As I’ve noted previously, there is a tendency to substitute ego stroking for intelligent analysis. With social analysis, this is the tendency to explain a phenomenon as being caused because the protagonist is more beautiful, more thoughtful, more caring, etc. Conversely, the explanation can be that the antagonists are idiots, ugly, or cruel. The problem isn’t so much that these things can’t be explanations. The problem is the presumption of malice combined with almost no foundation for supporting that presumption.
Andrew Sullivan has been linking to a number analyses over the GOP’s lack of support among college students. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones offers his thought
[M]y guess is that this is primarily a reaction to social conservatism. Students at top universities just can’t stomach the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-civil rights, anti-religious-tolerance attitude of the current GOP.
He isn’t the only one to offer this analysis. He also offers more analysis that is worthy of greater consideration that I’m not addressing here. The sentence I highlighted though gets a number of things wrong.
For instance, the idea that the GOP is anti-religious-tolerance is actually projection. The Democrats are all too often openly contemptuous of religious believers and as a party has no comfort level with a role for religion in the public square. (See the reaction to faith based programs for evidence thereof.) Yes, anti-religious-tolerance is covering a lot of things, one of them presumably being the Muslim religious center controversy in New York. However intolerance of Muslims is not a phenomenon isolated to the GOP in this country.
Then there is the whole matter of young people themselves. In our just completed election, 21% of eligible young people cast a ballot, a fairly typical result. In contrast, the last presidential election saw 50% of young people cast ballots, the 2nd highest in history. It is very difficult to maintain that young voters are being strongly driven by certain issues and that they are very apathetic at the same time. It seems quite apparent that the presidential election was exceptional for the participation of young people and attempts to divine the intentions of young people without taking account of that will be folly. The easiest conclusion to draw is that the exceptional participation was particular to now President Obama and not the result of an ideologically driven trend.
Then there is the whole matter of representation at elite universities. We probably shouldn’t ignore a few things here. Today there is a network of decidedly conservative institutions that wasn’t present 50 years ago. While more people now have bachelor degrees, it is less of an ideological marker. Graduate degrees are now that marker. Elite is now more or less code for East Coast elite, not reflecting places like the University of Chicago, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, not that these are bastions of conservative thought by any means but nevertheless reflective of the fact that the real options for elite students are significantly broader than in the past. While education certainly hasn’t been completely democratized, the separation amongst institutions is not nearly as vast.
As a former Republican, it would give me no greater pleasure than to trash my former party. If I didn’t think it had problems, I wouldn’t have left. I’m not going to be one of those people who claim the whole system is wrong, and both Republicans and Democrats have problems. I do in fact believe the Republican Party is more ideological right now, and I do believe the Democratic Party is more seriously addressing the issues. I do not however believe the distance between them is that great, and there are myriad of issues the Democrats prefer to demagogue rather than seriously engage, most of them having to do with the family, sexual license, and religious freedom. If those issues become front and center again, the Democrats will be in for a lot of pain. As for the last election, losing is the price of winning. The Democrats were able to enjoy some successes that caused some constituencies to become alienated. As fears subside, those constituencies should come back.
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