You are shocked. You are shocked that your guardian of democracy, Vice President Kamala Harris, a commended former prosecutor, attorney general and Californian senator endorsed by Obama himself, has fallen to the whim of the electoral college and the general populace.
You are shocked that Donald J. Trump, the disgraced 45th President, the felon convicted on 34 counts of invoice fraud, the “fascist to the core,” has completed a decade-long political victory lap, painting the greater part of our great nation, and nearly every critical toss up, a brilliant red.
You are shocked — but I, on behalf of the many pundits and thinkers of prior — am not.
For much of the last three months, it seemed redundant to vouch or even presume that the Veep was in for a layup against Trump’s third bid for the Oval Office. We appealed to Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys, manifested that a “silent majority” might fail to prevail and assured ourselves that historically faulty polling would, by some miracle, shake out a Blue Victory. We were beyond mistaken.
Instead of considering circumstance with a retrospective eye, we have created an illusion wherein our problems mirror that of the greater Republic.
By “we,” I refer to those like us Cornellians: elite, politically motivated and highly educated. This demographic, wherein political agents toil over advantageous issues, find themselves utterly frazzled when the rest of the nation bests their candidate of choice. But if we took it upon ourselves to open a book, which many of us have failed to do as anecdotal evidence shows, we might have been more prepared for the election.
Take William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. This seminal work argues that the contemporary university has grown distant from classical liberal values and religion itself, instead coercing scholars to heed to a secularist, uniform agenda. During Buckley’s time at Yale, the administration touted reformist values that would supposedly prepare the institution for a new era. Instead, it brazenly quashed academic freedom and, in turn, suppressed students’ ability to question society beyond Phelps Gate. At its core, Buckley’s work is a commentary on atheism in academia, but moreover it reflected a “struggle between individualism and collectivism,” a plight we face decades later.
Just as Buckley highlighted the dangers of ideological conformity within academic institutions like ours, today’s political discourse often mirrors similar anxieties, particularly when elite voices scrutinize figures like Donald Trump. Upon MSNBC’s projection that Trump would be the victor after claiming all 10 of Wisconsin’s electoral votes, Jen Psaki, the former press secretary under President Biden, ran down the list of detractors that, to her, would have deemed him unfit for the highest seat. From his former loss in which Trump “refused to accept the outcome” to his “authoritarian” regime and Project 2025, Psaki reflected our confoundment. But she too, in her shaky, tremulous oration, could not conceive a second Trump term out of concern for her culturally homogenous peers.
Like Psaki, many of us dwell in the bubble Buckley warned of. We trip off the Blue Pill and denounce all that is not complementary to our agenda which, theoretically, alleviates inequities and upholds individualism across a breadth of demographics. When inquiring about the topical issues at stake, we assume the average citizen is concerned with the implementation of anti-racism policy or the significance (or lack thereof) of using “Latinx” over gendered pronouns. We are caught up with progressive phenomena, quarrels within academia and identity. But ultimately our discourse is invariable, and confirmation bias runs rampant. And it is evident that we have not done our reading.
Conversely, average Americans couldn’t care less about the progressives’ anti-Trump agenda; we may call them uneducated or outright dumb, but after all, they voted Trump in. This intellectual bubble reinforces merely Cornellians’ individualism and neglects to factor in how those with less political awareness and education were deterred by a campaign founded on principles irrelevant in their eyes.
When the befuddled John King announced a projected Trump win in Georgia, I acknowledged that my predictions would ring true. So I went to bed, neither grieving nor downtrodden. But I did ponder on a second piece of literature, one that warned against Democratic remiss: Yascha Monuk’s The Identity Trap.
Published just last year, the book outlines party principles that would contribute to the Dems’ great demise. Monuk grapples with a self-referential “identity synthesis,” a progressive initiative that, since the early part of the 2010s, has taken the political world by storm. From campus to campus, identity centric curricula rendered the nation’s elite institutions “woke,” and portrayed the party that represents them as self-serving.
This was all unintended, of course. According to Monuk, what was likely conceived as a new standard for addressing generational inequality and racism actually created a culture of intolerance. Your ethnicity or economic status was once a facet of your person and political views. Under the synthesis, however, all questions, arguments and habits fall under scrutiny, but from a narrow lens that merely places identity above all else.
If you look beyond the environment Monuk speaks of, you’ll find the rest of America struggling with practical, everyday issues. Rising costs in middle America, a diminishing working class and even Latinos’ fears that a further influx of illegal immigrants would render them invaluable are just some of the many priority issues for voters, and ones elite voters like ourselves were oblivious to. Even in the most violet of counties, the Biden administration’s clumsiness in regard to America’s backbone — manufacturing and agriculture — was more than sufficient reason to vote against his more salient successor. And the neverending discourse on identity, or what many have coined the “Great Awokening,” only distracts from the pressures facing Americans.
The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold unveiled the views of an overlooked demographic: the voters in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Trump won over this reliably purple county by two times the margin he had in his first campaign. According to Reingold, independents, Latino and young voters were cataclysmic to Harris’s success in the region, ringing in a win for Trump. Unlike those in our comfortable standing, these labor force Americans could not stand to witness further price hikes and wage stagnation over trivial identity politics. One of the voters Reingold spoke to was Justine Zaremba, whose familial development depended on a flourishing economy, whereas she would have to “convince [herself] not to have kids.”
Sure, these stakes may not coincide with ours, but we cannot underestimate the sheer brute of these forgotten voters. The Harris-Walz campaign was disjointed from the heartland and predictably fell into Monuk’s “identity trap”.
Let us now look to Polish philosopher and psychologist Solomon Asch’s “Opinions and Social Pressure.” When we consider Asch’s findings, we find that unanimous assent within a group resonates with the unsuspecting outsider, even the object or opinion assented to is irrefutably wrong. His theory, which asserts that a “[polluted] social process” in which agents “surrender” to the whim of a popular belief (at least within a certain circle) is a detriment to one’s critical thought processes.
Clearly, many have not been exposed to this critical commentary, hence our herd mentality as it relates to politics. If we step out of the fray and take a good, hard look at the unanimity that clouds our environment, we could apply such philosophy and take pride in diversity of thought.
Here at Cornell, among other elite institutions and coalitions, we were baffled, but only because we could not, and would not, hear out the voters we fail to associate with. The cultural schism between us and the rest of America is wider than ever. We slipped pamphlets under dormitory doors calling for blue votes, inscribed Democratic spiel in chalk and set up voter initiatives throughout campus. But in what we believed to be grassroots organizing or political activism, we ignored the rungs below us — and the lineage of critical works that warned against this corrosive mentality. Despite adherence to progressivism, our political culture is ironically stagnant, a point consistent with the aforementioned thinkers’ texts. Hence, I make my proposal: It is time to escape the identity trap. As learned as we may believe ourselves to be, there is a wealth of literature (even beyond those mentioned) that could shift the status quo on campus. Because maybe, just maybe, if we did our due diligence and realized the struggles of the burdened contra fallible “progressive” programmes, we all might have been “unburdened by what has been.”
Francis Jaso is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].
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