I was in my third year of college in 1980 — 20 years old— when Ronald Reagan was elected the first time in a landslide. (It really was a landslide) Both my parents voted for Carter. I remember being uplifted by Reagan’s election, by his ideals, by his inauguration speech, by the “shining city on a hill.”
What is wrong with these kids? Can someone with kids please explain? What are they thinking of?
My guess is that most of these kids were public school students who had 13 or more years of anti-US indoctrination drilled into their heads prior to coming to college to receive another 4 or more years of the same thing.
I am also guessing that when you were younger, schools may have been more pro-US.
The same thing that drives us to protect individuality and individual freedoms. I think everyone has a need somewhere inside to be unique, in some way. Ironically, being an ‘individual’ to a teenager/young adult often means being different somehow than their parents, and believing, or at least supporting what is considered ‘cool’ among their friends. It's cool to be green. It's not cool to be an old white guy who ‘just doesn't get it’.
Obviously none of that is true, but I do believe the left has helped themselves immensely by propagating the illusion that they are on the cutting edge of progress in society. I actually heard Larry King say this once (that liberals were the progressives who were pushing things forward in society). We've done a very poor job of defending what we believe against those who would label us as throwbacks.
I think the ‘big tent’ that Newt keeps talking about shouldn't be thought of as a tent made up of RINOs and conservatives. I think it should be thought of as containing people who all believe at their core in individual liberty, and the defense of this against those who would try to take it from us while saying they are only trying to help.
The big tent might contain people of multiple religious faiths, agnostics, atheists, evolutionists, creationists, fundamentalists, and cosmics, Opera lovers, and NASCAR fans. That's not where the dividing lines should be drawn. They should be drawn at the level of a much more basic principle, the principle in the Declaration of Independence that ‘All men (and women) are born equal in the eyes of God, and that we are endowed by God with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So, climbing down off the soapbox, the concepts of freedom, individuality, and rights of all to pursue happiness without the yolk of government suppressing them are very fresh concepts. They always will be. We just haven't done a very good job fighting the political correctness drones and letting the successive generations know that the most cool, most progressive, most modern, most hip societal concepts are those of liberty, individuality, and self-determination.