TO THE EDITOR:
There’s a lot of talk among campus liberals about Trump. Here’s some advice that they might want to consider:
First, your reaction to Trump is almost exactly the reaction of a huge portion of America in 2008. This isn’t worse or better, but keeping it in mind is a good idea.
Second, if you keep dismissing Trump supporters as “those people” — the poor or the bigoted — then you’ll never be able to understand the phenomenon. It’s there, but it doesn’t even come close to explaining everything.
Third, YOU ARE THE ELITE. College students are part of the elite of our society. Apart from simply living in the Disneyland Bliss that is a college campus, this applies also to socioeconomic status for many people at UNC. So it’s not wrong to say that the dominant ideologies here — social justice, left humanitarianism, etc. — which are preached just as vigorously by NGOs, international institutions, and most major media organizations — are ELITE IDEOLOGIES. That’s exactly what most of the U.S. — the rabble, the unsophisticated, “those people” – is reacting against.
The thing is, the very people liberals and leftists profess to defend are the same people who wouldn’t be comfortable or probably even invited to the safe space dinner table. That’s a fundamental problem for the ideology.
These conversations are good to have, a necessary step in the whole electoral process. But I hope that a grounded analysis will start providing a backbone to conversations that should be more about exploring value differences, which is really the critical question here.
John Jacobi
Junior
