Two events happened last week that exposed the generational divide facing conservatives in Alabama.
First, a rally for Roy Moore attended by religious leaders descended into a bizarre, fire-and-brimstone scrum that ended with perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes screaming at local and national reporters for daring to ask questions.
“There’s a simple answer to your question,” Keyes said angrily, “and that simple answer to your question is that you are a mob.”
Flip Benham, a popular evangelical minister, also began scolding. “You are an angry, old little boy,” he said to one reporter.
It was an embarrassing moment for Alabamians, but thankfully it says more about the past than anything else. That’s not the future of the party.
The second event was much better, and bodes well for the future of conservatism in Alabama.
Hours after that chaotic rally, the Greater Birmingham Young Republicans did what the party’s state steering committee wouldn’t do. It made public a resolution revoking its support for Moore and calling on the Alabama GOP to do the same.
“The last holdout is the Alabama GOP and we as the young Republicans of the state of Alabama in Birmingham we feel like we need to say something,” said one of the group’s leaders, David Wisdom, in an interview with WBRC in Birmingham. “We feel like we need to send a message to the steering committee to let them know that we will not put up with this,” he explains.
Other younger conservatives around the state agree.
“At this point there’s just too much evidence against him to just dismiss it and say ‘oh, your denials are legitimate,’” said Chris Pattillo, chairman of the University of Montevallo’s College Republicans. “I see no reason that they would have come forward unless it actually happened.”
Montevallo’s College Republicans are part of the statewide College Republican Confederation of Alabama (CRFA). State chairman Zachary Weidlich, a student at the University of South Alabama, would not respond to the Moore allegations and said he asked his fellow board members not to comment, either.
But it’s likely they’re thinking the same as many other young conservatives.
“I think it has shaken a lot of young conservatives at colleges,” Pattillo said. “We’re Republicans. We support the party, but I think at this point he’s just embarrassing us.”
Pattillo said that after the initial allegations broke, some of his fellow students were still willing to support Moore as they waited for the allegations to be disproven, but that willingness has dissolved.
“I think now people have just lost faith,” he said. “I haven’t talked to any of my fellow Republicans here at Montevallo who are still actively supporting [Moore].”
For too many Alabama conservatives, politics is now a zero-sum game, and even Governor Kay Ivey is playing. She said on Friday that she will vote for Moore in December, despite having no reason to doubt his accusers, in order to secure conservative supreme court justices. We heard the same line of argumentation from those who warily supported President Trump.
This brings us back to the divide. For these older conservatives, more and more disqualifying behavior is becoming permissible in the name of courts. For young conservatives, more and more is at stake when voters give candidates like Moore a pass.
