A call to arms

National Review, Dec 28, 1992 by Amy Lumet

Baby Cons of America, unite: You have nothing to lose but your parents' guilt.

AVERY polite gentleman in New York asked me this fall if I was planning to vote for Bill Clinton. Talk about insulting! I pointed to my John McCain hat--"I'm a Republican," I said. The gentleman told me that, in his experience, cute young things tended to be liberal. We need to prove him wrong in a major way.

Through laziness, wishful thinking, and most likely sheer incompetence on the part of the "experts," the Clinton victory has, in part, been attributed to that nebulous entity, the "youth vote." But, hey!--more under-thirty voters are identifying themselves as conservative than ever before.

For more than twenty years, pundits have been nattering on about two types of conservatives---"Paleos and Neos." Well, hello there, we right-wing voters under thirty feel quite neglected. Politicians don't notice us unless we work for them at Cratchit-like salaries. And then they steal our ideas. We've also been called all sorts of stupid things like "The Lost Generation." We know where we are. Unfortunately, people who have tried to chart us as a social phenom can't find many common threads--therefore we're "lost."

Only one polling group has been able to find a significant trend in the under-thirty set. It gave us a little credit for not being morons and tracked us politically instead of socially. That group was the Republican National Committee under Lee Atwater. You must admit, Clinton's sax doesn't hold a candle to Atwater's axe. (Author's note: If you're old, "axe" is slang for guitar.) Atwater noticed that there is a third generation of conservatives. Since intellectuals like everything nice, neat, and named, call us Baby Cons.

One of the biggest differences between Baby Cons and older Cons is that we have no guilt about our views. Go ahead, call us smug, racist, elitist, reactionary, etc. We don't care. We are the only generation able to start from square one and say, "Act as if life is fair." For everybody. A "have-not" from the worst possible circumstances has the same de jure rights and chances as I do.

As this was not necessarily the case in the past, guilt and resentment color the behavior of prior generations. Paleos feel guilty because some of them actually were. Neos feel guilty about everything. One of the reasons so many shrinks are liberals is that they're fed up with their Neo-Con patients. Neo-Cons discuss their embarrassing pasts with the tediousness of proud new parents. They used to be liberals; then their taxes got too high for them to afford Mao jackets in twenty different colors. Hello, responsibility. Those of their age group who didn't see the Right try to impose both their hypocrisy and their guilt on young people via the PC movement. Baby Cons are fed up with being pushed around by people so insecure that they have to preface any political or social observation with a moral disclaimer: "I think apartheid is terrible, but ..." or "Well, things have been unequal, but..." Shut up and have some guts. We know what's right and what's wrong.

We are the first generation to have been raised by government as evil stepmother. You all thought you saw it in the Thirties, but FDR's programs were small potatoes compared to the behemoth of rules, regulations, and assorted idiocies we are trying to unsnarl ourselves from today. Busing, 55-mile-an-hour speed limits, rules in advertising, college quotas, low-income housing projects in our neighborhoods, don't do this, don't say that, no smoking on planes or trains--the list is endless. We're even the first generation of Americans to have lousy cars mandated by the government.

After Brezhnev

WE ARE also the first generation to come of age in the era of collapsed Communism. As a matter of fact, since Brezhnev died before most of us could vote, we feel that liberalism is a hell of a lot more pernicious than Communism. No Commie can claim the moral high ground at a dinner party without getting laughed at. Let a liberal try it and he gets an award or something. Baby Cons don't have a bear breathing down our necks, which gives us a different perspective.

Paleos and Neos grew up with a USSR that could microwave them in seconds. For us, they were the team to beat at the Olympics. And then they folded. Baby Cons contributed to the biggest foreign-policy event of the century not by writing, not by running for office, but by voting. Since 1980, Republicans have pulled ahead of Democrats in the allegiance of voters under forty. In 1980, younger voters were 37 per cent Democratic, 20 per cent Republican. By 1991, Republicans led by 35 to 28 per cent among 18- to 29-year-old voters (data courtesy of the Republican National Committee, New York Times, July 13, 1991). Paleos and Neos had their lives, employment, and ideologies shaped by Marxism, hard and soft. The death of Communism affords Baby Cons the luxury of time to pay more attention to issues at home.

And what they see makes them mad. You'll hear it over and over: big intrusive government, big moral government, big parental government. One Baby Con put the problem very well: "[The] creeping socialism manifest in the expansion of government threatens the only valuable right in the Constitution--the Fifth Amendment right to private property." I love this statement. Every jackass in town forgets that this is the Fifth Amendment. Ask the libs about the Fifth and they'll make some crack about IranContra hearings. May an interstate go through their homes.