Republicans: It’s Not Hip To Be Square

Let’s continue our rebuilding the Republican Party series by answering a question asked by Scott. What can Republicans do to attract young, middle of the road, independent types. On the one hand, this a good question. On the other, this presents a bit of a false dilemma. Let’s explain why that’s the case first, then we’ll talk about how to make the party a little more hip.

Why The Youth Don’t Matter

The children are the future. . . yeah, but they don’t vote. It’s an undeniable fact that the youth don’t vote in nearly the numbers that older people do. Why does this matter? Because not all votes are created equal.

Politics is about getting enough votes to get your agenda into place. If a particular group isn’t large enough, like six-fingered soccer uncles, or they don’t vote in large enough numbers to help you, then there is no reason to risk losing other supporters just to attract that group. Because the youth don’t vote, there is little reason to pursue them. In other words, it would be unwise for Republicans to risk alienating their other constituents just to pick up additional youth voters.

But if we ignore them, won’t the youth turn into older liberal voters? No, not really. It is the nature of youth to be leftist, but it is the nature of aging to make them conservative. That’s why Francois Guizot once astutely said, “Not to be a [liberal] at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.” (A quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill.)

Here’s why this is true. Youth knows nothing of the real world and it lives in an affirming cocoon of friends, teachers and family. Moreover, it knows so little about the world and humanity, that it doesn’t even have a sense of how little it truly knows. That gives it a tremendous sense of certainty and idealism because it sounds so simple to solve the world’s problems when you don’t understand how complex they truly are. Idealism goes hand in hand with a sense of activity. . . a desire to change the world -- letting the world change itself is, in fact, anathema to idealism. Thus, youth is a sucker for utopian leftist thinking.

This means that it will be inherently difficult, if not impossible, for conservatives to make many in-roads with young voters, and the risk likely outweigh the rewards

But as people age, experience changes them. Youth soon learns that the world is not as black and white as it once seemed, that problems are more complex than it imagined, that people have different values, and that there are genuine disagreements. This slowly erodes the sense of certainty, and with it the messianic zeal to remake the world. Soon youth gets a job and learns the value of labor, and the value of property, and it starts to wonder why the government has the right to take its labor and give it to people who won’t help themselves, the very people it once saw as victims. Finally, youth builds a family. Suddenly, it learns the value of an ordered and safe society, and of the moral values it once disdained. But even more importantly, being responsible for others teaches youth to think in the long-term. Long term thinking leads to conservative principles and a conservative world view.

Each of these changes robs youth of its liberalism and pushes it down the road to conservatism. In other words, time and experience will make the young into conservatives (unless something interferes with this). Consequently, the whole “attract the youth” issue is a bit of a canard.

How To Get Hip: Clean Up The Image

That said, it is always worth trying to improve our image across the board. In this regard, the right (and the Republican Party in particular) has been its own worst enemy in recent years. Conservatism, in general, once stood for competent leadership, fiscal sanity, smaller government, a strong national defense, and support for civic organizations, i.e. organizations that glued society together, like churches and the Boy Scouts.

But conservatism became unbalanced, focusing almost to an exclusion on wedge social issues like abortions and gays. It became knee-jerk and intolerant. It became anti-culture, grumpy and nostalgic. Then it was beset by scandals as elected Republicans, unelected spokespeople and many who simply claimed to speak for conservatives immersed themselves in corrupt, criminal, immoral and unethical adventures. Finally, Bush blew a hole in the idea of competent leadership, of fiscal sanity, of smaller government and less interference. Now, some are trying to add an ugly strain of populism that has more to do with paranoia and 1930s leftism than anything seen before on the right.

So the first step in any conservative/Republican strategy needs to be to clean this up. Return to fiscal sanity. Support only competent leaders with a proven track record. Drop the corrupt, the crooked and the hypocritical. And most importantly, divorce the party from the interest groups.

Secondly, the party’s thinkers and pundits need to return to rational argument and abandon the knee-jerkism, the nasty simplistic bomb throwing, the paranoia, the professed hopelessness, and the self-righteousness that has become the hallmark of so many conservatives “thinkers.” Smug kills. And even more importantly, stop defining conservatism by claiming it stands against everything liberals want. No intellectual movement worth surviving can define itself as "not them." Start looking at the world as a conservative, not as an unliberal.

Those two steps alone would go a long way to cleaning up the party’s image across the board, including with the young. And, indeed, if we don't take these steps, little else will matter.

How To Get Hip: Targeting The Youth

With regard to specifically reaching the young, the Republican Party/conservatives need to first drop the sham marketing ideas like putting up a tent at CPAC for videogames. Young people see right through clichéd marketing gimmicks. What the party really needs to do is to change the attitude it projects.

First, stop sending out spokesmen who are (1) grumpy, (2) judgmental, (3) out of touch with the culture, (4) suffer from nostalgia, and (5) incapable of enunciating conservative ideas in ways that real people understand. Clever counts. That’s why people like Bugs Bunny, not Elmer Fudd.

Moreover, intentional or not, the right always seems to choose middle age/old white dudes as its spokesmen, except when its intentionally trying “outreach.” This plays into the caricature image of the party as the angry-white-male party, and it makes the outreach look like pandering. It’s time to make an effort to promote more competent women and minorities -- and I don’t mean affirmative action. They’re already out there. What I’m talking about is to stop automatically sending the old white dude to represent the movement at all events and to stop treating minorities like special occasion props.

And when you reach out to the youth of today, send young Republicans who actually have a foot in the culture. Stop sending the pale-white, home schooled kids in the suits and ties who quote Cicero like it’s cool, but have never seen a television and look intensely nervous sitting next to the minorities. You've seen these kids thrust into the light as "youth spokesmen" at conventions and on Fox News. They may be bright, but no one believes they represent youth.

Further, youth worships celebrity, as do many others. We do have celebrities, even if most aren’t in Hollywood. We should be recruiting athletes and country music singers en mass. The rest will follow.

Fifth, find a way to get involved with the youth. They are looking for something to do to let them make the world better. Offer it to them. Recreate community programs where kids help pick up litter, build homes for charity, clean up parks, participate in sports leagues. Sponsor music festivals and athletic camps -- which are a big thing now. Hip corporations do this, leftist groups do it, we should do it.

Sixth, kids love tech. Adopt it and use it. More importantly, learn to have fun with it, and stop whining when other conservatives have fun with it. If a conservative makes a rap song, let it be. . . don’t run out and condemn rap. If they poke a little fun at Obama, stop calling it undignified. Stop being uptight. And stop issuing Fatwa against everything in the culture you don’t like. Just accept that others do like it and change the channel. Why do a thousand conservatives need to whine about every stupid word that comes out of some actor's mouth? This only makes conservatives look hypersensitive. Have a little more faith that our beliefs can withstand the inane yammerings of Sean Penn without every conservative whipping out the cannons.

Finally, develop a sense of humor, and not one based just on taking cheap shots at the other side. That's the difference between the Onion, which mixes political and nonpolitical humor, and conservative imitation sites which do little more than sarcastic, angry anti-left humor. That's the difference between Bill Clinton, who seems like a fun guy to get a beer with, and Newt Gingrich who seems like a man who's never told a joke. Nobody likes uptight, grumpy, overly-critical as~holes, and we seem to be overstocked with them.

These are thing we can do to make the party more attractive to young independents without alienating the other people the party needs. Beyond this, it’s probably not worth trying much more.