GOP and Man at Yale by Daniel McCarthy

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GOP and Man at Yale

The intellectual dexterity that once distinguished campus conservatives has given way to mindless Republican boosterism.

by Daniel McCarthy
The American Conservative

"James R. Lawrence III doesn’t look like a campus misfit. The North Carolina State University senior has the kind of clean-cut, buttoned-down appearance one expects of a major in biomedical engineering, a field whose academic rigors leave little room for an “Animal House” or Abbie Hoffman way of life. But Lawrence is more unusual than his demeanor might suggest. He’s distinctly in the minority of a minority, as both a campus conservative and one who’s against the Iraq War.

In the eyes of some of his friends on the Right, that makes Lawrence really a kind of leftist. When he published an editorial for the anniversary of Hiroshima criticizing Harry Truman’s use of nuclear weapons against Japan, one of his colleagues on the campus conservative paper, The Broadside, suggested he was its “token liberal.” That isn’t surprising—student conservatives across the country tend to resent any suggestion that U.S. foreign policy could be immoral. But it is ironic, considering that one of the classic texts of postwar conservatism, Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, was written in response to the horrors of the Second World War, including America’s use of nuclear weapons. “The atomic bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity,” Weaver wrote to a friend in 1945.

Lawrence cited Weaver and Human Events founding editor Felix Morley in his article, but that counted for little. The young men and women of the Right aren’t reading much Richard Weaver these days—nor much Robert Nisbet or Russell Kirk, to name two other seminal conservative thinkers critical of modern warfare. The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.” The campus Right has almost always been more activist than intellectual, just as the wider movement has been more political than cultural. But where once students were at least familiar with the names Kirk and Weaver, or Mises and Nock, today they look to Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter for guidance. They’re little acquainted with the wisdom of the contemporary Right’s founding generation, and it shows.

Campus conservatives are not just the future of the movement, they are its present as well. Alumni of the major right-wing youth organizations fill the ranks, and hold the commanding heights, of the institutions that mold conservative orthodoxy today. American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene is a former national director of Young Americans for Freedom. Ann Coulter and National Review editor Rich Lowry are veterans of student papers affiliated with the Collegiate Network, the breeder reactor of conservative campus journalism. Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff launched their political careers as leaders of the College Republicans National Committee, as did Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed.


..... SNIP"

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_06/cover.html

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1. I know, I know... they are full of themselves. But know thine enemy.