YAF’s Gaffe

Dear Young America’s Foundation,

It’s been said over and over again: The conservative movement needs help. Since the election of Barack Obama—a sweeping denunciation of conservatism—right-wingers such as yourselves have grasped desperately for a coherent message or figurehead. Most indicative of your troubles are the pundits whose stock has risen since November: Rush Limbaugh, who recently opined that “feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society,” and Glenn Beck, who last week pretended to dump gasoline all over another Fox News anchor in an attempt to visualize the horrors of Obama’s presidency (which, alas, may not be the most insane thing he’s done lately).

But just because older conservatives are gasping for a message and screaming bizarre accusations about socialism, there’s no reason to believe that young conservatives—the fine, enterprising folks who populate groups like yours—can’t come up with something better, right?

Wrong.

It’s rare for me to encounter a single document that fully encapsulates a movement’s hopes, dreams, and failures. Luckily, that’s exactly what happened when I came across a flyer you folks are circulating advertising your activities during the upcoming April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests. It is an incredibly useful cultural artifact for me, and for anyone else hoping to understand modern conservatism’s stubborn refusal to adapt to a changing world.

The conceit is simple:

Your liberal classmates believe it is moral to confiscate money from hard-working Americans and entrepreneurs and give it to those who didn’t earn it, yet what will they say when you ask them to apply that same philosophy to their grade point averages?

Young America’s Foundation invites you to film your fellow students’ reactions when you ask them to pledge their support to grant your school’s administration the power to redistribute grade point average to those who are not high academic achievers.

I’m most interested in explaining to you guys why this is an extremely stupid argument to make, tactically speaking, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least do a quick once-over of the faulty, offensive logic on display here.

Generally speaking, GPA is a merit-based indicator, and if you work hard at a well-functioning educational institution, you will get good grades. Generally speaking, at least in the United States circa-2009, income is not an indicator of merit; you’re probably unaware of this, but many Americans, at the moment, are working 40- or 50- or 60-hour weeks but aren’t coming close to being able to pay the bills—particularly when said bills involve health-care and higher-education expenses. And you’re calling them lazy. Nice.

Now, onto the broader sort of political stupidity you’re displaying here. In addition to the filming—which I’m sure will be a blast and will make for some compelling material—you’re asking students to circulate a petition on April 15 “to educate [their] peers about the immorality of socialism.” You guys seem hung up on socialism in general, mentioning it by name four times in the flyer and making several other references to it.

Unfortunately for you and your campaign, the word “socialism” has been butchered by the right to the point of meaninglessness. No one is advocating a “socialist” state per se, but conservatives have been branding as “socialist” ideas with very broad-based support—universal health care, for example, which in a recent poll 57 percent of Americans of all ages said they support. Another recent poll showed that, when asked (in a somewhat stupidly worded way) which system they preferred, young people are just about evenly split between capitalism and socialism. Young people simply no longer associate socialism with, say, the U.S.S.R., as Matt Yglesias pointed out, but instead with all the popular policies you’ve been trying to tar as socialist. So if YAF wants to bring more young people into its fold, you should develop a firmer grasp—that is, any grasp at all—on the current state of American discourse. One more time: Cries of “socialism!” don’t scare people anymore.

And it’s not just your incessant use of “socialism” as a catch-all rhetorical crutch that speaks to how staggeringly out of touch you are. Your entire campaign is premised on the notion that young Americans are a) scared of taxes, and b) don’t think government has a role to play in solving the country’s biggest crises. You’re exactly wrong on both counts. As part of a big, informative poll on young people and their attitudes toward politics and government that I’m almost certain none of you read, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Democracy Corps asked young people who watched the State of the Union, “[w]hat one part of the speech seemed to speak most to the things going on in your life?,” (question 24) 67 percent answered with something related to the economy, education, jobs and unemployment, or healthcare reform. Taxes? Five percent.

This makes perfect sense if you take one moment to stop and think about the average young person. What’s more likely, that his or her family is in dire financial straits because of taxes, or because of medical or tuition bills? Is the average student more likely to be struggling five or ten years from now because of student loan debt, or because of taxes?

So, in short: Young people aren’t scared of taxes. They aren’t scared of socialism. And across the board on both the poll I referenced above and similar ones, they emphatically agree that government has a role to play in solving crises related to the economy, health care, and other major areas of concern. In response to all of this, YAF, you’ve designed a campaign that tries to grab young people’s attention by scaring them with the specters of high taxes, socialism, and the notion that Obama wants to use government to solve their problems.

Good luck with that. I wish you the best.

Sincerely,

Jesse

Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.

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