We continue our explanation of the dangerous values and conduct, which the Republican 527 group, the College Republican National Committee seeks to create on college campuses throughout America. For the sake of brevity we will withhold our comments upon the odious image of Young Republican sex parties that Skippy pointed us to and the disappointing, but hardly surprising, evidence that the CRNC attempted to defraud senile senior citizens. In previous posts we examined the way in which CRs exploit the service of U.S. soldiers and encourace a feigned and parasitical patriotism among its members, the ways in which the CRNC encourages students to committ fraud, and the ways in which the CRNC encourages lawlessness among college students.
In today’s post, we hope to demonstrate how the CRNC encourages its acolytes on college campus to refuse to engage with new ideas in an intellectually coherent, much less responsible manner. Indeed, the CRNC encourages its devotees to treat ideas with which they are unfamiliar or ideas with which they disagree, with contempt. Such an attitude, of course, rather undermines the entire purpose of a liberal arts education, which is to enable students to confront the unknown with a wide-ranging set of analytical skills and to engage propositions they disagree with in an intellectually rigorous and honest way.
The intellectual honesty requirement requires all participants in a discussion to admit the possibility, ab initio, that they may be wrong and that they may learn something from their interlocutor. There are obvious moral limits on this admission. One doesn’t have to concede anything to a Hitler, for example. If a participant in a principled discussion wishes to refuse to admitt the possibility that his/her interlocutor’s ideas may have some merit, however, he or she is under a profound moral burden to explain how and why the ideas in question are fundamentally flawed. If a participant in a principled discussion insists on refusing to admitt any possibility of the correctness of his/her interlocutor’s ideas, moreover, that citizen is also under an equally profound moral burden to remain engaged in the discussion in order to persuade his/her interlocutor to abandon such fundamentally flawed ideas.
This is the kind of citizen those engaged in a liberal arts education hope to produce: committed, passionate, engaged, analytical and honest. The CRNC’s promotion of an attitude of intellectual contempt, therefore, is rather a bad thing for college campuses in general, and Pudentilla believes, the CRs who populate those campuses in particular. Even more importantly, such an attitude is fundamentally anti-democratic and ultimately disastrous for the success of the republican democracy that America’s Founders hoped to create.
We take as our text two passages from the sacred text of CRs, the “Chapter Manual.” The CRNC provides this manual as a pdf file on its web site. First:
Be creative in concocting activities and special projects. Think of every liberal event as an opportunity to get out our message. In conclusion, consider the following creative ideas:
1. The next time a liberal group has hunger strike on your campus, wait a few days, and then have a College Republican barbecue adjacent (and upwind) from the hunger-strikers. This works equally well for any vegetarian protests as well.
2. President Nixon considered using a helicopter to extinguish the flames of the candle-light vigil peace protesters during the Vietnam War. (p. 42)
We marvel at the honor in which the CRNC still holds Richard Nixon, the Republican whose assault on the Constitution of the United States included the burglarly of Democratic party office, the creation of an enemies list, the use of the I.R.S. and C.I.A. to investigate and harrass his opponents and intereference in F.B.I and congressional investigations of his crimes. We note, moreover, that the tactic Nixon apparently contemplated using (dousing candles with a helicopter) would not appear to have met the “liberal arts” test of honest intellectual engagement with those who may in good faith disagree with you on a controversial issue. Indeed, we suspect it may not have passed a simple test for criminality. We pass over in silence the wild irony of the contemporary CRNC’s approval of Nixon’s desire to squash opposition, which history has proven correct, to the Vietnam War, even as modern young Republicans urge others to fight and die in their place in Iraq.
We prefer to concentrate our attention on the CRNC’s advice to its affililates to hold a barbecue next to a “liberal group’s” hunger strike. Hunger strike for what, you well may ask, Gentle Reader. The CRNC’s point is that there is no cause for which a “liberal” group may legitimately demonstrate. A hunger strike in support of North Korean citizens suffering horribly under their totalitarian regime’s corrupt leadership, for example would not, if sponsored by a “liberal group” be exempt from the CRNC’s recommended scorn. Thus CRs may treat any cause suppported by a liberal group with scorn and contempt. The tactic proposed by the CRNC here is particularly invidious be cause of its inherent clownish appeal to many of the post-pubescent youth who populate college campuses. As young students grapple with questions of their own identity (political, religious, sexual) in a new environment, they confront much with which they are unfamiliar. The CRNC offers them no compelling set of analytical principles with which to contemplate the unfamiliar. Instead, the CRs encourage young students to emulate an “Animal House,” vision of “cool kids” behavior. Our second quote from the sacred text, indeed encourages CRs to:
Organize counter-demonstrations to disrupt the events of liberal groups (p. 45)
Note that the CRNC doesn’t actually bother to define who the “liberal groups,” who campus CRs may target. The failure to define “liberals” allows the CRs to create a rather expansive view of their opposition (anyone who is not CR), no doubt promoting deep bonds of fellow feeling between members of a campus CR group. Unfortunately this “us vs. the world,” mentality thereby justifies behavior which if not illegal, is certainly not appropriate on college campuses. The CRNC, for example, urges its campus affiliates to conduct voter registration drives in such a way that only conservatives and Republicans are registered.
Our objective is not to register everyone to vote. Instead, we want to register only Republicans or those leaning Republican who will vote for our candidate. We certainly do not want our efforts to benefit the opposition! Therefore, this project should be conducted jointly with and using the information obtained from the campus canvass. (p. 40)
Pudentilla confesses that she is stunned by this advice. She has volunteered in voter registration drives in her day and she confesses that she always helped those who wish to register as Republicans do so. Helping Republicans register didn’t make her inner-Democrat happy, but it did make her inner-democrat, who believes that the Founder’s republican democracy will flourish all the more when all citizens, regardless of partisan identity, participate in the political process. The CRNC, in contrast, is teaching young CRs on college campuses to stuggle not for what will benefit the country, but for what will benefit their party. What is worse, it teaches them to prefer the party’s claim to the country’s.
So on campuses all across the country, CRs compete to concoct the most scornful, contemptuous and clownish response to ideas that anyone who is not a CR might hold. At Marquette University, during its annual Mission Week, which the University had chosen to devote to the theme of “constructing peace,” and to which they had invited Ghandi’s grandson to speak, the MU CRs decided to launch their “adopt a sniper” stunt.
While the MU CR’s web page gleefully records all the media attention CRs gained from there tactic that nominally was meant to “support the troops,” the page provides no link to AmericanSnipers, the group that actually sends equipment to military snipers whom the Pentagon has failed to adequately equip. While the MU CRs have managed to set up a pay-pal link to obtain donations for themselves, they have no links to any of the myriad of organizations that, in fact, support the troops at home and abroad (like AnySoldier, or DAV (Disabled American Vets). We conclude that the MU CR’s don’t actually “support the troops.” They have managed, instead, to treat an idea that while controversial has some historical support (the occasional political success of non-violent political protest) with adolescent disdain. They have not, as students of the liberal arts engaged in political debate should, explained why a Jesuit university’s decision to devote a week to the contemplation of the activity of constructing peace is so bad.
We should not be surprised to learn, then, that the MU CRs also has been a proud host of a popular CR event, the Animal Rights Barbecue, nominally a response to “PETA’s illegal tactics,” (unspecified of course) which does nothing to engage the very vexed issue of the way in which we mortals exercise our dominion over the animal kingdom. The utter lack of intellectual engagement of this CR exercise may explain its popularity with CR groups through out the country. CRs at The University of Washington, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, the University of Central Oklahoma and Cornell University sponsored such barbecues.
Such stunts are common fare for the “Red” Jugend. The Young Conservatives Club at the University of North Texas held a “capture the illegal immigrant” event. The latest bit of mockery the CRs have devised “Straight Pride Week.” Apparently all they could muster at the University of Texas at Austin was a single “Straight Pride Day”. The CRs at University of Central Oklahoma, announced a “Straight Pride Day,” and received a mention from Rush Limbaugh, but appear not to have actually held the event. You may observe photos documenting the bathos of such an event in North Carolina at Pam’s House Blend.
The question of the civil rights and the legal status of gay citizens in the U.S. has achieved no little urgency in the last year and been the topic of sustained political debate. Pudentilla has her opinions about this question and knows that not everyone shares them. The CRs, unfortunately, appear to be working hard to ensure that their acolytes will be unable to contemplate this question. The will be able to scorn and deride those who disagree with them. But they will be unable to argue with them or to persuade them.
We suspect that the CRNC promotes this nonsense with a purpose. A thousand flowers of buffonery bloom throughout the country as 19 year-olds struggle to be ever more outrageous. The CRNC in D.C. measure the media’s response and highlight activities which they deem successful (rather than respond to such stunts with something approaching an adult’s skepticism). If the MU CR idea is approved we will see, no doubt, many more "Adopt A Sniper" events in which few funds are raised for the troops, but much media play is obtained for the CRs. CRs also monitor each other web sites to get ideas. In their summer leadership camps exploits in utter intellectual irresponsibility are compared and exchanged.
That’s a disservice to the intellectual life of the campuses where CRs reside, but it is, we think, ever more of a threat to political fabric of the nation. Clubs of aristocratic young thugs played no small role in the usurpation of the democratic government in Athens a few millenia ago. There is no reason to think that properly trained to scorn democratic values of tolerance and intellectual honesty, Republicans trained to be the "Red" Jugend won't do the same in this democratic republic. Which is why some classicists are concerned about the culture of contempt the CRNC is cultivating on college campuses.
