The truth about twenty-somethings.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: 20-year-olds - Cover Story

On a brisk Washington night in December, in a long exhibition hall at the Marriott Metro Center near the White House, the annual Conservative Leadership Conference was in full swing. Floyd Brown's Citizens United hawked "Whitewater's Most Wanted" posters and the Bill Clinton-Gennifer Flowers tapes; The Washington Times had a booth selling subscriptions to its "National Edition"; across the way, Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media proudly displayed a 1978 letter from Ben Bradlee, of The Washington Post, calling Irvine "a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante."

Inside a meeting room at the end of the hall, while guests schmoozed with Phyllis Schlafly and sidled up to a cash bar, William Kristol, the current Republican Clausewitz, took the podium. "With this election," Kristol announced, "the 60-year dominance of liberalism and the Democratic Party are over."

In the audience as Kristol offered this assessment was 22-year-old Kevin McDermott, who, like hundreds of other young Republicans, is coming to Washington to work for a new GOP congressman. "I don't know that government can do anything right," McDermott said later, adding that a formative political influence in his life was Patrick Buchanan's era on "The McLaughlin Group."

You might want to dismiss McDermott's voice as an extreme example, the kind of thing you would expect to hear from people who go to meetings that feature National Rifle Association and Heritage Foundation exhibits. But that would be a mistake, for if anything McDermott represents the prevailing view among the bright young people in politics in America in 1995--shrewd, pragmatic, anti-government. Discount the conventional wisdom that, in 1992, MTV permanently brainwashed a whole generation into an army of lefties. The young did vote for Clinton in droves in '92, but now two thirds of them disapprove of the job he's doing, and more and more identify with the Republicans. In fact, according to a bipartisan "Battleground '94" survey last fall, by a huge ratio, 56 percent to 32 percent, young voters believe the GOP better shares their values than the Democrats.

To be sure, anti-government sentiment is not just generational; it would be very tough to find anyone today who would boldly declare blanket confidence in Washington. But this attitude is especially prevalent among twentysomethings, right and left. According to Louis Harris, 78 percent of people 18 to 24 disagree with the statement, "government can generally be trusted to look after our interests."

"I don't have a lot of faith in the government in general," says Kristen Joiner, 25, who grew up in liberal Madison, Wisconsin. "I don't think it has the means to get things done, frankly." If a Young American for Freedom alumnus who canvassed for Buchanan in New Hampshire said this, it wouldn't be very interesting; that a young woman like Joiner--who works for Habitat for Humanity International--believes it is striking. To understand how important this is, remember how popular liberal government used to be. The twentysomethings of the thirties, for example, were overwhelmingly Democratic; in 1936, Gallup found that voters under 24 favored FDR, 57 percent to 38 percent. In the forties, young people were so pro-Roosevelt that Republicans tried to make it harder for GIs (whose average age at that point in the war was roughly 24) to vote absentee in 1944, expecting a huge FDR margin. And in the eight presidential elections between 1952 and 1980, young people voted Democratic six times.

No more. Many twentysomethings assume that, as MTV vice president Gwen Lipsky characterizes it, "the system just seems broken." This view has become, outside of having divorced parents, the most common characteristic of my generation (I was born in 1969.) And what's interesting is that lots of people you would ordinarily expect to be liberal are in fact increasingly conservative.

This, roughly, is the young liberal cohort of the anti-government movement: young Democrats and left-leaning activists who work long hours, drink lots of Starbucks coffee and microbrewed beer, recycle, ride mountain bikes, wear Teva sandles, sleep on futons, occasionally sport nose rings, and backpack in Nepal or Burkina Faso or Tibet. They shop at Kramerbooks in Washington's Dupont Circle, Shakespeare & Co. in Manhattan, or the Coop in Cambridge. Their Port Huron and Woodstock are Rio and Cairo, where earnest internationalists ponder the fate of the Earth. They talk a lot about grassroots community service. They read Al Gore's Earth in the Balance, and their seminal journalistic experience of 1994 was the publication, in February's Atlantic Monthly, of Robert Kaplan's apocalyptic piece "The Coming Anarchy." The article argued that environmental degradation, tribal upheavals, and poverty are so widespread that pretty soon national boundaries won't matter anymore. Bill Sherman, a 26-year-old Clinton Interior Department appointee, says, "That article comes up in three-quarters of conversations among young politically interested people when they begin talking about world issues. I've still got a copy of it sitting on my...