One of the great fantasies of the Left is that if the older generation simply dies off, all their policy goals will be achieved. In 2013, Oprah Winfrey mused – after two elections of President Obama! – that it might require older white Americans to die for America to achieve racial progress. “There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it – in that prejudice and racism –and they just have to die.”
Now Bill Nye The-Purported-Science-Guy is thinking along the same track.
He told The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, “Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational…We’re just going to have to wait for those people to ‘age out,’ as they say. ‘Age out’ is a euphemism for ‘die.’ But it’ll happen, I guarantee you – that’ll happen.”
These musings are not only pathetically immoral, they’re anti-democratic – the notion behind a representative republic is that people can be convinced on the issues. If Nye has failed to convince people that global warming is a catastrophic threat requiring massively burdensome government intervention, that’s his own fault – perhaps he’s too busy producing songs about “My Sex Junk” or cartoons with polysexual ice cream scoops.
But the fantasy of the Left that the demographics of the country will move in their direction if they can just get rid of undesirable populations has a pretty dark undertone: hoping your political opponents croak so that you can win legislative battles without having to win the argument smacks of nastiness. While conservatives sometimes joke about Leftists having fewer children and then losing the argument through demographics, we’re not actually rooting for it, nor do we think that lack of children from Leftists would be a necessity for political victory.
But on the left, the hatred for those old white Americans is quite real. And it’s one of the driving factors behind that constituency’s hard turn toward candidates like President Trump.