DAMSELS IN DISSENT

The politics of left and right have increasingly blurred, giving rise to a new breed of female conservatives-think Wendy Shalit, Danielle Crittenden, Amity Shlaes, Virginia Postrel-who want to rock the country's hearts and minds, not its votes. And while the message is often retro, the medium is cool

SAM TANENHAUS

Politics

Wendy Shalit's voice, soft and genteel, rises easily above the lunchtime din at Le Marais, the popular kosher steak house in midtown Manhattan, near Times Square and the Diamond District. Gentility and force converge neatly in Shalit. Demurely clad in an ankle-length skirt and button-down shirt, open at the collar, she offers the radiant image of the Jewish girl next door, the sort who might take graduate courses while still in high school or read The Faerie Queen for fun because everybody else is reading Shakespeare. She also excels at staying on message.

"Look, no one wants to give the young advice anymore," she says over her single portobello mushroom and Diet Coke. "The culture is telling them to let it all hang out and don't be prudish. Be cynical and be jaded and don't care about anything. ... All the advice that comes from the pop culture ... is not in line with reality. I want to get the advice in line with reality, to say, 'This didn't work at all. We tried it, it resulted in a lot of unhappiness.' The problem in resuscitating [that] advice is that it has now become political."

Politics the problem? Some would say it has been Shalit's ticket. Since arriving in Manhattan in 1997, hard upon her graduation from Williams College, she has become the wunderkind of the neoconservative circuit, a star attraction at weekly Manhattan Institute lunches, monthly gatherings of the Fabiani Society, a conservative social club, and seasonal cocktail parties at The New Criterion, the highbrow conservative arts monthly edited by Hilton Kramer. But while others twice her age are still struggling to break out of that dense but enclosed universe and get a hearing in the larger world, Shalit, who turned 24 this summer and is a contributing editor at City Journal, the policy magazine that is required reading in the Giuliani administration, is on a direct path to celebrity.

It helps to have written a controversial book. Shalit's A Return to Modesty, now in its fifth printing, denounces the culture of promiscuity and pleads for the revival of forgotten codes of courtly love. When I spoke with her, Shalit (pronounced shaleet) was preparing "study questions" for inclusion in the paperback, due out in January. Not bad for someone who was sitting in college classrooms herself two years ago. Then again, how many authors can boast jacket blurbs from both the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin ("I do so very much appreciate her concern with sexual violence and female degradation") and the dowager conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb ("Nothing less than a prescription for a new sexual revolution")?

Shalit's book does indeed offer something different: Victorian prudery combined with Reviving Ophelia-style feminism. Men, she maintains, should honor women, who in turn should preserve their treasures for the marriage bed. Above all, parents should protect their children. The steep cost of not doing this can be measured in the alarming numbers of young women who fall prey to eating disorders, depression, suicide, and date rape—the litany recited by feminists, only in Shalit's view it is not the "patriarchy" that is to blame but the sexual revolution. To her, in loco parentis are hallowed words.

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This has sent pundits on the right such as columnist George Will and David Gelemter, the Yale professor and social critic, into raptures while it has brought hard jabs from the left. "Stream-of-consciousness ramblings on boyfriends, college and virginity," pronounced Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation, "gussied up into a book by which Shalit herself will certainly be embarrassed in a few years." "Oh, she makes me sick!" Camille Paglia told The New York Observer.

Shalit shrugs. "You have to be able to take the attacks. You have to be able to learn from them and to distance yourself, and say, 'What can I learn from this?"'

One lesson is that in the world of female intellectuals the political is resolutely the personal, especially for a writer who dares probe the gaping wound known as liberal anxiety. "The former progressives have become today's reactionaries," says Shalit, while she and a number of other young conservative women are leading "a counterrevolution." While many on the left are writing them off as throwbacks, the real message is that these "retrochicks" and "bom-yesterday babes" (as one outraged feminist, film critic Molly Haskell, has called them) look more like the coming thing, heralds, or sirens, of a genuine conservative chic. The more acute thinkers among them may be going even further, shaping a new politics untethered to tired left-right dichotomies. They ignore partisan debates, as a rule, focusing instead on shared generational experiences. Check out the New York Press, the downtown weekly that's emerged to challenge the aging, liberal Village Voice and you'll find the new sensibility at work: young, anti-Establishment, smartly clued into the culture—and, often as not, right wing.

"If you say you're conservative, that's a big freight load of stereotypes. Fundamentalist, moralizing, trying to get into people's bedrooms... it's an embarrassment."

In the forefront, at least as far as media exposure goes, is Shalit, part ingenue, part vixen, all smiles as she goads her feminist elders into battle. "They can't stand the fact that [Wendy's] so smart, so squeaky clean, apple-cheeked," says the 31-year-old writer Norah Vincent, another new-wave conservative who writes a regular column for the gay magazine The Advocate. Vincent also happens to be a graduate of Wiliams and was impressed enough by Shalit's analysis of the 90s college scene to pitch a review of A Return to Modesty to the editor of "a major newsmagazine"—she won't say which one for fear of repercussions. "The editor said, 'Sounds great, I'd love you to do it. Do 1,500 words and get it in as soon as you can,'" says Vincent, who happily complied. "He called me back a week later. He was so pissed off, madder than any editor I've ever dealt with." He told Vincent he was not going to run the review. Why? It seemed he was expecting an all-out attack. "I was so appalled," says Vincent, whose balanced appraisal eventually appeared in Salon. She later recounted her saga to Shalit, who "laughed it off and said, 'I'm so used to it.'"

It's true. Voung as she is, Shalit is a seasoned combatant in the culture wars. She had just finished her sophomore year when Commentary, the flagship neocon monthly, published "A Ladies' Room of One's Own," her witty account of her futile search for a single-sex bathroom in Williams's dorms. The essay was not a hit on campus. "Wendy was at Wiliams during the worst of political correctness," says Mark Gerson, a 27-year-old author and investment banker who was a senior when Shalit was a freshman. "A lot of personal hostility was directed at conservatives." After pornography was slipped under Shalit's door and a mouse placed in her room, the administration hustled her off campus and gave her an unlisted phone.

The outside world was more receptive. Shalit's essay, reprinted in Reader's Digest, brought in a flood of mail. She also heard from Adam Bellow, 42, then the editorial director of the Free Press, the conservative Simon & Schuster imprint known for launching incendiary best-sellers such as The Real Anita Hill as well as important theoretical works such as the social scientist Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Impressed by Shalit's "intelligence and literary control," Bellow suspected he had found another Katie Roiphe—whose 1993 book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, a debunking of the date-rape epidemic, had led to a cover story in The New York Times Magazine and angry attacks from high-profile feminists.

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A Return to Modesty immodestly invites close scrutiny. The book's jacket features a Dtirer nude coyly shielded by fig leaves, complemented by a picture of the photogenic author. That packaging alone helped Shalit secure the kinds of media gigs, such as NPR interviews, that are normally off-limits to conservative authors, in the opinion of Bob Newman, whose Boston publicity agency handled Shalit's extensive radio tour. Newman has found that Shalit and Danielle Crittenden, another client and attractive conservative author, are naturals for an emerging demographic, young and female, stimulated less by "hot issue" topics—the partisan red meat of Rush Limbaugh and company—than by "lifestyle" issues: sex, marriage, family. Liberal women have views on these subjects, too, but they are less practiced in debate and tend to be stuffy and humorless. The new conservatives, says Newman, understand the "need to be provocative, push buttons, be sexy."

The new conservatives understand the "need to be provocative, push buttons, be sexy."

Ah, yes: sexy, but not too. Let's see— there was the full-page photo of Shalit giggling attractively in People, the fetching head shot in Time (posing with her cat, Milton, as in Friedman, the Nobel Prizewinning economist). And there is the flow of piquant gossip. Shalit won't discuss her romantic life ("That would not be modest"), but she has been linked recently with a Manhattan attorney and before that with John Podhoretz, editorial-page editor of the New York Post. "The funny thing about Wendy is she's a serial dater," says an acquaintance. O.K., but what's a young female neocon to do? You won't find love unless you look for it.

The point is that however much Shalit may deplore modem courtship rituals, she's as steeped in them as the next twentysomething; she still lives in this world. That becomes plain enough when I confess that before reading her book I was not familiar with the expression "hooking up." I can see Shalit is stunned. She tries to help me along. "Even as in 'I hooked up with him last night'? Like that?" Come to think of it, once I'd been watching, well, Jerry Springer, and saw a college-age pair sheepishly admit to having casually "hooked up" one night, a revelation that sent a third guest, morosely silent to this point, leaping out of his chair, fists flying. I'd caught the drift but didn't realize they were employing ...

"A term," Shalit says firmly. "It's very bizarre. It used to be 'making love' and then 'having sex.' And now it's 'hooking up,' like airplanes refueling." The tone is clinical, detached, amused: Lolita explaining the facts of life to Humbert Humbert. But unlike Lolita, Shalit remains sheathed in purity. So how come she knows so much, or thinks she does? "I have zero intellectual modesty," she explains.

In truth this damsel in distress—with her mingling of rebellion and reaction, her earnestness tinged with camp, her blatant chutzpah—is a finished product of our particular cultural moment. More in step with the age than she lets on, she has constructed a worldview out of her emotions and locked onto her "target market" with the skill of one well versed in media techniques. (There were, perhaps, hard lessons to be learned from the example of her older sister Ruth, once a rising star at The New Republic who was brought down by repeated allegations of plagiarism and left the magazine this year to pursue a new career in advertising.) Wendy shows me her backpack from the Body Shop; she has torn off the original label, which read, "Animals in Danger," and replaced it with one of her making: "Conservatives in Danger." The message may be retro. The medium is cool.

Shalit is by no means the isolated, marginal figure depicted by her critics, and we can expect to see many others like her, unintended creations of that incubator of modern reactionism, the college campus, with its graying professoriat in thrall to New Left slogans, "poststructuralist" curricula plying the invidious dogmas of race and gender "difference," and enfeebled administrators handing out condoms as a send-off to spring break.

The pre-packaged leftism of American campuses isn't news, and it's easy enough to laugh off hypersensitive speech codes and the like, but what do you make of it all at age 18, just arrived on campus and ripe for first impressions of the bigger world? You might well find yourself in the position of Pia Nordlinger, who was apolitical when she entered Kenyon College in 1992 but was bewildered to discover that "the feminist presence was so strong and militant." Obviously the feminists had "won the culture wars," says Nordlinger, so why were they still "preaching from the classroom"? Couldn't they see what any undergraduate knew in her bones, that yesterday's bold dissent had become today's regnant orthodoxy? The disconnect made Nordlinger reexamine all she saw. For instance, during "take back the night" demonstrations in which young women protested the high incidence of date rape, Nordlinger found herself sympathizing with the sentiment, but was "frustrated by the tone ... the celebration of victimhood." On "Denim Day," organized to support homosexuals, Nordlinger wore khaki. A small protest, but it led to others. Now, at age 25, she writes conservative editorials on city and state policy for the New York Post.

Then there is Kanchan Limaye, also 25. The daughter of Indian emigres, both physicians, she gave little thought to racial politics growing up in San Antonio or during college at the University of Texas at Austin, where she enrolled in 1992. Only when she went east to the Columbia School of Journalism did she encounter "liberal racism done by people who were trying to be overly tolerant but making fools of themselves." There was an awkward session with a professor whom she had asked about job prospects. He "said something like 'There's lots of opportunities for people like you out there,' and he started pulling up this stuff on the Web about disadvantaged women. And I was, like, 'I know you're trying to help me, but don't use that kind of line, and it's really quite insulting.' I thought to myself, Is this how blacks are treated? No wonder this builds a kind of resentment and anger and a feeling of separatism."

Now an art critic, Limaye also writes essays such as "Is There Life After Race?" for Reason, the libertarian monthly, and, like Shalit, she attends the Fabiani Society's gatherings on the first Tuesday of every month at the Princeton Club. But even this group remains a heavily male preserve, as I was reminded when I dropped in on a meeting. The guest speaker, Wiliam J. Stem, a contributing editor at City Journal, delved into the minutiae of "state capitalism" as if he were addressing the local Lion's Club. Of the several dozen guests, only a handful were female, and the room seemed bathed in old-fashioned Ivy League gloom: men in business suits three deep at the bar and forming a scrum at the cheeseand-fruit table. Limaye, slender and wearing what she later described to me as "an ankle-length, body-hugging, translucent Ralph Lauren V-neck sleeveless cotton summer dress, striped in sunset pastels, atop a salmon-colored DKNY camisole"—she used to be on the staff of the lifestyle magazine Avenue—seemed to have swept in from a fashion shoot, at least in contrast to the more matronly appearance of the other women present. "The first time I went I was sort of shocked," she says of the Fabiani Society. "It's just a boys' club.... It's a little odd." So there's more work to be done on the right? No question. "When you talk about changing agendas or redefining conservatism, that's one of the ways [in which] it needs to be redefined. There's a kind of objectifying of women that isn't necessarily fair or accurate. It's kind of weird."

Ten years ago, when I began exploring conservative intellectual circles in New brk, most of the women I met seemed appendages, stuck in the role of prefeminist helpmate, ferrying dishes from dining table to kitchen. Few looked happy about it. u could feel the pressure of unused intellect. Even today the phrase "woman conservative" conjures up scary images of Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly declaring war on homosexuals, or possibly the "complete housewife" greeting her warrior husband in a Saran Wrap negligee, iced martini in hand. There were, of course, more sophisticated voices: dreamy Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan-Bush speechwriter, or acidic columnist and talking head Mona Charen. They were the female auxiliary of the Republican Party, bolstering the domestic front in the long siege against liberals. While the men droned on about first-strike capability and throw weight, the women decried "abortion on demand" and rhapsodized about "the mommy track."

"If you say you're conservative, that's still a big freight load of very negative stereotypes," says Lynn Chu, a 43-yearold Manhattan literary agent whose rightwing stable includes Newt Gingrich, social scientists James Q. Wilson and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, and Virginia Postrel, another important young theorist. "Fundamentalist, moralizing, trying to get into people's bedrooms ... it's an embarrassment, always has been. We go so far as to say [to clients], 'Look, you've written for National Review. Why don't you just take that out? Don't even tell [book] editors.'" Another problem, as Chu sees it, is the typical mind-set of ideological conservatives. "They're not comfortable graciously occupying the mainstream as if they belonged. They would rather keep churning out screechy polemics about how awful everything is."

The new wave is fluent in subtler tongues. The thinking may be familiar, but the vocabulary has been remodeled along generational, rather than partisan, lines. This is partly a consequence of the Clinton presidency, which has demonstrated that conservative ideas (such as curtailing the welfare state) can prevail if packaged humanely or "compassionately," as George W. Bush would say. Another who can speak the new language is Danielle Crittenden, aged 36. A leading player at the Independent Women's Forum, the Washingtonbased conservative organization, she was the first editor of its magazine, The Women's Quarterly. She and her husband, David Frum, an author and contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, form one of the capital's pre-eminent power couples. But Crittenden's book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modem Woman, which combines a tart critique of the feminist legacy with a plea to young women to put family ahead of career, seems pitched across the political spectrum.

"When you criticize feminists, they keep talking about the 1950s. I wasn't evenborn in the 1950s."

'I probably don't vote the way Danielle does, but on the personal side I agree with her," says Cynthia Gitter, the Simon & Schuster editor who first suggested to Crittenden that she write a book. At the time Gitter was 30 and had been in book publishing for almost 10 years. "I was raised as a red-blooded American woman, postfeminist," convinced "I should have a career, not just be a housewife." Then, in 1995, she read an op-ed piece by Crittenden in The New York Times pointing out the curiously low value placed on motherhood in American culture, and "it struck a chord." Gitter had no idea who Crittenden was or what her politics were. She knew only that "my friends talk about these same issues" and "I wasn't the only one who had an interest in this."

Gitter steered Crittenden through the writing of a book proposal and showed it to various higher-ups, all women. Everyone agreed the commercial prospects were strong, but Crittenden's anti-feminist arguments affronted some editors, women in their 40s. One editor, who read the proposal on the subway, was so incensed she nearly missed her stop. There was talk of shunting the book over to the Free Press imprint rather than embarrassing the parent house. But Gitter persisted. Eventually, Crittenden was summoned for a conference. "[Simon & Schuster] flew me up to New York and I had to sit at a long boardroom table," she remembers. "I was at one end, and there was this row of women editors, and Cindy's sort of sitting next to me quietly and nervously" while Crittenden was cross-examined for 20 minutes. " 'How can you say this?' 'What do you mean [by that]?"' The cool and polished Crittenden sailed through. "She's been attacked so many times she knows where the arrows are going to come from," says Gitter. What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, published a year ago, has since gone into four printings.

The questions Crittenden poses—"Is work really more fulfilling than raising my children? Why is the balance between being a good mother and working so elusive? By giving up my job, am I giving up my identity?"—have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with lifestyle. Only today the two are inseparable, so the book has lit as many brush fires as A Return to Modesty, with which it has been paired in a number of reviews.

Quick: who is more concerned about Internet pom, liberals or conservatives? The answer is: both. The old categories no loiger apply.

Crittenden, too, has been assailed from the left. Indeed, she offers an easy target since her resume belies her book's thesis: she has been a working journalist all her adult life. She and Frum, who both grew up in prominent and prosperous Toronto families, inhabit a large, elegant home in Washington, with a backyard cabana for overnight guests. "The overall impression," says one visitor, "is of both wealth and studied manners." Another says it reminds her of a house in Bloomsbury. When the children were young, a nanny helped with the two kids, who are now enrolled in private schools, freeing Danielle to write. Her next project is a book on heroines, who have surrounded Crittenden throughout her life. Her mother-inlaw was Barbara Frum, the revered CBC journalist and interviewer, who died in 1992 after a long battle with leukemia. Crittenden's mother, too, was a professional journalist who raised a family. So where does Crittenden get off scolding working moms? She acknowledges the point, adding, simply, "I'm an extremely ambitious person." But Crittenden also says her resume isn't the point. What is, then? That "kids change you. You can't know this when you're 22." True enough. It's a discovery many women her age seem to be making. Crittenden blames feminists who dropped children to the bottom of the agenda. "You look to older women to tell you what it's like, and I don't think they [feminists] were truthfully telling us." According to Crittenden, they were too busy making gains in the workplace to give much thought to families. "When you pop up and start criticizing them, they're not even prepared to deal with you.... They keep talking about the 1950s. I wasn't even born in the 1950s."

The new female conservatism is less about the past than the future. It also reflects the changing contours of American political culture. As Francis Fukuyama recently told The New York Times, "All the big issues that used to divide the left and the right—the Cold War, inflation, crime, welfare—have just collapsed as partisan issues." We have become, instead, a nation of soccer parents, preoccupied with schools, health care, child care, the familyfriendly workplace. Consider: a decade ago when Tipper Gore campaigned for warning labels on rock albums, she became the butt of jokes. No one's laughing anymore, not in the era of the V-chip and Columbine High School, not with the unreconstructed liberal Hillary Clinton worried about sex and violence on TV and smoking in movies. Quick: who is more concerned about Internet pom, liberals or conservatives? The answer is: both. The old categories no longer apply.

Even atop the citadel of ideological conservatism, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, you can hear Amity Shlaes quietly observe, "To decide to be allied with one party or the other is not a great idea." A protegee of Robert Bartley, the Journal's fiercely partisan editor, Shlaes has risen steadily up the ladder: overseas correspondent, op-ed page editor, and now, at 39, the youngest member of the Journal's editorial board. Yet she says she didn't register as a Republican until 1996 and did so only to cast a vote for Rudy Giuliani in the mayoral primary.

Shlaes is possibly the right's most powerful female journalist, anchored at the Journal since the mid-80s, when she helped make it "the central ground zero of conservatism, or of young conservatism," according to Crittenden, whose husband was in Shlaes's class at Yale and later her colleague at the Journal. It was Shlaes who tipped off the Independent Women's Forum that Crittenden might be a good choice to edit The Women's Quarterly, when it was getting off the ground in 1994. The mother of three—her husband, Seth Lipsky, formerly her editor at the Journal, is now the editor of the Forward, the prestigious New York Jewish weekly—Shlaes remains a den mom to junior conservatives. "I think she's brilliant," says Shalit, whose byline has begun appearing on the Journal's op-ed page. "I really look up to her."

It's not hard to see why. For a workaday journalist, Amity (as everyone calls her because "I'm the only one") radiates an eerie, almost lunar calm. Maybe it's the view from her office, on the ninth floor of the Dow Jones Building, which overlooks a smooth expanse of New York Harbor. I am visiting in the midst of a small crisis: a federal judge has shocked everyone, including his clerk, by delivering an opinion (on Internet commerce) ahead of schedule. This means Shlaes has two hours to obtain a precis of the decision, redraft an editorial for the next day's paper, answer queries from her editor—and give me the interview she has promised. But she treats all this as a mild inconvenience, like the baby-sitter's running a little late.

With her trim figure, short copper hair, and smart red jacket, Shlaes could pass for a stylish college professor. Indeed, like many editorial writers, she is inclined to lecture, though in a nurturing way. "What does liberal mean?" she asks between phone calls to the judge's chambers. "What does liberal mean in Europe? It means like John Stuart Mill, oriented toward the individual, lib-er-ty"—she draws out the syllables, as if to give me time to get the spelling right.

Shlaes's odes to capitalism sound rote but are grounded in firsthand experience. In the 1980s she lived in Germany as a graduate fellow and then in Brussels as a journalist, experiences which she drew on for her first book, Germany: The Empire Within, published in 1991. "\bu can learn a lot about economics when you go to a country where the economy doesn't work. A lot of what social democrats in America thought might work out existed in East Germany and didn't work out there. That made me more a free-marketeer."

It also reinforced the informal teachings of Shlaes's father, a real-estate developer in Chicago. She grew up in Hyde Park, seat of the University of Chicago and the redoubt, in the 60s and 70s, of free-market theologians Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Shlaes opens her wallet and shows me a snapshot of Friedman, "the smartest man in the world," posing with one of her children. It's all a family affair. Which may explain why Amity's new book, The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It, is organized around the life cycle. It includes chapters on "Y>ur Clothes," "Yrur Work," "Your Marriage," "Your House," "Your Baby," "Your Retirement," "Your Death."

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A few years ago the idea of a tax book sensitive to female experiences would have seemed peculiar, to say the least. But, as Shlaes points out, "women create businesses at twice the rate men do." (Actually, the ratio is closer to three to two.) "Women are increasingly involved in financial stuff, and they have money, stock, a stake in society, a stake in the market. I like to write to women because I'm a woman, but first and foremost, women are people." The book's appeal is decidedly un-gender-specific—fans include Republican leaders Dick Armey and John McCain. It's not clear how many converts she's won, but with its smooth prose and lively anecdotal style, The Greedy Hand has been the biggest hit of the new wave of conservative books, reaching 16th place on the New York Times best-seller list and No. 1 on the Amazon.com sales ranking.

Shlaes's simple credo—"First and foremost, women are people"—is an exercise in classically liberal tolerance. In fact, she is paraphrasing The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan, too, called for "woman to be seen as a human being of limitless human potential" rather than perceived just "in terms of her sexual role." She, too, foretold a time when women would pursue the same worldly goals as men instead of inhabiting a parallel universe. I ask Shlaes about Friedan and her legacy. "My mom was in Betty Friedan's generation, more or less. My mom went to Smith," like Friedan. "I went to Yale. And the reason I am where I am is because my mom got where she was pretty early. If my mom had stayed home I think a lot of this would be much harder for me. I'd be, like, 'I can't be a good mom, because moms stay home.'"

In fact, Shlaes's mother was a Democratic activist in Chicago who worked for reform candidates such as Adlai Stevenson III while raising three children. "She had an office, she had a secretary. She had whatever the predecessor to the Filofax is. She made lists, lots of lists, everywhere. She had her own car in the city. I was so proud of her. My mom was in the real world and she knew important people." Today, Shlaes's mother "has a little trouble with my politics, but I say to her, 'Mom, if you were my age you'd feel the way I do.'"

So where will the new conservatism lead? The answer is not to be found in New York or Washington. It is thousands of miles away, in California, in the writings of its blonde political sage, Virginia Postrel, the author of The Future and Its Enemies, a quirky, bold, and original attempt to redraw the terms of political debate for the next century. Since its publication last year, The Future and Its Enemies has acquired demi-cult status in the high-tech world. Postrel's admirers inelude Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, and Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com. Though a fan of Silicon Valley, Postrel is not a groupie. "She knows how the community ticks, how the people five and work," says technology guru Esther Dyson. "She lives in L.A. She's not blinded by the glitter of the lights in Silicon Valley. She's in touch with reality."

To decide to be allied with one party or the other is not a great idea," says one of the right's most powerful female journalists.

If Los Angeles has become the real world, the 21st century must indeed be closing in fast. Unlike most thinkers on the right—or left—Postrel seems as much at home in the next century as in this one. She is decidedly not an enemy of the future. Yet she is often miscast as a doctrinaire conservative. In a review, The Kansas City Star even lumped her book in with Shalit's, to Postrel's bemusement. "I have nothing in common with her," says Postrel, who ran a skeptical review of A Return to Modesty in Reason, the libertarian magazine she edits. "I don't think the Wendy Shalit prescription is one that's going to appeal to most women. Insofar as it says, 'It's all right to be different and take a different stance toward modesty, and you're not the only one in the world,' this is fine. It's sort of like coming out of the closet.... But I don't think the general prescription of some sort of return to a world in which women find protection by being bound to men is going to work." (Postrel is more in tune with Shlaes, who has published her in The Wall Street Journal and whose book was praised in Reason.)

Virginia Postrel has created a new political vocabulary, part Ayn Rand, part Star Wars, that pits "dynamists" against "stasists."

What works and what doesn't are major questions for Postrel, a devout empiricist and also something of a visionary. Many political thinkers agree the old terminologies of right and left are spent, but only Postrel has created a new vocabulary, part Ayn Rand, part Star Wars, that pits forwardlooking "dynamists" against outmoded "stasists." Dynamists embrace "a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition." They thrive on unpredictability and believe in the trial-and-error mechanisms of the open marketplace. But stasists always want somebody in charge, setting limits, putting the brakes on original minds. "Ours is a magnificently creative era," Postrel writes. "But that creativity produces change, and that change attracts enemies, philosophical as well as self-interested." Republicans are as guilty as Democrats because they, too, insist "there must be a single blueprint for everyone."

The reaction from reviewers has been respectful but questioning. In The New Republic, Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe called The Future and Its Enemies a "lively, engaging, and thought-provoking book," but rejected its thesis that the unfettered marketplace makes a good model for society at large: "Chaos theory is fine for numbers. As a principle for how humans ought to live, it is extremely unimpressive." Others think Postrel's dynamism is merely a revamped edition of the old down-with-govemment, up-with-the-market liturgy. They are right, to some extent. But Postrel works intriguing new angles. For example, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader are both stasists, as are A1 Gore and Ross Perot. Dynamists include urbanists Jane Jacobs and Joel Garreau. One of the rewards of living in California is watching dynamism flourish on all levels. Postrel, fervently pro-immigrant, praises the Cambodian refugees who own 80 percent of California's doughnut shops and champions hair braiders from West Africa who practice their intricate craft in defiance of state licensers. While mainstream conservatives, such as her occasional sparring partner David Frum, bemoan the decline of traditional standards, Postrel, a pop-culture addict, extols Dilbert and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "New art does not replace old art," she writes. "We do not lose King Lear to get Ran or Laurence Olivier's Henry V to get Kenneth Branagh's." (Not that Postrel and Frum are hostile adversaries. In fact, he and Crittenden threw a dinner party for Postrel in Washington when her book came out. The guests included Washington Post columnist James K. Glassman and Ruth Shalit, who got an early break in journalism in the pages of Reason but was later quoted in George dissing Reason as a "fourthrate libertarian magazine." Postrel is still annoyed by the insult.)

Postrel may be the only woman in America whose ambition since college was to edit a journal of ideas, and not just any journal but the one she does in fact edit. Reason's circulation of 55,000 places it midway between The New Republic (94,500) and Commentary (about 25,000); Postrel has been in charge of the monthly since 1989, taking it over, at age 29, after stints as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Inc., the business publication. In her 10 years at the helm of Reason, Postrel, whose monthly column is its principal attraction for many readers, has made it the house organ of what looks like the emerging politics of Generation X, a fusion of the anti-Establishment credo of the 60s and the free-market theology of the 80s. "The right won the economic argument, and the left won the cultural argument," says Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, which features a regular column by Postrel.

Postrel uses her many platforms to promulgate her philosophy, which is more or less libertarian, though the word makes her nervous because so many people associate it with the fringe Libertarian Party, to which Postrel, a self-described Reagan Republican turned independent, has no connection. If she lived in New York or Washington she would be famous. But she prefers L.A. "Everything crosses here. Different cultures are represented, different ideas, different parts of the economy. It's a North American place, Latin American place, Pacific place, not an Atlantic place, though a lot of people here are from the Atlantic Coast." Postrel's task is to make sense of it all. She is like a master D.J. who sequences the latest riffs from the hard sciences, the social sciences, business, and technology, to name only the most obvious sources.

I catch up with her in San Jose, on a Sunday afternoon in July. She and her husband, Steve, 39, who has a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. and teaches at the University of California at Irvine's School of Management, are in town for the inaugural dinner of the Civil Society Institute, the brainchild of economists at Santa Clara University who are on a mission to spread the gospel of "classical liberalism." Where else but in Northern California would a Jesuit university sponsor a libertarian think tank backed by Silicon Valley dollars? The Postrels are a handsome couple, he tall and dark, she tallish, with flowing locks. A makeup artist once told Postrel she was the palest person he'd ever worked on apart from the singer Annie Lennox. Today that striking pallor is accentuated by a navy-blue suit, a cobaltblue silk shirt, and matching nail polish. (In her Forbes column she cites nail salons as examples of the dynamist economy and quotes statistics—from Nails magazine—to prove it.)

It is late afternoon, murderously hot, but the Postrels have elected to walk rather than drive their rental car from their hotel to the Capital Club, 15 minutes by foot. The Postrels met as Princeton undergraduates in 1978. They lived in the same dorm, a floor apart, and have been together ever since. They are the kind of couple who always seem to be in the middle of a conversation, which in their case unfolds in a private idiom composed of abstruse economic terms, advertising buzzwords, literary references, and Internet argot. At the moment they are elucidating the principle of the "evoked set"—a popular marketing phrase meaning, in essence, a well-positioned brand name. They are using it in reference to the fact that East Coast editors seldom invite Virginia to comment on the many topics on which she is alarmingly well informed. Steve's theory is that Virginia's name is not "evoked" for the editors "because she's a woman, and when they think of 'women intellectuals' they don't think of her, because she doesn't specialize in 'women's issues.' So maybe her brand position is a little stuck in the middle."

Postrel catalogues how the future r looked to pessimists in the 1960s: "no grass, no trees, no Internet billionaires, no feng shui consultants, no female soccer stars."

With the heat rising up from the pavement in blasts, we're all dripping by the time we reach the Capital Club. One hundred eighty-five guests gather in the ballroom, which has a coffered wood ceiling, exquisitely patterned, and palm trees strung with tiny white lights. In her keynote remarks, delivered in a throaty voice, Postrel gives an amusing catalogue of how the future looked to pessimists "when I was a little girl back in the 1960s": a bulldozed, featureless America, disfigured by high-rises, "no dirt, no grass, no trees, no backyards ... no old-fashioned houses, no suburbs, no shopping malls ... no blue jeans, no sneakers or skateboards ... no Goth teenagers, no evangelical Christians, no Internet billionaires, no feng shui consultants, no brown-skinned immigrants, and no female soccer stars."

I glance at my table companions. There is a 25-year-old law student who hopes to set up a "bicoastal practice," the coasts being California, where she has been educated, and Singapore, where she was bom and raised. Across from her sits a young Cambodian who tells me he is fed up with the two major parties since both are incurably out of touch. Taking in this crowd, it is possible to think a rainbow coalition of geeks will, after all, inherit the earth.

Later I ask Postrel, the Reagan Republican, if anyone in politics today speaks to the new generation. The answer is no, not a single one. They are all stasists, marooned in creaking ideologies. That includes the current crop of presidential contenders. Recently George W. Bush's advisers invited Postrel to Austin "as part of a group to talk about issues involving high technology and the 'new economy,' a term I don't like," she says. "I told them, 'You realize I am not joining the campaign. I would be happy to do this, but I would do this for any of your opponents that I believed was sincerely interested in my ideas.'"

The optimism of the new conservatives may be their most salient trait, along with their amusement at their fearful elders. There was a time, perhaps, when the jitters were justified. It was not so long ago that we felt overwhelmed by a monolithic Soviet empire, nuclear stockpiling, racial unrest, urban decay, suburban anomie, alienated youth. Some of those perils have been met and mastered. Others haunt us still, in ever evolving forms. Yet who dared dream, a quartercentury ago, that America would remodel itself into what it is today, the world's lone superpower, affluent beyond reckoning, with a popular culture that still sets global rhythms? But our political discussion hasn't caught up. Even in the Clinton era it remains captive to the old categories, the old terms, the old pieties. The past is hard to give up. This is understandable. So is the elders' indignation at seeing young women, bom in the 60s and 70s, taking for granted so much that was won only after long, hard struggle:

Ivy League degrees, glamorous careers, numberless choices. But that is how social movements work. In fact, it's the idea, isn't it? The pioneers make sacrifices so the next generation can move on, unencumbered by sour memories of the past, free of the old demons.

I'm reminded of something Wendy Shalit told me about her college days. She had decided to begin a study on modesty and informed her professors. Several cautioned her not to do it. Another said he sympathized with Shalit's outlook, though he didn't want it known. Shalit should go ahead, he said, since she was already a pariah. "And this was somebody who had tenure! I just thought, What a coward! What is he afraid of? We're gonna die anyway. Not to be morbid."

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