As much as it is heartening to see Repugs humiliated, this story doesn't necessarily presage much of a leftward shift in either campus politics or US politics in general. Part of the problem with rightist politics is that they're never appealing to more than a small minority of youth. All of this nonsense about chastity weddings (or whatever they're called) may play well to the 12-and-under set, but once you get to high school, it's only the hard core who are going to pay anything more than lip service to conservative ideals. Similarly, once you've left college, gotten a corporate job, moved to the suburbs and bot your second SUV, how can you possibly espouse any but the most tepid leftwing sentiments with a straight face? Also, the right consensus has been knocked around more than a bit. Once there's a Democratic Prexy again, I'm sure the UVM campus/college Repugs will coalesce again out of the alienated, uncool morass where they now languish.
Does anybody pay more than lip service to conservative ideals?
Paying lip service to conservative ideals is a conservative ideal.
1: Really? Always? I thought in the 80's the Republicans had the youth vote, at least in opinion polls.
Newt Gingrich, killing the conservative movement one speech at a time!
In Defense of the Bush Doctrine? Don't know that I'll want to read it, but somebody should get paid to so I won't have to.
Unmentioned in the article is the realization they must have faced that if Weiner's coming, they may as well give up.
Part of the problem with rightist politics is that they're never appealing to more than a small minority of youth. All of this nonsense about chastity weddings (or whatever they're called) may play well to the 12-and-under set, but once you get to high school, it's only the hard core who are going to pay anything more than lip service to conservative ideals.
Chastity may not play well to teenagers, but the core conservative principles of "Fuck everybody, I got mine" and "War is awesome" seem tailor-made for them.
2: It's actually a complex question.
Any statement of the form 'Conservatives don't really have ideals; they routinely betray the ones they claim to hold most dear. They're just a bunch of power-hungry petty tyrants and schemers.' runs into the fact that there really is no percentage whatsoever in much of what we've come to associate with the Bush Administration.
On the other hand, they're obivously not simply idealists, because, well, they really do routinely betray the ideals that they seem to hold dearest. I strongly suspect that deep in their hearts, most or all of the Bush Administration really, truly wanted to do right by Iraq post-invasion. But they really, truly fucked that one up.
Frankly, I think the Republican Party is mostly the part of make-believe, which is not really either ideological or pragmatic, but orthogonal to both.
I think that pretty early in the Bush administration graft and electoral scheming (closely related) completely overwhelmed all policy thinking whatsoever, ideological or pragmatic. Policy was dominated by vote-buying, influence-peddling, and hot-button niche issues important to loony demographics. The mercenary political operatives and the big players in high tax brackets were the only one who had any reason to feel any reasonable satisfaction. But that describes most of the big media.
Similarly, once you've left college, gotten a corporate job, moved to the suburbs and bot your second SUV, how can you possibly espouse any but the most tepid leftwing sentiments with a straight face?
Empirically, largely for cultural reasons, there is of course a shift toward the right as one's life moves in this direction. But it's not at all the logical necessity you make it out to be here. Certain strongly left views and sentiments might seem at odds with such a lifestyle, but mainstream Democratic politics? A large minority of such people remain Democrats, and it's unclear to me, at least, where the cognitive dissonance is there.
12: I think that's a big part of it, too. I need to consider my 'pragmatism vs. ideology' arguments in light of the 'pragmatism vs. ideology vs. politics / electoral-focus' counter-hypothesis.
1: I don't find that any stranger than having pot-smoking, dirty joke telling, illicit-sex having early 20-somethings metamorphosis into being insufferable megachurch-going moral scolds. Given the compromises I make in order to live with the conflicts between my own moral and political standards and the things in life that I find it hard to do without (computers, butter chicken, bochwurst, motorcycles, baseball), I'm pretty sympathetic towards people that are trying hard to combine semi-traditional family-building with progressive politics.