http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030217s=henwood
Partying on the Right
by Doug Henwood
We all had our youthful indiscretions that haunt us for the rest of
our lives. Mine was conservatism. Sometime late in high school, I
fell under the spell of Milton Friedman and Bill Buckley, and about
the first thing I did when I got to college was join the Party of the
Right (POR). I didn't last long in the party, only about a year. I
got tired of all the pompous rituals, and political sanity returned,
bringing me back to the left from which I'd started.
Looking back, I can only explain it as a perverse form of adolescent
rebellion. But since membership is for life at least, I'm still on
their mailing list. For years, I'd been meaning to check out their
annual banquet. When I joined in 1971, movement conservatism was
marginal everywhere, especially on campuses. Now things are very
different, with laissez-faire economics revered around the world and
the United States run in a fashion that a National Review
editorialist could only have dreamed of a generation ago. And since
this was the POR'S fiftieth-anniversary banquet, it promised to be an
exuberant affair. So last December I sent for a pair of tickets at
$75 apiece, and circled February 1 on my calendar.
The POR is one of the parties within the Yale Political Union, a
debating society modeled on its Oxford namesake. Most Political Union
members are perceived by outsiders as earnest and even dorky, but the
POR is the only party that achieves serious levels of weirdness. Not
the kind of weirdness famously catalogued by Orwell, who lamented
socialism's appeal to every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal
wearer and the rest. Members of the POR wear black tie, not sandals,
and the surroundings are posher than Orwell had in mind. But a POR
meeting is something truly extraplanetary.
I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. The site of the festivities was
the Quinnipiack Club, an establishment whose taste for oil paintings
of hunting dogs was evidence of its Anglophile aspirations (despite
its location in downtown New Haven). Pre-dinner drinks were
unremarkable; I chatted up a few student members and some alums, who
seemed quite happy with the Bush Administration (despite some
reservations about civil liberties). But for a gathering of presumed
political junkies, the conversations (even the overheard ones) were
remarkably apolitical.
Even when we were seated at our assigned tables, politics still took
a back seat to the awkward chitchat one makes with strangers. I spent
much of the dinner speaking with the neighbor to my right (of
course), an engaging painter whose favorite artistic subjects are
bruised limbs and severed heads.
But things really livened up once the mediocre food was cleared away
and the toasting session began. A POR toasting ritual is organized
around a green cup--a large silver cup filled with a vile green
punch. The first toaster is always the current chairman (so called
even though the current officeholder is a woman), who began with the
traditional reading of the speech given in 1649 by the party's hero,
King Charles I of England, just before his head was lopped off by an
executioner. It's strange enough that American conservatives would
support a monarch against the claims of Parliament, but the speech is
even stranger: I must tell you that the liberty and freedom [of the
people] consists in having of Government, those laws by which their
life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having
share in Government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A
subject and a sovereign are clean different things. Having performed
her task, the chairman passed the cup to her right (of course), to
another officer, who performed the ritual recitation of the British
monarchs, starting with Egbert. So much for the Declaration of
Independence.
Rightward passage of the green cup continued, and the content of the
toasts evolved from the odd to the repulsive. There were toasts to:
the Catholic Church (inspiring some hisses from the Episcopalians);
the brotherhood of the POR; the possession of absolute truth,
which is one of the incidental perquisites of party membership; to
the murder of Ben Linder, the American Sandinista sympathizer who was
killed by the Nicaraguan contras in 1987. The toasting was
interrupted to sing an apparently well-known song, Stomping Out the
Reds. Toasts resumed: to the Crusades; to the British empire and
its American successor; and to the prospect of building a Basilica
in Riyadh, and a cathedral in Mecca. The last prompted a call from
the audience, What about Jerusalem?
Which brings up another issue about the POR--its indulgent affection
for some of the worst regimes ever. One toaster joked that the POR
chairman when he first joined really looked like a Nazi, which
provoked chortles. But the Nazi question is never far from the
surface. During my time
