Between the end of the Chatterley ban and Yeasayer's first LP?

Joseph Knippenberg asks the perennial question about kids today:

. . . I learned a long time ago—I’m old, you see—that the original great exponent of youth politics was Niccolo Machiavelli, who was the first to celebrate the political daring and audacity of the young. Audacity is a virtue, in the Machiavellian sense.

Whether or not he’s read Machiavelli, Barack Obama gets that. It’s an old assertion, but those who don’t pay attention to old things don’t know that. It’s also a radical assertion, intended to turn the “old” world on its head, to emphasize action at the expense of contemplation, practice at the expense of theory, the restless activity of the young at the expense of the contemplative repose of the old.

I’m not arguing that Barack Obama is a self-conscious Machiavellian, but he is a politician made for the world that Machiavelli has made, a world in which “we are the change we have been waiting for” makes a certain kind of sense.

That line also makes sense as a kind of appeal to youthful identity politics: we are young and new, intended to replace what is just plain old.

And so on.

I may not be old enough to rent a car, but I'm the wrong person to ask about the inner workings of the 18-25 cohort. (To illustrate: I wasted [redacted from embarrassment] minutes last night arguing over which slogan is the more widely accepted archetype of sixties subway graffiti, "Frodo lives" or "Clapton is God.") That being said, Knippenberg's subject is something I care about, and I was disappointed that he emphasized the aspect of youth identity politics that I find most benign, deemphasized the aspect that bothers me most, and sidestepped entirely the desperately interesting dilemma on which I haven't yet made up my mind.

Old folks think; young folks act. 'Twas ever thus. Hamlet's impotence wouldn't be half so tragic in a character twice his age. Lay that same logic on Lear or Macbeth, flip it, reverse it. This isn't to say that being young is the same as having the right to act, only that age has a duty to act as a check on youth's impetuosity. And youth has a duty to push back against age's inertia. It's the same kind of balancing act that takes place between justice and mercy. They're both right, and they're both wrong; the best we can hope for is a good, clean fight.

On the other hand, Knippenberg breezes past the kind of change that "out with the old, in with the young" usually implies, which is pernicious in a way that mere "change" isn't. What are we sweeping away? Outmoded prejudices. Why? Because we are so much more open-minded. The Whig who thinks of history as one grand march of progress and the liberal who thinks of history as a gradual erosion of prejudices are two distinct kinds of damned fool. The great danger of the latter—the kind of self-consciously young person who draws a straight line from Benson to Ellen to Isis and wonders who's next in line for mainstream acceptance—is that he doesn't feel the need to make a case for his position. Arguments from tradition are beneath his attention. He needs only to wait for the old and prejudiced to die.

If you believe that all truths can be justified through argument, then none of this should bother you. If, on the other hand, there are still some prejudices you would like younger generations to take on faith (and if you've ever tried to persuade—ha!—a five-year-old into thinking that it's nice to share, there are), then this model of youth superseding age should seem dangerous. (I make a longer argument for salutary prejudice here; I cite John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, if that's any enticement.)

So young people should be understood as a political class of their own, not, as is often thought, because they are so much more open-minded than everyone else but because they have so much more energy. (I'd put idealism in the plus column, too, but one doesn't have to.) There remains a question of whether or not it makes sense for a young, politically active person to call himself a conservative. Everyone knows Churchill's thoughts on the subject, but Peter Viereck's take is almost as memorable. He says of William F. Buckley:

Has a young St. Paul emerged form the Yale class of 1950 to bring us the long awaited Good Tidings of a New Conservatism and Old Morality? The trumpets of national publicity imply it. But this Paul-in-a-Hurry skips the prerequisite of first being a rebel Saul. The difference between a shallow and profound conservatism is the difference between an easy, booster-ish yea-saying to the old order and a hard-won tragic yea-saying.

I've said that a give-and-take between activity and intertia is the natural state of affairs between youth and age; Viereck has put forward a give-and-take between liberalism and conservatism. The thirty-second argument against that position is that submitting to some compelling, sublime authority is the beginning of individual self-discovery, not the end. (Again, see this old post.) Young people don't have the same instinctual attachment to authoritative prejudices that their elders do, but that doesn't mean that they're right and their elders are wrong. Sometimes it means that young people need to embrace these authoritative institutions and allow those authorities to shape them, not because these authorities can present good arguments but because they're aesthetically, emotionally, or intellectually compelling. That's what young conservatives are for. The thirty-minute version of this argument is the Kinks' We are the Village Green Preservation Society.

As a last swipe at Viereck, to counterbalance Dan McCarthy's kind words: whose yea-saying is more charmingly tragic, the old curmudgeon's or the Paul-in-a-hurry's?