The NY Times has a lengthy article about the new conservative movement on college campuses. The Times writer is alarmed by the fact that the right-wing kids are not only articulate, effective, and growing in popularity, but also -- egad -- connected to conservative organizations. Although the author can't help but discuss the leftist culture prevalent on almost every college campus, there is not one mention in a 6,000-word article about left-wing organizations and support networks, which are easily as well-funded and relentless as those on the right. The young conservative women in the article were impressive. And I learned a new phrase: ''stiletto conservatives.''
One Bucknell conservatives club member, Allison Kasic, buys it. She's a 19-year-old who just finished her sophomore year, and she writes a regular column in The Counterweight and has her own rock-music show each Monday on the college radio station. Raised in Littleton, Colo., the daughter of an administrative judge, she is a confident, tough young woman who wears little makeup and favors jeans and T-shirts. As a management major concentrating in marketing, she sees the importance of selling a new brand of conservatism to female students. ''There's the old stereotype of the WASP-y country-club wife or the Bible-study mom from the Midwest,'' Kasic says. ''But that's not what conservative women are anymore.'' Kasic, instead, points to ''stiletto conservatives'' like Hoff Sommers and Coulter. ''We have role models now,'' she says. ''Hip, strong women who exude the message: 'I don't need hand-holding just because I'm a woman.''' Kasic herself plans to be a working woman when she graduates (''I'm no soccer mom,'' she laughs; ''I don't even like kids''), but she respects women who choose a different path -- to be homemakers, like her own mother. ''Conservatives are inclusive in a way that liberals are not,'' she says, voicing a central theme of the Independent Women's Forum ethos. ''We say that women can be executives or stay-at-home mothers.'' Kasic extends this notion to the abortion debate. Herself an anti-abortion Catholic, she says that the Republican Party today nevertheless supports candidates who espouse the right to abortion. ''But the National Organization for Women has never supported a pro-life candidate,'' she says, as proof of the left's narrowness and the right's ''diversity'' (a term the conservative movement has deliberately co-opted from the left).It can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the ideology that frees women, but such is the skill with which the right has reframed the issues for the campus crowd, and such is the degree to which the left has allowed its own message to drift into rigidity and irrelevance for many college-age women. Another Bucknell conservatives club member, Denise Chaykun, typifies how some young women are only driven further to the right by what they see as the pieties of the left. Chaykun, with her shoulder-length blond hair, faded jeans and rock T-shirt, could have stepped out of a 1970's campus sit-in. But she is one of the most combative and hard-core conservatives at Bucknell. ''You come to college, and the message they give you is 'Your parents are racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and we're going to take you and change that,''' she says. ''A lot of the courses are mushy stuff about sex and gender and social relations. You can't take a class about a war. We don't have a military historian at Bucknell. Everything is so dumbed down because no one wants to offend anyone.''
via The New York Times Magazine
Posted by Alan at May 24, 2003 07:48 AM