Letters to a Young Conservative Read online

  Libertarianism is a philosophy of government, but conservatism is a philosophy of life. The libertarians want to contract the domain of government to expand the domain of personal liberty. For the most part, conservatives support this. But on the question of how liberty is to be used, on the central question of what constitutes the good life, libertarianism is largely silent.

  The central libertarian principle is freedom, and to defend freedom, some libertarians find themselves arguing that whatever people choose is always right. But one could arrive at this view only from the premise that human nature is so good that it is virtually flawless. In reality, human nature is flawed, and freedom is frequently used badly. Conservatives understand this. Conservatives defend freedom not because they believe in the right to do as you please, but because freedom is the precondition for virtue. It is only when people choose freely that they can choose the good. Without freedom there is no virtue: A coerced virtue is no virtue at all.

  Consider an example that contrasts the conservative and libertarian views of freedom. If you said to a libertarian, “What if 300 million Americans opt to become pornographers like Larry Flynt? Would that constitute a good society?” While the conservative would emphatically answer no, the pure libertarian would have to answer yes, because these people have chosen freely. As this example illustrates, libertarianism is a philosophy of choice without political concern for what people actually choose. Thus, although many libertarians live virtuously, libertarianism as a philosophy is indifferent to virtue. In this respect it differs markedly from conservatism.

  Admittedly, vast areas of programmatic agreement exist between libertarians and conservatives. Both believe that the federal government has grown prodigiously and that it needs to be severely curbed. Even on social issues, libertarians and conservatives are often on the same side, although not always for the same reasons. A few years ago, I heard a conversation between a conservative and a libertarian. The conservative said, “I am distressed by the idea of fornication in public parks.” The libertarian replied, “I am distressed by the idea of public parks.” And on the policy issue in question, the two found themselves in happy agreement.

  Conservatives, like libertarians, resist looking to the government to redistribute income. But on some occasions, conservatives are willing to use the power of government to foster virtue. Libertarians find this appalling. “If you won’t trust the government with your money,” one of them said to me, “how can you trust it with your soul?” Well, nobody is putting the government in charge of morality or salvation. But government policy does influence behavior, and conservatives are not averse to using the instruments of government, such as the presidential bully pulpit or the incentive structure of the tax code, to promote decent institutions (such as intact families) and decent behavior (such as teenage sexual abstinence).

  The issue that best illustrates the libertarian-conservative disagreement is the drug war. Libertarians say that the “war against drugs” has been a failure, and this seems to be true. But what if the antidrug effort could be conducted in such a way that it was a success? Libertarians would still have to oppose it because in principle they are against the idea of the government regulating drugs. Conservatives, who may agree with libertarians that our current antidrug campaign is imprudent and inefficient, would generally have no problem with a more sensible campaign that effectively reduced the use and abuse of hard drugs.

  Chris, I am not asking you to relinquish your libertarian beliefs. But I think your libertarianism would be intellectually richer if it were integrated into a more comprehensive conservative philosophy that advanced a substantive vision of the good life and the good society. In other words, the best argument for freedom is not that it is an end in itself but that it is the necessary prerequisite for choosing what is right. Think about it.

  3

  The Education of a Conservative

  Dear Chris,

  I am glad that you found my letters contrasting conservatism and liberalism (and distinguishing both from libertarianism) to be helpful. You pronounce yourself a “libertarian conservative,” and this seems to me an excellent way to preserve your libertarian economic philosophy within a broader conservative worldview.

  Let me go on to address your questions about how I became a conservative, and how I became involved with the conservative movement at Dartmouth. I arrived at Dartmouth in the fall of 1979, having come to the United States the previous year as a Rotary exchange student from Bombay, India. Dartmouth was entirely new to me. I had never visited the campus before; I am not even sure that I had heard of Dartmouth when I applied. But my host family in Arizona convinced me that it was an Ivy League institution and that I should attend. They left out the part about the snow.

  I started out at Dartmouth as a pretty typical Asian American student. My plans were to major in economics and to earn an advanced degree in business, either in the United States or in London. I enjoyed writing, however, and signed up to write for the campus newspaper, the Dartmouth. I learned the basics of journalism and wrote several news stories during my freshman year. Toward the end of the year, a major schism occurred at “The D.” The editor of the paper came out of the closet as a conservative. He began to write editorials supporting the candidacy of Ronald Reagan for president; the other editors, scandalized by this offense, began the process of getting him fired. They succeeded, and the brash young editor, Gregory Fossedal, resolved to start an alternative weekly newspaper. He called it the Dartmouth Review, and modeled it after William F. Buckley’s National Review.

  I was not a conservative. I had never heard of National Review. In fact, I didn’t see myself as political. In retrospect, I realize that by the end of my freshman year my views were mostly liberal. If you had said “capitalism,” I would have said “greed.” If you had said “Reagan,” I would have said “washed-up former actor.” If you had said “El Salvador,” I would have said, “another Vietnam.” If you had said “morality,” I would have said, “can’t legislate it.” These were not reasoned convictions. Rather, I was carried by the tide. A liberal current flows on most college campuses, and the more prestigious the campus, the stronger the current. If you do not recognize this, you will surely be swept along. The only way to avoid this is to actively resist the waves.

  Although I had acquiesced in the prevailing liberal weltanshauung, I was by no means a radical. Indeed, during my freshman year I was offended by much of the radicalism on campus, but I had no coherent way to think about it or to express my dissatisfaction. For instance, during our convocation ceremony, a very dignified affair, the college chaplain said to our freshman class, “I want each of you to look to the student on your right, and the student on the left. One of the three of you will have a homosexual experience to climax before you graduate.” Personally, I found this a bit shocking. Indeed, I looked to my left and right, and I resolved to avoid those two guys for the rest of my days at Dartmouth.

  I was also troubled by the radicalism of the feminist professors on campus. These women made statements to the effect that all males were potential rapists. One professor said she could barely walk around the Dartmouth campus because the tall tower of Baker Library upset her so deeply. To her, the tall buildings at Dartmouth were “phallic symbols.” I swear, this woman’s definition of a phallic symbol was anything that was longer than it was wide. And because these women were famous for bringing their politics into the classroom, your grade was likely to suffer if you didn’t agree with them.

  Another phenomenon I found puzzling was the anti-Americanism of many foreign students. We had foreign students who were on full scholarship at one of the most beautiful campuses in the world, yet they spent their time bitterly complaining, and some even found Dartmouth responsible for their “institutional oppression.” Iranian students who had been sent to America to study by the Shah had now become ardent supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose social policies they deplored but whose anti-Americanism they found delightful a
nd exhilarating. At the time I did not know what to make of these things.

  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.

  4

  Pig Wrestling at Dartmouth

  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.”