Source images: Getty© Source images: Getty
Story by Nate Weisberg
On a muggy Saturday evening in May, 30 young men and a few women, all Christian and mostly Catholic, filed into a 19th-century redbrick building on Capitol Hill, part of Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus. The occasion was the monthly meeting of the Cicero Society, a parliamentary debating club committed, according to its terse website, to “developing excellence, preserving the Western intellectual tradition, and forming young leaders” — which in Washington is usually code for conservative job placement.
Despite the oppressive humidity, tweed jackets were the outfit of choice. The young men carried themselves like people twice their age or perhaps from a different era. One even had a cane, though it was hard to tell whether this was an accessory or a necessity. The setting was equally fusty. The debate was held beneath a large painting of the signing of the Constitution. Nearby were relics from the days of the Founding Fathers: an original copy of Thomas Paine’s American Crisis No. 1, a first edition of The Federalist.
Some of the society’s formal members, several of whom are political appointees in the Trump administration, wore pins on their jackets depicting the society’s crest, a quill pen crossing a sword. Others, pinless, worked the room, hoping to make a good impression. Some would later give floor speeches responding to the evening’s resolution, the main route to being accepted as a full member. The few women present weren’t auditioning quite as strenuously, perhaps because they were less eager to be admitted to what is, in essence, a fraternity.
After cocktails, guests settled into their chairs. I was handed a laminated guide: no one to speak unless recognized by the chairman; members to refer to one another as “the gentleman” or “the lady”; approval and disapproval to be expressed through “pounding of feet and hisses,” which, the guide explained, promoted “a lively atmosphere.” The session then began with a recounting of the minutes of the previous month’s debate, “Did William F. Buckley Jr. Fail?” Buckley, the founder of National Review, is best understood here as a stand-in for the kind of overpolite, free-market conservatism the Ciceronians reject. The chairman recalled that a young man of Indian descent had earlier “confessed to the society that, in many ways, Buckley was the reason he was there.” (An internship at National Review brought him to the U.S. from Canada.)
The room hissed.
It would be easy, from this alone, to mistake Cicero for a bunch of nativist trolls. But the society is more interesting than its casual cruelties, which did not, in any case, seem to offend the Indian immigrant in question, who is one of the members. Founded in 2020 by Ivy League conservative Christians, Cicero once attracted a more mixed crowd. A woman involved with the society since its early years told me that, at its height in 2021, the gender ratio was more balanced. Then, she said, “the normal people left and the weirder people came.” Talk about Groypers and incels spooked the women. Late last year, the Harvard Crimson reported that a Harvard debate society called the John Adams Society, a feeder for Cicero, had stopped allowing women to participate altogether; Cicero has not gone that far, she told me, but some members would like it to. The rules hardened. “The people who really love Robert’s Rules started having a little too much fun,” she added. The group’s politics also shifted, becoming a magnet for young New Right devotees who felt history moving their way as Donald Trump returned to the White House. Some members, another woman involved with the society told me, are hoping for it to become a staffing network-in-waiting for a future J.D. Vance administration.
