Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver,
one of five new trustees of
National Review, is a leader in a
group no longer characterized by
uniform views.
Posted on 07/17/2004 7:40:06 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver,
one of five new trustees of
National Review, is a leader in a
group no longer characterized by
uniform views.
In 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.
That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.
Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.
"Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days," said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. "It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions," he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.
The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall's and Oxblog, oxblog .blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America's Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.
In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. "Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism," she began. "The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?"
Rearing new conservatives has long been a subject of keen interest to their elders. To counter what they considered the liberal dominance of the major universities and news organizations, a handful of conservative foundations has helped build a network of organizations to train young members of the movement, most prominently the 51-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It publishes journals and books, sponsors fellowships and administers a network of 80 conservative college newspapers.
"I think one of the principal, even signal, features of the conservative movement is its overriding concern for nurturing young people," said Jeff Nelson, 39, the institute's vice president for publications.
Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell's husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute's programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.
Mr. Nelson said young conservatives' greatest challenge might come from their predecessors' success. "Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling `stop,' " he said, "but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement's view of itself, from history's opponents to destiny's child."
"We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture," he continued. "There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did."
The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been "unimaginable" to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.
Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. "Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy," Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. "I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement."
Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.
Daniel McCarthy, 26, an assistant editor at The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, said that although many of his contemporaries questioned the war, few were willing to turn against the president, as he had.
"I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement," he said, "back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals who didn't necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world."
But some young conservatives argue that the United States may need to become more active, not less. Eric Cohen, 26, is the director of the biotechnology and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; the editor of its journal, New Atlantis; a consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics; and a contributor to The Weekly Standard.
In an interview, he argued that conservatives needed to accept an active role for government in dealing with advancing technology, whether in the form of terrorists' weapons abroad or attempts to change the nature of life at home. "The conservative project is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home," he said.
Mr. Cohen defended the Bush administration's preventive intervention in the Middle East as well as its limitations on federal financing for stem cell research.
"Medical progress is going to keep people alive longer than they would have been," he said. "I think prudent conservatives are going to have to find some responsible way to have sensible government to deal with the needs of aging generations. We have seen a version of this in the prescription drug bill, and there are going to be other obligations."
Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen's support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.
"If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability," he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. "For us, those two halves are inextricably linked," he said.
But several conservatives, young and old, said the greatest division in the movement pitted young traditionalists against their more libertarian peers. David Weigel, 22, the former editor of a conservative magazine at Northwestern University, a contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason and an intern at the editorial page of USA Today, said that last spring his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
He contended that even young conservatives who maintained a strict moral code for themselves were increasingly reluctant to regulate the behavior of others. "I am personally abstinent," he said, "and I plan to stay that way, but I have no problem with international aid programs that use or distribute condoms."
Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big "a political payoff."
"There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats," he said.
Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. "The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart," he said. "But I don't think the threads are by any means abandoned." He added: "There has never been a movement that doesn't go through this perplexion and development."
No idea. Not something that normal conservatives need worry about. I don't think conservatives should waste their time worrying about a need to appeal to those preoccupied with genital issues. I dislike genital politics. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a better policy. If a liberal wants "privacy of the bedroom" KEEP IT PRIVATE AND SHUT UP about it. Don't try to force everyone else to accept something abnormal and unhealthy. E-coli and sex don't go together.
I'm not into that particular activity either, but I do admire a woman with a nice booty.
And you do have a point, but I thought "don't ask, don't tell" was a phrase of liberal origin. I'd look for something else to use as a describer.
Hence, my main point - what's a conservative doing wasting oyxgen and brain energy worrying about condoms? This stuff really amazes me. I don't need to have a policy position on condoms or sodomy. None of our tax dollars should fund the weird social engineering of sex promoted by kooky foundations and quack social science.
Absolutely.
No taxpayer money going for either condom-distribution schemes OR abstinence programs.
The ONLY time government needs to get involved in the regulation of sexual activity is when it comes to children
and unwilling adults.
A fair question. I think I would need to study the history of such laws in detail, along with such things as the sociology of Amsterdam, Denmark, France, Sweden, places with more relaxed attitudes on prostitution, pornography, age of consent, etc.
In Maryland I have seen things such as where an "adult" (erotic) dancing club has been opened rather close to a middle-class residential community. There may be justifiable reasons for family-based communities to want to "regulate" such activities. I'm not sure that all of us would want to raise families and daughters in, say, Amsterdam or Las Vegas. Also...there's nothing all that charming about a broken-down, heroin-addicted prostitute in her mid-20s. The psychiatric histories of prostitutes and former professional strippers might illustrate reasons why such activities deserve juridical scrutiny beyond just Christian moral appeals for chastity and abstinence. Not sure it's entirely true that things done in "the privacy of the bedroom" never harm anyone.
An interesting point - I wonder what the history has been of condom companies lobbying for such taxpayer-funded programs. Would make a rather good satirical comedy - The Life and Times of a Condom Lobbyist in Washington, D.C.. Set in the Clinton years, of course. Lots of intrigue.
Just to address the last line, being short on time for the day:
I believe there are people in this country who view anything but the standard "man on top, get it over with quick, and only do it to try to make a baby"-style sex as evil activities they would dearly love to forbid.
There's the other camp, thinking that anything goes, and that's the other end of the teeter-totter.
Frankly, either of the above thought processes scare me.
>> By the way, how come you never hear about there being any "old Turks?"
Because Young Turks smoke like Turks..
So what? What's the likelihood of that ever happening? I find it somewhat odd that a liberal in, say, New York or California spends sleepless nights worrying that somewhere in the backwoods of Virginia or North Carolina guys reading the King James version of the Bible think that sodomy, fornication, and adultery are wrong.
I don't think they really believe that their private copulatory adventures (in "the privacy of the bedroom") are in danger. I think it's an iconoclastic style of social protest to raise oratorical hysteria (for political purposes) about alleged, weird, religious extremists. It's a form of liberal McCarthyism, I think. They know that there is no political threat to "sexual freedom." They just strongly dislike evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and they love engaging in a kind of wild-eyed fear-mongering about the Bible Thumper Peril that is poised ready to sink America into a maniacal dark age of Salem Witch Hunts.
There are kooky hyper-religious freaks in various hinterlands of North America. Snake handlers and what not. I don't think it's credible that they pose some sort of major threat of imperiling other Americans' private copulations.
But liberals don't really want "privacy of the bedroom." What they want is public perversion. And they want to force everyone else (through the courts) to accept a totalitarian secular humanist dictatorship. What they don't like is religious conservatives engaging in public religious speech. Has nothing to do with any real threat to "the privacy of the bedroom." John Kerry and Company will try to play this card. Should prove for some interesting high comedy.
I just simply do not believe that Robert Reich is unable to masturbate or roll around with an inflatable female doll at Harvard because somewhere in Virginia Pat Robertson is brooding over Old Testament passages in the King James version. That's absurd. If he's that afraid of southern Baptists and Fundamentalist Christians, he should see a good psychiatrist.
Now...if we had a truly conservative magazine run by guys dressed and styled like The Kinks...and with the ironic/satirical attitude...that would be something to talk about! 18th-century dandies.
Conservatives in black. ;)
Darn, I miss Lee Atwater...
Lot of conservative values on display in Hammer Films flicks. Family continuity. Man's home is his castle. Small-town values. Submissive, attending, large-breasted women. Chivalry. No ACLU-directed ban on the public display of the crucifix. Tough lesson for liberals, the latter.
Regards, Ivan
He'd have trouble finding good courses in metaphysics at most universities these days.
Love at First Bite (1979)
Directed by Stan Dragoti
George Hamilton (Count Dracula), Susan St James (Cindy Sondheim), Richard Benjamin (Dr Jeff Rosenberg), Arte Johnson (Renfield), Dick Shawn (Lieutenant Ferguson)
"Plot: The Communists evict Count Dracula and his manservant Renfield from Castle Dracula so that the castle can be occupied by the Rumanian Gymnastics Team. Dracula decides to head to New York in pursuit of fashion model Cindy Sondheim, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love Mina Seward. He seduces her after meeting her on a disco dancefloor. But her fiancée, psychologist Jeff Rosenberg, notices the bites on Cindy’s neck and tries to stop Dracula." http://www.moria.co.nz/horror/love1stbite.htm
Social issues ping.
No, they tend not to be impressed by that. ;)
Regards, Ivan
LOL!
Unsung conservatives:
Montague Summers, Bram Stoker...
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