A Patronizing Look at Campus Conservatives

Interviewing self-described conservative
undergraduates at a pair of colleges that they identify only as “Eastern Elite”
and “Western Flagship” – one an Ivy League school, the other the main campus of
a state university system in the West – the authors discover very different
sets of conservative “styles” at the two institutions. Among conservatives at
Flagship, they say, “provocation is mainstream,” as demonstrated by an
“eye-popping event known as the Affirmative Action Bake Sale,” where, to
underscore the injustice of group preferences, Young Republicans charge
different prices based on group identity. Conservatives at Elite, the authors
tell us, are too “intellectual” to conceive of such a stunt, which the authors
clearly find shocking and tasteless.

Indeed, conservatives at Elite, where liberals are in the clear
majority, “complain much less about their
liberal peers than do students at Western Flagship,” where moderates outnumber
liberals. A few Elite conservatives employ what the authors characterize as
“highbrow provocation…a pedigreed National Review style.” But most
reject provocation tout court, instead “comport[ing] themselves almost as if by an unwritten code of
conduct, to which all other members of the Eastern Elite community…likewise
adhere.” Rather than provocation, in short, conservatives at Elite opt for what the authors
label “civilized discourse.” Why? Because, the authors repeatedly insist, Elite
has a “strong institutional culture of civilized discourse,” exercising an influence that “so strongly…favor[s] civilized
discourse” that “civilized discourse drowns out all alternatives.” 

So,
at least, claim the authors. But their own interviews tell a different
story.  One member of Elite’s pro-life
group recalled designing posters in which fetuses said what they wanted to be
when they grew up. “People hated them . . . tore them down and defaced them.
But I learned from that experience.” The authors’ comment on this story? That
“the pro-life group…didn’t like the controversy they were creating and dumped
those tactics for the civilized discourse style that seemed more appropriate
for their campus.” The authors miss entirely the real point of the story: that
tearing down and defacing posters isn’t “civilized” – it’s vandalism. They
don’t understand that what this anecdote illustrates is the taming of Elite
conservatives by leftist students who feel righteous and powerful – and who
know they won’t get in trouble for committing vandalism, so long as it’s the
right kind. The authors have presented an account of ideological tyranny – and
don’t even realize it.

So it goes. One Elite conservative
notes that every day, it seems, the school paper “bashes Sarah Palin,” calling her “dumb” and “a
religious nutcase.” Another says that when she’s in groups of students, “you’ll
very often hear people…talking about how crazy or bigoted or irrational
conservatives are.” A third says that “in a lot of my lectures…there were a
lot of Sarah Palin jokes” by faculty. And a fourth mentions a roommate who said
at dinner “that she was going to vote for John
McCain….and for an hour a couple of people…said that she was denying
children education and she was sending soldiers to their death. And she came
back to my room crying.”  Yet the authors continue to praise Elite’s “civility,” to assert
that students and faculty alike “regard the classroom as an unacceptable space
in which to grind one’s political axe,” and that if Elite conservatives eschew
provocation it’s because they belong to a sophisticated community that “requires a more refined mode of political expression.” 

Yet what their evidence
actually shows is that their Elite interviewees have been tamed.  It makes sense: a conservative who gets into a
hard-left Ivy school is likely to know something about “playing the game.” One such student, recalling a
Palin-bashing prof, says she’d certainly never “walk up to him and say, ‘I
support Sarah Palin,’ because it’s just, you know, that’s just something that
you learn when you’re
like six. If you want to make people
happy, you say what they say.” She knows that at a place like Elite, a
conservative who speaks her mind as vigorously as liberals do risks losing all.
Another student observes that while it’s common in Elite classrooms for
liberals to deliver rambling political rants, conservatives never answer back
because that would be “inappropriate.” The word appropriate crops up in
another Elite student’s statement that even
at dinner with dorm friends she’d “never say I voted for John McCain…because
it just would…it’s just not really a socially appropriate thing to do.” One
student puts it this way: at Elite “there is a kind of sense that people
wouldn’t necessarily talk in class if they were conservative, so there was kind
of an underground feeling.” 

The authors call this
civility. Some might use another word. Perhaps
the aptest way to sum up the situation at Elite is this: the liberals are out
and proud, while the conservatives, with few exceptions, are closeted.  Some have been intimidated, bullied, even
terrorized into being closeted. And the authors like it that way. Their prose
drips with condescension toward the conservative kids at Flagship, whose
robust, unapologetic expression of their conservatism and willingness to
challenge their professors’ politics the authors consider the sign of people
with “aggregate lower SAT scores.” (The authors insist they’re not putting down
Flagship students’ intelligence – but they keep doing just that.) Unlike the Elite
conservative who keeps mum in the face of ranting liberal profs because she
wants “to make people happy,” a student at Western Public (a college in
Flagship’s state system) tells how she responded to a history professor who
said Obamacare opponents “sit in their houses with tin foil on their heads”:
she went up after class and told him that he was insulting her family and
neighbors.

What do the authors make of this?
They suggest the girl was inspired by “the taste for confrontation supported by
[conservative] student organizations” at her school. It doesn’t cross their
minds that her conduct was admirable – founded in self-respect, integrity, and
a willingness to “speak truth to power” (an activity that people like the
authors don’t seem to recognize when the power is on the left and the speakers
are on the right). For them, troublemakers like this girl form an unpleasant
contrast to the Elite conservatives whom they admire for rejecting the national
GOP’s “highly partisan confrontational tactics” – exemplified, in their view,
by “Sarah Palin’s mocking tone” at the 2008 GOP convention about “Barack
Obama’s history of community organizing.” Like liberal students’ vandalism,
Democrats’ Palin-mocking plainly doesn’t register, in the authors’ minds, as confrontational.

Needless to say, if these student
conservatives were being harassed, insulted, and worse because they were, say,
black or female, the authors would treat it as a casus belli; they would
not view acquiescience in prejudice as “civility”; and they’d recognize
the bravery of those who resist. But because the kids are conservatives, the
authors are clueless about what they’re reporting on here. Wood neatly
demonstrated this cluelessness in a recent interview, suggesting that the fact that some liberal kids turn
conservative at college disproves the notion that universities are sites of
“liberal indoctrination.” Wood doesn’t grasp why truly liberal-minded young
people, confronted with what goes by the name of liberal nowadays, would start
identifying as conservatives. In sum, Becoming Right is fascinating and
illuminating – but in ways of which the authors are entirely unaware.   

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Bruce
Bawer’s latest book is The Victims’
Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.