In the aftermath of the Wisconsin election, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker acknowledged the important role students played in determining the outcome but viewed the problem facing the party in a cultural context. “Young voters are the issue,” he wrote on Twitter. “It comes from years of radical indoctrination — on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture. We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”
Heh.
Edit: Axios has a related piece out this morning: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/23/trump-desantis-colleges-universities
Typical response “they are being indoctrinated” instead of thinking that maybe they need to actually do things that appeal to their voter base, It’s so ass backwards it’s astonishing. Just the language used alone is all wrong, young voters aren’t the issue, the issue is your ability to appeal to them.
In my admittedly limited and likely biased experience, progressives and further left tend to be more critical in the way they approach authority figures. The GOP is just pissed they can’t as easily indoctrinate younger generations into fighting against their own interests.
I’ve heard it said several times, the GOP tends to say the opposite of what they mean. “college kids are being indoctrinated” = “umm, guys, we’re having a hard time indoctrinating the college kids…”
alt: every Republican accusation is a confession
college students are being indoctrinated = we’re trying really hard to indoctrinate everyone, and being even mildly educated is a problem for our dipshit ideology
For real though. I went to church multiple times a week from around age 8 until my late teens, I went to the private Christian school run by our church from grades 8 through 11, I was thoroughly indoctrinated - but it all started falling apart in my early teens, when the pastor told me that animals don’t have souls. How can you have pets and love them and not be absolutely certain that they have souls?!? And if he’s wrong about something so obvious and basic, what else is he wrong about??
Turns out - everything 😂
It really doesn’t take much education or life experience to start questioning it all.
It takes enough courage and willpower to meet resistance and stay resilient, aka the kind of backbone that conservative spaces teach you to never have.
Bow down to your superiors.
This is the actual point. The GOP is bent out of shape at the moment, not only because the kids want some semblance of economic justice and vote accordingly, but also because higher education accreditors are low key threatening to withdraw accreditation from institutions (like the New College of Florida) in states where GOP governors are stripping faculty of academic freedom and imposing political points of view in the classroom.
So, of course, politicians like DeSantis who depend on culture war bullshit for support are suing over the higher education accreditation system, arguing that accreditation as a gateway to Federal funding should be in the hands of state departments of education. See: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/23/desantis-sues-biden-administration-over-accreditation
So just to be clear what is going on: the “free market / free speech” GOP is suing to impose a state takeover of higher education standards so that they can impose political content in the classroom (“the happy, happy slaves learned valuable skills in Ole’ Dixie, yay!”). That is straight up Orwellian.
This is reason #1001 as to why we need to get out and vote.