In 2008, a few weeks before my first son was born, I was in Washington, DC, on a business trip.
We had a meeting with an Army general who happened to be a good friend of my point man in the capital. It was a very pleasant lunch. At some point during the conversation, he learned that I was about to become a father.
He told me something I have never forgotten.
Where he came from, he said, there was a saying that the first child makes you a man.
Until then, we are no more than “grabasstic pond slime,” as Sergeant Major Hartman used to put it.
He was not entirely wrong.
There is something fundamental about becoming responsible for another human being. You grow up when the consequences of your decisions stop belonging exclusively to you. Until then, you can make mistakes, change direction, burn bridges, waste money, take risks and generally behave like an idiot without necessarily having to carry somebody else along with you.
Children change that.
Suddenly there is another person whose future depends, at least partly, on your judgment. Your decisions acquire weight. You develop skin in the game.
Young people generally have very little of it.
That is not necessarily their fault. It is simply a consequence of being young. Most teenagers have few genuine responsibilities. They have not accumulated much experience, they have not yet had sufficient opportunity to make expensive mistakes, and they have little understanding of how quickly seemingly abstract political decisions can become very concrete problems in their own lives.
Yet they are often extraordinarily confident about those decisions.
This is not an ideal combination.
Young people are also particularly susceptible to ideology and narratives. Again, this is not an accusation. It is a consequence of limited experience. If you have not yet spent decades watching political promises collide with reality, you are naturally more inclined to believe the promise.
That makes teenagers and very young adults an interesting demographic for political movements.
They have strong convictions, considerable emotional energy and, frequently, very little personal exposure to the consequences of the policies they support.
We should therefore be careful about confusing enthusiasm with maturity.
I do not pretend to know what the ideal voting age is. Perhaps there is no perfect number. I am increasingly inclined, however, to think that it should be somewhere in the mid-twenties.
I am open to arguments for something different.
But I have become increasingly convinced that teenagers should not vote.
The objection, of course, is that this sounds paternalistic. Perhaps it is. But democracy is not improved merely by maximising the number of people allowed to put a mark on a ballot paper. The quality of a democratic decision depends at least partly on the capacity of voters to understand consequences, weigh competing interests and recognise that politics is not a video game in which somebody else pays when your preferred experiment fails.
Age does not automatically produce wisdom.
Neither does having children.
There are sixty-year-olds who remain fools and twenty-year-olds who are remarkably mature.
But generalisations exist for a reason.
As people acquire responsibility, they tend to acquire perspective. As they accumulate obligations, experience and consequences, they develop more skin in the game.
Perhaps that should count for something.
Because the younger the electorate becomes, the more likely it is that political decisions are made by people who will not yet have experienced the consequences of those decisions.
And I suspect that is one reason why the results become increasingly detached from reality.
The younger the voters, the crazier the results.
That is not a mathematical law.
But it may be an empirical one worth testing.