Oakeshott Samizdat

Tuesday, cigarette #2

A reader calls my dream of a right-wing urban subculture comparable to gay urban subculture romanticized and idealistic: "Having some secret gnosis boosts your self-esteem, but there's no reason to go underground for the sake of going underground!"

I'm not sure whether this is a rebuttal or an excuse, but my own experience of right-wing culture has been colored by the sense that conservatism at Yale is a kind of underground. I remember being a freshman and having an older member of the Party of the Right press a copy of After Virtue into my hands, look me in the eye and say, "This will help you." Before the spate of reissues we only had one copy of Conscience of a Conservative between us, and it got passed around until it fell apart. There was a rivalry between those Christians who lent C. S. Lewis books to prospective converts and the faction that preferred G. K. Chesterton. "Lewis is an intellectual lightweight!" "Chesterton's too-clever-by-half!" The book-swapping could get nasty.

The medium matters — there's a difference between reading your friend's annotated copy of The Quest for Community and reading it for CSTD 320: What is Conservatism?. If you're designing an undergraduate community, playing off the "underground" genre is as likely to work really well as to backfire.