Kids These Days
Much has been made of the overwhelming support Barack Obama received from our wayward youth. One of the key insights of Frum Forum is that demographically the GOP’s go-to guys are far older and less numerous than previously. Nonetheless, there is hope that the future is not especially bleak on the youth front. The Washington Post contains a lament at the lack of radicalism in that cohort. Ron Charles wonders where our radical youth have gone. He laments that in the 60’s people read Abbie Hoffman and Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath, and now they read J.K . Rowling, Steven King and the “Twilight” series by someone named Stephenie Meier. This series evidently revolves around long, unconsummated romances between vampires and humans.
Obviously the tripe put out by Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Book, the depressing Sylvia Plath and the now rather banal Anais Nin are not anything I’d want healthy young people reading. In fact, soulless, eternally damned undead are a lot more upbeat than Sylvia Plath. Other than Hemingway and Melville, Mr. Charles’ list of “literature” is dreck. Germaine Greer and Jerry Rubin will not be read by anybody in 100 years and its too bad they were read 40 years ago. The rejection of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin is not the rejection of literature, it’s the assertion of taste. Nonetheless, the rejection of radicalism Mr. Charles identifies is great news for conservatives.
No doubt these young “moderates” have radical views on marriage and sex roles. But that aside, the spirit of rebellion, of wanting to smash all that is and has been, seems completely absent. This is a ripe field for conservatives. The Obama worship will quickly get old as promises are broken and the quotidian burdens of governance reveal the same old liberal agenda that made the 70’s such a delight. A youth culture resistant to radicalism in its most ridiculous forms is fertile ground for conservatives.
This is also a time of economic retrenchment. It is one thing to take over the student hall when unemployment is nonexistent and school is a lark. At NYU last month a 60’s style building takeover was executed. It was promptly ridiculed and denounced not only by the administration but also by the student body! In the worst job market since 1983 students may actually want to have a resume that reflects solid subjects. Transgressive literature is not high on that list.
Part of this may be that we have reached bottom. How is it even possible to be sexually transgressive on college campuses today other, perhaps, than by getting married? When Che Guevara is a hero, Bill Ayers is a professor, and the government is set on nationalizing the banks, exactly what else could a radical want? Nonetheless, the great hope Barack Obama has inspired may quickly turn young people off as the reality emerges far from the promise. When job prospects are diminished by a hobbled private economy, first paychecks are smaller than expected after taxes (particularly FICA) and young people encounter the web of regulation and dysfunction that every expansion of government entails, already non-radical youth may swiftly become conservative.
There has to be some reasonable alternative waiting for them, of course, but it is not outside the realm of possibility that the reaction could come more quickly than anyone thinks. Laments by the Left that “in my day the vampires were randy as hell, could hardly pause to bite a neck, not like these chaste vampires running around today…” are not likely to impress young people looking for their first job, to form a family, or to buy a home.