The perils of Totulism
Keep children out of politics
In Citizens, his account of the French Revolution, Simon Schama wrote how the Jacobins recruited children into ‘relentless displays of public virtues’. These youth affiliates, the ‘Young Friends of the Constitution,’ encouraged children to attend sessions at the group’s headquarters in Paris, while ‘throughout France, “Battalions of Hope,” consisting of boys between the ages of seven and twelve, were uniformed and taught to drill, recite passages from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and parade before the citizen-parents in miniature version of the uniform of the National Guard.’
In Lille, a ‘children’s federation’ was formed, two of whose members, César Lachapelle, aged eight and Narcise Labussière, nine, were noted to declare ‘We will live for our patrie, and our last sighs will be for her…. When our parents and teachers boast endlessly of the wisdom of your decrees and when from all parts of France we hear applause for your immortal work, when all of France showers blessings upon your heads, how can our hearts remain insensible? No, Messieurs, recognition and respect know no age.’ They sounded insufferable.
The use of children has been a feature of authoritarian and illiberal regimes down the years, most notoriously during China’s cultural revolutions when teenagers were encouraged to attack teachers, while the recruitment of adolescents was found across communist regimes. In September last year, far-left extremists at a traditional French riot in Aurillac brought children along, showing them how to throw ‘foam cobblestones.’ Sweet.
In contrast, the use of children as political human shields has historically been viewed with discomfort by the more politically moderate, creepy even. Not so much today, where numerous schools have recruited children to bunk off to attend climate protests. During the recent Labour Conference there were dozens of schoolchildren outside, ‘campaigning’ for free school meals, apparently with the blessing of their teachers. In the United States, children have been encouraged to pester politicians over the ‘Green New Deal’; in Ireland, a group of 9-12 year olds from a community centre in Cork were utilised by a taxpayer-funded charity to promote a more generous asylum policy through the medium of rap music.
The taboo against using kids to promote political ideas has largely been broken, driven not just by naked calculation but also a mawkish sentimentality about the opinions of children, their purity and goodness. It’s a form of populism that might be called totulism - politics dictated by tots.
The trend became notable in the 2010s, when politicians and journalists began repeating the profound thoughts of children on the hot button issues of the day. In 2017 the New York Times reported that at the Advent School in Boston, a teacher asked a group of students the big question: ‘What is gender? The first answer came from a second-grader: “It’s a thing people invented to put you in a category.”’
There was a 5-year-old girl who wrote to Pope Francis calling for looser immigration controls because ‘my dad works very hard in a factory galvanizing pieces of metal.’ Meanwhile, President Joe Biden produced a letter from ‘Charlotte’ asking why men get paid more, and ‘I think you should fix this since your the presitent’ [sic]. Horrible cynics such as myself suspected that most of the young children were simply repeating what they’d been told by parents and teachers, or, in the case of various social media posts recounting similar stories, simply made up. The trend subsided for a while – but hasn’t gone away.
