by Tom Pantera
Columnist
It’s been interesting for me to watch the disarray among conservatives and their efforts to remedy it. Since I play for the opposing team, I find it highly amusing to watch how conservatives in this country have gone about trying to get more voters, particularly young people.
As a college instructor, I spend the majority of my time around the young. And while I understand how some of what conservatives say resonates, more often I wonder if most conservatives have ever met anybody under the age of about 60.
They make the mistake of dealing with all young people like they deal with their kids. What they fail to understand, however, is that there’s a wide range of parenting techniques out there and a lot of what they do doesn’t appeal to somebody who may have been raised in a different kind of household.
But more than that, they fail to understand just how different the lives of young people are now and how those differences mean they’re not necessarily amenable to being convinced by the same old dog-and-pony shows. Particularly after the last presidential election, most conservative self-examination came to the conclusion that the problem wasn’t their message, it was the marketing.
That’s partially true, but it’s by far the minor part of the problem. What a lot of conservatives fail to understand about currently young people is that they’ve been marketed to by everybody since virtually the moment they were born. The delivery systems have changed – “viral marketing,” for example, where a product or idea is sold basically through social media, wasn’t around when I was young because there was no Internet and thus no social media – but the messages really haven’t changed all that much.
Because they have been targeted by marketers all their lives, young people today have enough experience with sales pitches that they start from a position of skepticism. They assume that what they’re being told is b.s., so just passing it on isn’t going to convince them. If they think you’re jiving them, they’ll simply tune out, God bless ‘em. You have to give them a reason to listen, both because they don’t believe everything right away and also because they are so bombarded with marketing messages for everything from deodorant to presidential candidates that it isn’t easy to break through all the noise about, say, the latest “Twilight” movie.
It’s been particularly amusing to me to watch the social conservative wing of the conservative movement try to sell their product to young people. Earlier this week, Salon.com ran a list of “5 Christian ‘hipsters’ trying to make fundamentalism look cool.” Of all the conservative factions that are trying to sell their message to young people, Christians are perhaps the most inept. They always come off as a parent who tries to convince the kids they’re cool by using slang that was outdated five years ago.
The Salon list included radio hosts, motivational speakers, musicians and other high-profile types, although unless you’re into that kind of thing you probably would only recognize one name. That would be Tim Tebow, whose spectacular failure as an NFL quarterback was chronicled by just about every type of media outlet.
The problem with all these “cool” social conservatives is that they may know how your average hipster dresses and talks, but the basic product they’re selling is still considered deeply uncool by the majority of the target market. It just isn’t easy to sell a homophobic agenda to kids who have grown up in a world where being gay not only isn’t considered horrible, but actually carries some cachet in some circles (like popular entertainment, which is an even bigger part of kids’ worlds than it was a couple of decades ago). And with more and more people coming out of the closet, kids generally know a gay person or two and can see that they don’t have two horns and a forked tail. They know that the sexual orientation of the kid who sits next to them in math class has virtually no effect on anybody else’s life.
Likewise, it’s tough to sell an anti-abortion agenda, even though as a moral question abortion has good, valid arguments on both sides. Conservatives keep beating the same tired old drums as though the very sound and fury will itself convince. But a lot of young people have grown up around teen-age mothers – hell, a lot of them were born to one – and they know that debates about how God feels about abortion are, to most people, less important than whether they will have to choose between making the rent and buying baby formula. MTV reality shows to the contrary, most kids know that parenthood is a tough gig any time and even tougher when you’re not ready for it.
Christian conservatives also have a tendency to fall back on “you should do this because the Bible says so,” which has always been a lousy argument. In formal logic, that tactic is called appeal to authority and is recognized as one of the bigger logical fallacies. Think about it: When is the last time you got any kid to do something just because an adult said so? You can’t even get a lot of kids to make a bed, much less do anything that will have long, lasting effects on their lives, by saying “because I say so,”.
Now, as a liberal who would like to see this country get less conservative, it’s probably a bad idea for me to give pointers to the other side. But I just can’t help myself. Think of it this way: Imagine how much better political debate would be in America if one side wasn’t so deeply clueless.