WI: Nixon raised the military age to 21 instead of lowering the voting age to 18?

What if Nixon decides to raise the military age instead of lowering the voting age? I assume the drinking age saga of 1971-1984 would have been prevented. Would people under 21 be percieved differently? Would schools be different?
 
I'm open to the idea that allowing young people of age 16 and 17 to buy 3.2 beer will reduce binge drinking later on.

open to the idea, I may be mistaken.

And in general, I like the idea of medium steps and stages as far as achieving adult privileges, although I do tend to think persons should receive full adult privileges at age 18.
 
How much influence does the President really have on constitutional amendments? I'm genuinely curious about this. Legally, the President has no role in the process whatsoever.
 
The age of eligibility for the draft, and the age of voting are both fixed by statute and not by Constitutional fiat. Therefore changing these (as well as the drinking age which is fixed by states not the federal government) requires only Congressional action, or state action for drinking and also age for voting in state elections. If you raise the draft age to 21 (but allow voluntary enlistment under previous rules - 17 with parental consent, 18 otherwise) you will need to start drafting a fair number of 21+ year old makes who otherwise were not drafted OTL, in particular more college graduates until the draft winds down by 1973. This will have all sorts of effects, one of which will be all draftees will be able to vote as opposed to only a small percentage being able to vote which could very well have effects on the 1972 election, although I can't McGovern winning in any case.
 
It woulod make sense. Even though Nixon escalated Vietnam first, he did eventually end it. So you could recreate Nixon's thought process being "I'm not going to need these troops when we exit Vietnam so raising military age is no problem, plus I won't have to give the Democrats the young voters during reelection"
 
How much influence does the President really have on constitutional amendments? I'm genuinely curious about this. Legally, the President has no role in the process whatsoever.
Good question, and the answer is informal influence, which may still be considerable.

And you're right, legally, since it requires two-thirds of each house to propose Amendments, the president has no role.

(the alternative method, which to the best of my knowledge has never been used in U.S. history, is for two-thirds of the states to petition Congress to call a Constitutional Convention to propose new Amendment(s), any of which would still have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states)
 
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I'm open to the idea that allowing young people of age 16 and 17 to buy 3.2 beer will reduce binge drinking later on.

open to the idea, I may be mistaken.

And in general, I like the idea of medium steps and stages as far as achieving adult privileges, although I do tend to think persons should receive full adult privileges at age 18.
I would argue that the states lowering their drinking ages in 1971 did more to hurt our cause (and the rights of teenagers in general) than it did to help. Anyway, I wonder if colleges would have become more authoritarian with higher voting and military ages.
 
colleges likely would have remained authoritarian or relaxed rules at a much slower pace.

I met a man in his early 20s who works as a professional sales rep at an auto dealership. He seems informed, knowledgeable and engaged in talking with customers, without overdoing it and just laying a bunch of information on people. That is, he seems good at his job. And he's married with one child. Well, a professional sales job might be one of the few jobs these days where a relatively young adult can do this.

And so, if the U.S. middle class society had continued growing from late 60s, early 70s would have helped a wide variety of aspects. We would have all had more real choices.
 
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I list the main harms of alcohol as drunk driving, domestic violence, and acquaintance rape. All serious harms, and we might well be able to list a few more. In a number of ways, alcohol is a bad drug, as opposed to something like marijuana which is a relatively 'good' drug.

And to complicate the public policy question of whether and how to de-criminalize marijuana, people do in fact often use marijuana and alcohol together.

All the same, I'm not in favor of delaying the normal privileges of adulthood to age 21. There has to be better ways of doing it.
 
The military effect is obvious: significantly fewer 21-year-olds think it is a good idea to run uphill towards a machine gun than do 18-year-olds. Also, by the age of 21 young men will (mostly) have jobs, many are likely to have families. Such men are harder to recruit than high school students. This will mean that the US military experiences a major manpower problem.
 
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