We millennials are often pegged as a fiscally conservative, but socially liberal political generation, a generation that doesn't want to be told what to do in any context, one that views any sort of authority with revulsion.
And at its most basic level, these "don't tread on me values" are also the values of libertarianism. So when Sen. Rand Paul told Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday that the country is "really ready for the narrative coming - the Libertarian Republican narrative," some may be inclined to think he's right, but we have to prove him wrong.
Folks like Sen. Paul are trying to stoke the anger over unstable entitlements and our massive national debt to drive their extreme and insane agenda. Our generation won't get any Medicare or Social Security if structural reforms aren't made to both programs, but that doesn't mean we have to slash and burn the entire federal budget to get there. It certainly doesn't mean cutting investments in education and infrastructure that have always made our country great like Paul's five year balanced budget proposal would have to do.
If William F. Buckley instructed a generation of conservatives to stand athwart at history yelling stop, then Senator Paul and his radical friends are asking their brand of conservatives to stand athwart at history, holding a grenade launcher yelling stop, or else we'll burn the whole place down.
Is the country really ready for that brand of politics? And does our generation want to be the one to institutionalize these fringe views?
The Great Depression and the New Deal forged a long consensus for an activist government. The Great Society helped drive this home and expand the scope. And while the Reagan Revolution talked a big game, it did next to nothing to actually scale this massive government back. But it did bring about huge tax cuts. Clinton balanced the budget with his balanced approach, and President Bush squandered a surplus on tax cuts, wars and increasing spending.
If this president has made any mark on our countries fiscal future it's been a mark of kicking the can down the road, leaving the big decisions to the me: first gen Y-ers who supported him to the tune of 60 percent for re-election. And given his increasingly sour relationship with Congress, the grand bargain he and Congressional leaders is likely dead for the next four years.
That leaves us millennials in a precarious position. We have to stabilize our debt, and if we don't soon, the results could be disastrous. Such dire circumstances make the extremism that's cropped up as the mainstream quite understandable-it's easy to cling to dogma in times of crisis, it's much harder to step outside of yourself and make the tough, but right decisions-and the gerrymandered House districts that make relatively few members of Congress really fight for their reelection makes the extremism worse.
However, if we want to be the generation that puts America back on a sound fiscal trajectory, then we must be the generation of radical centrism, not the radical libertarianism or the equally as radical social democratic view espoused by so many of the House Democrats.
A radical centrist is not obsessed with the dogmas of conservatism or liberalism; instead he is obsessed with finding workable solutions. The national debt currently sits right around $16.4 trillion. Current Republican orthodoxy would tell you that the only way to close this gap is through deep reductions in discretionary spending and a radical restructuring of our mandatory programs. Current Democratic orthodoxy (espoused by people like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi) says the only way to close this gap is to jack up taxes on the richest Americans, and continue to pour money into failing and bankrupt social safety net programs.
Everyone but those holding a radical leftist view understands the dire straits our massive debt could put us in, but there's not much agreement on how we should get there.
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However, commission after commission and gang after gang has told us how we could get there. They've given us the radical centrist way forward. Get more revenue with smart tax reform and cut down spending by restructuring unsustainable entitlement programs.
This is politically painful. There's no doubt about that. After all, it runs counter to the basic dogmas governing our country today, but it's the only way we'll get back to fiscal sanity and as such, our generation must get behind such proposals.
If we stay silent, if we continue to be unwilling to engage, the country our children and grand children grow up in, and the country we grow old in just won't look the same as the one we have today.
America is the greatest country on Earth. I have no qualms about admitting that. The beauty of our country flows from the institutions that have endured the test of time. But these institutions are only as good as the people we send to run them.
We have maintained our greatness by identifying great people to hold the line. Extremists on the right and left that have gained such prominence are not such people.
Generation Y must recognize this or give in to an inevitable decline of the American way of life.
Let's embrace the radical centrists and reject the extremists before it's too late.
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