[HIMC] NYTimes.com Article: The Young Hipublicans

[Bob Buzzanco]

Despise and mock these people, but they understand that ORGANIZATION is the 
basis of power; a long-term sustained effort at organization is requisite, 
not transient actions that are done mainly for self-satisfaction and don't 
lead to anything effective but just short-term publicity.  While a group of 
assholes in San Francisco were vomiting in the federal building to 
"protest" the war [and who cleaned that up, do you think?] or so-called 
activists were blocking traffic and pissing off commuters in the most 
liberal zip codes in America, these people are organizing for power.  Not a 
bad lesson. . .

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The Young Hipublicans

May 25, 2003
By JOHN COLAPINTO


The temptation, upon entering Charles Mitchell's dorm room
at Bucknell University, is to assume that he's kidding. The
doormat features a picture of Hillary Clinton and the
injunction, ''Wipe Liberally.'' A vast American flag
festooned in red, white and blue Christmas lights adorns
one wall, along with a faded Reagan-Bush '84 poster and a
small photograph of the cowboy-hatted Gipper himself. The
sole concession to any interest outside right-wing politics
is a wall hanging of an African jungle scene. ''My nod,''
says Mitchell, an intense 20-year-old history major, ''to
multiculturalism.''

There's an element of youthful provocation at work in all
this, of course -- an awareness, on Mitchell's part, that
any liberal who dares to enter here will reel back in
horror. (''It's fun to freak people out,'' as he puts it.)
But it would be a mistake to assume that his decor reflects
only a sophomoric search for self-definition. Having just
completed his sophomore year, Mitchell is a dead-serious
political ideologue, a right-wing activist so effective
that he has been singled out by leaders of the national
movement as one of its rising young stars. This past year's
editor in chief of Bucknell's conservative newspaper, The
Counterweight, and a founding member of the Bucknell
University Conservatives Club, he has come to this small
liberal-arts college tucked amid the cornfields in
Lewisburg, Pa., not solely to educate himself (he holds
down a 3.9 G.P.A.), but also to spread the conservative
gospel, to wage war with what he considers an egregiously
liberal faculty and administration and to win the hearts
and minds of his politically undecided peers. Which is why
it is both a joke and not a joke when he announces on his
dorm-room answering machine: ''I can't come to the phone at
the moment because I'm out advancing the great conservative
revolution.''

He's not alone. At campuses across the country,
undergraduates like Charles Mitchell have organized for an
assault against the university establishment not seen since
the 1980's, when Reagan's popularity triggered a youthquake
of conservative campus activism. Today's surge reflects a
renewed shift pronouncedly to the right on many defining
issues, after several years during the Clinton presidency
when students gravitated toward more liberal political
labels.

As with college conservative movements in the past, the
recent wave has been fueled and often financed by an array
of conservative interest groups, of which there are, today,
almost too many to keep straight: Young Americans for
Freedom; Young America's Foundation; the Leadership
Institute; the Collegiate Network; the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute. These groups spend money in various ways
to push a right-wing agenda on campuses: some make direct
cash ''grants'' to student groups to start and run
conservative campus newspapers; others provide free
training in ''conservative leadership,'' often providing
heavily subsidized travel to their ''publishing programs'';
others provide help with the hefty speaking fees for
celebrity right-wing speakers. Through these coordinated
activities, these groups have embarked in the last three
years on a concerted campus recruitment drive to turn
temperamentally conservative youngsters into organized
right-wing activists. From Maine to California, students
have taken up the offer -- even at such lefty bastions as
Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students
at Howard University, a black institution in Washington,
have started a group that has been referred to as the
''hip-hop Republicans.'' The Campus Leadership Program has
by their own count helped set up 256 conservative campus
groups in less than three years. The College Republican
National Committee, a group that mobilizes students to
campaign, has tripled its membership since 1999 to an
all-time high of 1,148 chapters.

The impact has been felt far beyond the campus quadrangles
and classrooms. Scott Stewart, chairman of the College
Republican National Committee says that campus
conservatives were instrumental to the success of the
Republican Party in the last midterm elections. ''Students
provide the enthusiasm, the excitement and the work that
needs to be done for free in political campaigns,'' he
says, ''knocking on doors, talking to voters, passing out
literature, pounding in lawn signs.'' Then there is the
role, historically, that college conservatives have played
in shaping Republican Party ideology. A former campus
conservative, William F. Buckley, wrote the movement's
Ur-text, ''God and Man at Yale.'' Published in 1951, the
book attacked his alma mater for spreading ''socialist''
ideas and for its lack of religious instruction in the
classroom. To help institutionalize his mission of leaching
liberalism from campuses, Buckley helped create the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the first education
institute devoted to turning colleges to the right. I.S.I.
was one of several groups behind the campus conservative
movement of the 1980's, which gave rise to Dinesh D'Souza,
Ann Coulter and Ralph Reed, all former college
right-wingers who are today leaders in spreading and
shaping the Republican Party message. But just how close a
college conservative can get to the levers of power is
suggested by the ascent of one hard-right, Nixon-loving
ideologue who, in 1973, became chairman of the College
Republicans and who today is credited as among the greatest
influences on President George W. Bush: Karl Rove.

''They have a theory of getting them while they're young,''
says David Brock, a former college conservative who
graduated from Berkeley in the mid-1980's. After spending
almost a decade as an activist in the conservative movement
(during which he published the 1993 liberal-bashing book,
''The Real Anita Hill''), Brock had a change of heart. In
2002, he published a book, ''Blinded by the Right,'' about
his former life as a conservative-movement insider.
''People are searching for their identity in college,'' he
says. ''The right try to instigate polarization so that it
looks like the right wing is the alternative to the left.
This is what happened to me. I went to Berkeley because it
had a liberal reputation. But I became disillusioned with
some of my experiences with the left on the campus and I
had a knee-jerk reaction -- or I was looking for an
alternative -- and there was the right. There really wasn't
anything in the middle.''

The mission of today's college conservatives is, in many
respects, no different from what it was in Brock's day, and
even Buckley's. But today's movement also differs markedly
from ones that came before. Influenced as much by the mood
and mores of MTV as it is by the musings of Allan Bloom,
today's movement has shaped itself around a new demographic
of young right-wingers, one that includes a heavy
contingent of women and that draws some of its fiercest
ideologues from the middle class. Having spread beyond
traditionally conservative hotbeds like Dartmouth, it's a
movement that operates in an atmosphere that did not even
exist when Buckley and D'Souza were undergraduates:
campuses governed by speech and behavior codes introduced
more than a decade ago. A result is a new breed of college
conservative, one poised to inherit the responsibility of
shaping the Republican Party in the years to come.

The Bucknell University Conservatives Club has its origins
in the fall of 1999, when a freshman named Tom Elliott
arrived on campus. His father is Bently Elliott, former
director of speechwriting for Ronald Reagan. Growing up in
Alexandria, Va., and attending Easter-egg hunts on the
White House lawn, Tom Elliott absorbed by osmosis the
central tenets of conservatism: smaller government, less
taxes, more military spending, welfare reform, no abortion
on demand. He'd never questioned his right-wing beliefs
until he entered Bucknell, where, he says, he found his
ideas coming under attack from his professors.

''In my spare time, I started visiting conservative Web
sites,'' he says, ''so I could arm myself.'' In his
sophomore year, he wrote right-wing columns in the student
paper, The Bucknellian. Styling himself after his
journalistic heroes, like Hunter S. Thompson, Elliott
strove for an in-your-face attitude in his writing and came
to enjoy his status as the campus's provocateur. But it was
not until the summer after his sophomore year that he
called on his contacts with conservative interest groups,
like the Leadership Institute, to move on his idea of
starting a conservatives club and his own right-wing campus
newspaper. Elliott enlisted a fellow Bucknell sophomore,
Michael Boland, a square-jawed evangelical Christian from
Cooperstown, N.Y., the only other ''out'' conservative on
campus at the time.

It was, in many respects, an odd marriage. Elliott, a
hard-partying frat boy from a privileged background, fits a
common stereotype of the college conservative of the
1980's: affluent, confident, connected (his father is a
Bucknell alumnus and trustee). When Elliott offers that he
''doesn't take school too seriously, and my grades reflect
it,'' you know he's telling you that he doesn't have to
worry too much about a career and money (after graduating
this month, he plans to ''travel and maybe write a book in
the future''). Mike Boland, by contrast, is like many of
today's young right-wingers. Determinedly middle class (his
dad is an X-ray technician, his mom a teacher's aide),
Boland can afford Bucknell's $35,000 in tuition and fees
only with the help of financial aid. Studious and
abstemious, he works hard to keep up a 3.9 G.P.A. For
Boland, the effort that has taken him from a modest
background to the top ranks of an elite university bolsters
his conservative beliefs on self-reliance. ''If you don't
earn it,'' he says, ''you don't appreciate it.''

Boland agreed to join Elliott in starting Bucknell's
conservatives club. The two don't agree on every issue
(Elliott is against capital punishment; Boland supports
it), and they often clash when it comes to how best to
spread their message (Elliott likes to use satire and
ridicule to raise hackles; Boland prefers close reasoning),
but the two share a mind-set common to virtually every
college conservative you meet. They describe themselves as
defenders of ''individuality'' and ''freedom'' against a
campus, and world, overrun by groupthink liberalism and
pious political correctness. They also share a belief that
despite the common perception of youth being synonymous
with progressive, liberal ideals, the true spirit of their
generation is solidly, if quietly, conservative.

The polls bear this out. According to the U.C.L.A. Higher
Education Research Institute, which has been tracking the
attitudes of incoming freshmen at hundreds of colleges
nationwide since 1966, student conservatism is increasing
in many areas. Asked their opinion about casual sex, 51
percent of freshmen were for it in 1987; now 42 percent
are. In 1989, 66 percent of freshmen believed abortion
should be legal; today, only 54 percent do. In 1995, 66
percent of kids agreed that wealthy people should pay a
larger share of taxes; now it's down to 50 percent. Even on
the issue of firearms, where students have traditionally
favored stiffer controls, there has been a weakening in
support for gun laws. ''We're at a record low on this
item,'' says the U.C.L.A. Institute's associate director,
Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at U.C.L.A.
''We've seen a decline over the last four consecutive
years.''

Yet according to Sax, this conservative trend on issues
does not necessarily mean that students call themselves
right-wingers, or even Republicans. ''Students' opinions of
particular issues are not always in line with their own
self-placement on an ideological spectrum,'' she says.

Still searching for their identities, many of these kids
are not yet prepared to declare a particular political
affiliation. This is where the conservative campus
activists come in. Having recognized the importance of
conservativism to their own lives, they have committed
themselves to the task of bringing out the unacknowledged
conservatism in other students. The mission of today's
activists involves less an act of persuading their peers to
accept an ideology than in awakening them to the fact that
they already embody it.


Back in early September 2001, Boland and Elliott sent a
campus e-mail message announcing the birth of the Bucknell
University Conservatives Club. Among those who showed up
for the first meeting was Charles Mitchell, a freshman and
another middle-class kid attending Bucknell on financial
aid. ''You knew right away,'' Boland says, ''that this guy
was a warrior.'' Mitchell arrived in Lewisburg from a
suburban enclave in Delaware County, Pa., and became intent
on being a campus activist. He traces his passion for
right-wing politics to his father, who runs a trolley
repair shop for Septa, the public transit company in
Philadelphia. A member of the N.R.A., Mitchell's father
took his son shooting every Friday. ''That was really the
beginning for me,'' Mitchell says. ''It seemed to me that
the policy of less government in conjunction with gun
control made sense. And everything else just kind of
followed from that.''

That initial e-mail message brought out only five or six
attendees. But soon after, an event took place that would
give the club a campus profile it might otherwise have
taken months to achieve: the attacks of Sept. 11. When a
small coterie of students and professors organized vigils
against the American bombing of Afghanistan, the
conservatives club staged a counter-rally in support of the
troops -- a kind of strategy encouraged by the
Beltway-based interest groups that not only helped finance
the students' activities but also helped shape them.
''Pro-troops'' and ''pro-America'' rallies were staged,
simultaneously, at colleges across the country. The tactic
brought results. ''Kids started coming up to us,'' Mike
Boland says, ''and asking how they could join up.'' Today,
the club has about 35 active members. And each issue of The
Counterweight carries supportive letters from students who
are not in the club.

A jump in club enrollment post-9/11 was not unique to
Bucknell. According to Bryan Auchterlonie, the 24-year-old
executive director of the Collegiate Network (a program
administered by I.S.I.), the terrorist attacks helped to
galvanize right-wing students across the nation. ''Students
are upset with what they see as anti-Americanism on
campuses,'' Auchterlonie says. ''Patriotism is big now.''
It's a patriotism that the national college movement has
pushed to the fore as an issue that can win the sympathies
of kids who are not overtly political. ''We handed out red,
white and blue ribbons on the anniversary of 9/11,''
Charles Mitchell says. ''I didn't think anyone was going to
take them. We ran out in half an hour.''

Besides the flag, the other potent symbol for today's young
conservative movement is Ronald Reagan. Because they are
too young to recall any of Reagan's live TV appearances
(Mitchell, for instance, was born in 1982), today's college
students tend to see the former president purely as his
image makers tried to present him when he occupied the Oval
Office: as a Norman Rockwellian, mist-shrouded icon of
Better Times -- an idealized figure of myth. The
Washington-based groups know this, and they play on it.
When the Leadership Institute, a group formed by a
right-wing activist, Morton Blackwell, recruits on campuses
each fall, it prominently displays at its sign-up table a
huge poster that includes a photograph of Reagan.

Mitchell is one of those who has fallen under the spell of
the former president. His dorm-room bookshelf holds no less
than four Reagan biographies, from which he is given to
quoting, as if from Scripture. ''If you study what Reagan
wrote and said and believed,'' Mitchell explains, ''it
didn't change from at least the 1960's on. People always
attack that and say he was intellectually lazy. I don't
think so. The guy believed in something. He came to the
presidency with three big goals: defeating communism,
lowering taxes and recovering the economy. And that's what
he did.'' Mitchell's support for George W. Bush derives
from what he sees as one of the current president's
Reagan-like qualities: a certain down-to-earth honesty. ''I
don't agree with Bush's politics some of the time,''
Mitchell says, ''but he's not phony at all. When he talks,
he's just a straight-up honest guy, and I love that. As
politicians go, you kind of trust him.''

But a movement based on patriotism and Reagan-worship alone
could not have spread so rapidly nationwide. Here's where
the left has unwittingly helped to energize the
conservative movement. Visit any college campus today, and
you're struck by the forces of what the conservatives call
overweening political correctness that have seeped into
every corner of life. Same-sex hand-holding days, ''Vagina
Monologues'' performances, diversity training seminars,
minority support groups, ''no means no'' dating rules,
textbooks purified of gender, racial or class stereotypes
-- for all their good intentions, these manifestations of
enforced tolerance can create a stultifying air of
conformity in college life. Hence the cries for
''individual responsibility'' and ''freedom of speech''
that are the leading slogans of today's campus conservative
movement -- a deliberate echo of the left-wing Free Speech
movements of the 1960's and a direct appeal to the natural
impulse, on the part of young people, to rebel against the
powers that be.

''It's been true through recorded history that the younger
generation instinctively rebels against the establishment,
whatever the establishment might be, and that definitely is
part of what encourages folks to join us,'' says Blackwell,
a former head of the College Republicans who trained Karl
Rove. ''We know we're turning the tables,'' says Manny
Espinoza, the public relations director of the Leadership
Institute's Campus Leadership Program, ''and we know it's
frustrating the other side, because they know it's their
stuff and now we're using it.'' Indeed, the Collegiate
Network, which distributes some $200,000 a year in
publishing money to 58 student newspapers, issues a
handbook, ''Start the Presses!'' which explicitly counsels
its conservative charges to ''loosen up,'' to, in effect,
get in touch with their inner Abbie Hoffman. ''Don't strive
to be thought of as 'serious' and 'respectable,''' the
handbook counsels. ''On campus, those words equate to
'irrelevant and ineffective.'''

The Bucknell Conservatives have taken this advice to heart.
''Some club members do want to shock,'' Mike Boland says,
''to incite outrage, to start fires -- because they think
that doing so just demonstrates how ridiculous campus
liberals can be.'' He cites The Counterweight's satiric
twitting of the campus performances of ''The Vagina
Monologues.'' The paper has published an annual ''Penis
Monologues'' rich in sophomoric humor (''My man-hammer has
not clubbed a single baby seal. . . . ''), and each year it
sparks anger in the college's various women's support
groups. ''Did we print that piece knowing that the
feminists would blow a gasket?'' Boland says. ''Yes. But we
did it anyway, because it was fun to write and the response
allowed us to show how intolerant and intellectually lazy
some feminists had become.''

If the interest groups have worked hard to retrofit the
college conservative movement as a right-wing version of
the leftist Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960's,
they have worked equally hard to frame the conservative
women's movement on campuses as a new brand of empowering
feminism. A number of well-financed and highly organized
conservative women's groups in Washington have been
instrumental in leading the charge, among them the Clare
Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Independent Women's
Forum. The latter has started a ''Take Back the Campus''
crusade, in which an array of well-known right-wing women
are brought to colleges by the activist conservative clubs
to explore such questions (as the Independent Women's Forum
Web site puts it) as ''whether women's-studies programs
actually harm women with misleading feminist myths of women
as victims.'' (The answer, according to the I.W.F., would
be an emphatic yes.) Regular speakers on campus include
Phyllis Schlafly, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ann Coulter, Katherine
Harris and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of ''Who Stole
Feminism?'' and ''The War Against Boys.'' These women
preach that the preponderance of women's-studies classes
and the proliferation on campuses of Take Back the Night
marches, sex and dating rules and rape-awareness lectures
-- all of which are aimed at making women feel empowered on
campus -- in fact do precisely the opposite: they
infantalize.

One Bucknell conservatives club member, Allison Kasic, buys
it. She's a 19-year-old who just finished her sophomore
year, and she writes a regular column in The Counterweight
and has her own rock-music show each Monday on the college
radio station. Raised in Littleton, Colo., the daughter of
an administrative judge, she is a confident, tough young
woman who wears little makeup and favors jeans and
T-shirts. As a management major concentrating in marketing,
she sees the importance of selling a new brand of
conservatism to female students. ''There's the old
stereotype of the WASP-y country-club wife or the
Bible-study mom from the Midwest,'' Kasic says. ''But
that's not what conservative women are anymore.'' Kasic,
instead, points to ''stiletto conservatives'' like Hoff
Sommers and Coulter. ''We have role models now,'' she says.
''Hip, strong women who exude the message: 'I don't need
hand-holding just because I'm a woman.''' Kasic herself
plans to be a working woman when she graduates (''I'm no
soccer mom,'' she laughs; ''I don't even like kids''), but
she respects women who choose a different path -- to be
homemakers, like her own mother. ''Conservatives are
inclusive in a way that liberals are not,'' she says,
voicing a central theme of the Independent Women's Forum
ethos. ''We say that women can be executives or
stay-at-home mothers.'' Kasic extends this notion to the
abortion debate. Herself an anti-abortion Catholic, she
says that the Republican Party today nevertheless supports
candidates who espouse the right to abortion. ''But the
National Organization for Women has never supported a
pro-life candidate,'' she says, as proof of the left's
narrowness and the right's ''diversity'' (a term the
conservative movement has deliberately co-opted from the
left).

It can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the
ideology that frees women, but such is the skill with which
the right has reframed the issues for the campus crowd, and
such is the degree to which the left has allowed its own
message to drift into rigidity and irrelevance for many
college-age women. Another Bucknell conservatives club
member, Denise Chaykun, typifies how some young women are
only driven further to the right by what they see as the
pieties of the left. Chaykun, with her shoulder-length
blond hair, faded jeans and rock T-shirt, could have
stepped out of a 1970's campus sit-in. But she is one of
the most combative and hard-core conservatives at Bucknell.
''You come to college, and the message they give you is
'Your parents are racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and
we're going to take you and change that,''' she says. ''A
lot of the courses are mushy stuff about sex and gender and
social relations. You can't take a class about a war. We
don't have a military historian at Bucknell. Everything is
so dumbed down because no one wants to offend anyone.''

This past year's president of the Bucknell University
Conservatives Club, Chaykun is also Charles Mitchell's
girlfriend. The two met and began dating in high school.
Chaykun says that she always had a conservative bent (both
her parents are registered Republicans), but Mitchell had a
big influence in her transformation from privately
conservative high-school student to fierce college
activist. For instance, until she met Mitchell, she viewed
firearms as ''evil.'' But in her senior year of high
school, he gave her a copy of John Lott's ''More Guns, Less
Crime,'' which argues that allowing law-abiding citizens to
carry concealed handguns is an effective deterrent to
violent crime. Chaykun was convinced. Last Christmas, she
was thrilled when Mitchell gave her a semiautomatic .22
rifle with telescopic sight. Chaykun keeps it in a black
nylon bag decorated with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Care
Bears and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles patches. She takes
her gun with her to an outdoor shooting range near the
campus where Mitchell and other members of the club blast
away with .357 Magnums and AK-47 rifles at paper targets
printed with the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein. (Chaykun shoots at a regular bull's-eye.) ''It's a
lot of fun,'' she gushes. For Chaykun, the most difficult
thing about being a female conservative on a university
campus is the flak she catches from other women. ''I get
personal character attacks from the feminists on campus,''
she says. ''I try to explain that I'm a feminist, too. But
they don't listen. They say, 'Oh, her boyfriend told her to
say that.'''

In fact, much of what Chaykun -- and indeed most any campus
conservative you meet -- says is something that someone
told them to say. This is not to doubt their passion and
belief, but it is to be realistic about the language and
tactics they've developed to communicate those beliefs.
Bryan Auchterlonie of the Collegiate Network makes no
effort to conceal that his organization helps to shape
messages and provide ''talking points'' for their
conservative student activist members. He lists what he
calls the ''formal programming'' -- which includes the
C.N.'s annual conference, journalism courses, grants,
fellowships and summer internships. ''Then there's the sort
of ad hoc, off-the-radar-screen type of stuff,'' he goes
on. ''It's basically general P.R. advice on how to spin
their messages on campus.''

Despite this close relationship between the Beltway-based
groups and the conservative campus activists, Charles
Mitchell bridles at any suggestion that he and his fellow
club members are puppets for larger interests -- not to say
operatives in the vast right-wing conspiracy. ''I really
have no patience with that viewpoint,'' he says. ''We could
be doing The Counterweight with the Campus Leadership
Program or without them, with the Collegiate Network or
without them. They didn't put us up to this. They'll be the
first to tell you that if you don't have the drive to do it
yourself, it's not going to happen. We can get as many
checks from Arlington as you want, and there still won't be
a paper. What matters is having a group of people who are
willing to do it.''

In early April, several members of the Bucknell
conservatives club, having put to bed an issue of The
Counterweight, sat around a burger-strewn table in a school
cafeteria and talked about the future of conservatism in
America.

''I think the paleos are dying out,'' Mitchell says. He's
referring to the conservative movement's Old Guard, whom
the author David Frum recently labeled the
''paleoconservatives.'' Mitchell and his friends can't
abide them.

''Yeah,'' Kasic agrees. ''Paleos like Pat Buchanan -- and
Bob Novak.''

''Trent Lott isn't a paleo,'' Mitchell says. ''He's just a
moron. Strom Thurmond is probably a paleo.''

''George Wallace,'' Chaykun says.

''Yeah, and the
Copperheads,'' Mitchell says, referring to the Northerners
who supported the South during the Civil War. ''People who
think Lincoln started the era of big government. That's
paleo. The paleos are the people who give us a bad rap.
They carry all these tinges of anti-Semitism and racism --
and that's what people expect from us. People expect us to
be like Pat Buchanan, like, 'We're diluting our great
Western culture by letting immigrants in.' I don't think
any of us buy that.''

Kasic says: ''It's not like Pat Buchanan's wrong on
everything, it's just the persona -- he's just a grumpy old
guy who's always complaining about something. He's not
accessible to young kids.''

Mitchell says: ''He worked for Nixon, for God's sake. I'm
not a Buchanan conservative. I'm a D'Souza conservative.''

While it's true that Mitchell and his fellow club members
are far closer to 80's right-wingers like D'Souza and
Coulter, there are also crucial differences. Many of those
Reagan-era conservatives announced their politics on campus
with their dress and grooming, the men sporting
aggressively conservative Clark Kent haircuts, blue
blazers, red ties, loafers; the women tended to wear skirts
and heels -- openly adopting the uniform of the Youth for
Reagan army. Today, most campus conservatives who hope to
be effective won't dress like George Bush or Dick Cheney.
The idea is to dress like a young person. When the Bucknell
conservatives assemble for their weekly meetings, they look
like a typical, if all-white, sampling of American
undergraduates, which is to say, there are plenty of ragged
T-shirts, backward baseball caps and frayed jeans in the
room. Some club members even let their freak flag fly a
little. Aaron Hanlon, who attends the school on a grant,
recently cut his hair into ragged spikes and dyed it blond.
With his skeletal runner's frame and hawklike nose, he
could pass as the elegantly smack-addled lead guitarist in
a neometal band instead of the hard-right conservative that
he is. Corey Langer is a club member just out of his
freshman year who dresses in full-goth regalia, complete
with ankle-length black overcoat, vintage Ozzy T-shirt,
pentagram necklace and an array of ''finger armor'' that he
bought at a ''psycho-hippie shop'' near his hometown of
Higganum, Conn.

These days, the interest groups encourage a hipper look.
Auchterlonie encourages campus conservatives to drop the
stiff-as-a-board ultraconservative attire. ''What
conservatives really need help on is how to be cool on
campus,'' Auchterlonie says. ''We're easily pigeonholed as
loafer-wearing jerks.'' On visits to colleges across the
country, he tells kids, ''You don't have to adopt, hook,
line and sinker, the conservative outfits, conservative
haircut, conservative philosophy, conservative
everything.''

But the difference between the college conservatives of 20
years ago and today goes deeper than dress. Many members of
the Bucknell conservatives club, for instance, endorse
same-sex unions. Corey Langer recently wrote a
Counterweight article supporting gay marriages. This is a
far cry from D'Souza's day, when gay males were termed
''sodomites'' in The Dartmouth Review. In part, the
Bucknellians' openness to gays and lesbians can be
attributed to the strong streak of libertarianism that runs
through the club -- a conviction that the government should
stay out of any and all aspects of life, including the
bedroom. But you can't hang out long with the Bucknell
Conservatives and not form the opinion that their tolerance
on issues like homosexuality goes beyond libertarianism.

Like the rest of their generation, they've been trained,
from preschool onward, in the tenets of cooperation,
politeness and racial and gender sensitivity. As much as
they would hate to admit it -- as hard as they try to fight
it -- these quintessential values have suffused their
consciousness and tempered their messages. You can see it
in Charles Mitchell's editorship of The Counterweight. Back
in the 1980's, the editors of campus conservative
newspapers subscribed to the theory spelled out by D'Souza
in his book ''Letters to a Young Conservative.'' ''At The
Dartmouth Review,'' he wrote: ''To confront liberalism
fully we . . . had to subvert liberal culture, and this
meant disrupting the etiquette of liberalism. In other
words, we had to become social guerrillas. And this we set
out to do with a vengeance.''

D'Souza and his colleagues reveled in the shock and outrage
they awakened with open gay-baiting and racist and sexist
jokes. Charles Mitchell eschews such vicious tactics. Humor
is crucial, but he has no desire to be mistaken for a
bigot. ''There are a few conservatives,'' he admits, ''who
would say, 'That's good, people are calling you a racist,
you must be getting your point across.''' Mitchell rejects
this. ''The point is not to create outrage -- at least not
for us,'' he says. ''The point is to get your ideas out
there and make a difference.'' For Mitchell, the goal is to
persuade the politically undeclared students who make up
the largest percentage of the college's undergraduate
population -- a group he estimates at some 75 percent of
all students -- that they are, in fact, already part of the
movement. Though they don't necessarily think of themselves
as Republican, the stance they take on individual issues --
taxes, abortion, affirmative action -- gives them a
conservative identity. And being a conservative can be cool
and, as Mitchell puts it, not ''just something that wacko
people in Alabama do.''

Within the national college conservative movement as a
whole, Mitchell and his fellow Bucknellians are recognized
as among the savviest activists in the country. Last
December, they were No. 1 on the Young America's
Foundation's list of Top 10 Campus Follies, a citation
bestowed on campus events that exemplify the most
outlandish manifestation of political correctness.

In January, a group of Bucknell club members were invited
to Arlington, Va., to attend the Conservative Political
Action Conference's annual jamboree, which this year
brought out such right-wing luminaries as Dick Cheney, Tom
DeLay and the ubiquitous Coulter. There, Charles Mitchell
addressed the crowd in a panel of students speaking on
''Real Stories of Real Liberal Bias on Real College
Campuses.'' Marveling that he was sharing a microphone used
just the day before by the vice president, Mitchell
outlined to raucous applause from the crowd of perhaps a
thousand the ''campus outrage'' that had put the Bucknell
Club on the radar of the national movement.

Last fall, Mitchell and the Counterweight staff published a
''free speech'' issue of their newspaper. Bearing a photo
of the rapper Eminem on the cover, the paper contained two
articles that tested the boundaries of what the
administration calls ''acceptable'' speech. In keeping with
the kinder, gentler conservative activism of today, the
articles were innocuous enough. (They gingerly examined
incidents in which white students were chastised by the
university for ''racially insensitive'' acts: in one
instance a pair of frat boys dressed up for Halloween in
blackface as Serena and Venus Williams; in the other, a
white student used the phrase ''What's up, my Negro?'' on
the phone with a student he didn't know was black). The
articles were carefully written and edited to avoid any
hint of endorsement of the acts, but within the heightened
atmosphere of identity politics that can govern campuses,
the articles were declared racially divisive by offended
students, faculty and administrators. Some campus liberals
called for The Counterweight to lose its school financing.

To the conservatives, the paradox was obvious: the
administration's reaction to the Counterweight stories
underlined the very point the editors were trying to make:
namely, that the university, in its zeal to ameliorate any
possible friction among students, is stifling the open,
vigorous, nontimorous exchange of ideas. ''To me, it's
sheltering and patronizing,'' Charles Mitchell says. ''I
just believe with every fiber of my being that our speech
code is wrong, and it has to go. It's completely against
everything that this university ought to stand for.'' The
imbroglio, however, also provided an unequaled opportunity
for the club. The Collegiate Network handbook ''Start the
Presses!'' states: ''As a media outlet, you have the power
to transform a minor event or fact into a major
embarrassment. . . . If the school persecutes you, send out
press releases, notify alumni and give the administration a
public black eye.'' The Bucknell conservatives followed
this playbook to the letter. They sent out a press release
to the local newspaper, which put the story on the front
page. The club members were booked on the Fox cable program
''The O'Reilly Factor.'' (They were bumped because of the
Washington sniper crisis.) Still, they received a lot of
mileage from the controversy. As a direct result of the
furor, The Counterweight immediately became a must-read
publication on Bucknell's campus -- avidly pored over,
argued about, debated and discussed by administrators,
liberals, African-American students, professors and
conservatives alike. Their print run of 2,500 copies is
gone within days of hitting the pavements. In less than two
years, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club
established itself as one of the most visible and
influential student groups on campus.

Just how influential is clear when you talk to Bucknell
faculty members. Geoff Schneider, an economics professor at
Bucknell, says that the conservative group's constant
charge in The Counterweight, that the university is
infected by political correctness and that professors seek
to indoctrinate students with a liberal agenda, has had an
effect in the classroom. ''As the conservatives have become
more prominent, other students are more prone to believe
that they are being indoctrinated,'' Schneider says. ''So
the openness of a number of students to new ideas and new
ways of looking at things has actually moved in a
disturbing direction. Students are much more willing to
write off something as 'liberal talk' -- oh, I don't need
to think about that, that's just ideology -- as opposed to
thinking, in a complex way, about all of the different
ideas and evaluating them.'' Kim Daubman, a social
psychology professor, concurs. Recently she taught a class
in which she talked about the theory that news coverage of
warfare in Iraq could lead to a rise in homicides in the
United States. ''I could see the students rolling their
eyes,'' she says. ''I could just hear them thinking, 'Oh,
there she goes again!'''

While professors like Schneider and Daubman worry about the
potential for conservative activists to stifle intellectual
openness among students, they also grudgingly admit to
admiring the right-wingers' passion. ''A lot of faculty
members talk about the lack of commitment that most
students have to anything,'' Daubman says. ''It seems that
they're about getting a credential and being able to get a
good job. That's why you hear faculty say about the
conservatives club: 'At least they believe in something. At
least they've got convictions.'''




John Colapinto, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, is
the author of ''As Nature Made Him'' and the novel ''About
the Author.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/magazine/25REPUBLICANS.html?ex=1054778672&ei=1&en=f1a05bd793ccedb3


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