COUNTERPOINT: College campus polarization stems from misunderstanding

Provocative far-right speakers Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon are slated to speak at “Free Speech Week” next week at UC Berkeley. The organizing group, Berkeley Patriot, has had some logistical difficulties, but if it pulls off even a scaled-back version of this event, it’ll be controversial. There are significant divides within the campus community over the traditional free speech versus human decency issue, but for the sake of understanding, I offer these observations about my fellow conservative students who, by my measure, seem to have mixed and often negative feelings about conservative college stuntsman-ship like that about to commence at UC Berkeley. The fact of the matter is, emphasis on this kind of media-seeking activism eclipses the more temperate conservatism that many center-right students tend to exude.

Today’s young conservatives are, by my observation, more likely to call themselves “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” and be as accepting and tolerant of people of all ethnicities and sexual orientations as many in the center or on the left.

It seems to me that many conservative students are uncomfortable with liberal campus political habits, including the general worldview of “intersectionality” in social justice that informs many formal campus conversations, the highly confrontational nature of certain sectors of campus politics and the protests, marches and vigils that divide highly complex and passion-laden issues into stark questions of right and wrong, justice and oppression. (Yes, Yiannpoulos does these things too; no, you won’t find all conservative students supporting that.)

Many campus conservatives might actually be somewhat sympathetic to many of the causes that Black Lives Matter affiliates or feminist organizations advocate for. But the tactics of those organizations, their postmodern rhetoric against things conservative students hold dear, and their tendency to view less passionate supporters as guilty of insufficient zeal, tarnish these groups in the eyes of right-leaning students.

These conservative students feel — and are — outnumbered. It’s no secret that many political science classes at USC are dominated by liberal-leaning students, with only a handful of conservatives. That disparity doesn’t make conservatives a persecuted minority by any means — but then again, you don’t have to be a persecuted minority to feel ostracized by popular opinion.

All of these trends converge to make conservative students on campus — with some justification — feel separated and annoyed with the broader campus culture and proud of their political identity. And that separation, annoyance and pride, metastasized and overdone, are what fundamentally drive quiet sympathy for Yiannopoulos-like speakers, rather than total agreement with those speakers’ worldviews. Few people actually like Yiannopoulos, but plenty of decent and otherwise politically uninvolved people have a guilty pleasure knowing that someone so preposterously obnoxious can be such a gadfly in the left’s soup.

I can hear the critiques about white,

middle-class privilege coming. And they may well be right. It may well be true that “privilege” of whatever sort is the reason conservative students can feel this way, that unjust power structures and oppressive normative constructions have disposed some of us to benefit from others’ exclusion. I’m not doubting this.

But conceding all that, it’s difficult to convince someone that they, their beliefs and their habits are the problem. It would seem that jeremiads about racial justice and gender construction do more to drive right-leaning students toward Yiannopoulos, and not away from him. I’m not saying the left is wrong in its beliefs, but I do think its expression and evangelization of those beliefs can be counterproductive if its aim is conversion.

It’s important to understand where people come from, especially when they or their affiliates keep finding their way into the national news. I think my side has a long way to go to deserve wider respect across the political spectrum; in the same vein, the campus left could put in more effort to understand where my cousins-in-party-registration are coming from. And as the divisive events at UC Berkeley’s “Free Speech Week” unfold in a few days, maybe that understanding can preclude some vitriol.

Luke Phillips is a senior majoring in policy, planning and development. “Point/Counterpoint” runs Wednesdays.