Resistance From The Right: Conservatives & The Campus Wars in Modern America
One of the major reasons that conservatives have enjoyed considerable political success is their attention to building up a strong infrastructure. Colleges have been a key training ground, though the right’s activities there have often been eclipsed by those on the left, especially in academic studies.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd fills in that gap with her rigorously researched, though at times turgidly written, book Resistance From The Right: Conservatives & The Campus Wars in Modern America. While much of her focus is on events of the 1960s and 1970s, she uses them to explain how the conservative movement evolved and gave us President Donald Trump, January 6, and the forced exile of many moderate conservatives from the modern Republican Party.
“In the 1960s, the up-and-coming generation mobilized around respectability, fundamentally rebuking disruptive direct action by radicals. In the years since, the Right’s respectability politics have been abandoned as their obsession with combatting (and mimicking) political opponents led them to employ what they have formerly decried as the least palatable strategies of their adversary,” she writes. (184-185)
Conservatives were not sitting idly by. In part due to the generosity of benefactors such as the Koch brothers and the Coors family, they developed organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom and funded groups such as the College Republicans.
During the campus tumult triggered by protests over the Vietnam War and civil rights, liberal groups received considerable attention. That is partly because of some well-publicized events, such as the burning of the ROTC building at Washington University on May 4, 19701, and the 1968 protests at Columbia University.2
However, conservatives were not sitting idly by. In part due to the generosity of benefactors such as the Koch brothers and the Coors family, they developed organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom and funded groups such as the College Republicans.
Several recent conservative leaders first learned the political ropes in groups such as these, including former two-time Attorney General William Barr, former Nixon and Reagan aide and pundit Patrick Buchanan, and political strategist Karl Rove.
These people and others had the same goal as Trump and his supporters: Own the liberals.
Shepherd contends that: “The only evident principle that guided these distinct groups, and would shortly unify them, was a reflexive anti-liberalism.” (79)
She notes that conservatives felt the need to push back hard because they were outnumbered and marginalized on many campuses. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) Chair David Keene, who would go on to lead both the American Conservative Union and the National Rifle Association, previewed the approach of campus conservatives when he wrote in 1968: “(T)hose students who have been wronged over the years [may] band together and administer a sound and thorough thrashing of the offending rabble.” (79)
Shepherd, an instructor in higher education history at the University of New Orleans, approaches her topic as a liberal critic of conservatism, but one who has at least a grudging respect for her ideological adversaries.
The founding of the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, at the home of a key intellectual godfather of modern conservativism, William F. Buckley, is considered a seminal moment in the history of the right. That organization was a training ground for many conservative activists and provocateurs. And it also set up a structure for promoting ideas that was outside the Republican Party. While there was cross-pollination between the groups, YAF has always been more doctrinaire.3
Shepherd, an instructor in higher education history at the University of New Orleans, approaches her topic as a liberal critic of conservatism, but one who has at least a grudging respect for her ideological adversaries.
She occasionally overreaches and paints with too broad a proverbial rhetorical brush.
“The Republican Party’s total commitment to thwarting the Left (rather than promoting its own principles) and its willingness to use punishment against its members has transformed the self-described party of ideas into a machine for minoritarian rule,” she writes. (192)
The GOP still has a concrete set of ideas (though they have changed in the era of Trump, as they often have when a new leader takes over), and those have helped it win at the ballot box. The country is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans and neither side has clean hands.
To be sure, the GOP has outmaneuvered the Democrats, in instances such as the 2000 presidential election and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unwillingness to confirm President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in an election year while doing so for President Trump. The Democrats used the courts to push through policies in areas such as affirmative action and restrictions on religion in the public square that did not enjoy widespread public support. And the Democrats’ successful effort to torpedo Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination laid the groundwork for much of the no-hold-barred approach that predominates in politics today.
Shepherd’s book is especially insightful when she gets into the weeds of conservative organizations and explains their tactics.
She notes that the national office of College Republicans micromanaged campus chapters: “College Republican leaders issued chapter quotas, challenging members to recruit 10 percent of their campus student bodies and ensure that all members were paying dues. Careful attention was paid to appearances. Instructions for staffing membership booths were to ‘look sharp, have pretty girls, and some handsome guys.’”(142)
Shepherd’s book is especially insightful when she gets into the weeds of conservative organizations and explains their tactics.
We also learn that there were occasional alliances between left and right. She points out that in some instances, libertarians sided with liberals to oppose the Vietnam War, though sometimes for different reasons.
The disagreements between traditionalist and libertarian conservatives are a frequent theme in the book. Though that divide was not always clear. Some traditional conservatives opposed the war or at least tried hard to avoid the draft. They were often criticized as chicken hawks or, more harshly, draft-dodging war wimps.
The book is especially strong in describing the famous clashes at Columbia and Kent State4 and some lesser-known protests. Shepherd goes in great detail, and you feel as if you are transported back to that time.
She does not mention the Washington University protests, which culminated in the burning of the ROTC building. That and other events were symptomatic of the broader unrest on campus and led to, among other things, the resignation of Chancellor Thomas Eliot.5
Some conservatives saw their political stock rise because of their reaction to campus unrest.
Then-California Governor Ronald Reagan famously quipped when he saw signs saying, “make love, not war,” that “the trouble is, from the looks of them, it didn’t look like they were capable to either.”6
Reagan also took concrete action, including engineering the firing of University of California President Clark Kerr for what Reagan believed was an insufficiently aggressive response to student protests.7
Shepherd’s book is a valuable contribution to a growing collection of scholarly and popular books about the history of American conservatism, many by those on the left.
Some conservatives saw their political stock rise because of their reaction to campus unrest. Then-California Governor Ronald Reagan famously quipped when he saw signs saying, “make love, not war,” that “the trouble is, from the looks of them, it didn’t look like they were capable to either.”
Those looking for a broader political history of conservatism should read Rick Perlstein’s four-volume account. It is overly detailed, but insightful.8
If you want more concise takes on the subject, by traditional conservatives, check out books by Matthew Continetti 9 and George Will.10
Shepherd reminds us that we are still living with the impact of the conservative campus activism of the 1960s and 1970s. And she argues that the current leaders of the right are the natural heirs to their ideological forefathers, not an aberration as some maintain.
“Republican patricians did not just give way to the partisans. They raised them,” she concludes. (193)
This argument will no doubt engender pushback from some of the ever-diminishing Never Trump faction of the Republican Party. But Resistance From The Right provides an important, if flawed, take on this important topic and sheds light on some inconvenient truths.
