Young Americans’ rejection of the Republican Party is not merely a short-term issue, perhaps even satisfying to conservatives who declined to vote or work for candidate and then President Donald Trump, because it will have longer-term effects: 59 percent of Millennial voters are now registered as Democrats. Party affiliation creates vestigial preference.

Nor should we be complacent that young Americans will age into conservatism. There’s actually no evidence of the phenomenon. As Kim Parker of the Pew Research Center concludes, “the differences we see across age groups have more to do with the unique historical circumstances in which they come of age.”

Americans under the age of 30 had as their formative experiences the era of terrorism, the mistakes of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2008 financial crisis, all of which they associate with the Republican Party. And they revile the depredations of Trump’s behavior and procedural contortions by Senate Republicans to partisan purposes (like the refusal to vote on the Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland).

What we as a conservative movement look like to young Americans is old, white, male, bigoted, and unprincipled—people who bray loudly at others breaking the rules but excuse ourselves doing so.