Trumpism on College Campuses

To quote Tabachnick (2016), “Obviously, Trumpism is linked to the person Donald Trump, but its roots run much deeper, intertwining contemporary and traditional political trends in such a way that makes it both uniquely American and of the twenty-first century […].” Its characteristics include “distillations of much more complicated phenomena” that can be summarized as a mix of celebrity, nativism, outsider status, and populism. We use the term “Trumpism” in this paper to capture respondents’ views on Trump as a person, as well as his administration overall, including the federal appointments that have taken place under his watch, his style of governance, policy positions, and so on.

There is no single libertarian organization that stands out in our data. Instead, we found a mix of sponsored chapters and locally independent clubs across our field sites. At the national level, Young Americans for Liberty claims to be the largest libertarian organization mobilizing college students. However, at the University of Virginia, Students for Individual Liberty was the premier libertarian group. They received support from Students for Liberty, a different national libertarian organization. Conversely, at the University of Arizona, we talked with students associated with Strive—an organization promoting the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Rand was not a libertarian, but her ideas have greatly impacted libertarianism. And the Strive members we interviewed self-identified as libertarians. Despite the students in our sample being affiliated with different organizations, they described their relationship to politics in very similar ways. As such, we have lumped the libertarian groups together for this analysis.

With the exception of two students who were on American Enterprise Institute’s Executive Council for their respective universities, the right-leaning students removed from this paper’s analysis did not share membership in similar conservative clubs. Three were unaffiliated with a campus-based political club, two were part of separate transpartisan dialogue groups, and one was a member of Christians United for Israel.

For example, at a University of Virginia CR meeting we attended, of the approximately 25 students present, six were women and three were non-white (based on phenotype). At the same time, our interviews with progressive college students in the larger project (while diverse in gender) also skews white (although, not as strongly). Much of this racial over- and under-representation results from the predominance of whites at our four field sites.

It is worth noting here that unlike the sorting that happens in school admissions, in which students are either filtered in or filtered out, the sieve of political clubs allows movement in both directions. Students can be sorted in and then sort themselves out as they join other groups better aligned with their interests and dispositions.

Since we gathered our data, TPUSA has occasionally come under attack from individuals and groups further to the right (e.g., see Coaston 2019). At our field sites, at the time we conducted our interviews, though, TPUSA was considered the group on campus willing to stake out extreme positions and take risks in promoting them.

Ronald Reagan has been beatified among younger Republicans, and campaign shirts from the 1984 election have become conservative chic in recent years. In telling us this, Ernest is positioning his former self as a typical Republican, not a true (free-thinking) libertarian.

Libertarian students’ withdrawal from electoral politics is not necessarily the position of the national organizations that help sponsor their groups on campuses. YAL, for example, supports a highly orchestrated student mobilization effort to help chosen candidates in local and state races (known as Operation Win at the Door). However, campaigning (especially for traditional Republican politicians) was not a key interest among the libertarians in our sample. If anything, participation in these groups appears to promote an intellectual cynicism toward electoral politics.