When I joined Princeton as a freshman in the fall of 2016, I had few political opinions and even those that I did have generally fell on the liberal side of the spectrum. I prided myself on my moderate beliefs and the ability to consider both sides but pass no judgments about either. I believed that everyone had their stories and, especially as a recent, first-generation immigrant, it was hardly my place to judge. I walked through the FitzRandolph Gate with as blank-slated a mind as would make even Descartes proud. I had followed the 2016 election fairly well and voted for Hillary Clinton. When Michigan and my home state of Pennsylvania turned red that night, I was disappointed.
But it was just another election. Having grown up in an absolute monarchy and a corrupt democracy for all my life, I was happy there was one to begin with. It was refreshing to have voted in an election unmarred by claims of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and fraudulent tallying. Yes, my candidate had lost, but at least the centuries-old constitutional republic had survived yet another bitter political season.
With the election wrapped up, I looked for a home on campus for my moderate, slightly liberal views. I found none. What I did find, however, was how much I loathed the Ivy League’s brand of liberalism.
In the aftermath of the election, I saw some of the country’s smartest students compete to illustrate just how undeserving of that recognition they were. Intellect and rationality were overcome by factionalism and emotion. The battle for safe spaces turned into a war on free speech. The idea of tolerance was soon polluted and weaponized to shut down conservative opinions. Discourse had become offensive, ideas harmful, and universities summarily abandoned the ideal of diverse thought that they had spent decades pursuing.
For a moderate, this wasn’t just shocking — it was alienating. Moderation had no place in elite liberalism. One was either with the herd or against it.
It became clear that campus liberalism had few goals other than its own canonization as the sole intellectually acceptable view. The more I was told that liberalism was for the intellectuals, the more repulsed I was. The further I was pushed to the Left, the further Right I ended up. There was no longer independent thought. Indeed, there was no original thought. All that Trump did was wrong. It did not matter what his policies were, how they were justified, what ends they sought to accomplish, or what nuances they contained. From the ACLU to the Alliance for Justice and from CNN to The New York Times, it was clear that opposition to conservatism had undergone a radical shift, from an emphasis on ideas to an emphasis on identity. Gone were the days of actual discourse that mobilized the moderate base. A new age of identity politics and open media bias had dawned on the political horizon, forcing polarization and factionalism even among those who desperately tried to resist its beckoning. For all the Left’s claims of liberal superiority, this fundamental shift was as politically suicidal as it was intellectually dishonest.
Even from a practical vantage point, it was exceedingly difficult to take seriously the cries for assorted strains of justice when more than half of the students in every Princeton class were headed to Wall Street, occupying it in a much different sense than Leftists intended in 2011. They could barely practice what they so fervently preached. Of course, as they soon realized, socialism was far easier to proclaim from their ivory towers than it was to live out with a Princeton degree in hand.
For a moderate to whom neither side was inherently better than the other, these progressions of the Left were truly revealing. It was clear that modern liberalism was imploding and, thankfully enough, there was no room for me on that sinking ship. My rightward drift finally found me the home that I had been denied on the other side. And so it was that, in less than a year, I had gone from voting against Trump to helping write his speeches.
Akhil Rajasekar is a student at Princeton University in the class of 2021.
