Guy Benson is the kind of 19-year-old who has contacts at the Pentagon and refers to himself as being “on the record” in support of Social Security privatization. He’s operations manager of Northwestern’s radio station, WNUR, where he’s also one of the conservative hosts of the political debate show Feedback, and for the past three summers he’s interned at Fox News.
Eventually Guy identified the station as WNUR, and himself as a college student. It was like the moment where Spider-Man is unmasked on the train, and the passengers gasp, “Why . . . he’s just a kid!”
What the entire meeting would boil down to was message discipline. College Republicans president Henry Bowles III, a junior whose vintage T-shirt and carefully tousled hair made him look like the lead singer of an indie-rock band, got things started. He told the group that for the duration of the semester, each session would start with a presentation on some important issue. This week Ben Snyder, a member of Students for Life, would give a PowerPoint presentation about the upcoming Supreme Court battles titled “Us vs. Them.” And next week, said Henry, someone would be talking about the flat tax.
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A little later, as Ben discussed the impending battle over Supreme Court nominees, he mentioned the possibility that Senate Republicans would rewrite filibuster rules so Democrats couldn’t filibuster judicial nominees. This strategy is often called the “nuclear option” because it could provoke a war between the two parties, but has, Ben told the group, “now been renamed the constitutional option.”
I graduated from college four years ago, and I happen to have spent a good percentage of my time as an undergraduate talking about politics–in my case, sweatshop labor and other lefty causes–with my activist friends. With the possible exception of a few mild admonitions for language that wasn’t sufficiently PC, I never saw anyone interrupt anyone for slipping off message. I was also surprised to see the Republican kids collectively generating arguments to use when fighting with liberals, sharpening their talking points, and preparing for battle. My fellow liberals and I didn’t see ourselves engaged in a war of ideas. We probably didn’t even realize there were any conservatives around to fight with.
During the many hours I spent with Guy, whenever conversations turned to the substance of his politics, my blood would start to boil: he calls abortion “genocide,” finds unions “distasteful,” and thinks the government has no business providing retirement security for the elderly. There’s not much we agree on, politically speaking. But when Guy mocked the style of liberals and Democrats, taking shots at Al Gore’s ponderousness, or the hypocrisy of rich liberals, or perpetually aggrieved undergrads, I’d find myself agreeing, siding with him against my own people. The right has virtually perfected swatting at this kind of low-hanging fruit, and they’ve discovered that if you do it enough, pointing out those parts of the left that everyone finds grating, you almost never have to engage with the substance of what those people, or anyone associated with them, say. They’re dead on arrival.
He might not have a vast conspiracy to call on, but he and his conservative friends, many of whom live in adjacent suites on the first floor of PARC, do stick together. They call themselves out-of-the-closet conservatives, in contrast to the wimpier, but to their mind more numerous, conservatives who are in the closet. These closeted types are cowed by the liberal consensus on campus, Guy says, but he knows they’re out there. “There’s people who aren’t particularly political, who would rather not go through the hassle of being one of the conservatives. They might quietly vote for the Republicans, but they’re, let’s say, less forthcoming conservatives. A lot of people don’t want to make waves. I’ve made conservative statements in class and been hissed. I’ve gotten a few e-mails after Feedback shows–a couple of people were unhappy with some of my views.” I asked if he ever responds to such critics. “Yes,” he said. “I thank them for listening.”
