Danielle Charette is a senior at Swarthmore and one of the founders of the Swarthmore Conservative Society. In a recent post at Intercollegiate Review, she explained how conservative students can work together on campus.

Fusing the Forces of Freedom

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.”