Campaign '04: The Right's New Wing

Earlier this month, a group of students met in Washington to bash George W. Bush, debate the power of multinational corporations and hear a speaker who denounced the Iraq war, the Patriot Act and stricter airport security. A leader of these college kids calls them "the new counterculture," but here's the thing: they aren't liberals. The 185 students were in Washington to attend the 26th annual National Conservative Student Conference.

Many of them think the President has betrayed them by signing bills fattening Medicare and the Department of Education. Though the students embrace small businesses built on enterprise, they criticize big ones for knowing no borders and observing no national loyalties. And while he is fringe even among those students, 40-year-old hip-hop entrepreneur Reginald Jones--who says the Iraq invasion was unconstitutional because Congress never declared war and who decries post-9/11 security measures as infringements on our freedoms--has become one of the most popular figures among the young right. His raucous seminar on the evils of abortion, taxation, the Democrats and "milquetoast" Republicans--as well as the pleasures of NASCAR--didn't end until 2:30 one morning.

The world of young conservatives, then, brims with surprises--not least that just a few months after the Deaniac moment, college students are returning this month to campuses being transformed by the right. To be sure, the conservative movement has been growing among students for decades--at least since 1951, when God and Man at Yale by William Buckley Jr. became a best seller and helped spawn student-right groups across the nation. As a recent issue of the conservative Campus magazine points out, reporters rediscover the student right every few years, as if it were "very new and very strange." In fact, the movement is very old and very powerful, run not by gangly kids but by seasoned generals of the right. These organizers have worked campuses for years, and--judging by their record-setting budgets and sponsorship of hundreds of campus publications, student groups and guest lectures--they have reached the height of their tactical powers.

Three main conservative groups have reshaped student politics:

--The Young America's Foundation (YAF), a Herndon, Va., organization, founded in 1969, that sponsored 200 conservative lectures across the country last year (in addition to the National Conservative Student Conference). At many schools, those speeches have become the biggest events of the semester. Last year at Duke, for instance, YAF speaker Ben Stein, an ex--Nixon aide and former Comedy Central host, attracted 1,500 people, 200 of whom had to be turned away--a bigger crowd than the one that had come to hear Maya Angelou two months earlier. With its $13 million annual budget, the foundation--run by a former Reagan Administration adviser, Ron Robinson--is now the nation's largest advocacy group devoted to student politics. (This YAF is not to be confused with another conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, which flourished in the '60s and '70s.)