In 2008, the year I graduated from Yale, April 20 fell on a Sunday. That was a problem for the Party of the Right. We had intended to hold our protest against the drug war on April 20, the traditional day, but cross-scheduling our rally with Sunday church services would have cut our turnout in half. (If you don’t know the significance of the number 4/20 to the war on drugs, ask one in five American teenagers.) After some debate, the libertarians caved to the traditionalists and rescheduled Yale Conservatives Against the Drug War—aka “Tweed for Weed” —for the following Saturday.
Moving the date of the protest paid off. Even the more Right-wing Christians who weren’t exactly for weed showed up with signs that said THE DRUG WAR BREAKS UP FAMILIES. The rest of the Christians got the signs the libertarians had made for them: I COULDN’T PROTEST THE DRUG WAR ON 4/20 BECAUSE I WAS IN CHURCH.
It’s amazing in retrospect that the Party of the Right could be so ecumenical, given that we were split almost evenly between two ideological factions that should have been at each other’s throats. At one extreme were the anarcho-capitalists, whose ringleader was a Dumpster-diving mountain man from Idaho who spent his gap year teaching English in a Chinese whorehouse. (Fluent girls get better rates.) I shared an apartment with a couple of them the summer after graduation, and I can’t remember them ever toasting anything but “Smash the state!” That same summer bred an interfactional romance not involving me, which led to the following exchange between my female housemate and her Glee Club director:
“The chip in my passport doesn’t work. Will that be a problem when we go to South America?”
“I’m not sure. What happened to it?”
“My anarchist ex-boyfriend microwaved it to free me from the state.”
Opposite the libertarians was a merry band of pre-Vatican II Catholics whose record at winning converts for Mother Church was so consistent that the POR soon got a not-entirely-flattering reputation for being a “Catholic factory.” I was one of these, and a religious studies major on top of that, although I can’t say I ever captured any heathen scalps myself. I watched most of the theological drama from the sidelines, occasionally laying bets on which souls would flip. On one particularly good Easter, I won two bottles of gin, but I felt so crass for gambling bottles of liquor on my friends’ salvation that I immediately invited over my newly minted coreligionists and the two losing bettors to split the winnings. At least once a month, someone from the Catholic faction would drink too much on Saturday night and oversleep the last mass of the day at five p.m.
When I wonder how we managed to have such party solidarity despite everyone’s ideological differences, I suppose that it was partly because our libertarians tended to be Southerners and Westerners who cared as much about manliness and personal honor as our traditionalists, and partly because our Catholics were more dissipated than our anarchists. I’m sure that the foxhole mentality of being conservatives on an Ivy League campus helped. But I think the glue that really held us together was the fact that, conservative or libertarian, we all smoked like busted tailpipes.
Fusionism was the theory. When I let two libertarians use the cover page of my Bible to roll some fine loose Turkish tobacco when they’d run out of papers, that was the practice.
It wasn’t just that nothing breeds mutual affection like huddling under a shop overhang in a New Haven sleet storm because Anna Liffey’s won’t let you smoke inside anymore. We smoked on principle. It was reactionary, libertarian, spiritual, and aesthetic all at the same time. Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein’s tribute to nicotine, was our Bible, because it had sentences like this: “When the religious dignity of smoking is completely obscured, we have lost a right to pray in public.”
That our tobacco habit had something to do with freedom should be obvious. We were lucky enough to have one bar nearby that still allowed smoking inside—the Owl Shop, a cigar bar—but the cheaper places hounded us out into the New Haven cold, in accordance with Connecticut law. During my four years at Yale, it seemed like every other week brought news of another city banning smoking in bars, which we took as proof of an incipient police state.
But it was never simply a matter of personal liberty, which, after all, wasn’t something the traditionalists always cared about. Most of us were in favor of banning prostitution, for instance, in spite of the libertarian mountain man’s assurances that all the prostitutes he’d met in China were the salt of the earth. Smoking bans bothered us because they gave the modern cult of health the force of law, which was more than we thought it deserved. The little joys of cigarette smoking—a moment of late-night camaraderie, an excuse to talk to an attractive stranger, just the right prop for an emphatic gesture, or simply a moment of relaxation at the end of a long day—these were all more important to us than health. There was something unappealingly technocratic about the state’s attempt to boil the argument down to heart-disease rates. Unlike the libertarians, we thought smokers should have to make a convincing case that the benefits of smoking in bars outweigh the costs. Unlike the Left, we thought unquantifiables like the way good bourbon mixes with a Marlboro should count.
The other hot front in the war on tobacco in those days was the campaign to airbrush cigarettes out of classic movies, which sounds ridiculous the first time you hear about it but struck a chord with the Party of the Right. Cary Grant and Lauren Bacall—or Lou Reed and Nico, depending—had a lot to do with how and why we smoked. None of us was ashamed to admit it, either. When the skeptics tritely accused us of only smoking in order to seem cool, we took it to mean that cigarettes have an aesthetic beauty even puritans can’t deny. Arguments from aesthetics came in handy in political debates, too. The party once debated the topic Resolved: Patriotism is glorified brand loyalty, and the prevailing opinion on the floor was that yes, it is, and no, we don’t care, because brand loyalty can be a powerful moral force. Consuming a particular product means living up to its image—a Parliament tastes like a Lucky Strike, but it matters which one a person chooses to smoke. Back in his college days at Oxford, Oscar Wilde complained, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” and he was only half-kidding. Men start acting more gentlemanly when they put on nice suits, which is why POR debates had a strict dress code. In the same way, the responsibility of behaving like an American makes people a little more self-reliant and freedom-loving than they would otherwise be, just as being British stiffens the upper lip when foreigners are watching. Brand loyalty and patriotism are all parts of a person’s reputation, which is just another word for something demanding to live up to.
The way we figured it, lighting a cigarette imposes the same kind of expectations, which after four years of talking about it grew into something we referred to as the smoker’s code. First rule: you are duty-bound to give a light to anyone who asks for it, no matter how humble. As someone once said, if Prometheus had stolen fire from heaven to light his cigarette, the gods would have let him do it. Second rule: there is no such thing as owing someone a cigarette, because keeping count of how many smokes someone has bummed from you is petty and gauche. The third rule, which covered everything else: no cowardly, classless, un-seductive, or painfully earnest behavior unbecoming a smoker. You’re smoking a cigarette, so act like it.
Our devotion to style as something of deep moral importance made sense, given the strange kind of traditionalists we were. Fifties nostalgists and canon chauvinists were our allies, certainly, but no trad in the POR was boring enough to agree with them. My own special nemesis was what we called the “fence” idea of traditionalism, after Chesterton’s thought experiment about the man who sees an apparently useless fence across a road. Don’t tear something down because you can’t see the use in it, Chesterton said. “Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
I hated that fence. For one thing, there are plenty of instances where it’s impossible to know why a particular tradition was created, and, in those cases, fence traditionalism means nothing more than having a higher threshold for how bad things have to get before you’re willing to change—weak sauce, not the stuff counterrevolutions are made of. But mostly I hated the fence because it paints an uninspiring picture of tradition as a concession to human ignorance. Humans are ignorant— “the individual is foolish, but the species is wise,” said Burke—but my own traditionalism felt less like resignation and more like falling in love. When I decided to start taking Catholicism seriously, it wasn’t because the Church offered arguments that convinced me of anything, or because I thought she was so old she must be right. It was because, when confronted by the totality of a beautiful institution, I fell hard. Becoming a smoker was the same. I wanted what the smokers had, and, if the only way to get it was to let them lead me into behaviors I didn’t quite understand, so be it.
Traditions and rituals put flesh on the bare bones of an idea, giving it a personality. When you make an idea more like a person, you transform it from something you believe into something you can love. You can’t fall in love with a fence, except in Massachusetts.
The anarcho-capitalists didn’t care one way or the other about tradition, but they did care about honor, which, next to style, was the theme of the smoker’s code that mattered most to the Party of the Right. For reasons we never quite articulated, smoking felt like a rebellion against Yale’s moral consensus that the two most important things in life are for everyone to be happy and for everyone to get along. It may have had something to do with our favorite cigarette-smoking archetypes—reporters, aristocrats, and thieves—all of whom fit the description I once read someone give of turn-of-the-century yellow journalists: “I don’t think they had an ounce of morality between them, but they had a very acute sense of honor.” Or, to pick a line from Raymond Chandler’s description of the perfect noir hero, “I think he might seduce a duchess, and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin.” Our libertarians may have written off opposition to drugs and prostitution as uptight Catholic moralizing, but they would have eaten their own teeth before betraying a fellow party member, even one they hated.
The party needed a culture of honor, given how much of our time was spent fighting with each other. We were brawlers who didn’t think it was a good night unless someone got eviscerated on the debate floor. The advantage of honor over boring old ethics is that it sees violence not as the regrettable outcome of a breakdown in your moral system, but as an important and admirable expression of it, provided the fight is conducted by the proper rules. (No eye-gouging.) Other kinds of morality try to minimize violence, even the metaphorical kind, on the logic that cooperation and persuasion yield better outcomes. This hardly gives conflict its due. I always preferred the motto of one of my personal heroes in the POR: “I only believe in violence when it’s absolutely unnecessary.”
Our constant philosophical brawling had its costs—one party member who had been raised the son of evangelical missionaries got his belief in God knocked out of him the same semester he was serving as president of a Yale Bible study group. (He served out his term, of course. It was an honor thing.) One girl joined the POR as a Left-wing, Riot-Grrrl lesbian and left it a Right-wing, Catholic, celibate lesbian. The constant throwing of philosophical punches produced plenty of casualties like these, if you want to call them that. It also made us brothers-in-arms whose loyalty to each other was unshakable. The old saying that sums up the way we felt: “Nobody hits my little brother but me.”
It might not be apparent from my description that the POR’s strange brand of conservatism has anything to offer the modern movement, so let me close with the story of a time when our very undergraduate ethos had a head-on collision with the grown-up world, which is also the story of the time I thoroughly humiliated myself in front of Ross Douthat. A few months after I graduated, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited Douthat to Yale to speak at their conference on “The Future of Conservatism,” and, since I was living in New York at the time, I popped up to New Haven for the weekend. During the Q&A, I asked Douthat why he always addressed his blog to the Left rather than to his fellow conservatives, and what he hoped to accomplish by embracing the dubious mantle of “respectable” conservatism. I think I even used the word “token,” which, given his move from the Atlantic to the New York Times four months later, was prescient.
“Well,” he explained, “take the article I just published in the Atlantic— ’Is Pornography Adultery?’ I wasn’t trying to get the Atlantic’s audience on board with the whole of the Catholic Church’s teachings on sex and marriage. I just want them to consider the possibility that maybe, in certain circumstances, pornography shouldn’t be totally and unreservedly celebrated. I’m going one baby-step at a time.”
The Q&A started to wrap up, and I remembered that there was still free coffee in the foyer, so I got up from my seat while Douthat was answering his final question. Just as I reached the door, he referred back to my question.
“As I said to the blond girl in the front row … hey, wait! Where are you going?” I froze.
Now, what I should have done was politely resume my seat and let the man continue with his answer. What I actually did was widen my eyes, look to the left and to the right (“What, you mean me?”), and then, with great, exaggerated tiptoe steps, walk backward out of the room. The last thing I heard before I shut the door behind me was Douthat saying, “Hey, come back!” and the audience laughing.
As soon as I heard the murmur of chatter through the door, I knew it was safe to come back in. A distant acquaintance of mine, named Peter, walked up to me and said, “That was a perfect metaphor.” I told him I did not think my red-faced embarrassment was a metaphor for anything.
“No, it’s a metaphor for why Douthat is wrong. We don’t need little baby-steps. We need grand, unapologetic theatricality.”
I still felt mortified—Mr. Douthat, if you’re reading this, I’m very sorry—but Peter was right that the party’s bombastic style and Douthat’s meliorism make a good compare-and-contrast. Douthat believes in putting forward good arguments that the other side will understand. The POR believes that the best way to convince someone you’re right is to make what you’re doing look good. We preferred embodying conservative values to articulating them, according to St. Francis’s advice: “Preach the gospel without ceasing; if necessary, use words.” P. J. O’Rourke is a good Franciscan; he makes the Left worry that, by rejecting conservatism, they’re missing out on a good time. The best way to convince someone you’re right is to make what you’re doing look good, and a cigarette properly held goes a long way in that direction.