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October 24, 2002, 9:00 a.m. D’Souza U Dinesh D’Souza, conservative mentor. By Matthew Continetti Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza (Basic Books: 224 pp., $22.00)

all it serendipity: Just as Dinesh D'Souza's latest bromide against the purveyors of political correctness hits stores, a new poll shows that today's young people are more conservative than their elders. These newly described conservatives, most of whom attend educational institutions where the only exposure to conservative thought might be a mention or two of Edmund Burke in a European-history class, require a more solid intellectual grounding in the reasons behind their intuitional conservative beliefs. D'Souza's book, Letters to a Young Conservative, satisfies that need; it's an entertaining soupçon of modern conservatism, filled with anecdotes and talking points designed to appeal to the undergraduate who yearns to "stand athwart history, yelling stop!" but is unsure about how to do so. If there is such a thing as conservative ideology, then D'Souza's latest, part of Basic Books' "Art of Mentoring" series, comes closest to distilling it into one attractive package, minus the brandy and cigars.

But mentoring is also tough work. According to the dust jacket from another title in the series, mentoring texts are "meant to shape the future of their disciplines and to inspire the careers of the next generation and generations after that." The paradigmatic mentoring book is German poet Rainer Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens is another classic example of the genre. Unfortunately, by this standard, Dinesh D'Souza's Letters to a Young Conservative does not stack up as a work of mentoring — this member of the next generation was not inspired. It doesn't quite shape the future of its discipline. But what it does do, and does well, is serve as a primer on contemporary conservative thought.

As the title suggests, Letters to a Young Conservative is composed of 31 letters addressed to a young conservative named "Chris." Chris presumably attends Columbia University, where the author of this review also studies.

The chapters include such topics as "Authentic vs. Bogus Multiculturalism," "How Affirmative Action Hurts Blacks," "More Guns, Less Crime," and "How Reagan Outsmarted the Liberals." There is nothing especially new to the arguments presented herein, and in many cases the chapters are miniature recapitulations of ideas that D'Souza has already dealt with in his books The End of Racism, Illiberal Education, Ronald Reagan, and most recently, What's So Great About America. Those books constitute a conservative canon all their own, and one would be edified in reading them. The value of Letters to a Young Conservative lies in the fact that it gathers all the ideas which make up D'Souza's brand of conservatism and puts them between two covers.

There is another reason why this book is worth reading. The opening letters are retrospective in tone and subject matter, as they deal with the development of D'Souza from an apolitical liberal to a self-described conservative radical. D'Souza is an excellent memoirist, and special attention is devoted to Dartmouth professor and NR Senior Editor Jeffrey Hart. We are told that in the eighties Hart would walk around campus wearing buttons that said "Soak the Poor." A page later, D'Souza describes how Hart, "a walking producer of aphorisms," once said that "When I heard about the French Revolution, my reaction was that I was against it."

This is great stuff, and the cause of not a few laughs. It is also the stuff of mentoring. The intellectual presence of a scholarly wit of Hart is shown to have had a galvanizing effect on the young conservatives who started the Dartmouth Review. Simply reading about Hart's antics makes one eager to storm the liberal barricades, and stand athwart history yelling, "Stop!" It becomes clear that it was the force of Hart's personality that shaped D'Souza and other Dartmouth conservatives into activist non-activists. D'Souza assuredly has that same force of personality — his frequent lectures on college campuses, including the one last winter at Columbia University which is presumably the inspiration for these epistles, attest to his wit and rhetorical skills — but that same force of personality is curiously missing from Letters to a Young Conservative. Instead, you find half a memoir and a brief treatment of some conservative ideas.

Those ideas are not without problems, either. D'Souza's central thesis is that the rise of a Rousseau-ist ethic of authenticity, where people believe that the source of moral truths is located within themselves, presents special problems to conservatives that argue for traditional morality and public virtue based on exterior, transcendent truths. This is a keen observation: but D'Souza offers little by way of a strategy in which conservatives advocate tradition and prescription in a non-judgmental, authentic world. His advice is to stress that political and economic freedom is a precondition to virtue. Well, okay. But that is precisely what the Rousseauians say when they argue for what the sociologist Alan Wolfe calls "moral freedom."

D'Souza doesn't address this paradox. Nor does he articulate strategies for minority outreach in his chapter titled "A Republican Realignment." While D'Souza reckons, correctly, that it is a mystery why more Asian Americans, who are by and large the most traditional of the latest wave of American immigrants, do not vote Republican, he does not offer any suggestions of what it would take to bring more Asians into the Republican coalition.

That might be too much to ask for such a brief book. Instead, readers, and young conservatives especially, can read Letters to a Young Conservative in an evening or two, delighting in anecdotes from the culture wars and learning about the major issues facing conservatives today. In effect, the book is like a mini-seminar with D'Souza as the professor — with all the strengths and weaknesses that come with such a mini-seminar. But one has little doubt that when someone offers answers to the questions that D'Souza poses, they will have done so after reading this book. They might even reach those answers based on D'Souza's means of reasoning — which means that D'Souza might prove a successful mentor after all.

— Matt Continetti is a senior at Columbia University and was a 2002 NR summer intern.