Joe Knippenberg brought this Mike Gerson column to my attention. Gerson argues that conservatives are going to have accommodate to the fact that younger voters are less religious and less culturally conservative than younger age cohorts. Here are some only somewhat on point responses drawn from personal observations that only apply to some young people:
1. Many young people, unless they have been socialized in a strongly center-right environment, or who have (for whatever reason) developed unusual reading habits, have never been exposed to a sympathetic explanation of pretty much any conservative view on pretty much any issue. They don’t watch right-leaning media, and to the extent that they are aware of its existence, know of it as the biased FOX NEWS (though they don’t really know what that means.) They practically don’t know that political talk radio exists. Most politics is carried on in what might as well be a foreign language. Romney is just a guy who they hear for a few minutes at a time making vague complaints about the economy. Obama must be sorta flawed (why else is the economy so bad?), but he is still basically one of the good guys. He is trying to offer an affordable college education through student laws and reliable health care coverage and he is for the little guy and he isn’t biased against minorities and he wants to save the planet from pollution and global warning.
2. For all that, many of these kids have pretty conservative instincts on quite a few issues ranging from abortion to taxes, to gun rights. They came to a lot of these opinions organically. They’ve known pregnant people and have gone through the ultrasound process or know people who have. They have a sense that the fetus (and especially the late stage fetus) is a human being who, as a general rule, should not be destroyed. Their opinions vary from the moderately pro-life (banning most abortions other than rape, incest, and threats to life of the mother) to moderately pro-choice (abortion legal in the first trimester, but no late term abortions except in the case of the mother’s life in danger.) The vast majority of them are to the pro-life side of the ROE status quo and to the pro-life side of President Obama. Almost none of them know this. Many of these kids have jobs and think of the money they earn as their own and extend the same respect to other people. They want to know that their tax money is being used wisely and don’t want to give up a penny more than they have to. They have no idea what the National Rifle Association is, but they’ve had to study the Bill of Rights a little. The part about the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” speaks for itself.
3. These right-leaning instincts have zero political salience at the moment. The Republican Party is the Other. Conservative spokesman are either absent or speak an incomprehensible dialect about the private sector and job creators and socialism and becoming like Europe. Some of them have seen Michael Moore movies. A lot more of them have seen Earth In The Balance. They don’t buy all of it. They are somewhat skeptical by nature, but the skepticism manifests itself as buying into heavily diluted versions of the narratives of those films. They haven’t seen 90 seconds (never mind 90 minutes) of a conservative argument embedded in media they choose to consume and pitched at their level of understanding.
4. Election season campaigns are generally the wrong time to try to win them over. Attitudes change more slowly than that. Before they will be willing to listen to a conservative candidate, they need some context. Sometimes this will mean raising the salience of an issue. This could mean exposing them to the idea of the legality late term abortion and on the humanity of the late stage fetus. Sometimes this means focusing on the good work that religious and other civil society institutions do and explaining why protecting the autonomy of such institutions from government is both protecting the rights of good people and good for society in general. Sometimes it will be introducing policies that young people will never have heard of elsewhere because most of them don’t read National Affairs and aren’t going to. It could mean explaining how they could have health care security and larger paychecks by going to an Indiana-style HSA/catastrophic coverage plan, instead of Obamacare forcing them to buy more expensive health care plans that they might not want. It could mean explaining something like Rick Perry’s plan for an inexpensive and expedited state college education. I could be Jim Manzi’s suggestion for higher economic growth and moderation in dealing with climate change. This is probably all too much for any presidential candidate (or a presidential candidate + congressional candidates + some governors) to accomplish in one campaign season. It is crucial for the audience to have background knowledge and a sense of the stakes. Candidates have to talk about a lot of things in a campaign, and most people devote only a little time to listening. If people don’t have some minimal background knowledge, they become overwhelmed and tune out. The ground has to be prepared.
5. The best approach is a personalist and sympathetic moralism. Issues need to be understood in terms of real people. Human beings that won’t be mutilated. College degrees that will be earned without crippling debt or higher taxes. Decent people being free to live their own religious beliefs and help others. The moralism is important too. These things matter and we should act on these things. But the kind of moralism is important. The focus should be on eliciting personal sympathy and the chance to take positive action in the medium-term – even if that just means their vote in the next election. You don’t have to explicitly condemn. If they buy into the argument, they’ll figure out for themselves who to condemn. The focus should be about getting the audience to stand up for themselves and for others.
6. How much of the Super-PAC money that went to fund redundant commercials attacking Gingrich in Iowa would have been better spent in the years between elections focusing on changing minds?
May 12th, 2012 | 10:27 am
Hey Pete, the right wing needs to express their ideas in a format that the youth can relate to. Also reach out to upright young individuals who embrace and agree with right ideas. Then from their they can relay the information to their peers. When youth see their peers informed and passionate they tend to follow.
May 12th, 2012 | 5:13 pm
Jake, even before trying to figure out what format younger Americans will relate to, they need to find a way to embed their ideas into media large numbers of young people already consume. The relative liberalism of the mass media allows the content producers to embed liberal messages into what is otherwise profit-oriented content (think the American President or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry), and the teacher corp is relatively friendly to liberal idea so that global warming scare movies make into into classrooms. There is also a talent issue as producing a propaganda documentary for the noncommitted takes significant talent. We’d be better off if a fraction of the right-of-center Super-PAC money that went to intra-Republican presidential primary fights were spent between elections on paid media/well produced documentaries (less impact on the second as the entertainment media would be less likely to hype them much) that were focused on bringing a center-right message (pick your issue) to younger cohorts who aren’t already in strongly right-of-center social networks. I can’t overstate how outgunned the right-of-center is when it comes to persuasion-oriented materials that reach a large fraction of younger people.
May 13th, 2012 | 2:34 am
Why not start with children’s books and work the long game? ;-) My favourite book as a kid was “The House That Beebo Built”, which I’ve since discovered was written to have a strong libertarian (ie anti-govt and big business) philosophy – and my father, who bought it for me, was a diesel mechanic and paid-up union member at the time…
(Also, shouldn’t the second sentence read:
and less culturally conservative than older [not younger] age cohorts.)
May 14th, 2012 | 7:18 am
The best news for conservatives about young voters is that the young grow up. Mugged by reality, their Leftist idealism dies, leaving them clinging to essential tenets of liberalism, a love of life, liberty and property; the latter as they acquire it.
The young just won’t be conservative until they have something to conserve.
May 14th, 2012 | 6:53 pm
Kate, their lives aleady provide the material for an openess to right-of-center politics and policy on the above issues. There are also conditions-based arguments. The Obama presidency hasn’t been a great time for the young to find jobs (not that I think most of that is Obama’s fault but…) and Obamacare was basically designed to force the young to pay higher health care premiums for coverage they might not want. That’s something I left out. The combination of the mandate with the extensive coverage mandates that close the door to potentially cheaper options that might maintain their health care security is also a potential politcal opening.
The problem is that they have literally not heard even one word of center-right argument that makes a lick of sense. They don’t know what socialized medicine is and they don’t understand what is so good or bad about becoming more like Europe (and what is Europe like anyway?). All they hear is nonsense-sounding arguments being made against a guy they basically like.
As they get older, some of them will gravitate toward the right-leaning populist media. But there are barriers. That media is built around communicating to an audience who already speaks a certain political dialect. Most of them won’t become viewers of FOX News or listeners of conservative talk radio. So where will they hear a decent and thoughtful center-right take on politics that is intelligible? Maybe it will come from a candidate, but it is tougher to communicate when past experience has failed to produce a shared frame of reference (like what is premium support Medicare), and your audience is inclined not to trust you because they have never really heard your message before and what messages they have heard about you have been critical. Maybe on the second or third hearing they might be more comfortable and willing to listen, but what candidate will they give that much attention to?
It isn’t impossible. It is just tougher, and the tougher it is, the less likely it is that any particular politician will really try, and the fewer who try, the harder it becomes, and so on.
That’s where a communication strategy that prepares the ground would be so helpful. So who to do it? That’s a good place for various kinds of Super-PACs and foundations (and some rich guys who could do more good seeding young minds with good ideas than bolstering ambitious politicians during election years) would come in with a relentless focus on those who haven’t already bought into the center-right narrative. Easy for me to say. It isn’t my money.
May 14th, 2012 | 7:34 pm
“Mugged by reality, their Leftist idealism dies,”
But does it? We have had years of no fault divorce, and massive problems from it. Their is no sign that it will go away any time soon. There are other areas as well where people seem to have maintained the “Bourgeois Liberalism” of their youth.
May 16th, 2012 | 5:25 am
Yes, Pete, I see your point. However, I am watching a lot of kids grow up. I don’t just mean my own kids, but their many friends and my former students, the ones that keep in touch. They don’t all hate Rush Limbaugh (some do), but talk radio and Fox News do not define conservatism.
As far as I can discern, it is through the family that they become more conservative. I don’t just mean that they develop adult relationships with their parents and can begin to hear what their parents say. I mean they learn from their own children, through parenting and trying to be good parents, what principles and ideals have value. They begin careers or at least to have steady work. They acquire possessions and begin to resent confiscatory taxation, because of what it takes from their families. They begin to seek God, because they want their children to live in a moral universe. They want their families to be safe. They have things to conserve. They begin to look for what will conserve those things.
That’s how you reach them. That’s how conservative messages have always reached them. My kids’ friends, sometimes tattooed, gauged, nose-ringed, talk to me about conservative things without knowing they are becoming conservative. I break it to them gently. Inasmuch as Obama speaks of conservative things, they like him, but he’s given them lots of reason to doubt him on all that stuff. They are disillusioned. Ron Paul spoke to a lot of them — what was his communication strategy? Try that.
May 17th, 2012 | 7:37 pm
[...] It almost certainly tells you nothing. No political salience at all. Conservatives have neither the infrastructure nor the vocabulary to communicate with younger voters who haven’t already been socialized into the dominant [...]
May 20th, 2012 | 1:01 am
“As far as I can discern, it is through the family that they become more conservative.”
True, but increasingly people remain childless and unmarried until very late in life.
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