Publishing powerhouse a conservative success

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 31, 1998 | by Stephen Goode

As we publish books under the Regnery banner, very powerful books, exciting books, and then create a demand for them, individuals go to their bookstores with purchase orders and the [bookstore] chains then order and carry them. I am more concerned about supply than about the distribution channel.

Insight: You're a Dartmouth College alumnus. Has the increasingly liberal reputation of your alma mater bothered you over the years?

TP: Well, sadly, Dartmouth has always been more liberal than its reputation. Back in the sixties, as an example, my first political-science professor was the chairman of the local Democratic committee in Hanover, N.H., and at: the end of our first survey course he said, "You can write your term paper on anything you want but Barry Goldwater." Why? He said, "Because Barry Goldwater has nothing worthwhile to say?"

There's an incredible intolerance on the part of liberals, and especially hard-core leftists, for any opposing point of view. You still find that on the college campuses. It's quite incredible. In the university, where you're supposed to have academic freedom, where you're supposed to be challenging yourself with new ideas, to be exposed to a wide range of new thought, that's where you have the most dogmatic and intolerant collectivism you could imagine. The radicals of the 1960s are the entrenched, tenured faculty of the nineties.

Insight: What did you do when your professor forbade a term paper on Goldwater?

TP: That was in the sixties. Barry was big news then, but he was just being dismissed out of hand. And that announcement by the professor was just exactly what I needed to point me to the bookstore to buy Barry Goldwater's book and find out what was so obnoxious -- what in this professor's view was so worthless -- that I shouldn't be bothering with it!

I read Conscience or a Conservative and it had a very profound influence on many of us who were growing up in the sixties.

Insight: Are you a lifelong conservative?

TP: When I went off from high school I had instinctive patriotic beliefs, but they had not been informed by studying political science all the way back to the Founding Fathers, John Locke and the British heritage. I didn't have the context, but I had the predisposition for conservatism, which I believe many Americans do. Too bad the elites are not giving them the leadership that is necessary as we go into the new millennium.

Insight: So there's a basic conservatism among Americans that publishers can tap into with books by conservative authors? Books like Conscience of a Conservative?

TP: Oh, that's how I became an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater and president of Youth for Goldwater in New Hampshire in 1964. I was, of course, disappointed when he lost. So it was a great victory for conservatism when Ronald Reagan won in 1980. That marvelous Reagan decade followed. But when Clinton came into the White House, I realized that no longer did conservatives have a spokesman -- that we had just the opposite -- and I thought there would be an opportunity for someone who wanted to publish conservative ideas to get the word out! I'd like to do a magazine. I'd like to do more of everything so that our point of view has an opportunity to be heard at its best by the American public.