"The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan 'Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton,' has long passed," Daniel McCarthy writes in the American Conservative. "Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming "George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.'"
McCarthy's piece is must reading, and not just because yours truly makes a cameo appearance therein. The feigned outrage of talk shows, the whiz-bang discussions on cable news, and the attention-deficit-disorder rants of blogs (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) doesn't provoke a whole lot of intellectual curiosity among the rising generation. Where is today's Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Richard Weaver? Absent, just like the real articles. The further we get from the Kirks, Hayeks, and Weavers, the further we get from the Kirks, Hayeks, and Weavers.
This dearth of thoughtfulness among young conservatives hit home a decade ago while working a conservative student conference. A stunningly beautiful college senior confessed that she had never read a book in its entirety. What was she doing at this conservative conference? As years passed, I began to ask the same question of myself: What am I doing at this conservative conference? Such events had transformed from thoughtful discussions of conservative ideas into GOP pep-rallies. Can't there be a happy medium between "'Don't Immanentize the Eschaton" and "George W. Bush Is My Homeboy"?
I have done something--how effective I don't know--about the very real problem that McCarthy exposes. At Accuracy in Academia, I launched Conservative University, an annual gathering where students read such classics as Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, the State, Russell Kirk's Redeeming the Time, and Frederic Bastiat's The Law. Later, at the Leadership Institute, I taught a curriculum for the group's dozen or so seasonal interns that included discussions of the works of various authors included in Morton Blackwell's excellent Read to Lead (I'm proud to have devoured sixteen of the twenty-five books on the list). Here at FlynnFiles, we participated in a book discussion on Hayek's Fatal Conceit last year, and hopefully, when my own book project is complete, we can follow that up.
What an absolute thrill it is to introduce young people to the books of the conservative canon that shaped the movement that they are a part. But what a complete downer to come across young conservatives disinterested in conservatism. It is this latter phenomena, I believe, that is largely responsible for the conservative movement that less and less resembles, well, the conservative movement. Instead of an independent entity evangalizing conservative ideas and pushing the existing parties further right, the conservative movement now exists as an auxiliary of the Republican Party. Winning elections, not winning ideas, now matter above all else. What a shame!
All is not lost. In my travels as a campus speaker, I come across so many brilliant young conservatives. They make me hopeful for the future even when the present offers despair. The past, too, encourages. Having been in and around the conservative movement for fifteen years, I'm old enough to have witnessed young movement conservatives grow up to become elected officials, CEOs, professors, authors, and even movie producers. If the rising generation of conservatives elevate to such positions of influence, it is important that they are worthy of such positions. Becoming grounded in wisdom, to prevent being pushed to and fro by the political winds, is a good way of ensuring this.
What a different course America would be on had George W. Bush taken an ocassional break from naked keg stands at Yale to take in William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Milton Friedman. No doubt if today's conservative students dieted on such fare they would lose their taste for the current occupant of the Oval Office. "If students critically engage the works of the wisest men of an even older Right," McCarthy concludes, "they too may be forced to conclude that George W. Bush is no conservative all—or else that Kirk and Weaver...are really leftists."
As a young conservative myself, I can say that its pretty depressing. I myself have not read all the books I should read. The Conservative Mind is just about the only piece of the conservative canon that I have read, though I do manage to do a lot of reading, and I am-shamefully, the broadest read member of my club, most likely (which says a lot more about the movement than it does me). I am pretty active in the nation-wide events as well, and its pretty rare to come across a young conservative that is-well, conservative.
These days, its all about winning elections, and very little about ideas.
The conservative canon is very unforgiving. The material for me at least is difficult to parse and doesn't make for good stop and go reading on my train ride into work. It would be better to hand people more gentle books like Kirk's Politics of Prudence and Fleming & Gottfried's slim work The Conservative Movement.
Nobody reads Marx anymore either, thankfully.
Ideologies are dead, science is the new philospohy.
Of course the science of JP Rushton, EO Wilson, Arthur Jensen, Steve Pinker, Michael Bailey, Richard Hernstein, and anyone else whose findings don't fit in with your preconcieved ideology doesn't count.
It is a shame - but I think HEHE may have hit on something. I wonder if any college kids are reading any more, left or right. When I was in college we would convert Dems and leftists simply by having them read our conservative paper honestly. Which is to say they were never really leftists at all - they just accepted what was in the air without taking time understand what that meant.
Who *is* placing a high premium on ideas over politics?
