[aisengard]

I mean, they tried that in the primaries and young people still stayed home. If they actually came out in force for Bernie like you said they would, he would have won every primary. Young people simply don't vote because of a lot of different reasons. Probably some of the reasons are immaturity and a lack of belief that they have agency, which is understandable given how society works in the US. You have basically zero rights until you turn 18, at which point you are magically able to vote! Do you believe you have the ability to affect the world at that point? Of course not.

"Put up candidates that don't suck" in this context is basically "put up candidates who will cater to young voters at the expense of literally every other constituency", which is exactly the reason Bernie lost in 2016, and lost even harder in 2020. You can't focus only on one group of people, even if that's the only way to drive their turnout. It's just a losing game, clearly not one worth playing with a group of people who don't yet understand that other people exist, with other priorities.

[beepbooptheory]

I guess I just didn't realize that was the settled reason why Bernie lost!

I just think even granting this framing, what is the point or the lesson here? Is the idea that Clinton in 2016 was more well-rounded, had broader appeal as a candidate and young people were too immature to realize this?

[aisengard]

The lesson is that making your sole priority driving youth turnout is a losing strategy, for reasons that are not that confusing. The Bernie lamenters would do well to learn lessons from his failures, rather than blaming everyone else.

[beepbooptheory]

Sure, but what does this mean? Like ok we know not to solely cater to the youth vote, great. That wouldn't imply to me then that the correct thing to do instead is alienate or anger that same vote, right? Shouldn't we see nominees that cater to all of them, or a lot of them at least? Or, what's wrong with wanting that?

We do not need to start from the point of view that each given interest or group is totally opposed, that we are locked in some zero-sum death spiral where "the youth vote" shares absolutely no overlap with anybody else. Politics is possible at all because we believe in something else. You could decompose everything down into a list of people to blame with stuff like this, but it won't tell you what to actually do!

[aisengard]

That's the thing - we already know that each given interest group has common interests. That's how you build coalitions, by finding those common interests and tamping down on the differences. The problem with the youth vote that we know, is that if we cater to anyone other than them, or god forbid have any opinion they disagree with, they get disillusioned or even outright hostile (very much to their own detriment), for reasons I speculated on above.

So it's better to treat them as a totally unreliable voting bloc that is nice to have, but in no way should be treated special. They are fickle, impossible to corral, and make particularly awful coalition partners.

Bernie, for one, would have done well to use their energy to launch, as he did, but then switch to broadening his coalition, rather than doubling down on catering to their every whim and attempted browbeating. That rigidity and tunnel vision is what sunk him, and is what would have led to total electoral collapse if he had somehow made it to the nomination.

[beepbooptheory]

Ok well then I guess there really is no hope here for this. I guess it's just a shame it's such a helpless case with the kids here!

But really, if you have a democracy where there seems to be one uncompromising bloc that no one can really satisfy, that too is democracy in action in a way! Or rather, it maybe says something about the state and the parties that this is the case with regard to the youth. Given all of history, we can't just say in general "kids are intrinsically uncompromising, short term idealists fundamentally incompatible with democracy." Right?