I was also that kinda smart well-informed kid - I thought. :)
In retrospect, when I first voted at the age of 18 I was horribly underinformed/undereducated/naive. And at, say, 16 I would have been comparatively speaking so much more naive and susceptible to populism, be it from the left or the right.
There are layers/complexities to politics, and it takes time to understand them.
You do have a point that most adults are also horribly underinformed, but...
I just did a google image search for images of the US Capitol Riot from January this year, and it doesn't look like a particularly young crowd. Looks more middle-aged to me.
The 5 year old crowd kinda lacks the means of transportation to pull these kinda of things of. That doesn’t mean they are wiser than the capitol rioters, just that they have a harder time to do things by themselves. Middle-aged people have both the means to go to events and also the capital to do so.
In retrospect, when I first voted at the age of 18 I was horribly underinformed/undereducated/naive. And at, say, 16 I would have been comparatively speaking so much more naive and susceptible to populism, be it from the left or the right.
There are layers/complexities to politics, and it takes time to understand them.
You do have a point that most adults are also horribly underinformed, but...