I came to Princeton as a strong-defense, law-and-order, church-going, teetotaling conservative; I left Princeton as a strong-defense, law-and-order, church-going, teetotaling conservative who has never voted Republican again. The reason is that in 1983 Jerry Falwell came to speak at Alexander Hall and, not having previously paid enough attention to politics to know what to expect, I was appalled to hear the self-righteous, theocratic, anti-science views of someone so influential in the party for which I would have voted by default in 1984. Since then my estrangement has only gotten deeper as the party, with the complicity of intellectual conservatives like those profiled in the article, has become increasingly dependent on conspiracy-mongering and white-victimhood populism, leading in a straight line to Trump and his insurrection (which wasn’t even mentioned in the article). “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
As a physics major, I didn’t have time to take much more than the distribution-requirement minimum of introductory humanities courses, so I didn’t get close enough to any liberal professors to be subject to their supposed indoctrination. With regard to losing my vote, and those of an increasing fraction of my college-educated suburbanite demographic, conservatives have scuttled their own ship.
I came to Princeton as a strong-defense, law-and-order, church-going, teetotaling conservative; I left Princeton as a strong-defense, law-and-order, church-going, teetotaling conservative who has never voted Republican again. The reason is that in 1983 Jerry Falwell came to speak at Alexander Hall and, not having previously paid enough attention to politics to know what to expect, I was appalled to hear the self-righteous, theocratic, anti-science views of someone so influential in the party for which I would have voted by default in 1984. Since then my estrangement has only gotten deeper as the party, with the complicity of intellectual conservatives like those profiled in the article, has become increasingly dependent on conspiracy-mongering and white-victimhood populism, leading in a straight line to Trump and his insurrection (which wasn’t even mentioned in the article). “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
As a physics major, I didn’t have time to take much more than the distribution-requirement minimum of introductory humanities courses, so I didn’t get close enough to any liberal professors to be subject to their supposed indoctrination. With regard to losing my vote, and those of an increasing fraction of my college-educated suburbanite demographic, conservatives have scuttled their own ship.