Spiliakos writes:
My own experience with really bright, hard working, ambitious, and politically engaged (but not obsessive) kids is that conservative messages rarely get to them in a detailed or friendly form outside of major election campaigns. There are exceptions, but those kids are a minority and usually have to find conservative media on their own. That means that, for most of these kids, their perceptions of politics are framed by media institutions that are liberal-leaning to various degrees of intensity and openness. They are also going to go to colleges where their professors will be varying degrees of liberal. This makes a generalized friendliness to liberal politicians and policies the default position.
The populist conservative media isn't really much of a help. The vast majority of these kids don't listen to the radio for politics (neither talk radio nor NPR.) They aren't going to watch Hannity or Beck. Those shows aren't really designed for them anyway. Those shows work best for those who have already bought into the conservative narrative and they don't really take on the best arguments of the other side. But these kids will have heard the best arguments that liberals have to offer and they are smart enough not to forget them.
This is all very true, unfortunately, as is this:
The communication problem with this group is tough. We need a set of institutions that speak to an audience that will have heard many of the best (or maybe second best) liberal arguments for this or that liberal policy. As Murray pointed out, if conservatives "take a cheap shot" or "duck an obvious objection" to their arguments, they will lose this audience.
Which is why it's good, I suppose, that they don't listen to Sean Hannity. Anyway, Spiliakos has much more to say about this at the link.
It does seem to be the case that many young people simply imbibe liberal assumptions from their cultural or academic environment and never stop to wonder whether those ideas are really true. They rarely hear those ideas challenged and are often surprised, like a zoologist who chances upon a species heretofore thought to be extinct, to encounter people who don't assent to them. When such encounters occur the bright young person is prone to assume that the doubter is simply uninformed or otherwise backward.
I don't know how this can ever be changed until more smart young conservatives choose to do what liberals did back in the 60s and 70s which is to begin their own long march through the institutions. When more bright young men and women who hold conservative views undertake careers in cinema, education, law, journalism and other fields which shape the culture, the situation that Spiliakos laments might change. But unless they do, I'm afraid that liberals we will always have with us and liberal worldviews will be the default position for so many of our most intelligent young people.
RLC
