This weekend, hundreds of thousands of young people participated in the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., the culmination of efforts by student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who had survived the recent shooting that claimed 17 lives.
As expected, many of the speakers at the march called on Congress to pass further gun-control legislation. But the protest was different in tone from earlier rallies like the 2016 Women’s March. It was organized by, and deliberately focused on, the young. Despite the intense media coverage leading up to the event, the celebrity presence was muted (though George Clooney and Kim Kardashian both managed cameos).
What wasn’t muted were the many pleas by march organizers for young people to register to vote and to use that voting power at the polls in the midterm elections in November. True, many marchers and speakers at the rally talked about their hopes for a coming “blue wave” of Democrats in the fall, but the fact that plenty of homemade signs advocated not gun control, but registering to vote, is notable.
It would be easy to be cynical about the marchers and their slogans, and to assume that this will prove to be less a sustained movement than a brief protest moment. This seems to be the approach of the White House, whose only acknowledgement of the event was a generic statement praising the kids for exercising their First Amendment rights (President Trump exercised his own right to avoid protesters by spending the weekend in Mar-a-Lago).
What Trump should have done—and what conservatives, regardless of their views on guns, should do—is acknowledge the civic-mindedness of these marchers. Yes, there is plenty of hyperbole from both sides in the gun control debate, and there are plenty of reasons to wonder about the staying power or convictions of 17-year-olds who have spent the past few weeks in the glare of the media spotlight. It’s also true that some of the rhetoric from the marchers—on their signs and from the stage—was irresponsible and counterproductive. But rather than complain about their arguments, engage them. And rather than dismiss their concerns, address them.
On a practical level, conservatives need to reckon with some uncomfortable realities.
Many of this weekend’s marchers won’t be old enough to vote until the 2020 elections, but their older brothers and sisters have already made their political affiliations clear. A recent report from Pew found that 62 percent of registered millennial voters favored Democratic candidates for the upcoming midterm elections. Only 12 percent of millennials embrace mostly conservative positions, which Pew notes is the lowest of any generation. The post-millennial generation—which includes the middle-school and high-school-age kids at this weekend’s march—appear likely to continue this trend. “The mass shooting generation is nearing voting age,” a spokesman for the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety told the New York Times. “They plan to make sure they vote and they get others to register to vote.” A sophomore survivor of the shooting challenged the crowd in D.C. to register and vote to prove older generations wrong about youth activists. “They think we’re all talk and no action.”
Political and civic engagement is crucial for a healthy democracy. Instead of mocking teenage marchers, why not use this moment as an opportunity to engage in critical self-reflection about why the Republican party—and the conservative message more broadly—has not managed to reach these future voters?
Demographically and politically, conservatives are in a battle for the hearts and minds of these kids—and so far, conservatives are losing. You don’t have to agree with the marchers’ admittedly uninformed stance on guns or their naive embrace of their own celebrity status to acknowledge their accomplishment. Their willingness to drop everything and organize this march and advocate for greater youth participation in politics might or might not lead to action at the polls come November. But ignoring their rallying cry for civic engagement—or worse, condemning it—risks encouraging the kind of cynicism and apathy that conservatives have long argued is one of the greatest threats to democracy.
