As happens now and again, mainstream conservatives are furiously e-mailing each other links to a ham-handed attempt to fuse obsolete Republican talking points with popular culture. I am, of course, talking about The Young Cons, whose rap song “Young Con Anthem,” has conservatives all across America pretending they enjoyed listening to it.

The video’s lameness is staggering. “Stiltz” and “Serious C” (the white, Dartmouth-attending “rappers” in the video) decided to combine every annoying College Republican stereotype with hip-hop. I kept waiting for them to refer to their shoe tassels and elephant-shaped cufflinks as “bling.” The number of people this sort of thing actually appeals to is assuredly in the low single digits. Unfortunately, you would never guess that based on the typical conservative reaction to this tripe.

“Conservative rap song burning up the internet,” say the headlines. Right. As I share this guy’s aesthetic tastes, I cannot claim to be any sort of authority on rap. I can, however, notice a difference between rappers that people will actually want to hear, and the Young Cons. As far as I can tell, the Young Cons’ “fans” primarily claim to like them because “they don’t use the F-word.” What they are essentially saying is, “I don’t like hip-hop (and that includes this particular song), but this seems better than most hip-hop because it does not offend my political sensibilities. So, since hip-hop is not going away, let’s at least try to get the kids to listen to these guys.” The same thing happened a few years ago when The Right Brothers released the atrocious “Bush Was Right,” except they set their lyrics to uninspired pop-rock rather than uninspired rap.

The conservative movement knows that it has a problem with young voters. Specifically, they have no young voters. The Young Cons, or any similar group, will not help. Hip-hop will never be a good medium for promoting supply-side economics – or any other Republican buzzword these tools will ever want to advance. BET and the GOP are not natural allies. A disingenuous rap song explaining that Martin Luther King was “really a conservative” (which is simply not true, by the way) will not change that essential fact.

You occasionally hear that the conservative movement needs to “engage in some culture,” and finally abandon the myopic strategy of focusing exclusively on the electoral health of the Republican Party. I simultaneously agree and have no idea what that means.

The trouble with efforts to advance “conservative art” is that artists are a self-selecting group. I am not sure what can be done to change the fact that most musicians and screen writers tend to lean toward the statist left. However, if someone decides to be an artist of any sort simply because he is a conservative and he thinks more conservatives should be artists, it’s a good bet that he will churn out crap.

My fear is that future attempts to promote “conservative” culture will turn out just as bad as recent efforts. The Right can do without more Denis Prager quotes pasted into lame rip-offs of whatever happens to be semi-popular at the moment. If that’s the best it can do, the mainstream Right will be better off giving up on popular culture entirely. Such a move will not save the conservative movement, but it will at least keep it from humiliating itself further as it continues to decline.

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