John Warner spoke today at Larry Sabato's Intro to Politics class, and he took a lot of questions. Most everyone in the class now has a working knowledge of the constitution and the political process, and at least a vague idea or what's going on in the country. Most of the questions were the only one on their particular topic, but Senator Warner expressed some surprise at the focus of about half of the questions and the only recurring theme of the discussion: the erosion of our civil liberties.

Among the D.C. punditocracy, there's a lot of pontificating on what young voters do and don't care about, and I suspect most of them would be every bit as surprised as Senator Warner was about the level of concern among young voters with civil liberties. Presumably, America's youth don't vote in large numbers because they are mostly shielded by their parents from the material concerns that motivate most political engagement. So the analysts bore their audiences looking for material issues that young voters are supposed to care about (usually college loans and balanced budgets), but I'd like to suggest an very different approach: academic issues.

I don't mean "education"; I mean the things we read about in civics class and history class, like the constitution, the wars we faught to defend it, the civil rights movement waged to finish the job it started. Usually people call these "abstract" issues, but that's when they're talking about adults who don't care about them anyway (except solidly-Democratic Democrats). But to students, who don't pay for taxes or health insurance, no issue can be concrete or abstract -- even student loans seem a lifetime away.

The division is instead between what adults and politicians and pundits tell us, and what we know, what we can reason and grasp with our own minds. To me, every issue is abstract, but habeus corpus and the fourth amendment are at least self-evident. Politicians appealing to the youth vote, as well as pundits analyzing it, need not fear the abstract -- everything is abstract, but the recent, blatant violations of the constitution, drowning polar bears, and civillian casualties are crystal clear.