Confessions Of A Former Campus Conservative
Let me make clear at the outset that the
“former” in this title refers to my campus location, not my
conservative beliefs. I was a student reactionary, and proud of it.
Accordingly, after reading the recent
New York Times
Magazine article, The Young
Hipublicans, I indulged in intense bouts of indignant irritation . .
.
Let me make clear at the outset that the
“former” in this title refers to my campus location, not my
conservative beliefs. I was a student reactionary, and proud of it.
Accordingly, after reading the recent
New York Times
Magazine article, The
Young Hipublicans, I indulged in intense bouts of indignant irritation
(“...and is there
some
reason why, in the
one
article where the
Times
concedes the existence of campus conservatives, the cover photo
must
be shot to look like a poster for Attack of the Conservative Clones?”)
before finally deciding to sit down and write something about
it.
By now, of course, others have made some of the same points I would have. The title alone of Jonah Goldberg’s column in the National Review Online, Conservatives in the Mist, neatly sums up the condescending tone of the Times article. As Goldberg writes:
“There's still this fascination with the conservative-as-other. There's still this condescending sense that what makes them tick, let alone what makes them successful, has to be based in either their ignorance or their iniquity. Sure, Colapinto is honestly conveying his astonishment that young conservatives are people, but that astonishment is still insulting and old news.”
It’s this “old news” aspect of the piece that most irks me -- the way in which the Times treats as major revelations facts that have been true about the conservative movement for years. For example, after interviewing one of the female students, the author mentions how “[i]t can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the ideology that frees women”. Not to me, or anyone else on the Harvard campus who read my article entitled “Conservative Feminism: The Other Women” back in 1989. Nor did I and my friends dress in blue blazers, bash gays, or insult black people, despite the Times’ conviction that such things were de rigeur for conservatives back in the bad old days of the 1980’s.
It’s undeniable that the Bucknell students featured in the article are quite a bit different in beliefs and tactics from Dinesh D’Souza and his companions at the Dartmouth Review. But it simply isn’t true that “in the 1980’s the editors of campus conservative newspapers subscribed to the theory spelled out by D’Souza,” that conservatives had to act as “social guerrillas,” shocking and outraging the campus with racist and sexist jokes. The Times quotes Charles Mitchell, editor of Bucknell’s conservative paper, the Counterweight, who argues that “[t]he point is not to create outrage ... the point is to get your ideas out there and make a difference.” This could just as easily been said in the 1980’s by the editors of the Harvard Salient (I should know; I was one) or the Princeton Tory. There were always
conservative students who disliked the Dartmouth Review and found their “shock and outrage” tactics personally unappealing as well as politically unproductive. Unfortunately for us, the Times and similar liberal media outlets preferred at that time to ignore the more reasoned, libertarian-leaning campus papers and focus exclusively on the Dartmouth Review and their ilk, no doubt because this made it so much easier to portray all conservatives as racist, sexist, gay-bashing bigots.
Now (only fifteen-twenty years later) the Times has been forced to recognize that this portrait isn’t accurate, but they’ve come up with an ingenious new twist. Sure, conservative students aren’t really bigots -- but that’s only because they’ve been so heavily influenced by their generation’s years of marination in liberal racial/gender sensitivity training. They “hate to admit it,” they “try to fight it,” but their newfound reasonableness and resultant success are all thanks to the liberals!
To buy this argument, you have to completely ignore the existence over fifteen years ago of campus papers very similar to the Counterweight, but that’s no problem to the Times, which never bothered to notice them in the first place. Doing any actual research into the former state of campus conservatives (or, perish the thought, getting a conservative writer who’d
been a student back then to do the piece) would only run the risk of disproving the Times’ eloquent conspiracy theories describing how these new reasonable conservatives are only speaking words their well-organized off-campus sponsors told them to say. (Yes, this theory does appear to contradict the previous one about childhood liberal influences). So long as you can end the article with grim warnings about the decline in openmindedness among the students, why worry about its absence at the New York Times?
By now, of course, others have made some of the same points I would have. The title alone of Jonah Goldberg’s column in the National Review Online, Conservatives in the Mist, neatly sums up the condescending tone of the Times article. As Goldberg writes:
“There's still this fascination with the conservative-as-other. There's still this condescending sense that what makes them tick, let alone what makes them successful, has to be based in either their ignorance or their iniquity. Sure, Colapinto is honestly conveying his astonishment that young conservatives are people, but that astonishment is still insulting and old news.”
It’s this “old news” aspect of the piece that most irks me -- the way in which the Times treats as major revelations facts that have been true about the conservative movement for years. For example, after interviewing one of the female students, the author mentions how “[i]t can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the ideology that frees women”. Not to me, or anyone else on the Harvard campus who read my article entitled “Conservative Feminism: The Other Women” back in 1989. Nor did I and my friends dress in blue blazers, bash gays, or insult black people, despite the Times’ conviction that such things were de rigeur for conservatives back in the bad old days of the 1980’s.
It’s undeniable that the Bucknell students featured in the article are quite a bit different in beliefs and tactics from Dinesh D’Souza and his companions at the Dartmouth Review. But it simply isn’t true that “in the 1980’s the editors of campus conservative newspapers subscribed to the theory spelled out by D’Souza,” that conservatives had to act as “social guerrillas,” shocking and outraging the campus with racist and sexist jokes. The Times quotes Charles Mitchell, editor of Bucknell’s conservative paper, the Counterweight, who argues that “[t]he point is not to create outrage ... the point is to get your ideas out there and make a difference.” This could just as easily been said in the 1980’s by the editors of the Harvard Salient (I should know; I was one) or the Princeton Tory. There were always
conservative students who disliked the Dartmouth Review and found their “shock and outrage” tactics personally unappealing as well as politically unproductive. Unfortunately for us, the Times and similar liberal media outlets preferred at that time to ignore the more reasoned, libertarian-leaning campus papers and focus exclusively on the Dartmouth Review and their ilk, no doubt because this made it so much easier to portray all conservatives as racist, sexist, gay-bashing bigots.
Now (only fifteen-twenty years later) the Times has been forced to recognize that this portrait isn’t accurate, but they’ve come up with an ingenious new twist. Sure, conservative students aren’t really bigots -- but that’s only because they’ve been so heavily influenced by their generation’s years of marination in liberal racial/gender sensitivity training. They “hate to admit it,” they “try to fight it,” but their newfound reasonableness and resultant success are all thanks to the liberals!
To buy this argument, you have to completely ignore the existence over fifteen years ago of campus papers very similar to the Counterweight, but that’s no problem to the Times, which never bothered to notice them in the first place. Doing any actual research into the former state of campus conservatives (or, perish the thought, getting a conservative writer who’d
been a student back then to do the piece) would only run the risk of disproving the Times’ eloquent conspiracy theories describing how these new reasonable conservatives are only speaking words their well-organized off-campus sponsors told them to say. (Yes, this theory does appear to contradict the previous one about childhood liberal influences). So long as you can end the article with grim warnings about the decline in openmindedness among the students, why worry about its absence at the New York Times?
Posted: Sat - June 14, 2003 at 02:31 PM
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Published On: Nov 16, 2003 06:43 PM
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