Republicans are a minority at Georgia State, which is not a surprising fact of the south’s most diverse collegiate campus. But it is a bit ironic given that Georgia has been a GOP state since Brown Betty’s got on the menu.
According to the polling service “270toWin,” the state of Georgia hasn’t voted against the Republican party in a Presidential election since 1992.
And yet our campus, a few blocks from Capitol Hill, is home to an overwhelming liberal majority.
“Liberal” is an adjective used to describe a step towards new behavior or thought and a retreat from more traditional behavior and thought. This has been historically associated with the Democratic Party.
Because of this association, the idea of being a student Republican is almost a paradox and largely scoffed at. This is due to our willingness to accept and enforce political labels.
A recent CSS, or College Senior Survey, administered by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA, revealed a 9.4 percent increase in students with liberal or far left political views by the end of their collegiate experience, along with a 6.2 percent decrease in those with conservative or far right political views.
Along with these governing stats, the survey found a 14.4 percent increase in students for the legalization of Marijuana by the end of their collegiate experience, a 12.8 percent increase in pro same-sex marriage, and an 11.9 percent increase in “pro-choice” students.
All of these positions are historically known as components of the liberal agenda. Like ours, the campus was deemed a “liberal” campus. It is within this that the issue of political labels arises.
Many students may hold certain positions, but this does not automatically place them within a “party box,” those boxes being Democrat and Republican. And yet, we place ourselves in these party boxes, disregarding the political spectrum.
The issue of political labels can be likened to labels in the realm of sexuality. If you’ve taken a Sex and Society course here, then you may have learned that not everyone can be placed in a “box.” While it is rarely acknowledged is that political positions, like sexuality, can be very fluid. A person can easily be fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
It is this fluidity that should be acknowledged by the student. The pressure to consume every element of a “party box” seems to permeate campus grounds. We take issues like immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage and mash them together, divvy them up into “for” and “against” and feed them to each other.
Historically, this is how politicians have packaged such issues, but this only moves to further divide parties and maintain the detrimental tradition of placing people in those party boxes.
To assume that a Republican student or Democratic student stands for everything that has been historically associated with either party is presumptuous and naive at best. Given the changes in our social landscape over the past several decades, it is misleading to assume that the young conservative today shares every view of the older conservative.
As students, rightful heirs to progressive thought, we have to set an example for our elected officials by discarding party boxes. By undoing the folds and rising up and out of these boxes, we are able to share each other’s atmosphere, inhale each other’s ideologies, and respectfully come to understandings.
It is only with this understanding of differing ideologies that we can truly progress and construct opinions, void of stale stereotypes and damaging presumptions.
Your opening statements are incorrect. The state of Georgia voted for, and helped elect, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and was one of only 6 states to vote for his re-election in 1980. Jimmy Carter was/is a Democrat.