NYC Republicans: Cult of Personality

The pause breaks. "Half an hour, sir."

Half an hour later, Elena Suhir sips what looks whiskey-based. "That woman?"?there, she gesticulates with her chin?"?is just a bitch," she says. Aware that I'm writing down her every word, she turns to me quickly. "But that's got nothing to do with the divisiveness of Republicans."

Suhir, an olive-skinned beauty in her mid-20s, and her Young Republican comrade in arms, Robert Alan Hornak, who's wearing a blazer with an anti-Hillary pin, care a lot about this alleged divisiveness. She takes pains to impress upon me that she left the Gramercy Park Republican Club, after sitting on its board, because of the despotic tendencies of one of the club's founders and its members' inability to get past armchair philosophizing. "It was created for ego, not for the cause, which is to counter the corrupt Republican establishment in the city."

Suhir makes sure I identify her completely, so that the GPRC can feel the back of her manicured hand.

The GPRC, both Suhir and Hornak tell me, wouldn't even get behind tonight's event, an address by conservative luminary Dinesh D'Souza, the American Enterprise Institute scholar and former Reagan administration domestic policy analyst. This is New York Young Republican territory, where Hornak believes he can help cultivate and energize right-leaning activists to take GOP politics to the street. Hornak's scourges are the New York County GOP, which he says sacrifices fostering an atmosphere of encouragement and camaraderie in the interests of maintaining its tenuous grasp on power; and bootlickers like the GPRC, who posture against the party machine but end up in solemn genuflection.

Echoing the party's Number One, Hornak says it's necessary to change the tone of urban Republicanism, and when I pick up on his thematic appropriation we talk for a while about George W. Bush, whom Hornak unequivocally supports, despite what he considers the vacuousness of "compassionate conservatism."

"He's trying to develop a coherent philosophy," he tells me, pointing out Bush's support for smaller government. I tell him that's been a Republican essential since Goldwater, and ask what needs to be developed. Hornak assents. "It's a familiar message with a new face, and that's good."

The 25 or so Young Republicans assembled at L'Ivre certainly embrace the familiar. While D'Souza, standing behind a table in the bar's intimate back room, discusses his new book, The Virtue of Prosperity?about the new economy and the political and cultural landscapes it's creating?the crowd responds best to the Reagan references. His voice cracking, D'Souza leads off with the A-Material, a hoary old Reagan anecdote the crowd eats up.

It doesn't end there. Republicans, D'Souza says, are today torn asunder by prosperity, split into camps of economic optimism and cultural pessimism, he says. It's all very far from Reagan's message of freedom leading to virtue. Reagan celebrated liberty and virtue, D'Souza said.

One interlocutor asks D'Souza how much of the new economy is attributable to Reagan. It's a shame, since D'Souza is an eloquent speaker and his insights into the culture of wealth can be nimble and prescient. No matter. People want to hear about Reagan.

D'Souza affably signs newly printed copies of his book, selling them for a discount, but at least one woman wants an autographed copy of his Reagan biography, which he selfishly neglected to bring. A gray-haired Young Republican hedged in advance, lugging his own copy of Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.

Hornak kisses people goodnight as they slink away. He evinces a Reagan-like optimism that the moribund local GOP can be revitalized through actions like the protest this week outside Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters. He's got a bunch of red and yellow vinyl bumperstickers reading "Vote Communist, Vote Democrat."

I tell him most people find the equivalency ridiculous.

"They can't deny their socialism," he tells me, rehashing an ossified argument about the difference amounting to a matter of degree. He's spoken to Democratic friends of his on the subject, and, he reports, they've admitted it.

My God. They've admitted it. A specter is haunting Manhattan. I left the bar, blasted with infernal air a second time, thinking about a sclerotic party haunted by specters of former socialists.