This week we saw the lunacy of #MillionStudentMarch organizer Keely Mullen’s wild demands meet the unflappable logic of Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto. It made for television magic and has been viewed over a million times online.
My Facebook and Twitter feeds have filled with clips of Neil’s interview. As he took apart her arguments for free tuition, a higher minimum wage and a tax on the “1 percent,” the Fox Business Network’s perfectly fair questions and her naive responses unleashed a wave of triumphant conservative gloating across the social sphere.
Spiking the football should not feel sad, but it does. Sad for the reasons you think. Especially sad for some reasons you might not.
It’s sad that Keely Mullen is wrong in demanding more from everyone but herself. It’s sadder still that she was unable to express a logical justification. A greater sadness, however, is that Mullen is not alone: She represents an entire generation lost, at least for the moment, to the political party that should be her home.
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Shortly after another embarrassing spectacle, the 2012 elections, the College Republican National Committee, for which I serve as national chairman, researched the Keely Mullen generation. We did it because millennials matter; after all, they decided the election. If voting had started at age 30, Mitt Romney would now be president.
Yet those young voters who cast ballots against Romney, we also learned, are not inherently liberal. In fact, they agree with the GOP’s small government, liberty-loving principles, both in theory and in practice.
Their consumer, learning and communications habits depend on remaining “connected” in an open, freedom-loving society. They reject old, top-down political programs that allow elite Washington politicians to close and limit their choices.
What they don’t do is connect the openness they demand with the only political party that has it wired in its core.
Millions of Keely Mullens have never heard from our party that it is Republicans, not Democrats, who want to open up our economy to bottom-up economic growth and a brighter, more prosperous future.
We haven’t done a good enough job of making the case that Republicans offer an alternative to old-school artificial and political schemes that Democrats still love. We’ve found that young voters will choose the open economy that Republicans propose over the Democrats closed economy, where Washington limits economic choices … if we give young voters that alternative.
Instead, Republicans have defined conservative principles mainly by what we oppose.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s critically important we say “No” to the Democratic Party’s tired, old “more of the same” agenda that has limited our choices, our growth and our prosperity.
But we have forgotten to show my generation, today’s college students, that our conservative principles are good for more than saying, “No!”
What Republicans believe is lifting more people from poverty and oppression than any old Washington political program, and it’s increasingly popular around the world — except on our own college campuses.
Our principled and practical solutions are worth fighting for, and the moment to ramp up our efforts to share them with the next generation has come.
The protests at Mizzou, Yale and a hundred other colleges should make all of us in the Republican Party take a long, hard look at ourselves. Our failure to make a better case for principled, forward-looking Republican solutions has left a vacuum on our college campuses. The Keely Mullens of this world are filling it — and we see the results.
If you’re only now paying attention, you may have missed how campuses have grown insidiously more hostile to conservative students over the past few years. Whether it’s a conservative commencement speaker bullied away from graduation or professors using their perches to spew hateful and degrading rhetoric about our ideas, there has been no lonelier place for a conservative than on campus.
We tweet and Facebook mocking comments about naive students, demanding more of the same old, top-down solutions that are failing all of us — and our ridicule is justified. Good for us. Let’s enjoy a brief victory dance. But how about we suit up and fix it?
It hard to acknowledge that we have been failing in our obligation to raise the next generation of Americans with the conservative ideals that grew our nation. It’s hard to acknowledge that we, as Republicans, must demand more from ourselves.
Freedom is only ever one generation away from extinction. That generation is now in college.
Those raised by the Greatest Generation, who enjoyed most fully the blessings of freedom, had and have still the obligation to imbue their children with these values. My generation shares in the responsibility to extend them.
Rome is on fire. Let’s all stop tweeting while it burns.
Alex Smith is chairman of the College Republican National Committee. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
