The Outstater
Don’t Give Up on the Young
I’VE FOUND THE YOUNG OVERRATED. They don’t have much money, they’re always moving around and they invariably lean socialists or worse. Nonetheless, people I respect tell me they are important — “the future,” don’t you know — so I try to stay open-minded.
Now comes news from Canada that young people there are discovering that the world of Justin Trudeau (and by association Kamala Harris) doesn’t work. Michael Bonner, a Canadian writer, makes a compelling case that young people have had enough of liberal nonsense. His major points:
If an election were held today in Canada, 47 percent of those aged 18 to 34 would vote Conservative and only 24 percent and 17 percent would vote Liberal or socialist, respectively. This is a reversal of the youth support that brought the Liberals to power in 2015. Bonner explains this not as the result of conservative rhetorical brilliance but as a natural reaction to liberal silliness:
“One of the Trudeau government’s first moves was to announce a plan to ‘decolonize’ Canada. In their own telling, the Trudeau Liberals manage a civil service and a military riven by systemic racism and white supremacy, respectively. Everyone knows that such claims are ridiculous, but few have dared say so in public.”
On top of that, grounded and detailed explanations of what has gone wrong are beginning to take hold, particularly in regards to issues of special concern to the young — the cost of living, wages, inflation, unaffordable housing.
That last is said to be a primary reason young people are not getting married and beginning families. The Tories, using verifiable statistics and solid economic observations, have been effective in demonstrating that housing problems are not natural but rather the result of bad policy decisions.
The liberals have no answers to either this or the real-life experiences of the young. Instead, they remain obsessed with identity politics and woke activism. Even Stephen Marche, a liberal commentator, has called this “institutional suicide.” Bonner quotes him predicting that such liberal activists “are about to find themselves lonely jokes, like hippies in the 1980s, their ideas and their language will serve as straw men and punching bags.”
Is that happening here? I haven’t seen any viable polling in that direction. Anecdotally, though, I recently broached the topic over coffee with a beloved niece. She is troubled by the moral confusion coming out of the Democrat Party, and for perhaps the first time in her life she is expressing sincere curiosity about what the other side might have to say.
I would have liked to have pointed her to insightful critiques from the mass media on racial equity and social justice. Unfortunately, all I could offer were a few memes on cats. — tcl
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