The Righting Process
From behind the door, a muffled shout: “Fuck off, we don’t want none of your conservative shit!” The disembodied voice then shoves the magazine, a svelte twenty-two pages, back under his door and into the hallway, already littered with other rejected copies. My partner gives me a weary shrug, as if to say, “What else did you expect?” before returning to the thankless, endless task of distributing the Princeton Tory.
It’s an exciting time for the staff of “Princeton’s premier” (that is, only) “magazine of conservative thought,” the release of their second issue of the year. By the next morning, there will be a copy in every student’s room, waiting for them when they wake, hoping for the chance to be perused briefly before the inevitable. “The vast majority throws us away without reading us,” said John Paul Spence, editor-in-chief.
Given that this issue’s cover article is on the rousing subject of “metaphysical economics,” perhaps the students can’t be blamed. Regardless, even if the Tory announced a switch to listicles and celebrity nudes tomorrow, it seems unlikely they’d get more than a couple dozen people to actually open the magazine. The reasons for the Tory’s perpetual lack of an audience are various and numerous, but perhaps the most obvious is that liberal college students don’t want to read a conservative magazine.
Nor do they want to join one. That’s why I, a liberal, decided to spend a few weeks getting to know the Tory — talking to members, attending meetings, and even helping out with distribution. When I first began this project, I was reluctant. I assumed I would be spending my time with a group of miniature Mitt Romneys, some of the more humorless, confrontational, and closed-minded students on campus.
This sentiment is hardly unique. There was a noticeable uptick in anti-conservative and anti-Tory messages on the anonymous social media app Yik-Yak in the days following the magazine’s distribution (though one user was actually grateful to receive the new issue, since the “dorm was running out of toilet paper”). Not to mention the aggressive responses I received at distribution, or the disemboweled copies of the Tory scattered throughout my hall the next day, detritus left by a student either liberal or drunk (or likely, both).
Whoever the student was, he or she certainly didn’t give the Tory much of a chance, just as most students on this campus don’t give conservatives a chance to be heard. Too bad, since they might actually have something to say.
“A Place Where Philosophers Interact”
The first image one sees upon opening that issue of the Tory is Zach Horton’s picture, next to his editorial. In the photo, Zach, the magazine’s current publisher and former editor-in-chief, stands in a wood-paneled library, looking up from an open book, as if it were a scene from a bad commercial and he’s about to say “Oh hey, I didn’t see you there.” With a slight smile on his face, a George Will-esque bowtie around his neck, and a wall of tomes behind him, he couldn’t look more like a young conservative if he tried.
Despite the somewhat stilted photo, Zach is quite engaging in person, speaking thoughtfully and passionately about the Tory’s mission. “We do not want to be just a campus National Review. We want to do something that’s unique,” he said. Under Zach’s leadership, the Tory has moved away from policy papers and the Republican party line towards a focus on philosophical-style inquiries into modern politics and campus life. “Instead of just hearing talking points from Democrats and Republicans,” he said, “I want to see problems resolved with clear thinking.”
This can take many forms. A recent editorial of Zach’s, for example, defended the importance of moderation, which he defined as “an even-keeled sense of reasonability.” He argued that moderation is a vital quality for all college students, writing, “The University is the ideal place for intellectual conversation, and such dialogue only thrives when there is mutual acknowledgment that reasonable people of goodwill can disagree.”
Besides the conservatism inherent to defending traditional values, Zach’s editorial was apolitical, and thus of potential interest to the entire campus. Or, as it turned out, of no interested to anyone. It’s both sad and ironic that his essay, attacking our tendency to “clump together in our little cliques of political group-think,” was read by no more than a handful of students, simply because it appeared in the campus conservative magazine.
But despite the myopia that can often result from interacting with only like-minded people, doing so may offer other benefits. Whatever their background, conservatives here tend to stick together. Many told me that they knew almost all of the conservatives on this campus, for example. Which is not to say that the conservative community is homogeneous. “There are a lot of libertarians. There are a lot of social or fiscal conservatives,” said Sofia Gallo, a staff writer. But even though their individual ideologies may differ, conservative students provide support to their fellow right-wingers. “It’s good to debate, but it’s also nice to refine your ideas with people who you’re not necessarily arguing,” she said.
Indeed, though simply being around others who share one’s minority views is refreshing, the biggest advantage the conservative community has may be its ability to provide intellectual backing to its members. When Sofia was still in high school, she learned about conservatism mostly by “read[ing] random things online.” But after coming to Princeton, other students and faculty pointed her towards more canonical conservative texts, helping her find intellectual support for ideas in which she had already believed.
And the process seems to work wonders. Having been an active member of the Tory for over three years now, Zach is able to cite numerous conservative thinkers — Scruton, Oakeshott, and Burke, among many others — as backing for his beliefs. Moreover, he speaks thoughtfully about the philosophical basis for his conservatism, which he described as “a preference for the known, not the unknown.”
This focus on intellectualism seems to be inherent to conservatism here. “The conservative has a distinct appreciation for what has come before us,” meaning many conservative students are “interested in history, schools of thought, philosophy,” Zach said. While my evidence is admittedly anecdotal, of the nine people on the Tory masthead who have declared a major, seven of them chose a field in the humanities. Though the STEM fields are of course academically rigorous, majoring in the humanities requires one to be an intellectual in the traditional sense — one who pursues knowledge for knowledge’s sake (since it’s certainly not for the sake of a bigger paycheck).
This attitude is a fundamental part of the Tory’s ethos. “It’s a place where philosophers interact,” Zach said. Grandiosity aside, Zach’s statement rings true — at the meetings I attended, and in my discussions with students, I saw a desire to move past the superficial discourse that many staff members think is too prevalent on campus. The Tory doesn’t always achieve this; certain articles even demonstrate a disappointing lack of critical thinking, such as Tal Fortgang’s “Checking My Privilege,” which briefly sparked national outrage last year for its misunderstanding of what the term “privilege” actually means. But at its best, the Tory is capable of thoughtful critiques and insightful discussions of American politics and Princeton life, from an often-ignored point of view. Indeed, it is capable of refuting the notion that conservatives are anti-intellectuals. Certainly the global-warming denying, “legitimate rape” propounding brand of conservative found in Washington might fit that label. But writers for the Tory are Princeton students, not career politicians, and their intellect reflects that fact.
And though his magazine has perhaps not received the readership it deserves, Zach remains hopeful. “We believe that if students really are of the liberal mind, in the sense of the liberal arts, they will be inclined to read some diverse thinking, and be open to it,” he said. “And not to read it just to know how to respond, but to consider whether it might be true.”
“They Just Don’t Know It Yet”
“You know, Barry Goldwater said ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,’ and I completely agree,” Evan Draim told me. Evan, a managing editor at the Tory, president of the College Republicans, and the youngest delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention (he was 17 at the time, not even of voting age), is much more mild-mannered than his enthusiasm for “Mr. Conservative” might suggest.
Dressed in checkered shirt and boat shoes, looking not unlike a young Paul Ryan, Evan tells me that the Tory is home to many different types of conservative students. “The conservative movement is not monolithic. You have many different groups within it — libertarians, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives,” he says. At the Tory, “we all try to incorporate as many of those perspectives as possible.”
Indeed, of the dozen or so Tory writers and editors I interviewed, most had their own unique definition of conservatism. All of them, however, understood that conservatism is a broad term, encompassing many different beliefs and values, even within the relatively small campus community. Rather than create tension, this diversity of opinion often leads conservative students to discover common ground. “There’s a general set of principles we all share, and how we apply those principles to certain policies is what differs,” Evan said.
Just as he shares principles with fellow conservatives, Evan also feels that it’s very possible to connect with liberal students. “I think that it’s about showing common ground,” he told me. Describing his so-called “listen, don’t lecture” approach to talking with liberal students, he said “If I know that they’re conservative on one or two issues, I point out where we have that agreement and try to get them on board. And maybe eventually I try to convince them that they may have more in common with Republicans than they do with Democrats.”
Which is not to say that all his conversations with liberals have an ulterior motive. Evan seems aware that most liberals are set in their views, but thinks that talking to them is still worthwhile for debate’s sake. And sometimes, his approach works wonders; a few former members of the College Democrats recently switched to the College Republicans instead, according to Evan. “They viewed it as being a great place for open discussion of the issues,” he said.
Despite the popular conception that all right-wingers are either aggressive bigots in the Newt Gingrich mold, or out-of-touch automatons like Romney, conservatives here tend to be friendly and welcoming. In many ways, it’s a savvy strategy. Since the proportion of conservatives tends to increase with age, it makes sense that many college liberals might have a hidden conservative lurking within, waiting until the opportune moment (mid-life crisis, say, or the inevitable retirement to Florida) to surface.
“What Reagan said about Hispanic voters is that they’re conservatives, they just don’t know it yet,” Evan told me. “I maintain to this day that a majority of young people are conservative, they just don’t know it yet.”
In an effort to reach these nascent conservatives, or at least open a dialogue, he tries to keep his articles accessible to a wide range of students. “I don’t view myself as talking to a small set of Princeton students, like just conservatives,” he said. “My duty is to speak to all Princeton students.”
This effort involves giving conservatism a friendlier face. “Part of the fun of being a Republican on campus is playing a role in fixing our branding issues, in bringing the Republican Party to a place where it can appeal to young voters,” Evan said. “Sometimes, just by hanging out with conservatives…[liberals] will come around on some of the issues.”
It’s hard to imagine a liberal saying anything similar about conservative students — if one could become a liberal just by hanging out with other liberals, there wouldn’t be any conservatives left on this campus. Perhaps this is because conservatives tend to be more set in their beliefs than liberals, since it certainly takes a fair amount of conviction to be a conservative at this young age.
But it seems more likely that conservatives on this campus make an extra effort to be approachable and open to discussion of their beliefs. Evan feels that the same may not be true of liberals on campus, many of whom, without reading the Tory, “ascribe one political ideology to it and judge it based on the ideology.” The most inflammatory articles, like Fortgang’s, receive the most attention, and heavily sway campus perception of the Tory, while the more moderate and thoughtful articles are ignored.
But even given this, the Tory is distributed to every student on campus, and Evan remains hopeful that “some people, even if they’re not conservative, might peruse through it.” Perusal, one assumes, being the first step towards a full-fledged conversion to conservatism. But failing that, a brief glance through the Tory might be enough to give liberals pause, to help them “realize the error of their ways,” as Evan said. “Hopefully earlier rather than later.”
“My Mission Is Just to Understand”
At the beginning of this school year, Christian Say, president of the Anscombe Society and a staff writer for the Tory, published an article entitled “Rape Culture and the Paradox of Consent.” In it, he made a forceful case that our focus on consent when dealing with cases of rape and sexual assault actually helps reinforce the rape culture it seeks to defeat.
Three days later, the Tiger (Princeton’s premier/only humor magazine) published a parody. Seizing on Christian’s unusual metaphors, the Tiger took quotes from the article and presented them as a series of Jaden Smith tweets, entitled “How Can Consent Be Real If Our Sex Isn’t Real?” The Tiger article was liked 120 times on Facebook; Christian’s was not liked once.
Christian, however, didn’t mind. “Some of the examples were meant to be ridiculous,” he said, expressing surprise that people didn’t seem to understand that. “People took my jokes, and made jokes about them because they thought they weren’t jokes.” Regardless, he was happy that people cared enough about the article to parody it.
Mostly though, he didn’t care about jokes being made at his article’s expense, because he was still assured that it was right. “If it’s a good joke and it’s funny, I’m all for it,” he said, but “no one offered substantive criticism.”
Despite his article’s scholarly tone (and apparently questionable humor), Christian is actually quite funny in person. Perhaps it’s only because the campus doesn’t expect to laugh with the Tory that they laugh at it.
But for Christian, the humor seems to be mostly window dressing. The real aim is to make people reevaluate. “I hate the non-questioning attitude a lot of people have,” he told me. And whether his readers are liberal or conservative, he means for them to come away from his articles thinking differently than they did before.
To this end, he rarely argues from a conservative standpoint, focusing instead on the unquestioned assumptions that underlie political beliefs on both sides of the aisle. His most recent article on rape culture had an implicit conservatism behind it, arguing that sex has been devalued in modern society. But the article before that, entitled “Why You Are Not a Heterosexual,” was targeted at conservative notions of sexuality.
Christian’s motives are not political, but personal. “My mission is just to understand things,” he told me. “A lot of what I write is for myself. I’m writing just so I can clear the arguments up in my head.” This allows him to be prepared for discussions and debates with fellow students later on.
Many conservatives I spoke with told me that being in a political minority has forced them to clarify their views to themselves. “You have to be careful, especially when you’re often the ones accused of being intolerant,” Zach told me. “If you don’t speak carefully, you may fulfill a stereotype.”
Though this constant pressure to be ready to respond to liberals intelligently may be a nuisance at first, it turns out, unsurprisingly, to produce intelligent conservatives. Young liberals “can get away with just throwing opinions out there and not being informed about them,” said Solveig Gold, a staff writer for the Tory. “Conservatives don’t have that luxury.”
This environment has helped make Christian a self-confident conservative. “If I write something, I’m willing to stand behind it,” he said. But this self-confidence is not the same as obstinacy. “I’m fine with being wrong,” he told me. “I don’t care, I just want to know.” This is why he takes care not to sound too self-certain in his articles — if he receives genuine criticisms of his views, he’ll change them.
Though the Republican elite on television and in Washington often comes off as intolerant or close-minded, many of the conservative students I spoke with expressed a desire for a more robust and open political dialogue here. It’s a common sentiment, even among liberals, on this rather apathetic campus. But it seems especially present among conservative students, many of whom want to engage in real, thoughtful discussion with their liberal counterparts. Zach said that the Nassau Weekly, which he called “pretty explicitly liberal,” often “grinds the gears, because it doesn’t take the other side seriously.” (Full disclosure: I’m a staff writer for the Nassau Weekly.)
But maybe it’s not liberals specifically that lack intellectual honesty — maybe it’s Princeton students in general. Christian finds that most precepts here consist of “individual people spewing their individual bullshit.” Wanting real conversation, he chooses to engage students in precept. “I take what they said at face value, pretend it was said in all honesty, and then just work with it,” he told me, asking classmates to provide textual evidence for their claims, or to explain what they mean — essentially, to be as thoughtful in class as Christian is in his writing.
Unfortunately, this has earned Christian a bit of a reputation. He’s heard from friends that some classmates consider him to be very aggressive in precept. But if a desire for smart conversation now counts as aggression, then I’m inclined to believe aggression is sorely needed on this campus, and that the Tory might be a vital source of it. Regardless, Christian doesn’t seem to mind the reputation. He considers himself to be “that guy on campus for a lot of other conservatives, like younger freshman…that guy who they can go to and ask questions.” At times, he even seems to enjoy this responsibility, since it allows him to help shape political discourse on campus by “calling people to be genuine, and calling people to be human.” And if that fails, then he can just go back to calling people on their precept bullshit.
“Happy Warriors”
Solveig Gold is not your typical Republican. She hails from the liberal hotbed of New York City. During the Vietnam War, her mother and maternal grandparents were vocal antiwar activists — as she puts it, “my mother wore a black armband to school everyday, my grandfather grew his hair out, and their phone was wire-tapped all the time.” When asked why the government considered her family important enough to spy on, Solveig told me that her grandfather is Robert Jenson, a leading Lutheran theologian, and at the time, a prominent Christian liberal. He, as well as his family and Solveig’s godfather Richard John Neuhaus (who later founded First Things, a prominent ecumenical conservative journal), made the switch to conservatism in the wake of Roe v. Wade.
Solveig seems to have retained some of her grandfather’s rebellious streak, though one might not guess it from her long blonde hair, chic attire, and membership in the university Glee Club. She casually wrote off the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” political ideology, ascendant among Millennials, as “a copout,” since it seems designed to be as inoffensive as possible. “Offending people is never good. That being said, the fear of offending people…hurts the conversation,” she said.
So it makes sense that Solveig was attracted to the Tory, which “has tended to be on the edgier, slightly more pugnacious side of the conservative spectrum,” as Professor Robert George, likely the most prominent conservative on campus, wrote in an email. “But Tory people are happy warriors rather than scowlers,” he added.
This makes the Tory emblematic of what UC San Diego sociologists Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood call “highbrow provocation.” In their recent book, Becoming Right, a study of differing modes of political expression on various college campuses, they claim this style is characterized by “goading other students into recognizing the politically correct follies of their campus.”
Any number of recent Tory articles, from “The Editor’s Guide to Bad Liberal Arguments,” to Christian’s latest piece, which turned the recent obsession with consent on its head by claiming it actually reinforces rape culture, exhibit a similar tendency to taunt their audiences, even as they educate them.
This tendency seems present in the larger conservative community on campus as well. In October of last year, the Anscombe society sponsored a discussion between Princeton faculty members about gay marriage. Every aspect of the event, from its simplistic name, “Gay Marriage? A Debate,” to the minimalist black and white posters advertising it, seemed designed to irk liberals — but subtly, rather than aggressively.
The campus conservative community’s highbrow provocation stands in stark contrast to what Binder and Wood call simply “provocation,” a style they claim tends to be present at larger state universities. Conservatives who use this latter style “strive to be a visible, vocal, mediaworthy presence,” which “always gets a reaction.” Binder and Wood provide examples of this style, including the “Affirmative Action Bake Sale,” where white students are charged more than minorities are, and hosting inflammatory speakers such as Ann Coulter. The provocative style is designed to express anger at and ridicule the campus liberal majority, rather than, say, open up a dialogue.
In many ways, this divide between Princeton’s highbrow provocation and other schools’ more aggressive style mirrors the current divide among Republican legislators between the party establishment and the Tea Party. One is elitist, the other populist; one favors debate, the other stunts; one is skeptical of liberals, the other refuses to cooperate with them. Though the two Republican Party factions share many fundamental beliefs, their styles of expression differ greatly. Discussing the Tea Party, Sofia said “I don’t really have anything against them. I just don’t like some of their tactics and their language.”
But conservatives here take issue with more than just the Tea Party. Solveig wishes the Republican Party would fix what she calls its “PR problem,” referring to the conspicuous lack of right wing women and minorities. (This equating of diversity with “PR” is obviously problematic, and perhaps explains why none of the staff particularly cares that the masthead is all-male and almost all-white). Many other Tory staff members expressed distaste with what they saw as a rising trend of aggression in the Republican Party. Solveig contrasted the more civil environment of Princeton with the increasingly divisive political climate in Washington, saying “I think it would behoove the Republican Party to remember what it was like to be in a classroom, and that conversation can get you somewhere.” Other staff members bemoaned the lack of civil discourse, not only across the aisle, but within the Republican Party itself. “On some social issues, the Republican Party needs to accept greater flexibility, and not push people out because they don’t check off all the boxes of a litmus test,” said Evan.
Despite the Tory staff’s dissatisfaction with the current state of the Republican Party, it remains to be seen if they will be able to change things for the better. To do so would probably first require that they actually get involved with politics after graduation. “There’s going to be a selection bias in who gets into politics down the road,” said Zach. “It’ll be biased towards people who are in College Republicans now. I’m inclined to think that that means that there will be considerable similarities between how things are done now and how things are done later.”
Zach believes that “if someone with a Tory-mindset gets into politics, that will be a marked change.” But that someone may or may not be him. “I wouldn’t rule out involvement in politics, but I hate — I would probably not like it,” Zach corrected himself diplomatically — like a true politician.
***
The Tory, that often mocked, not-often read magazine of conservative thought, inspires diverse reactions — respect, condescension, pride, loss of faith in humanity. Whatever one’s personal opinion of the Tory, it seems clear that it has ineradicably altered political discourse on campus. Professor George recalled that, when he began teaching here in 1985, conservative students “felt that they were, for all intents and purposes, alone and on their own.” There was little faculty support, and “only the bravest conservatives” were willing to identify themselves as such.
Today, Professor George believes that campus has become more welcoming to right-wing viewpoints. “Conservative students today are willing to express their views publically, including in campus discussions, without too much fear of being ostracized or bullied,” he said. And whether or not one agrees with conservative ideals, it is undeniable that an increased diversity of opinion is vital to a healthy campus discourse. As Professor George put it, “at our university, we value, and don’t just pay lip service to, intellectual and political pluralism, freedom of thought and discussion, and civility.”
But it’s one thing to merely tolerate conservatives on campus, and another entirely to listen to what they have to say. I spent approximately two months doing exactly that, and though I’m (fortunately) still thoroughly liberal, I’ve also come to realize that my opinions about conservatives were mostly ill informed. Conservatives students here are not the same conservatives who appear nightly on Fox News, or who disappoint us daily in our nation’s capitol. They are, in fact, some of the more thoughtful and open students I’ve had the pleasure of meeting during my time on campus.
When compared to the discordant, oppositional tone of contemporary American politics, Princeton can seem a haven of mutual respect and intellectual openness. “All of us, liberals and conservatives alike, should be grateful for these features of campus life at Princeton, and we should all do our parts to preserve them,” said Professor George. But it is far from perfect here. Doing our part entails more than simply acknowledging that there are other viewpoints. It means taking the time to actually acquaint yourself with opinions — and people — you disagree with.