Against political involvement

(Why super-involved conservative young people may actually be working for the liberals!)

I was once on the board of an alumni association. One of the older members said everyone on the board was either right out of school and new to the area, or retired. He wasn’t upset about it in the least. He said it was simply that everyone else was busy raising their families, which he thought was a good thing.

Nowadays the conservatives really want to get more young people involved. They seem over-excited about getting attendance at events and meetings. You know, it’s just some guy talking too long about something only a little interesting, but the Facebook event page says “come be part of this exciting event!” Uh huh. A local conservative nonpartisan organization just gushes over its 30-year-old single guy who is ready to volunteer for everything. They love how much time he gives to the group. But 30 isn’t actually young. And at that age, he ought to be contributing by raising a family. But it looks like he has invested so much of his energy in political volunteering, sending e-mails, organizing rallies, maintaining a superficial internet presence, that he has missed the boat on major life investments.

If conservatives really intend to try to live like super-involved liberals, they will be abandoning the very worldview they are fighting for. Consider:

Liberals get a lot of young adults involved, but if my friends and associates are any indication, those people are living out a worldview in which individuals interact with civil society directly, without being invested in a family first. At its worst, it’s me and the government. That is, those friends tend not to be married. They tend not to have families. They have huge presence on facebook, and they hold and attend lots of “events,” but if you ask me, the whole thing looks a lot like college. In college, we were all separate individuals participating in student organizations and attending events. Accumulating experiences. Stuffing our schedules with “involvement” for its own sake. Living in organizations rather than families.

And that is the liberal worldview, isn’t it? Everyone unmarried, everyone dependent on society at large, the State, for emotional and economic support. Pure democracy is both radically individualistic and totalitarian. But it has no legacy. It is impermanent.

My married friends don’t live like that. Certainly many of them still care about politics, but their investments look much less like they’re just desperately trying to fill their time and be “involved.”

Conservative young people seem to be more likely to get married and start families. They spend less time on Facebook, and their political volunteering comes after their commitment to their families. In fact, to the extent that they are involved in politics, they are doing it FOR their families, because they have something, someone, important to take care of beyond themselves. They aren’t individuals interacting directly with the State. The first interaction they have is their spouse, and everything they do flows out of that basic relationship. If you ask me, that is a far better way to generate policy.

And I have been convinced that cultural change comes about by example. Getting young adults to give all their time to politics keeps them from focusing on building families. But families are the most important units of society. So if conservatives want to stay unmarried and over-involved in politics, they will actually be working for the liberals. Even if they are fighting for conservative policy! Because they are living out the liberal model of society.

So, I’m not saying young people shouldn’t be involved in politics. I’m saying they should have families first.