Blindsighted: the ignorance of literature in the light of the elections

You are shocked. You are shocked that your guardian of democracy, Vice President Kamala Harris, an acclaimed former prosecutor, attorney general and California senator endorsed by Obama itself is at the mercy of the electoral college And the general population.

You are shocked that Donald J. Trump, the disgraced 45th president, convicted the felon on 34 counts of bill fraud, the “fascist to the core,” has completed a decade-long political victory lap that has left most of our great nation, and almost every critical throw, brilliantly red.

You are shocked – but I, on behalf of the many experts and thinkers of the past – am not.

For much of the past three months, it seemed redundant to argue or even imagine that the Veep was facing defeat against Trump’s third bid for the Oval Office. We called on Allan Lichtman 13 keysit turned out that a “silent majority‘ might not succeed in gaining the upper hand and assured us that historically incorrect poll would, by some miracle, produce a Blue Victory. We were more than wrong.

Instead of looking at circumstances retrospectively, we have created an illusion in which our problems reflect those of the larger Republic.

By “we” I refer to people like us, Cornellians: elite, politically motivated, and highly educated. This demographic, in which political actors toil on beneficial issues, becomes utterly exhausted when the rest of the nation defeats the candidate of their choice. But if we took it upon ourselves to open a book, which many of us have failed to do as anecdotal evidence shows, Maybe we were better prepared for the elections.

Take William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. This groundbreaking work argues that the contemporary university has moved further away from classical liberal values and religion itself, and has instead forced scholars to respond to a secularist, one-size-fits-all agenda. During Buckley’s time at Yale, the administration touted reformist values that would supposedly prepare the institution for a new era. Instead, academic freedom was brutally destroyed and in turn suppressed students’ ability to question the society outside Phelps Gate. At its core, Buckley’s work is a commentary on atheism in academia, but moreover it reflected a “battle between individualism and collectivism,” a condition we face decades later.

Just as Buckley highlighted the dangers of ideological conformity within academic institutions like ours, current political discourse often reflects similar concerns, especially when elite voices scrutinize figures like Donald Trump. Based on MSNBC’s prediction that Trump would be the winner after claiming all 10 of Wisconsin’s electoral votes, Jen Psaki, the former press secretary under President Biden, said: ran down the list from opponents who, according to her, would have considered him unfit for the highest seat. From his earlier loss, where Trump “refused to accept the outcome” to his “authoritarian” regime and Project 2025, Psaki reflected our confusion. But in her shaky, trembling speech, she too could not imagine a second Trump term, out of concern for her culturally homogeneous peers.

Like Psaki, many of us are living in the bubble that Buckley warned about. We abandon the Blue Pill and denounce anything that is not complementary to our agenda, which in theory alleviates inequality and upholds individualism across a broad demographic context. When we inquire about current issues, we assume that the average citizen is concerned with their implementation anti-racism policy or the meaning (or lack thereof) of using “Latinx‘ about gendered pronouns. We are entangled in progressive phenomena, arguments within academia and identity. But ultimately, our discourse is unchangeable, and confirmation bias is rampant. And it’s clear we’re not done reading yet.

Conversely, the average American could care less about the progressives’ anti-Trump agenda; we can call them uneducated or downright stupidbut in the end they Trump agreed. This intellectual bubble only reinforces the individualism of Cornellians and fails to take into account the way that people with less political awareness and less education were put off by a campaign based on principles that they saw as irrelevant.

When a confused John King announced an expected Trump victory in Georgia, I acknowledged that my predictions would come true. So I went to bed, not grieving or downtrodden. But I did think about a second piece of literature, one that warned against democratic negligence: that of Yascha Monuk The identity trap.

The book, published last year, outlines the party principles that would contribute to the Democrats’ major downfall. Monuk struggles with a self-referential ‘identity synthesis”, a progressive initiative that has taken the political world by storm since the early 2010s. From campus to campus, identity-focused curricula have “woke” the country’s elite institutions and painted the party that represents them as self-serving.

This was all unintentional, of course. According to Monuk, what was likely perceived as a new standard for addressing generational inequality and racism has actually created a culture of intolerance. Your ethnicity or economic status was once a facet of your person and political views. However, in the synthesis, all questions, arguments and customs are examined, but from a narrow lens that places identity above all else.

If you look further the environment Monuk talks about, you’ll find the rest of America struggling with practical, everyday problems. Rising costs in Central America, a declining working class and even The fears of Latinos that a further influx of illegal immigrants would make them invaluable are just some of the many priority issues for voters, and ones that elite voters like us were unaware of. Even in the most violet counties, those of the Biden administration clumsiness regarding America’s backbone – manufacturing and agriculture – was more than enough reason to vote against his most notable successor. And the endless discourse about identity, or what many have called the “Great Awokening,” only serves as a distraction from the pressures Americans face.

Olivia Reingold of the Free Press revealed the positions of an overlooked demographic group: the voters of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Trump captured this reliably purple county by twice the margin he had during his first campaign. According to Reingold, independents, Latinos and young voters were disastrous for Harris’ success in the region, which delivered a victory for Trump. Unlike those in comfortable positions, this American workforce could not bear to witness further price increases and wage stagnation due to trivial identity politics. One of the voters Reingold spoke to was Justine Zaremba, whose family development depended on a booming economy when she would have to “convince herself not to have children.”

Sure, this commitment may not coincide with ours, but we cannot underestimate the brutal nature of these forgotten voters. The Harris-Walz campaign was disconnected from the core area and predictably fell into Monuks’identity trap”.

Now let’s look at ‘Opinions and Social Pressure’ by Polish philosopher and psychologist Solomon Asch. When we consider Asch’s findings, we find that unanimous consent within a group resonates with the unsuspecting outsider; even the object or opinion assented to is irrefutably wrong. His theory, which posits that a “(polluted) social process” in which agents “surrender” to the whims of a popular belief (at least within a certain circle) impairs one’s critical thought processes.

It is clear that many have not been exposed to this critical commentary, hence our herd mentality when it comes to politics. If we step out of the fray and take a good look at the sameness that clouds our environment, we can apply such a philosophy and take pride in the diversity of thought.

Here at Cornell, we, among other elite institutions and coalitions, were dismayed, but only because we could not and would not listen to the voters we did not engage with. The cultural schism between us and the rest of America is greater than ever. We slipped leaflets under dormitory doors calling for blue votes, writing the Democratic narrative on them in chalk and setting up voter initiatives all over campus. But in what we believed to be grassroots organizational or political activism, we ignored the sports among us – and the body of critical works that warned of this corrosive mentality. Despite our adherence to progressivism, our political culture is ironically stagnant, a point consistent with the writings of the above-mentioned thinkers. That’s why I make my proposal: it’s time to escape the identity trap. As learned as we may think, there is a wealth of literature (even beyond those mentioned) that could change the status quo on campus. Because maybe, just maybe, if we would do our due diligence and realize the struggle of the taxed in return for fallible ‘progressive’ programs we could all have been ‘unencumbered 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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