Conservatives are used to thinking that we can never win back the youth. They’re rioting for Antifa, dying their hair blue, and chopping up their genitals; despair, for all hope is lost.
But it turns out that Zoomers are growing far more conservative than the conventional wisdom ever deemed possible.
Donald Trump is “making stunning inroads” Axios reports, whining that his “youth-friendly positions . . . defy GOP orthodoxy and contradict past statements.”
His inroads are, in fact, quite stunning. A new New York Times/Siena poll has 18-29-year-old likely voters (far more indicative than merely registered voters) within spitting distance. At 47%, Biden’s only two points ahead. This narrowest it’s been since the 2000 election, and the two decades since then have seen some of the widest partisan divides. If Trump pulls this off, American politics will never be the same.
But the rest of Axios’ claim is a load of hogwash. Trump’s always had frat boy energy with youthful irreverence; this is no contradiction. Instead, it’s the washed-up hippie boomers, and the out-of-office bookworm they worship, who run the government today. They’re the real stodgy old hypocrites.
Despite obviously being a nerdier and whiter version of Urkel, Barack Obama somehow convinced millennials he was cool. I guess smoking weed before it was legal and palling around with Jay-Z before he looked like Whoopi Goldberg helped.
But Trump possesses the vitality and iconoclasm that most men lose in their 20s. He’s kept it up well into his 70s.
Youth is more than just a number, it’s a spirit, “a vibe,” as the kids say; you either have it or you don’t. At 77, Trump is still the figurehead of a youthful revolt, the man standing against all the powers-that-be, the benighted fools who built hypocritical rules and granted themselves arbitrary authority. He’s standing up and telling them no: I know better than you, your ways dumb and outdated, and we’re going to do things my way from now on. He’s the hippie stoner at Woodstock, and the establishment is his conservative mom telling him to get back to church.
“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” goes a famous line from the 1953 film “The Wild One.”
“What have you got?” responds a young Marlon Brando.
No line could better capture the youthful infatuation with rebellion. And there’s no bigger rebel today than Donald Trump.
