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Civil and uncivil places: The moral geography of College Republicans

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Jeffrey L. Kidder
Jeffrey L. Kidder
Jeffrey L. Kidder
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Abstract

In this paper, I explore the spatial logic of othering. This perspective helps link a strong cultural program with microlevel analyses of small groups. Using ethnographic and interview data of College Republicans at a mid-sized public university, I report on the ways members mapped out boundaries to the civil order through ideological performances involving profane narratives about place. In talking about a wide range of topics, the College Republicans in this study constructed a moral geography of contemporary America – one that relegated urban areas into the realm of the uncivil. In studying the spatial logic of othering, the resonance of campaign rhetoric like “real America” and “New York values” come into sharper focus. Cultural research into inequality and political discourse can benefit from the analysis of how perceptions of the material world interrelate with identity and morality.
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Original Article
Civil and uncivil places: The moral
geography of College Republicans
Jeffrey L. Kidder
Department of Sociology, Northern Illinois University, 816 Zulauf Hall, DeKalb,
IL 60115, USA.
E-mail: jkidder@niu.edu
Abstract In this paper, I explore the spatial logic of othering. This perspective helps
link a strong cultural program with microlevel analyses of small groups. Using ethno-
graphic and interview data of College Republicans at a mid-sized public university, I
report on the ways members mapped out boundaries to the civil order through ideo-
logical performances involving profane narratives about place. In talking about a wide
range of topics, the College Republicans in this study constructed a moral geography of
contemporary America – one that relegated urban areas into the realm of the uncivil. In
studying the spatial logic of othering, the resonance of campaign rhetoric like ‘‘real
America’’ and ‘‘New York values’’ come into sharper focus. Cultural research into
inequality and political discourse can benefit from the analysis of how perceptions of
the material world interrelate with identity and morality.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2018) 6, 161–188.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0023-5; published online 11 May 2017
Keywords: binaries; conservatism; discourse; identities; othering
Identifying with Places
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Alaska Governor and
Republican candidate for vice-president Sarah Palin famously characterized
the nation as possessing ‘‘wonderful little pockets of what I call the real
America.’’ She was speaking at a fundraiser in Greensboro, NC, and she
went on to explain that such pockets were the ‘‘pro-America areas of this
great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the
courage of everyday Americans’’ (quoted in Leibovich, 2008). Eight years
later, during his 2016 presidential bid, Texas Senator Ted Cruz repeatedly
faulted his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump, for
possessing ‘‘New York values.’’ When questioned, Cruz elaborated, ‘‘I think
most people know exactly what New York values are. […] Everyone
2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology Vol. 6, 1, 161–188
www.palgrave.com/journals
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Our goal in this paper is to analyze the discursive practices used in the construction of conservative social identities on college campus-not to examine the race-based privileges undergirding these narratives, fitting though they may be (cf. Kidder 2018). Instead, we will show that discussions about the president and his administration were a way for right-leaning students to promote what they felt were the most valued images of the self within the interview setting (Zussman 1996). ...
... Ten are women. Based on firsthand observations of conservative college groups, reviews of the clubs' official social media posts, as well as past research on right-leaning college students (Binder and Wood 2013;Kidder 2016Kidder , 2018, we assume the dearth of minorities in our data is representative of typical club memberships, while women are probably overrepresented in our subset. Which is to say, student-led groups on the right are disproportionately populated by white men. ...
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