Something Exstinks in Here

You're tired, you're dumb, and nobody likes you:

Faster than you can say "Facebook," the under-30 set is moving toward the Democratic Party.

…Forty-four percent of 18-to-29-year-olds consider themselves Democrats, while 23 percent identify with the Republican Party, according to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll. It wasn't always this way: President Ronald Reagan won 59 percent of the youth vote in his 1984 bid for a second term.

"It cannot help your party if you're a Republican to have had many people come of age in an administration that has so botched so many enterprises," said Michael O'Hanlon, director of Opportunity 08, a broad study of the electorate by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

A spokesperson for the American electorate said: "Duh."

Despite all the semantic genius of Republican strategists, the one thing they've failed to really address is that the politics of youth—and ergo the politics of the future—is always optimistic. (It's no coincidence that Mr. Audacity of Hope appeals disproportionately to the young.) For the last decade, the GOP has been very successful as a party of doomsayers, a party of fear-mongerers, a party of protectionists who speak to the terror of desperate, aging bigots who see their cloistered world of carefully guarded privilege beginning to crumble. Yes, you're special because you're white, soothes the GOP immigration policy. Yes, you're special because you're straight, soothes the GOP same-sex marriage policy. Yes, you're special because you support the patriarchy, soothes the GOP policies on women's issues and their posture as manly men cowboy-knight-soldier-warriors. Yes, you're special because you're a Christian, soothes the GOP faith-based initiatives. You're very, very special—and we'll protect your traditions. We'll protect you.

The thing is, every American generation is progressively less interested in being protected from brown people and gays and uppity women and atheists, because every American generation is progressively more brown and tolerant and egalitarian and politically secular. Add to that a younger generation increasingly green, and the GOP isn't selling much of anything the future voter is looking to buy.

The depressing, alienating lack of optimism in the contemporary GOP platform also speaks to why Reagan did so well pulling younger voters: For all his despicable conservative scumbaggery and vile policies, he was always sunny. If there was something gloomy plaguing the nation, he wasn't foolhardy enough to address it; he just ignored it altogether. Reagan packaged his insufferable bigotry and corporate cocksucking in a big sanguine package and topped it with a cheerful bow and gave another speech about a shining city on a hill.

Meanwhile, Bush just keeps on smirking as he promises to hate everyone you do.


If you're a dinosaur, that is.