Critical Mass

By Dan Gelernter

Now that I have returned to weekly posting, it seems appropriate that I return as well to my former custom of reporting on each week’s Tory Party debate. This is the week before the kickoff of Yale’s Spring term, and so I’ll use it to give you an overview of the Yale Political Union.

The Yale Political Union (YPU) was founded in 1934 and is Yale’s largest undergraduate organization. The YPU convenes once weekly for a political debate that opens with a guest speaker; YPU speakers last term included such beacons of conservatism as William F Buckley Jr, and Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as such purveyors of societal decay and obnoxious stupidity as Michael Dukakis and Al Sharpton. In the Union’s golden years, results of debates were wired to the White House. This is no longer the case.

Each of the seven parties in the YPU is an independent organization that hosts its own weekly intra-party debate, and every YPU meeting begins with an announcement from the party chairmen, each of whom gives the results from his party’s last debate and a general invitation to upcoming events.

In Union debates, the parties sit in a broadly ideological arrangement, with the Party of the Right, the Tories, and the Conservatives on the right side of the room, the Independent Party in the middle, and the Progressives, Party of the Left, and Liberals on the wrong side of the room.

The Independent Party was formed as the “Conservative Party” in 1934, along with the other founding party of the YPU, the Liberal Party. Over time the Conservative Party moved to the Left, and finally had to rename itself. The Independent Party today is primarily leftist, as many liberals prefer to call themselves moderates. It is the largest party by far, with about half the voting strength of the entire Union (130 members or so). This means that anyone they endorse in a YPU election is almost assured victory, unless all the other parties can combine against them, which is a rare thing.

The Liberal Party has between 25 and 30 active members. There is nothing much one can say about this party, except that it would contain the most rabidly leftist members of the Union if it was not for the formation of the Party of the Left last term (which was accomplished in part by defecting Liberals).

The Party of the Left, being brand-new, is the unknown quantity in the YPU, and so I won’t wager a guess as to its chance of survival.

The remaining leftist Party is the Progressive Party, formed in the 60s. The Progs, as they are known, are the most hippy-like and are renowned for their utter lack of seriousness. Whereas even the chairman of the Liberal Party has a gavel, the Progressives prefer to chair their debates with a bone. This is perhaps why they are on the verge of dying as a member party of the Union: in every term, each Party has to have 30 people (“quals”) who have signed in at three different debates. The Progs were on probation last term for failing (spectacularly) to meet this goal, but they nevertheless managed to attain the required number of signatures to survive for the Spring term. Since they have only a half dozen or so active members, they likely achieved the requirement by employing time-honored YPU methods, which range from goading friends into showing up to paying an a cappella group to sign in en masse.

The history of the current right-wing parties of the union began with the Party of the Right, formed in 1953 to fill the void left by the leftification of the Independent Party. The POR (say, “P-O-R”) provided an admirable refuge for Yale conservatives for about fifteen years, when troubling tenancies began to emerge. A dramatic libertarian contingent formed, and there were rumors of fascist sympathies (including Nazi salutes et al) which persist to this day. In 1969 the Party of the Right was divided into two clear factions: the traditionalists and the libertarians.

Following an infamous purge of the traditionalists by the libertarians (an election for the where the libertarian chairman of the POR commanded that the traditionalists be given green ballots, which were immediately separated and discarded) the traditionalist faction fought for two years and finally won recognition as the Tory Party of the YPU in 1971. The p.o.r. today (referred to in lower-case letters, to separate it from the pre-split POR) suffers from a burden of silliness (they never refer to the chairman by his name and claim that he is omnipotent and omniscient). The por suffers as well from an authoritarian leadership that predetermines the outcome of its elections -- a practice that resulted in several resignations last term. The por has around 30 or 35 active members, but may be in decline. Their political makeup is so radical that a number of its members defected to help for the Party of the Left.

The Tory Party (my own party) has had many ups and downs in membership -- as recently as the late ‘90s there were only four active members and the Tories were considered to be in imminent danger of dying. The Tory Party is now enjoying a dramatic upsurge and has about 30 members. They are the party of traditional, Burkean Conservatism and of ladies and gentlemen. The Tory Party follows Robert’s Rules of Order rigorously, and is also the only party in the Union to forbid the use of vulgarity on its floor.

The Tories also have a daughter society at the University of Chicago, known as the Edmund Burke society, which counts our very own editor Mark Meador among its members.

Finally, we have the Conservative Party. The name is somewhat of a misnomer, as this party is generally considered the most centrist of the three parties on the right. They often claim to be the oldest party in the YPU, by affiliating themselves with the original Conservative Party (now the Independents) but are actually the youngest party on the right, formed by a disgruntled por defector in 1996. They too are enjoying an upsurge in membership today.

The most entertaining event of each YPU term is generally considered to be the last one: elections. The election process usually begins on the Sunday night of the last week before finals with the YPU “Inquisition.” During this process, each party reserves a room on campus and interviews the candidates for Union office. All the parties have their own methods for conducting these interviews, about which they are normally secretive, but which range considerably in reputation: the Progs are known to be rather perverse, the Cons have the reputation of nastiness, and the Independent Party and the Tories are considered to have the nicest, most polite floors. Though there is an official schedule for the proceedings, it is normally derailed early in the evening, and the Inquisition can last well into the next morning.

Elections are held on the following day, and each Party releases a list of its endorsements. Most parties endorse a candidate for every race; the Tories are known to endorse very sparingly, and more often give a no-endorse, or, in special cases where the candidates are completely unsuitable, endorse a fictional character, such as “Cornelius the Cardboard Cutout.” The YPU convenes again in the evening for the ballot reading -- members are allowed to write whatever they wish on their ballots, provided that the ballot is signed, and the speaker of the Union is required to read each ballot in its entirety. Some ballots contain veritable essays that may range from random irrelevancies to vitriolic diatribes against some offending party or (more rarely) person.

And that is a snapshot of Yale’s Political Union. Starting next week, I will do my best to capture for you the elegance, charm, and intellectual rigor of Tory debates. See you then.