Young Conservatives: More Patience Needed
The following is a guest post that originally appeared on the Facebook page of its author, Georgia Young Republicans Chairman Robert Lee, and is reposted here with his permission:
Just some thoughts from someone in the Oregon Trail generation (part millennial, part GenX) about what my party, which I’ve always belonged to as long as I could vote (going on the better part of 17 years now – holy crap!), needs to really face up to if survival is even to be considered.
The diversification of our party and our country isn’t a problematic thing, at least not for those of us under the age of 40. I’ve spent the better part of our last year traveling the State, explaining to everyone that would listen the generational shift is reflective of a larger identify shift in Americans. We’re slowly getting away from looking at America’s ideals through the framework of the American community and more through the framework of the individual American. Doesn’t mean the ideals have changed – individual rights, the innate human dignity we all share – but it certainly does mean the way we internalize those ideals has changed. It’s a subtle change that that will have extremely profound consequences for the way the world works.
This election season has been hard on us for a variety of reasons. Walls are anathema to a wide open world in which we see six billion individual people we haven’t met yet. Talking about American being great again completely ignores everything that makes it great now, and not only for us but for the world at large. Every day, hope and optimism abound inside of us, which is why we pour our hearts and souls into the endeavors that matter to us.
Young conservatives are the eternal optimist and the key to America’s future because of it. We are the ones that will take that founding principles our country was built on and modernize their application for a better world – so long as we’re not constrained by the rules of a bygone era that don’t inherently mean much to us.
To this I’ll say, if the argument is that “You vote Republican because we are always better than Democrats…”, you face a losing proposition with younger conservatives. You just do – that speaks to the framework we were never raised in and, quite honestly, don’t want to go back to.
To my fellow younger conservatives, we need need to exhibit more patience than we have. There’s guidance to be had by folks that are experienced in a world we no longer live in, if nothing else to help us better identify potential pitfalls ahead that we might be too inexperienced to quickly notice.
If you’re simply telling folks to do something out of duty, you’re already losing the argument. If your reason for not learning is impatience, well then you’re going to lose the argument. Our party is in shambles, and has been for the last decade.
It’s time we individually start criticizing ourselves as contributors to the GOP’s demise before we start blaming others, or the system itself, for creating this mess.
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They won’t do it Charlie. Remember those two upstart GOP reps from a few years ago that the established GOP openly assassinated their primary election? The establishment (Cagle, Ralston et al) was very public about their intent to ‘cull’ those heathens out of the club.
The GOP will eat their young to stay in power. They don’t CARE, Charlie. They just live in the moment, and the only prayer they offer is a silent one that they, like Dennis Hastert, won’t be discovered as being simply another human being, NOT blessed by a deity, NOT living in a “Just world” where deities bless the rich and the rest must be defective and not deserving of said deity’s blessings of a Spiffy sports car.
We live in a random existence, not a pre ordained one. The GOP is not the Party of God™
Congratulations on giving Trump an opportunity to destroy the status quo.. You get what you pay for.
You get that Jesus praying and guilt out of that Dome. Otherwise, everyone in the status quo is going to be hung out to dry and rot in the wind. This state is two elections away from cleaning house. You good old boys and gals in the Dome better count your shekels, you are gonna need them for the coming s**t storm.
Pep talks aside, young conservatives/republicans really need to figure out something positive that unifies them. Trump proved how dangerous it is to only being anti: Obama, Hillary, Terrorist, Socialism, etc. Empty platitudes like Liberty/Freedom lead to empty candidates. The Reagan Revolution is over. The Oregon Trail generation needs to find a leader (with actionable ideas) that will guide that party.
The republican party of today has only remained in power by fostering hate of “the other”. Their “ideas” are wrong (unless of course you earn over 1 million), and have been proven so. Trickle down is voodoo, and unregulated capitalism is meritocracy just with another name. The one thing Trump has done is to say the hell with the voodoo and dog whistles…I’ll just say it out loud…no dog whistle needed, and people never really did buy in to the voodoo. It goes to show that those dog whistles were what was winning on the local levels. Trump proves it, and he will also prove that the days of it working are dwindling hourly (and certainly wont work for him)