Letters to the Editor: Democrats are really centrists

I was having trouble understanding why the Duke Conservative Union was so fired up about some Democrats on campus, but then their executive director, Madison Kitchens, revealed their faulty logic.

He said that the preponderance of Democratic faculty is indicative of humanities departments where the ideologies are skewed toward the left. Relative to Republicans, most Democrats are indeed politically to the left. However, relative to the worldwide scope of academic discourse (which is the correct level of comparison), the Republicans are practically off the scale to the right. Indeed, Democrats are really centrist, and you have to look to the Green Party or some other political affiliation to find views that even approach the "left".

One of the primary requisites of being a good teacher and an academic is an ability to be open-minded and see both sides of an issue, thus most academics have a liberal world view (in the classic use of the term) and a centrist political outlook on the personal level.

It hasn't always been thus, but the far-right have hijacked the Republican platform, resulting in a closed-minded party which is the barest shadow of what it used to be. The only place left for centrists is in the Democratic Party (given the restrictions of our two-party system), which is exactly where you would expect to find most well-versed academics who teach balanced courses in prestigious humanities departments.