Beware GOP: Millennials Don’t Like What We’re Hearing
The Republican establishment seems unaware of the power of young libertarians.
By BENJAMIN DOMENECH September 09, 2014
Depending on which Republicans you listen to, the rise of libertarian views among millennial Americans is either nonexistent, a great threat to the country or both. Few recognize the truth: that it is a trend of the Republican Party’s own making. And it represents an opportunity for the GOP to decide, after almost a decade in the wilderness, what kind of party it wants to be – a party still clinging to the compassionate conservative lie, or one that believes in the primacy of liberty.
Most of today’s leading Republicans are even now making the wrong choice, it seems. Potential presidential candidates like Republican governors Chris Christie, John Kasich and Mike Pence have already given up the fight against President Obama’s health-care law and are creeping toward more compromise with the Democrats. More and more, when it comes to entitlement expansion, we are hearing religious-toned “my brother’s keeper” rhetoric from them. As Kasich put it bluntly: “When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”
A century ago, another presidential candidate made the case that Christian religious belief required a more active government to address social needs—including the prohibition of social ills, the expansion of entitlements and the centralization of power. “America was born a Christian nation,” this man said. “America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.” That candidate was Woodrow Wilson, and although he was a Democrat, his strain of religion-soaked, utopian progressivism is the historical antecedent to the compassionate conservatives of today, who still feel called to work diligently to make government do good, instead of rolling government out of arenas of life in which it has no business.
It was the Republican elite’s acceptance of the progressive approach to domestic and foreign policy that wrecked the party’s base and allowed for the rise of the Pauls—Ron and more recently his son Rand—and the tea-party movement. Now Republicans must choose between recognizing the accuracy of the libertarian critique of their agenda, rediscovering the promise of human liberty and putting their faith back into self-governance; or exacerbating what is now only a detente with progressivism and turning it into a permanent peace, aligning themselves with the false idea that that a government that is compassionate must of course do more, not less.
But if they choose wrong, they will risk losing the freshest base of the party: the millennial generation, which is entering its thirties as the largest and most diverse in American history. Millennials include a multitude of disparate views, which pollsters are struggling to turn into a coherent narrative. But there is no doubt that the energy on the young political right today is in its more libertarian cohort, more so than traditional conservative organizations.
The past six years have seen explosive growth of libertarian groups on campuses and in communities across the country. Students for Liberty has added more than 100,000 members and Young Americans for Liberty has formed more than 500 chapters. Multiple polls from Pew and Harvard University attest to young voters’ acceptance of non-interventionism, drug decriminalization, skepticism of government and other libertarian ideas. And surveys from Quinnipiac, Public Policy Polling and Reason-Rupe have found Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul receiving the most support of any Republican candidate among millennials.
These campus groups and a host of different state and national groups have helped educate and organize this movement, whether via top-down organizations that have built armies of volunteers to battle the overreach of the national security state, or bottom-up organic groups that have enabled thousands of young moms to stand against Common Core in their communities.
At the turn of the 21st century, the idea of an organized and activated libertarian movement would have struck most people as absurd, even for those in the halls of sympathetic think tanks. But it has arrived thanks to a number of factors, most of which, again, have to do with the decisions and mistakes of the Republican Party.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/beware-gop-millennials-dont-like-what-were-hearing-110769.html#ixzz3CuaKsHik
