That bastion of liberal media bias, The New York Times, has just published an article tracing John Roberts’ political development as an undergraduate and then law student at Harvard in the six years following 1973 (and you thought only Reasoners stayed at Harvard for six or more years). The derision Roberts faced as one of just a handful of campus conservatives, the Times intones, helped him develop as a resolvedly soft-spoken conservative, willing to hear but not cave to rational arguments from the left. After all, as plenty of interviewees are more than happy to have a chance to articulate, being a conservative in those years at such a radically left-wing East Coast school was immensely oppressive. One explains:

“Conservatives were like the queers on campus,” said Eric Rofes, a classmate of Judge Roberts who later became an organizer on gay issues. “People made fun of them. They mocked them and saw them as jokers or losers.”

And he’s a moderate. Then there’s folks like Grover Norquist (a class behind Roberts at Harvard), who explains:

“There was a ‘Boy Named Sue’ quality to being a libertarian or conservative at Harvard,” said Mr. Norquist, referring to the Johnny Cash song and Shel Silverstein poem (“Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,/ My fist got hard and my wits got keen.”) Conservatives at Harvard, he suggested, learned to be “tougher than anyone else.” Unlike students on the left, he said, they were constantly being challenged.

Good lord. Sure, the left maybe got too comfortable with itself while it allowed the resolve of the right to deepen, but are you really telling me that it’s discriminatory and bullying to question the political wisdom of libertarians? If that’s discrimination, it’s certainly merit-based. More to the point, those aren’t the words of somebody tough, they’re the words of somebody self-righteously self-pitying. If that’s what you call oppression, you’ve probably been somewhat over-protected (hint: Harvard). And if it’s what you call oppression when you’re a 50 year old man—and when THE NEW YORK TIMES IS INTERVIEWING YOU FOR YOUR VIEWS ABOUT A NOMINEE FOR THE SUPREME COURT—shame on you.

The last person I heard articulate this position, in a similarly privileged public forum and also at a pinnacle of self-unaware irony, was Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman, speaking to 250 gathered Harvard College Republicans in the spring of 2004. Mehlman began by mentioning that he understood what a persecuted minority they represented, and that he was glad his speech had occassioned a safe space for them all to gather and support each other. You need a safe space in which to be conservative? Have you looked at the map recently (hint: it’s above)? You are, if a persecuted minority, a persecuted minority that happens to control most of the country and all branches of government.

Nice to see Mehlman making sure those young conservatives got this talking point down now, before 30 years go by and they or their friends are up for a Supreme Court nomination.

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