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Party Crashing
A paleo’s-eye view at the Star Trek convention of the American Right

After showing the federal security guards my driver’s license, I walked through the metal detector. Beep! Between my suit and overcoat, I must have had over a dozen pockets, and I didn’t feel like figuring out which one held my change, so they scanned my jacket and I walked through again. This time I made it without trouble, but there were still old ladies waiting for security guards to pass wands over them to make sure they weren’t hiding knives beneath their broaches.

No, I was not getting aboard an airplane but entering the 32nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). With the exclusion of the year I was abroad, I have made the three-hour drive from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I am now a senior, to the conference every year of college. In the past, it was held at a hotel in Crystal City, Virginia, but this year it took place at the Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.

In many ways this is appropriate; a giant federal building next door to the headquarters of the IRS is an ironic comment on conservatives who have made peace with big government. The guards and metal detectors represent the movement’s main passion, the national-security state. And the fact that the only reason they decided to move it is because the building is named after Ronald Reagan suggests attendees’ primary preoccupation: putting a simulacrum of our 40th president on everything from the $10 bill to Mt. Rushmore. A number of people at the conference were wearing shirts and hats that piously stated, “God, Reagan, Bush.”

CPAC, sponsored by the American Conservative Union (ACU), is the largest gathering of conservative activists in the country. Neoconservative Marshall Wittmann derisively calls it the Star Trek convention for conservatives. While I have never been to a Star Trek convention (really!), from my second-hand impressions, this description is apt....

... One of the most interesting things I noted was the burgeoning movement to draft Condoleezza Rice to run for president in 2008. When I talked to a few people wearing “Draft Condi” buttons to find out why they thought she should become president, the only answers I got were that she was intelligent and supported the president. All of them denied that they wanted her to run because she was a black female, but they did not question that this fact had its political utility. My initial response was that her race and sex were unlikely to gain points from the professional anti-racists or even from minority and women voters. I learned, however, that the main reason they thought her race was useful was not because she would deflect accusations of racism (not that they didn’t entertain the possibility), but because it could help expose left-wing racism—whatever that means.

Secretary Rice may be quite conservative, but the only thing I knew about her was that she was willing to lie to help the president go to war and that she supports affirmative action. A few weeks after the conference, I read that she is also pro-choice. If she turns out to be pro-gay marriage and for increasing federal spending as well, I doubt it will do much to deflect conservative enthusiasm for her. Supporting George W. Bush and whatever wars he decides to fight seems to be only litmus test.

In fact, if one thing was apparent from CPAC, it is that foreign policy has become the defining issue for the Right, and anyone who opposes endless war will be derided as a liberal, anti-American, or worse. This is done at the expense of all domestic concerns—both social and economic. Although New York Post editor Ryan Sager complained that open-borders advocates and supporters of homosexual marriage were not greeted with unqualified acceptance at CPAC, they were both treated with much more respect than anyone who opposed the war. That people like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger are hailed as conservative heroes shows that many conservatives are willing to sacrifice almost any principle for electoral success and war. ...