U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) spoke to the Ector County Republican Women Thursday night about why they are Republicans, and the message they are trying to send when they are trying to convince others to be conservative.
Crenshaw started by saying he didn’t think the younger generation was being taught that conservatism is what gave them the country they are in today.
“My biggest fear recently is that we’re not doing a great job of that,” Crenshaw said. “We’re losing the younger generation.”
He argued that it was not liberalism that made the country what it is today, what he called a miracle, and said liberalism tends to lead to socialism, saying that the more you promise things, the more control the government has to have to get those things.
“Eventually you have to promise them a benevolent dictator. They’re well-intentioned, but it eventually leads to AOC, we don’t want that,” Crenshaw said, referring to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Crenshaw argued the reason Americans should be conservative is because it’s a coherent governing philosophy with clear principles driving it forward, a framework to solve problems. He said his philosophy when it came to solving problems and crafting policy came down to asking questions like whether the policy does good or feels good, does it encourage local control or centralized bureaucracy, and whether it promotes equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.
“When we talk to young people they tend to be more freedom-minded than you might realize, they’re not really socialist,” he said.
Crenshaw said people should ask when they give something to someone whether it takes away from someone else, and encouraged personal responsibility.
“A dependency on government is something you do to people you hate, and we should not treat American citizens like people we hate,” he said.
Democrats, he said, simply ask whether a policy addresses injustice, and called it activism as opposed to strategy, which he said had no place in government.
“We can’t always agree on things” Crenshaw said. “If you try to have some people in Washington tell everybody they have to do the exact same thing, we’re gonna drive everybody crazy.”
Crenshaw also criticized one idea he called libertarian, which is open borders. He said while the idea was nice from a marketing theory due to the movement of labor, it isn’t good for governing a society.
“We have a right to say that legal immigrants have the right to get in front of the line as opposed to illegal immigrants,” he said. “We have 100,000 people claiming asylum when only 10, 15 percent of northern triangle countries have an actually valid claim.”
This isn’t accurate. While about 20 to 30 percent of asylum requests are granted annually, that doesn’t necessarily mean every other asylum request is denied because it is invalid.
Crenshaw said there was a misconception that federal government can solve everything, and that a group of experts can figure everything out. He said the idea of revolution was seductive, especially to young people.
“When they hear talk about revolution and Bernie Sanders and all this crap it is seductive, because that’s what the young mind is always looking for,” Crenshaw said.
Crenshaw said every generation, the country is in danger of squandering what they have, and said it was values like personal responsibility and liberty that keep the republic alive.
“Conservatism is about gratitude for everything that has led to this moment, and we have to fight for it and we have to tell people what it is,” he said.
