Against Ivy League Conservatism

Over the past weekend, I, along with around twenty other Dartmouth students, including several members of The Review, ventured down to our nation’s capital to participate in the annual March for Life and the David Network Conference. As always the March for Life was a splendid event with extra joy and hopefulness in the air after the recent Supreme Court rulings. I have been fortunate enough to attend the March for the last two years. The March continues to be one of the most festive, refreshing experiences in American politics. However, the main force which brought Dartmouth students to Washington was the David Network Conference the day after the March. The David Network is a nascent enterprise that seeks to organize Ivy League conservatives in a more formal, unified manner, and while I agree that this organization has a noble purpose, elite conservatives must make deliberate plans and great sacrifices to have any chance of success.

First off, while the Right must reassert itself in institutions and infiltrate them if possible, the right must also be realistic about what institutions can be subverted. Bottomline, the Ivy League will never be conservative. As this group of universities exists to propel the current left-wing ruling class forward, giving needed credentials and instilling liberal cultural sympathies to capable young people, conservatives must realistically view these universities as a hostile force that will never return to the neutral institutions which they once perhaps were. A conservative student at an Ivy League university is much more similar to being an ex-pat in a foreign country than a patriot in his own. Yes, there exist groups on campuses that have conservative sympathies, and one can get by through keeping up private sensibilities; however, to try to wage direct war in the heart of the beast that is an Ivy League university is a futile endeavor and any “victory” one achieves will be pyrrhic at best.

Ivy League universities maintain their elite positions because they inculcate elite, liberal sensibilities in students. They provide a certificate to young people that merely states these students have gone through a cultural rite of passage where they can dependently occupy elite positions in society without causing a ruckus or uproar. In a sense, to be an Ivy League student is to be what conservatives should be resisting: a person who is more loyal to the current ruling regime of the nation than to the actual people who populate our great country.

Conservatives must reject the current prestigious certifying systems of elite institutions and instead cultivate elites that can transcend the current boundaries of the ruling elite. First, we need budding elites to reject conventional paths. Finance and consulting are undoubtedly lucrative and professionally advantageous; however, these career paths are simply an extension of the elite-making apparatus that starts in the Ivy League. This demand is hard, but conservatives need their young people to make great risks, to challenge orthodox paths, and to swerve away from where the cultural hoard carries them. Many of the panels at the David Network Conference advocated for conservatives to band together and stand their ground in respective consulting, tech, and finance positions, career paths which merely extensions of the current ruling order elite-selection pipeline. While conservatives in these fields should not be simply left behind, dedicating resources to cultivate conservatives in these industries is a misallocation. 

Instead, conservatives should focus and encourage students to embark on their own paths, away from these standard directions. For example, many high-paying starting jobs for today’s graduates all exist in the same five to eight cities. While these cities are hemorrhaging with young talent and capability, the culture of these cities is oversaturated with young professionals, who are only building careers and nothing else, no families and no communities. Conservatives should use this brain drain to their advantage. Encourage students who come from red states to return home to those red states. Allocating young talent to local communities, communities that are ripe for young talent to make a real difference and gain real power, is what conservatives should encourage. Instead of encouraging students to occupy basic consulting or finance positions, conservatives should instead incentivize and resource-back young elites to return home to Arkansas or Nebraska or Wisconsin and contribute tangibly back to communities where their talent will be best used. “Impact making” work is an overused Leftism term; however, the Left does have an entire NGO and non-profit apparatus for just these purposes, to encourage young talent to integrate themselves into local communities and build up bases of support. The Right could take a page out of the enemy’s handbook and place resources behind similar programs in rural communities that are sympathetic to their causes. 

If conservatives want to create a new elite, they cannot simply use the system of their enemies and hope that it will bear fruits for them. Conservatives need to encourage young elites away from simple prestige or monetary-seeking positions and toward that which can inculcate applicable governing skills and culture-making tendencies. We need artists and teachers, not excel spreadsheet workers. If conservatives wish to overcome the ruling elite, which wishes to destroy traditional forces in this country, they must also reject the current apparatuses of elite selection in this country. The false prestige of the Ivy League is that of a liberal, hostile force, and conservatives must create new, better elite-making systems.