Shaking hands with the enemy at the Conservative Summit

By Randi Cecchine

Two weekends ago, the National Review Institute held a three-day Conservative Summit at the Marriot Hotel in Washington, D.C., around the corner from the Whitehouse, as anti-war protesters filled the Mall. The conference, titled “Claiming the Future,” was listed in the Heritage Foundation’s e-mail bulletins, my favorite source for charting the goals of the elite conservative class. I’ve always enjoyed entertaining opinions unlike my own, so I registered for the summit, growing nervous and excited as it approached, feeling like a real spy infiltrating enemy territory. Being a documentary filmmaker, I brought along my video and still cameras, unsure if I’d be granted permission to use them, unsure of what I would do with the footage, but excited by the prospects of capturing my experience for others to see.

I arrived at Friday night’s cocktail reception honoring John Bolton, ordered a strong drink from the bar and lingered close to the service staff, thinking about times I had observed elites from their shoes. Filled with adrenaline, I took some photographs and milled around the room, trying to listen in on conversations and get a feel for the crowd. It was hard to distinguish among the participants, who were approximately 70 percent male, 97 percent white and quite forgettable in appearance.

After indulging in sumptuous steak, I spotted Ralph Reed across the room, exuberant and boyish as he chatted up another man. Reed was executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the mid-1990s, has been implicated in various election and financial scandals, and recently lost the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Georgia. I walked up to him, interrupted his conversation with a smile and asked if I could get a photo with him. He put his arms around my waist, and we smiled and laughed while his friend took our picture.

I walked away with the same strange feeling of delight that arose many times throughout the weekend. Ralph Reed helped devise the Christian Right’s strategies for mobilizing voters on anti-gay and anti-abortion issues. A decade ago, I worked on a documentary that highlighted the danger these people posed, yet there we were, both completely disarmed. I realized that I had attended the summit to gain this kind of access, to measure personalities and understand how conservative philosophies are constructed. I kept my eyes on Reed for the rest of the weekend: He was usually chatting up someone at the back of the room, smiling, laughing, in pursuit of something unknown.

The summit’s primary focus was on understanding November’s mid-term election “debacle” in an effort to reorganize and ensure Republican victory in 2008. John Bolton, recently dumped from his post as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told audiences at the cocktail reception: “This is a time not to be reflecting on what we’ve done wrong and what we’ve done right in the past six years — certainly there’s been a lot that’s been done wrong.... This is really a moment to get our philosophical compass back on foreign and domestic policy. Now is the time to be optimistic and look ahead so that we are the ones who are setting the pace and letting the other ones catch up to us.”

The summit presented various interpretations of the November election results but pointed to a few common themes: corruption, immigration, Iraq and incompetence, especially the Bush Administration’s failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina. Various participants claimed that the American people now view the Republican party as the party of big government. This, they asserted, shows that Republicans have abandoned the core conservative values of limited government and personal freedom.

I was surprised to hear very little mention of George W. Bush except from his brother Jeb, who, in a luncheon speech, said he was not going to make any comments critical of the President. It appeared these folks wanted to put distance between themselves and Dubya. Considering how many of them are unemployed and recharting their own career paths, I imagine they are hoping they can survive the political battle scars of this administration and eventually blame Bush for their misfortunes.

There were a few names I heard repeatedly during the weekend. For an easy laugh, a speaker needed only mention Hillary Clinton’s name. Nancy Pelosi was mentioned 10 times the first evening, and then I stopped counting. But the name that I heard the most was Ronald Reagan.

Radio personality Laura Ingraham, on an evening panel of women (the only female presenters during the three-day event), asked the audience, “Is everyone in the room looking for the next Ronald Reagan?” The audience cheered and applauded. The deep love and longing for Reagan is central to this group’s identity, because he articulated a clear and simple path for them: the forces of good capitalism over evil communism, a time of hope after a period of fear.

Amid today’s myriad uncertainties, conservatives seem to be yearning for clearly defined problems and transparent solutions. For the first time in many years, they seem lost in a rudderless vehicle, waiting to be saved. As someone who has felt deeply afraid of their violence and disregard for humanity, it was powerful to witness their fear. It helped me understand their rush toward war in Iraq, their desire to challenge this fear with immediate action. Almost four years later, they finally seem to be questioning their support for the rush to war.

I met individuals at the summit who were friendly and kind. I felt grateful to connect with the so-called enemy in such a potentially hostile landscape. The event coordinators granted me permission to videotape, and I plan to edit a short piece for YouTube that won’t mock the participants but will simply represent my experience. At the end of the weekend, I admitted to a young man from Toronto that I wasn’t a conservative, as I talked about the lives of Mexican migrant workers. He asked if I was some kind of spy, and I told him yes, but that I was genuine in my interest of our conversation.

These days, Americans on the whole seem stuck, allowing ourselves to be defined by our hatred of the other side. The political parties have taken advantage of our fears, polarizing us to the detriment of the nation. Ideologues on the right and the left spout endless examples of their rivals’ wrong-headedness, and we listen because it makes us feel like we belong to a group, a tribe that agrees with us. Is there a chance we can evolve past this behavior and focus on the things we all have in common: a country with a very complex economy, a need for civic engagement, meaningful dialogue and genuine communication across the ideological spectrum without being righteous or smug? Sitting with people unlike yourself and listening to them without response can be an excellent exercise in building new paradigms and picturing a more positive future.

I had a fascinating weekend and have a great deal of information and videotape to digest. I came home with a stronger capacity to see the world through the other side’s eyes, a curiosity to research the multiple interpretations of conservative philosophy, and a genuine desire to question my own assumptions. I also conquered some deep fears, feeling more confident to move seamlessly among social groups. For this, I’ll always be thankful to the Conservative Summit.

Randi Cecchine is a documentary filmmaker and an adjunct professor of video production and media studies at the College of Staten Island who lives in Chelsea. She is currently working on a documentary musical about The Missile Dick Chicks, a political performance group.