It’s not hard to see how America’s elites and its snide class of wannabe professional politicians threw away their hegemony over American politics.
They did it by forgetting who they were supposed to represent, by appealing more to their enemies than to their constituents, and by spending more time playing internal status games than fighting for Americans.
The Liberal Party is making the exact same mistake.
Listening to Young Liberal president Cooper Gannon on 2GB appear to characterise Australians who left the party for One Nation as the ‘dregs’ of the Liberal Party, it’s hard not to have flashbacks to Hillary Clinton lumping Trump’s supporters into a ‘basket of deplorables’.
It’s a particularly shocking statement from someone supposedly charged with bringing young Australians back on board: to adopt and advocate for right-wing ideas, or at a minimum to support the Coalition.
Why have youth movements like this so consistently failed to deliver?
I’m sure the sheer contempt these movements seem to show for Australians with different ideas of conservatism is part of it. More often, though, it is my opinion that these movements exist, in part, to serve the interests of staffer careerists and their MPs rather than to fight for ideas, let alone good ones.
Liberals are struggling because those they’ve given the responsibility of speaking to our newest generations have lost touch with young Australia. Instead, they have their fingers firmly wrapped around the cold corpse of comfortable careerist centrism.
That young people tend to vote for left-wing parties is not an iron law of politics. It’s the consequence of decades of neglected duty, of sacrificing truth for electability, and of believing politics is the goal rather than one means to a better Australia.
Like many of our problems, it’s the consequence of generations of people who should have known better choosing to do what they wanted rather than what they ought to do.
So, what’s the cure? I believe it must start with the Australian citizen, not a political party. We must make the case directly to Australians for the ideas, habits, and people that made Australia great, with no expectation of immediate personal reward or political advantage.
This author happens to work for an organisation – The Institute of Public Affairs – which has always prioritised the pursuit of ideas and the interests of the Australian people.
The Young Liberals do not themselves have to win government, so perhaps they could engage broadly with young people regardless of their particular brand of conservatism.
Why trash those who have decided your ideas aren’t cutting it, when you could inspire them instead? Give young Australians real ideas, instead of resorting to petty sniping.
Our IPA Academy, run each summer in Melbourne does just that: bringing young conservatives and classical liberals together on shared ground, not fighting for an electorally irrelevant sliver of it.
You can’t stop socialism, or any other form of political radicalisation, by telling young people their problems aren’t real, or that those problems only arrived recently. You stop it by giving them a stake in the country, both in its economic future and in the tradition that made Australia what it is.
Give them a grand narrative; lay out the great adventure before them in saving their country. Don’t call them dregs. Call them to be dreamers.
Jordan Abou-Zeid National Manager of Generation Liberty & Research Fellow
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