The Young And The Right, Ctd

It's worse than many think. A reader writes:

I was reading your blog the other day, when I saw a post called "The Young and The Right". It talked about how not only do the young have a high approval rating of Obama, but we have a distinctly low approval rating of the Republican leaders in congress. I'm two months from graduating High School in North Carolina, a 40 year Republican stronghold, and newly minted swing state. I've grown up with my only personal memories of politics being that of the Bush Administration.

Every friend of mine that registered to vote last year registered not as an independent but as a Democrat. Many more too young to vote told me they wanted to do the same. The lasting political effect of the Bush Administration is not only that's created a new generation of (for now) solid up-ticket to down-ticket Democratic voters, but a new generation of leftists.

What the Bush Administration has done is make words like "Statism" "Democratic socialism" and "Welfare State" spoken with praise by Teenagers in Western North Carolina.

All we know of the right is the Ultra-reactionary and barbaric performance of President Bush and the Congressional republicans, and, for the most part, all we've seen from the Left is dogged opposition to the right's inane or insane policies. Conservatism as a movement has lost its future, because it has, from what I can see, completely lost the young. The Hour is getting very late for the Right to talk about deficits or of social squabbles. It only reinforces their image to the young as the political group that has to be stopped. They are fast digging their own graves.

Until the right thoroughly accounts for what happened over the last eight years - and not in a perfunctory aside - they will have no credibility in reshaping their movement. And they should be ignored.