POLITICS AUGUST 11, 2011
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Day 1
The giant, disembodied heads of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley glared down at me; they knew I was up to no good. It was the opening banquet of the National Conservative Student Conference, and I couldn’t even find a seat. I wandered through the crowd at the Hyatt Regency: flags, blue mood lighting, white tablecloths, white people, and bowties. Lots of bowties.
The banquet was in honor of Ronald Reagan’s hundredth birthday, and had been convened by Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a huge, tax-exempt national organization dedicated to saving college kids from their “tree hugging … gun taking … wealth hating ... leftist loving … professors and peers.” And it didn’t take long to realize how special this week would be for these young right-wingers. The students were already brimming with a kind of hypothetical nostalgia: for a cold war they never lived through, a president for whom they never voted, a culture war in which they never fought.
Luckily, I found myself at a full and friendly table of right-wing apparatchiks, passing around caffeine pills. I could work with this. To my right sat Anthony, who became a member of the Reagan Library while attending California Lutheran University. On my left sat Eric, a bearded theology student at Colorado Christian University (CCU).
The CCU kids were a blast, probably on account of the stimulants. “On my first day of English class in Nebraska,” Eric recounted, “they told me that all the presidents were racist slaveholders, and that we can fix all problems with communism. I was like, what?” J.T., the bespectacled student-body president at CCU, chimed in. “Did you know there are more pot shops in Denver than Starbucks?” And then there was Britney, a gorgeous, whip-smart CCU senior—she even seemed impressed by my notebook. And then … “My man is Rick Santorum.” Yikes.
Each seat at the banquet came equipped with free Reagan swag, including the DVD, Still Point In A Turning World: Ronald Reagan and his Ranch, directed by Stephen K. Bannon, which screened after a dinner keynote from Senator Marco Rubio. The documentary was pure ranch-fetishism. The film swept through three decades of chintzy stock-footage: gathering socialist storms, firefighters, soviets, steelworkers, and finally, the Gipper building fences. “To understand this great man,” intoned the narrator—Patrick Warburton, the voice of Joe Swanson on Family Guy—“you must understand his beloved ranch.”
After the banquet, I caught up with Bannon being accosted by a few fanboys, one handing him a Balanced Budget Amendment petition, and the other a business card—young conservatives tend to have these. The Tea Party auteur greeted me with a “hey dude,” and told me he was “happy with the response” to his universally panned feature-length Palin documentary, The Undefeated. It was the first time that Palin’s name had come up that evening.
In fact, so far there hadn’t been much talk of politicians or parties at all, except for the long-dead Gipper. The YAF was in the business of escapism, selling an illusory get-away from Generation Obama. These disparate young conservatives—some Christian, some libertarian, some country club—felt out of place, strangers to their peers. Throughout the conference, I saw them taking refuge in this weird wonderland, this 80s Reagan ranch fantasia. They were like real-life, non-shaggy-haired, conservative Owen Wilsons. They desperately wanted to wake up at midnight, step into a mysterious 1981 Chevy Camaro, and drive back in time to “morning in America.” They were born in the wrong decade, and here, they could be themselves.
Day 2
The next morning the disembodied heads multiplied, this time in a stuffy George Washington University auditorium. Ronnie and Bill had been joined by terrifying, glassy-eyed printouts of Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Dinesh D’Souza, Margaret Thatcher, and Jason Mattera. In the stands there sat a Kyrgyzstani delegate, a Czech, a Jewish kid in a Beatles yarmulke, some Brits from Oxford, and six kids from Poland, one with a flowing blonde mullet. The diversity was just as well. This morning was clearly going to be about race: All three of the conference’s black speakers had been scheduled almost back-to-back.
Joseph Phillips, a former "Cosby Show" star, took the podium. Asked accusingly about “problems in the black community,” Phillips dodged: “It’s a problem with the broader culture, black and white.” He looked tired and overworked. A student from Clemson University stood up. “Thank you for saying those things,” he said. “I too have experienced a lot of racism directed at me as a white man.” I looked around: nothing but nods.
The morning’s star guest was Representative Allen West, who strode up to the podium and launched into a defense of his attack on Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: “I’m sick and tired of sitting around and letting liberal progressives push us around!” The crowd went wild. A soft-spoken student was so pumped to ask West a question that he fumbled his own name. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I just got so excited!”
Unfortunately, the evening’s festivities began with a letdown. The scheduled guest, Senator Jim DeMint, had fled town for an early vacation after the debt deal. Dinesh D’Souza had also bailed. A replacement was found at the last minute: the teutonic blonde-maned Mari Will, wife of columnist George and former Reagan speechwriter.
But, far from Reagan elegy, Will’s speech was bloody red meat. (“Who knows who Maureen Dowd is?” Boos rang out.) But when she turned to a defense of the Republican political establishment, the crowd fell silent. The mention of Bachmann and Perry brought a few claps; Romney, not so much. “I know a lot of you don’t trust him,” conceded Will. “No questions?” she finally sighed. There was a painful silence, until a lone plea rang out from the front: “Will you tell us just one Reagan story?” She sighed and obliged: a quick one about Reagan improvising at the podium. “Remember,” she closed, “He wasn’t just a puppet; he was one of us … . Don’t believe what the liberals say about his Alzheimer’s.” Quickly shifting the subject away from cognitive deterioration, conservative Washington Examiner reporter Tim Carney closed the evening with a popular message: Republicans are selling the conservative movement short. “Move the party to the right!” was his biggest applause line of the night. Spoken in the wake of the debt crisis, it seemed hard to believe.
Yet, although the YAF organizers kept preaching party solidarity, the students I talked to were never in the mood for electioneering or endorsing candidates. They thought of themselves less as Republicans than torch-carriers. They dreamed of Reagan and Mari Will shaking up the welfare state on Air Force One, and would accept nothing less. Their organizing elders, who had actually been around for the Reagan revolution, could never match that kind of pure faith.
Day 3
Being a right-winger in Generation Obama is weirdly edgy—hipster, even. You get to cultivate an outsider affect, the better to look down on the so-called naïveté of your cultish peers. In this spirit, the NCSC often took on the air of a secret society, for boosting self-esteem. Young conservatives receive significant benefits by virtue of their rarity. They are lavished with both attention and funding by their elders, moneyed Republicans who really know how to put on a show.
Case in point, Alyssa Cordova, a recent graduate of George Mason University and one of CPAC’s “Stars of the Future.” The title of her speech? “Thank You, Feminism: Six Ways that Feminism Has Hurt Society.” Even here, I sensed, this would be a tough sell. “A lot of guys hate Michele Bachmann,” a guy named John had told me earlier. Why? “Well, look, she has that anti-porn pledge.” He quickly added, “Now, wait, don’t get me wrong, I don’t, like, support porn.”
Cordova railed against abortion, college women’s centers, gender-neutral bathrooms, and The Vagina Monologues. “At my campus they sold vagina lollipops! Why can’t they just do a bake sale?” Chase from the University of Oregon stood up to ask a question, carefully prefacing it with: “Women, I think they’re good. They’re great!” The kids’ questions again tended toward the self-conscious: how could they fight campus cultures of promiscuity without becoming social outcasts? “You shouldn’t care that people will think you’re sexist, or racist, or whatever … . So what if they get offended!” Cordova closed to polite applause.
Afterward, I ran into Britney, and asked her what she thought of the speech. “It’s liberalism, not feminism that’s the problem,” she said. “If feminism didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have the right to vote. That speech was a disgrace.” Unfortunately, this ray of light was quickly interrupted by the next speaker: Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat and former Reagan treasurer.
Buchanan covered all the bases. She told Reagan stories. She extolled the tea party. She made the kids feel better about their social exclusion. And she spoke of the passing of her generation, and the rise of theirs. “Like Reagan, one person can make a difference!” She was practically shouting over applause now. “Get involved, stay on the field, fight!” The kids seemed to have forgotten the feminists, the debt deal, affirmative action, 2008, the 1990s. Their self-conscious angst had been replaced by backslapping and hollering. It was like a revival meeting for awkward middle schoolers. The noise was deafening, and people around me were rising to their feet. I dropped my pen. “Be the young leaders that this great country deserves!” As a double standing ovation rolled through the crowd, I felt myself unconsciously clapping as well. Crowd psychology is a hell of a drug.
“It’s your time,” yelled Bay. “What do you believe? What do you believe?”
Alex Klein is an intern at The New Republic.
19 comments
Very good article! These people are scary as hell!!
- rover27
August 11, 2011 at 1:09am
You might think that after a few years of being my Army unit's token tree-hugging, anti-gun, academia-&-arts-loving lefty loon, the scenes described in Alex's article wouldn't seem so creepy to me. And I'm a Carolinian, so I'm used to the struggle of preserving my head's ability to not explode while absorbing an abundance of uberright wing gibberish in all environments. Yet as I read this, my reaction to the report from this disturbing event devolved into a series of cringes & shudders. No beautiful young woman should sully herself by posing for a photo with Jim DeMint's book. And this travesty is doubled here! {faints dead away}
- Konstantin
August 11, 2011 at 1:30am
Actually, they seem like some students of mine who are caught between desiring to engage and wanting never to be challenged. They read deliberately provocative statements (e.g. Founding Fathers were racists and/or slaveholders) designed to break up assumptions as statements of rigid orthodoxy that they have to buckle under to or they'll get a D-. They feel uncomfortable with precisely the open debate they claim is denied them.
- ironyroad
August 11, 2011 at 1:31am
I would like to see more articles that cross the line between culture and politics, provided the culture part doesn't get the usual bumpkin treatment. In my home state almost all college age kids are conservative; though many describe themselves as libertarian, they aren't. Issues that once separated conservative and liberal, such as race, aren't so relevant anymore. As this article points out, there's a universal nostalgia for Reagan, even though these young people weren't born yet or were too young at the time to have any concrete memory of it. The main lesson learned from the Reagan era, that government is the problem, contrasts sharply with the government benefits they enjoy, ranging from public universities to government subsidized loans or grants. It must be the culture not the politics that has so influenced young people. My culture question: why do young, smart, highly educated women talk funny. It's a cross between Valley Girl and Ivy League done with a flat, nasal, mid-western accent. Anbody have an answer to that culture question.
- rayward
August 11, 2011 at 7:13am
The forming of the conservative mind? This was well done. I knew there had to be some sort of coven for reassuring these people that they are not in error but that it's the fault of the broader society for not being conservative enough. And the divinity of Reagan! It should be shameful for any religious person to bear, but I guess since some of these people are zealots, it means they don't critically examine their own ideas and contradictions.
- chaitless
August 11, 2011 at 7:14am
I dunno, to me they seem like pretty typical kids trying to figure out who the hell they are. When I was 21 I and five of my fellow chain-smoking philosophy majors piled into a Country Squire to drive four hours to hear an unintelligible lecture by Jacques Derrida. (He was resplendent in an Italian suit sporting a tan worthy of George Harrison.) I reckon if that fumbling exercise in group intellectual exploration (and binge drinking) had been recorded by a scribe as observant as Mr (Ms?) Klein it would have yielded many moments at least as cringeworthy as anything at the NCSC.
- AaronW
August 11, 2011 at 8:13am
Oh, how I remember when a carton of Marlboros was ten bucks in the Old Dominion and Food Lion sold Bugler roll-your-own tobacco two packs for fifty cents and twelve-packs of Black Label for three dollars. Those were the days...
- AaronW
August 11, 2011 at 8:31am
Didn't Stephen Glass write about something like this 15-odd years ago?
- wildboy
August 11, 2011 at 8:44am
Here's my two cent explanation for the young folks' Reagan nostalgia: it's the same as the Eisenhower nostalgia during the 1960s and 1970s. And what's the explanation. Both Eisenhower and Reagan were president following two tumultuous decades, in Eisenhower's case, the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War in the 1940s, and in Reagan's case, the social revolution of the 1960s and the economic upheavel (inflation, oil embargo) and political scandals (Watergate) of the 1970s. What the nation longed for after those tumultuous years was, well, nothing, nothing tumultuous anyway, and many young folks picked up that nostalgia from their parents, parents who would talk about how much better and simpler life was back then. In my generation, there were plenty of young folks who resisted the social revolution and longed for a return to the Eisenhower years they learned about from their parents, just like many young people today who long for a return to the Reagan years they learned about from their parents. Of course, in both cases, they longed for a myth.
- rayward
August 11, 2011 at 11:53am
I long for the Clinton years again. I really do.
- Konstantin
August 11, 2011 at 12:09pm
rayward, do you recall that Justice Dept woman, a Bush appointee, who was testifying before Congress in 2007 on the issue of the firing of U.S. Attorneys who didn't get with the program? She was in her mid-thirties, but if you just heard her voice e.g. on NPR news you would have pegged her as a 17-year old just out of high school. Maybe there's something that makes young women in conservative circles try to shield their own ambitions, personalities, etc from criticism by nurturing a kind of 'girlie' vocalization that emphasizes vulnerability and femininity?
- ironyroad
August 11, 2011 at 12:46pm
irony... I think the other side to the coin of many young women these days trying to sound "young" i.e. the girlish vocalization, the combination of valley-girl speak, text acronyms, and the work "like" as a phonetic pause-button is all linked back to the very notion that they (those under 30 years old) consider themselves "girls" instead of a woman. Somehow the very designation of calling someone who is 21, 25, 28 a woman is somehow an insult to the pop-culture inculcation that they all grew up with in the 90s. My wife, 11 years my junior at 28, considers herself a girl, even though she is very much all woman. It's a strange thing indeed and it's not limited to only young conservative women but simply women between the ages of 20 and 30 that contain that subconscious mindset.
- singlspeed
August 11, 2011 at 1:17pm
'Word' not 'work' and "is all linked" should read "are all linked". Apologies for the grammatical thumb typing.
- singlspeed
August 11, 2011 at 1:21pm
Sounds like a lot of opportunities to divide and conquer. Just sayin'...
- Tobbar
August 11, 2011 at 1:42pm
These kids seem a bit paralyzed by the world today. They don't want to think about the reality of it, so they withdraw to Mommy and Daddy's world. It's one of the many ways that people don't grow up. This includes the "adult" speakers at the event. Reality is so ugly that even, yes, conservatives feed big-time at the government trough and do all the corrupt things that liberals are accused of. I can't blame these future Tea Partiers for not wanting to think about the corruption they will add to the world. But learning to think starts with being critical of yourself and your beliefs. Let's hope a few of these kids can eventually escape the prison that their non-thinking compatriots are in. There's always hope, even in the real world.
- magboy47.
August 11, 2011 at 2:21pm
Reagan slashed social programs like Head Start. Interestingly both Dylan Kleybold and Eric Harris were both born in 1981. Does this show a relationship between cuts in Social Programs and violence in teens? I don't know, I have an IQ right around 95 about the same as most Republicans.
- DDS112097
August 11, 2011 at 2:41pm
On another note. My two oldest children went to a fundamentalist church camp this last weekend. The church that my wife and children attend is extremely liberal. So, this was quite an experience for my kids. The oldest referred to the Youth Group leader as a Jesus drill instructor who yelled at the kids that they are not christian if they don't give their lives to Jesus, realize that God has a plan for you and there is nothing you can do to change that plan, and that if you don't accept Jesus and let God run your life you are going to hell. Luckily, my 14 year old kept here mouth shut and did not become confrontational. She enjoyed everything about the camp except for the Jesus part. The Jesus Drill Instructor gave them a sheet to list what in this world is more important than God. It was a trick question as nothing is more important than God. My oldest wrote a paragraph and a half about things she thinks are more important than God. Can't tell that Dad is an agnostic.
- DDS112097
August 11, 2011 at 2:52pm
singlespeed -- that's an interesting point. I think it was different in the 70s and 80s and I wonder when it changed. I remember an episode of "Rosanne" in which DJ (I think) has a girlfriend who says at one point in the story "Honestly! I'm a fourteen-year-old woman, for heaven's sake!" It's meant to be adolescent and funny, of course, but the joke is entirely dependent upon girls claiming to be women, not women claiming to be girls.
- ironyroad
August 11, 2011 at 3:27pm
Cheap thrills here. If you want to make fun of college kids for being incoherent, you can do it all day-- like shooting fish in a barrel. But I certainly wouldn't assert that the GOP/teaparty kids profiled here tend to be any less informed than their progressive counterparts. Nor would I assert that this gives any meaningful look at the way conservative ideas are formed. This article doesn't explicitly make either of these assertions, of course, but it seems to me that the author must know it will be read that way. And allowing readers to think that this gives any meaningful insight into what makes young Republicans tick is just counterproductive-- it doesn't help fix what needs to be fixed in our political discourse, and actually makes things worse by giving progressives an excuse to believe that they're just more coherent than their ideological opponents. Put another way, if you believe (as I do) that Reagan's legacy has been profoundly harmful and think that it's important to help wean young Americans off his anti-government rhetoric, the way to do it is NOT to selectively make fun of a few ideologically incoherent college kids. And really, that's the main thing this article does. Lame & part of the problem.
- mattsie
August 12, 2011 at 12:25am