OPINION: Vance should be more like Ohio, less like Yale
“We have a big tent in this party,” Senator JD Vance said Wednesday night during his speech at the Republican National Convention.
But instead of trying to be the Big Tent Party, the GOP should try to be the Big Ten Party.
If the Ohio State University grad ends up going from Mamaw’s house to the White House this November, it may be, ironically, thanks to Silicon Valley and a Yale University law professor.
But a Trump-Vance victory should also help the GOP become a Big Ten Party, one that appeals to Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Republicans have criticized universities for wokeness, classroom bias, antisemitism, and producing worthless college degrees. And while there are good efforts to fight back through refocusing on the humanities, specialized centers, and regular tenure review, the Big Ten campuses, at least their origins, give another guide.
Universities should have missions if they want to avoid becoming amorphous blobs with hundreds of degrees and minors.
Vance’s alma mater, the University of Illinois, and Purdue University, along with other Big Ten schools, were started as land grant universities, focused on training individuals in technical arts and agriculture. Universities will succeed when they stick to their mission. Universities fail when they stray from their mission.
But the Big Ten is also synonymous with the Midwest – at least the original Big Ten, not this weird coast-to-coast thing it is now.
Midwestern values should be Republican values.
The GOP should be the party of workers, of middle-class people, of churchgoers, and of homesteaders.
Should Republicans be libertarians, conservatives, traditionalists, integralists, or something else? They should be Pat Buchanan’s 1992 culture war speech at the Republican National Convention.
Commenting on the L.A. riots, Buchanan shared how young soldiers stopped the mob from burning down a nursing home – “force, rooted in justice, backed by moral courage.”
Universities face their own mobs – pro-Palestinians with encampments, professors pushing illogical gender ideology onto students (and young kids), and campuses committing abortions on their own students.
It will take force, justice, and courage to stop them and reclaim the universities, “block by block.”
Justice, truth, and courage – those are Midwestern values.
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IMAGE: Senator JD Vance/Facebook
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