I started reading Dinesh D’Souza’s Letters to a Young Conservative the other day. I picked it up on impulse in Borders yesterday, and was impressed enough to carry it up to the cashier and purchase it. As I left, the cashier asked, smiling, if I were a young conservative. An odd question, considering the book I had just bought. I said that I wasn’t that young (I’m 31).
It’s a good book. I had never heard of D’Souza before yesterday; then again, I was a drug-addled anarchist in the early nineties, and primarily apolitical up until about 1999….
In 1999 I was in a Christian hardcore band in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and suddenly decided that I should be a radical Christian. My old left-leaning politics had never really left since my drug days, so it seemed reasonable to me that an enlightened leftism could co-exist with Christianity. I ate up books by Chomsky, devoured Adbusters magazine, reverenced the politics of Rage Against the Machine (just not the atheism), studied post-modernism and cultural studies in my spare time (yes, I’m weird; I know). I found a book called Christianity and the Class Struggle, and set it proudly on my bookshelf, although it was so mired in the zeitgeist of the sixties that it was difficult to take it seriously in a modern context, and I admit I still haven’t read the whole book.
It took awhile, but gradually I began to become a bit put off by the fact that all these radical books I was into were diametrically opposed to the moral and ethical issues I felt most strongly about. It’s lots of fun to listen to what Jello Biafra has to say about politics, but did I really want to live in a world with, not just a minimum wage, but a maximum wage? I found that I disagreed with the left about wealth, about ethics, about morality, about religion, about tolerance — eventually I had to admit that I really didn’t agree with them at all. It was simply more "hip" to be a leftist than to be a conservative.
I decided that I didn’t really want to be "hip" if it also meant being wrong.
So it’s not really a surprise that I had never heard of Dinesh D’Souza, even though he’s been a conservative author since the early nineties (while I was staring at the ceiling on acid). Letters to a Young Conservative is a well-written, conversational, funny, and insightful book. A few quotes follow:
On his college days:
…the college chaplain said to our freshman class, "I want each of you to look at the student on your right, and the student on the left. One of the three of you will have a homosexual experience to climax before you graduate." …I looked to my right and left, and resolved to avoid these two guys for the rest of my days at Dartmouth.
Today there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe.
I haven’t finished the book, but I’m already a fan. If it sounds like your thing, you will certainly enjoy it, and if you feel you’re in the middle of the spectrum, you may want to check it out just for some balance to the overwhelmingly leftist worldview which is aimed at us from all sides.
