Since Roy Moore lost the election to become Alabama's next senator, there's been a lot of sharing on Facebook of the graphics showing that Roy Moore got 66% of the white vote in Alabama (compared to only about 4% of the black vote), or of the vote break of male vs. female.
It is, of course, important not to lose sight of the fact that 2/3 of the white voters in Alabama voted for someone as obviously deranged as Roy Moore. But there's been far less talk about the huge gap between age demographics - voters 18-44 voted 60% for Doug Jones, compared to voters 65+ who voted 60% for Roy Moore. The Washington Post has a breakdown of voting in the election by demographic.
So first off, the fact that young people voted overwhelmingly for Doug Jones is good news for the future. But more fundamentally, I think we way overestimate the amount of "wisdom" that comes with age. A majority of 45-to-64-year-olds voted for the man who said Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress, and who wrote an official opinion as a state judge saying that homosexuality was "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature’s God". (And that was before the stuff about dating 16-year-olds - which I have said on the record was certainly nothing for him to be proud of, but was actually one of the least offensive things about him, relatively speaking, and got vastly more coverage than the fact that, say, Moore did not think Muslims should be allowed to serve in Congress.)
You would think older people would have the advantage of having more information, and more time to think about things, just by having been around longer. But the truth is that it just doesn't seem to work that way. The simple fact that it was old people who put people like Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions and would have put Roy Moore into office if they'd had their way. Whatever extra wisdom they gain from an extra 20-30 years of existing, it's apparently not enough to cancel out the disadvantage of being born in an earlier, uglier time, and absorbing the values of that time which are very hard to grow out of.
Of course these are just averages. I know and respect a lot of older people, including some conservative ones. But as a group, on average they tend to vote for politicians who have been causing the most problems lately.
I just hope when I get to be that old that I'm not part of the problem. #NotAllOldPeople
