Princeton Student Says Liberal Campus is Pushing Students to the Right
“Today’s campus conservatives embrace a less moderate, complacent and institutional approach to politics.”
Princeton student Adam S. Hoffman claims the craziness of the left is making some students more conservative.
He writes at the New York Times:
My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right
In the not-so-distant past, the Typical College Republican idolized Ronald Reagan, fretted about the national debt and read Edmund Burke. Political sophistication, to that person, implied belief in the status quo.
For that bygone breed, an education at an elite institution was a moderating finishing school. Even then American universities skewed liberal, but the conservatives of old had real opportunities to make their case — and have their ideas respectfully challenged — in the public square. At my own school, Princeton, I’ve been told, politics were mostly separable from personal relationships.How things have changed.
Today’s campus conservatives embrace a less moderate, complacent and institutional approach to politics. Instead of belief in the status quo, many tend toward scorched-earth politics. But these changes aren’t solely the consequence of a fractured national politics.
They’re also the result of puritanically progressive campuses that alienate conservative students from their liberal peers and college as a whole. The distrust of authority, the protest and the disobedience that have characterized the left’s activism over the past half-century or so have arrived on the right. The American universities that once served as moderating finishing schools have become breeding grounds for conservative firebrands.
The story of this transformation, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, starts around 2014, when Gen Z arrived on campus. The new progressive students were less tolerant of heterodox ideas and individuals. Demands to rescind invitations to speakers seemed to spike. The terms “microaggression” and “trigger warning” made it into everyday campus parlance. At Yale, for instance, a lecturer’s suggestion that students should determine which Halloween costumes are acceptable for themselves ignited a firestorm.
These changes were felt on my campus, too. “Princeton has become a much more politicized place over the last 10 years,” said Thomas Kelly, a philosophy professor. It’s also become more progressive. Diversity training sessions blatantly endorse progressive ideas: Espousing a colorblind ideal, for example, is deemed a “microinvalidation.” Bureaucrats police conduct and speech. Many programs cater to left-wing causes.
Hoffman appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show to discuss his op-ed.
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Comments
Could it be that the students are smarter for realizing the craziness of the left is making them more conservative?
College age people are not all happy to float downstream with all the usual debris just to go along. Pretty soon, to be a campus radical, one must defy leftist orthodoxy. Young people like to do this as a continuation of rebellion against parental authority. Trends on campus go in cycles.
For every one who is “pushed” to the right, 10 more see how successful leftist bullying is and run in that direction. It is not a winning game for us.
“The American universities that once served as moderating finishing schools have become breeding grounds for conservative firebrands.”
{…} Sometimes young conservative agitators are dismissed
{…} Mr. Trump and Ron DeSantis are different kinds of politicians from John McCain and Mitt Romney.
Gosh. Hoffman is so new he still reeks of Johnson’s baby powder and baby dove hand & face wipes. (too mean?)
Laura is a RINO thru and thru, I stopped listening to her sometime ago when it became crystal clear
Gone are the days of Breitbart, now there was a Conservative man that had the cajoles to FIGHT, kind of like my man Trump
I’ve been listening to Russell Brand of late, on and off last few years, he gets it, and though he speaks often a bit too fast for my head mixed with an English accent with hippie clothes of the 60’s…he fights.. for sanity and is.
He had a podcast on Rumble, check him out, you will be surprised how far Mr Brand has come since his sobriety… we all should be so sober…
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/russell-brand-destroys-msnbc-analyst-big-pharma-over-covid-vaccines-and-msnbcs-bias-video/
Right wing students have minds as brimming with inexperience as left wing students.
You have to experience perverse side effects in operation several times to get the real point – build systems for stability not immediate gain. Structure vs feelings.
The reason to be an originalist is, if you can’t do structural stability design yourself, you rely on the founding fathers, who were pretty good at it. It was their design goal.
One sociological aspect I have observed with the rampant tribalism pushed by the progressive leftists is the similarity to prison culture. Imagine some average guy gets convicted of embezzlement. He gets put into a prison population divided into clear groups. He now has a choice remain an independent or join a group.
Sooner or later he will be targeted based upon what others view as his tribe. Whether he chooses to embrace tribalism or not others make the decision for him. This is the end state of tribalism. People segregate themselves into smaller sub populations based not on ideology but on ‘race’. Our society worked too long and hard to erase these divisions and now the progressive leftists want to reignite the flames of tribalism. It’s utterly insane.
All kids rebel at some level from their parents / those in authority. The surprise here is that it’s taken so long and that rebellion is so mild. Cheers –