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16 Apr 2007 02:19 pm

The Young and the GOP

It's a full-scale collapse. A reader writes:

Based on what my younger son, a college sophomore, and his friends tell me, the "Young Republican" organizations on many campuses are falling afoul of the same problems that created a revulsion against their political parents in the Nixon era, when I was in college. With the ascendancy of Nixon, the YR became storm troopers of the imperial presidency - doctrinaire, authoritarian, exclusive, dishonest and generally obnoxious in the way they coated their realpolitik with a transparent veneer of moral self-righteousness.

They behaved then and, I understand, behave now like a bunch of middle-aged, self-important know-it-alls around whom the stench of hypocrisy hovers like a visible fog. Or, they are perceived as too dim-witted to know any better. These characteristics, hypocrisy and stupidity, have ever been repulsive to the young and and are turning many college students today (a far more focused and pragmatic bunch than my feckless peers) sharply away from the party the YR represent.

My older son, now 25, finds the Christianist base of the party risible and pathetic. He and his friends abhor the moral and ethical vacuum at the center of the Republican Party; they sneer at the mendacity of the Administration; they shudder at the prospect of the deficit they will have to pay; they believe that the Republicans have made more dangerous the world in which they will raise their children.   

Based on what I hear from these young people, I wonder less that the the Republicans have lost support among those under 30 and more that they have any support at all.

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