Ryan Smith talks with KVNU For the People host Jason Williams
LOGAN — It was dormant for a while, but an individual is in the process of revitalizing the USU College Republicans group ahead of the return of students to the Logan campus this fall.
Ryan Smith was a guest on KVNU’s For the People program on Thursday and agreed that the challenge is a lot of young people just don’t care about politics the way it’s been done, but he said their group does have interest.
“That was a concern for me when I got up to Utah State, the beginning of last year, there (were) all these clubs on campus, and I saw there was college Democrats, and I said, where’s college Republicans. There wasn’t a conservative club up on campus, so I said, ‘I’ll just start it myself. Don’t need anyone else pushing me to start it’, so we started it up. We’ve got 129 members, we’ve had a good turnout for a lot of our events,” Smith explained.
He said they’ve grown a lot for one year and it’s the most active it’s been in quite a while.
“There was a College Republicans before, so I agree with you….we need students and the younger generation who will become the new leaders to be involved in the political processes and to have the right mind set going in. I think you see a lot of young people are more willing to have good conversations. Arthur Brooks, he’s a conservative thinker on the center right, and he says ‘we don’t need less dialogue’ like some people say, ‘I don’t want to talk about politics’, we need better dialogue.’”
In talking with students, Smith gets a sense they are just tired of all the divisiveness.
“I definitely think there is a large sentiment up on campus with that, whether individuals that I talk to that are more on the right or more on the left. People, specifically these students, they often say ‘I’m just sick of this two-party system, I’m sick of all this us versus them mentality’ is really what the root that they’re getting to, this division and polarization in the country.”
Smith said they just want a better way and better conversations.