Kids Have No Place in a Liberal Democracy

We are building toward a series of portentous midterm elections that might as well be called the Kinderreferenda, with exactly none of the whimsy or charm that word entails. Whether the specific issues relating to children that parents, politicians, pundits, pediatricians, and peanut gallerists have spent the past several months debating—school closures, vaccine mandates, masking, appropriate reading material, classroom instruction and the role of families therein—appear on every or any ballot is irrelevant; the fate of the nation’s children is the engine of moral concern driving electoral activity local and national, left and right. If Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia last year was secretly foretold in every fractious school-board meeting and town hall preceding it, then it was also a portent of things to come: It’s a childish world, and we’re all just living in it.

This is in every way typical. at stake in the Scopes “monkey trial,” in ,in ,even in Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center. Which is to say: That which is putatively about children, in our liberal-democratic society at least, is never about them. It’s rather about all the subterranean moral values and beliefs we theoretically agree to disagree about so that we can all just get along—and the fact that, when it comes to children, that method of keeping the peace is especially fragile.