The Dire State of Campus Conservatism

W ith the results of the 2022 midterms growing clearer, it is evident that Republicans underperformed significantly. What should have been a red wave turned into a red mist. Republicans have failed to retake the Senate, fumbling away many winnable races, and appear on track to claim a much smaller House majority than expected.

Much has been written about how Donald Trump and his candidate choices cost the GOP races across the country, contributing to the party’s midterm struggles. What’s been less discussed is how Trump and his fans affected the youth vote.

Any conservative who has gone to college knows that being on campus can be trying. With a handful of exceptions, most campus atmospheres are adversarial, if not outright hostile, to conservative thought. Even my own University of Florida isn’t immune. Nevertheless, for a conservative student like me, college has been invaluable — not just because of the degree I will one day earn from it, but because of what it’s taught me about the future of the conservative movement.

The outlook for American conservatism is bleak. There is intense anti-intellectualism in some prominent parts of the movement. Numerous leading commentators in conservative media have begun recommending that parents stop sending their kids to college completely. The so-called New Right has taken aim at higher education in its entirety, which seems a misguided approach. More traditional conservatives understand higher education’s uses, which were perhaps best illustrated by the demise of Roe v. Wade: The Federalist Society, a serious repository of originalist jurisprudence founded in the early 1980s by conservative students at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, has helped reshape the American judiciary through its campus efforts.

The Federalist Society and a handful of other conservative student groups — the Young America’s Foundation, for instance — do valuable work pushing the movement forward. But they are, sadly, more the exception than the rule these days. Many other right-wing campus groups are failing their student members and endangering the future of American conservatism. The most prominent example of this failure is Turning Point USA, the nationwide group fronted by Charlie Kirk. TPUSA, with a presence on more than 3,000 college campuses, has impressive reach. It seems to be tied to College Republican groups nationwide, has worked with numerous political campaigns, and often represents the most unified front against campus bias. It has a significant influence on many young conservatives and provides them extensive networking opportunities.

It is also an entirely unserious organization. You need only look at the people running it for proof. Kirk associates with stop-the-steal types and gives a platform to conspiracy theorists. On October 31, he called for an “amazing Patriot” to bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker so that conservatives could “ask him some questions” about his actions. His podcast has welcomed Dinesh D’Souza twice, allowing D’Souza to air his fraudulent claims that the 2020 election was stolen. On his show this past Friday, Kirk implied that those counting the ballots would release the tallies in such a way as to make Republicans look bad, taking the lead in some sort of mainstream-media-backed plot. He did so alongside Jack Posobiec, another TPUSA-linked conservative commentator who is famous for his promotion of Pizzagate, stop the steal, and other conspiracy-theory-driven movements. Candace Owens rose to stardom in conservative circles on the back of her association with TPUSA and now defends Kanye West despite his numerous antisemitic statements. This is perhaps unsurprising, given Owens’s own past controversial remarks about Adolf Hitler, and her claims that the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism worldwide, actually creates more antisemitism.

That an influential group dedicated to creating the next generation of American conservatives is associated with such characters as Kirk, Posobiec, and Owens is worrisome enough on its own. But in addition to drawing young people to conservative ideas, organizations such as Turning Point ostensibly exist to drive young conservatives to the polls — and on that front, the results in last week’s midterms were not pretty. Nationwide, the youth vote broke 63–35 percent in favor of Democrats, showing the same gap that has been growing since 2004 and widened significantly in 2016, when Trump became the head of the GOP and Turning Point tied itself to him. In Pennsylvania, voters ages 18–29 voted 70–28 percent for Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman and 71–27 percent for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro; Turning Point held a rally for Shapiro’s Trump-backed Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, in September. Voters ages 18–29 broke 63–34 percent for Raphael Warnock in the Georgia Senate race. And in Arizona, where Kirk spoke at campaign rallies alongside Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and where Turning Point enjoys outsized influence within the state GOP, voters ages 18–29 broke 71–29 percent in favor of Lake’s Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, 76–20 percent for incumbent Democratic senator Mark Kelly, and 72–24 percent for Democratic secretary of state nominee Adrian Fontes.

Sure, correlation is not causation, and TPUSA may not have singlehandedly caused the Republican candidates in most of these races to lose. But these and other results make it clear that TPUSA’s approach isn’t helping the GOP to address its long-term struggles with young voters. Indeed, Turning Point’s brand of conservatism is not only dangerous to the movement; it repels many of the same young voters it’s meant to reach.

There is a better way. In A Time to Build, Yuval Levin links the decline of serious thought on American campuses to the sort of culture-war activism that Turning Point promotes:

That purpose [of the university] is ultimately the discovery, development, amassing, examination, and application of knowledge—pursued through teaching and learning. The question that can help us judge the appropriateness or integrity of what happens on campus is something like “Are we building knowledge?” . . . It can help us tell the difference, for instance, between giving time and attention on campus to a pure political provocateur and troll who just wants to get a rise out of people and giving time to an accomplished social scientist who offers arguments backed with evidence that people may not like to hear.

On campuses today, the “troll model” is ascendant, and the Federalist Society model is in decline. If we want serious conservative thought to thrive in the future, that needs to change. Turning Point and similar organizations are not concerned with conservatism’s principles. They could not care less about the ideas of Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley, or Ronald Reagan. Their goals are shallow and performative. They will ruin the future of the party — and, more important, the movement — if they aren’t defeated.

To that end, one Burke quote seems particularly relevant: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” The bad men of the American Right have combined, and they are winning the battle. Good, serious conservatives must begin to associate to stop them — including, and especially, on campus.