Isolated in the Information Age

Young voters are more politically up-for-grabs than one
would think. They are more likely to favor same-sex marriage, and are
unreceptive to the kind of fear of big government/socialized medicine political
shorthand that is commonplace in conservative discourse (the scare words don’t
scare them). But young voters are also closely divided on immigration policy
and a narrow majority favor restricting most abortions. So the good news is
that the opinions of millennials are more complicated than the headlines. The
bad news is that no one on the right knows how to reach the millennials who hold
some center right opinions.

One potentially tempting approach for reaching these voters
is libertarianism. This has superficial plausibility. Libertarianism has the
virtue of clarity, which seems especially virtuous to youth. It also seems to
fit with the low trust millennials put in social institutions generally (why
trust big government any more than you would anyone else?).

The problem is that the millennials, in their social
atomization, will (like the rest of us) end up having to depend on somebody
sometime. If they know they can turn to no one else, they will turn ever more
often to the government. That is why the millennials’ combination of low social
trust and friendliness (in the abstract) toward bigger government is only a
seeming contradiction. Economic vulnerability and social mistrust is fertile
ground for bigger and more intrusive government. Millennials already feel on
their own. You can’t get them on your side simply by telling them that you will
leave them more on their own by cutting the government—even if you tell them
that they will be better off as a result. Given a choice between social
democracy and being left on their own, most millennials will choose social
democracy.

That doesn’t mean that a distrust of government doesn’t have
a place. It just has to be a distrust of omnicompetent government rather than
effective government. And this distrust needs to be complemented by policies
that seek to facilitate (but cannot by themselves produce) a more connected
life for millennials. Tax policy can be reformed
to increase the take-home pay and improve the work incentives of parents. Employment
policy can be reformed to connect
the long-term unemployed to the job market.

Contrast this to libertarian Republican Rand Paul’s tax plan,
which would increase
the tax liability of working parents at or near the earnings median. A report
by the College
Republicans revealed that 20 percent of millennials had put off getting
married because of economic anxieties. If the center right can defend the
universal good of a more prosperous and more connected life, then conservatives
have a chance to make a case for limited government politics. We won’t win those
millennials over if we promise them a tax increase if they get married and have
children.

But discussions of policy agenda are futile by themselves. The
transmission belt between center right ideas and the lives of many millennial
voters is either broken or nonexistent. Among earlier generations,
conservatives could have hoped that ideas like the suspicion of “big
government” would have passed down through the institutions of churches
and families. But now, because of demographic trends, fewer millenials come
from families that have had any affiliation with the center right.

In the past, if nothing else, there was always the mass
media. People sat through television commercials, and the norms
of the network news meant that conservative ideas would occasionally have to be
covered with something that resembled fairness. But now the audience for television
(and especially the network news) tends to skew older.

Many millennials might still have “conservative”
inclinations. They might think that late-term abortion is horrible, that
marginal income tax rates much above 50 percent are unfair, and that it is
wrong to cancel people’s health insurance that they like and make them buy more
expensive coverage that they don’t want.

But those conservative inclinations won’t influence voting
if they are not connected to a comprehensible agenda and a set of sympathetic
political personalities. The challenge is that many millennials get much of
their news from either entertainment industry sources or from social media that
don’t follow even the norms of the “liberal” mainstream media.

While many millennials might not take an active interest in
the news, their politically active peers will more likely be on the left. That
means that the political content of many millennial’s social media streams will
be some variation of left-wing partisanship—whether wonkish or satirical,
worshipful of the left’s latest darling or demonizing of the left’s latest
chosen villain. Inside that social media stream, it won’t matter how good your
ideas are. They will be either ignored (in which case they might as well not
exist) or they will be distorted beyond recognition. Reaching Americans inside
that media stream is the communications challenge of the moment.

Over on twitter, Slate’s David Weigel wrote that “The
scarier things look for Dems in 2014, the more pieces we’ll see about gaffes
from random GOP state legislators.” That strategy won’t save red state
Democratic senators in 2014. Too many of the likely voters in those races have
at least some history of voting center right. But the strategy that Weigel
describes does succeed in shaping the worldviews of younger voters every day. One
can hardly blame those younger voters. We have never broken through to actually
talk to them (and it is not like the most prominent recent representatives of
the center right have had much to say).

Back in the mid-1960s, after the defeat of Barry Goldwater,
it seemed like the center right was on the verge of permanent marginalization. Conservatives
were able to win over voters from the center-left coalition using the media of
that day to address the concerns of that day. Many working-class white
Democrats who considered conservative Republicans to be ancestral enemies and
representatives of economic privilege ended up voting for Ronald Reagan. Today’s
conservatives face different voters, different issues, and a different media
environment, but it is really the same challenge. It is the challenge of
finding the common ground and explaining how our ideas are consistent with the
principles of many millennials and how conservative policies address their
concerns. It is the challenge of actually talking to them (which is much harder
than it sounds). A policy agenda is thankfully taking shape. What we lack are
the social and communication tools. No investment in reaching these millennials
can be too large and it cannot come too soon.

Pete Spiliakos writes for First Thoughts. His previous columns can be found here.

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