When several college students marching at this month’s white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., were identified as members of their campuses’ College Republicans chapters, the national group and local chapters were quick to distance themselves from any suggestion that they supported racism.
“As the national chairman for over 250,000 College Republicans nationwide, I condemn in the strongest way possible the vile, racist, and cowardly acts committed by white supremacists in Charlottesville,” said Chandler Thornton, of the College Republican National Committee, in an August 14 statement. He later reiterated that point to The Chronicle. “We believe there is no place in the Republican Party, or anywhere in America, for white nationalism and racial supremacy of any kind.”
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When several college students marching at this month’s white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., were identified as members of their campuses’ College Republicans chapters, the national group and local chapters were quick to distance themselves from any suggestion that they supported racism.
“As the national chairman for over 250,000 College Republicans nationwide, I condemn in the strongest way possible the vile, racist, and cowardly acts committed by white supremacists in Charlottesville,” said Chandler Thornton, of the College Republican National Committee, in an August 14 statement. He later reiterated that point to The Chronicle. “We believe there is no place in the Republican Party, or anywhere in America, for white nationalism and racial supremacy of any kind.”
Compared to the reaction of President Trump, who said some attendees at the rally were “fine people,” it was a strong response. But the chapters’ ties to the far right go beyond members who attend rallies.
When Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right internet troll, rolls onto a campus, he often does so at the invitation of a College Republicans chapter. That was the case at the University of Washington, where someone was shot in ensuing protests, and at the University of California at Berkeley, where protests also turned violent. The same student group at Berkeley later tried to invite Ann Coulter, whose catalog of incendiary remarks rivals that of Mr. Yiannopoulos. Ms. Coulter’s speech was canceled.
Most people think the Republican Party is racist anyway, so we might as well give them some confirmation bias.
Nathan Damigo, a student at California State University-Stanislaus and an avowed white nationalist, has told The Chronicle he tries to recruit students to the cause by looking to conservative campus groups. “Most people think the Republican Party is racist anyway, so we might as well give them some confirmation bias,” he said.
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As with the Republican Party nationally, experts agree that the College Republicans, a group that has always been a political minority in higher education, will probably spend the year jockeying for control of its identity.
Will they be firebrands who tolerate no political correctness, in the style of the president? Or will they adopt the more-reserved tone exhibited by other prominent Republicans, whose membership in the party predates President Trump’s?
The question is not new. Over the past year, the College Republicans on some campuses have splintered over how to respond to the influence of Mr. Trump. But its importance has only been elevated since the outbreak of violence at white-nationalist rallies.
“They have a brand that the national organization may not want to have tainted by another Charlottesville,” said Amy J. Binder, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego who studies the campus right.
Policy Wonks or Bomb Throwers?
To understand where the College Republicans will plant their flags this year, it helps to understand where the groups have generally stood.
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Jeffrey L. Kidder, an associate professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University, spent three years talking to an unidentified group of College Republicans at a “midsize, midtier public university in the United States.” He later turned those observations into a research paper. He told The Chronicle that the College Republicans considered themselves attuned to policy in a way their peers weren’t.
“They were paying attention, and all these other people — in particular liberals but really average college students period — were sort of oblivious,” Mr. Kidder said. “They weren’t paying attention, but these College Republicans, they were.”
That policy focus, he said, would seem to translate into a reluctance to support someone like President Trump, who is widely reported to have little interest in the specifics of public policy. But Mr. Kidder said he could easily see members of the group he studied gravitating toward Mr. Trump. He said that though policy is important, a sense of identity can play a greater role in students’ lives.
“That’s very important for these College Republicans, sort of trading stories about how their liberal professors or their liberal classmates who just don’t get it,” he said. “It’s really important to them to draw this line.”
And, he argued, the president is great at drawing that line.
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The group of College Republicans Mr. Kidder studied, he said, also had two main discourse styles. One favored policy points and traditional debates — or as Mr. Kidder put it, “If we could do better messaging, everyone would see we’re right.”
We’re here to have fun and cause a little trouble, and getting under people’s skin is an enjoyable pastime.
The other focused on trying to outrage liberals, or really anyone outside their group, because the cause is lost already. Mr. Kidder summed up the latter style as “What’s it really matter? We’re here to have fun and cause a little trouble, and getting under people’s skin is an enjoyable pastime.”
Part of the challenge in charting the course of the right is determining just who qualifies as extreme these days. Ms. Binder, an author of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University Press, 2012), said a large part of that identity crafting lies within the groups themselves.
“What is going to be important going forward is figuring out the gradation of what the alt-right looks like,” said Ms. Binder, referring to the racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-feminist. “Is an Ann Coulter speech the same thing as an alt-right, KKK, neo-Nazi event? Are they different? How are they different? Who is making those decisions?”
‘People Are Going to Immediately Engage’
Brice McAndrew, a senior studying political science, is president of the Hood College Republicans, a group at the Maryland college that had been defunct but has been revitalized in recent years. In its early days, he said, the group existed in mild obscurity. Members debated the College Democrats and tried to get their foot in the door. “The administration just didn’t pay attention or care about the fact we existed,” Mr. McAndrew said.
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But the vibe changed as the presidential election unfolded. And a conflict over a public display by the College Republicans drew local headlines. The display featured remarks by right-wing speakers, some of them critical of transgender people.
We have to do what’s best for us, and not worry where the rest of the people lie.
Mr. McAndrew recalled the fervor over the posters, and realized that his group shouldn’t be cowed by the demands of others. “We have to do what’s best for us, and not worry where the rest of the people lie,” Mr. McAndrew said. “We’re the Hood College Republican club, and we can’t let everyone else dictate what we do.”
And, he said, he understands the appeal of inviting a polarizing figure like Mr. Yiannopoulos. Someone from a think tank like the Heritage Foundation, say, wouldn’t attract any attention, but Mr. Yiannopoulos would.
“It’s very important to not only present viewpoints to people, but to present them in a way that’s going to make them engaged,” Mr. McAndrew said. “People are going to immediately engage with it, whether it’s positive or negative.”
‘It Probably Is Already on Your Campus’
George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, recently argued in an essay for The American Conservative against the conventional narrative of who makes up the “alt-right.” The popular perception of white nationalists may involve Confederate-flag-wielding nuts, but it’s more complicated than that, he wrote.
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A portion of the alt-right, Mr. Hawley told The Chronicle, is made up of millennial men, often online. Given that age demographic, it makes sense that some members of the alt-right are at residential colleges nationwide.
Don’t stay up at night worrying about massive alt-right rallies at your university.
“I would say it probably is already on your campus,” he said. “Does it matter very much? Obviously, college administrators would rather there not be racist students on their campuses. But in terms of what their impact is outside of their dorms or apartments actually is going to be, I would say, Don’t stay up at night worrying about massive alt-right rallies at your university.”
Mr. Hawley also said the alt-right is amorphous and hard to define. That’s partly because anyone willing to pound out racist messages on a computer keyboard could be part of the movement. And Mr. Hawley, who wrote the forthcoming Making Sense of the Alt-Right (Columbia University Press, September), said the members don’t have an incentive to publicly announce their political leanings.
That anonymity has already manifested itself on campuses. Shortly after the 2016 election, white-supremacist fliers and graffiti appeared on dozens of campuses. At Texas State University, white-nationalist posters have gone up multiple times since the election.
This may be out of the control of College Republicans.
White-supremacist ideology is clearly present on campuses. With that in mind, if the College Republicans don’t invite speakers who stoke the flames that appeal to the alt-right, a different group could.
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“This may be out of the control of College Republicans in a way,” Ms. Binder said, “and there may be other groups that crop up on campus that find the funds or the support from the community to have speakers that even College Republicans now deem controversial or unacceptable. It wouldn’t surprise me if new organizations pop up on campus to kind of foment this, and College Republicans hold back.”
Chris Quintana was a breaking-news reporter for The Chronicle. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.