Quote Originally Posted by bae View Post
When I went to our state-level Republican convention as a delegate, it was pretty clear to me the Republicans were toast.

There were a *lot* of younger folks there, of *all* genders, and a fair amount of racial and economic diversity. Among the Ron Paul supporters, which were a significant part of the delegate crowd.

The Old Guard used every dirty trick in the book to try to marginalize and expel this group of energetic motivated people. And they were pretty successful at it.

A telling comment at a dinner I was at during the convention, from a 20-something: "well, we'll just have to wait until they all die of old age...". She was probably quite right. At 49, I was pretty much the oldest person in their crowd, but near the younger end of the spectrum of The Old Guard faction.

The Republicans rudely threw away the next generation or two of supporters at that convention. People who basically were socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and fans of smallish government and local action.
Bae,

Thank you for this evaluation and observation. I think that this is true of my own experience.

I did find that a lot of us who are as you describe "socially liberal, fiscally conservative and fans of smallish government and local actions" have been marginalized within the party. I would say that's a pretty good description of myself.

In law school, I started to head in that direction and got active in local republican actions. I was really frustrated with how it all went down. There were several of us under 30 (at the time) who were quite motivated by these great ideas and grass-roots effort and the whole concept of working locally (ie, "occupy style"), and the people over the age of 55 were really . . . well, nasty with us. Lots of yelling and freaking out if we disagreed with them. Marginalized is. . . well, it's a nice way of putting it. We were commonly patronized too.

So, then Dean comes into power over the DNC and they start talking about grass roots organizing and what not. My friends and I head across the street (as in literally) to those offices. I always thought it was funny how the offices were *across the street* from each other in my town. made me giggle to no end. I have an absurd sense of humor.

Anyway, I head across the street and at first they are all like "yay! Young people interested in our action! woohoo!" But they didn't like us much at all. The over 55 set treated us the exact same way - yelling at us when we brought up alternatives or new ideas, calling us names, really being patronizing (over-influenced by our parents/professors/media/someone else, not thinking for ourselves, being too young to really understand/know, etc).

As such, most of us rather "gave up" and started to meet with each other in a sort of loose political salon where we talked about ideas and basically wait for the other group to move out of power.

We also wonder if our parents were this frustrated when they were our age or what.

My sister and her husband have decided to become activists within the republican party, but they are a mix of thecon lite, neocon heavy, and a smattering of libertarian (or at least, he likes the A.Rand books). I think that their local office is happy to have ANYONE helping out, so my sister and her husband are practically celbrities. but they are also pretty square within the party, too -- not very many waves honestly -- so they haven't been marginalized. They also bring my parents to many of the events, so this perhaps legitimates them a bit or something. I don't really know.

Anyway, yeah.