Letters to a Young Conservative (3 page)

I joined the
Dartmouth Review
for two reasons: one esthetic, the other intellectual. The first was that I found a style and a joie de vivre that I had not previously associated with conservatism. The best example of this was the paper’s mentor, Jeffrey Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth and a senior editor of
National Review.
Hart was exactly the opposite of the conservative stereotype. He wore a long raccoon coat around campus, and he smoked long pipes with curvaceous stems. He sometimes wore buttons that said things such as “Soak the Poor.” In his office he had a wooden, pincer-like device that he explained was for the purpose of “pinching women that you don’t want to touch.” Rumor had it that he went to faculty meetings with his wooden-hand contraption. When a dean or professor went on and on, Hart would churn the rotary device and the fingers on the wooden hand would drum impatiently in a clacking motion, as if to say, “Get on with it.”

Even more outrageous than Hart’s attire and equipment was his mind. He was a walking producer of aphorisms. “When I heard about the French Revolution,” Hart once said, “my reaction was that I was against it.” During a trip to Washington, D.C., a group of us saw an antiracism demonstration. One fiery-eyed black man wearing a Malcolm X shirt approached Hart. “Hey man,” he said. “Can I have two dollars for breakfast?” Hart replied, “Shame on you. You should be using the money to fight racism.”

Hart’s writing was striking for its lyricism and candor. His most controversial column about Dartmouth was called “The Ugly Protesters.” He wrote it during the time of the protests against white rule in South Africa, when the campus green was regularly occupied by a horde of angry young men and women shouting, “End apartheid,” “Avenge the death of Steven Biko,” “No more Sharpeville massacres,” and “Divestment now.” Hart wrote that he was puzzled by the intensity of the protesters. What possible interest could they have in events so remote from their everyday lives? Observing the protesters, Hart noted that their unifying characteristic was their state of dishevelment. Not to mince words, they were, as a group, rather ugly. Exploring the connection between their demeanor and their political activism, Hart arrived at the following conclusion: They were protesting their own ugliness! Hart’s column caused a sensation on campus. Walking to class the next day, I saw a remarkable sight on the Dartmouth green.
In an attempt to disprove Hart’s characterization, the protesters had shown up in suits and long dresses. But they had made a strategic blunder because their suits were so ill-fitting that they looked even more ridiculous. Watching the scene from his office in Sanborn Hall, Hart blew billows of smoke from his pipe and chuckled with obscene pleasure.

In part because of his political incorrectness, Hart was one of the few people I have met whose jokes made people laugh out loud. His sense of humor can be illustrated by a contest that
National Review
privately held among its editors following the publication of a controversial Bill Buckley column on the issue of AIDS. People were debating whether AIDS victims should be quarantined as syphilis victims had been in the past. Buckley said no: The solution was to have a small tattoo on their rear ends to warn potential partners. Buckley’s suggestion caused a bit of a public stir, but the folks at
National Review
were animated by a different question: What should the tattoo say? A contest was held, and when the entries were reviewed, the winner by unanimous consent was Hart. He suggested the lines emblazoned on the gates to Dante’s
Inferno:
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

I remember some of those early dinners at the Hart farmhouse. We drank South American wine and listened to recordings of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and of Robert Frost reading his poems, and Nixon speeches, and comedian Rich Little doing his
Nixon imitation, and George C. Scott delivering the opening speech in
Patton,
and some of Winston Churchill’s orations, and the music from the BBC version of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited.
There was an ethos here, and a sensibility, and it conveyed to me something about conservatism that I had never suspected. Here was a conservatism that was alive; that was engaged with art, music, and literature; that was at the same time ironic, lighthearted, and fun.

The second reason I joined the
Dartmouth Review
was that I was greatly impressed by the seriousness of the conservative students. They were passionate about ideas, and they argued vigorously about what it meant to be a conservative, and what it meant to be an American, and who was a liberally educated person, and who should belong to a liberal arts community, and whether journalism could be objective, and whether reason could refute revelation, and whether corporations should give money to charity, and why Joseph Stalin was a worse man than Adolf Hitler, and why socialism was not merely inefficient but also immoral. Once, in the middle of a serious argument, I proposed a break for dinner and was greeted with the response, “We haven’t resolved the morality of U.S. foreign policy and you want to EAT?”

I realized that these students, who were not much older than I was, had answers before I had figured out what the questions were. Their conversations, peppered with references to classical and modern sources, revealed how much I could learn from them, and how much I had
to learn on my own. Thus I began to read voraciously, not just my classroom stuff but also Edmund Burke, David Hume, Adam Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Friedrich Hayek, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Gradually, I found myself developing a grounded point of view. For the first time, disparate facts began to fit together, to make sense. Conservatism provided me with a framework, durable and yet flexible, for understanding the world. And having understood the world, at the tender age of twenty, I was ready to change it.

Dear Chris,

While I was at the
Dartmouth Review,
we used to tell the deans that taking on our campus paper was like wrestling with a pig. Not only did it get everyone dirty, but the pig liked it!

You have pressed me for further details about my Dartmouth escapades, and I am happy to oblige. As I recount some of the sophomoric things we did, I ask you to keep in mind that during this time we were sophomores! Having turned forty a year ago, I now have a somewhat different perspective than I had when I was twenty. Thus in bringing back those happy and adventurous times, it seems worthwhile to ask what we accomplished. What did we gain and what did we lose, and was it worth it?

The first thing I should note is that we were an outrageous bunch. I didn’t start out this way; in fact, for the
first year I was considered a moderating influence on the
Dartmouth Review.
The reason I became radicalized is that I saw how harshly the conservative newspaper was treated by professors and by the administration. No sooner had the first issue appeared on campus than the administration threatened to sue the
Dartmouth Review
for using the name “Dartmouth.” The college maintained that it owned full and exclusive copyright to the name. Never mind that Dartmouth is a town in England. In fact, some two dozen establishments in Hanover—from Dartmouth Bookstore to Dartmouth Cleaners to Dartmouth Printing—all used the name. These were commercial operations unaffiliated with the college. By contrast, we were a group of Dartmouth students publishing a weekly about Dartmouth College and distributing it to the Dartmouth community. Clearly the motive of the lawsuit was ideological.

The administration did not stop with legal threats. Early in the paper’s history, one of the editors, Ben Hart, was distributing copies to the Blunt Alumni Center, when a college official named Sam Smith went berserk, attacked Ben, and bit him! It happened this way: Smith grabbed Ben from behind, Ben attempted to free himself by wrapping his arm around Smith’s neck, and Smith proceeded to bite him on the chest. When Ben—who is the son of Jeffrey Hart—entered his dad’s office and explained the bloody gash, his father’s terse response was, “Thank God you didn’t have him in a scissors hold.” Smith was eventually convicted of assault and paid a small fine.

These actions, inconsequential and even amusing in themselves, nevertheless reveal the psychology of the typical liberal college administrator. These guys are harsh, even brutal, in dealing with conservative dissent; invertebrate, even encouraging, in dealing with liberal dissent—and yet they solemnly insist that they are fair and unbiased. During my freshman year, the Dartmouth administration sought to expel a reporter from the
Dartmouth Review
for “vexatious oral exchange” with a professor. Meanwhile, the left-wing radicals who took over the Dartmouth library faced no charges, and Dartmouth’s president even apologized for being out of town at the time and unable to attend to their urgent demands. As this hollow man explained himself to the radicals, “My absence was not an attempt to be insensitive to your burning need.”

These incidents point to the larger dilemma facing conservative students in a liberal culture. The dilemma can be stated this way. Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But what if the existing society is liberal? What if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must stop being conservative. More precisely, he must be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical. This is what we at the
Dartmouth Review
quickly understood.

I discovered another reason why the conservative activist on the liberal campus needs a radical approach. At Dartmouth and other liberal campuses, politics is frequently transmitted to the students not through argument but through etiquette. You see, the high school graduate who goes to an elite college such as Dartmouth wants nothing more than to learn what it means to be an educated Dartmouth man (or woman). And the professors realize this, and exploit it. Consider the freshman who goes to a faculty cocktail party and says that he is concerned about “the Communist plot in Nicaragua.” What do the professors do? Do they argue with him? Do they seek to demonstrate that the Sandinistas are not Marxist? No, they raise their noses into the air and give the student a look as if to say, “Are you from Iowa?” The student is humiliated. He realizes that he has committed a social gaffe. And over time, he learns. By the time he is a senior he is winning big social accolades from his professors by going on about “the rising tide of homophobia that is engulfing our society.”

At the
Dartmouth Review,
we recognized that to confront liberalism fully we could not be content with rebutting liberal arguments. We also had to subvert liberal culture, and this meant disrupting the etiquette of liberalism. In other words, we had to become social guerillas. And this we set out to do with a vengeance.

Reading over old issue
s
of the
Review,
and sharing recollections with my former colleagues, I am sometimes amazed to realize what social and intellectual renegades
we were. We were not above using
ad hominem
attacks. We described one professor as sporting “a polyester tie and a rat’s-hair mustache.” When he wrote to complain, noting that he never wore polyester ties and that his mustache could not reasonably be compared to rat’s hair, we printed an apology. “We Goofed, see p. 6.” In our apology, we said, “We regret our error. In reality Professor Spitzer has a rat’s-hair tie and a polyester mustache.”

Feminists and homosexuals were a regular target of
Review
satire. One of our columnists, Keeney Jones, observed a decade after Dartmouth went coed, “The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth. The question is whether women should be educated at all.” The
Review
also printed an alumnus’s Solomonic observation that “any man who thinks a woman is his intellectual equal is probably right.” And the Last Word—a series of quips and quotations on the last page of the newspaper—featured the observation: “Homosexuality is fine,” said Bill, half in Ernest.

Sometimes items from the bad-taste file at
National Review
made their way into the
Dartmouth Review.
You see, the editors of
National Review
sometimes make jokes that are too inflammatory for a respectable national magazine to print. But we found them entirely appropriate for a college weekly. Thus the
Dartmouth Review
’s obituary for actress Natalie Wood ended thus, “We deplore the foul rumor. Ted Kennedy was not on Catalina Island when Natalie Wood drowned.” When the new Miss America, Vanessa Williams, was forced to give up
her title following news reports that she had posed nude for
Penthouse,
the
Dartmouth Review
noted, “Jesse Jackson may pull out of the presidential race this season. It has been revealed that his grandmother has been posing nude in
National Geographic.
”

That some of these quips are in bad taste goes without saying. But is this scorched-earth approach effective? Let’s consider a couple of examples. When Dartmouth refused to stop funding the Gay Students Association, despite numerous
Review
editorials questioning why funds should be awarded based on sexual orientation, we decided to test the consistency of the administration’s policy. We founded the Dartmouth Bestiality Society. We appointed a president, a vice president, a treasurer, and a zookeeper. We wrote up an application and developed a budget. Then we went before the college committee on funding and made our case.

The administrators were appalled, of course. “There is no interest in,
ahem,
bestiality at Dartmouth,” one said. To which the president of the Bestiality Society gamely replied, “That may be true, Dean Hanson, but it is because of centuries of discrimination! Those of us who are inclined toward animals have been systematically excluded and ostracized. Our organization will provide a supportive atmosphere in which people of our particular sexual orientation are treated with respect. At Dartmouth, if not in society, let us put an end to beastophobia.”