Interesting thoughts from Jason Lee Steorts:

It would be unfair in the extreme to deny that many young, educated voters have reflected thoughtfully on conservative arguments and rejected them. But it would be naïve in the extreme to deny that lots and lots of people, on all sides, are completely predictable outputs of cultural inputs. If your inputs are, roughly, the college campus plus the “mainstream media” plus the “blogosphere” plus the music industry plus Hollywood, it’s no wonder you end up talking like the guy on the roof.

I don’t think, then, that the problem is conservative positions — or at least not mainly so. I think the problem is the way conservative positions are communicated. If we want to persuade the cool kids, we need to find a way of reaching them. Part of that is retaking the cultural institutions we’ve ceded to the Left for almost half a century. (No, I don’t know how. Feel free to drop a note in my suggestion box if you do.) But another part is expressing our views — and especially our moral views — in a way that eschews shrillness, does justice to the complexity of the questions at issue, and justifies our positions from the ground up instead of assuming a shared foundation. Or, if you’ll allow me to switch metaphors (and you will), we need the elites, the intellectuals, and the masses who put on their modes of thought to see the whole background picture against which we state our beliefs. Should they still reject us, at least they’ll know what they’re rejecting.

I believe pretty strongly that the core tenets of conservatism are both simple and painfully easy to communicate. You don’t have to be William F. Buckley, Jr. to be able to tell someone that they’re better off if they spend their money the way they see fit and when a politicians tells you how the government should spend your money, what he’s really saying is that he’s smarter than you and you should bow to his superior intellect.

Conservatives have, over the past decade, ceded the simple language to the left. We’ve retreated behind think tanks and long policy discussions and somewhere lost the ability to explain a core belief in less than a hundred words. The left is winning politically in part because it’s boiled its message down to simple statements. Heck, Barack Obama won the Presidency on two words.

I’m not entirely convinced that conservatives need to entirely retool the message they deliver. We needn’t over-think this. (which, alas, conservatives do an awful lot). What we need to do is to simplify our message. Severely. If you can’t fit a compelling reason for a conservative tenet in a Tweet on Twitter, then you’re using too many words. The meat of each important conservative principle should be compact enough to fit on a business card.

That’s not to say that we must dumb things down in order to be simple. Few people would say that the haikus of Basho are any less intellectual nor beautiful than the sprawling works of T.S. Eliot. It also doesn’t mean that we have to give up policy discussions and the wonkery that conservatives so love. Look at what success Evangelical Christians have had by boiling down the essentials of the Gospel into tracts. They’ve condensed the essential message of the Bible into a simple folded pamphlet, yet no one thinks that’s the sum total of Christian belief.

I say that any conservative resurgence has to lie in being able to communicate our core believs simply and elegantly, no matter the audience. Our beliefs are universally-relevant and we shouldn’t worry about whether the cool kids will get them. They will.