Interview: “Political Discourse, Dissent, and Disillusionment on College Campuses this Election Season,” with Tim Alberta (The Atlantic)

Tim Alberta spoke at the Tocqueville Center on Oct. 23, 2024, on “Trump, Harris, and Coalitions they are Building” for our Elections in America event. We had a chance to ask Tim what he’s observed about political discourse and liberal education on his visits to college campuses this election season, the state of political discourse in the Trump era, and what college-age conservatives and progressives think about indoctrination on the left and the right. 

Tim Alberta is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. He formerly served as chief political correspondent for POLITICO. In 2019, he published the critically acclaimed book, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump and co-moderated the year’s final Democratic presidential candidate

 debate aired by PBS NewsHour. He attended Michigan State University, where his plans to become a baseball writer were changed by a stint covering the legislature in Lansing. He went on to spend more than a decade in Washington, reporting for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Hotline, National Journal, and National Review. Alberta joined The Atlantic in March 2021 with a mandate to keep roaming and writing and telling stories that strike at the heart of America’s discontent. His work has been featured in dozens of other publications nationwide, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair, and he frequently appears as a commentator on television programs in the United States and around the world. His newest book, and instant New York Times Bestseller, is The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in the Age of Extremism (2023).

Tim Alberta on the enforcement of conformity and stifling of dissent in educational spaces today

TOCQUEVILLE CENTER: What are your thoughts on political discourse and liberal education in America today? What are you observing on college campuses this election season? 

TIM ALBERTA:

Well, the education piece is a bit out of my wheelhouse, but I guess I would just say that my big picture thoughts on liberal education in America is, is it a capital ‘L’ liberal or a lowercase ‘l’ liberal? I’m not asking rhetorically, because I think a lot of us have concerns, not just people in the Academy, but those of us who care about the Academy and the formation of young minds. I think there is a certain enforced conformity that you see in a lot of education spaces today that’s sort of stifles dissent. And in a way, what it actually produces is a sort of militant backlash that just further polarizes campuses, the discourse, and the country.

 

“I think there is a certain enforced conformity that you see in a lot of education spaces today that’s sort of stifles dissent.”

 

I go to a lot of college campuses. I think I’ve been five or six college campuses in the last month. It’s something I do with a fair bit of regularity. I was at Michigan State last week. I was at the University of Colorado the week before that.  I was at Wheaton College the week before that. So I do this a fair bit. And I was at Baylor the week before that. So my point is that I do spend a lot of time on campus, especially with journalist groups and political science groups, and you pick up a lot. There’s a feeling, a certain discomfort, even among students who are themselves pretty progressive in their politics and their worldview, with how one-sided much of the conversation is.

Much of the curriculum is really one-sided, and you’re picking that up amongst progressive students. I think what some of these young people are perceptive enough to understand is what I said a minute ago. For example, you’re dealing with a TPUSA chapter on your campus, that’s in your face and presenting fire and brimstone, blood and soil, and the view that the fight for this campus is a fight for this country, right? Students are encountering that and starting to wonder, well, hold on a second, where are the rational and sane conservatives that I can have an intelligent, good-faith conversation with around these things rather than just yelling at each other and screaming at each other.

And I think that’s the vacuum that you see in a lot of these spaces, a lot of these campuses where it becomes more and more apparent. I’m on the board of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. And so I’ve taught students and had fellows there, and now I do programmatic stuff to help them. And even though it’s a more left-of-center campus, you consistently will hear from students wanting to have a more productive good-faith dialogue, bringing together people with different worldviews, different backgrounds, different beliefs. But it’s hard in college campuses, which should be places that are facilitators of that viewpoint diversity, incubators of that. And my fear is that they’re not.

 

“…you consistently will hear from students wanting to have a more productive good-faith dialogue, bringing together people with different worldviews, different backgrounds, different beliefs. But it’s hard in college campuses, which should be places that are facilitators of that viewpoint diversity, incubators of that.”

Indoctrination in liberal education is also happening on the right

TOCQUEVILLE CENTER: Do today’s college students want to have more dialogue between the right and the left? 

TIM ALBERTA: 

I don’t think we give young people enough credit because I think oftentimes kids recognize the difference between being educated versus being indoctrinated. I’ve done a lot of reporting on this, like in most recent book I wrote, a big chunk of the early phases of the book and the very end are around Liberty University.

And there are students there who themselves are conservative, but they are becoming increasingly agitated with and upset by this sort of right-wing indoctrination that they’re receiving there, right? And they know that there’s more to the conversation. And so I think that this almost a mirror image of what you see in some of these more secular spaces, this kind of growing uneasiness with a totally one-sided, top-down conformist conversation that happens on these campuses. 

You also hear it from kids who, again, might themselves agree with a lot of the liberal zeitgeist. And yet there’s still a dissatisfaction. 

 

“And there are students there who themselves are conservative, but they are becoming increasingly agitated with and upset by this sort of right-wing indoctrination that they’re receiving there, right? And they know that there’s more to the conversation.”

Indoctrination and increasing disillusionment among citizens, as a direct result of divisive political discourse in liberal education

TOCQUEVILLE CENTER: You can extend this to your observations about politics generally, but do you see this increasing dissatisfaction with political discourse in liberal education as being connected to the increasing politicization of everything? 

TIM ALBERTA: 

I’m going to answer a slightly different question than what you’re asking. I think one of the biggest forces animating voters in this election is just disillusionment, a feeling – and this is especially prevalent among young people who tend to lean to the left – that their voices are not heard, that the political parties are not responsive to them, that they’re just taken for granted or marginalized and really don’t have aseat at the table.

Especially for young people whose entire political awareness is shaped by the Trump era, right? If you’re 19 years old on a college campus, this is all you’ve known for the last eight or nine years. Your entire concept of politics is shaped by Donald Trump. And there was a marked shift and they’re not even aware of it. In 2015, everything went crazy. And everything got so extreme. And they don’t know it wasn’t always like that. They don’t have that context, that institutional memory.

 

“I think one of the biggest forces animating voters in this election is just disillusionment, a feeling – and this is especially prevalent among young people who tend to lean to the left – that their voices are not heard, that the political parties are not responsive to them, that they’re just taken for granted or marginalized and really don’t have a seat at the table.”

 

So in these campus spaces, these students look out into the world and they see this totally bifurcated, hyper-polarized political and cultural conversation where there can be no compromising because it’s good versus evil. And the one side is out to destroy the other, and it’s just turned into this zero-sum conflict. The students want something better. I’m consistently remarking on that when I spend time around young people. There’s always going to be some crazy kids to the far right, to the far left, or whatever. But generally, a lot of these kids look out in the world and they’re like, we don’t want to inherit this. We want something better than this. And so they try as they might in their own spheres of influence, byt they struggle to produce it in part, I feel like, because they’ve just become kind of beaten down by what they’re seeing. 

And when you talk to young people about this election in particular, like they might hold their nose and turn out and vote because they feel like, OK, you know, I have a responsibility, right? It’s my civic duty, whatever. But there’s just this gnawing dissatisfaction and disillusionment – and this is obviously much more of a problem for the Democrats than the Republicans because Democrats tend to really depend heavily upon drawing young voters and working to gin up enthusiasm on campuses. And it’s hard to see a path for Kamala Harris to win the presidency if she doesn’t turn out a really sizable percentage of the 18 to 29-year-old vote. And when you spend time with that demographic, they tend to be really sour about the state of things.

 

“…it’s hard to see a path for Kamala Harris to win the presidency if she doesn’t turn out a really sizable percentage of the 18 to 29-year-old vote.”

 

I can’t help but wonder if colleges are doing enough, if their campuses are doing enough, to try to do better by them.  

 

Tocqueville Center

October 23, ’24