Fusing the Forces of Freedom

Fusing the Forces of Freedom

By Danielle Charette

When I arrived as a freshman at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, I knew of only two bona fide conservatives—me and my good friend Tyler Becker, who, by the grace of God, lived next door.

Three years later, the group Tyler and I cofounded—the Swarthmore Conservative Society (SCS)—is legitimate enough that students refer to us by our acronym. Each week, our society hosts open dinner meetings where we swap perspectives on campus controversies (Swarthmore generates plenty), national politics, the books from our reading group, and academic lectures. How did we make the group a success? We borrowed a strategy from the William F. Buckley Jr. playbook.

In the early 1950s, Buckley worked with Frank Meyer and others to build a conservative coalition out of the shambles of the American Right. They did this by “fusing” in the pages of National Review the philosophies of traditionalism, libertarianism, and anticommunism in the service of common political ends. The movement they built is the one you recognize as “conservative” today.

Similarly, our work at Swarthmore demands a big-tent approach. This is a strategy that can win popularity on just about any college campus and unite disparate dissenters into one coherent group. Although there may be areas of disagreement, this only adds nuance to our discussions and tests the vigor of our arguments. We all acknowledge that what we are conserving are the ideals of classical liberalism—a free government and a free economy—in the spirit of the American Founders, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Hayek. So our club welcomes libertarians, localists, Burkeans, Christians, constitutionalists, moderates, and anyone else whose philosophy is “old school” enough to stand athwart the dominant Swarthmore progressivism. We do “fuse” various perspectives that serve a common conservative goal. You might even call what results intellectual “diversity.”

Although this approach is purposefully broad, we do stand on principles—those of a true liberal arts education. We cite them, for example, when we criticize the college’s history department for failing (for years on end) to offer a single course on the American Founding. We stand on those principles when we object to classroom bullying—for instance, when Keynesian economic professors read our members’ free-market newspaper editorials aloud in class to mock us. We insist on these principles when we demand free speech from a college administration that watches conservative students get jeered into silence in public meetings.

Together we defend free speech, tradition, genuine academic inquiry, and fair play—basic tenets of a free society that, sadly, are not always upheld at America’s elite colleges.

So pool your forces. Gather members. Welcome disputes. Work with outside organizations such as ISI to cosponsor lectures and debates. Don’t let the progressives divide and conquer. As Ben Franklin said, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Danielle Charette, a senior at Swarthmore, contributes to both of Swarthmore’s newspapers, The Phoenix and the Daily Gazette, and serves on the editorial board of the oldest campus literary magazine, Small Craft Warnings.