“The Grand Old Party has been stereotyped for years as the political party of the old, white, straight, male that hates diversity and revels in hating anyone different from themselves,” reads the beginning of Amazon’s description of Meredith Ancret Walker’s book, A New Breed of Elephant: Conservative Outreach, Transcending Identity Politics, and Victory in the 21st Century.
As a conservative who also happens to be a lesbian, Walker is aware that such stereotypes are widely untrue. In her book, she set out to clear up the many misconceptions of the GOP and to make suggestions on what can be done to broaden the appeal of conservative values. The result is a compilation of interviews with minority conservatives from a variety of demographics, such as age, race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender.
When it comes to millennials, who are certainly a minority within the GOP, Walker feels the biggest problems with outreach center around reputation and media.
“As conservatives we’ve allowed a very negative stereotype of conservatism to be fed to the world,” Walker told Red Alert Politics. “Some of that is our own fault because major ‘conservative’ news outlets employ people who can spend half an hour talking about the evils of MTV. Aside from the poor choices we make for spokespeople, we are also not all that good with our media messaging. Our ability to interact with popular culture in any meaningful way is a severe problem when it comes to young voters.”
In A New Breed of Elephant, Walker further outlines how conservatives can use Hollywood, YouTube, and social media to reach America’s youth. In addition to utilizing current media trends, she also recommends that the GOP look at social issues through a pro-small government lens more often than through a religious or moral lens.
“I’ve always viewed the ideological divide on social issues as an issue of generational lines, rather than party,” Walker writes in her book. “As the millennial generation is hitting voting age and splitting between parties, they are bringing the more millennial approach to these issues into both parties. While young people do occasionally end up in the conservative camp, the very vocal religious right is a major turn off…it may be time to put that particular platform to bed and realize that as a party that is supposedly in favor of small government and allowing individuals to live their lives without being controlled by others, maybe gay marriage is really just not the hill we want to die on.”
It is also important to note that A New Breed of Elephant became available in eBook form months before Donald Trump turned out to be the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, something that Walker says will hurt the GOP’s chances of winning the youth vote in a massive way.
“I say this unapologetically on the basis that young voters are generally not eager to jump into bed with a party leader who has not only been endorsed by the KKK, but who also chooses white nationalists to be delegates for him in the primary and has been unquestionably sexist in his approach to women,” the author shared. “Young voters who value policy over social issues might be able to ignore the racism and sexism in Trump’s personality and the reputation of his supporters if his policies were even slightly conservative, but he fails on that front as well in everything from economic policy to foreign policy.”
Walker admits that she immediately changed her voter registration after Trump won her state’s primary, adding herself to the long list of young conservatives who feel as though the current state of the Republican Party does not represent their principles. As a result, she is in the midst of working on rewrites to her book, which will include a new forward and new content that will address the 2016 election.
A New Breed of Elephant: Conservative Outreach, Transcending Identity Politics, and Victory in the 21st Century is currently available for purchase as an eBook on Amazon, though Walker confirmed that a paperback version, as well as eBook versions for iBooks and Barnes & Noble, is on its way. An eBook version of its 2nd edition will become available around June 1, 2016, with a paperback version soon to follow.
