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The Tyranny of Being “Cool”
Robert McReynolds’ post about “Smart Republicans” could not be more apropos to a conversation I had over dinner with a dear friend and fellow young Conservative. Part of our conversation included a discussion about becoming less tolerant of intolerance as we become older.
We both said that our circle of friends is shrinking with each passing year, as the drudgery of putting on a smile and biting our tongue — while someone makes a snide comment about how awful things will be now that those Republicans control the House and the Senate — increasingly grates on us. Actually, it’s the hypocrisy of the Left that drives us batty, but those on the Left don’t see it that way. They believe they are the purveyors of truth and tolerance, and those that don’t agree with them can shut the foxtrot up!
My dinner mate and I — both semi-hipsters — don’t shop exclusively at Whole Foods (what?!), don’t eat only organic (outrageous!), are Christian (you are so hateful!) and Conservative (you’re an awful person). And all of that makes us un-cool. The Academy, in their ivory tower genterie, has done a bang-up job of branding Conservatism the worst thing possible to a Millennial — uncool. After all, is there anything more horrible to a young person that to be uncool, unhip, unfashionable?
The tragedy of being uncool is aided by the vacuousness of youth and Millennial culture. When the deepest thought a 21-year-old has is about how brave Kim K was for posing nude in order to “break the internet,” it is not hard to sell that person on the virtues of being “cool” at all cost. Progressivism is cool, young, hip, and forward-thinking. Conservatism is for old, outdated, sweater vest-wearing fogies (one might make a joke about wearing a sweater around one’s neck if one were so inclined…). The Academy and the liberal media have created an “us vs. them” mentality between Liberals and Conservatives, much as there is an “us vs. them” aspect between children and their parents. And if you’re young, you don’t want to be like your parents — ugh!
As a result of this intense Millennial need for ‘coolness’ and acceptance — funny, considering the joke of how you drown a hipster (“in the mainstream”) — has pushed many young Conservatives effectively into the closet, with all the same fears of retaliation and hatred the gay community experienced “back in the day.” When I’m in certain circles, I do not feel at liberty to offer my thoughts on current events or politics, because I quite enjoy having my throat intact.
I am intensely irritated at the hypocrisy of the whole situation — those who claim to be the most tolerant are themselves supremely intolerant, and that makes me want to scream at them, which I believe is socially unacceptable? Therefore, if I can help it, I often choose to not interact with people of the Whole Foods, inner-arm tattoo, organic microbrewery bent.
I am fortunate to work at a facility that is largely conservative, though there is a group that loudly expresses their opposing views. And guess what? I’m okay with that! My dinner mate, however, works at an ad agency. “I’m pretty sure I would be lynched if I let my coworkers know my political views,” he told me tonight. What a horrible thing to feel! What discrimination festers at that office! Oh wait, they’re Liberal, so it’s okay for them to discriminate, right…?
I lost all hope for Millennials after Brandeis University cancelled Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s appearance because she is so totally cool! She wears Louboutins and just look at her…
Images for ayaan hirsi ali
Why was her appearance cancelled? Because she was critical of the “peaceful religion of Islam?”
VC – Didn’t you get the memo? Love is hate, etc. And, supposedly, you live in a bastion of the mainstream countercultural thinking.
I think we need to work to reframe the conversation before any real progress is possible
Not only critical, but a target of a fatwa as well.
ET – we love you but (as we have discussed on previous threads) Babyboomers have contributed their own set of problems to the national debate
If only all of us could be so brave as to have a fatwa on our heads.
You have no idea! Read her books about her childhood, her travels between Somalia and Ethiopia to rescue family members, and the story of how the Dutch Parliament turned its back on her because her security was too expensive. AEI in Washington rescued her by offering her a resident scholar position and a work visa in the U.S.
Although that is true, this started with the parents and grandparents of the baby boomers.
My Republican grandfather was an engineer, but he went nuts after FDR was elected and basically John Galted his life. By the time I knew him, he was selling peanuts through vending machines.
About ten years ago, my now-deceased mom and I had a really interesting conversation about Herbert Hoover. I asked her about how the Republicans felt when Hoover lost to FDR. She said, “We were devastated. Hoover had saved Europe from starvation.” To the Republicans at that time, to see FDR cast as the altruist and Hoover as the uncaring politician was shocking. It was a lie. My mother’s face was angry about it.
This has been going on for a long, long time.
Indeed, James McPherson wrote in one of his books (I can’t remember which one) that while Horace Mann was strolling the streets of Boston wondering how to get the immigrant children into school, Karl Marx was writing Das Kapital from a jail cell in England. Both men were responding to the massive migration of poor people to the newly industrialized cities.
There has been a lot of kicking the can down the road for a long, long time.
I worry because I see most of my contemporaries not having the intellectual fortitude to see the can, what it represents, and how to fix it. I also worry that there is little sense of American exceptionalism amongst the Millennials. I think most would be in favor of America becoming part of the EU because it would be ‘cool’ to be European. I mean, Europeans wear scarves year round, after all…
VC – I’m 37, so I’m guessing the nuts who are your contemporaries are in the same ballpark as mine….here is the difference (in my opinion) between our nuts and the babyboomer’s nuts….we will pay the price. James Pethokoukis may disagree with me but this pyramid scheme is going to fall apart eventually. When it does there are going to be, in my guess, a lot of shell shocked baby boomer kids….the boomers will be too old to notice at that point
Preach, Brother Pants! I think the Millennials that have their head in the organic sand and frankly have no idea that this is even an issue.
Marci made an excellent point. Most Boomers have been victimized by FDR and his social security, medicare, medicaid and workers comp policies. We’ve been busy paying for the Greatest Generation to enjoy all these benefits knowing that many of us on the younger side of the Boom (1961) will never get our money back.
In the meantime, we have produced one of the greatest musical revolutions of all time plus Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who created 500 billionaires and 30,000 millionaires between the two of them.
Keep your criticism to yourself until your generation can claim similar *props.*
Thanks.
ET – again, we love you……to put it in a sentence…..here is the issue of the babyboomers….you created a lot of transfer payment goodies (medicare, medicare prescription drug benefits, half off movie night) but did not create enough offspring to support it. Greatest Generation was not perfect (my Patton Army grandfather being an example) but they had enough kids to keep the game going for awhile longer. The Beatles songs on my MP3 player are great, but they don’t pay they bills
This reminds me of a poem I had to memorize for my French class:
La Cigale et la fourmi
by Jean de La Fontaine
La cigale ayant chanté
Tout l’été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue :
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.
Elle alla crier famine
Chez la fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu’à la saison nouvelle.
« Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant l’août, foi d’animal,
Intérêt et principal. »
La fourmi n’est pas prêteuse :
C’est là son moindre défaut.
« Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.
— Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.
— Vous chantiez ? J’en suis fort aise :
Eh bien ! Dansez maintenant. »
The Cricket and the Ant
translation by Don Webb
The cricket had sung her song
all summer long
but found her victuals too few
when the north wind blew.
Nowhere could she espy
a single morsel of worm or fly.
Her neighbor, the ant, might,
she thought, help her in her plight,
and she begged her for a little grain
till summer would come back again.
“By next August I’ll repay both
Interest and principal; animal’s oath.”
Now, the ant may have a fault or two
But lending is not something she will do.
She asked what the cricket did in summer.
“By night and day, to any comer
I sang whenever I had the chance.”
“You sang, did you? That’s nice. Now dance.”
Sad, but likely true. I’m a boomer who is hoping to outlive the Ponzi scheme, but regardless of when it blows up, millennials are already paying a price in terms of opportunities never created.
I’m curious. President George W. Bush said that increased immigration of young people would be the answer to the problem of the boomers’ not having enough kids. Would you agree with that? Is that the answer?
We apparently managed to create enough offspring who believe they all deserve to go to college on a federal loan that they will eventually default on and we the Boomers will end up paying for.
So I did my patriotic duty by having no children that taxpayers will be forced to fund; I just pay for everybody else.
It’s really, really, not a good idea to mess with me on this topic.
ET – once again, I will have a drink to you that I did not plan. Luckily, it is still vacation time, so a few extra drinks will not cause too much harm :)
Regardless of where the spending genesis lies, the problem is we are still going on shopping sprees with the credit card of the American tax payer. Obama has put this debt issue into another echelon with an Alinsky-ite flare.
VC – you are far too reasonable and kind. I am from Chicago, where it comes down to finding someone to blame. Just kidding……probably
Yes, I understand Chicago is a bastion of professional finger pointing. Finger pointing would only do good if people could remember and learn from history about how we got into this mess. However, it doesn’t seem that we have a long enough memory to learn from the past. Every time my friends from the Academy sing the praises of Socialism, I’m amazed that they seem to forget that we’ve tried it before, and it was a disaster of epic proportions.
@MarciN- “I’m curious. President George W. Bush said that increased immigration of young people would be the answer to the problem of the boomers’ not having enough kids. Would you agree with that? Is that the answer?”
I think that is at least partly true, although I’ve been disappointed in Hispanic immigrants’ electoral choices. I.e., immigrants who came here from Russia in the 70s and 80s didn’t vote Communist when they arrived here; after all, they’d come to the US to escape Marxism. Latin Americans come from countries whose leaders are parodies of Obama- encouraging gov’t dependency, class warfare and reckless spending, yet they vote for the same type of politics that they came to the US to escape.
My hope is that if Hispanics move up the economic ladder, they will leave behind the welfare culture of dependency. Although I fear that Obama’s $18 trillion+ debt may create a stagnant economy for at least a decade or two, limiting upward mobility .
If you wait long enough being conservative will be the new cool – not. Anyway even if it were to happen by then you’d be old and wouldn’t care anymore about being cool.
BTW it is the Progz, not Boomers fault. Most of us have been solid, and cannot be held responsible for what the idiots and their enablers have done to our once great and exceptional nation. I would venture that a majority of Boomers vote Republican or certainly at least the married ones. The loss of America, if and when she goes under, will be due to the Progz of many, many generations. Oh and one more thing, wasn’t the youth vote a major factor in getting Obama the Destroyer elected? They to their children’s children will be paying for that mistake, maybe even probably until the end of time.
Props for the Boomers, we did win the Cold War. No small thing that.
The irony is that the party of the hip and cool is about to (again) consider nominating Screech (not the Saved by the Bell star) for the presidency. I think it is Jonah Goldberg who refers to her as “every man’s first ex-wife,” an exceptionally fitting description.
In the end they simply want everyone to have everything but can’t even understand the question “who pays for it?”
I would be worried about the trend, but as I see my hipster brother-in-law (now sporting the fashionably approved ironic beard) start to go bald sitting in his insurance company cubicle I’m reminded that we’re always less than a decade from the next group determining what is cool.
Ooooh, you know what is super cool? 13% unemployment, and 43% youth unemployment! 6.40 euro for a gallon of gas (and that’s right now, while it’s cheap)! No minimum wage! Walkable neighborhoods (like mine) where you cannot lift your eyes from the ground due to the proliferation of dog poop! Parks where the grass gets mowed, oh, every 4 months or so (and watch for the dog poop before you lie down to commune with nature)! Trying to dry your clothes on a clothesline year-round because owning/using a dryer would send you into bankruptcy! Stores that close on Sunday, Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon, every lunchtime, and all 459,003 holidays! Waiting a year (or more) for routine surgery! “Europe” is rad.
Seriously, VC, send all your Millenial pals and their scarves to Italy. I’m sure they’d love it, and you’d get a some well-deserved peace and quiet.
Perduto ho la pace! Non capisco questa infatuazione europeo.
Yes, Liz! I think there are few things that make one appreciate one’s home more than travel. I’ll bet people would be more grateful for the bounty the free market has created in the US if they spent time in, oh let’s say, Bratislava…Italia è troppo bella.
Some of my high school friends just posted pictures on FB of them having dinner together over the holiday break. Every one of them has a Masters or a Doctorate (MIT, Yale, U of Chicago, NYU), and every one is as Progressive and Leftist as they come. These are not intellectual slouches, but yet they choose the easy way out politically. I do not understand.
I’ve always enjoyed straddling the line between a reactionary Republican and being frequently mistaken for a liberal.
I eat mostly vegetarian because of my wife, I’ve got lots of tattoos including inner arm ones, I always wear Goorin Bros. hats from San Francisco, I’m non-religious, and I was even for a time a member of a local atheist book club. The latter experience I found so depressing for its far left membership, that I simply stopped attending. Not to mention I was held in suspicion for claiming to not be traumatized by a religious upbringing.
VC, have you seen the ongoing discussion in Brayden’s thread on liberal college experiences?
I saw read his post, but not the comments. I have to say, overall my college experience was fairly neutral. I never felt that I was being pressured to start reciting from the little red cookbook of Maoism or anything. My second degree was earned at a fairly conservative university here in Nashville. In nursing there is a decent amount of talk about “underserved populations” and people without access to healthcare. My one really liberal, BS class was Community Health; there was a lot that I took issue with in that class, but most of my classmates were pretty conservative, so none of us RSVP’d to the pity party we were being told to throw.
“I think it is Jonah Goldberg who refers to her as “every man’s first ex-wife,” an exceptionally fitting description.”
My personal favorite is, “America’s mother in law.”