Introduction by Mary Eberstadt
This book is a unique attempt to answer a question that continues to confound many observers both American and otherwise: Why conservatism? It does so not through shrill polemic or high-decibel rage, but rather in the most practical and informative way possible: via the unfiltered voices of a dozen leading authors and editors of the contemporary right, including some of the best-known and most influential in the country. Peter Berkowitz, David Brooks, Joseph Bottum, Danielle Crittenden, Dinesh D'Souza, Stanley Kurtz, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry, Heather Mac Donald, P. J. O'Rourke, Sally Satel, and Richard Starr all tell their stories here. They explain how they came to reside on the conservative side of America's red-blue divide -- in some cases, to their own surprise.
The utility of such a volume in this particular political moment is evident. For one thing, following 9/11, two terms of George W. Bush, Democratic victories in fall 2006, and controversial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the mood on the right itself is one of introspection and soul-searching. For another, and despite significant disenchantment among some, the overall conservative realignment of the United States is still one of the biggest political stories of the past quarter century. It remains so with or without Bush in the White House, whether or not the American military continues its mission in Iraq, and regardless of who holds the next majority in Congress or on the Supreme Court. The November 2006 elections -- in which Democrats roundly prevailed by promising for the first time since Bill Clinton to govern from the center, and a handful of right-leaning Democratic candidates defeated Republicans unaccustomed to attack from that wing -- clinch the point about our political sea change. Whatever the particular fortunes of the Republican Party one year, two years, or five years hence, the United States as a whole has plainly moved right.
Yet even though many more Americans are now likely to self-identify as "conservative" rather than "liberal," the reasons for that transformation remain questions of enduring public wonder and scrutiny -- not least from Cambridge to San Francisco and everywhere blue in between. How did a movement that appeared sidelined and embattled only a generation ago come to exert such influence that even the Democratic Party now tacks starboard? What accounts for the unprecedented growth and reach of right-leaning think tanks, magazines, television, and radio? What, in short, has been happening out there such that so many Americans are now comfortable with the conservative label, or, conversely, so averse to contemporary liberalism?
During the last several years, any number of high-profile attempts to answer those questions have circulated from all political directions. Homegrown progressives have gone puzzling over their fellow citizens (Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, Jim Wallis's God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It), Englishmen have gone puzzling over Yanks (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation), rank-breakers of all kinds have gone puzzling over everything from fellow conservatives to their former selves (Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy, Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, Bruce Bartlett, Impostor). We have even seen one soi-disant latter-day Tocqueville (Bernard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo) traverse the country and sally through its social classes from high to low, in part to divine the same political mystery. And still the question for many people -- especially, though not only, liberals -- remains: How can so many supposedly rational fellow citizens out there believe all that backward reactionary stuff?
That is exactly what our contributors, all leading lights in one way or another in the intellectual firmament of the current right, wish to explain here.
That such a book might make for interesting reading was a thought kindled in me some months back during a conversation with P. J. O'Rourke about the striking number of political conversion stories we each knew. We had in mind not the eminent converts of the preceding generation, many of whom had moved from youthful socialism through the liberalism of their time and on into neoconservatism -- Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and the rest -- but rather, the so-far-untold tales from those who came next. These "younger" writers like us, now roughly in middle age, had attended college in the postliberationist 1970s and 1980s, when liberal-left thinking was not the dominant game on campus, but in many places the only one. What had happened, we wondered, to push this new generation away from the "default" position embraced by so many of our campus peers?
This book is the result of pursuing that question, which I was particularly curious to see through for two reasons -- first, because the fact that I had also "traveled" in some political sense gave me a natural interest in it; second, because my past and present associations as editor or author at various journals and magazines (The Public Interest, The National Interest, the Weekly Standard, Policy Review, First Things) had given me some inkling already of how many more such stories might be out there.
Like me, the authors of the pages ahead know the right not only from the outside in, but also from the inside out. All represent in one form or another the venues through which many ideas are made and disseminated -- journals including National Review, City Journal, Commentary, and those others named above; think tanks, including the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Manhattan Institute; "alternative" media like Fox News, nationalreview.com, and many other blogs and sites followed by conservatives. Thus, these contributors represent in miniature the generation now peopling the right-leaning think tanks and airwaves and internet and book and magazine publishing -- in a word, some of the human nuts and bolts of what Hillary Clinton once disparaged as the "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Of course "conservatism" in America is no monolith, and these pages reflect that reality, too. Their criterion for what is right is simply the obvious one: It's what those on the other side call you whenever you put your head up and they feel like taking a shot. As Irving Kristol observed two decades ago in Reflections of a Neoconservative:
The key ideological terms of modern political debate have all been either invented or popularized by the Left -- "liberal," "conservative," and "reactionary," "socialist" and "capitalist," "Left" and "Right" themselves -- so that it is extremely difficult for those on the non-Left to come up with an adequate self-definition....The sensible course, therefore, is to take your label, claim it as your own, and run with it.
And so we will do here. The practical fact is that if you are (for example) a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and write for the likes of Policy Review or any other journal that is not the New Yorker or the Nation, and publish anything at all, ever, that locates you to the right of, say, Michael Moore, then the New York Times will call you a "conservative" -- an "ultraconservative" if you really annoy them -- no matter what fine-tuned harrumphing variations with hyphens you yourself might prefer. "They" see "us" as a united front, and so for purposes of simplicity will we see ourselves here.
Naturally, reality on inspection could show otherwise. About any number of specific ideas -- the war in Iraq, immigration, gay marriage, stem cell research -- many conservatives, including those ahead, disagree. The perpetual tug of war between libertarianism and social conservatism, for example, runs firmly (if tacitly) between the lines of these pages, as could the tension between "democratism" and "realism" in foreign policy had these same authors been asked to debate the war in Iraq. Even so, one common denominator holds: These are not the only writers of their generation who could pen an essay explaining how they left the "default" position of left/liberalism behind to become something else. For every essay in these pages, any number by other authors with related con-version stories could have taken its place. That's how widespread the flight right has been. And that, in a way, is precisely the point of this book.
So what did happen to make the right the intellectual and political residence of these particular writers? Though their nuances and experiences differ, the tales told here do play variations on distinct themes.
For some, the answer begins in foreign policy -- or rather, in the excruciating national humiliation that they associate with the years 1976-80. "Jimmy Carter made me the conservative I am today, as I suspect he did many members of my generation." So summarizes Richard Starr, managing editor of the Weekly Standard, and so undoubtedly would many fellow travelers agree. Further specifying "a visceral reaction against the moral chaos and defeatism of the 1970s," Starr makes vivid this perhaps overlooked point about the reaction against the liberalism of that time: Something about a twenty-year-old, especially, does not love being told to suck it up and turn down the heat and blame yourself or America first -- and to put up with the hostage crisis because any proposed alternative to defeatism is bound to be worse.
In short, Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, as is widely held, may indeed have been unthinkable without Jimmy Carter, but Carter's influence in one perverse sense may have yet to be measured in full. For in the outcry against what he and his policies stood for, the American Spectator and any number of polemical imitators on campuses were born -- sharp, critical, and often shockingly funny vessels of the right that would go on to mock and deflate the worst of contemporary liberalism, and to i...
