the Reagan Jugend are our coming leaders... thank God for Ronald Reagan!!!
Posted on 08/04/2005 6:40:41 AM PDT by rob777
This week, hundreds of young conservatives from college and university campuses across America are gathering at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for the annual Young America's Foundation Conference. They are hip, intelligent, politically savvy, and the most determined group of campus activists since the 1960's radicals.
As the hippie professors' pony tails wax grayer and grayer, the rising generation of conservative students grows stronger and stronger.
No one knows the burgeoning power of the conservative movement on America's college campuses like the far-Left activists whose efforts these days are consistently less persuasive, less civil, and less consequential. "Liberals do predominate in college and university faculties," writes Campus Progress director David Halperin. But,
it is conservatives who are winning the battle of ideas on campus these days. Progressives have been out-hustled and need to fight back – with serious, comprehensive efforts to strengthen progressive voices among young people and to empower new generations of leaders. If progressives do not step up to meet these challenges, they risk widening the conservative advantage for many decades to come.
So last month, Campus Progress held its first national conference for liberal students to counteract the fruitful work of groups like Young America's Foundation and the Leadership Institute, Collegiate Network, College Republicans, and campus Christian and pro-life groups. Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, claims that campus life is "rapidly tilting rightward." It is certainly an exaggeration – professors are overwhelmingly left-wing, administrators enforce political correctness with vengeance, and the terms of learning are set by educators who call themselves socialists, communists, progressives, liberals, and/or atheists.
But clearly, conservatives are in the fight that the Left thought it won more than three decades ago. "Conservatives, now dominant in government, seem to be aiming for control of remaining frontiers," Halperin writes. "Today there is strong evidence of an intensified conservative effort to grab the upper hand in the campus world."
An impressive corps of young conservatives already fill the think tanks and congressional offices and Bush administration posts in the nation's capitol. And the influential media conservatives are younger names like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rich Lowry, Laura Ingraham, Joe Scarborough and Dinesh D'Souza.
"Meanwhile," Halperin mourns, "a Washington, D.C., coalition meeting of progressive groups on any given issue is likely to be directed by the same people who led those meetings 20 years ago." Speakers at the Campus Progress conference included Bill Clinton, Paul Begala, Dee Dee Myers, and various folks from the labor unions, old media, and arts and entertainment fields.
There could be no better contrast between the mood at this week's Young America's Foundation Conference – optimistic, aggressive, confident – and the mood at last month's Campus Progress Conference – pessimistic, stuck-in-the-1960s, bewildered.
The young Right may have more work to do, but the young Left doesn't even know how to defend its territory. For too long, it has taken its establishment for granted. And it was the establishment, you may recall, that the Left aimed to destroy in the 1960s. Now that they are the establishment, the same pattern of rebellion must repeat. Only this time, it's a conservative youth rebellion.
Young Americans are rebelling on campus – not to uproot, but to restore the ancient roots of our civilization; not to announce a revolution, but to declare the message of ordered liberty; not to protest soldiers and kill babies, but to support our military in the war on terror and choose life in the war on abortion.
It's about time, of course. Political correctness has permeated so deeply into the contemporary campus that young people, instead of being attracted by it, are so repulsed that they are driven to seek conservative ideas. Many students first hear conservative ideas at campus speeches or conferences sponsored by Young America's Foundation. Other college students have grown up listening to talk radio, going to church, and learning conservatism from their parents. Still others hail from the growing homeschool movement, read Christian literature, or attend popular Christian conferences sponsored by Summit Ministries, Worldview Academy, Focus on the Family, Intervarsity, or Campus Crusade for Christ.
Besides the growing conservative movement on major secular campuses, the student body growth at evangelical Christian colleges outpaces growth at any other kind of higher education institution.
In other words, there's hope for the future. The days of the radical Left on America's campuses are as numbered as the waning employability of the Baby Boom generation. And the Right, celebrating permanence and principles and posterity – the requisites for further advances in the next generation – is rising.
The host of this conference, Young America's Foundation.
I like Young Americans for Freedom but they are declining rapidly and have been for longer than I have been alive.
Fascinating stuff, and quite convincing. They went back in American history and showed how past generations were similar to more recent ones. For example, the progressive trust busters of the early 20th century (big thinking idealists) line up with the anti-war student protesters of the 60's.
Bottom line: the generation of young people coming of age are most like the WWII generation; willing to sacrifice for something larger than themselves.
Personally, I don't buy this media blather about "young people on a rampage". It's hype, written by an older generation projecting their own deficiencies.
My kids are 5 1/2, 3 1/2, and 1 1/2. They call them democraps, originally I thought they just couldn't say the right word, but then realized it was their Mother and me who didn't pronounce it right. It's true, you can learn a lot from kids.
But could any "serious" person take a look at what the Left does and use the term "progressive" to describe it without dripping irony?
There's only one term that accurately describes the modern Left and that is "international socialist" (historical allusion deliberate).
I used to love these people. I bought a bike and started riding to and from campus. Blowing by those non-shaving, ratty-haired, stink-fleshed hippies on my 21 speed Diamonback gave me nothing but pleasure.
On the subject at hand: Thank God! Now... we need to return to traditional social values: personal responsibility, strong family, the importance and sanctity of marriage... I am a young, upstart professional, well ingrained in my field, but I'm scared to death of marriage on account of the litigious Rats in Reps clothing out there. Teachers, "artists," finance people... you name it, and 9 times out of 10, they're libs. Just check out Match.com sometime. Most of the women on there are self-described "middle of the road." As soon as they find out that I carry a .380 Walther PPK/S every day, anywhere I go, they're running for the hills thinking I'm a psycho or something.
Where are all the gun-toting ladies out there? Where are the self-respecting, God-fearing, traditional-family loving ladies? Anyone? Anyone?
They're certainly not in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic where I am. I'm beginning to think they're a dying breed.
Don't underestimate the impact of South Park on us.
Indeed, the only city of any importance 50 years from now will be New York City. That's only cuz children of rich liberals have the money to move there.
I have bad news for you: The Muslims are having way more kids than even conservative Christians.
Yep, times are changing.
But it's like a pendulum and it will eventually swing back to the liberal side. In the 80's we had the yuppies (or the ME generation) who were rebelling against the hippies. In the 90's we had Gen X who were rebelling against the materialism of the Yuppies. Now we have this "Gen Y" who are rebelling against the angst and disillusionment of Gen X.
I'm old enough to see have seen these swings in my lifetime and know that the only thing constant is change.
The same pair wrote a book in about 1997 called "The Fourth Turning," which used historical models to fairly accurately predict a major international crisis coming in the early 21st century (they just didn't know the form would be Islamofascism).
I agree - very interesting, and prescient, stuff.
the Reagan Jugend are our coming leaders... thank God for Ronald Reagan!!!
Perfectly said. Pence recently said "Too many "conservatives" increasingly see big government as good government as long as it is our government" This is something that must change.It starts with the next generation.
In last year's Presidential election, my 18 year old daughter was eligible to vote for the first time. Mind you, she was a freshman at the Univ. of Houston at that time and I was ambivalent about her politics. She knows mine very well.
Nothing made me more proud when she told me the news - she voted for President Bush! I knew then that my daughter is on the right track.
You proved his point.
Here's the summary definition of American conservatism:We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.Those objectives are the Establishment in America; they can be opposed but those who do so pay lip service to them even as they undermine them. Those who undermine the Constitution, do so in the name of the Constitution - by which they mean, not the written document but the authority under whose color they seek to impose upon our liberty.Those who seek to impose on our liberty do so in the name of liberty, and call themselves "liberals." They are bullies. Hillary Clinton is a bully, as Peggy Noonan pointed out. So are they all. Bullies are arrogant, and bullies are cowardly.
Arrogance is the sin of "pride," but it was understood by the ancient Greeks as opposing virtue when Socrates defined a "sophist" as one wise in his own conceit before the time of Christ. It is arrogant to claim a virtue, as the sophist claimed wisdom - and as the reporter claims objectivity. Such people's arguments always boil down to, "Because I said so - and who are you to question me?"
Arrogance is enough by itself to explain bullying, but bullying generally entails cowardice as well. Since arrogance is inherently unjustified, the arrogant person can scarcely fail to be aware of the risk of oppostion from a courageous person, or from another arrogant person. This phenomenon is clearly evident in the bullying behavior of journalists who - being contemptuous of the weak PR positon of the ordinary citizen, nevertheless studiously avoids giving serious offense to other journalists.
Help in the form of courageous youth may indeed be on the way, but they must run the gauntlet of bullies in the schools, universities, and journalism in order to arrive as adult leaders who will nurture the next generation of lovers of ordered liberty.
Yeah, read that one, too. Denser and more difficult to digest, I thought, but I plowed through it...
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