The Party of the Right (POR) is a fraternal, political, and intellectual organization founded in 1953, functioning secondarily as one of the parties within the Yale Political Union. The POR was founded by genuinely conservative members of the Conservative Party, outraged by the Conservative Party's chairman's support of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 U.S. presidential election, and is the third-oldest party in the Yale Political Union. Membership in the Party of the Right is elective, and is, as a quotation from the 1950s boasts, awarded on the basis on intellectualism, not ideology: "We care not what you think, only that you do think."
The Party of the Right is most conservative of the seven Parties in the Yale Political Union. Its membership, however, has never been exclusively restricted to conservatives, and the POR's traditions and identity explicitly embrace both Traditionalism and Libertarianism.
Its membership has traditionally been divided between libertarian and (usually Roman Catholic) traditionalist camps, but POR debates are characteristically devoted much more commonly to philosophy, intellectual history, and culture than to current governmental issues and policy. The POR has been described in a recent Yale Herald article as "at once flamboyant, intellectually elitist, aggressive, mischievously subversive, eccentric, and maniacally eager to challenge anyone and everyone."
Members of the POR publish Yale's only regular conservative publication, the Yale Free Press.
According to one former Associate Editor of the National Review, "The Party of the Right is the most important organization an intelligent young conservative can join in America today."