Much of populist conservative punditry supports President Trump and the Trump agenda for the sole reason that it infuriates liberals. Or “triggers” them. Or “owns the libs.” It’s depressing, but it’s a natural outgrowth of what’s been happening to the conservative movement on college campuses for years.
For all the headlines about how uninterested in policy and discourse the modern college Left is, the college Right has been poisoning the discourse for a long time. The incentive structure on college campuses combined with the underdeveloped political conservatism of teenagers has created a feeding ground for outrage culture — and it was only a matter of time before it seeped out into the adult population.
Being a politically-active conservative on a modern college campus is a lonely life. Every structure and institution is controlled by the ideological Left, liberal student groups outnumber conservative ones 20 to one, and many fellow students who will eventually grow up to be Republicans are uninterested in political activism. Serious conservative ideas are given short shrift in the classroom and ignored outside of it. The whisper network on my own college campus warned of a particular professor who thanked a student’s in-class defense of a flag-burning constitutional amendment for offering “the redneck perspective”; another wrote an article for the student newspaper defending academia’s distaste for conservatism by analogizing it with flat-eartherism as a legitimate theory.
Because of disdain in the classroom and neglect outside of it, conservatives on campus turn to outrageous stunts. Conservative student groups lack the membership and the resources for serious political events to matter. They can either settle for spartan events in the campus’s smallest lecture halls, or plan and host events that they know will turn out the anti-conservative activist groups. An event that ends with a speaker getting shouted down by angry liberals is more successful than a calm policy discussion with an audience of 20.
I know because I was an active campus conservative. I wrote for the student paper and was involved with the College Republicans for all four years in college, including spending a year as president of that group. In my time at a liberal arts college, the school’s largest venue was used multiple times by liberal groups that hosted Jesse Jackson, Wesley Clark, Fareed Zakaria, and more. The only time that a conservative political figure warranted the school’s largest venue was when Ann Coulter came to campus.
We hosted debates in small halls and ordinary classrooms. We hosted policy discussions in lecture rooms. We hosted election-night watch parties. We hosted experts from some of the most esteemed think-tanks. Ann Coulter was the only person that could draw a crowd larger than a daily Psych 101 class.
This is the norm for conservatives on college campuses across the country. Serious thought and discussion by conservatives is ignored. Think tank scholars speak to empty rooms. Ann Coulter gets standing-room-only. In an environment where college clubs need to justify their budgets on a year-over-year basis by proving they’re hosting events that generate a lot of interest and attendance, it’s obvious which route College Republicans will take.
Incentive structures like this have now trickled out through the entirety of conservative punditry. The college lecture circuit is lucrative for speakers who can manage to book consistently, netting four- and five-figure paydays for a 90-minute lecture. (Side note: if a campus conservative group would like to pay me for my lecturing services, contact my agent!) The way to draw consistently on college campuses is to generate outrage, not thoughtful discussion.
A meditation on judicial interpretations of Lochner v. New York may be interesting, but it won’t generate millions of YouTube views like a polemic on transgenderism as a mental illness will. An organized debate with College Democrats may be productive, but it won’t produce media coverage like an “affirmative action bake sale.”
Baiting outrage by being outrageous has been a way of life for campus conservatives for a long time. It was only a matter of time before they grew up, took over the conservative political party, and prioritized trolling liberals over serious policy proposals. Structural incentives on campus have led conservatism to this point. While growing up and out of outrage culture used to be the norm for conservatives, the campus attitude has now infested the Republican Party top-to-bottom.
Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. Previously he was director of outreach and policy at The Franklin Center and managing editor at Townhall. His views here are his own.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
