YAF's Gaffe
A conservative youth group settles on a post-Obama strategy: ignore young people.
By Jesse Singal
April 13, 2009
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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Just an FYI, there are currently zero videos in the youtube group where YAF is asking people to upload their clips. Ha. www.youtube.com/grou…
— Tanya - Apr 13, 05:34 PM - #YAF has lost their minds. Since when do Americans promote resisting Presidents? Isn’t that anti-American? Doesn’t that go against everything the right stands for? Isn’t Iraq storming with insurgent factions that are built upon resisting US occupation? Give me a break. Note to Right: Try a new strategy, Obama is already President.
— Katie Fowter - Apr 13, 09:24 PM - #“Since when do Americans promote resisting Presidents? Isn’t that anti-American?”
Are you a total moron? The out of touch pro-tax, anti-free speech left has been doing that every time there is a conservative in office.
— ASmith - Apr 16, 11:52 AM - #“Since when do Americans promote resisting Presidents? Isn’t that anti-American?”
Are you a total moron? The out of touch pro-tax, anti-free speech left has been doing that every time there is a conservative in office.
— ASmith - Apr 16, 11:52 AM - #Thanks, ASmith, for proving what I’ve said about you Yaffers for a long time: You are not only incredibly stupid, but you have terribly short attention spans.
When we resisted the former corrupt, criminal pResident in the last eight years, the gang of corporate jackals that the Yaffers mindlessly follow (bleating like sheep to the slaughter) screamed every nuance of “Anti-American” at us that their limited vocabularies could muster.
All the noise was designed by the corporate jackals and their Yaffer sheep in the hopes of distracting us from the fact that the former resident of the White House lied us into the invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq, tried to cut off free speech by illegally wiretapping the phone calls of most Americans, and tortured people in the American gulag of Guantanamo while lying to the American people saying, “We don’t torture.”
You’re not anti-American for resisting President Obama. You and the other Yaffers are anti-American for holding the American people (including young people) in such utter contempt.
— hterrya - Apr 17, 08:48 AM - #“...are anti-American for holding the American people (including young people) in such utter contempt.” Talking about the pot calling the kettle black.
And I bet you wet you pants in sheer excitement when the news that Obama’s KGB, the DHS, has named conservatives and vets as dangerous to his America and that they need to be put on watch lists. — ASmith - Apr 17, 10:10 PM - #First off, ASmith doesn’t seem to know sarcasm if it went up and smacked him in the face. For disagreeing with Dubya in middle school, I was labeled un-American. But the point is that it’s hypocritical to label Left protesters as un-American and Right protesters as concerned Patriots. Quite frankly, its the other way around in my book, although all are welcome to the debate.
Secondly, one thing I never got about the GPA metaphor is that if it were income, GPA is already intensely ‘socialist’. Case in point, there’s an achievement cap: 4.0. There are no caps on executive salaries or bonuses, as they are supposed to serve as incentives…despite the fact that they get them whether or not they perform up to par. GPA is at least partially based on merit.
Because there is no cap on wealth in the real world, it is easy to rebut the assumption that redistributing wealth would lower everyone’s standard of living. There IS enough for everyone to live what amounts to a middle-class life under the current system. Case in point: UN reports that there is enough food produced to feed 11 Billion people, not distributed according to need but according to capital.
When people react in horror to the poverty of Communist Russia, what they forget is that before the implementation of socialist policies, they were a nation of serfs and slaves. America is not a nation of serfs and slaves, and we are not about to become Communist Russia in our policies. All that is being suggested is a little bit of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor, not an authoritarian revolution in an impoverished country. So it’s stupid to treat socialism like a cataclysm. Enough of the rhetoric!
— yarpsa - Apr 18, 04:11 PM - #So, Yarpsa, I guess you would be happy to live the rest of your life in a one or two room flat, with extremely few choices of dry and grocery goods w/o ever having a chance of making the choice of improving your chances of making more money living in the former USSR? The implementation of socialist policies in the USA would eventually surely fully guarantee that. If you dig classic cars, move to Cuba. If you want to go to prison in N. Korea, possess a cell phone.
— ASmith - Apr 18, 05:49 PM - #“All that is being suggested is a little bit of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor…” Oh, yarpsa, btw I do pay a butt load of taxes as it is and a major amount of that goes to welfare which is a “little bit of redistribution” of wealth. And I am very “middle class.”
— ASmith - Apr 18, 06:03 PM - #“All that is being suggested is a little bit of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor…” Oh, yarpsa, btw I do pay a butt load of taxes as it is and a major amount of that goes to welfare which is a “little bit of redistribution” of wealth. And I am very “middle class.”
— ASmith - Apr 18, 06:03 PM - #I heard a funny quip during after the election of W. that a reporter apparently said “ this is most certainly a farce, I don’t know not even one person who voted for him.” In the same way Campus Progress, you must feel like you know every student and what they are and aren’t afraid of because, after all, you cite a “big, informative poll” with a sample set of – gasp – 606 respondents! Just because YOU don’t know people with other points of view, does not mean they don’t exist. YAF has a student base of thousands across the country who in deed are very, and rightly, afraid of socialism.
You are fine and accurate to say that our type is “hung up on socialism.” I encourage you to go get hung up on socialism yourself, and if you don’t think that redistribution of wealth, nationalizing health care, and government takeover of private enterprise is socialism, then please, show us what it is, and how Obama’s policies are not moving in that direction. If you do think he is a socialist, then please, by all means, defend it, show us thriving, healthy, productive socialist countries. You could even move there and write a bestselling book about how great your life is. I might even buy it at a wall-mart. — tara - Apr 20, 03:14 PM - #Tara-
Please be precise with your terminology. “redistribution of wealth, nationalizing health care, and government takeover of private enterprise” describes a social democratic framework, which some, including Bernie Sanders, describe as socialist. There are a long list of successful social-democratic states:
Brazil, the Scandinavian countries, Israel, Germany, France, the U.K. to name a few.
I hope Obama is headed in that direction. Unfortunately for the good of damn near everyone and for the remote validity of your rhetorical point, he isn’t.
— Socialist - Apr 22, 10:34 PM - #