One of the University’s defining characteristics may be its political liberalism, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any Republican Cardinals.
In fact, there are about 70 students who search for a route of political expression other than the Democratic Party, according to Eugene Wong ’09, president of WesRepublicans. The group is now large enough to elect an executive board, including a vice-president and a treasurer.
WesRepublicans began in the fall of 2005, when Wong, then a freshman, joined forces with Sarah Armstrong, a senior at Connecticut College and chair of the state chapter of College Republicans. With Armstrong’s feedback, Wong began recruiting outside of the former Davenport Campus Center and MoCon Dining Hall. Initially more upperclassmen signed up than frosh, and most original members have graduated.
Currently working to put out a newsletter and recruit speakers to campus, WesRepublicans is connected with both the state and national parties, from whom it receives funding. But aren’t these conservative voices mostly scorned on this campus of supposedly raging liberals?
“It’s a little rough, I’m not gonna lie,” Wong said.
Mytheos Holt ’10, the recently elected treasurer of WesRepublicans, elaborated.
“At Wesleyan, if you are a conservative you are likely to get one of two responses,” Holt said. “[Either] ‘You fascist genocidal piece of shit, get away from me and go shoot yourself because you are a waste of space.’ Or, ‘I’m not even going to dignify your argument with a response because you can’t even pronounce nuclear correctly and you probably killed all your brain cells at the local frat.’ I myself prefer the latter because it’s far easier to prove that you’re not stupid than you’re not evil.”
Members of the student group run the gamut from libertarians to die-hard conservatives, and everything else in between. Wong describes WesRepublicans as a “motley crew” of students and summarized their highly diverse viewpoints with a one-sentence mission statement.
“[We’re here for] anybody looking for an outlet other than the Democratic Party,” he said.
Holt would take it one step further.
“[Our mission is] to legitimize conservative viewpoints on campus, to make it known that in order to be a decent person, you don’t have to be a communist,” he said. “Conservatives are decent, kind, interesting people, so stop with the bullshit name-calling.”
Despite supposed tension, relations between WesRepublicans and student group WesDemocrats are surprisingly amicable.
“We’re actually very good friends,” Holt said. “They don’t resort to name-calling.”
Some students remain skeptical about WesRebuplicans’ presence on campus, however.
Nick Fesenko ’10, who recently joined the group despite his mostly liberal views, thinks that WesRepublicans fit his preconceived notions almost perfectly.
“[I joined] to see the other side,” Fesenko said. “I’m not done seeing the other side, but they seem nice enough. My first impression of them was if I had seen them in high school I would have thought they were jocks, non-weird people, normal folk.”
His opinion of them has not yet changed.
“[They’re] normal, more so than most people here on campus,” Fesenko said.
Isaac Meyer ’10, who says he has never supported a Republican candidate, sees the presence of WesRepublicans as potentially positive for Wesleyan.
“I think it’s completely important to have them on campus,” Meyer said. “Wesleyan is known for being really diverse, and diversity isn’t just race or sexual preference, it’s also politics. [And without them], debate would be really one-sided.”
But would having more Republicans on campus change the nature of Wesleyan itself? Meyer doesn’t think so.
“It depends how you define Wesleyan” he said. “If you define it as a bastion of liberalism, then yes, it would. But if you look at it more as [a place of] intellectual inquiry, then it would be the same, if not better.”
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