At a moment when memes sadly double as not-so-meaningful discourse, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos urged conservative students to try engaging with ideas rather than just trolling enemies for a change.
A good education, DeVos told the crowd at the High School Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA, means “learning about ideas — and not just the ones you agree with! It’s way more than putting a face or a phrase on a T-shirt.”
And just like that, the education secretary dropped some badly needed knowledge on Turning Point USA. It’s a lesson the young conservative group has struggled to grasp from its infancy during the Obama administration to its very apparent adolescence during the age of Trump. They have more interest in triggering liberals and drinking leftist tears than persuading opponents and winning arguments.
A little irreverence goes a long way, of course, and the wicked wit of William F. Buckley was a great driver of conservatism, for instance. But rebellion should serve more than a tribal purpose and Buckley, it should be noted, managed to build a following without selling out his principles or devolving into partisan soundbites. Charlie Kirk and his adolescent TPUSA army could take that lesson to heart.
The group began with the admirable goal of making conservatism cool. They ended up reducing all of conservatism into bad Internet memes and stupid arguments. Hence the T-shirts.
Despite its hundreds of chapters across college campuses and its multimillion-dollar endowment, TPUSA is most closely associated with the light blue T-shirts that say, “Socialism SUCKS.” And sure, that economic ideology has enslaved and murdered millions across the globe. It does indeed “suck.” But tyrannies aren’t demolished by T-shirts and Karl Marx certainly can’t be dismissed with a meme. They are defeated with intellectually honest, winning arguments.
DeVos wasn’t the first to warn the TPUSA crowd to turn away from their current approach. Together with Nikki Haley, she offered something of an abbreviated syllabus on the need for civil arguments inside a civil society. Earlier in the week, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told the conservative kids to knock it off with “owning the libs.”
“I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this — are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?” Haley asked the students just two days earlier. “We’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn’t leadership — it’s the exact opposite.”
“Real leadership is about persuasion, it’s about movement, it’s bringing people around to your point of view,” she added. “Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do.”
So to convince others, like Haley suggests, the TPUSA kids must learn and consider the opposition’s arguments. That means getting the right kind of education, like DeVos prescribes, which requires finally growing up.
