Responding to an Existential Threat

Fittingly, Shepherd’s book begins with an occurrence that many wrongly depict as uniquely characteristic of today’s political climate: college students shouting down a conservative speaker.

The year was 1967. The setting, Dartmouth College. The arch-segregationist ex-governor of Alabama, George Wallace, was on campus to give a speech, but activists chanting “Wallace, racist” shouted him down. After students stormed the auditorium’s center aisle, Wallace fled the college, later sarcastically telling a reporter, “That’s academic freedom.”

Just a few years earlier, Wallace’s gripe would have been incoherent and such a student protest would have been genuinely surprising. At the time, American college students were still more than 95 percent white, and most were middle-class, Christian, and churchgoing; fewer than half had ever been on a blind date. The number that identified as strongly “liberal” or “conservative” was pretty small. Students were, on the whole, square.

But as Wallace would soon learn, college campuses were changing. Federal funds broadened access for poorer students and students of color; civil rights victories mounted; Black Power dawned; women demanded liberation; the Vietnam War escalated. In 1968, almost forty thousand students nationwide embarked on 221 demonstrations at 101 colleges, and the bombing of university facilities and seizure of administrative buildings were fast becoming near-daily occurrences.

To the relatively small number of avowed conservatives on campus, this amounted to an existential threat. The ranks of the radicals were thin, but regular students could be “taken in by the slogans” and “motivated by naïve idealism,” warned conservative elder (and future Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell. Soon, these students might become “the shock troops of the revolution.”

Conservatives had to fight back, the movement elders decided, to crush the radical energy on campus and cultivate shock troops of their own. The elders would provide money, mentorship, and connections; the young conservatives would be armed for war.

Initially, college conservatives lacked a unifying set of tactics. The more bookish among them distributed publications in an effort to furnish their peers with ready-made talking points and classroom rebuttals. Others founded their own publications, the most lasting of which was Reason magazine.

Their brasher classmates assembled counterprotests, petitioned administrators to punish the protesters, or organized displays of solidarity for the cops. The budding politicians launched takeovers of campus clubs and student governments; one conservative who became president of the student body of Huntingdon College was a young man named Jeff Sessions. In an eerie precursor of contemporary events, the director of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) exhorted young Republicans to station “security” personnel around campus ballot boxes. Another of the CRNC’s leaders was Karl Rove.

What ended up uniting these disparate campus conservatives was not (as many would claim) a shared anti-communism, but a broader reactionary approach. The talking points that movement elders disseminated taught students to employ ad hominem attacks and ignore the substance of leftist analysis; the campus publications that conservatives founded likewise focused on exposing the “errors” espoused by leftist professors rather than promoting any positive vision.

The students assembling for counterprotests rarely sought to counter the merits of the activists’ critique, instead engaging in provocative tactics like singing a racist song at an antiwar event, “because racial justice and peace were entangled in their minds as liberal goals to resist,” Shepherd noted. “The point was no longer about the war, but about provoking the left.” To modern conservatives, such an approach is known as “triggering” or “owning the libs.”

Nowhere was the essentially reactionary nature of campus conservativism clearer than in their attempts at humor. A favorite tactic was to appropriate leftist language but inject it with ableism, homophobia, or racism, to try to provoke their opponents.

Thus, students at Wichita State University founded the Society for the Prevention of Asinine Student Movements (SPASM), while students at the University of North Carolina created a faux-leftist publication under the pseudonyms Fong Dong Kong, Dee Day Jr, S. Creamcheese, and Zoot Floot Mason. Often, conservative attempts at humor morphed into threats of execution, symbolic hangings, and the burning of effigies — all defended as “harmless jokes” by their perpetrators, and all intended as incitement and menace.

An early turning point that led campus conservatives to become more dependent on reactive tactics was the famous series of antiwar and pro–civil rights protests at Columbia University in 1968. All through the spring of that year, left-wing students and community activists targeted Columbia over its war weapons research and its plan to displace black residents by constructing a gym in Harlem (known colloquially as “Gym Crow”). Conservative counterprotesters were present from the beginning, but over the course of the semester their approach grew less ideological and more violent.

In late April, a campus conservative proposed trapping those engaging in a sit-in within university buildings — “to place the occupiers under siege and starve them out,” as he said. Although conservatives lacked sufficient numbers to accomplish this, a coalition of 250 white men (dressed in coats and ties) did try to prevent food and supplies from reaching activists sitting in at the campus library. The next day, a group of football players “and other white men” — including future attorney general Bill Barr — physically confronted activists trying to deliver supplies to the protesters.

As Shepherd notes, the Columbia counterprotesters did not engage with “the actual matters at hand”: weapons research and the displacement of black community members. “Animated by the imagined threat of a nationwide conspiracy, they were bizarrely confident that they needed to physically intervene on behalf of powerful university authorities,” who had been deploying police since the first rally. Eventually, over a thousand of those police expelled student protesters with tear gas, clubs, and physical violence; cops injured 148 students and arrested 712 people (most of them students).

In the aftermath of the Columbia protests, the university suspended seventy-three students but expelled none. Conservative students were outraged by what they considered to be appallingly lenient punishments, and they petitioned for more punitive treatment.

As Columbia-like protests spread to other campuses that fall, conservatives threatened their campuses with lawsuits for failing to prevent “the actions of a belligerent minority” from “interrupting classes.” Conservative students also gladly reached out to police offices, offering to inform or spy on their classmates.

Still, by the end of 1968, the Columbia protests remained an exception to the general rule that conservative activists did not “assert violence themselves,” confident as they were that “state violence was on their side,” Shepherd writes. After 1968, “that reticence would change.”

“Start Yelling ‘SDS Brutality’”

The whole world was watching as American troops continued to blithely obliterate Vietnamese lives in 1969. That year, as the war burned on, radicals across the United States continued to bomb campus-based military recruitment and research centers. More than eighty went up in flames in the first year of Richard Nixon’s presidency. At the same time, the demands of civil rights activists were increasingly bearing fruit, including the call of many collegiate activists for black studies programs and greater diversity among students and faculty.

Campus conservatives responded with many of the tactics they had used in the past: holding counterdemonstrations, demanding that authorities enforce punishment, threatening to sue. But they also resorted to threats of mortal violence.

A letter from the “silent majority of Cal State Long Beach and the surrounding cities” addressed to “the [n-words]” claimed that “if this verbal harassment of white people does not stop, the [Black Student Union] will be exterminated.” Meanwhile, one Louisiana State University student, the future white supremacist leader David Duke, appeared on the Tulane campus dressed in a Nazi storm trooper uniform and held up a sign reading, “Gas the Chicago 7,” referring to the New Left activists then under indictment for protesting the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Duke also distributed copies of a white supremacist magazine advertising tear gas as “Negro control equipment, guaranteed to drop the most vicious buck in his tracks.” At the University of Minnesota, conservatives produced literature that, in Shepherd’s words, “encouraged white men to execute Black campus demonstrators en masse.”

This wasn’t just talk. Some campus conservatives were embracing violence. During a 1969 occupation at Cornell University, for instance, eleven white fraternity members broke into and assaulted members of the Afro-American Society. One manual later put out by the far-right student group, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), instructed members to respond with physical force “if the situation justifies it” and included detailed instructions for baiting building occupiers into physical confrontations:

[Put] a ring of students, preferably two deep and including a large number of girls, around the building. . . . When the leftists try to move in, the Majority Coalition line should lock arms, and make it necessary for the left to use violence against fellow students to get in the building. If they try, start yelling “SDS brutality,” but do not resist. The left will then be in the position in which they like to put the police.

Athletes, the manual added, were especially useful in such situations.

On campuses all across the country, a more confrontational approach was animating right-wing students. In the summer of 1969, at YAF’s national conference — its theme was “Sock It to the Left” — leaders officially formulated a fall “Freedom Offensive” that called for meeting violence with violence. That fall, YAF leaders urged students to take “physical action” and put on a “show of force to stop the vigilantes on the left.” YAF even set up a fund for students arrested or injured while fighting left-wing activists. So strong was police support for their position, however, that it doesn’t appear that any YAF students were arrested counterdemonstrating.

With this offensive, Shepherd writes, YAF “transformed the student Right from a constellation of disconnected and aggrieved individuals and clubs into a distinctly traditionalist and far-reaching national organization opposed to the student Left.”

Still, the campus right was far from a monolith. Evangelicals, cold warriors, Nazis, and budding financiers made for an uncomfortable coalition. One particularly gaping schism, between traditionalists and libertarians, divided YAF. “As the spring 1970 semester approached,” Shepherd narrates, “it became clear that the only way for the campus Right to remain a cohesive force was to incite deeper suspicions and fears concerning the New Left. They had no unifying ideas of their own.”

Educating Reactionary Minds

It was the National Guard shooting of unarmed college students at Kent State University and the hundreds of campus protests that broke out in its aftermath that united the student right. Just a day after Kent State, YAF members and athletes at Tulane physically fought protesting students. (One conservative graduate student present was a young Newt Gingrich.) Many other “clashes” broke out between conservatives and protesters in the days to follow. “Conservatives, now organized entirely along the principle of defeating the Left, accelerated their mobilization into the new decade.”

Shepherd’s narrative largely ends in 1970, but, in a concluding chapter, she traces her themes forward to the present. The conspiracism of the contemporary Republican Party; the obsession with combating political opponents; the absence of an affirmative policy agenda; the claim to speak for a silent majority and the embrace of tactics designed to obscure the fact that they don’t — all of these are hallmarks of the modern conservative movement, and all have at least partial origins in the reactionary campus activism of the late 1960s. As that generation of campus conservatives (Gingrich, Barr, Sessions, and Rove, among many others) went on to prominent careers, Shepherd concludes, “they did not leave their training or ideology behind.”

The conspiracism of the contemporary Republican Party; the obsession with combating political opponents; the absence of an affirmative policy agenda; the claim to speak for a silent majority and the embrace of tactics designed to obscure the fact that they don’t — all of these are hallmarks of the modern conservative movement, and all have at least partial origins in the reactionary campus activism of the late 1960s.

Wisely, Shepherd avoids attributing too much of the modern conservative id to just a few years of college organizing (at a time when a distinct minority of young people attended college). As the work of scholars like David Austin Walsh, John S. Huntington, Michelle M. Nickerson, and Lisa McGirr have shown, the distinctive blend of reactionary authoritarianism, white supremacist chauvinism, and fascist aesthetics that constitutes a considerable length of the American political spectrum arose from diverse origins. Instead, Shepherd’s principal takeaway is that contrary to the claims of “prominent historians and Never Trump pundits” lamenting the supposed devolution of the party of Ronald Reagan, modern conservatism’s “endorsements of violence can be understood as a continuity rather than a break.”

It’s a salient insight. Yet it’s easy to wish Shepherd were willing to take it a bit further. Although she refuses to succumb to centrist nostalgia for the supposedly more respectable conservatives of the late-twentieth century, she nonetheless characterizes the student right of the 1960s as engaged in a “transition” from “the promotion of conservative ideas to reactionary resistance against their political foils.” No doubt the collegiate activists she studied did change their tactics, but it would have been valuable to consider the extent to which the student right was ideologically reactionary well before the apotheosis of the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Indeed, a number of scholars, most notably Corey Robin, have argued that conservatism has been inherently reactionary since Edmund Burke. Of course, Robin clarified, to label conservatism “reactionary” is not to call it “unthinking.” Rather, conservatism “begins from a position of principle — that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others — and then recalibrates that principle in light of a democratic challenge from below.” It would have been interesting had Shepherd contended more forthrightly with such accounts, especially as she notes repeatedly that the increasingly reactionary tribunes of the New Right received considerable funding and guidance from the industrial and aristocratic (and generally college-educated) scions of the Old Right.

Still, Shepherd’s account is a powerful corrective, a compelling narrative, and a frankly frightening parable. Just weeks ago, news broke that a national convention of college Republicans is hosting a Holocaust-denying white supremacist. There are indications that eighteen-year-old boys are trending rightward. Today, with more young people attending college than ever before, the campus appears to remain a launchpad for the most noxious flights of reaction and cruelty.