Go blue states, because red states are backward and suck! Gooooooo donkeys!
One expects to hear this kind of banter while watching cable news, not while reading the written musings of a Dartmouth undergrad. Yet I found this to be the case last Thursday when I opened to this very page and read Kapil Kale's article ("Liberal Bias at Dartmouth," April 7). In this piece, he examines the titular conundrum. Along the way, however, he loses all sight whatsoever of objectively pursuing the topic and instead lapses into the very same liberal bias of which he speaks.
Central to his argument are the assertions that Democrats are liberal and Republicans are conservative. Unfortunately, Mr. Kale uses two distinct versions of "liberal" ideology and lumps them homonymically and conveniently together. The common usage of the term, as well as its Enlightenment meaning, is something vaguely relating to human dignity, freedom and rights. The more modern political usage, however, typifies a way of viewing the world that is, at best, half-liberal. "Liberals" in today's governments around the world are not fighting for man's freedom from his government; on the contrary, they spend half their time fighting so that a wage earner has his property taken from him and placed into government coffers. One can think of few policies that are less liberal and, I dare say, more authoritarian, than government control of personal property. Whether you believe these policies to be sound or not is one thing; shrouding them as an enlightened form of liberal thought is entirely separate and totally wrong.
Kale's rantings are dangerous on several levels. What he has essentially done is brought back the nauseating partisan rancor that permeated this campus through the past election season. He has taken the whole realm of political ideology and incorrectly laid it out in a linear fashion corresponding to our twisted parties, as if it is wholly impossible for a true conservative or liberal to exist, and furthermore said that the entirety of this spectrum is gobbled up under the bloated donkey and elephant idols that this culture of ours has built up. He leaves no room for differing opinion. If you happen to want both abortion rights and no gun control, now we not only have the RNC and the DNC telling us "too bad," we have our own undergraduates saying so from the halls of one of the most hallowed academic institutions in the world. God forbid you question the system and ask, for instance, why the government has a say in why anyone can get married to begin with -- your political musings do not fit on the line of liberalism-conservatism, so you are out of luck!
Furthermore, Kale makes unfounded claims and uses assumptions whose veracity he simply asserts -- an act eerily similar to the blind faith of which he accuses his interlocutors on the American political stage. He implies that to hold anything other than the Democratic Party's platform as one's political viewpoint is simply uneducated. Just go get yourself a bachelor's degree already and start raising money for Howard Dean, would you? He lumps religious fundamentalist conservatism together with whatever other types of "conservatism" may exist in the world. His op-ed makes the mistake of finding trends among groups and then applying what he found to every individual within that group. At one point, he appears apologetic for his claims: "This is not to say that all Republicans are unreasonable" But the rest of the text speaks clearly, Kale: I, as an educated man, am some sort of sick joke because I do not support some form of socialism.
What is perhaps even more disturbing than the writing of "Liberal Bias at Dartmouth" is the absolute lack of response it received from the student body. When Daniel Pipes speaks here, there are columns and letters all over this newspaper ten deep from people up in arms about supposed prejudiced, hateful comments. And yet, when one of us writes matter-of-factly that, well, like, clearly Republicans are just ignorant, and like, if they just took their heads out of their chicken coops they would realize how silly they have been for not being more supportive of welfare and social security, not a murmur escapes the community (as of this writing).
I pen these words in order to stand on whatever soapbox I have and to shout at the top of my lungs that I, as a "socially conscious," politically aware student at Dartmouth absolutely, unequivocally refuse to have the nature of political debate at this school degrade to some disgusting, perverse caricature resembling Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. I refuse to open my newspaper in the morning and have it poisoned with that base, Orwellian duckspeak. I implore every member of this community, regardless of political beliefs, to appraise these debates at the core of America's future with objectivity and honesty. I would expect to hear one-sided blabbering like Kale's emanating from a political operative in Washington; it is sickening to see political debate degenerate to that level in Hanover.
