‘adultification’ - ideally some things wouldn’t be ‘adult’ responsibilities either, EG child justice system builds on issues with adult justice system, child labour issues build on general labour issues, just with more empathy for the child versions
a third of the population of the world are children, in some countries it’s closer to half
political power as concentrated by place rather than time, temporal nature of family and children, interests of children within family not in Region, children outliving political powers, pluralized locality votes, children no stake in interregional conflict
right to ‘property’, including slaves, women and children, but only land as property counted to gain the vote as it was the only property considered to give him a vested interest in the commonwealth - ‘common interest with and attachment to the community’
children are the ‘temporary property of others’ - the novel Elmet (Fiona Mozley) has these vibes - children as property
when it went from land ownership to any man, men become the public representative of ‘private’ family
a basis in labour - seen to work outside of the home
from economic interest to political competence
In US, lowering age in order to justify drafting for Vietnam war
Seen as ‘eventual inheritors of a better world rather than present participants in political life’
Considered to have ‘prepolitical innocence in which they need to be protected from public life’
Not equivalent to making medical decisions - some medical decisions end your own life but to make the ‘wrong’ choice in a vote cannot directly make the decision, only indirect impacts - maybe in direct democracy the decision of the individuals are trickier
Michael Cummings “the civic disengagement and loss of social capital plaguing democracies today is rooted in the systematic silencing of people’s political voice during their early years”
“Democracy does not have to divide supposedly independent adult subjects from supposedly dependent child objects. It does not have to divide citizens between those occupying present democratic space and those still in pre-democratic time” Pg 156 bottom chunk
“Reconstructive democracy […] refuses to separate the people into one group whose differences are valued as expressions of independent experience and another group whose differences are coded as secondary expressions of dependence. Put differently, it refuses to separate democratic space from democratic time. There is no meaningful sense in which some people still need time before they can be fully admitted into democratic space.”
To maximise individual freedom/liberty above all other concerns (neoliberalism) is to be dominated by the interests of the powerful few
Go beyond deconstructivist democratic theory to reconstructivist democratic theory
“The wall between dependent and independent persons is a false one. All children and adults are thoroughly interdependent”
“The proxy-claim right to vote is am interdependent right to vote that accounts for this more complex human reality”