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the right stuff
The microphone squeals. "Speak up!" someone yells from the back. The crowded eating area of the University Memorial Center is the staging area for the protest–or, if you want to get technical, the counter-protest–to the demonstration. Like a jostled hive, the Boulder campus is abuzz over the fact that only a hundred yards away at an outdoor kiosk the now infamous "Affirmative Action Bake Sale" is selling cookies and muffins at prices that are determined by one’s race. The College Republicans (who already have a slight image problem in a city known as the state’s liberal love nook) are holding the event as a demonstration against what they see as the unfairness of race-based admissions. In response to what is clearly a racist affront to multicultural programs everywhere, the campus liberals have marshaled half-a-dozen student groups, including the Black Student Alliance, Asian Unity, United Mexican American Students and Food Not Bombs. The crowd is already pretty worked up, and Duran continues ticking off the low numbers of minority enrollment at CU that confirm what everybody in the room already believes: In order to foster diversity, colleges and universities must take active steps to ensure that underrepresented voices are heard in classrooms. This understood, however, a listener almost half-expects the left-wing Duran, as per the recent storm of complaints by CU Republicans and state lawmakers, to then list off the low amount of conservative professors at CU. But this is the nature of the debate on campuses these days, a rhetorical brain-twister where both sides are using the same language to argue for different points. Or, wait, are they different? The liberals think so but, uh, can’t fully articulate it. They just know this is bad–bad, bad, bad! And that is exactly the way the College Republicans want their counterparts thinking. Young and the restless While the words "media" or "controversy" will likely send CU football players shrieking toward the safety of Dal Ward Athletic Center, they couldn’t sound sweeter to Brad Jones, the chairman of the CU College Republicans. The Karl Rove of the CU campus, the 20-year-old communications major is one of the main brains behind the right-wing group’s dramatic upswing in activity in recent months, including the acerbic bake sale. After the UMC counter-demonstrators made their way to the Ekeley kiosk, the three-by-four-foot bake sale table seemed ridiculously small when compared to the 10-person-deep mob of angry liberals elbowing around it. It’s all working out far better than Jones ever imagined. Perhaps the best part was the vice chancellor of student affairs’ ingenious attempt to avoid more campus controversy by trying to block the bake sale, a heavily publicized student demonstration, from taking place. Suddenly a mediocre news hook became a lead story, and now reporters from nearly every major newspaper and TV outlet in Colorado are covering this event. Wiping large flakes of fallen snow from his geek glasses, lips tightened in his patented smirk, Jones makes no effort to conceal his amusement over the mayhem he’s created. "We’re playing from the liberal’s rulebook man," Jones says gleefully, which only seems to stir greater anger in the pro-Affirmative Action demonstrators encircling him. "Going to court and being outrageous and being silly is something that liberals have had a monopoly on for years!" Students like Jones are part of a new breed of young conservatives being birthed from the haunches of campus cultures from Berkeley to Burlington. In style, they more resemble the scrappy activists of the ’60s and ’70s then the loafer-wearing business majors that typified College Republicans in the past. But their efficiency at getting out their anti-liberal message is also due in large part to the institutional support structure provided by conservative think-tanks and other right-wing organizations (in Colorado, say hello to the Golden-based Independence Institute.) They’ve been called the "Hipublicans" by the New York Times, the "New Right" by others, but whatever the term, these young ideologues are passionate, well organized and media-savvy. And the left, already in the midst of a mid-life crisis, can only shake its fist at these new rebels and reminisce about its own disappearing youth. Right turn Since Jones took the helm of the CU College Republicans in fall of 2003, its single-digit membership has increased five-fold. This was evident at their final meeting last semester where, even though finals were in full-swing, about 35 students turned out to help Jones strategize the next semester’s PR events. Their group had just recently gained praise from local conservatives–and scorn from everyone else–for bringing right-wing pundit Ann Coulter to speak at Macky Auditorium. Blond and caustic as ever, Coulter demonstrated to campus conservatives that the best way to engage liberals in conversation was by infuriating them, and in Boulder she found many more than willing participants. According to Jones, the polarizing event also helped sway many non-politicized students toward his group. "It is true that people will already come to school with a particular bend politically," he says, "but there are also a lot of people who are sitting on the fence. And especially after bringing out Coulter, we found a lot of people who are really taking a hard look at which side of the fence they want to fall on." Most of the young people gathered in the basement auditorium label themselves as conservative, though what that means seems to vary from person to person. Some are borderline Libertarians or fiscal conservatives who extol the benefits of free trade, open markets and small government. Some arrive at their conservatism through religion and march in the moralistic ranks of the Christian Right. When the nitty-gritty of their beliefs come up there is much to disagree about. But their single strongest unifying factor is the isolation these students describe in being the few outspoken conservatives on CU’s ultra-progressive campus. But even that’s beginning to change. A recent survey by the UCLA says that more U.S. college freshmen are identifying themselves as "conservative" or "far right," 23 percent in 2003, while the "liberal" label declined a point to 24 percent. Nationwide, The Economist reports, College Republicans have tripled their membership in the past three years, "increasing their chapters from 409 to 1,148 and recruiting 22,000 new members in 2002 alone." These numbers coincide with polls that chart the overall views of young Americans in general as taking an ideological shift rightward. The survey also noted that today’s college students are markedly different from their parent’s generation at this age. Today’s students drink less, smoke less, attend church more and report wanting to raise a family more then students in the ’60s. Another contrasting value trend is students focused on "being very well off financially," rose from 42 percent in 1966 to 74 percent last year, while those reporting a wish to develop "a meaningful philosophy of life" has crashed from 86 percent in 1967 to 39 percent in 2003. Rich white men? Theirs was a right-wing love story. He was the chairman of the Campus Libertarians; she the president of the Federalist Society. They met up one day three years ago to discuss how they could expand their conservative campaigns and ended up, sniff, expanding each other’s hearts. Since they were married eight months ago Flux Neo, 27, and Tamara Louden, 36, have been the First Couple of campus conservatives–and also a reminder of how looks can be deceiving. With Neo’s shaved head, tattoos and piercings and Louden’s cropped hair, the two look like they should be skulking on street corners with clipboards and yellow Greenpeace jackets rather then lobbying for conservative causes. This is also true of many of the conservative students who don’t fit the collective image of young Republicans as affluent white males trolling for business connections. Many are decidedly middle-class and outfitted in the usual 20-something garb of spiky hair, goatees and faded jeans. But this doesn’t mean that Neo, a double major in political science and communication, necessarily blends into his classes. "I think that it’s important to be as outspoken as possible when in classrooms," Neo announced at the College Republicans meeting. What he perhaps enjoys most is confronting the assertion that all conservatives grew up in privileged backgrounds or "have all the power" in society. As Neo will tell you (and he will tell you) he was raised in foster care in California and Arizona after his mom left and his father could no longer afford to take care of him and his younger brother. Being of half-Mexican descent, Neo says that he grew up around "Vato culture" and became involved with drugs, violence and crime when he was teenager. In an effort to escape that life, Neo took off to Europe and traveled for a few years as a techno DJ. After eventually ending up at CU, Neo almost immediately became involved in student government–his ideological shtick, he says, is a belief in "personal responsibility." In 2002, Neo ran for a position on the Board of Regents as a Libertarian. With Louden working as his campaign manager and Donald Rumsfeld working as his political roll model, ("He’s a modern John Wayne, forthright and frank,") Neo managed to pull about 5 percent of the vote here in Boulder. Harpooning a liberal "I would say that young conservatives now tend to be more of the Reaganite, ideologically purer breed of conservatives," Jones says. "And it’s good for us because that type of person, that type of activist, are the ones that like to get out and raise a lot of hell and fight for the issues." Conservative activist? To many Boulderites this sounds like a contradiction in terms, if not blasphemy–Abbie Hoffman must be spinning! But before Boulder liberals start planning a banner-drop in protest, they should first be active in something that they are already so good at: looking inward.
Many young conservatives who say they are constantly shouted down as being racist or Nazis for speaking candidly feel the need to become even louder and even co-opt those tactics used by their opponents. Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author who is credited with coining the term "politically correct," came up with another phrase "harpooning a liberal," which he describes in his book Letters to a Young Conservative. "One way to be effective as a conservative," he writes, "is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most and then keep doing it." David Horowitz, another pundit who makes his living thinking about lefties, puts it another way in his book Left Illusions: "Employing the aggressive style of the left to combat the left is a self-conscious attempt . . . to take away the moral high ground from which the left launches its attack." This can be thought of as the young conservative version of "freaking out the squares." At the meeting last semester Jones stands before the group, tongue firmly implanted in cheek, seeking suggestions for next semester’s events. The Conservative Coming Out Day is popular. And the Affirmative Action Bake Sale, which has been utilized by dozens of conservative campus groups in other states, draws the most cheers. They have to be careful about it though, Jones tells them. They will certainly be branded racist, but they have to not react in anger. "The goal is to get shut down, basically," he says, adding, "and then all the media shows up and we’re victims." The group laughs. The point here is to not only piss off liberals, Jones points out, but it’s also a kind of ideological ju-jitsu. Use the momentum of your opponent, in this case left-wing anger, to expose how irrational your opponent is, gain media exposure and thereby further your cause–a tactic taken directly out of the progressive playbook. For this ploy to work, of course, one needs a straight-man, someone to be outraged or react violently. And on many campuses, often times the only thing one can bet on is that the liberals will be outraged. Identity politics For anyone wishing to engage in quality political debate these days, the destination is obvious. Blogs. The conservative website Cuz We Said So recently tackled the often pondered issue of the difference between liberals and conservatives. For blogger David Gaw it comes down to one thing. "Victimhood. Liberalism splits the world into pieces and looks for the external cause of the challenges each piece faces," Gaw writes. "The environment is the victim of Big Business and Big Oil. Criminals are victims of their upbringing, of an unfair system, and of religious zealots who would put them all to death. Homosexuals are victims of their own biology and of religious zealots who would oppress them." But many point out that, with so much print being devoted to conservative students claiming they’re facing discrimination from universities, conservatives are becoming the new victims. The difference, of course, is that conservatives say that their grievances are legitimate, while everyone else’s are overcooked. "You can call it victimization if you want," Jones says, "but it’s probably a mischaracterization because we want to show that there is actual harm being done. On the flip side, liberals bemoan very generalized feelings about racism." Group identity is always forged most strongly when people feel like they are being oppressed, judged unfairly based on a set of rules created by the oppressor. Though they will cringe at the comparison, the young conservatives, too, have leapt into the identity politics parade, waving their own flags of pride. They may have formed in opposition to it, yes, but just as their conservative role models like George W and Karl Rove are by-products of the utopian-minded ’60s, these young conservatives are still outgrowths of the PC era. In 1999, conservative activist Jessica Peck Corry started a group called the Equal Opportunity Alliance on campus to get the race box eliminated from school applications. Corry says that the Equal Opportunity Alliance "really is the true face of diversity. We have intellectual diversity, we have liberal students and we have conservative students, you know, Democrats, Republicans; we have black students and white students." Antonia Gaona, 22, is the new Director of the Equal Opportunity Alliance. Listening to her talk about the issue, one notices that she uses all of the same terms that liberals use. It’s what the gay rights movement called "reclaiming" a word. The lesbians took back "dyke," and now the conservatives are laying stake to "diversity," "marginalization" and "oppression." But as conservative students criticize the "culture of blame and oppression" they see defining the liberal worldview, they are simultaneously characterizing themselves as oppressed by the great liberal propaganda machine apparently made up of the media, the higher-education system and the mono-culture of Boulder. And when conservative students dismiss whole sections of thought right away as liberal propaganda, this may lead to some of the same intellectual laziness that they attribute to their liberal counterparts. Perhaps a new answer that everyone can agree on would be a new CU class, Sociology 3000: The Conservative Identity. Corry soon became part of the Campus Accountability Project, which is part of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank based in Golden. The Independence Institute has had a tremendous influence on politics in Colorado. Its past president is a guy named Tom Tancredo and past board members include Mike Rosen and Gale Norten. Its current president Jon Caldera is a former graduate from CU. He has both a local television show, a radio program and a Daily Camera column which serves the purpose of being the evil twin to Clint Talbot’s liberal screeds. The I.I. was started by John Andrews, who, as the Senate president, was the main force behind the ad-hoc hearings where conservative students testified to the experiences they had with liberal professors. Corry organized the conservative students from campuses all over the state and published a report called "In their Own Voices." The academic bias debate is probably most heated in Colorado. It was thrown to the forefront by David Horowitz, the conservative author who has started the Students for Academic Freedom. Horowitz has always been good at writing up manifestos, a skill he learned 30 years ago when he was a New Left radical before becoming a right-wing political writer in the ’80s. He has drafted what he calls the "Academic Bill of Rights," for which he received a very attentive audience here in Colorado, gaining a personal meeting with Governor Bill Owens and, you guessed it, Senate President John Andrews. This leads many people to believe that recent conservative "diversity" efforts are more about partisan politics than academic integrity. They are looking to kick the institutional crutch out from under the crippled body of the left. Left behind? After a story in the Washington Post about the CU bake sale, Rush Limbaugh even took notice. "Ladies and gentlemen," he says, "let’s just remind you 15 years ago when we started this program, did you hear the words campus conservatives?" At the bake sale, some protesters hold signs that say, "I love Affirmative Action" or "Got Privilege?" A large number of protesting students also have large pieces of tape placed over their mouths, a symbol they might be able to explain to onlookers if they could open their mouths to speak. One person begins grabbing boxes of cookies off the table, refusing to pay. Perhaps the counter protesters thought it was necessary to come out in force in order to steal the attention back for their own cause. But it was too late. The debate has already been framed. The campus conservatives once again emerge in the papers as the radical protectors of free speech. And they come off as the underdogs fighting against the liberal-controlled campus system. Conservatives have become savvy in the ways they approach the political game. They’ve stolen plays from the opposing team and used it to their strategic advantage. The question now is how will the left wake up and do the same? Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com |
Blacks only earned 1 percent of undergraduate degrees here at CU," says Robert Duran, a wispy-framed sociology grad student and publicly declared ethnic minority, "but they represent 4 percent of Colorado’s population."
The political issues driving the College Republicans are not the social subjects like abortion or gay marriage that are defining points of the national party. Not wanting to crack their support base over a divisive issue, Jones and his Vice Chairman Matt Schuldt instead focus on issues college students are unconditionally responsive to: free speech. This comes as in the form of a reaction against what the young conservatives see as the draconian speech codes that make up much of campus dialogue these days. Jones calls them the "language police" or the "diversity thugs," those people that enforce social tolerance to such a degree they stifle other’s opinions and are thus pitted by conservatives as the enemies of free speech.
