Delivering an opinion requires a certain awareness of how that opinion will land with its audience. This is to say, when someone delivers an opinion in a public forum, it is accompanied by a rhetorical goal. We are an opinionated student body, and the Daily provides a wonderful forum for these opinions. But, I am skeptical about some of this forum’s present use. Some pieces deliver quite familiar arguments into a situation — our campus culture — entirely ready to receive their underlying sentiments. What do we say of an opinion whose rhetorical goal is completely harmonious with its rhetorical situation? Is this not the same as pouring a glass of water into a bucket of the stuff?
Two recent opinion pieces fall into this problem. As a preliminary, I will say that I am left-leaning politically and thus consider myself sympathetic to the authors’ ends. Additionally, I am commenting on the pieces and not the individuals themselves, taking them as characteristic of a larger trend.
The author of the two-part opinion, titled “Stop denying women’s bodily autonomy,” has quite noble goals. The piece declares its rhetorical intention in its title. Men must acknowledge their privilege and act to abolish this. We ought to care about the issue of women’s reproductive health and vote in the upcoming election accordingly. The resounding command at the end of the work reads: “It is now time to recognize this privilege and return it to those whose lives and bodies are in fact directly impacted by their uterus.” However, I am not sure that this piece possesses much rhetorical-situational force.
Women’s reproductive health is an incredibly respected issue among youth voters. When asked by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics to compare any two issues, 50% or more responding youth voters considered women’s reproductive rights to be more important than climate change, the Israel/Palestine conflict, corruption, inflation and student debt. In short, women’s bodily autonomy is on the young voter’s mind.
Further, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights — which uses statistics from a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research — 76% of students surveyed from nine Northeastern states “prefer to go to college in a state where abortion is legal and accessible” and “84% of students and 69% of parents do not want the student to be without abortion access while at college.” The motivation for sampling specifically the Northeast region is that “it has the highest share (45%) of students who leave their states for college—plus students would be leaving home states where abortion was legal.” We can reasonably infer, therefore, that the preference for abortion access when deciding on undergraduate location will reflect a generally pro-choice sentiment among Tufts students. Further, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, “among adults under age 30, 76% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases” and, further, “about two-thirds of college graduates (68%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”
Reiteration of, and reminders about crucial issues, especially personally relevant ones, is unequivocally good. But, as an opinion piece, I am not sure this style of argumentation accomplishes much. The piece resonates with the view of many, if not most, undergraduates. Entirely anecdotally, I do not doubt that, were this opinion delivered to a room of Tufts students, it would be thoroughly respected, if not celebrated. Once more, I do not make this remark to imply this campus consensus is wicked. Far from it. I merely mean to indicate the utter resonance between this opinion and the campus doxa. So, because its rhetoric lacks any dissonance with its surrounding environment, the opinion piece, in its capacity as an opinion, accomplishes, strictly speaking, nothing.
Without any disruptive rhetorical content, left-leaning opinion pieces released into an open-armed left-leaning environment can fall, in the worst cases, into incorrect and unsupported assertions. The piece “Inflation is pretty much fake” slips into this trouble. The author lists various statistics regarding Target’s profits and their move to cut prices, then concludes that inflation is almost entirely fabricated. This verdict is not sound. The M1 money supply, measuring money as a medium of exchange, leaped from around $4 trillion in March 2020 to over $16 trillion in June 2024, according to the database Federal Reserve Economic Data. This means that, over the pandemic, the amount of spendable money in circulation skyrocketed. The increase in spendable money resulting from the U.S. government’s pandemic policy, among other factors, created an increase in effective demand. As there was more money around, people wanted to and could purchase more retail goods. Since more people wanted to buy goods and more money was available, demand increased and prices rose. Additionally, the value of each dollar decreased following this increase in money supply.
This increase in effective demand combined with supply chain difficulties created the conditions for inflation. According to a report by the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, “The combination of sharply increased demand for goods … and the gaps at critical points of supply chains and transportation networks, created shortages and sharp price increases.” There are real, socioeconomic mechanisms that result in the nominal increase in the price of goods. The author asks: “This sudden and significant cut in prices [from Target in 2023] begs the question — if Target could always support these lower prices, why were the prices raised in the first place?” According to this logic, we could similarly ask “If Target could increase prices during the pandemic, why did they not before?” Here we see the inferential issue, and the argument carries, in truth, no explanatory power. I am not saying that corporations or firms are benevolent actors or that they do not seek to rob their customers when the gods allow. I am simply saying that false inferences, incorrect phrases and anti-capitalist sentimentalism do not and will not move any minds on a campus so in agreement with its motivating rhetoric.
What, then, is the point of this piece? Our shared campus consensus lays an excellent ground for debate over controversial and difficult subjects. That abortion on campus is not a hot-button issue compared to the rest of the country allows for lots of discursive potential on and around this topic. But, to declare fairly common sentiments pushes us nowhere. I would like to see an environment where individuals seek to make strong points which are, in some sense, a risk. It is neither helpful, productive nor situation-changing to release opinions into a domain over-willing to accept them. At best, these pieces result in platitudinal remarks and, at worst, in untruths. My peers should look to cultivate some tension with their ideas and opinions. Otherwise, there might as well be nothing new under the sun.
J.R. Roche is a junior at Tufts University studying political science.
