Letters to the Editor

 

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Conservatism Not Sexy

I applaud the analysis behind your May 12 cover article, “Exactly How Liberal is Stanford University?” But I worry that the process of designing one’s Facebook profile pressures students to present themselves as more liberal than they actually are, skewing your results.

To put it bluntly: few can resist crafting a Facebook profile as bait for the opposite sex. The word “liberal” dangling above “Favorite TV: Sex and the City” says, “I believe in free love. Ask me how!” A girl might be a political conservative, but that word on her profile is a stamp announcing to the world that her home state regulates pre-marital kissing. So she says liberal and lets us use our imaginations. Likewise, it’s no wonder that the brothers of SAE feel least pressured to conceal their right-wing affinities, when their building is already a magnet for the most “liberal” girls around. Meanwhile, when a less fortunate guy like me meets a sveldt babe and plans a follow-up, I need an online persona that expedites the goals that underlie my continuing interest. Being conservative, however, is simply not sexy.

“Liberal” and “conservative” connote lifestyles more strongly than political views. If your survey data do not capture political leanings, they successfully measure the undergraduate libido. And here, your results are good news for us liberals.

Andrew Gradman, History, ‘06

 

No Happy Mean

Tayler Cox’s opinion of Ann Coulter’s writings tells us more about Cox’s distaste than Coulter’s positions. (“Opinions,” April 20.) With its mostly ad hominem tenor, lambasting Coulter’s style without engaging the substance, Cox’s piece would be subject to a demurrer for nonresponsiveness or even irrelevance, much like a pugilist’s shucking technique to whale away in frustration. Though favoring “logical arguments” and “rational discourse,” Cox herself avoids them in favor of “throwing around” the “blanket associations” she scorns.

For instance, though apparently peeved at Coulter’s “remarks that she believes the country would be better off if women didn’t vote,” Cox offers no rebuttal in what should be an intelligent debate. She should consider (1) that women in 1850 or 1885 didn’t clamor for the vote and were quite content with their lot as well as being better educated, (2) that most married women even now vote with their husbands, and (3) that the sex gap (mostly single women) in voting patterns is always leftward. As a result, A.V. Dicey’s thought deserves attention:

(As for “the idea that the possession of a vote is a personal right,” he concludes that a “fair-minded man” who is prepared) to go a little further into the nature of things ... will ultimately say that ...this is a delusion. It is in truth the obligation to discharge a public duty, and whether this miscalled right should be conferred or withheld from Englishwomen can be decided only by determining whether their possession of the parliamentary vote will conduce to the welfare of England.

His thinking parallels James Madison and James Bryce’s in regards to the increased confusion of government from adding more votes, such as for women, whose interests were already amply considered without an actual franchise. “The more complicated any system of popular election is made, the more power is thrown into the hands of election agents or wire-pullers. This of itself increases the power and lowers the character of the party machine.” Dicey goes on to show how unnecessary, and even ridiculous, it would be to include representatives of every opinion, good or bad, in every decision, sometimes reaching the outlandish result of a government that could not function at all.

Coulter’s idea (shared by more than most people realize) deserves more than mere dismissal. One can’t ignore that, “suffering from a host of social ills,” the welfare of both our countries has suffered. Cox’s rhetoric shows scars from living in the Stanford environment, concerned, e.g., with the sin of “polarizing,’’ when the universe and human life itself is in continuous tension, balance of oppositional forces, a productive dialectic, even sex itself in inevitable “polarization.” As more than one sage has noted, it is absurd to pretend there is a happy mean between the right and the wrong.

W. Edward Chynoweth
Ex ’45; JD ‘63