Post-Election Trauma

One conservative student's encounters with the enlightened Left on campus

By Kerry Eskenas
Posted on 11/18/04

The day after Bush won re-election was a predictably somber day on the Berkeley campus. It was also a bitter one, as members of the Left philosophized about their defeat by essentially expressing their contempt for American democracy.

Weeks ago, while Kerry supporters still had high hopes, Berkeley Professor Alan Ross announced that the guest speaker for his Political Science class on November 3rd would comment on and analyze the results of the election. Bernie Ward, a San Francisco radio personality, was the speaker invited. In class that Wednesday, Ward celebrated the President’s re-election by attacking the Bush administration and insulting the Republican Party for fifty minutes. As a result, I learned that Republicans are religious extremists who hate gays and minorities. In fact, Ward claimed that the election went to Bush only because of religious social issues. His evidence for this was the polling statistic that 21 percent voted based on moral values. For the first time in my life, in a class of 700 people, I raised my hand to make a comment.

I told him that I am a non-religious Republican and that moral values encompass more than religion. The biggest issue in this election was, undeniably, the War on Terror, and polls have shown that people supported Bush as a better leader in the face of terror. What this illustrates is that moral values encompass, among other things, character and leadership, and Senator Kerry simply did not score as high as President Bush did in these areas.

Ward responded that the two poorest counties in America are located in Kansas, and even though 80 percent of the population there lives in poverty, they overwhelmingly identify with the Republican Party. Ward and other like-minded leftists use examples such as these to “prove” the argument that the main supporters of the Republican Party are the religious Right—after all, why else would such poor people not side with the Democrats? He did not even consider the possibility that the people to whom he referred prefer hard work over handouts. Perhaps when these Republicans name “moral values” as the decisive factor behind their votes, they count hard work as a moral ideal. Religion certainly does belong in the category of “moral values,” but morality is a much broader category than Ward gives it credit for.

Such presumptuousness and personal attacks are the norm among the Left, particularly in the wake of the current elections, which infuriated them even more because it was such a decisive victory. On my way home from class, I encountered more hatred and bitterness on Sproul Plaza. A wall was displayed on which passersby could write comments about the election; not surprisingly, students mainly wrote obscenities against both President Bush and America.

When I put a Bush sticker on the wall as I walked by, angry students greeted me with more obscenities and personal insults. It is to be expected that most liberals will react with anger after four years of insistence that Bush’s presidency is illegitimate, only to find out that the majority of America really does want Bush to remain in office. It is quite another thing to be met with such hatred by fellow students. It has been clear for a long time that the Free Speech Movement has disintegrated into free speech for liberals only, but it is disturbing to see otherwise-intelligent and supposedly intellectual University students react with such intolerance and hatred to the legitimate results of a fair presidential election. The irony will never wear off.

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