Dangerfield Conservatives

Even when they get to speak on college campuses, political conservatives, as the late stand-up comic Rodney Dangerfield would say, “don’t get no respect,” but that treatment is starting to backfire on those who would dis them.

Consider the reception given free-market economist Ben Stein in a recent appearance at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “The low point was a heckler calling me a ‘facist f**k,’ then running out of the room—by mistake for him, into a closet,” Stein wrote in The American Spectator. “He sneaked out of there sheepishly but I still didn’t like it.”

“I spoke about how happy Martin Luther King would be if he could see the progress we’ve made and about how the military and police and firemen are the real stars, not those creeps Babs Streisand and Tim Robbins and Robert Altman. I wonder how the heckler felt hearing that from his closet.”

Then there’s the treatment accorded the Federalist Society when that group tried to showcase a debate at the City University of New York. “We write to CUNY’s progressive community to boycott the Federalist Society event featuring Roger Pilon from the ultra conservative Cato Institute,” read a letter from a dozen CUNY law school students. “Boycotting the event would send a strong message to the conservative elite that CUNY is not fertile ground for the conservative agenda.”

“Although we understand the instinct to attend the event and engage in a debate (a desire we share), after much thought, we’ve concluded that a boycott would be the most effective way to combat an organization that believes in the interpretation of the Constitution that strips away the many advances that have been made on behalf of civil rights and women’s rights, to mention just two.”

One wonders just how much thought these budding barristers did put into their missive. The Cato Institute, for example is not “ultra-conservative” but libertarian.

The distinction is a key one. That libertarian ethos, for example has led scholars at Cato to sharply examine the controversial Patriot Act to determine whether the law infringes upon civil liberties, something the uber conservatives of the CUNY students imagination might be reluctant to do.

“The boycott was a failure,” according to Eugene Meyer, president of the Federalist Society. “Roger Pilon delivered his speech before a good crowd, including several faculty members.”

“Roger reports that the question and answer period provided a forum for some challenging intellectual give-and-take.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.