There are few alumni who attract such ire from the Duke community as Stephen Miller. Students loathe him for his brashness and nationalist policies; staff openly denounce his role in planning immigration raids across the country; and the Duke administration — well, to them Stephen Miller is something like the boogeyman to a small child tucked beneath the blanket, shuddering in abject horror and wishing he would “just go away.”
But before Miller rose to the highest heights of political power in the United States, angering nearly every political faction on his ascent, he was a columnist for this very paper. As an undergraduate, Miller wrote on a wide range of topics, often under hilariously terse titles like “Prejudice,” “Betrayal,” and “Persecution” — perhaps an emotional theme is already emerging. Other columns, to his credit, still resonate today, particularly those criticizing Duke’s lack of care for America’s cultural distinctives.
For all my agreements and disagreements with the many arguments Miller penned during his time in Durham, there is one column that stands apart — not merely because it is wrong, but because it illustrates a fundamental error at the heart of his brand of “national conservatism.”…