The Tea Party’s Problem with Students

Last Friday I was joined by Alexander McCobin, Blayne Bennett, and Peter Neiger in speaking at the annual Americans For Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit.  AFP is a great organization that mobilizes grassroots activists to fight for free markets and limited government.  Lately they have been doing a lot of work supporting tea party activists across the country.  Students For Liberty was invited to discuss student outreach and how other organizations and alumni can best work with students.

During one of our Q&A sessions, the two following statements were made by summit attendees.  Both were middle age or older.  These are rough paraphrases, but they accurately capture the tone and meaning of the exchange.

Paraphrased statement #1: “What do you mean when you say liberty?  You use that word a lot but have not defined it.  That is the problem with students; they don’t know what liberty means.  You need to define it and tell them.”

Paraphrased statement #2: “Kids today are so narcissistic.  All they care about is themselves and their smart phones.  They won’t listen to anyone, their parents or anyone else.  How can we break through that and get them to do what we need them to do.”

These quotes are very insightful for why most tea party organizers have trouble attracting students.   Many of them take a top down approach to working with young people.  They want to tell students what liberty should mean for them. They want to tell students how they should run their group, what issues they should focus on, and what policies to discuss.  They see it as a paternalistic relationship, where the old people need to tell the kids what to do.

This is completely the wrong approach for organizing and motivating students.  To borrow a line from the Fresh Prince, tea partiers just don’t understand.

The key to successful student organizing is to empower students.  Find out what they want to do, what they are passionate about, and help them do it.  This is our philosophy at Students For Liberty.

We were founded by students to provide a forum of support for their fellow students and student groups dedicated to liberty.  The full time staff works for the student Executive Board.  The student board sets the agenda based on what they know students want and then we (the staff) help them execute it.  We also take the same empowerment approach towards supporting student groups on campus and the results have been outstanding.  It is amazing how much students can accomplish when given the resources and opportunities to be leaders of liberty.

This is why you see so much growth in the student movement for liberty today.  Students across the world are standing up and taking control of their own futures.

The  New Left and anti-war movements of the 1960’s accomplished so much precisely because they were run by students.  It was students fighting back against the government to take control of their own lives that made that movement so strong.  Real movements like this have to be based on bottom up, empowered leadership.

This is what many (not all) of the tea party organizers simply do not grasp.  To them it is all about getting students (those youngins) to get on board with their (the old people’s) plan.  I say this with no malice, simply as an observation.  I have many friends involved in tea party organizations that are doing great work fighting against the government.  More power to them.

I say this only as advice to anyone who wants to work with students to fight for a free society.  Trust the students.  Treat them like the young adults they are.  Be a support mechanism; give them the resources they need to be effective.  Give them ownership over their own projects and their own lives.  That is the way movements grow.  That is the way real, lasting change happens.