(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.

How many times do we say “it doesn’t mean anything” before we are willing to accept that even our protestations are now evidence that it (whatever it is) DOES mean something?

Apparently, women don’t contribute to Wikipedia. Apparently, we’re surprised. Apparently, it is a problem. Read the New York Times article.

Thirteen percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are women. Why? The article suggests that boys write more about boy topics (like action figures) than girls write about girl topics (friendship bracelets). I think it is possible that there is simply more to say about action figures than about friendship bracelets. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, says, in the article, “Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table…If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.” She echoes a common, and valid, argument: women, as a differently situated social group, have a lot to contribute to the great conversation of mankind. They have different subjective perspectives as well as access to different knowledge and information. Boys don’t know much about those little bracelets.

But is that the reason we need more women’s voices in the public forum? We need to know more about friendship bracelets?

The article observes that Wikipedia’s female participation rate is similar to that of many other public fora.  Pundits, op-ed columnists, and politicians tend to be male. In the wider world beyond Wikis, we can speculate that men are keeping women from participating in public discourse.

But what about Wikipedia? It is open to anyone who wants to be there. Faced with these numbers, commentators cast about for explanations: something about Wikipedia is latently patriarchal. Women have been trained to feel their views aren’t wanted. If only elementary school science teachers could convince girls to love engineering we wouldn’t be in this mess! 

What if Wikipedia reflects some generalized truth about the feminine character? What if we simply don’t want to be part of public discourse? What if we prefer to talk about politics in person, with our families and friends? What if we prefer to show our friends how to make friendship bracelets?

I’d like it if we stopped complaining that women aren’t acting enough like men and started affirming the activities women choose to pursue and the contributions that they make to society in “traditionally feminine” areas. The devaluation of activities and manners women prefer is an especially insidious form of repression, maybe. Some feminists find the feminine worthless. If femininity is more than a social construct, the feminists may be doing more harm than the patriarchal society they are fighting.