Next Generation

From a NYT profile of a new crop of students enrolled in the Heritage Foundation's summer internships:

They are young and bright and ardently right. They tack Ronald Reagan calendars on their cubicle walls and devote brown bag lunches to the free market theories of Friedrich von Hayek. They come from 51 colleges and 28 states, calling for low taxes, strong defense and dorm rooms with a view.

And let's get one thing straight: they're not here to run the copying machine.

The summer interns of the Heritage Foundation have arrived, forming an elite corps inside the capital's premier conservative research group. The 64 interns are each paid a 10-week stipend of $2,500, and about half are housed in a subsidized dorm at the group's headquarters, complete with a fitness room.

Unusual in its size (and in its walk-in closets), the program, on which Heritage spends $570,000 a year, is both a coveted spot on the young conservative circuit and an example of the care the movement takes to cultivate its young.

Scott Hurff, a senior at Wake Forest University, wanted the internship so badly that he filed three applications. Rachael Seidenschnur had set her eyes on Heritage since her youth in Little Rock, Ark., where she revived the teenage Republicans club at Central High School.

Kenneth Cribb came with family ties and a book by the conservative author Russell Kirk, which he said "sends chills up my spine." Daren Stanaway and Brian Christiansen welcomed Heritage as an escape from the liberal orthodoxies they said they experienced at Harvard and Yale.

"In the face of derogation, many intelligent young conservatives have simply responded by hiding their beliefs or going with the crowd," Ms. Stanaway wrote in an application essay. "I refuse to be one of them."

It goes without saying [and yet, we say it...] that the conservative movement has far outpaced the liberal movement in youth outreach and training programs. They have put significant funding into College Republican clubs, and even have reached into high school classes in some areas, tapping the shoulders of young conservative upstarts like Ms. Seidenshnur to do as much of that work as possible because they know how to activate key tenets of peer-learning [ that is to say: a person is more likely to believe something that one of their close peers tells them. Interrelated to this: a person is more likely to believe something if THEY are the ones who are teaching it to their peers as well. It is a fertile breeding ground for group-learning].

So why haven't the Liberals decided this method of training was not their flavor? In many ways, they need to reconsider the college campus as a place of access in the same way that College Republicans have. They need to embolden and support youth-driven clubs and activities as they relate to politics.

But it also should be noted that within this idea of the Heritage Foundation's internships is an intense and latent sense of emboldening elitism that must be avoided. These kids may believe they're getting the best political training available to become "pharmaceutical representatives" [I can think of no more morally reprehensible occupation than a representative for an entire inndustry that ardently refuses access to drugs to treat HIV in Africa with the ardure that this industry has; that refuses to see a chip in their profit-margin at the expense of its own elderly and under-insured; that consistently manipulates its own scientific drug studies to put wildly popular drugs such as Vioxx on the market despite full knowledge of their dangers. Good choice, you "values-centered" youth of tomorrow] but they are not getting training on being global, aware citizens.

They also have intense grudges. Listen to Ms. Stanoway again: "I refuse to be one of them [who backs down.]" She has a loathing for even her own kind who buckle under pressure- she is hard-up conservative- and not because she's got something to PROVE. Rather, because she feels that something is owed to her.

Its these kinds of thought processes that the left must combat with the opposite senses on the left.