Whenever the subject of young people who have the audacity to
eschew political liberalism comes up, it’s obligatory to quote
Georges Clemenceau (though often in the guise of Winston
Churchill): “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no
heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has
no brain.”
Put me down squarely in the heartless category. I was cheering
for Ronald Reagan by the time I arrived for kindergarten. When I
was in high school, I knocked on doors for conservative candidates
— in Massachusetts — and let the local Republican Party dress me
up in an Abraham Lincoln costume and march me up and down the
street for the annual Fourth of July parade. In college, I was
active in a variety of conservative causes and busied myself with
penning right-wing screeds for the campus newspaper.
So I know a little bit about the young conservative crowd. Some
prefer a fogeyish, counter-countercultural image, donning blue
blazers with brass buttons and other formal attire appropriate for
standing athwart history at any age. These are the kinds of people
who sign their names with initials and Roman numerals.
But most of them would blend in pretty well among other people
their own age. These are precisely the teen-aged and
twentysomething conservatives that ideologically dissimilar
observers just don’t completely understand. For example, the
New York Times created the whole “hipublicans” phenomenon
when it revealed that normal college students who lean right can be
found in fairly large numbers.
LAST WEEKEND, THE GRAY Lady took another look at the young right
engaged in a fascinating discussion on the direction of American conservatism on
the occasion of William F. Buckley’s retirement. The conversation
involved differences on the right over the role of the federal
government domestically and in the world, the war in Iraq, social
issues and the fate of the libertarian-traditionalist coalition
cultivated by conservatives since the days of Frank Meyer.
It was an illuminating if inconclusive look at the challenges
the conservative movement faces. I would love to think that this
kind of soul-searching is the norm among young conservatives and
has percolated into the consciousness of students on the right. But
if the fundraising appeals I occasionally receive from collegiate
conservative groups are at all representative, I must conclude that
at least the latter is not the case.
Far from charting a course for a “post-Buckley future,” to pinch
from the Times’s headline, many of these young
conservatives seem fixated on concerns that have been evident since
Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951. They
recount anecdotes about the antics of leftist professors, publicize
voter registration statistics showing Democrats to be wildly
overrepresented in most faculty lounges and otherwise complain
about the difficult lot in life that belongs to non-left-wing
students.
The academic left surely has a lot to answer for, but I
personally find this focus troubling for several reasons. The first
is subjective and by no means scientific: This portrayal of campus
life is largely alien from my own experience as a vocal
conservative at a school where most people were left-of-center or
indifferent.
Faculty lefties occasionally gave me grief about my political
views, which they rarely shared. But many of these people also
encouraged me, aided me in my (at best intermittent) studies and
did me favors like writing letters of recommendation. The
relationships between liberal educators and conservative students
that I’ve encountered were not mainly adversarial.
I also worry that some campus conservatives are developing a
persecution complex and treading perilously close to appropriating
the rhetoric of self-identified student victim groups. One of the
things that always differentiated right-wing student groups I was
acquainted with from other university political activists was a
sense of humor. These ragtag bands of young Tories, evangelical
Christians and supply-side business students not only rejoiced in
ruthlessly skewering PC niceties, but they also joyfully poked fun
at stereotypes of themselves. If this sounds insignificant, try to
imagine campus feminist, environmentalist or gay-rights groups
doing the same.
Above all, I’ve come to wonder why we on the right give the
university left-wingers the satisfaction of worrying about them as
much as we do. The intelligentsia has wrecked many things in our
country, but outside of a few disciplines I don’t think they have
much long-term impact on their students’ political views. Indeed,
there are examples where their reach is being surpassed even by the
campus right: Ben Shapiro, only 20, is a nationally syndicated
columnist and author of an exposé of the academic left
currently zooming up the Amazon charts. How many of his leftist
tormentors from UCLA command even a fraction of his audience?
None of this means that university politics are unimportant or
that conservatives have achieved anything approaching a level
playing field. And maybe my assessment of a campus political scene
I am no longer part of is missing something important. But it seems
to me that the intellectual heirs of the modern conservative
movement face greater challenges than the political composition of
the typical college English department.
