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Complaining and The Chronicle’s opinion section seem to go hand-in-hand these days. Be it as a platform for cathartic venting or as an outlet for “virtue signalling” to one’s peers, editorials are a convenient forum to demonstrate one’s “wokeness” regarding the shortcomings of the neoliberal economic order and the West Union fish.
Our campus is abuzz with political discussions that will only become more important as the Democratic primary continues and the general presidential election of 2020 nears. President Trump’s defects and malign activities, while not the focus of this piece and too numerous in quantity to list here, have made him a weak incumbent, vulnerable to defeat. However, the president’s electoral odds are being strengthened by the Democratic party’s hard-left turn and embrace of candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Confined to the Duke bubble or progressive Twitter, one could not be faulted for perceiving that there is widespread support for hard-left policies and that a campaign centered on these policies can capture strong voting majorities.
The political discord at Duke and in America’s body politic more broadly is plagued by Radical ‘Randys’. These political extremists dominate the conversation both on campus and on the airwaves of cable TV, whether it be Fox News or MSNBC, as they appeal to only their own tribe of ideological followers who share their respective world views. These radicals have little to no interest in cooperating with their opponents on the other side of the aisle, much less arguments and facts that run contrary to their own.
Last April, a petition to save Quenchers (the former smoothie shop in Wilson Gym) received over 2,000 signatures after Duke announced that it lost its vendor’s license to Red Mango. Yet after a nearly 10-month campaign, Duke Students for Housing Reform’s petition to decouple selectivity and housing has only 351 signatures, per the group’s website. In other words, nearly a third of Duke undergraduates signed their name to protest the removal of a beloved smoothie shop, while only 5 percent felt strongly enough to attach their name to a petition seeking to eliminate Greek life and SLG housing sections. Indeed, while DS4HR succeeded in creating discussion about our housing system, it seems that their actual platform appeals to only a small percentage of Duke students.
