The increasing infantilisation of older adults
Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2025 1:43 pm
I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it, but there was a leak of the Young Republicans’ local leaders group chat where they posted the kind of stuff that you’d expect on 4chan’s /pol/ and /b/ rather than on a conventional boomercon GOP chat: Anyway, I’m not talking about the group’s racism or sexism as much as how starting with Vance, there has been a bizarre effort to infantilise the people involved, as shown by how those adults are referred to by Vance and other MAGA folks as “kids”:
https://xcancel.com/allenanalysis/statu ... 3302200564
https://xcancel.com/bchepren/status/1979691641180188892
This linguistic choice, while superficially benign, is deeply symptomatic of a broader cultural tendency: the progressive infantilisation of adulthood in contemporary political discourse. What might seem like a gesture of leniency or compassion in fact reveals a larger transformation in how maturity, agency, and responsibility are understood in late modern societies.
Calling grown men in their twenties and thirties “kids” functions as a moral shield. It allows political actors to reframe agency as immaturity, transgression as inexperience, and accountability as cruelty. In rhetorical terms, infantilisation becomes a way to neutralise both criticism and moral responsibility without resorting to explicit censorship. It situates the politician as a paternal figure rather than an ideological ally, shifting the dynamic from solidarity to guardianship. The gesture is thus not an expression of empathy but a form of ownership: Vance positions himself as protector, arbiter, and moral authority over those he calls “kids.” Such language doesn’t simply soften condemnation; it reaffirms hierarchy under the guise of benevolence.
This rhetorical move works because it resonates with deeper social transformations that have blurred the boundary between youth and adulthood. Over the past few decades, the structural preconditions of traditional adulthood—stable employment, affordable housing, and family formation—have steadily eroded under neoliberal financialisation. The result has been the emergence of a new social category: the “permanent adolescent,” someone suspended between dependency and autonomy. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified this process by normalising both economic precarity and state intervention into private life. As Giorgio Agamben and Byung-Chul Han have argued in different ways, this normalisation of dependency functions as a new form of social control: a “biopolitics of care” that redefines compliance as responsibility and obedience as maturity. In such a climate, the infantilisation of adults becomes culturally legible and politically useful.
What is particularly striking is how this tendency transcends the traditional left–right divide. On the progressive left, infantilisation often appears in the rhetoric of “safety” and “trauma,” which assumes that individuals are too psychologically fragile to encounter certain ideas. On the populist right, it manifests through appeals to “innocence” and “protection,” in which the purity of “our children” or “our boys” becomes a moral justification for censorship and paternal authority. In both cases, the subject’s agency is withdrawn in order to legitimate control, and the language of compassion becomes indistinguishable from the logic of discipline. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality—power exercised through the management of life rather than the threat of death—helps illuminate how both sides now govern through care. What differs is not the structure of control but the aesthetic of its justification.
The irony is that the populist right once defined itself as a movement of free speech absolutists, positioning itself against progressive moral paternalism. That rhetoric has now largely collapsed. Instead of defending unpopular speech as a universal right, figures like Vance now excuse it by appealing to immaturity, effectively replacing liberal freedom with conservative tutelage. Freedom of expression becomes a conditional privilege granted to those deemed capable of “adult” speech, a category determined by political affiliation rather than principle. This is not a defense of liberty but a subtle form of gatekeeping. In this new paradigm, the state or its ideological representatives decide who qualifies as a responsible adult and who remains a child in need of guidance.
The conceptual backdrop to this shift is the long-standing Western ideal of childhood innocence, a cultural fiction that scholars such as Philippe Ariès and Jacqueline Rose have shown to be more about adult fantasies of purity than about real children. To call someone “innocent” is to define them as incapable of moral agency and thus in need of protection. That logic has now migrated into adult political life. When Vance calls his supporters “kids,” he is extending the protective discourse of innocence to adults who are politically useful to him, effectively suspending their accountability while reaffirming his own authority. In this sense, innocence becomes not an ethical quality but a political instrument, invoked selectively to protect allies and condemn opponents. After all, I doubt JD Vance would consider an 18 yo owning PIM as "kids being kids".
This produces what we might call a regime of conditional adulthood, in which maturity is not a biological stage but an ideological status that can be revoked or withheld. Political allies can be indefinitely infantilised when convenient—excused as misguided or naive—while political enemies are denied innocence altogether and held to impossibly high standards of culpability. The same culture that excuses thirty-year-olds for hateful speech as “kids being kids” will treat a teenager expressing dissent as a dangerous adult. This inversion reveals that “age” has become a political technology, a flexible marker of moral worth. Power now decides when individuals are considered mature enough to be held responsible, and that decision is deeply ideological.
Infantilisation thus transforms what was once derided as “cancel culture” into something more insidious: parental culture. Both rely on the withdrawal of agency in the name of protection, and both depend on the rhetoric of care to obscure the exercise of authority. The political subject is no longer a self-governing adult but a dependent moral child who must be protected from harm, temptation, or error. In this way, coercion is rebranded as benevolence, and censorship becomes a form of love. Foucault’s insight that modern power operates not by forbidding but by fostering is crucial here: infantilisation doesn’t silence dissent through fear, but through the promise of safety.
The deeper crisis, then, is not simply political hypocrisy but a cultural erosion of faith in adulthood itself. Liberal democracy presupposes that citizens are capable of self-rule, of managing freedom responsibly without paternal supervision. As Hannah Arendt warned, the health of the public sphere depends on individuals willing to appear in it as autonomous actors. The growing distrust of adulthood undermines that foundation. If citizens are viewed as too fragile, too naive, or too childlike to handle freedom, then democratic participation becomes a performance managed by parental elites. What replaces it is not tyranny in the traditional sense, but a form of moral daycare—authoritarianism disguised as compassion.
The Vance episode, though minor in itself, reveals this transformation in miniature. His rhetorical protection of adult subordinates under the label of “kids” captures the wider logic of a society that no longer believes its members can be trusted with moral agency. The political infantilisation of adults reflects a civilisational turn toward managed dependency, where both freedom and responsibility are mediated by paternal authority. To resist this trend requires more than defending free speech; it demands reclaiming adulthood as a political condition—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s words and actions without seeking refuge in innocence. The true contest ahead may not be between left and right, but between those who still believe in the possibility of adulthood and those who have quietly abandoned it.
https://xcancel.com/allenanalysis/statu ... 3302200564
https://xcancel.com/bchepren/status/1979691641180188892
This linguistic choice, while superficially benign, is deeply symptomatic of a broader cultural tendency: the progressive infantilisation of adulthood in contemporary political discourse. What might seem like a gesture of leniency or compassion in fact reveals a larger transformation in how maturity, agency, and responsibility are understood in late modern societies.
Calling grown men in their twenties and thirties “kids” functions as a moral shield. It allows political actors to reframe agency as immaturity, transgression as inexperience, and accountability as cruelty. In rhetorical terms, infantilisation becomes a way to neutralise both criticism and moral responsibility without resorting to explicit censorship. It situates the politician as a paternal figure rather than an ideological ally, shifting the dynamic from solidarity to guardianship. The gesture is thus not an expression of empathy but a form of ownership: Vance positions himself as protector, arbiter, and moral authority over those he calls “kids.” Such language doesn’t simply soften condemnation; it reaffirms hierarchy under the guise of benevolence.
This rhetorical move works because it resonates with deeper social transformations that have blurred the boundary between youth and adulthood. Over the past few decades, the structural preconditions of traditional adulthood—stable employment, affordable housing, and family formation—have steadily eroded under neoliberal financialisation. The result has been the emergence of a new social category: the “permanent adolescent,” someone suspended between dependency and autonomy. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified this process by normalising both economic precarity and state intervention into private life. As Giorgio Agamben and Byung-Chul Han have argued in different ways, this normalisation of dependency functions as a new form of social control: a “biopolitics of care” that redefines compliance as responsibility and obedience as maturity. In such a climate, the infantilisation of adults becomes culturally legible and politically useful.
What is particularly striking is how this tendency transcends the traditional left–right divide. On the progressive left, infantilisation often appears in the rhetoric of “safety” and “trauma,” which assumes that individuals are too psychologically fragile to encounter certain ideas. On the populist right, it manifests through appeals to “innocence” and “protection,” in which the purity of “our children” or “our boys” becomes a moral justification for censorship and paternal authority. In both cases, the subject’s agency is withdrawn in order to legitimate control, and the language of compassion becomes indistinguishable from the logic of discipline. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality—power exercised through the management of life rather than the threat of death—helps illuminate how both sides now govern through care. What differs is not the structure of control but the aesthetic of its justification.
The irony is that the populist right once defined itself as a movement of free speech absolutists, positioning itself against progressive moral paternalism. That rhetoric has now largely collapsed. Instead of defending unpopular speech as a universal right, figures like Vance now excuse it by appealing to immaturity, effectively replacing liberal freedom with conservative tutelage. Freedom of expression becomes a conditional privilege granted to those deemed capable of “adult” speech, a category determined by political affiliation rather than principle. This is not a defense of liberty but a subtle form of gatekeeping. In this new paradigm, the state or its ideological representatives decide who qualifies as a responsible adult and who remains a child in need of guidance.
The conceptual backdrop to this shift is the long-standing Western ideal of childhood innocence, a cultural fiction that scholars such as Philippe Ariès and Jacqueline Rose have shown to be more about adult fantasies of purity than about real children. To call someone “innocent” is to define them as incapable of moral agency and thus in need of protection. That logic has now migrated into adult political life. When Vance calls his supporters “kids,” he is extending the protective discourse of innocence to adults who are politically useful to him, effectively suspending their accountability while reaffirming his own authority. In this sense, innocence becomes not an ethical quality but a political instrument, invoked selectively to protect allies and condemn opponents. After all, I doubt JD Vance would consider an 18 yo owning PIM as "kids being kids".
This produces what we might call a regime of conditional adulthood, in which maturity is not a biological stage but an ideological status that can be revoked or withheld. Political allies can be indefinitely infantilised when convenient—excused as misguided or naive—while political enemies are denied innocence altogether and held to impossibly high standards of culpability. The same culture that excuses thirty-year-olds for hateful speech as “kids being kids” will treat a teenager expressing dissent as a dangerous adult. This inversion reveals that “age” has become a political technology, a flexible marker of moral worth. Power now decides when individuals are considered mature enough to be held responsible, and that decision is deeply ideological.
Infantilisation thus transforms what was once derided as “cancel culture” into something more insidious: parental culture. Both rely on the withdrawal of agency in the name of protection, and both depend on the rhetoric of care to obscure the exercise of authority. The political subject is no longer a self-governing adult but a dependent moral child who must be protected from harm, temptation, or error. In this way, coercion is rebranded as benevolence, and censorship becomes a form of love. Foucault’s insight that modern power operates not by forbidding but by fostering is crucial here: infantilisation doesn’t silence dissent through fear, but through the promise of safety.
The deeper crisis, then, is not simply political hypocrisy but a cultural erosion of faith in adulthood itself. Liberal democracy presupposes that citizens are capable of self-rule, of managing freedom responsibly without paternal supervision. As Hannah Arendt warned, the health of the public sphere depends on individuals willing to appear in it as autonomous actors. The growing distrust of adulthood undermines that foundation. If citizens are viewed as too fragile, too naive, or too childlike to handle freedom, then democratic participation becomes a performance managed by parental elites. What replaces it is not tyranny in the traditional sense, but a form of moral daycare—authoritarianism disguised as compassion.
The Vance episode, though minor in itself, reveals this transformation in miniature. His rhetorical protection of adult subordinates under the label of “kids” captures the wider logic of a society that no longer believes its members can be trusted with moral agency. The political infantilisation of adults reflects a civilisational turn toward managed dependency, where both freedom and responsibility are mediated by paternal authority. To resist this trend requires more than defending free speech; it demands reclaiming adulthood as a political condition—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s words and actions without seeking refuge in innocence. The true contest ahead may not be between left and right, but between those who still believe in the possibility of adulthood and those who have quietly abandoned it.
