Yesterday I read an interesting article over at FiveThirtyEight.com titled Could Trump Drive Young White Evangelicals away from the GOP?. It was an interesting article, but the title didn’t really fit. While Trump may accelerate the generational divide in the Evangelical world, the divide would be there anyway.
In a nutshell, the kids these days aren’t buying the fear that Republicans are selling. That applies to every segment of the population, and the Republican bedrock of white evangelicals is no different.
Younger white evangelicals aren’t worried about becoming a minority; in their world they already are. And they’re dealing with it. They are generally more conservative than their friends, and that’s just a part of life. Their church groups are less white as well. They spend significant time with people who are not lily-white, and many of those brown friends share their values.
Trump, as a world-class fear salesman, might be accelerating the divide between young and old. Older Evangelicals drink that fear like the Kool-Aid it is, but the young ones, while retaining their conservative ideals, just aren’t buying the “scary brown people” narrative. At least, not as much as their parents do.
Those kids will still throw down hard on the subject of abortion, but they’re not going to vote for some joker who has likely funded more than his share of terminations just because he promises to build a wall.
So can we take a moment to stop bitching about millennials? “Kids these days” are not buying the random fear of their elders and instead they are asking their predecessors to stop bankrupting the world just when it’s their turn. Republicans know they are aging out, and it pisses them off. But rather than adapt to the sensibilities of the new generation, they are digging in their heels, and saying that the kids are WRONG!
If it weren’t for the slavery-inspired Electoral College and some pretty damn flagrant gerrymandering, Republicans as we know them would be finished already. But here’s hoping that the young conservatives, even the ones I disagree with, can find a political voice outside the old-white-man fear machine that the Republicans have become.
