As many of you know, the College Republicans voted to endorse Republican nominee Donald Trump. Many of you may not know that I was one of the most vocal opponents of endorsing.
I do not want Trump to be president for many, many reasons, but, as a University student, his attacks on the Khans, a Gold Star family, felt personal. Read the last few lines from my speech at the meeting below:
“The Republican Party is more than one candidate, and I cannot support someone who attacks heroes for being captured who suffered years of torture like John McCain, and who thinks his ‘sacrifices’ to his business are somehow even close to equivalent to the sacrifice of a member of the University of Virginia, Class of 2000, who died in service.”
Even if you don’t agree with our decision (I don’t) or even respect it, I hope you can respect the process through which it was made. Here’s what happened behind the scenes that night.
We, the executive board, decided to let our members decide whether to endorse Trump. Those members were who we were elected to represent, and they deserved to have their opinions heard. Most of us also thought there was no chance of an endorsement and thought having a vote would give our stance more legitimacy. If you think about how David Cameron felt about calling a Brexit referendum versus when the results came in, you have a pretty good idea of how we felt.
The vote tally was close: 67 to 63. If I had guessed before that meeting what the tally would have been, I would’ve said about 75 to 25 against. When the real numbers were in, I panicked. We hadn’t officially checked to make sure only voting members (those who’ve paid dues) participated. At least 90 percent of voters were, but what about those 4 votes… could that have been the difference?
I was adamant — we had to do another vote, we had to make sure. A few of the other members of the executive board reminded me that had the vote been the other way — 67-63 against endorsement — we wouldn’t have suggested such a thing. We had to honor the process we had created.
It’s saddened and angered me to read some of the reactions from other members of the University community. Two comments on The Cavalier Daily’s Facebook page were, “So much for our top ranking [school] if these are the kind of idiots we’re producing,” and “Was always somewhat okay my school was conservative — never expected it to be hateful or stupid.”
Calling your opponent stupid is probably the least substantive comeback ever, but more importantly, throwing that word around helps Trump succeed.
Think about it. When someone says you’re stupid for thinking the way you do, does it make you feel inclined to agree with the person insulting you? Probably not. Trump’s support is often anecdotally credited to low-income, blue-collar white people who know Democrats think they’re stupid and who think Republicans don’t care about them anymore. The more the media and East-coast elites tell them they’re dumb, the more eager they are to vote against them. We saw it with Brexit, and we saw it with Trump’s primary victory.
You know what’s harder than calling someone stupid? Trying to understand them and why they feel so differently than you, even if they are wrong, and accept that maybe you even had a part in it.
Who are some of the worst offenders? Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama painted a caricature of “bitter” rednecks who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy” to “explain their [economic] frustrations.” Clinton said just a few days ago that half of Trump supporters fall into a “basket of deplorables.” Unfortunately for those politicians, these idiots are somehow still able to pick up on their condescension.
As Emmett Rensin wrote in an article for Vox, “I am suggesting that they [liberals] instead wonder what it might be like to have little left but one’s values; to wake up one day to find your whole moral order destroyed; to look around and see the representatives of a new order call you a stupid, hypocritical hick without bothering, even, to wonder how your corner of your poor state found itself so alienated from them in the first place.”
Now, I know my description of the Midwestern working class factory family doesn’t apply to the vast majority of the University. But that doesn’t change the fact that Trump benefits from your condescension, even at a top university. No matter how stupid you think his supporters are, they can read, and they’re reading what you say about them. And they’re coming to vote against you.
Ali Hiestand is a third-year College student and the events chair for the College Republicans.
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