Justin,
I appreciate your effort and think you should continue to think and write about this subject. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the following part of #24 is true:
If you think “appealing to idealism” is going to capture the youth vote, you are sorely mistaken. You need youth-friendly policies and the three biggest factor’s in a young person’s life are school, future employment, and family. Higher tuition, lower expected salaries (and an aggressive attack on minimum wage – something many young people see on their first paychecks), lacking an attractive health care plan, bad wars that steal away siblings or cousins or parents, these are all negative in the eyes of the young voter.
All of these do not represent limited government, self-reliance, a love of liberty above convenience, and what it truly means to be conservative or libertarian, you choose.
Conservatism is dead, for lack of a better term, as ideas can never really die. It will take a bottoming out by the left, analogous to the current bottoming out by the right, or at the very least the republican party, to allow a resurgence of conservative ideas. But even the bottoming out of the left isn’t a guarantee. If they reach with their talons ever deeper into Americans’ lives, their bottoming out could also lead to something graver, and with greater antipathy towards liberty.
The youth vote might more easily be peeled away from the Democrats by the seriousness of their own missteps. For instance, if a Guardia Civil is really in the plans and conscription part of that plan, you then may begin to see quite a few youth “find their inner libertarians.”
In the meantime, I don’t believe you can sell conservatism to a culture that prizes theory above history and tradition, consumerism and convenience above morality and a social contract that reaches back to antiquity -to the dead who paved our arduous path- and forward to those who are not yet born.
It’s more likely they will agree with Marx in this small excerpt from his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
By the way, are blockquote tags operational here?
