Election Issue 2024 | Forum
Conservatism on campus on the eve of the election
As President of WashU’s College Republicans, I have found that WashU, though possessing a similar left-liberal monoculture as most other universities, is fairly tolerant and generally open to ideas. Maybe it is just that people on campus think of conservatives and conservatism as quaint, rare, and non-threatening, but I’d like to think this is due to a greater commitment to free dialogue on the part of the University and its students.
If anything, WashU’s culture serves our club greatly, as it is liberal but not censorious. Due to the pro-free-speech position of the administration, we do not face the many undue administrative hurdles faced by conservative groups on other campuses, including that of nearby St. Louis University. At the same time, many otherwise apolitical students join the club to escape WashU’s overwhelmingly left-wing culture, and to explore a different intellectual and political tradition. Due to these factors, we have good attendance at our meetings for a WashU club, averaging around 20-30 people at any given meeting, and at times, even more.
As a club, we have found that open discussions aid us in having interesting and engaging meetings. At every meeting, we discuss a handful of current-events subjects and leave the floor open for discussion, allowing anyone to participate. One will hear a variety of viewpoints, whether from different stripes of conservatives or from liberal students who attend to hear the other side and share their views. At the club level and as a whole, we are unashamedly conservative and provide a space for right-of-center students to share their views without fear of penalty.
Just as politics is about coalition-building, College Republicans finds itself with a very diverse membership roster, particularly in terms of ideology. We have everyone from dyed-in-the-wool conservatives from several intellectual streams — including Chestertonian Distributists and social conservatives and Libertarians — to liberals who join the club simply for open discussions and to hear new viewpoints.
On any subject, one will find club members with a variety of views. I believe that this ideological diversity is our strength, as open discussion allows for intellectual growth. Just as iron sharpens iron, encountering new ideas can help prepare one to defend their own. The philosophical and ideological paths of many of our members further diverge, with many people coming to a variety of conservative viewpoints through a variety of means, whether through family, religion, personal journey, or finding the left-liberal monoculture of the University to be intellectually stifling.
I became a conservative due to a confluence of factors throughout high school. The most notable of these was the journey that culminated in my conversion to Catholicism from atheism as a freshman at WashU.
In this journey, I read and engaged with the writings of many thinkers throughout Church history, from Augustine to Benedict XVI, which both convinced me of the claims of the Catholic Church (including on issues such as the dignity of human life) and showed me the importance of tradition (both in the Church and in society). On this latter point, my conversion fundamentally reshaped my relationship with the past and helped me to feel the weight of history.
I came to see that what is inherited by us and passed down to us is not something to be discarded in the name of novelty and “progress,” but is instead something that defines who we are and gives us a firm foundation to understand the world. I found this complementary to many conservative authors that I began reading around the same time, whether contemporary, such as Roger Scruton and Patrick Deneen, or historical, such as Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre.
Lastly, as someone who grew up in the aftermath of the Global War on Terror, I personally found liberal internationalism, be it in its left-liberal form of Obama’s support for regime change in Libya and Syria or in its pseudo-conservative form of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, to have failed. Thus, I found myself gravitating towards the realism and restraint-oriented foreign policy of politicians such as former President Donald Trump, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and historical figures such as Robert Taft.
Because of these factors, I decided to join WashU’s College Republicans as a freshman in 2021. I then served as Vice President of the club last year, and am currently serving as President of the club and Chairman of the State Federation. I am aware that many other club members have had very different paths into conservatism and into the club, and I welcome this diversity of experiences as something that greatly strengthens our chapter. I would like to invite those reading this to consider different viewpoints, including conservative ones. Perhaps you, too, will find that you might be a conservative.