To Be Young and MAGA Was Very Heaven!

By Taylor Lewis

Good news, rumpled, holey-cardigan-donning, chopped-hair-having, perennially frustrated public-school English teacher. The kids have been reached.

Young men—and they are men, despite likely leeching off their mom’s health insurance plan—are interested in big ideas again. But they aren’t just keen on philosophical faceoffs. They’re romantic, yearning, wide-eyed, open, prepared to accept the mantle of greatness. Oh, they’re also keenly dressed, with tailored three-pieces, tastefully patterned pocket squares, and polished Oxfords.

The only problem for the humanistic pedagogues so troubled by listless youth: this intellectual vibrancy resides exclusively within the Trumpian right. Picture: a bunch of Dylan Thomas epigones languishing on a hillside, MAGA hats atop their conditioned curls, necks bound with Mar-a-Lago branded silk ascots, wearing wool socks embroidered with a portrait of Fauci behind prison bars.

The apocryphal folk wisdom that twentysomethings lack heart if they’re not archly liberal is obsolete. Now on the right is where all the vim and vigor plays.

Writing in The Point magazine, Mana Afsari, a young female freelancer, contrasts two political conventions that occurred last July. The first was the National Conservatism conference, a heterodox gathering of the wily subdivisions within the right’s splaying tent, including but limited to, America-Firsters, economic populists, postliberals, national conservatives, Catholic integralists, Trump diehards, conventional Republicans, monarchists, well-read brainiacs, hard-drug railers, sniffily Turning Point interns, senators, representatives, and maybe a couple of Jan 6ers who thus far had managed to evade the Sauronic FBI.

Afsari thought herself a stranger in a strange land walking through the doors of an unapologetic brofest. But she came away pleasantly surprised: “Even still, I expected to find something of a political sideshow at NatCon; instead, I found a movement, perhaps the only one I’d encountered during my time in DC.” The “hundreds of young men” she met weren’t your typical Washington workaday warriors, content to cubicle for eight hours before downing a dozen of the cheapest pilsners they could find within Hill watering holes. They’re genuinely interested in the ancient art of idea exchange. Many have actually formed informal debate parties where tawdry topics like metaphysics and what governing force will eventually succeed the liberal international order are discussed, all spliced heavily with “quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers.” And while many of these buttoned-up attendees embrace Trump, even seeing him as one of history’s rare movers, they waste little breath on what grabs the slit attention of your average political creature: tweets, soundbites, campaign intrigue.

Speaking as your average middle-aged millennial Twitter-addict, I’ll blurt out the first feeling that comes to mind when reading of this nerdish cohort: boring! But also: inspiring! Afsari’s observations are reminiscent of Declan Leary’s own meditation upon departing the District for America proper: the seemingly out-of-place thinkers and arguers within Washington constitute “a vibrant subculture… like the first decisive generation’s councils in the taverns of Philadelphia, beneath the notice of a bumbling empire.”

How much of a comfort is it that our nation’s future is being bandied about with sharp verbs, loquacious nouns, and more than a few inspired gerunds by mustached IPA sippers? Considering the Founding Fathers’s famous one-night $15,000 bar tab, I’d say it’s mildly soothing. And far better than a bunch of snotty European gentry debating statutes in a Viennese coffee & cakes house.

If the right is busying itself running a trifecta government and hosting book clubs on the Bullfeathers patio, what’s the Left, our traditionally college-cloistered bloc, up to? Surely there’s a Wokeabbean revolt forming, composed of all sorts of septum-pierced recruits like racial militants, beret-wearing syndicalists, firearm-toting trannies, pudendum-hatted harpies, polyamorous dropouts, with a few homeless vagrants tagging along for added flavor. And they’ve got to be fervently coordinating rallies to protest the Trump Administration’s onslaught of cost-cutting executive orders, complete with bullhorns, keffiyehs, and handmade signs painted with blood of aborted fetuses. This is the unemployed, much annoyed Left we’re talking about after all.

Except, the high-pitched cries that sounded across metro skyscrapers during Trump Term One are fewer and quieter, and it’s not because irate progressives strained their vocal chords. In the eight years since Trump first won the Oval, lefties have aged—not just in calendar count. Afsari’s reporting from the obverse of NatCon, “Liberalism for the 21st Century” is more gray but less gay (in the traditional definition) than the rambunctious right-side colloquium. How she described the scene: “There are white heads shaking in disapproval on every other panel like parodies of nineteenth-century conservatives—staid, unaware, too furious at the incomprehensible incomprehension of the young toward their legitimate authority to understand their own decline.”

The Left, by this account, has become what it professed to despise: haughty scolds convinced the kids are too big for their britches and don’t respect the good produced by the long liberal order. And the Right are now the iconoclast ragamuffins that a generation ago would be regarded as Marxian agitants.

Non-profit megadonors shouldn’t get too excited, however, believing the GOP now has a lock on the young vote. How much this boomlet in unwrinkled right-wingery is driven by genuine conviction, and how much is just ‘rent rebellion, will be determined by that ultimate metric: the clock’s steady hands.

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