The point here is not simply that Cawthorn is young, though he is — unusually so for a member of Congress. It’s that Cawthorn grew up in a culture of recording and sharing that has now become a distinct disadvantage at a job predicated on tradition and sobriety.
At the moment, Cawthorn’s future in Congress is very much unsettled. There has been no federal elected official in recent memory who has been similarly battered by such an unrelenting and diverse array of allegations. Some are serious and fiduciary, like claims that he engaged in insider trading or that he violated salary rules in how he paid his chief of staff. But many are more titillating, including photos taken during a raunchy game on a cruise ship and a newly released video showing him engaged in … well, it’s hard to determine what, but it didn’t involve much clothing.
The argument I’m making here is not about that first set of claims. I think it’s pretty clear by now that Cawthorn’s approach to his position has often been unserious. He directly stated to his Republican colleagues shortly after taking office that he had “built my staff around comm[unication]s rather than legislation.” That he got tripped up by an alleged failure to adhere to complicated rules governing his position is not surprising.
But that’s compounded by the fact that he comes from a universe of wildly different cultural expectations. As I’ve written before, it will probably be the case at some point in the future that every potential candidate for federal office either has similar documented shenanigans from their younger years or that the broader culture around posting online is more reserved and less permanent than in the early days of social media. But Cawthorn didn’t grow up in that era. He grew up in an era in which you just take goofy, weird and inappropriate photos and videos and share them.
Then consider where he works. Cawthorn is 26. The average age of members of the House at the beginning of this Congress was more than twice that: 58.4 years. And that’s the average! Cawthorn is not only young — he is the youngest member of Congress by a margin of multiple years. He is, quite literally, of a different generation than nearly all of his peers.
Even off Capitol Hill, that corresponds to marked differences in use of the Internet. Analysis from the Pew Research Center released in January indicates that 96 percent of people in Cawthorn’s age range have smartphones compared with to 61 percent of those 65 and over. Of Cawthorn’s age group, 84 percent use social media compared with 45 percent of the oldest Americans.
It’s important to note that the percentage of younger Americans who use social media has actually declined over the past six years. In part, this probably reflects increasing wariness of social media tools and declines in adoption of sites like Facebook among the youngest Americans. But it also means that in the period before he ran for office, people in Cawthorn’s age group were even more likely to use social media than they are now. We can extend this outward: He, like other young people, probably shared a lot of stuff with a circle of friends that people older than him would never have been able to record in the first place, much less to share quickly with their phones, had they considered doing so.
Those generational numbers from Pew in hand, we should also…
Read More: One of Madison Cawthorn’s liabilities: He’s too online for Congress
