FREDDIE DE BOER: The Deepest Bias in Media? Fear of Looking Old. “Social media opened the door for people in the industry to directly express and enforce a set of values, and a core value was lionizing the young – the young were left and the left was young, at least in the progressive imagination, and anyway, no one wants to feel old.”

The left valorizes youth because young people are ignorant, gullible, and easily manipulated. Old ideas seem new to them, because they haven’t seen them fail before.

Related: “Why is the ‘Party of Youth’ Run By Old People?”

Plus:

Leftist politics, as noted above, is something that the manipulative old sell to the gullible young. Hence leftists’ nonstop efforts to produce more gullible young people.

Young people are susceptible to socialism for a number of reasons. One is that families, by and large, actually do operate along more or less socialist lines. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is a fair description of how most families work. Parents have jobs, earn, pay bills, care for their young, provide clothes, education, medical care and more, without the children being expected to pay their way or, nowadays, even contribute. (That last was quite different a few generations ago, when teenagers provided, on average, about a third of the household income.)

Since this works at home – certainly for the children who are the recipients of their parents’ largesse – it seems natural to expand it to society as a whole. People who have been looked after for their entire lives are likely to be comfortable with the idea of being looked after in the future.

Of course, it works at home because the parents feel an attachment to their children, and a loyalty to them, that people don’t feel for strangers. . . .

But to retain the support of the younger people, they must be insulated from the objections of the middle-aged. This is done by cultivating youth culture. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” is a famous example. The reason you’re not supposed to trust them is that they are likely to tell you that the exciting new socialist ideas you’re being fed have in fact been tried over and over again for more than a century, generally with disastrous results.

The divide was further strengthened by the invention of “cool.” As Roger Simon has written, at one time being cool was the obsession of a generation – really of several. And being cool meant, among other things, being estranged from what the squares were doing, and the squares were, by definition, the older, stable, more experienced people.

One of the reasons the “coolness” strategy worked was that young people care a lot about their reputations, and age separation in our education system (more on that in a bit) means that the people whose reputations they care about are mostly other young people.

You can see why leftist education is always bad.