A hoarse voice from the trenches
Emily Greyard Mitchell is a Field Representative for the Leadership Institute. The Leadership Institute's mission is to “increase the number and effectiveness of conservative public policy leaders.” It was founded by Morton C. Blackwell in 1979. LI has recruited and trained over 55,000 young adults in the public policy process. “The Institute produces leaders for a new generation of public policy leadership unwavering in its commitment to free enterprise, limited government and traditional values and equipped with the practical skills to implement sound philosophy through effective public policy,” states its website. President Ronald Reagan said that the Leadership Institute is "paving the way for a new generation of conservative leadership." As a field representative, Emily Greyard Mitchell works to promote the Institute’s principles on college campuses across the United States.
“And two of my grandchildren go to the public schools here in Phoenix,” Nancy Pelosi said this morning, neglecting to tell us how her countless other grandchildren don’t. She drones on amusingly, “and my fourth grade grandson said, ‘When you see Governor Napolitano, thank her for the book on Native Americans and thank her for teaching us to respect diversity.’”
No fourth grader would really say that. Nancy puts words in the mouths of babes and ideas in the heads of college students.
I was patrolling the line of hundreds of leftists waiting to get into the Memorial Union held in Arizona State University’s ballroom on Monday and handing out informative flyers to grab their attention. “Did you know Nancy Pelosi is anti-union?” I’d say, sliding the paper into their greedy hands, now ready to believe anything because I’d said what they wanted to hear. “Nancy Pelosi is a poor example of the independent woman,” I said, handing a sheet to a shoeless, braless feminist hippie student.
The sheet did not point out any virtues of unions or feminism, but it did address Nancy’s hypocrisy, and lucky for us, she’s even hypocritical on leftist issues. I’m not afraid of Nancy, because it’s so easy to convince students that she has no idea what it’s like to actually earn a college education, which goes for roughly half the price of the Tahitian pearls she wears.
I’m a field representative for the Leadership Institute in Arizona. I know that when you talk to college students about politics, you can’t drone on about missiles or foreign policy or the national debt. Those are advanced issues and to those who don’t understand or care about politics, it’s like listening to farmers go on excitedly about a new species of corn. You can’t talk about different species until you talk about the corn itself. You have to talk in the language of college students: Tuition money. Housing regulations. Beer. Video games. Sex.
As a field representative, you work with student groups like “The New Sexual Revolution” to address abstinence or the libertarian Choice Magazine to address the economic and regulatory problems with the university system. It’s all about how you package and advertise your ideas when it comes to reaching college students.
Another element that counts is the bandwagon effect. People want to be on the winning team, so you generate the appearance (and reality) that there are multiple right-wing groups that work together, and lots of people are involved. See, on almost every campus, there is one (and usually only one) conservative beachhead, often the College Republicans. And if you’re lucky, they do activism to keep their group glued together between elections. But the left has not only College Democrats, but a multitude of other leftist organizations that band together for political activism.
So, when a speaker like Nancy Pelosi comes to campus, it appears that multiple groups have brought her and support her and that everyone is on the side of the left. Said differently, the leftist student groups are so tightly connected at most universities that if a you question or attack the behavior of one student club, you’ll risk provoking the wrath of (what appears to be) the entire college community.
The lone conservative beachhead, or single active conservative student group, I was just talking about is only the “hand.” The conservative movement needs more “fingers,” like the fringe groups the left has, to form a fist with which we will beat the left. And it works.
This time last semester, there was only one operating pro-life student organization in Arizona. Now there are nine. They have competing diaper drives and volunteer hours. They know each other and network. They are even hosting the first Western Regional Students for Life Conference this weekend, open to the Students for Life chapters in every state west of Texas.
One reason campus activism in the “finger” form is so effective is because, while groups will work together to make that fist, each finger is separate. Generation Y has been brought up in an individualistic, customizable, “personal choices” sort of society, and as a result, we tend to shy away from holistic world views. We are more willing to adopt this sort of à la carte political philosophy. This makes single-issue groups work because they filter out all other assumptions. Thus, each group attracts a different segment, and together, the fingers reach a wider range and greater number of students. For example, one of my friends is a pro-life activist, and also happens to be gay. Single issue groups strip the conservative movement of stigmas and expectations and generate the win mentality, by focusing narrowly on specific objectives.
At the end of our Nancy Pelosi protest, I was drenched from a cold downpour, unusual and unexpected here in the desert. I had poster paint under my fingernails and all over my clothes, my arm was sore from holding the bullhorn, and my voice was hoarse. I watched our liberal counterparts float around victoriously – basking in the glow of their hero as they nearly carried her from her four-course luncheon to her speech. It seemed no one was listening to us as we stood there with our posters that read, “Nancy is a Caviar Commie” and “Nancy We Don’t Want Your Bribes.” It felt like in the great war, we lost this particular battle. But I could see in the wind-burned faces of the student protestors a satisfaction because they knew they were right. I saw determination because they now saw who they were up against.
It was then I realized the new reality: we are the new counterculture. Conservative Generation Ys are the new underdogs. We are the new revolutionaries. We are the soldiers in the trenches getting dirty and doing all the fighting. It’s not the 1970s anymore, and the liberals aren’t the protesting students; those people grew up and now they’re in power. They’re sitting in the ivory towers and on the high horses. And he on the highest horse is brought down first.
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