Since the election, President Donald Trump’s opponents have struggled to find their role in the new era. Political norms seem irrelevant and liberals are struggling to make themselves heard. Two weeks ago in the Review, Will Cramer suggested that activists rely on intuition over facts to make arguments, particularly in regard to immigration reform (“Immigration Raid Discourse Requires Moral Intuition,” Feb. 24, 2017). I agree that appealing to people’s compassion and morality can be persuasive. I also share in Cramer’s frustration about the cold, empirical politics of establishment Democrats. But this perspective, fairly prevalent among Oberlin progressives, could exacerbate the anti-truth trend in American...

Democrats have a tough time getting into the trenches. This has been clear from the beginning of the Obama era, when the Tea Party was able to thwart a number of progressive policy initiatives, despite being a political minority. It became frustratingly apparent when Senate Republicans successfully blocked federal Justice Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court for an unprecedented 293 days. Facing partisan impediments at nearly every turn over the past eight years, congressional Democrats chose to take the high road. They chose to place their faith in the system, believing that if only they could weather the storm, the ship would right itself, and the Republican Party would be exposed and punished for the...

While many students were preparing themselves for a Thanksgiving full of feasting and celebrating with loved ones Nov. 21, law enforcement officers at Standing Rock were assaulting protesters with water cannons in below-freezing temperatures. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has been assaulted, terrorized and arrested since April for exercising its right to peacefully protest against the unethical construction of the North Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline, designed to serve as a key link between the state’s oil wells, was originally mapped to cut through Bismarck, ND — an area with more than 92 percent white residents as of the 2010 census — but was instead rerouted through tribal nations. The U.S. Army Corps of...

In the three years that I have been writing this column, I’ve rarely discussed politics. I always found political op-eds to be pretentious and impersonal, as though the writer spent so long digging for facts that they never considered the emotional significance of their story. But now, in the wake of the most disturbing election in recent history, I find myself scrambling to make sense of what happened. This is a rare moment when words feel totally useless, when no amount of eloquence can explain what we’re seeing, much less its significance. It’s impossible to catalog the effects this will have on our future, but at a fundamental level, the election of Donald Trump has called into question our understanding of language. ...