Lifestyles of the Chaste and the Stainless
Friday, January 25, 2008
The grotesque and fascinating tale of Princeton student Francisco Nava makes one wonder whether it’s possible to say with any seriousness that Young Conservatism hasn’t become a campus identity group like any other, though perhaps still lacking the advisory deans and physical plants. A lifestyle choice, in other words, with all the requisite doodads, and whose purpose is to invent new ways to appear crushed by society’s boot.
Nava was a member of the Anscombe Society, a group dedicated to blowing against the contravening wind of long-since-liberated sexuality at Princeton. Their efforts seemed mostly to take the form of Op-Eds published in the daily paper praising sexual abstinence. Nava began to find threatening notes in his mailbox, and eventually four Anscombe officers, plus Robert P. George, a professor, the group’s advisor, and a well-known Catholic conservative writer, also received threats. Nava was found beaten and taken to a hospital. He claimed to have been taken aside by two men and beaten with an Orangina bottle for his beliefs. He was treated at the hospital and released.
Yet it turned out that Nava had not only sent the threatening e-mails himself but had also inflicted his own beating. It emerged later that Nava fabricated a hate crime against himself at boarding school—an anti-gay slur on his door. There was no mass hysteria at Princeton, perhaps because of admirable restraint, perhaps because Nava was not one of the Left’s victims, perhaps because the evidence quickly came to light. The obvious parallel is to the Duke rape case, when the molded-over radicalism on campus, the false accuation, and the absurd racial politics of Durham combined to write a real-life Tom Wolfe novel.
It will be objected that to blame Young Conservatism for this is to dispense with commonsensical standards of responsibility. I would not argue that the Anscombe Society is responsible, any more than civil rights activists are responsible for the antics at Duke. Yet why did someone as troubled as Nava find himself attracted to that society? There was something in the air. Some join these groups because they simply enjoy the society of those who share their views, but others join to go to war with the world.
I would not be surprised if a study were to reveal that politics has no significant effect on a person’s sexual drive. My innumerable trolls through the Ultra Lounge have revealed that some on the right live like Kenneth Tynan, and some liberals, for whom Freud and Kinsey are gospel, get sweaty palms at the thought of hand-holding. (Freud, apparently, did not take advantage of the freedom he himself advocated.) In a campus culture where a vigorous sexual life is considered admirable, it’s not surprising that certain non-Don Juans consider themselves not merely different but besieged and oppressed. Not surprising, but given the consequences, not acceptable either.
The American conservative movement is unique in many respects. Unlike the continental European Right or even the British Tories, the American Right since the 1950s began with a small group of authors. Whittaker Chambers maintained until the end of his life that in abandoning Communism, he was joining the losing side of history. Then came the magazine, National Review, started by the young and energetic William F. Buckley, Jr. It fused various strains of right-wing thinking—anti-communism, traditionalism, and libertarianism—to create something politically viable. In expelling the Randians and the John Birchers, he made the movement intellectually serious—and that is what it was then, an intellectual movement. In other words, to offer a hypothesis, it was the first conservative movement to resemble a liberal movement. But one could say that all political movements contain the seeds of their own destruction, for once they gain power, philosophical rigor, the kind achievable only in books, dissipates. In the place of Chambers came Falwell. The original “young conservatives” relentlessly rebelled against the stifling liberal consensus, achieving a kind of romantic rebellion. (Not for nothing did an editor at the socialist In These Times write the first largely admiring biography of Buckley.) Today’s young conservatives have it about as tough as Little Lord Fauntleroy. I have personally field-tested their responses to political contradiction and found that they tend to respond by demanding that you quit the premises. Having borrowed the habits of identity politics, including demanding government-mandated affirmative action for conservatives (courtesy of David Horowitz), young conservatism was bound to end up with Nava in an alley flagellating himself with a bottle of Orangina, like Tyler Durden for the blazer-wearing set.
Identity politics proceeds from various falsehoods, but there are good reasons it persists and with such emotional charge. Belonging to one of these groups must be very comfortable. My ancestors only a few generations ago lived out a more extreme version of this. They knew their caste or class, and from that they divided the world into “to whom we must pay obsequy” and “on whom we may tread with our feet.” Happily for them, the latter group was a great deal larger. The American simulations may be less hierarchical and are based on choice, but they still fulfill the main role: shaping your day-to-day life, with an especial eye toward marriage or other forms of sexual companionship. Think of them as protection zones from the lively sexual free market on campus. If, at any time, you are at a loss for what you should be doing, you will receive plenty of suggestions from the clan, though suggestion is obviously too weak a word for something so insistent and subtly powerful. Everyone needs society of some kind, individualism being a kind of myth, but the social aspect corrupts and deletes the intellectual program.
If conservatism has become a subset of identity politics, which I think it has, we can look forward to more fabricated hate crimes. Only when the siege mentality ceases will soldiers in the keep stop pouring boiling oil all over themselves. The irony is that conservatism ought to have been better prepared for its decadent period. Decay was for a time the right’s great theme. It turns out that obsession with a disease can’t stave off its onset. n
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