There are few things less fashionable than being a conservative in a college town. Your professors find you odd, you don’t get to go to the cool rallies and every once in a while you get called a bigot or a fascist without provocation. However, there is a major perk. Brace yourself — it may surprise you.
A conservative on a college campus can achieve a serene state of being that is pursued by many but accomplished by few: the status of a contrarian. If that’s not fashionable in this post-modern, edgy society, I don’t know what is. There are a lot of faux contrarians out there — the hipsters, for example, who claim to be paragons of individualism yet all wear the same style of jeans. If anyone can explain that to me, hit me up; it confuses me. I always thought a true individualist would drape himself or herself in velvet, Costanza-style.
“But wait!” you say, “I thought the liberals were the contrarians, with their groovy enlightenment values in opposition to the oppressive reactionary culture!” You’re 50 years too late, old chap. Anything that was once considered mainstream conservatism is long dead.
The major political parties, the news media (Fox News, too) and the educational system are all bent over backward swilling from the keg of progressive groupthink. I blame Reagan.
Yet simply calling yourself a conservative is not enough. You have to go full-hog. As I said, neither of the major political parties are conservative, these days — including the Republicans. If Edmund Burke could see modern “conservatives” spouting interventionist war propaganda like it was going out of style, he might endorse another American Revolution. If you want to be a true contrarian, you have to go old school. That means paleoconservative — the hard stuff. Ditch the neoconservative baby’s milk excreted by Fox News and the Republican Party. It’s just the same post-Enlightenment wolf in sheep’s clothing. John Stuart Mill could cuddle with it.
If you want to find out whether someone is truly conservative, try an experiment. Ask him or her whether he or she believes in human progress. If he or she either says yes, or worse, stares at you in confusion, it’s a red flag. Conservatives don’t believe in progress — it’s the best arrow in the contrarian quiver. When Republicans say they can build democratic societies in despotic Middle Eastern societies, they reveal their progressive dispositions. Crack-pipe dreams of universal democratic harmony are in no way dispositionally conservative.
Once you can grasp this denial of human progress and embrace a brooding pessimism, you’re in business. The rest will follow in tow. Multiculturalism and the ever-worshiped “invisible hand” of economics will rightly appear as the futile machinations of fool-headed optimists.
One more caveat: You have to get religion. Nothing can teach you more about the limits of humanity than a romp through the Good Book. Calvinism is my bag, but it is by no means necessary. Avoid preachers who exhort politics from the pulpit, however. There’s nothing worse than a clergyman who can preach humility one day and get chummy with a politician the next.
Finally, be prepared to defend yourself. The slings and arrows of mainstream progressives will be lobbed with gusto.
But do not despair. Luminaries such as Russell Kirk, Peter Hitchens and the aforementioned Edmund Burke have built a strong castle from which to defend yourself. If you have to vote Republican, go ahead, but you should not under any circumstances be happy about it.
Our day has not yet come. Our day will be when the post-Enlightenment mantra is finally proven wrong, and the hordes of citizens awaking from their slumbers say, “We should have listened to you all along.”
And then we’ll be super cool.
Luke Bailey is a history junior at UF. His column appears on Wednesdays.
