We want to thank Powerline’s Paul (the one without a snappy nickname) for alerting to the book “,” because is sounds, um, fascinating. Here’s part of his review:
The essays essentially narrate the intellectual voyages of twelve leading thinkers under a certain age (I’m guessing around 60, with the average age under 50) who can be considered conservative. They are: Peter Berkowitz, Joseph Bottum, David Brooks, Danielle Crittenden, Dinesh D’Souza, Stanley Kurtz, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry, Heather Mac Donald, P.J. O’Rourke, Sally Satel, and Richard Starr.
Not all of them actually turned right. Lowry was never other than a conservative — his tale is about how he became an armed and dangerous one.
I was wondering how Rich, who (like fellow contributor Dinesh D’Souza) was the editor of a right wing college paper funded by the right wing Collegiate Network, and then went from one conservative sinecure to the next, ever was ever on the left. Now I know that he just became a gun nut (and therefore is NOT just another baby-faced conservative wuss, despite what you might think) somewhere along the line. Yes, this does sound like a real page-turner.
Crittenden was always conservative — her tale is about how she shed the feminism of the 1970s.
Yes, Danielle, who “began her career in journalism as a teenager, with a column in the Toronto Sun” — which her stepfather just happened to have co-founded, is hardly an example of a lefty who eventually came to her senses.
O’Rourke came from good Republican stock and returned to something like his roots after getting (in his telling) as much sex as he could from the “fetching” girls of the left who wore “peasant blouses, denim skirts, and sandals” and “strummed guitars, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and drank beer straight from the bottle.”
So, basically this book is about people who were always conservatives, but did sleep around in college, so they can now see how much much better they are than all those deluded liberals who they used to exploit.
Well, Paul does indicate that some of the contributors actually did have a change of heart — presumably either after 9/11, when everything changed, or at a dinner party where their lefty friends ate all the pie, thus revealing the weaknesses of liberalism.
Anyway, now that I know that there is a market for this kind of thing (well, as least a publisher for it), I’d like to edit a similar volume. So, if you would, please share YOUR story of how you saw the light and became a conservative. (If you want to see the template for such conversion stories, TBogg provides a good one).
And if your story is included in my volume (which I am tentatively titling ”‘Why I Sold Out: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Journeys from Closet Jerks to Out-and-Out Bastards”), you won’t get any money (I, as the editor, will keep it all as a tribute to capitalism), but you will get your name on the cover, probably. So, start writing!