Mary Eberstadt - Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys

by Mary Eberstadt

T his book is a unique attempt to answer a question that continues to confound many observers both American and otherwise: Why conservatism? It does so not through shrill polemic or high-decibel rage, but rather in the most practical and informative way possible: via the unfiltered voices of a dozen leading authors and editors of the contemporary right, including some of the best-known and most influential in the country. Peter Berkowitz, David Brooks, Joseph Bottum, Danielle Crittenden, Dinesh DSouza, Stanley Kurtz, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry, Heather Mac Donald, P. J. ORourke, Sally Satel, and Richard Starr all tell their stories here. They explain how they came to reside on the conservative side of Americas red-blue dividein some cases, to their own surprise.

The utility of such a volume in this particular political moment is evident. For one thing, following 9/11, two terms of George W. Bush, Democratic victories in fall 2006, and controversial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the mood on the right itself is one of introspection and soul-searching. For another, and despite significant disenchantment among some, the overall conservative realignment of the United States is still one of the biggest political stories of the past quarter century. It remains so with or without Bush in the White House, whether or not the American military continues its mission in Iraq, and regardless of who holds the next majority in Congress or on the Supreme Court. The November 2006 electionsin which Democrats roundly prevailed by promising for the first time since Bill Clinton to govern from the center, and a handful of right-leaning Democratic candidates defeated Republicans unaccustomed to attack from that wingclinch the point about our political sea change. Whatever the particular fortunes of the Republican Party one year, two years, or five years hence, the United States as a whole has plainly moved right.

Yet even though many more Americans are now likely to self-identify as conservative rather than liberal, the reasons for that transformation remain questions of enduring public wonder and scrutinynot least from Cambridge to San Francisco and everywhere blue in between. How did a movement that appeared sidelined and embattled only a generation ago come to exert such influence that even the Democratic Party now tacks starboard? What accounts for the unprecedented growth and reach of right-leaning think tanks, magazines, television, and radio? What, in short, has been happening out there such that so many Americans are now comfortable with the conservative label, or, conversely, so averse to contemporary liberalism?

During the last several years, any number of high-profile attempts to answer those questions have circulated from all political directions. Homegrown progressives have gone puzzling over their fellow citizens (Thomas Franks Whats the Matter with Kansas?, Jim Walliss Gods Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesnt Get It), Englishmen have gone puzzling over Yanks (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation ), rank-breakers of all kinds have gone puzzling over everything from fellow conservatives to their former selves (Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy, Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, Bruce Bartlett, Impostor ). We have even seen one soi-disant latter-day Tocqueville (Bernard-Henri Lvy, American Vertigo ) traverse the country and sally through its social classes from high to low, in part to divine the same political mystery. And still the question for many peopleespecially, though not only, liberalsremains: How can so many supposedly rational fellow citizens out there believe all that backward reactionary stuff?

That is exactly what our contributors, all leading lights in one way or another in the intellectual firmament of the current right, wish to explain here.

That such a book might make for interesting reading was a thought kindled in me some months back during a conversation with P. J. ORourke about the striking number of political conversion stories we each knew. We had in mind not the eminent converts of the preceding generation, many of whom had moved from youthful socialism through the liberalism of their time and on into neoconservatismIrving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and the restbut rather, the so-far-untold tales from those who came next. These younger writers like us, now roughly in middle age, had attended college in the postliberationist 1970s and 1980s, when liberal-left thinking was not the dominant game on campus, but in many places the only one. What had happened, we wondered, to push this new generation away from the default position embraced by so many of our campus peers?

This book is the result of pursuing that question, which I was particularly curious to see through for two reasonsfirst, because the fact that I had also traveled in some political sense gave me a natural interest in it; second, because my past and present associations as editor or author at various journals and magazines ( The Public Interest, The National Interest, the Weekly Standard, Policy Review, First Things ) had given me some inkling already of how many more such stories might be out there.

Like me, the authors of the pages ahead know the right not only from the outside in, but also from the inside out. All represent in one form or another the venues through which many ideas are made and disseminatedjournals including National Review, City Journal, Commentary, and those others named above; think tanks, including the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Manhattan Institute; alternative media like Fox News, nationalreview.com, and many other blogs and sites followed by conservatives. Thus, these contributors represent in miniature the generation now peopling the right-leaning think tanks and airwaves and internet and book and magazine publishingin a word, some of the human nuts and bolts of what Hillary Clinton once disparaged as the vast right-wing conspiracy.