In 2023, a study found that young people’s voting habits are heavily influenced by the voting patterns of where they grew up. That has certainly been the case for me. I grew up in Oakland, Calif., which belongs to the most Democratic-leaning congressional district in the country. I went to a high school with a very progressive student body, and now I’m at Tufts with a similarly progressive student body.
I began to challenge the highly progressive environment around which I grew up when an influential Democratic climate group called the Sunrise Movement began attacking former President Joe Biden for not being progressive enough. The organization complained that Biden was compromising too much with the Republican Party by whittling down his American Jobs Plan, a $2.3 billion plan unveiled as part of his Build Back Better agenda. They claimed that, as a result, the bill was becoming “weaker, smaller, and [will fail] to meet the challenges we face.” The problem with the Sunrise Movement’s criticism was that it completely overlooked the fact that reducing the plan was not a result of Biden’s attempts to be bipartisan. In reality, it was largely the work of former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, now infamous in the Democratic Party for torpedoing many progressive legislative proposals.
As someone who attended a virtual Sunrise Movement meeting in 2020, I was appalled by how short-sighted this claim was. Up until then, I had taken everything that the far-left said as gospel and not really questioned it. After this, however, I began to question the progressive environment. I realized that the ideology I subscribed to encouraged me to believe something that was uninformed.
Following this initial experience, my willingness to question the opinions of my peers began in earnest about a year ago with the response to the Israel-Hamas war. I saw the opinions of the ardently pro-Palestinian movement and the pro-Israel camp as having good points but both overlooking incredibly important parts of the conflict. To me, it seemed they were unwilling to try to understand each other’s perspective. I realized that one side of an issue, especially an issue as fraught as the Israel-Hamas war, never has all the answers.
To continue to explore other political ideologies unfamiliar to me, I enrolled in Professor Eitan Hersh’s class on conservatism in America last fall. Although this experience by no means made me a conservative, I can say that it helped me question many of my own left-leaning assumptions that I had just accepted because my peers around me thought the same.
Unfortunately, I think in today’s political climate it is more difficult than ever for people on the left to listen to what people on the right have to say. Part of this is understandable, as the Republican Party continues to swing far to the right and holds a reputation thoroughly marred by their widespread acceptance of election denial. Thankfully, there are still many more conservative thinkers out there who have a commitment to truth. If for no other reason than to actually educate yourself about how the other side views the world, some current thinkers I would recommend looking into include David Brooks, David French and David Frum. Although I certainly disagree with all three of these men on many issues, they are intelligent, eloquent writers, and their work provides the reader with a clear view of how they see the world.
So I have an assignment for you after finishing this article. Go think of an assumption that someone of your ideological persuasion might have and think of a possible counterargument against it. Better yet, is there an assumption that you’ve always been suspicious of but have just been too afraid to ask about? If you can do that, you’re well on your way toward becoming a less dogmatic, more intelligent political thinker.
