I'm 28 years old, and I have such a hard time listening to punditry on any news channel, because rarely if ever do I see someone that is around my age. Ed Schultz is 58, Sean Hannity is 50, and even my fave, the illustrious Rachel Maddow is 38, 10 years my senior. Maybe it's because a large part of the viewership for Fox is already elderly (O'Reilly's crowd gets discounts at Denny's) and it takes time to get to the upper echelons of cable television and journalism. However, it would really be great to have a pundit that was my age and knew how to read current events and candidate appeal directly through the lens of a young voter. Yes there are polls that show young people think this way or that, and there is a lot of conventional wisdom as to why younger people vote liberal/libertine. I know, older journalists are there because they have a greater amount of experience and education, and I'm just some whippersnapper, but I think that younger people have seen firsthand what the policies of our fore-bearers has in fact done, and can give you a critique as to how a lot of these candidates are playing outside the lens of conventional wisdom. I started thinking this after hearing about Rick Santorum and his appeal to "blue collar" America in the Midwest, I couldn't help but think that the pundits were making a lot of hay out of this proverbial "blue collar" America, as if that would be Santorum's ticket to the White House. As a young person, I just want to analyze these recent events through my eyes.
I come from a middle class family, but I don't see my parents as "blue collar" necessarily. In fact, that phrase doesn't have a lot of meaning to me. My mother ran her own business (no father in the picture here) and a lot of my other friends had parents working in service industries or running their own service based business. Now, you might think that we were upper middle class Romney types, but when my mom lost her business we went into a lower income bracket, and even then, the employment of my friends' parents was really varied. Note here how I said "parents" and not "fathers." Their parents may have worked in a factory, but there was actually a huge variety, mainly because a lot of people had been downsized and took it upon themselves to make their own way economically. I understand the "blue collar-white collar" distinction academically, but I don't differentiate between someone that does manual labor/factory work and someone who doesn't, mainly because I know a lot of people who do a mix of both. I know a lot of my friends don't really care if your family works minimum wage or is a powerful attorney. The link between profession and values is weak now that my generation started to come of age, and my parents generation was where it was starting to already lose cohesion.
Since the blue-collar/white-collar divide is lost on me, I thought maybe that was just an effect of living in Michigan, and that people who lived in more rural areas had a sense of what blue collar meant and how Santorum would appeal to them. I grew up in a Detroit suburb and I've recently moved out to a more rural area where people do jobs like manufacturing or minimum wage work, but even still, there are tons of international corporations here, and while I have one neighbor who does construction, I have another who is a social media analyst. I am blind to the color of their proverbial collar. Now, back to Ricky. He's a social conservative Republican with a hard working immigrant background. His sweater vests create the "I'm the happy patriarch in charge of my family" persona, and he has the batshit bonafides to win over the Obama derangement syndrome crowd. Maybe to the Archie Bunker clones who are sitting in their Lazy-Boys, bemoaning the fall of Western civilization while all the mistakes they made in their lives is finally dawning on them, Santorum is just the man to defeat the evil antichrist Obama by running against Obamacare (a strategy that didn't work so well for Bachmann, but hey, she's a woman). How does this narrative sound to my young ears?
The "blue collar" people supporting Santorum are the embodiment of the failures my parents rejected and moved past, and that I see as dangerous anachronisms that need to be erased. Santorum will be seen by me, as their last hurrah to drag us backwards and make up for all their failure.
I don't speak for all young people in this regard, but there is a reason we're strongly in support of same sex marriage, environmental protection, and feel that the matter of contraception is a dead issue and abortion is, like many things, best left to people whose situations you may or may not understand. I can even tell you why people of my generation like Ron Paul (I was an adherent of his for a few months, and then I met his followers). It's not just because "young people are liberal" and that going against the wishes of our parents is some sort of extended adolescent rebellion. No, we saw the hypocrisy of our grandparents generation, and we saw our parents desperately try to deal with a world of conflicting belief systems, and sometimes not come out the better for it. All those "blue collar" Santorum supporters hide condoms in the back of their dressers, skip mass to watch football, and put on a suit and take communion when the time comes. And guess what? Their kids, my parents, who are also supposedly blue collar class, are far more mixed in how their beliefs and actions intermingle and have had time to come to terms with the hypocrisy bequeathed to them by their predecessors, mainly because being the intelligent well educated young person that I am, I constantly question and am no fool.
In short, Santorum, being the greatest mind of the 13th century, will appeal to a very selective section of the population and force out a group of people (more my parents generation) who have had time to see that their blue collar values are not exactly something they want to see on the national stage, and will have vocal, ready support from people around my age who see Santorum as a dangerous regressive.