My parents are immigrants who consistently vote Democratic, I’m from San Francisco, and I’m eighteen years old. By all means, I should be voting for Barack Obama this Novemember…But I’m a conservative, so I won’t be. What the conservative movement needs is someone who speaks to the groups it ignores or is perceived to ignore, not by dismissing them and saying, “Oh well…we sorta tried that time.”
That means speaking to youth voters. See, we’re not dumb, we’re just naive. We watch The Daily Show and think that, hey, if we vote Democratic, we’re enlightened, we’re fighting the Good Fight; if we vote Republican, then we’re Stephen Colbert’s caricature of conservatism – dumb and ignorant nationalists. What conservatism needs to explain to its potential converts is that liberalism is the epitome of Hell and the Road of Good Intentions that leads there. The right to bear arms, for instance, is routinely and effectively criticized by liberals in the media. Conservatism needs to defend itself. It needs to explain that it’s not merely gun rights but the idea behind them – that our government entrusts in us the right to bear arms, and the tacit permission to rebel if governmental authority is abused.
I’ve been in plenty of debates with my classmates. What I’ve realized is that most of the kids defending liberalism can’t explain why they’re defending it. If the conservative movement had something like a more substantive Daily Show, an honest dialogue with youth voters, then it could break some of the barriers it’s placed on itself.
