David Faris - The kids are all left: How Young Voters Will Unite America

PICTURE YOURSELF FOR a moment as the commissioner of Major League Baseball, tasked with guarding the fortunes and traditions of the national pastime. You are in Kansas Citys Kaufmann Stadium on a long, languid, humid summer afternoon enjoying a hot dog and a Boulevard Tropical Pale Ale when one of your newest underlings, an adorably awkward math major fresh out of MIT, plops down into the seat next to you with some alarming news. Our fan base is quickly dying, he says. He shows you a thick binder full of data that confirms your worst fears, the sort of worries youd prefer to set aside while enjoying the Royals-Tigers game unfolding in front of you. Most of baseballs hard-core fansthe ones who buy tickets for the games, pay $150 a month for their monthly cable subscription to catch tilts on TV, and spend their free time in fantasy leagues full of their college friendsare over fifty. Americans under thirty, especially in growing demographics like Latinx fans, are choosing soccer or basketball over baseball.

The underling is blunt. In twenty years, we will be ice hockey, he warns, a sport intensely beloved by a tiny minority but mostly ignored by the larger culture. In twenty more, well be boxing.

He hands you a bullet-pointed list of ways to address this problem, refuses your offer of a beer (young people arent drinking much these days, after all), and walks away.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and following his advice, like ramping up youth league efforts, financing under-served communities, quickening the games pace, promoting the sports diverse stars, and perhaps placing major-league franchises in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other places where baseball remains wildly popular, you make a stunning gamble by doubling down on the sports core, dying demographic of older white men. You instruct teams to hold Caucasian Nights celebrating white culture. You eliminate wild-card playoff games, pitch clocks, and designated hitters to return to tradition. You lobby the government to make it harder for international players to get visas, and you appoint old white dudes with thready pulses and gray faces to every single important position of leadership in the game. You ban Latin American players from wearing jewelry or getting tattoos that represent their countries of origin. You look at the hordes of older white fans driving in from the exurbs and packing stadium after stadium, and the wall-to-wall media coverage of your antics and bask in self-satisfaction. You suddenly have a million followers on Twitter, most of whom arent even baseball fans but rather people who seem to enjoy human suffering. Baseball gets a little dead-cat bounce, but the future still looks grim.

If betting on a dying core demographic, deliberately alienating young people, and delighting in open, unapologetic racism seems like a total genius move to you, youre going to love the strategy of the contemporary Republican Party in the United States. Theres really no way to sugarcoat this: the GOP is getting clobbered so badly in the competition for young voters that the partys future looks bleaker than an episode of The Handmaids Tale. The MIT grad has been sitting next to party leaders for years now, reading exit polls and surveys and results in election after election, warning about the extinction-level political event hurtling their way to no avail. The chimerical victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election and his transformation of the Republican Party from thewink-winksuper-secret electoral home of Americas racists to an open, frothing white power organization with fond linkages to every authoritarian, right-wing nationalist group on the planet has momentarily rescued the GOP from its demographic destiny. The Trump era has given hope to reactionaries who have long dreamed of reimposing their vision of white, male dominance on the country, and legitimacy to a long list of far-right crackpots who once operated at the margins of society. And if Trump and the Republicans were polling ahead, or even respectably, with young people, Id be genuinely worried as I scroll through property listings in Ontario.

But they arent. Even as the US economy hummed along with its lowest levels of unemployment in forty years, as the stock market reached new heights, the Republican Party remains about as popular as tooth extraction with everyone under the age of forty. They see America as a society dominated by conservatives since their parents were children, and blame baby boomers and Gen Xers for systematically looting the country and burning down the bridges that once led to success and prosperity immediately after crossing them. Once upon a time, you could pursue affordable higher education for next to nothing, support a family, and buy a house with a few years of hard work and savings. Now, you have to take out fifty grand in crippling loans just to get through college, even at many flagship state universities that were once effectively free, and the world that confronts you when you get out is harrowing. The best jobs are in major cities, where everything feels up-charged. Real wages in many industries havent increased in decades, and more and more of your limited income gets eaten up by health care costs and housing, even as your callous elders mock you for the avocado toast and lattes that you cant afford and dont buy anyway.

Worse, too many people over the age of forty-five seem not to get it. They dont understand why they cant call you hot lips anymore or make jokes about Polish people or imitate foreign accents, and they are outraged at the idea of a woman being the lead in the new James Bond movie, and they think older brothers and dads exist to protect the virtue of young women, and they quietly (or not-so-quietly since the election of Trump) believe that the plight of poor folks and minorities is their own fault because they dont work hard enough and that young people are snowflakes who were given participation trophies just for showing up and whose brains were warped in childhood by parents who told them how special they were and that kids should know what the world is really like and that most of them are not special at all and they should not be told fairy tales about equality and justice, and they are tired of having their Thanksgiving soliloquies about Ronald Reagan ruined by the sour attitudes of their kids punk social justice warrior girlfriend or boyfriend, and they have nothing against Muslims or Africansthey were nice to one of them just last week!but they think its all gone too far, and that somewhere soon they are going to encounter a transgender Syrian activist in the bathroom and that,