CATEGORY: POLITICS (3 MIN) 

Telling the youth

For years, Republican pundits and strategists have bemoaned the lack of GOP support among younger American voters. The youth vote has been a blue landslide in each of the past few elections. But if these young people will grow up and slowly trend red as they mature, do Republicans even need to worry about their deficit? 

Nate Hochman, former ISI Collegiate Network fellow and current writer for National Review, says it should still be a concern. The mere fact that Republicans don’t win a majority of younger voters isn’t itself a huge issue, but their miniscule actual vote share might be, Hochman writes. 

Hochman then highlights some problems for the youth of America that Republican candidates need to at least put some energy into fixing.  

“It's not unreasonable for young people to be anxious about the state of the country,” Hochman argues. “They're not buying homes, getting married, or having kids — and they're making less money than their parents did.” 

Read Hochman’s piece right here. 

CATEGORY: PHILOSOPHY (29 MIN)

Leaving liberalism?

Many have postulated at different points in our country’s history that “America is at a crossroads.” So perhaps it is a more accurate statement to say that America is always at a crossroads of one kind or another. Today, some thinkers argue that Americans must now choose between yet another pair of roads: to follow liberalism, or to leave it behind. 

In Postliberal Order, three scholars take aim at this very issue. Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule together relate their individual work for a French conservative publication called L’incorrect.  

Pappin tells the story of the rise of the postliberal Right over the past decade. He overviews progress in theology, political theory, and the legal field to weave together the narrative of the postliberal order. And Pappin highlights political applications of this new thought movement in Hungary and the U.S. 

Deneen discusses his original theory on why liberalism failed and emphasizes the importance of a global response to liberalism’s dominance. Vermeule, meanwhile, talks about the theory of “common good constitutionalism” and its potential to reshape conservative legal theory. 

See all three of these thinkers’ articles right here. 

Gender: Who Decides?
A Debate on Transgenderism & Womanhood

What does it mean to be a man or a woman? Can you be born a man and actually become a woman? Is identity tangibly attached to something inherent in us, or is it intangible and subjective? Is it merely some social construct or is it embedded in our genes, in our biological identity itself? ​​​​Can we actually conquer our human nature and identity in the same way we seemed to have conquered the other realms of nature? If we try, what are the consequences? 

Join the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Pittsburgh, PA on April 18th at 7 PM as Michael Knowles and Deirdre McCloskey debate womanhood and transgenderism. Register here to attend in-person or online.

Join us in Pittsburgh >>>

Because our student editors and writers are bravely bringing conservative ideas to their campuses, we’re highlighting their efforts here.

CATEGORY: YOUTH (6 MIN) 

Blast from the past

Lost in the debate over how to reclaim young Americans for conservatism is the question of why. Why are young people so driven to reject conservatism? And how can younger conservatives try to reach their peers in a world so dominated by progressivism and woke-ism? 

For our Intercollegiate Review archive, Avi Woolf argues for one word: tradition. Woolf believes that exposure to the values and contents of our philosophical, historical, and religious tradition could help shift young progressives’ views of the world. Without tradition, he says, the newest generations become rudderless and easily seduced by the latest left-wing fad. 

“Tradition binds a person to a long chain of generations in both directions―it was there before him, and it is his to hand down to those who succeed him,” Woolf writes. 

At the same time, Woolf notes, we should not let tradition become the stale caricature that many have of it. The precepts that come from the Western tradition must be applied to our modern age in a relatable way. 

Discover Woolf’s full argument here. 

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