Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys,
edited by Mary Eberstadt (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008).
GERALD J. RUSSELLO is Editor of the University Bookman and the author of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (University of Missouri Press).
Perhaps because of their beleaguered
status for much of the postwar period,
conservatives have had a special penchant
for the conversion narrative, tapping into
an American tradition of the redeemed
sinner finding God in an unfaithful world.
By now, the conservative Bildungsroman is a
well-established genre. After living under
liberal illusions, a chance encounter—a
book, a professor, some event—opens the
protagonist’s eyes to conservative truths.
The question that traditionally has occupied
the conservative audience for such
books concerns the type of conservatism
the narrator will adopt. Would the young
recovering liberal hero reject von Mises?
Embrace Willmoore Kendall? What are
his (or, sometimes, her) views of the South?
Of tradition? These conversion narratives,
in other words, reflected the intellectual
ferment within conservatism and among
conservatives as much as they related the
mere rejection of liberalism.
Why I Turned Right is a celebrity version
of the old tale, with a generational twist.
Edited by Mary Eberstadt, the collection
features contributions from “leading Baby
Boom conservatives” who “chronicle their
political journeys.” Contributors include
humorist P.J. O’Rourke, New York Times
editorial writer David Brooks, National
Review‘s Rich Lowry, psychiatrist and AEI
Fellow Sally Satel, Heather MacDonald,
an editor at City Journal, and others. As
would be expected from such professional
writers, these are polished essays, free with
the dropping of names and book titles. At
the level of a lazy weekend afternoon, their
essays about how they confronted their
mostly liberal upbringings and education
and came to some type of conservatism
make a pleasant read.
There are a few exceptional pieces.
Joseph Bottum offers a thoughtful meditation
on how abortion and family resulted
in his rejecting the permissiveness liberalism
of his youth. “[R]eal conservatism,”
he writes, “usually begins when you find in
yourself a limit, a place beyond which you
will not go,” a truth that liberal society—
which Bottum calls “the pleasure dome,”
home of “niceness” and “coolness”—tries
to conceal. Bottum connects his rejection
of the permissive society with a web of
arguments rooted in constitutional history
and traditional religious faith, and offers an
interpretation of conservatism in America
as a balance between “the Bible and the
Enlightenment.” He recognizes the
paradox that “the Bible may help produce
the ethics a modern state needs to allow
[for] freedom, but the Bible didn’t start out
as the ethics of liberal democracy.” Belief
is independent of modern democratic politics,
but may be necessary to it. Hence,
liberal “civic religion” is likely to fail—as
is an evangelizing Republican Party.
Todd Lindberg, editor of Policy Review,
gives a moving account of his own journey,
beginning with a parent’s death. Lindberg’s
sensibilities seem always to have been on
the right, though initially with more of a
libertarian emphasis. He writes that while
labels are less important to him now than
in his youth, he does not “mind being
called a conservative or neoconservative,”
so long as the importance of individualism
within that tradition is recognized.
His intellectual process of appreciating
the freedom he valued as a younger man
may resonate with some today. Lindberg
also reminds us that the neoconservatives,
an influence on him as he developed his
ideas about politics and social change, were
once known for their hard-nosed realism
in confronting social reality, and their
ideas served as a gathering point for young
people seeking a way out of liberalism.
Overall, however, the collection reflects
the problems of what now passes for mainstream
conservatism, which is perhaps
better termed anti-liberalism. The first
clue to the book’s direction is there in the
subtitle. The political is really the last kind
of journey a conservative should undertake;
political positions are at root only
refl ections of philosophical and religious
conviction. This deeper journey, though
it no doubt occurred with some of these
contributors, is largely absent. Instead,
the flashpoints for these conservatives are
restricted to the university, politics, or
the small world of opinion journals. Not
for them Russell Kirk’s reflections on the
modern mind as he sat in the Great Salt
Desert during the war, or the worldly and
CIA veteran Willmoore Kendall’s conviction
that the constitutional order was
designed to protect a specifically American
form of self-government against its
enemies. No, the model here (though he
oddly goes unmentioned in the text) is
Frank Meyer, whose great struggle against
Communism was the spur to his becoming
a conservative, and whose lasting contributions
to conservatism were largely in
strategy and tactics. Substitute “political
correctness” for Communism, and the
tenor of these essays becomes clear, though
the danger less pendent.
Accordingly, we hear much about politics,
campus radicals, and “left-wing”
economics, but not much about hearth
or home, neighborhood or culture—or
at least not much as to why those things
are (or should be) central to a conservative
vision. In the closing essay, Rich Lowry
tries to connect his family and faith to his
conservatism, and his evocation of “filial
piety” as grounding for his beliefs echoes
Bottum’s notion of a limit. But Lowry
is a little younger than most of the other
contributors, hinting perhaps at an intra-
Boomer difference that is left unexplored,
and this promising approach is not developed.
Richard Starr, a managing editor at
the Weekly Standard, mentions in passing
his childhood on a farm and his respect for
those who work outdoors with their hands,
but he does not connect that background
to the question of why he is a conservative
now. Instead, we get a snub of Jimmy
Carter’s recognition of the limitations of
national power. Far from being ridiculous,
however, Carter’s recognition is (or should
be) a core conservative political insight,
especially in light of the current adventures
in the Middle East. That Carter was
wrong about much else need not doom
this insight. Indeed, Iraq is only occasionally
mentioned here, and only positively
when it is.
References to what were once considered
rather humdrum conservative principles
are now treated as punch lines. Some of
the contributors, for example, explain that
they got “really” conservative only after
they had children. Fair enough, though
that sounds like a line polished for Georgetown
or Upper West Side cocktail parties
as an excuse, not a defense, of their conservatism.
But why? There is little sense, in
other words, of what these contributors
believe is worth conserving. For an earlier
generation, conservation was the central
issue: trying to convince themselves and
others of the viability of the Western
tradition against Communism abroad and
liberalism at home. Of course, there were
variations even then. Kirk, for example,
thought liberalism had exhausted itself by
the 1960s, and that Western civilization
was moving into a new age whose identity
had not been determined but whose
content would be formed not through
rational argumentation but through imaginative
recreation of a tradition that would
inspire loyalty and devotion and which was
rooted in the permanent things of human
existence.
Indeed, it is not even clear how far these
putative conservative converts have really
“journeyed” at all, despite the book’s title.
A few contributors are not shy about admitting
that they are, in fact, not conservative.
Brooks says he “drifts to the left on social
issues” and calls the Iraq adventure “one
of the noblest endeavors the United States,
or any great power, has ever undertaken.”
Political theorist Peter Berkowitz believes
“conserving liberalism itself is among
our most pressing public tasks.” Starr
and Stanley Kurtz remain committed to
versions of the “open-minded” liberalism
of their youth. MacDonald, scarred by her
experiences with indoctrinating professors
in the academy, wants a return to “oldfashioned
liberal values” in academic life.
And Satel proclaims she is “embarrassed to
be in the same camp as moral conservatives
and the religious right. . . . I am prochoice,
pro-Darwin, and pro-stem cell.”
The tenor of such statements is not that
their authors have become conservative,
but rather that the older liberalism with
which they are comfortable has moved
on. If the Harvard faculty had not turned
to postmodernism, or if the Democratic
Party had not embraced multiculturalism,
it seems, they would have remained
contented liberals. In other words, to
paraphrase Ronald Reagan: they have not
changed, liberalism has.
Then why are they here, in a book
marketed as a collection of conservative
conversion stories? They are here, one
can only conclude, because the kind of
conservatism represented in this collection
is a harmless one that does not actually
threaten Brooks’s editors at the Times
or Eberstadt’s publishers. These writers
are for the most part deeply mortared into
the New York–Washington political and
cultural axes. They publish in mainstream
liberal journals and differ from their liberal
contemporaries mostly in their specific
policy prescriptions. So these widely trumpeted
“firebrands” are free to take their
swipes at diversity-mongering in college
admissions, feminist follies, and the like,
while the corrosive cultural elites who
loathe traditional values remain in power,
their core commitments undisturbed by a
genuine opposition.
Indeed, constructing so mild a “mainstream
right” pushes other conservatives,
whose claims are more pointed, farther
to the cultural sidelines. Absent from this
volume, for example, are positions such as
Rod Dreher’s “crunchy cons” or what they
might mean to a conservative realignment.
Nor are there mentions of other
Boomer conservatives whose vision is
sharply at odds with those presented here.
Bill Kauffman’s intellectual journey from
Hill staffer for Senator Moynihan to the
author of several books offering a wholesale
reworking of an American tradition
of regionalism—which directly challenges
both the tenets of liberalism and of this
kind of “mainstream conservatism”—
would have been a perfect counterpoint
to the potted histories presented here. The
contrast of his roughly contemporaneous
journey would have brought a little fire to
this collection, and also reminded us that
conservatives once heatedly disputed their
commitments. Of course, the inclusion of
a voice like that of Kauffman’s is almost
unimaginable in such a collection.
Ultimately, therefore, Why I Turned
Right disappoints. Each personal journey
is unique and worthy of respect—for who
can see into another’s mind and soul?—
yet not all of them need be shared with
the world. The contributions reflect an
anodyne conservatism that differs in kind
and not only in degree from the stronger
stuff that animated the conservative movement
since the end of World War II. These
particular conversions, with few exceptions,
are unlikely to capture the imagination
of those young people forming their
own conservative consciences today.
