Letters to a Young Conservative

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Letters to a Young Lawyer
Alan Dershowitz

 

Letters to a Young Contrarian
Christopher Hitchens

 

Letters to a Young Golfer
Bob Duval

 

Letters to a Young Conservative
Dinesh D’Souza

 

Letters to a Young Activist
Todd Gitlin

 

Letters to a Young Therapist
Mary Pipher

 

Letters to a Young Chef
Daniel Boulud

 

Letters to a Young Gymnast
Nadia Comaneci

 

Letters to a Young Catholic
George Weigel

 

Letters to a Young Actor
Robert Brustein

 

 

 

 

Dear Chris,

Thanks for your letter. I’m glad you enjoyed my talk at your university. Can you believe the number of protesters who showed up? There were people from the International Socialist group, the Spartacus League, the Coalition to Save Humanity, even some jobless guys from the local community. Wow, did they create a ruckus! Apparently they were distributing copies of a pamphlet called “Who Is Dinesh D’Souza?” I didn’t see the pamphlet until later, but I discovered from it that I am a racist, a liar, a stooge of the ruling class, and an enemy of the people. All of which I hadn’t realized until I read the pamphlet.

I don’t know whether you are aware this, but the protesters almost prevented me from speaking. When I arrived, they had already surrounded the building. They were screaming into bullhorns and carrying placards that
read DINESH D’SOUZA: RACIST AGENT OF U.S. CAPITALISM AND IMPERIALISM. As I made my way through the demonstrators, behind heavy security, I gave the protesters the thumbs-up signal and told them, “Fight on, brothers and sisters.” This seemed to make them angrier. One of them yelled, “You’ll be lucky to get out of here alive!”

Despite the university’s rule against bringing placards and bullhorns into the auditorium, the protesters managed to force their way inside. I am sure you found their gyrations on the stage quite a sight. My amusement over their antics subsided, however, when they began to disrupt my lecture with their shouts and chants. As you saw, the dean of the college had to warn the demonstrators to hold their fire until the question period, or else they would be evacuated. Only then did they quiet down and allow me to speak.

Undoubtedly the high point of the evening occurred near the end of my talk when the large, disheveled woman came rolling up the aisle shouting, “We don’t need a debate! Stop this man from speaking!” My usual strategy in such circumstances is to try to calm the protester down and engage in a discussion, but this time there was no point. Finally, the woman was dragged from the room by the campus police. On her way out she yelled, “I am being censored! I am being censored!”

Yes, the American campus has become an interesting place for a conservative. I cannot blame you for asking, What has happened to liberalism? Where did it go wrong? Is this what liberals stand for?

Today, alas, it is. But in saying this, I am not describing liberalism in its original or classical sense. We need to understand the big changes that have come over liberalism. The term
liberal,
in its Greek meaning, refers to the free man, as opposed to the slave. Liberals were originally the partisans of liberty. The American founders, for example, were committed to three types of freedom: economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech and religion. In their classical liberal view, freedom meant limiting the power of government, thus increasing the scope for individual and private action. The spirit of this philosophy is clearly conveyed in the formulations of the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law . . . ”

This classical liberalism underwent two dramatic changes in the last century: the revolution of the 1930s, and the revolution of the 1960s. The revolution of the 1930s, the FDR revolution, was based on the assumption that rights are not meaningful unless we have the means to exercise them. As Franklin Roosevelt himself argued, people who lack life’s necessities are
not free.
Roosevelt believed that to give citizens true liberty, the government should insure them against deprivation, against the loss of a job, against calamitous illness, and against an impoverished old age. Thus the liberal revolution of the 1930s introduced a new understanding of freedom that involved a vastly greater role for government than the American founders intended.

The second liberal revolution occurred in the 1960s. Its watchword was “liberation,” and its great prophet
was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Before the sixties, most Americans believed in a universal moral order that is external to us, that makes demands on us. Our obligation was to conform to that moral order. Earlier generations, right up to the “greatest generation” of World War II, took for granted this moral order and its commandments: Work hard and try to better yourself, be faithful to your spouse, go when your country calls, and so on.

But, beginning in the sixties, several factions—the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, the gay activist movement, and so on—attacked that moral consensus as narrow and oppressive. They fought for a new ethic that would be based not on external authority but on the sovereignty of the inner self. This is the novel idea that received its most powerful expression in Rousseau’s writing. To the American founders’ list of freedoms, Rousseau added a new one: inner freedom, or moral freedom. Rousseau argues that we make major decisions—whom to love, what to become, what to believe—not by obeying our parents, teachers, preachers, or even God. Rather, we make such decisions by digging deep within ourselves and listening to the voice of nature. This is the idea of being “true to yourself.” It is the new liberal morality.

Now that we have a sense of what liberals believe, let us contrast their views with those of the conservatives. Modern American conservatism is very different from European conservatism, or from conservatism traditionally understood. For one thing, conservatism in this
country is “modern,” and for another, it is “American.” Ours is not the “throne and altar” conservatism that once defined European conservatism, and that is still characteristic of many Europeans on the right. These conservatives were true reactionaries. They sought to preserve the ancien régime and the prerogatives of king and church against the arrival of modern science, modern capitalism, and modern democracy.

American conservatives are different because America is a revolutionary nation. For the founders, the ancien régime was the world they had left behind in Europe. Ours is a country founded by a bunch of guys sitting around a table in Philadelphia and deciding to establish a “new order for the ages.” Being a conservative in America means conserving the principles of the American revolution. (One of the most conservative groups in America calls itself the Daughters of the American Revolution.) Paradoxically, American conservatism seeks to conserve a certain kind of liberalism! It means fighting to uphold the classical liberalism of the founding from assault by liberalism of a different sort.

Classical liberalism, however, does not wholly define modern American conservatism. There is an added element: a concern with social and civic virtue. The term
virtue
has become a bad word in some quarters of American life. (It is especially unpopular with the chronically wicked and depraved.) Young people, especially, tend to associate it with finger-wagging and with people who tell you how to live your life. This is a very narrow view of
virtue: It applies only to what it is good to do, rather than what it is good to be and what it is good to love.

The conservative virtues are many: civility, patriotism, national unity, a sense of local community, an attachment to family, and a belief in merit, in just desserts, and in personal responsibility for one’s actions. For many conservatives, the idea of virtue cannot be separated from the idea of God. But it is not necessary to believe in God to be a conservative. What unifies the vast majority of conservatives is the belief that there are moral standards in the universe and that living up to them is the best way to have a full and happy life.

Conservatives recognize, of course, that people frequently fall short of these standards. In their personal conduct, conservatives do not claim to be better than anyone else. Newt Gingrich was carrying on an affair at the same time that Bill Clinton was romancing Monica Lewinsky. But for conservatives, these lapses do not provide an excuse to get rid of the standards. Even hypocrisy—professing one thing but doing another—is in the conservative view preferable to a denial of standards because such denial leads to moral chaos or nihilism.

Since modern conservatism is dedicated both to classical liberalism and to virtue, it is open to the charge of contradiction. What happens when there is a tension between liberty and virtue? Conservatives are often accused of resolving the tension by opting for liberty in the economic domain, but for virtue in the social domain.
If liberals inconsistently hold that government should get out of the bedroom and into the pocketbook, conservatives appear to espouse the opposite philosophy of government: “Out of the pocketbook and into the bedroom.”