The Young Hipublicans
By JOHN COLAPINTO - NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Kim Daubman, a social psychology professor, concurs. Recently she taught a class in which she talked about the theory that news coverage of warfare in Iraq could lead to a rise in homicides in the United States. ''I could see the students rolling their eyes,'' she says. ''I could just hear them thinking, 'Oh, there she goes again!'''....Horrors! Carl Rove is brainwashing our children!
The temptation, upon entering Charles Mitchell's dorm room at Bucknell University, is to assume that he's kidding. The doormat features a picture of Hillary Clinton and the injunction, ''Wipe Liberally.'' A vast American flag festooned in red, white and blue Christmas lights adorns one wall, along with a faded Reagan-Bush '84 poster and a small photograph of the cowboy-hatted Gipper himself. The sole concession to any interest outside right-wing politics is a wall hanging of an African jungle scene. ''My nod,'' says Mitchell, an intense 20-year-old history major, ''to multiculturalism.''
There's an element of youthful provocation at work in all this, of course -- an awareness, on Mitchell's part, that any liberal who dares to enter here will reel back in horror. (''It's fun to freak people out,'' as he puts it.) But it would be a mistake to assume that his decor reflects only a sophomoric search for self-definition. Having just completed his sophomore year, Mitchell is a dead-serious political ideologue, a right-wing activist so effective that he has been singled out by leaders of the national movement as one of its rising young stars. This past year's editor in chief of Bucknell's conservative newspaper, The Counterweight, and a founding member of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club, he has come to this small liberal-arts college tucked amid the cornfields in Lewisburg, Pa., not solely to educate himself (he holds down a 3.9 G.P.A.), but also to spread the conservative gospel, to wage war with what he considers an egregiously liberal faculty and administration and to win the hearts and minds of his politically undecided peers. Which is why it is both a joke and not a joke when he announces on his dorm-room answering machine: ''I can't come to the phone at the moment because I'm out advancing the great conservative revolution.''
He's not alone. At campuses across the country, undergraduates like Charles Mitchell have organized for an assault against the university establishment not seen since the 1980's, when Reagan's popularity triggered a youthquake of conservative campus activism. Today's surge reflects a renewed shift pronouncedly to the right on many defining issues, after several years during the Clinton presidency when students gravitated toward more liberal political labels.
As with college conservative movements in the past, the recent wave has been fueled and often financed by an array of conservative interest groups, of which there are, today, almost too many to keep straight: Young Americans for Freedom; Young America's Foundation; the Leadership Institute; the Collegiate Network; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. These groups spend money in various ways to push a right-wing agenda on campuses: some make direct cash ''grants'' to student groups to start and run conservative campus newspapers; others provide free training in ''conservative leadership,'' often providing heavily subsidized travel to their ''publishing programs''; others provide help with the hefty speaking fees for celebrity right-wing speakers. Through these coordinated activities, these groups have embarked in the last three years on a concerted campus recruitment drive to turn temperamentally conservative youngsters into organized right-wing activists. From Maine to California, students have taken up the offer -- even at such lefty bastions as Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students at Howard University, a black institution in Washington, have started a group that has been referred to as the ''hip-hop Republicans.'' The Campus Leadership Program has by their own count helped set up 256 conservative campus groups in less than three years. The College Republican National Committee, a group that mobilizes students to campaign, has tripled its membership since 1999 to an all-time high of 1,148 chapters.
The impact has been felt far beyond the campus quadrangles and classrooms. Scott Stewart, chairman of the College Republican National Committee says that campus conservatives were instrumental to the success of the Republican Party in the last midterm elections. ''Students provide the enthusiasm, the excitement and the work that needs to be done for free in political campaigns,'' he says, ''knocking on doors, talking to voters, passing out literature, pounding in lawn signs.'' Then there is the role, historically, that college conservatives have played in shaping Republican Party ideology. A former campus conservative, William F. Buckley, wrote the movement's Ur-text, ''God and Man at Yale.'' Published in 1951, the book attacked his alma mater for spreading ''socialist'' ideas and for its lack of religious instruction in the classroom. To help institutionalize his mission of leaching liberalism from campuses, Buckley helped create the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the first education institute devoted to turning colleges to the right. I.S.I. was one of several groups behind the campus conservative movement of the 1980's, which gave rise to Dinesh D'Souza, Ann Coulter and Ralph Reed, all former college right-wingers who are today leaders in spreading and shaping the Republican Party message. But just how close a college conservative can get to the levers of power is suggested by the ascent of one hard-right, Nixon-loving ideologue who, in 1973, became chairman of the College Republicans and who today is credited as among the greatest influences on President George W. Bush: Karl Rove.
''They have a theory of getting them while they're young,'' says David Brock, a former college conservative who graduated from Berkeley in the mid-1980's. After spending almost a decade as an activist in the conservative movement (during which he published the 1993 liberal-bashing book, ''The Real Anita Hill''), Brock had a change of heart. In 2002, he published a book, ''Blinded by the Right,'' about his former life as a conservative-movement insider. ''People are searching for their identity in college,'' he says. ''The right try to instigate polarization so that it looks like the right wing is the alternative to the left. This is what happened to me. I went to Berkeley because it had a liberal reputation. But I became disillusioned with some of my experiences with the left on the campus and I had a knee-jerk reaction -- or I was looking for an alternative -- and there was the right. There really wasn't anything in the middle.''
The mission of today's college conservatives is, in many respects, no different from what it was in Brock's day, and even Buckley's. But today's movement also differs markedly from ones that came before. Influenced as much by the mood and mores of MTV as it is by the musings of Allan Bloom, today's movement has shaped itself around a new demographic of young right-wingers, one that includes a heavy contingent of women and that draws some of its fiercest ideologues from the middle class. Having spread beyond traditionally conservative hotbeds like Dartmouth, it's a movement that operates in an atmosphere that did not even exist when Buckley and D'Souza were undergraduates: campuses governed by speech and behavior codes introduced more than a decade ago. A result is a new breed of college conservative, one poised to inherit the responsibility of shaping the Republican Party in the years to come.
[T] he Bucknell University Conservatives Club has its origins in the fall of 1999, when a freshman named Tom Elliott arrived on campus. His father is Bently Elliott, former director of speechwriting for Ronald Reagan. Growing up in Alexandria, Va., and attending Easter-egg hunts on the White House lawn, Tom Elliott absorbed by osmosis the central tenets of conservatism: smaller government, less taxes, more military spending, welfare reform, no abortion on demand. He'd never questioned his right-wing beliefs until he entered Bucknell, where, he says, he found his ideas coming under attack from his professors.
''In my spare time, I started visiting conservative Web sites,'' he says, ''so I could arm myself.'' In his sophomore year, he wrote right-wing columns in the student paper, The Bucknellian. Styling himself after his journalistic heroes, like Hunter S. Thompson, Elliott strove for an in-your-face attitude in his writing and came to enjoy his status as the campus's provocateur. But it was not until the summer after his sophomore year that he called on his contacts with conservative interest groups, like the Leadership Institute, to move on his idea of starting a conservatives club and his own right-wing campus newspaper. Elliott enlisted a fellow Bucknell sophomore, Michael Boland, a square-jawed evangelical Christian from Cooperstown, N.Y., the only other ''out'' conservative on campus at the time.
It was, in many respects, an odd marriage. Elliott, a hard-partying frat boy from a privileged background, fits a common stereotype of the college conservative of the 1980's: affluent, confident, connected (his father is a Bucknell alumnus and trustee). When Elliott offers that he ''doesn't take school too seriously, and my grades reflect it,'' you know he's telling you that he doesn't have to worry too much about a career and money (after graduating this month, he plans to ''travel and maybe write a book in the future''). Mike Boland, by contrast, is like many of today's young right-wingers. Determinedly middle class (his dad is an X-ray technician, his mom a teacher's aide), Boland can afford Bucknell's $35,000 in tuition and fees only with the help of financial aid. Studious and abstemious, he works hard to keep up a 3.9 G.P.A. For Boland, the effort that has taken him from a modest background to the top ranks of an elite university bolsters his conservative beliefs on self-reliance. ''If you don't earn it,'' he says, ''you don't appreciate it.''
Boland agreed to join Elliott in starting Bucknell's conservatives club. The two don't agree on every issue (Elliott is against capital punishment; Boland supports it), and they often clash when it comes to how best to spread their message (Elliott likes to use satire and ridicule to raise hackles; Boland prefers close reasoning), but the two share a mind-set common to virtually every college conservative you meet. They describe themselves as defenders of ''individuality'' and ''freedom'' against a campus, and world, overrun by groupthink liberalism and pious political correctness. They also share a belief that despite the common perception of youth being synonymous with progressive, liberal ideals, the true spirit of their generation is solidly, if quietly, conservative.
The polls bear this out. According to the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute, which has been tracking the attitudes of incoming freshmen at hundreds of colleges nationwide since 1966, student conservatism is increasing in many areas. Asked their opinion about casual sex, 51 percent of freshmen were for it in 1987; now 42 percent are. In 1989, 66 percent of freshmen believed abortion should be legal; today, only 54 percent do. In 1995, 66 percent of kids agreed that wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes; now it's down to 50 percent. Even on the issue of firearms, where students have traditionally favored stiffer controls, there has been a weakening in support for gun laws. ''We're at a record low on this item,'' says the U.C.L.A. Institute's associate director, Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at U.C.L.A. ''We've seen a decline over the last four consecutive years.''
Yet according to Sax, this conservative trend on issues does not necessarily mean that students call themselves right-wingers, or even Republicans. ''Students' opinions of particular issues are not always in line with their own self-placement on an ideological spectrum,'' she says.
Still searching for their identities, many of these kids are not yet prepared to declare a particular political affiliation. This is where the conservative campus activists come in. Having recognized the importance of conservativism to their own lives, they have committed themselves to the task of bringing out the unacknowledged conservatism in other students. The mission of today's activists involves less an act of persuading their peers to accept an ideology than in awakening them to the fact that they already embody it.
Back in early September 2001, Boland and Elliott sent a campus e-mail message announcing the birth of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club. Among those who showed up for the first meeting was Charles Mitchell, a freshman and another middle-class kid attending Bucknell on financial aid. ''You knew right away,'' Boland says, ''that this guy was a warrior.'' Mitchell arrived in Lewisburg from a suburban enclave in Delaware County, Pa., and became intent on being a campus activist. He traces his passion for right-wing politics to his father, who runs a trolley repair shop for Septa, the public transit company in Philadelphia. A member of the N.R.A., Mitchell's father took his son shooting every Friday. ''That was really the beginning for me,'' Mitchell says. ''It seemed to me that the policy of less government in conjunction with gun control made sense. And everything else just kind of followed from that.''
That initial e-mail message brought out only five or six attendees. But soon after, an event took place that would give the club a campus profile it might otherwise have taken months to achieve: the attacks of Sept. 11. When a small coterie of students and professors organized vigils against the American bombing of Afghanistan, the conservatives club staged a counter-rally in support of the troops -- a kind of strategy encouraged by the Beltway-based interest groups that not only helped finance the students' activities but also helped shape them. ''Pro-troops'' and ''pro-America'' rallies were staged, simultaneously, at colleges across the country. The tactic brought results. ''Kids started coming up to us,'' Mike Boland says, ''and asking how they could join up.'' Today, the club has about 35 active members. And each issue of The Counterweight carries supportive letters from students who are not in the club.
A jump in club enrollment post-9/11 was not unique to Bucknell. According to Bryan Auchterlonie, the 24-year-old executive director of the Collegiate Network (a program administered by I.S.I.), the terrorist attacks helped to galvanize right-wing students across the nation. ''Students are upset with what they see as anti-Americanism on campuses,'' Auchterlonie says. ''Patriotism is big now.'' It's a patriotism that the national college movement has pushed to the fore as an issue that can win the sympathies of kids who are not overtly political. ''We handed out red, white and blue ribbons on the anniversary of 9/11,'' Charles Mitchell says. ''I didn't think anyone was going to take them. We ran out in half an hour.''
Besides the flag, the other potent symbol for today's young conservative movement is Ronald Reagan. Because they are too young to recall any of Reagan's live TV appearances (Mitchell, for instance, was born in 1982), today's college students tend to see the former president purely as his image makers tried to present him when he occupied the Oval Office: as a Norman Rockwellian, mist-shrouded icon of Better Times -- an idealized figure of myth. The Washington-based groups know this, and they play on it. When the Leadership Institute, a group formed by a right-wing activist, Morton Blackwell, recruits on campuses each fall, it prominently displays at its sign-up table a huge poster that includes a photograph of Reagan.
Mitchell is one of those who has fallen under the spell of the former president. His dorm-room bookshelf holds no less than four Reagan biographies, from which he is given to quoting, as if from Scripture. ''If you study what Reagan wrote and said and believed,'' Mitchell explains, ''it didn't change from at least the 1960's on. People always attack that and say he was intellectually lazy. I don't think so. The guy believed in something. He came to the presidency with three big goals: defeating communism, lowering taxes and recovering the economy. And that's what he did.'' Mitchell's support for George W. Bush derives from what he sees as one of the current president's Reagan-like qualities: a certain down-to-earth honesty. ''I don't agree with Bush's politics some of the time,'' Mitchell says, ''but he's not phony at all. When he talks, he's just a straight-up honest guy, and I love that. As politicians go, you kind of trust him.''
But a movement based on patriotism and Reagan-worship alone could not have spread so rapidly nationwide. Here's where the left has unwittingly helped to energize the conservative movement. Visit any college campus today, and you're struck by the forces of what the conservatives call overweening political correctness that have seeped into every corner of life. Same-sex hand-holding days, ''Vagina Monologues'' performances, diversity training seminars, minority support groups, ''no means no'' dating rules, textbooks purified of gender, racial or class stereotypes -- for all their good intentions, these manifestations of enforced tolerance can create a stultifying air of conformity in college life. Hence the cries for ''individual responsibility'' and ''freedom of speech'' that are the leading slogans of today's campus conservative movement -- a deliberate echo of the left-wing Free Speech movements of the 1960's and a direct appeal to the natural impulse, on the part of young people, to rebel against the powers that be.
''It's been true through recorded history that the younger generation instinctively rebels against the establishment, whatever the establishment might be, and that definitely is part of what encourages folks to join us,'' says Blackwell, a former head of the College Republicans who trained Karl Rove. ''We know we're turning the tables,'' says Manny Espinoza, the public relations director of the Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program, ''and we know it's frustrating the other side, because they know it's their stuff and now we're using it.'' Indeed, the Collegiate Network, which distributes some $200,000 a year in publishing money to 58 student newspapers, issues a handbook, ''Start the Presses!'' which explicitly counsels its conservative charges to ''loosen up,'' to, in effect, get in touch with their inner Abbie Hoffman. ''Don't strive to be thought of as 'serious' and 'respectable,''' the handbook counsels. ''On campus, those words equate to 'irrelevant and ineffective.'''
END OF PART ONE |
