You keep disagreeing, Hillsdale

Home Opinion You keep disagreeing, Hillsdale

Less than a week from today, Election Day 2014 will arrive. Indeed, thanks to early voting and overwhelming media coverage, it has, for all intents and purposes, arrived already.

To Hillsdale, this means a bit more than to students at other campuses. In 2012, students not only traveled to the key swing state of Ohio to campaign, but discussion of politics in some form dominated campus,  whether students were talking about why Mitt Romney deserved their vote, why he was just another managerial progressive, or why voting itself was pointless.

Even in the 2014 midterm, which will probably  inspire far fewer voters to trek to the polls than in an election year, elections occupy the minds of the engaged and the aloof alike. The former knock on doors in some micro-targeted suburb, while the latter must justify their deliberate apathy to their peers.

Sure, some students up at, say, Ann Arbor are politically engaged, but it is rare to find Hillsdale’s combination of political activism, on the one hand, and its caliber of political discussion, on the other. At Hillsdale, a campaign trooper for the College Republicans will take politics classes with an anti-voting libertarian, or perhaps even a neo-monarchist.

This is not to say, of course, that these two camps, and other along this spectrum, will always agree. Indeed, one need direct his eyes no further than the page opposite this one to discover two starkly divergent views on voting, the primary means of political expression in our representative government.

The important thing remains, however, that all of these ideas coexist on the same campus, and they do so (mostly) peacefully. All of them contribute to a fruitful, lively debate concerning the nature and future of our regime that any other campus would struggle to replicate.

So keep disagreeing, Hillsdale. Whether you think our Republic’s salvation lies in the ballot box, in principled abstention, or even in an abandonment of representative government altogether, your views sustain a debate that distinguishes our campus.

At least until Election Day is over.