I think there's some truth to your counterarguments 1 and 2. Young people are easier to sway into any change-oriented movement, so any push for sweeping change will have a lot of youth behind it, even if it's an older person pulling the strings and reaping the benefits.

It was the youthful Red Guards who were guilty of the worst Cultural Revolution atrocities, and Pol Pot's regime was even more reliant on adolescent murderers killing everyone who had criminal traditional values or had received a traditional education.

In contrast, Deng Xiaoping was over 70 years old when he instituted his post Cultural Revolution reforms.

Aside from teaching basic mathematical skills and literacy, the major goal of the new educational system was to instill revolutionary values in the young. For a regime at war with most of Cambodia's traditional values, this meant that it was necessary to create a gap between the values of the young and the values of the nonrevolutionary old.

The regime recruited children to spy on adults. The pliancy of the younger generation made them, in the Angkar's words, the "dictatorial instrument of the party."[citation needed] In 1962 the communists had created a special secret organisation, the Democratic Youth League, that, in the early 1970s, changed its name to the Communist Youth League of Kampuchea. Pol Pot considered Youth League alumni as his most loyal and reliable supporters, and used them to gain control of the central and of the regional CPK apparatus. The powerful Khieu Thirith, minister of social action, was responsible for directing the youth movement.

Hardened young cadres, many little more than twelve years of age, were enthusiastic accomplices in some of the regime's worst atrocities. Sihanouk, who was kept under virtual house arrest in Phnom Penh between 1976 and 1978, wrote in War and Hope that his youthful guards, having been separated from their families and given a thorough indoctrination, were encouraged to play cruel games involving the torture of animals. Having lost parents, siblings, and friends in the war and lacking the Buddhist values of their elders, the Khmer Rouge youth also lacked the inhibitions that would have dampened their zeal for revolutionary terror.

The Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Italofascists were also Young Turk movements, although the generation gap was not quite so extreme. In the case of the Nazis, the weakened conservative Junker elite (epitomized by the elderly Paul von Hindenburg) first tried to reign them in, then tried to use them, and wound up losing everything to them.

For the past few decades, or perhaps even centuries, it seems younger people have consistently been right in their position on social issues.

I guess you're not from a country that had Stalin Youth around in the 1970s. (We weren't an Eastern Bloc country either, they were just useful idiots.)

Alternatively:

There is no "right and wrong", it's a subjective value judgement, and similar to #1, they ultimately are the one's who's subjective values are taken to be objectively "right".

This gallup report suggests that views on abortion are more complicated. Young people are most likely to favor no restrictions on abortion, but also most likely to favor a categorical ban (even more likely than the 65+ crowd).

Right now, this would mean that gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, etc would all very quickly become legal (In the US at least).

In the US, under-30 adults have less liberal views on abortion than middle-aged adults, and the under-30s were getting less liberal about it more quickly than older adults until 2010 or so. (Also, abortion's been legal in the US for four decades.)

Perhaps society should take that into account, and weigh their opinions more heavily.

This kind of feels like suggesting "if you notice that your tribe is becoming extinct, you should help to speed up the process".

I'm Against Moral Progress. I don't think moral progress the way we usually talk about it is well founded. We observe moral change, then we decide since past moral change made values ever more like our present values on average, something that is nearly a tautology, the process itself must be good, despite us having no clear understanding of how it works.

Such confusion fogs many people on a similar process, evolution, having noticed they like opposable thumbs and that over time past hominids have come to resemble present hominids ever more they often imagine evolution to be an inherently good process. This is a horribly wrong perception.

Younger people haven't been right, they merely won the demographic battle and had their way.

Young people in general are good at picking winners, and quickly adapting to what is popular. Younger people's status quo bias will also fixate on newer norms compared to older people with aliefs the status quo is something else. Winners will also tend to try and influence them, especially in our society where voting power and public opinion grant legitimacy.

Younger people haven't been right, but despite being a young person who has over the past 3 years drifted strongly towards traditional values, I can't say they were wrong either. They simply had a different value set from the older generations before them.

Consider that currently monogamy or not flaying people alive is still valued both by the old and the young. We don't feel a need to explain why this is so. But should very convincing PeopleFlayers land in Central Park (LW2014 would think this bad) or should Polyamory continue to gain ground (LW2014 would think this good) in 20 years we would be wondering why young people are into PeopleFlaying and Polyamory and older people are not as much, and if this says something important about the nature of morality.

For the past few decades, or perhaps even centuries, it seems younger people have consistently been right in their position on social issues.

Taboo "right."

It only seems this way because of selection bias. Young people generally want to change stuff, and history/ethics is written by the victors. In cases where young people lost, the status quo was maintained, which means we don't pay as much attention.

Younger people haven't been consistently right. They support bad ideas as often as any other group but those are rejected and forgotten.

This can be tested. Organize a huge youth conference that will provide dozens of new ideas. Record the ideas, wait 20 years, and review them; wait 50 years and review them yet again. Also, compare with new good things that happened meanwhile, but were not suggested at the conference.

I suggest trying to find evidence about issues that made a larger difference, such as support for Mao or for fighting major wars. Maybe there's a principled definition of "social issues" that excludes things about which the young are wrong, but I'll guess that it's hard to find consensus about such a definition.

younger people have consistently been right in their position on social issues.

[Citation needed]

Not to mention that you treat "younger people" as a homogenous group which, quite clearly, it is not.

What were the equivalents of marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage 20 years ago? 40 years ago? Etc. And what policies did young people support that weren't enacted?

I think, in practice, young people would have to start voting more in order to have their opinions reflected in politics. Voter turnout among young adults is very low, so when politicians make decisions, they feel like they can safely ignore their concerns.