When it’s liberal vs conservative, one side has it easy. The other has it better

If someone had told me a year ago that some of the most profound commentary I would read about politics in 2024 would come from a bunch of liberal Ivy League college kids, it’s not that I wouldn’t have believed them. But I definitely would have asked for more information, and with quite the smirk on my face.

It’s true, though. One of the most compelling opinion pieces I’ve read all year was written by students on what was formerly the editorial board of the Yale Daily News, which now operates independently. Called Publius, it is “the only joint opinion publication at Yale, dedicated to raising provocative questions and nuanced answers.”

“We’re Jealous of our Conservative Peers,” read the headline.

They’re referring, of course, to the population of students on Yale’s campus who subscribe to a right-leaning political worldview, which, like virtually every other elite university in the country, is dwarfed by the population of progressive, or left-leaning students. A Yale Daily News poll in October of 957 students revealed that over 84% planned to vote for Kamala Harris or a further-left candidate, compared to fewer than 8% who planned to vote for Donald Trump.

Among faculty, the disparity is even worse. Out of roughly $127,000 in political contributions made by Yale professors in 2023, over 98% went to Democrats and affiliated groups.

“Conservatives are confined to a glum minority,” wrote the undergrads of Publius, which requires the approval of at least two-thirds its members to publish an editorial. “We hear often about how they have it tough, facing ostracization, mockery, and pressure to conform.”

Ask any conservative college student in Eastern Iowa if they feel similarly about the political environment on their own campus, and they’ll certainly say yes.

But there’s an upside to being in the political minority on campus.

“While liberal students are cushioned by a sense of majority, conservatives are compelled to grapple constantly with difficult questions. They are forced to interrogate their own beliefs and arguments in ways their liberal peers need not,” said Publius.

“It’s challenging, but it cultivates resilience, critical reflection, and the capacity to engage in community despite serious disagreement.”

It turns out that surviving college as a conservative student builds a thick skin and a degree of humility. When put through what the writers call “a gauntlet of ideological opposition, conservative students are met with the need to more deftly articulate their opinions.”

Liberal or progressive students, they wrote, are more likely to politically engage by using platitudes or aphorisms that aren’t met with much, if any resistance.

“They can get away with the minimal nuance that accompanies those buzzwords and slogans more commonly accepted within the Yale political orthodoxy. Our conservative peers are not afforded the same argumentative safety net. Instead, they must brace themselves for the pushback they fear they will face, oftentimes by framing their contentions in more palatable and precise ways. This pressure to accommodate and compromise can lead to refined self-expression.”

In other words, though they often feel ostracized for political views deemed intolerable by a loud and sometimes hostile majority, conservatives are the lucky ones; likely to leave college better versed in political discourse, their viewpoint formed not at the behest of an overwhelmingly left-leaning campus culture but in spite of it.

I’ll take a quick detour to give an example of past hostility toward conservatives on college campuses that I haven’t yet shared in this column.

In October 2016, I worked closely with a 20-year-old college kid, a student at Cornell College who deferred a few classes that semester to run the local GOP campaign effort. One night he attended a party on campus during which a female classmate walked right up to him, and, out of anger at his affiliation with Trump and Republicans, sucker-punched him.

There were several witnesses, but no bruise. I couldn’t convince him to report the incident to the school. He shrugged it off with a smirk, from behind which I caught a fleeting glimpse of a more serious expression.

Back to the editorial. Publius was addressing the political divide on the Yale campus, but much of what they wrote can be said about other industries such as journalism — namely, in terms of ideological imbalance.

It shouldn’t come as a shock that journalists, on average, lean noticeably left. A 2022 survey of 1,600 journalists indicated that only 3.4% of journalists identified as Republicans, a number dwarfed over tenfold by that of Democrat journalists.

At the national level, the ideological divide itself isn’t necessarily an embarrassment to legacy journalism — though consumers of legacy journalism may beg to differ. Gallup polling from October shows American confidence in mass media at a record low of 31%, with a sharp divide between Democrats and Republicans, the latter of which reports trust in mass media at only 12%.

Those partisan divides are sometimes easily revealed through news reporting.

In March 2020, President Donald Trump signed the first COVID-19 relief bill that provided a $1,200 stimulus payment to most Americans. The headline of a Washington Post report read, “Trump signs $2 trillion coronavirus bill into law as companies and households brace for more economic pain.”

(Note to conservative readers: No need to try to dissect that headline. It’s accurate, and unremarkably so.)

One year later, however, President Joe Biden signed another round of relief, this time with checks totaling $1,400. For the new president, the Washington Post ran this gem of a headline: “Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency.”

On its own, that’s pretty obsequious, not to mention exaggerated. “Showers money on Americans?” Really?

Compared to the preceding headline, however, the difference is just shameful. If longtime and/or classically trained journalists wish to know why public trust in legacy media has dwindled, they should consider this the first of many, many exhibits.

Two months after that Post report with the fawning headline, I started contracting with The Gazette at the encouragement of a couple friends who told me I would bring a unique perspective to the Insight page. I expected my pop-up career as a pretend journalist to last one year. At the end of that year, they hired me. That was over two and a half years ago.

Right-leaning readers expecting scandalous tidbits about a Gazette employee environment hostile to conservatives will be disappointed. They’re nice to me here. My boss and my editor are supportive.

The more abrasive reactions are from readers who don’t like something I wrote — often Boomer-aged university employees; either retired and bored or still hanging on and unaccustomed to a different viewpoint piercing their ideological bubble.

And it comes from all sides. Insight Editor Todd Dorman, the snarky liberal whom conservative readers love to hate, gets the same kind of guff that I do (likely even more,) only from … well, conservatives.

Funny how that works.

Still, I am indeed the only outwardly conservative writer on staff at a newspaper in Iowa. When I turn in my columns, they are edited and proofed by people who likely (or definitely) have a worldview different from mine. That can be a bit daunting.

That’s why the Publius editorial, probably written by a handful of snooty East Coast academic elitists I would otherwise find insufferable, struck such a chord with me. Those snooty East Coast academic elitists hit the nail on the head when pointing out that conservatives are the ones who should be envied on campus for their political mettle.

They write the truth. As a conservative in a liberal-dominated profession, I must always compare my beliefs to those I reject. I must endure the gauntlet of ideological opposition, usually in the form of condescending emails from old dudes or dumb taunts on the Twitter from weirdos with green hair. (I think I wrote “blue” or “purple” last time, so I’ll mix it up a bit.)

On the issue of school choice, for example, the left gets away with breathlessly claiming “private schools aren’t held accountable” with a chorus behind them.

I don’t have the luxury of an echo chamber. I have to dive into accreditation standards and record-keeping requirements and professional development mandates to show that “private schools have no accountability” is bunk.

When the left wails about child labor law changes, they get to liken reforms to something out of an Upton Sinclair novel while their chorus chants about protecting children.

When I say the changes are positive, I have to actually read the bill and point out that no, it doesn’t allow kids to work in meatpacking plants, and never was it written in a way that would.

All of it makes me a better journalist.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s no walk in the park.

The research can get intense. The words don’t always come together easily. And getting booed by a live audience of 100 for having the nerve to say that President Biden isn’t all there upstairs is not my idea of a good time.

But at the end of the day, I can stand up straight, knowing that my thoughts and ideas were battle-tested — on paper and in person, not to mention on the ballot. If more conservatives start to realize that, maybe I won’t be the only one of us around here for long.

Comments: Call or text 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com