Fully 65 percent of young adults were concerned about the country’s ‘moral direction’ — a departure from the judgment-free culture of self-gratification.
Yesterday, I wrote about Harvard University’s Institute of Politics poll of young adults (between the ages of 18 and 29), the toplines of which are, for the most part, not encouraging for conservatives staring down the barrel of generational change.
The press around this poll emphasizes to a conspicuous degree the finding that a minority of young adults are beset by crippling anxiety over the menacing world outside their doors. It’s hard to avoid the impression that this emphasis advances the dominant American political culture’s preferences: It promotes a fashionable anxiety that relies on government programs to file down life’s sharper edges.
There are, however, more than a few bright spots in this survey that deserve more attention than they’ve so far received:
• Fully 65 percent of respondents are “concerned about the moral direction of the country.” Just 10 percent disagree with that notion. Now, the particular “moral direction” in which young people would like to place the country is unlikely to be the same trajectory social conservatives would pursue. But, as I wrote in my latest book, the reapplication of a moral framework to navigating political debates is a departure from the judgment-free culture of heedless self-gratification their parents and grandparents sought out. It may not be your morality, but it is a morality, which is an improvement on amorality.
• When asked if they agreed with the statement, “Cutting taxes is an effective way to increase economic growth,” 41 percent of young adults concurred. Only 17 percent disagreed, and almost 40 percent were ambivalent on the subject. If your assumption from the youngish activists with access to cameras and microphones was that America’s young adults were all Keynesians, that assumption is challenged by these results. But only slightly. While a quarter of young adults don’t believe that “government spending is an effective way to increase economic growth,” 31 percent buy that dubious premise.
• Another 34 percent of young adults reject the notion that protectionist industrial policies designed to freeze the dynamic global economy in place are valuable. Just 17 percent of young adults disagree to some extent with the notion that “our country’s goal in trade policy should be to eliminate all barriers to trade and employment so that we have a truly global economy.” What was once a conventionally Democratic approach toward trade policy has recently found a cheering section on the right, so the partisan signals from which these young people might take their cues are a little scrambled. But a measurable plurality in this poll defaulted to free enterprise.
• Should “qualified minorities” be “given special preferences in hiring and education?” One-third of young people disagree with that premise — presumably preferring instead a meritocratic system that disregards accidents of birth when selecting candidates to assume societal roles. Thirty percent of young people still agree with that premise, while 35 percent declined to offer an opinion. This, too, might come as a surprise, given the monolithic view in center-left media in favor of reparative racial policies such as affirmative action.
Beyond this, as I wrote yesterday, young people’s self-reported grim outlook on the future is betrayed as a form of social desirability bias, given their sunny assessment of their own prospects. Young people believe they will be financially better off tomorrow than they are today, and nearly 70 percent rate their present circumstances positively. There are plenty of challenges before conservatives in their quest to evangelize their beliefs before a younger audience. But those obstacles are not insurmountable if the right knows what to emphasize.