For the GOP, this is more than just an opening; it’s a magical messaging moment, which, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, conservatives shouldn’t let go to waste. “This is a classic example of where they can walk the walk,” says Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute. This isn’t really a drug-legalization issue; it’s a states’ rights issue and a limited-powers issue. All conservatives have to agree on is that the federal government might have better things to do with its freshly printed money than try to enforce a nigh-unenforceable law that local voters and leaders think was a bad idea in the first place.
That’s how Clarence Thomas sees it, too. In his dissenting opinion in Gonzales v. Raich — a case that decided that California couldn’t allow home-grown medical marijuana — Thomas wrote that “local cultivation and consumption of marijuana is not ‘Commerce . . . among the several States.’” And, therefore, it’s not in the purview of the Feds. “Our federalist system,” he continued, “properly understood, allows California and a growing number of other States to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”
Just sub “Washington and Colorado” for “California,” and you have a constitutionally sound, politically popular, stupidly simple criticism of the White House. If the GOP is going to be competitive in 2016, it has to communicate to young people that intrusive federal government makes their lives worse. It has to communicate that it’s the party that respects personal choice and individual responsibility. And it would probably help to communicate that when in doubt, the GOP doesn’t automatically take the side of the insanely expensive branch of the federal government that breaks into people’s homes, shoots their dogs, and imprisons them because they added a funny ingredient to their brownies.
Demographics might well cost the Republican party the future, and conservatives must address this if we wish to stay relevant. But we should also ensure that the historically illiterate don’t cost us our past as well. In the comments section on BuzzFeed, one woman rants about the “Republicans” being responsible for “Jim Crow,” and a man says that the GOP should be banned because it’s always on the wrong side of history. The temptation is to look at this and ignore it as meaningless pop-culture silliness. This would be a mistake. Conservatives and Republicans have for too long ceded pop culture’s influence to the Left. If we continue to allow progressives to construct a linear historical narrative that casts conservatives and the Republican party as the villains in every piece, we can kiss goodbye to ever winning a national election again.
This is why the country is on the verge of ruin — the takeover of the educational system at all levels by the Left for the past forty years. While the coming collapse of the academic bubble (and the unsustainable pension of the teachers’ unions) may help purge the system of a lot of these liars, as Jedediah Bila notes, we have to take back the popular culture as well.