THE COLLEGE REPUBLICAN National Committee launched its annual convention at the Sheraton Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, on July 13. Hundreds of College Republicans make the pilgrimage every two years to elect a new board and to check up on their comrades in the right-wing conspiracy. According to veterans, the elections can be a serious–and occasionally dirty–business, contaminating the revelries of the weekend with backroom dealings, liquefying alliances, and general enmity.
None of that pettiness this year, however, as Charlie Smith, a Colorado boy with a reformist vocabulary, led an uncontested slate of candidates under the banner of “New CRNC.” The “old,” as it turns out, had “issues of financial transparency” and had stashed some “shady stuff” under its belt. But incoming executive director Ethan Eilon assured, “I can’t imagine anybody being overwhelmingly displeased with Charlie.” And so with no overwhelming–or at least noisy–displeasure, the festivities unfolded in the lobby, where dozens of conservative groups displayed their literature and tendered assistance and doughnuts to the conservative grassroots.
“Grassroots,” though, might not be the right label for the CRNC crowd, bejeweled as it was with cufflinks, rings, and ambitions aimed well above collegiate targets. When I was nurturing the local grassroots at UCLA, where I edited our heterodox newspaper the Bruin Standard, a conservative organizer once offered me the rather phony compliment of being the grass-tops. That term, if we are to use it at all, should probably be readdressed to the CRNC’s lords and ladies.
And yet, behind the affectations, the activist aristocracy still harbors activist emotions and appetites. The students were delightedly sampling from the booths of the Leadership Institute, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young America’s Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, and a host of 501(c)3-sounding societies that echoed soundbites of conservative sound and fury.
Accuracy in Academia exhibited its most popular bumper-stickers–among them, “PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals,” “Ted Kennedy’s car killed more people than my gun,” and “Get the US out of the UN.” National Right to Life displayed ultrasound pictures of newly conceived babies. Rants against the liberal media enjoyed heavy circulation, too. The Media Research Center passed out T-shirts with the image of Uncle Sam and this accompanying warning: “Don’t believe the liberal media!” The Leadership Institute declared in its guidebook that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is “one of the most devastating critiques ever written of big government and the liberal media.” The theory, alas, does not survive scrutiny. Rand’s only (and trivial) reference to the media has her protagonist, John Galt, take over the national airwaves to deliver a monumental, three-hour defense of individual rights.
College conservative activism is most authentic here, where passion supplants reason as argument’s locomotive. On page 124 of the American Cause, which I picked up from the table of the Leadership Institute, Russell Kirk writes of two types of revolutionary:
1) The naïve or sentimental revolutionary, who believes that something is hopelessly wrong with life as we know it and that their revolutionary agenda can actually provide the remedy for the ills to which humanity is heir . . .
2) The realistic, practical revolutionary, who may employ humanitarian phrases to win converts, but whose real aim is pure power.
Like every political organization, the College Republican National Committee has its helping of the second. (Jack Abramoff served as its president from 1981 to 1985.) But most College Republicans, even with their patrician look, remain sentimental revolutionaries.
Which is why, as the national Republican party regularly compromises on traditional conservative issues, the College Republicans stand firm. Forget doubts about the Iraq War; when it comes to foreign policy, “peace through strength” is still the catch-phrase du jour. At a time when their commander-in-chief backed an omnibus immigration bill, the CRs almost unanimously railed against “amnesty to criminals.”
It was Sam Brownback, not Rudy Giuliani or John McCain, who incited the cheers and howls of an adoring CR audience. Mitt Romney did not grace the impressive speaker series, but he too commanded loyalty. Of all the candidates, only Romney had sent campaigners to the convention to distribute stickers and magazines that announced: “Romney to the rescue.”
There were books to promote. Talk radio host Gregg Jackson was there to talk up his Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, a title that nicely captured the unofficial theme of the weekend. Bamboozled author Angela McGlowan, crowned by the audience’s approving whispers as “the black Ann Coulter,” condensed in her talk the whole empire of conservative clichés–tracing every social problem, much to the delight of the spectators, to the “liberal agenda” and the “liberal media.” In her amusing ode to the ideological diversity of Fox News, where she is a regular contributor, McGlowan said, “Every time I go into battle, there’s someone 360 degrees opposite from me.”
Of course ironies–like subtleties and shades–are often lost on the College Republicans, for many of whom conservatism has boiled down to a teapot of axiomatic one-liners. And yet for this old campus warrior, the one-liners were strangely refreshing. They show that in an organizational bureaucracy that prefers politicking to passion, passion remains.
But how much? Sitting at a table with a dozen student organizers, David Horowitz, the indefatigable campus warrior, was not bubbling with optimism. “I tried to get a conservative movement started 17 years ago,” he said. “I tried to get the college conservative groups involved. But I guess that’s not what conservative groups do.”
Undeterred by his seemingly exhausted academic freedom movement, Horowitz was unveiling yet another college campaign–this one to war against Islamofascism’s subjugation of women and homosexuals, and to expose the left’s complicity in the subjugation. To that end, Horowitz proposed a series of sit-ins at women’s centers on campuses across the country.
Disturbed by the proposition, one of the CRs quarreled that the tactics were too “out there” and volunteers too hard to find. Acclimated to such reservations, evidently, Horowitz explained that the protest would be less of a sit-in and more of a sit-out; students could just dilly-dally outside. When Horowitz, the loud revolutionary of the campus right, talks about a “comfort zone for conservative activists,” you somehow get the feeling that the movement is in decline.
Garin Hovannisian is an intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
