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Trump is not the exception when it comes to Republicans
On this point, I hate to be proven right
It was in college that I found my passion for politics. This is back in the Reagan 1980s, before George H.W. Bush was elected President. There was a group of college republicans who were radical and extreme and who had come to dominate campus politics. I dropped by interest in studying Chinese and computer science — much to my later regret — to pursue what I felt was my calling at the time: helping to defeat these extremists.
At the time, my girlfriend argued that by engaging in political bloodsport, fighting them at their own game, that I was debasing the entire political process. I argued to her then that the Nazis were able to come to power in Germany because the people who opposed them were unwilling to do everything they could to defeat them.
When I left college, I am proud to say that the student governance was firmly in the hands of a coalition of progressives who abhorred the nasty extremism of these college republicans. I had also helped establish a number of institutions aimed at stopping this group from gaining the kind of influence they had when I started college three years before. It was not just my efforts — there was a group of us committed to the same goal.
