LUDIC LOG

According to this article in the New York Times magazine, the hip new thing on college campuses these days is to be a conservative. Yes, among the nation's ever-trendy youth, embracing a reactionary, dominant political critique is the way to go!

The article takes pains to point out that this is some sort of reaction to the stifling speech codes and overweening political correctness allegedly found in our institutes of higher learning. I have spoken elswhere of the largely fictitious nature of campus liberalism; the purported domination of academia by Marxist fellow-travelers, where it exists at all, is largely confined to liberal arts departments where the conservative-minded student is rarely to be found. It is rare in history, economics and journalism, unheard-of in the sciences, and virtually non-existent in business, medicine and law -- the very disciplines to which most of the climbers portrayed in the article are drawn. The speech codes don't exist in most state schools, whose attendance far surpasses those of the elite schools on which the article focuses.

But even if quads and dorm rooms from Miami to Seattle were really the cartoons of Berkeley-style PC orthodoxy they are portrayed as in the pundit press, what good would a conservative reaction be? When you leave school and get out into the real world, one of the first things you notice is that the rarefied academic air of political correctness and well-crafted diversity evaporates. The atmosphere of liberal domination becomes invisible; there are no speech codes and no tut-tutting authorities frowning on politically incorrect talk to be found anywhere in the private sector, where the majority of graduates will spend their lives. Outside of the campuses, there are almost no institutions dominated by liberalism; not government, not the military, not industry, not the law, not medicine, certainly not business. (Not even, despite the tropes of the right, the media.) Complaining about the oppressive nature of liberalism on elite college campuses strikes one as akin to complaining about the rigorous hair grooming codes in the military. It is devoutly to be hoped that once these tools graduate and discover that the liberalism they claim to be reacting against scarcely exists in American society outside of academia, they will realize how completely hollow their 'rebellion' truly is.

While we are presented with a snapshot of 'big tent' campus Republicanism that hardly resembles that of the whitebread rich-kid college conservatives of the past, a closer reading hardly supports this image. Of the two girls profiled, one is the girlfriend of Charles Mitchell, and despite the harping on ethnic and class inclusivness, not only are all the interviewees white, they're also all fairly well-off. There's a somewhat fuzzy attempt to portray some of them as "middle-class", but it's unconvincing in the extreme. Whitebread millionaire's son Tom Elliott ("his father is Bently Elliott, former director of speechwriting for Ronald Reagan") is contrasted with "determinedly middle-class" Michael Boland, who "can afford Bucknell's $35,000 in tuition and fees only with the help of financial aid". Leaving aside the fact that Boland would presumably oppose the big-government programs that allow him to attend college at an elite university, there are tens of thousands of other students, isolated in unsexy state schools, unable to afford thirty-five grand a year even with financial aid. (These young conservatives, obviously, foresee future careers for themselves that make paying off such gargantuan debt unproblematic.) Adding to this stratified class snapshot are the mentions of Mitchell as a "middle-class kid" (from a tony Philadelphia suburb) and Weezer-t-shirt-wearing Allison Kasic as a judge's daughter. No one growing up poor or dark is to be found in this club, which leads one to wonder how diverse the new conservativism really is.

There is, of course, much fun to be had in the article, intentional and otherwise. From the literally sophomoric sense of humor displayed by Charles Mitchell (he has a Hillary Clinton doormat outside his dorm room reading "Wipe Liberally") to the designation of a group of young conservatives at Howard University as "hip-hop Republicans" to the bathed-in-glory reminiscences of Ronald Reagan by a bunch of people who were in third grade when he left office, the article is good for plenty of laughter through the tears. At one point, Mitchell blurts out the unintentionally hilarious line "I'm not a Buchanan conservative. I'm a D'Souza conservative." One wonders if this was just a hamhanded attempt to defuse charges of racism (in the context of the article, it certainly seems to be), or whether Mitchell just thinks that Buchanan hasn't written enough articles praising imperialism and colonialism lately.

Particularly amusing are the attempts to portray these hapless reactionaries as the advance guard of hipsterism; special care is taken to mention their allegedly cutting-edge appearance and tastes. Here's a kid in jeans, a t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap (as if this wasn't frat-boy standard issue for the last 10 years at least)! Here's a guy flaunting convention by spiking his hair and dyeing it blond, following in the iconoclastic footsteps of demonic rebels like Lance Bass! Here's a young fellow in full-on goth regalia, which surely must make his fellow moony nerds want to flock to the Grand Old Party. But even this limp hipness would be more impressive if it wasn't so...well...orchestrated: the private special interest groups that fund these sorts of conservative clubs "encourage a hipper look". Bryan Auchterlone, the director of the shadowy 'Collegiate Network' (one of the private groups encouraging anti-liberal campus reaction), deliberately tells students to cultivate a hipster appearance, saying "what conservatives really need help on is how to be cool on campus". The implication (hardly needed) being that it's not generally something they can accomplish on their own.

And it's these private groups -- groups like the Collegiate Network, Young Americans for Freedom, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Leadership Institute, which offer training in "conservative leadership", subsidize trips to meet with leading right-wing lights, fund speaking engagements on campuses by conservative lecturers, and hand out free cash money to start conservative newspapers on campuses -- that are the most disturbing aspect of the whole 'hipublican' vibe. Despite the best efforts of the students to portray themselves as a grass-roots reaction to suffocating collegiate correctness, the involvement of these heavily funded private institutions make the whole thing smack of Beltway propaganda, of a youth movement that didn't grow organically but was hatched in the brain of a PR-minded Republican hack and nursed along like a Romper Room political action committee by some back-room overachievers. In the 1960s, there were no such multi-million-dollar sources of funding for campus protesters, nor were any needed; like all genuine youth movements, it developed more or less spontaneously until it caught on, as cultural memes do, like a virus. If there's one thing genuinely hip people have in common, it's that they can sniff a phony a mile away. However misguided it may often be, there really is such a thing as genuine reaction. But brother...this ain't it.