Want to Be a Rebel? Be a Conservative.

Vivek Ramaswamy opened his remarks at the Republican National Convention this week with a familiar diagnosis: “We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis.” The entrepreneur-turned-politico proposed Trump as a unifier capable of bringing the country together “not through empty words, but through action,” through success, and through excellence.

National unity may be a tall order, but this year’s Republican Party is not your father’s GOP — and Ramaswamy, the only millennial to run for president this cycle, is pretty happy about that. 

In his remarks, Ramaswamy directly addressed Gen Z, a number of whom will vote in their first presidential election this year. “You’re going to be the generation that actually saves our country,” he said. “You want to be a rebel? Show up on your college campus and try calling yourself a conservative.” 

In 2024, the counterculture is conservative, though it’s been that way for years now. 

The Right has long lifted up its young adherents. Take, for instance, William F. Buckley, Jr., who first rose to prominence with the publication of his critique of rapidly liberalizing higher education in God and Man at Yale. As campus culture continued its leftward slide over the following decades, the GOP became the counterculture to progressive hegemony, and older Republicans recognized the utility of identifying and supporting younger adherents to their movement. 

Ironically, the longevity of the Right’s attention to campus skirmishes has been fueled by the Left’s inability to refrain from making a scene when a student publicly dissents from liberal orthodoxy. 

Most of the time, their tactics work. College campuses are filled with students who, as they begin to encounter the world on their own terms, conform or slip into silence when confronted with the opinions of the liberal elite. It’s easier to keep the peace, nod along, and get by. 

But some people aren’t interested in keeping the peace by staying quiet — and that’s when things get exciting. Faced with a young conservative who won’t back down amid peer pressure, liberal students and professors simply can’t help themselves. Liberal pushback begets conservative media attention, which further strengthens the student at the heart of the controversy. Suddenly, the lone voice has allies and the student becomes part of the movement. 

Year after year, the pattern repeats. Like the 1960s liberal counterculture, however, the Right’s counterculture eventually became hegemonic — all reactionary movements eventually do. So a counterculture slowly formed within the GOP. 

If it’s reactionary to dissent from the liberal worldview, it’s even more rebellious to go further and dissent from the reactionaries. 

Ramaswamy’s exhortation is careful. Say you’re a conservative, for this may carry a different meaning than the title “Republican.” After all, the Republican “formers” of yesteryear — former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Mike Pence, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, former Rep. Liz Cheney, and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan — aren’t in Milwaukee this week. 

Ramaswamy obliquely paints a picture of further rebellion. After all, he took the RNC stage as a relatively recent disciple of that counterculture, which cut its teeth during Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign before prompting and sustaining Trump’s ascendance. It’s a conservative cultural message — not an economic one — that Ramaswamy believes to be persuasive to the younger generation: “Say you want to get married, have kids, and teach them to pledge allegiance to your country. Give it a try, I bet it’ll be pretty liberating.”

Now the political party that has long seen its countercultural bent as an asset against progressive hegemony must confront an internal rebellion that wasn’t just a phase in 2016. Republicans have rewarded young dissenters on college campuses, but now they must grapple with the dissenters in their ranks. (RELATED: In Defense of Cancel Culture)

The MAGA movement is an odd, imperfect, syncretic organism, but it’s here to stay. Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate proves as much. Ramaswamy, for one, is willing to play ball. “We’re the country where we can disagree like hell and still be friends at the end of it,” he reminded the audience.  

There’s still work to be done. The Right’s ascendant counterculture needs to prove itself through action, not mere “empty words.” It needs to win the presidency and flip the Senate. But new generations bring new life to settled politics, and new movements rejuvenate existing parties. Amidst a national identity crisis, Ramaswamy encourages Gen Z to join the counterculture that has grown within the Republican Party for decades. Today, the rebels hold the reins. 

Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. 

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