Letters to a Young Conservative - Hardcover

The best-selling enfant terrible of the Reagan revolution offers advice to today's budding conservatives--the very people he sees as the true "radicals" of tomorrow. Dinesh D'Souza rose to national prominence as one of the founders of the Dartmouth Review, a leading voice in the rebirth of conservative politics on college campuses in the 1980s. He fired the first popular shot against political correctness with his best-selling expos Illiberal Education. Now, after serving as a Reagan White House staffer, the managing editor of Policy Review, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, he addresses the next generation in Letters to a Young Conservative. Drawing on his own colorful experiences, both within the conservative world and while skirmishing with the left, D'Souza aims to enlighten and inspire young conservatives and give them weapons for the intellectual battles that they face in high school, college, and everyday life. Letters to a Young Conservative also illuminates the enduring themes that for D'Souza anchor the conservative position: not "family values" or patriotism, but a philosophy based on natural rights and a belief in universal moral truths. With a light touch, D'Souza shows that conservatism needn't be stodgy or defensive, even though it is based on preserving the status quo. To the contrary, when a conservative has to expose basic liberal assumptions to scrutiny, he or she must become a kind of imaginative, fun-loving, forward-looking guerrilla--philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical. Among the topics Dinesh D'Souza covers in Letters to a Young Conservative:--Fighting Political Correctness--Authentic vs. Bogus Multiculturalism--Why Government Is the Problem--When the Rich Get Richer--How Affirmative Action Hurts Blacks--The Feminist Mistake--All the News That Fits--How to Harpoon a Liberal--The Self-Esteem Hoax--A Republican Realignment?--Why Conservatives Should Be Cheerful