scholars of our generation, well to the left of me and Steve. Nicholas Stephanopoulos just said flat out, this is entirely legal. It could be done by any state, and there would be no plausible legal challenge. He disagreed with our policy solution, but he acknowledged our legal position. Joey, Joey Fishkin, uh had what he basically did was like drop a footnote or a few passing textual words about how he thinks there might be a pretty good equal protection argument against this, but he didn't focus on it at all. He just focused in another direction. And I think that's a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that we're right on the law.
SPEAKER_00So the other um question that is still in my mind, I mean, you've kind of convinced me, honestly. I think this is a good idea. But the question I still have is about logistics. Um, because right now you go in and you get your ballot and then you put it in and it's just like one ballot, me, you put it in the machine, great. This sounds like we're gonna get real complicated. I mean, if you have two parents who have one child, which parent gets to vote for the child? Um you claim though in your article it actually wouldn't be that difficult because part of the registration process could be registering basically for your children. And when it's time to vote, the ballots could be marked with the number of people it represents. So a single parent with one child, they get two votes. If there's two parents, like I said, with one child, they'd each get one and a half votes. So that three votes are cast total by a family of three. I that makes sense. Is it like a little much for us all to adopt this system of fractional voting, or do you think it would be pretty easy?
SPEAKER_01I admit that it's unfamiliar. Fractional voting is something big to swallow, but it's worth it, right? Um it solves the problem of representing children through their through their parents. It reflects a principled position, namely one person, one vote. A family of three citizens would have three votes. That's appropriate. Um and uh, you know, the problem it's addressing is huge. I mean, we're talking about 23% of the citizenry that is not being represented at the polls at all, with observable negative effects on our entire politics, our entire policy situation, as illustrated by COVID, but really true all the time. So if we have to swallow some fractional voting, it's worth it. And in terms of like how big a pill that is to swallow, okay, 49 states already require voting registration in advance. States already have to track parent-child relationships, right? I mean, someone has to be able to register a kid for school or make a medical decision in the hospital or vaccines or whatever. So what I'm proposing is you just take this information that states already have. I mean, they know about the children in their in their state, in their district, whatever, in their town. They know about those children and they know who their parents are. I'm saying just add that information to the voting rule. Some people worry about fraud. I think it would reduce fraud, uh, because you'd have to prove in advance who you are and who your dependents are. And if it were easy to commit- I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the progressives who are against your proposal are worried about fraud?
SPEAKER_04I thought fraud didn't happen. No, I mean I'll seriously, why would parents? Oh, I see. So so they're worried that progressives so is that an admission that childless progressives will be incentivized to commit fraud because Democrats do that?
SPEAKER_01What I think I'm confused. Yes.
SPEAKER_00They've never cared about this issue before, ever. So Right.
SPEAKER_01Either voting fraud is a big problem or it's not. But in this case, and and they are they would be inconsistent with that face with our proposal. That said, I don't think fraud is a big problem. If it were easy to claim false dependence, right? To say I have 10 children and I don't, a lot of people would save a lot of taxes. Right? We claim dependence on our taxes and we get a deduction. So that's a huge financial. It is actually really hard to lie about your kids. They have social security numbers, they're connected to you by law, it's all very provable. So here's how it would work. When it comes time to vote, uh, it would be part of the voter registration how many kids you have and if you share custody uh of them with anyone else. And the poor worker would just fill out bubbles at the top of the ballot, right? So, like let's say there's a single parent, no spouse, one child. So you just fill out the bubbles. One person, parent, one child, full custody, this ballot counts for two. What if there's two parents with one child, husband and wife, let's say? One parent, joint custody, one child, this ballot counts for 1.5. The other person's ballot counts for 1.5. Together, they're three, which is appropriate because there's three citizens in that family. There's uh husband, wife, and child. But you need the fractional voting to make sure that each parent can vote their own perspective and get, you know, one half of the child. If they have three children, it would be one third of three children. Now, the math is unfamiliar. We don't usually do fractional voting, but it's not like it's hard math and it would be automated, and the ballots would all be traceable. So it would basically mean that you put parental information about minor children in the voting registration and you vote ballots as appropriate, and then you add at the end. And we'd have um elections where it would be like, you know, so-and-so got 20,000 and a half votes. And that is not too big a swallow, a pill to swallow for the reward of making sure children's interests are represented.
SPEAKER_04I just don't think this is any more administratively or logistically difficult than figuring out who's 19 or who's a citizen, right? Which so I just didn't they in didn't in the wasn't this in your paper, Josh, in the old days, graduates from Oxbridge, Cambridge and Oxford, didn't they get extra votes? So like they figured this out.
SPEAKER_01I mean, Britain used to do that. They used to uh say uh uh graduates of Oxford and Cambridge get extra votes. It's gotta be the least democratic thing I can possibly imagine, is giving uh elite college graduates extra votes. And I want to be clear, we are not saying that anyone should get extra votes or fewer votes. We're not making judgments about like the virtue or worthiness of different American citizens. All we're saying, and it's a very minimal idea, is uh if you've got 23% of your population that's citizens and can't vote for themselves for reasons of competency, right? They're not competent to vote for themselves. Let their natural representatives vote on their behalf. It's a very simple idea.
SPEAKER_00I don't want to like crash out on this, but I feel like there are a lot of exceptions or weird circumstances that could come up. I mean, this sounds nice, right? Um, but there are a lot of weird things. I think we'd have to have tighter voting laws. For example, here in Minnesota, we have same-day registration. Well, what if the mom registers earlier in the day and the dad registers later in the day, and now the kid is, you know, sorry, mom took your vote, kid, but dad's the you know, conservative and now he's pissed. So I think maybe this would have to come along with some other sort of regulations, but also think of all the special special cases. Um, a child who's an orphan, maybe, or um, a person who's disabled, they maybe in certain circumstances fall under the same category of not being able to vote for themselves, but should absolutely be represented with a vote. But who citizen children who have illegal immigrant parents? I mean, we could go on and on. So maybe your quick response, because we don't need to obviously go through all of these examples, but what do you say about the special cases?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so I think there are lots of them, as you say, and there's so many that it could suck up all of our time and they'd all be like puzzling and we'd get to chew on them and it would be intellectually fun, but it would also get really complex. Um, I think there's a way of thinking about this relatively simple simply. And here's the principle: if there is a child who is a citizen and would be able to vote, except that he's too young, and he has a parent who is eligible to vote in the relevant place, the parent can vote for the child. If the parent is not a citizen, he can't vote. We don't let like, like it would be crazy to say that um a German could vote in American elections. Maybe he doesn't even not even a legal immigrant. He's a German living in Germany, but his kid has American citizenship. Can he vote in American elections? That's bananas. That's crazy, right? So what you need is a triangle of relationships. You need to have a child who is a member of the relevant political community, the we the people, the demos, right? Like a citizen of Connecticut and the United States. You need to have a parent who is in the right relationship to the child, as, you know, this relationship of custody, of general guardianship, of being the child's fiduciary. And the parent has to be in the same relationship to the polity. The parent also has to be a citizen who's eligible to vote. When you have all of those conditions, then the parent can cast a vote on behalf of the child. Now, sometimes, sadly, that condition will be absent. Orphans are the obvious example. You have a child who would be able to vote, but there's no parent available to cast the child's vote. And yes, in a few cases like that, the child's interest in voting will be unfulfilled. But how does that compare to the status quo, where 23%, like all children can't vote? 23% of the population can't vote, uh, have no one to vote for them. This is certainly a huge improvement and relatively uh small number of special cases. Likewise with immigrants, right? You have illegal immigrants whose child is born on U.S. soil and after Trump v. Barber especially gets birthright citizenship. Well, the child has a right to vote, but there's no one available to cast the vote who is himself or herself a legal voter. And so that vote is frustrated. And um and I think we have to say the situation is better than the status quo. Um, and so uh I just want to address one last thing. Uh the big question here is who is we the people? Who is the demos in democracy? Democracies only make sense when you have a people that is determined to govern together, right? Like, like if British citizens could vote in American elections, it wouldn't be we the people of America governing together, right? It would be bananas to suggest, I remember actually when I was getting my PhD in philosophy in Germany, um, a German PhD student who's a colleague of mine said, I should be able to vote in your elections because America is so influential that what happens there affects me. So I should get to vote. And I was like, that's not how it works. It was kind of an interesting provocation, but it's not how it works because even if you're affected, you're not a member of our community. Just like I can't vote at the University of Minnesota where Elon is a professor, and he can't vote at Scalia Law where I'm a professor because we're not a member of each other's community. So this is, there's a lot of assumptions that just go unnoticed in democracies where we define we the people, we define the demos, and they're the ones who are governing together. And um, you know, children are part of the demos, and the vast majority of time, so are their parents. Children can't vote for themselves, so they get undercounted in the rough and tumble of American politics. And uh parents who represent their children in every other life context and who are members of the demos should be able to vote on their behalf. That's the core.
SPEAKER_04So, Josh, can we um I know uh let me go back to the founding for a second, um, because I think this is sort of important. They didn't really think through voting, right? They they knew that like we some degree of voting had to be Republican, right? But what exactly did that mean uh when it was only sort of property owners, uh, you know, white male property owners uh that could vote? And how does I guess your scheme fit into sort of the history of voting? And let me just say, like uh, or what you've called with your, you know, German uh gish what was the something social stash? I don't know, lessons of history, that's a different word that you taught us on voting. So let me just start with the founding, right? It strikes me that this is an example of virtual representation. And everyone sort of recoils when they hear virtual representation uh because we rejected that uh in the revolution, but actually we didn't. And I just want to make this point, right? Because children are already virtually represented. I want to go back to the point that I thought was persuasive and that Catherine thought was persuasive. Children are already virtually represented. So, what do we mean by virtual representation? Well, even in England during the revolutionary period, before the revolution, tons of people were virtually represented. Not everybody had the franchise, not every town sent a member to parliament, right? Women, of course, were virtually represented. And that's the argument they made about America, that you are virtually represented in parliament. And the response wasn't that virtual representation isn't a thing. The problem is virtual representation doesn't work if the interests are so divergent that you can't properly be thought to be virtually representing these people. The theory in England was that the people who did send members of parliament, and then the members of parliament themselves, had shared interests with the people in the realm, right? They legislated for the common good, which was for the common interest, which it was their interest and the interest of the people around them. Same religion, same culture, same profession and trade, right? And same geography. You had this sort of cohesive interest that we could plausibly say they were being virtually represented. But in America, it's like, wait a minute, you're 3,000 miles away. You have no idea what our local circumstances are, you have no idea what our local geography is. It is just not the same thing. Virtual representation doesn't work in this respect. But even in America, people have always been virtually represented. Children are have always been virtually uh represented because again, they have political, they have seats and other people are casting their votes. So it seems to me the question is like the question in the American Revolution. Who is best, who's most capable of virtually representing these people who cannot cast a vote themselves? And just like in America, we said it has to be Americans because 3,000 miles away is too far away. Here, who has the most interest along the lines of the children? Who has the best interest of the child at heart? And because they're already virtually represented. So the question is, who should be doing that virtual representation? And it seems to be the parents, no, who clearly would have the best interest of the child, would be most aligned uh with their interests. Have I sort of just recapitulated the point that I think is the point of your paper?
SPEAKER_01I I think it's a really interesting argument, Elon. And um I I don't think of this as virtual representation because what we're proposing is actual votes. The way virtual representation works is like you and I have aligned interests, and I can't vote, but you can. So your vote sort of makes sure that I get represented. And my problem with that is A, the people charged with virtual representation have usually made a hash of it. Like men did not do a good job of representing women before the 19th Amendment. And uh second, it tends to undercount, right? Because, you know, maybe there's one person who is thought to represent the American colonies, but actually the colonies have uh many millions of people, and so it tends to lead to radical undercounting. It fails the test of proportional representation. So I think the argument is really interesting. I agree with you that parents are the best situated to represent the interests of their child, but I'm interested in giving children, I guess you would say, actual representation through the proxy of their parents rather than virtual representation because they're just so undercounted right now. Like I assume the 19% of Americans who are parents, with minor children at home, are um sincerely voting for an America they think is best for their children, right? They're already, in that sense, virtually representing their children. But the problem is there's 19% of them, so they keep losing when it comes to things like school reform or public safety or COVID policy or whatever else. And the 23% of the people who they're voting for are not getting proportional representation. It's not 42% of the total vote, it's 19%, which is a big difference in policy.
SPEAKER_04Okay, you're right, you're right. So let me revise and extend. I think you've convinced me. I think what really I meant to say then is virtual, they're already virtually represented today. They don't have actual votes, they have virtual representation. So it's kind of like the situation of England, where they claimed we had virtual representation and we said it actually doesn't work. It doesn't work in this case because you can't plausibly be understood to be representing our interests for these reasons. And therefore, we need actual representation. And this isn't quite actual actual representation. It is actual representation by proxy, which is a hybrid of virtual and actual in a way, maybe, but you don't even have to accept that. But the point is it's the same kind of move. This virtual, they're already virtually represented by childless cat ladies. Okay, I just had to get that in once on this episode. Okay. Maybe they don't have a cat, but childless parents, you know, they're already virtually cat. Yeah, I know. And you say that is insufficient, their interests are not actually aligned, and so we uh need to give them actual representation. And okay. No, that that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so I I want to Can I say one more thing about the founding? Because this is so interesting. My take on it is that um the founders' own conception of voting was uh logically inconsistent with the concept of a republic. They did not have a fully fleshed out, defensible conception of voting, but they set into motion an American experiment that would get there over the course of historical time. So, what do I mean by that? You know, the founders, their fundamental belief was that a republic exists to protect the interests of all citizens. They thought that what it means to be part of a republic is every citizen's interests count and count equally. Um, that was their fundamental conviction. But they did not think that meant that everyone should get to vote. They thought that property-holding white men should get to vote because they thought of voting purely as a sort of accountability mechanism, a protective mechanism. If you start to get a tyrant, there are voters there to take the tyrant down. Um over the course of American history, a more robust conception of voting came into being. Right? So, for people who have read a lot of philosophy, I'm making an argument about the philosophy of history. It's sort of Hegelian in character. It has to do with a principle that emerges over the course of a society's development. So in the 1830s, uh, the American states started striking down pop uh property qualifications. And you saw the emergence of De Tokoville's America, which was a very, very kind of popularly governed America with a high degree of democratic accountability uh uh from uh elected officers. Then in the 1860s and 70s, during Reconstruction, there was actually a really fascinating process where at first the Reconstruction Congress were trying to give black people who were former slaves a panoply of rights, thinking this will give them equal citizenship. And it only gradually dawned on both the Reconstruction Congress and their opponents in the South that all that really mattered was voting. If black people could vote, they would be able to secure all of their other rights. And if they couldn't vote, all their other rights would be empty vessels that wouldn't have any real effect. And when black people got the vote, suddenly you saw like a I believe it was a black senator from Mississippi in the uh mid-19th century, right? The vote made all the difference. And that was how we made a transition from the 13th Amendment to the 14th Amendment to the 15th Amendment, which finally protected former slaves' right to vote. Because the 14th Amendment was inadequate. It said equal protection, it did not say the vote. You also got the Voting Rights Act of I think 1870. And then the process continued. Women claimed the right to vote and got it with the 19th Amendment. After the experience of the draft in World War II in Vietnam, there was this slogan, you know, old enough to fight, old enough to vote. And 18, 19, 20-year-olds started getting the right to vote. And what emerged over the course of the American experience as a whole was a revision to the founding concept. The founder's concept was everyone's interests count. That's what it means to have a republic. The discovery of America over the course of its 250-year history was if your interests count, you need to have the right to vote to defend those interests. If your interests count that comes with the vote, the fact that your interests count entails a right to vote. And I think that's the discovery. I think we should credit the founders with putting this experiment into motion and putting the thing into motion that would come to that discovery. But they didn't fully see their way to the bottom of that discovery in 1776 or 1788.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think we should end with the more practical potential implications of a policy like this. What would the actual real-world consequences be if we all of a sudden started parent proxy voting and counting votes for children? Um I looked into some of the data around how people with kids and people without kids do vote. Um it's not that surprising. We've referenced it already. The childless cat ladies vote differently than the people with large families. But there was a report by Pew in 2024 that actually analyzed this. And they found that at all age levels, parent parents are more Republican-oriented than non-parents. And there was like a 10-point swing, basically. So if you didn't have children, you were 10 points more likely to be leaning Democrat. If you did have children, you were more likely to be leaning Republican, which is interesting. Um that was the same for both males and females. Um, the other element that I think is interesting that we've touched on, but US fertility has been declining for years and remains well below replacement. And that is true across all demographics in America. But there is variability in birth rates and different races. White women still account for the largest absolute number of births, though their share has dropped below 50%, I think for the first time last year, maybe, or the year before. Um, and other other racial demographics have much higher birth rates, which I think begs a lot of questions because knowing the Democratic Party that we have, would they use this to exploit a system like this? They've used our immigration policy already to try to um gain voters. Would they somehow exploit a policy like this to also try to gain voters? Would this really incentivize their open borders sort of policy because the the more kids, the merrier? Um I don't know. I'd be interested to hear your guys' thoughts on the real world implications and then what might Democrats do if this became a policy and they thought, man, we could be in trouble the way things are right now, since people with kids tend to lean more Republican.
SPEAKER_04So let me jump in first and say I also don't think a lot of this breaks left versus right, though maybe I'm about to talk myself out of having said that. So just go back to 2020. What would the world have looked like? What would the world world have looked like if parents' votes were weighted based on their children? They can't actually not weighted, actually cast votes on behalf of their children, schools would have opened, right? Uh schools would have opened because what the teachers' unions are a bunch of teachers, most of whom are in their 20s and don't have kids. So of course they're going to close down. So the schools would have opened. I presume that laws will be passed prohibiting teachers from secretly socially transitioning children, right? Unless that's a right-wing issue. I just don't think it's a right-wing issue. I think left parents, you know, Democratic parents, maybe to a less degree, but they presumably wanted the schools open, right? Uh welfare. I mean, Josh, you briefly touched on this, but it was also in the paper. All our welfare programs, all our spending programs are debt. It's really debt. Like, oh, we'll pass it on to our children. Like, yeah, I think about that with my kids. Like, wait a minute, like if we support all of these spending programs through debt, what's their life going to be like in 30 years or 40 years? Right. And so, like, you could, it's almost obvious that there would be dramatic political differences, right? And it I'm not saying it's necessarily left versus right. I mean, Republicans left to spend too. Why? Because they also are responsive to voters who, you know, don't necessarily have the interests of kids right at heart right now. Okay, so you have stuff from me and from Catherine. Why don't you take us home on all this stuff, Josh?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I so the first thing I want to say is that I think we should favor parent proxy voting regardless of political consequences, because it's right as a matter of principle. So, you know, my whole argument is about, you know, one person, one vote. And if you have citizenry, 23% of the population that has no representation and policy is uh distorted for that reason, you should fix it. But I still want to talk about policy consequences. I think in the immediate term, um, there is a sort of some there's a way in which Republicans are sort of the parents' party and Democrats are increasingly not the parents' party. And that's partly a matter of like um just voting patterns. You can observe it, right? Um and it's always been the case that uh uh unmarried women are very very much more likely to be Democrat than married women who are more likely to be Republicans. So women have always been sort of a swing population in that respect. Uh and I think it's gotten more true, right? It's gotten more true with like the trans issue. The trans issue is a really interesting, like my friends who do not have children, um, think of you know giving trans people access to locker rooms and bathrooms and sports and sort of honoring their identity is just a matter of being nice. Like, why are you mean? Just be nice. These are people, they have needs, you know, they have thoughts. Who cares if it's even if they're right or wrong about their gender, just be nice. That's how they think of it. Parents do not think of it that way because they see very, very clearly that what you're doing is changing a whole culture. And the change in the culture changes how everyone's children, including their own, will relate to gender and sexuality, that that this is a change that affects everybody and affects them negatively, not just a matter of being nice to people in need. So um, I do think there are political differences in outlook between parents and non-parents that in the short term will favor the Republican Party. I don't think that's necessarily true in the long term. I think in the long term, the effect will be that both parties start chasing those parents' votes. And it changes both parties. Probably what it'll do is moderate both parties. Um, based on the stats I've seen, there is one population that is more Republican than men with children. It's men without children. It is moderating on male voting to have children. And right now we're seeing the Democratic Party just look at the numbers and be like, we don't need uh uh parents' votes. We can we can win with non-parents' votes, which they get in overwhelming numbers. But if suddenly parents are voting with the power of their children, then they're like, okay, we're still the Democrats, we're still progressives, but we have to change our position on schools. We have to change our position on sexuality. We have to capture Democrat progressive parents' votes. So I think in the long run, what you start to see is this sort of moderating influence of parents' perspectives on politics in both parties and a sort of race by politicians to see who can better capture the parents' votes. And I submit that would be really healthy for American politics. That would be a very welcome development.
SPEAKER_04I agree. What a great note to end on to our listeners. Always please hit that like and subscribe button. What an honor it is to have the leading expert, Josh Kleinfeld, here on the Rationally Based Podcast. Make sure to tune in next week. Thank you.