Campus Crusader for Conservatism.

Letters to a Young Conservative, by Dinesh D'Souza(Basic, 224 pp., $22)

Few college conservatives in the past 20 years can have missed a Dinesh D'Souza visit to their campus. My opportunity came when I was a freshman (not so long ago). We in the Yale Conservative Party hosted him for dinner, during which we astounded him with our right-wingedness. Naturally, we took his astonishment as a badge of honor, young Turks that we were.

D'Souza has spent month after month traveling around the country to speak to college and high-school kids, infuriating the campus Left and invigorating the few on the right. There is no person better suited to this task, for D'Souza has never lost the high energy and mischievous spirit of his Dartmouth Review days; one might say he is the Peter Pan of the Right. He obviously enjoys his peripatetic rabble-rousing, but it is an avenue without much glory, and we should all be thankful for his service to conservatism. No other person of his generation has done more to inspire young conservatives.

And so it comes as no surprise that Basic Books chose D'Souza to write Letters to a Young Conservative, part of its "Art of Mentoring" series. (Other books in the series include Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens, and Letters to a Young Activist, by Todd Gitlin.) We're far from Rilke here, but the idea is nonetheless a good one.

Letters to a Young Conservative could just as well have been titled "Dinesh D'Souza's Greatest Hits." There are 31 short "letters" to "Chris," his correspondent, with titles like "Pig Wrestling at Dartmouth," "How to Harpoon a Liberal," "Speaking as a Former Fetus . . .," "Family Values Since Oedipus," and "Who Cares About the Snail Darter?" This is D'Souza at his best -- polemical, witty, and rapier-sharp. He has given us a sort of conservative cheat-sheet: All the arguments can be found here -- against big government, feminism, postmodernism, affirmative action, judicial activism, gay marriage, anti-globalization, gun control, and so on. It will be useful for college students who need solid arguments at the tips of their fingers.

One source of the strength of D'Souza's book is that he was not a conservative when he arrived at Dartmouth, but was pushed in that direction by the radicalism he experienced on campus. He found a mentor in NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart, who was a professor at Dartmouth and remains instrumental to the Dartmouth Review. D'Souza's experience in the early 1980s rings true today: Very few students enter college as ideological conservatives, but left-wing campuses may turn them out that way.

Hart's brash, unapologetic conservatism, and his prankishness, inspired D'Souza (and, it must be said, a whole generation of Dartmouth graduates). D'Souza gives us a colorful description of his favorite professor:

He wore a long raccoon coat around campus, and he smoked long pipes with curvaceous stems. He sometimes wore buttons that said things such as "Soak the Poor." In his office he had a wooden, pincer-like device that he explained was for the purpose of "pinching women that you don't want to touch." Rumor had it that he went to faculty meetings with his wooden-hand contraption. When a dean or professor went on and on, Hart would churn the rotary device and the fingers on the wooden hand would drum impatiently in a clacking motion, as if to say, "Get on with it."

Hart's outrageousness rubbed off on D'Souza, whose intellectual high jinks livened up the Dartmouth campus. Letters to a Young Conservative retells some of these amusing tales. But the tales offer more than mere entertainment; they point, D'Souza believes, to an important lesson for campus conservatives. "If the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs," D'Souza writes, "the conservative must stop being conservative. . . . He must be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical." And this, I think, is where D'Souza begins to get it wrong.

To be sure, conservative newspapers are stolen from time to time on campus, and classes such as "Black Feminisms" lead the impressionable astray. But, by and large, campuses are much less radical than they were during D'Souza's college years. The paradigmatic college student is not the rebel, but what The Weekly Standard's David Brooks has dubbed the "organization kid": serious, driven, submissive, and leery of controversy. The "scorched earth" policy of the 1980s Dartmouth Review, if emulated today, might only result in shunting conservative issues to the fringes of campus life; conservatives could end up as marginal to student life as the anti- Starbucks and anti-globalization protesters.

That being said, the organization kids do need to raise some Cain; and they could probably do with some prodding in this regard from the likes of D'Souza. He writes "Chris": "Where to start? Conduct a survey to find out how many professors in the religion department believe in God. Distribute a pamphlet titled 'Feminist Thought' that is made up of blank pages. Establish a Society for Creative Homophobia. . . . Put a picture of death- row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal on your Web site and instruct people to click a button and execute him online." Being a conservative requires some courage and a good dose of humor; there is no better place than college to acquire these.

Also, in hopping from one hot-button issue to the next, this book fails to impart a conservative worldview that is inspiring. Conservatism and liberalism do not merely disagree on Social Security and affirmative action -- they are different projects altogether. The difference between the conservative view of, say, welfare and the liberal view is not a difference of means, but of philosophy. But in this book there is little sense of that overarching conservative vision, and so one is left with the feeling that there is little difference between conservatives and liberals other than that we disagree on some policy issues.

Related to this problem is another: that D'Souza defines conservatism too narrowly. He dismisses "throne and altar" conservatives, and indeed any philosophy that is in any way "anti-modern" -- because, in D'Souza's view, to be anti-modern is to be un-American. For D'Souza, the basis of American conservatism is the Founding, which he interprets as a modern, liberal project. This is without question an important school of conservative thought, but it is just that -- one school, among several. His lack of ecumenism means that D'Souza in effect excises the strain of conservative thinking "from Burke to Eliot," as Russell Kirk subtitled The Conservative Mind. This is especially lamentable given that it is precisely this strain that is most likely to attract students to the alternative political and philosophical worldview conservatism presents. D'Souza was inspired not only by Hart's philosophy of life and habits of mind, but also by the remarkable aesthetics of the professor's raccoon coat. As a friend of mine once asked, who wants to be a conservative if it doesn't mean drinking gin, playing backgammon, and discussing the Metaphysical poets? But these objections should not properly distract from what D'Souza has accomplished. In this book, as in his life, he has done what not enough conservative leaders and institutions even attempt to do: He has devoted his energy to young people, giving them an unapologetic and spirited conservatism -- one that has immediate relevance to them, and one that they can in turn communicate to others. We are in his debt.