American Conservatism Has Always Been a Youth Movement

Nothing is surprising about young adults' right turn

Gridley Lorimer Wright IV was a teenage right-wing radical. When Wright—“Grid” to his friends—matriculated at Yale in the fall of 1952, he arrived to a campus still shaken by Bill Buckley’s allegations that the University was brainwashing students into atheistic socialism. Wright evidently agreed. In his sophomore spring, he was a founder of the Independent Library, a short-lived student group that distributed Conservative books on campus. He also wrote for The Independent, the library’s opinion newsletter. In that publication, Wright let his radical flag fly, endorsing the Gold Standard, McCarthyism, and the abolition of both social security and the income tax.

It is funny to think of someone at once being labeled a college radical and an out-and-out Conservative. Yet throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, such characters were a growing presence on America’s college campuses. M. Stanton Evans—a Buckley disciple, Conservative movement leader, and friend of Wright’s—labeled it the “revolt on the campus,” the title of his 1961 book on the topic. When Evans graduated from Yale in 1955, he wrote, campus Conservatism was barely a blip. Returning to speak at his alma mater in 1960, he found “the new Yale conservatives were moving ahead at full throttle.”

It was not just at Buckley’s alma mater. Evans identified Conservative groups at (as just a sampling) Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Purdue, Pitt, Stanford, and Cornell. “What in 1951 had been only the inkling of disagreement sensed by a few scattered individuals and in 1953 had been merely a faltering effort to pose an alternative to the Liberal orthodoxy has now become a full-blooded and purposeful movement,” Evans wrote. “By common report, conservatism among American young people is on the upswing. The sudden volte-face of the young indeed has become topic A among those who watch over American campuses and has spurred a considerable amount of speculation and controversy. No one seems quite to know what it is all about, what has caused it, or where it is going.”

Months before the publication of Revolt on the Campus, Evans, Buckley, and 90-some young Conservatives had met at Buckley’s estate in Connecticut to draft a declaration of principles. The resultant Sharon Statement was so influential that members of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society drafted their own Port Huron Statement as a response. More importantly, the Sharon Statement became the founding document of Young Americans for Freedom, the nation’s premier young Conservative organization. It soon boasted chapters at schools across the country.

YAF was explicitly a part of the counter-culture which was then sweeping the nation’s youth. As founding Chairman Robert M. Schuchman put it, “My parents thought Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest heroes who lived... I’m rebelling against that concept.” That rebellion was so potent that at its peak, YAF was able to attract over 18,000 people for a “rally for world liberation from communism,” an event once described as “the birthday of the conservative movement.”

Source: UGA Civil Rights Digital History Project

YAF would eventually collapse amid in-fighting in the 1970s. But that collapse is just another sign of how YAF and the young Conservative rebellion of the 1960s were part of the same counter-culture that produced the much-better-known campus left of that era. And while YAF itself ceased to exist, many of its members went on to be major leaders of the American right, just as progressive campus activists became the leaders of the American left.

Nobody better captures the young right’s countercultural nature than Gridley Wright. After graduation, he became a stockbroker. Then, in the late 1960s, he “dropped out,” started tripping on acid, eventually founding a Malibu commune called Strawberry Fields. After a stint in prison and another in Bali, Wright formed Shivalila, “a spiritual organization dedicated to reviving the Stone-Age/tribal lifestyle via LSD use, nonmonogamous group sexual relations, and the worship and idealization of children.”

Teenage conservative rebel to LSD-fueled cult leader? If you squint closely, you can see that they’re the same thing.

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I had coffee with a noted historian of the American Conservative movement a few months ago. When I told him Wright’s story, he agreed with my interpretation. The historian’s generation of Conservatives—the Xers and elder Millennials—were, he said, the exception. During the Reagan and Bush years, they had been the establishment. But the history of American Conservatism begins with youthful rebellion. And it is not surprising that today it is returning to those roots.

Why, many commentators are asking, is the “vibe” “shifting?” Why, for the first time in decades, is Conservatism cool, and Liberalism not? It shows up in the scene pieces, which compare glitzy right-wing soirees to dull left-wing bashes. But it also shows up in voting behavior, with young men and women swinging towards Trump by unprecedented margins. And it shows up in the surprising new popularity of Conservative groups on college campuses, from the College Republicans to right-wing student papers at top schools.

This is unintuitive to a commentariat used to thinking of Conservatism as something old people do. But they are simply confusing age (how old someone is) with cohort (when someone was born). As the preceding discussion details, Conservatism is, at its foundation, a radical youth movement, of the same origins and nature as the left-wing campus radicalism that also emerged in the 1960s. And it makes sense to still think about it as a youth movement today, for three reasons.

The first is that, as is typical of a radical youth movement, American Conservatism is often characterized by a commitment to ideological coherence over practical politics. From its earliest days, the leaders of the movement took very seriously the idea that Conservatism was not just an alliance of political convenience, but a philosophy (albeit an often contradictory one). It was a movement, after all, that attracted ideologues as different as Ayn Rand and Richard Weaver—a radical libertarian and a radical traditionalist, joined by the conceit that, to use Weaver’s phrase, “ideas have consequences.” Frank S. Meyer, godfather of the now much-maligned “fusionism” of National Review, made his career on arguing that these philosophical strands could be reconciled. The fusion he assembled stood for at least a generation.

This kind of philosophical idealism is a young man’s game. Youth is when people ask the big questions about government, God, and the good. And they have more time and patience for those questions than do older people, who have many more practical concerns. Young people who become socialists are following the same impulse as young people who become Randians—a desire for a philosophical explanation of the world and their place in it.

Secondly, Conservatism, like its leftist counterparts, is first and foremost a theory and criticism of the establishment. This is true historically—remember that Bill Buckley was the boogeyman of the liberal consensus of the 1950s and 1960s. And campus rightists of the 1960s often found themselves in agreement with the left on who the problem was, even as they disagreed about the methods by which to address the problem. Anti-establishmentarianism remains a hallmark of the American right today, from the Tea Party to Donald Trump. And what is more youthful than wanting to stick it to the man?

Thirdly, Conservatism tries to speak to the social and existential discontent which often afflicts young, disconnected people. The Conservatives of the 1960s, like the leftists of the 1960s, were sympathetic to criticisms of the faceless everyman society that they felt 1940s and ‘50s liberalism had created. While their solutions were different (more radical capitalism versus communism), their articulation of the problems—of a great spiritual malaise—were quite similar.

Today, too, both Bernie leftists and Trump-y rightists are prone to identifying a subjective or spiritual dimension to our problems. This, I submit, is also a hallmark of youth politics, because young people lack the interpersonal attachments age tends to bring (marriage, kids, stable employment, etc.). And they are faced far more with uncertainty about the future and their position in it than are the old. A politics that speaks to this condition will resonate with young people, whether its prescription is revolution or reaction.

The left and the right, of course, reach wildly different conclusions about what to do about these issues. But both emerge from a similar historical context, and both historically appealed to young people for similar reasons. Consequently, neither can categorically claim over the other to have the young as its natural constituency.

My point, to be clear, is not a normative one. Obviously, I am a Conservative, but my support for conservatism is not conditional on its being a young person’s ideology. There are arguments for and against the ideas of young people—whether or not we should agree with them is beyond the scope of this piece.

Rather, my point is descriptive. Many thinking people are surprised that conservatism is hip, that the “vibe” has “shifted” right. But if you know the history of the American Conservative movement, nothing about this is surprising. Conservatism has always been the product of people like Grid Wright. Once you accept this view, the “vibe shift” makes total sense—it’s just a return to form.