Few political topics in the U.S. have received more paragraphs, more op-eds, and more Substack articles than the need for people to just listen to each other more. As Donald Trump has just taken office, the need for more thoughtful political discussion between those who disagree feels less like a “need” and more like a painful hunger for something whose taste we might still hold in half-remembered scraps, but is on the verge of being forgotten entirely. 

Sophomore Eliza Stulman explored the idea in her Student Life op-ed last week, “It’s time for a change in campus political culture,” where she talked about a school trip to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2023. She describes how, “While it was one of the most frightening moments of my life, I relished the opportunity to finally hear people share ideologies that could not be further from my own.” That opening to her article was deeply relatable to me. Based on the recent influx of Student Life pieces on listening to those with different opinions — in September, November, December, and another article besides Stulman’s last week — I am not alone.

I consume a lot of conservative media. Sometimes, I feel like I might have a problem when the first YouTube channel I go to after a significant news event is The Daily Wire, where I scavenge for whatever sick morsels Ben Shapiro has left for me to inhale without even chewing. I love the megachurch satellite TV channels I get in my apartment, the ones where you sometimes can’t be sure if you’re watching a sermon or a political rally or an infomercial; sometimes, it’s all three. 

I grew up in a fairly conservative Christian household, which meant my entire political world was narrow for much of my early childhood. My parents would often turn on conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s show during car rides when I was younger, so I quickly became familiar with how Obamacare was on track to destroy the economy and also probably the universe as we knew it within a year or two. I guess that’s part of why my media diet still includes so many ultra-conservative commentators and influencers: Despite my own rejection of nearly every argument they make, something about it feels familiar. Not quite pleasant, but navigable in a way that the rest of the world sometimes feels too confusing for. 

I reached roughly the halfway point in Stulman’s article on WashU’s political culture, where she begins talking about a trend where fewer people want to date or marry someone from a different political party — a trend that exists both at WashU and across the US. Stulman calls this a “frightening precedent” that sorts the world into “good” and “bad” categories, preemptively shutting down the possibility for even a minor conversation. 

I’m skipping over quite a few paragraphs here in talking about Stulman’s article, which is worth reading in full to appreciate her perspective. I share her interest in promoting healthy and inclusive dialogue on campus, and she closes her article with a charge for us to “become comfortable in the uncomfortable,” which would be as impactful even without the fullness of her other arguments behind it. But I am struggling to agree with Stulman’s claim that when two people are discussing their political disagreements, “The issue only emerges the second someone becomes defensive and puts their guard up.” Defensiveness can certainly create some issues, but there is a big difference between defensiveness against basic discomfort and defensiveness against fundamentally exclusionary politics whose victory comes by simply being given conversational legitimacy.

What I was consistently reminded of was the idea that creating an inclusive, multi-opinionated community might require us to be actively unwelcome to those who don’t welcome others. The all-too-familiar “paradox of intolerance,” which has itself been the subject of plenty of op-eds in the last decade: Philosopher Karl Popper’s suggestion that “We must therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate intolerance.” Intolerance toward various social groups has been a major theme of Donald Trump’s politics since he starting talking about the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in his 2015 campaign announcement speech, and many in the Republican party have been happy to double down on rhetoric that works to alienate and scapegoat whoever seems like an easy target. 

If someone happens to have radically different ideas from me on, for example, nuclear energy, I feel confident that engaging in conversation with them would bring only better mutual understanding. If our difference in opinion instead hinges on, for example, explicit racism or some other proud bigotry that is the lifeblood of Trump’s nationalist tirades, I anticipate no such mutual understanding as being imminent. Racism as a political position is not one designed to be rational or even particularly convincing. It is designed to perpetuate conversation, to tire people out, and to eventually insist on its legitimacy so indignantly that it is accepted as a ‘simply inevitable’ part of political life. 

The Democratic party is certainly deserving of criticism, including in their complicity in many of the oppressive systems that have enabled Trump’s political rise. But I reject the idea that conservative voices are the ones being silenced and ignored in any meaningful way in U.S. politics today. Conservatism’s marginal presence on college campuses is a national exception, not the rule. Meanwhile, the Conservative Political Action Conference that Stulman attended featured Michael Knowles from The Daily Wire saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” It’s one thing to refuse to associate with someone out of a difference of opinion, but I can’t blame anyone for refusing to associate with someone who doesn’t acknowledge their right to existence.

In February 2022, a study was published in the academic journal Nature Human Behavior that examined changes in prejudice across various demographics in the U.S. during the political rise of Donald Trump and the entirety of his first presidential term. The researchers found that “explicit racial and religious prejudice significantly increased amongst Trump’s supporters, whereas individuals opposed to Trump exhibited decreases in prejudice.” 

Emily Reynolds with the British Psychological Society, reporting on the details of the study, highlighted the specific increase in Islamophobia among Trump supporters, as well as their increased likelihood to agree with statements like “Blacks are not as smart as Whites.”

Results from studies like those are important context for the survey results in the 2024 Election Issue of Student Life, where 73% of respondents answered “maybe” or “no” to a question about whether or not they would be willing to date someone of a different political party. That question is increasingly situational as the Republican Party establishment and voters seem more and more willing to applaud Trump’s hypernationalism and authoritarianism as “true conservatism” rather than a highway directly to fascism. 

Now, the inhumanity of others is no excuse to act inhumanely in response, and I remain convinced that love and understanding are our only effective weapons against intolerance. Some of my family members and other longtime friends differ from me politically by quite a lot, and every time I visit home on school breaks, I get to practice talking in groups with more political diversity than most friend groups at WashU. 

With my family, it’s easy, though. No matter how heated the conversations get, perhaps even to the point of yelling through tears, I am lucky to trust my family enough to know that we can still recognize each other’s humanity. For many people, however, that trust is not a guarantee — certainly not always between strangers, and sometimes not even between family members. I know that my family members do not intend to advance policies that cause me harm, but for many members of the WashU community, it isn’t self-evident that a small disagreement won’t quickly spiral into proud advocacy for the rollback of human rights, the rollback of a shared social recognition of humanity. 

Inhumanity — the neatly-tied package of oppression, militarism, and nationalism that the Republican Party’s leaders now openly espouse — can be given a label of whatever political affiliation you like, but it doesn’t mean it needs to suddenly be given free rein in the “marketplace of ideas.”

Once again, I agree with Stulman’s call for more empathetic listening between people with a variety of ideas and opinions, and that a new campus political culture is deeply necessary. But such a culture requires mutual trust to be built up before any kind of productive listening can happen. This kind of trust-building is actually what I feel like our classrooms are best suited for, even more so than the broader project of listening to others and challenging our core beliefs. 

Trust-building on a college campus might need to start with a lot more discussions about agreement rather than jumping right in on whatever seems most provocative. It means asking the person next to you in class if they have siblings or what they did over the weekend, or maybe even asking about their thoughts on the weather, however uninspired another value judgement about the temperature outside might sound. It could be even smaller than that — a small wave when you pass a new classmate on campus. Heck, keep your hands in your pockets and just say “Hi!”

And after that it means picking out the common points of resonance in a class reading, and once you start to find your boundaries of disagreement, making a note of that before returning to the points of shared resonance. And after that it means spending some more time in your next class talking about your disagreements, and a little more the next class, and maybe you walk with each other for a few minutes after the next class to finish whatever debate you were having. And then, just maybe, listening to their disagreement might become effortless.

But that doesn’t need to happen right away. It can’t. I wouldn’t walk into CPAC and talk about immigration with the first person I saw — but if we met each other outside the confines of the conference, I might be able to talk about the weather with them for a bit. And sometimes, the weather is enough.