Making Sense: The Problem With This Conspiracy Theory Is Reality

Jamelle Bouie

According to Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Montana, young people have been “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion.

“Young people, listen up, they’ve been indoctrinated for too long. We don’t even try to talk to them anymore,” Sheehy said at an event last year.

This idea, that young voters have been indoctrinated  or even brainwashed  to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education” and that “the right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”

And last year, Elon Musk told his more than 100 million followers on the social platform X that “parents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges!”

It is easy to understand the real fear, among ordinary Americans, that once your children are outside the home, they will take on ideas and identities that don’t fit with what you imagined for their lives. But that is not what we have here. What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.

The problem with this conspiracy theory, of course, is reality. To start, the vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people.

And even if the nation’s college students were clamoring to study history, philosophy, sociology, literature and other, similar disciplines, there are so many students and so many classes — and so many teachers — that one should expect some proof of indoctrination to emerge at some point, somewhere. But even those conservative organizations devoted to tracking and monitoring college professors struggle to find evidence of anything that looks like the Soviet-style brainwashing described by Musk and other MAGA conservatives.

If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it. A young woman looking ahead to her future doesn’t have to be brainwashed to decide that she wants the right to decide when and whether to have a child. A young man with memories of school shootings on the news and shooter drills at school doesn’t need to be indoctrinated to decide that he wants more gun control.

If Republicans are underwater with young people, it’s because Republicans are not responsive to the interests of young people. For example, polls consistently show that climate change is a top issue for young voters. But not only do Republican politicians deny the reality of man-made climate change, they actively spread lies and conspiracy theories meant to obscure the reality that climate change is responsible for some of the heightened intensity of weather events like hurricanes Helene and Milton.

You can make this same observation with a host of different issues on which young people diverge from the Republican Party. They haven’t been indoctrinated; they just have needs and desires that Republicans refuse to acknowledge or appeal to. It’s the same with any group of voters. That’s just the way democracy works.

But Republicans have made democracy a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try, instead, to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?

The defining attribute of the modern Republican Party, beyond its devotion to Donald Trump, is a profound lack of confidence in its ability to compete for a majority of the country at large married with an inability to see outside its ideological cocoon. Republicans both reject the idea that voters could have a legitimate dispute with their views and do not seem to believe that they could convince anyone who disagrees. And so they decide that the public in question has been indoctrinated or brainwashed or led astray, in one way or another, from the supposedly pure light of the Republican Party.

But the truth is so much simpler. Republicans have tied themselves to the far extremes of the conservative movement — and most voters just don’t like it.