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The politics of American seniors
Hamilton College has completed its annual Hot Button Issues Poll, focussing this year on American high school seniors' attitudes toward homosexuality, gun control, and abortion. The results are interestingly mixed, and show a generation that is at once more liberal and more conservative than its parents. According to the poll, American seniors are more than twice as likely as their parents to support gay rights and gay marriage; they are also deceptively conservative on abortion--though more than 60% say they do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, the majority believes that abortion is morally wrong and opposes abortion under any circumstances except those in which the mother's life is in danger or the pregnancy resulted from rape.
In our politically binary public culture, it has become popular to oversimplify the outlook of today's college students--liberals tend to lament the growing conservatism of American youth, while conservatives tend to deplore the same generation's lack of core moral values. On campus, where liberal ideology rules supreme, speech codes, diversity movements, sensitivity training, and multiculturalism requirements attempt to liberalize students who are presumed to be locked in an intolerant conservative cultural stance. Elsewhere, novels such as Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and Francine Prose's Blue Angel seek to document both the devastating moral nihilism of the hyper-permissive collegiate culture and the cynical hypocrisy of students who learn to manipulate the policies designed to protect their not-so-tender sensibilities.
Polls such as Hamilton's urge us to move beyond caricature and stereotype when it comes to understanding where young adults stand and why they stand where they do. They also make it possible for us to begin formulating a more rounded and precise portrait of a new generation. But they will only do so if people on both sides of the political fence are willing to relinquish their convenient adolescent straw men.
Posted by acta online on January 08, 2006 at January 8, 2006 10:23 AM
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