The Left Lost My Soviet-Refugee Grandmother. Now They’ve Lost Me Too.

Until the Left returns to normalcy, there will be many non-voters like myself.

On the morning of November 5th, 2024, I made a choice that went against what my friends, the media, and countless texts and campaign ads ordered that I do. I stayed home and didn’t vote. The records had me down as a registered Democrat, but my feeling of allegiance to the Democratic Party had slowly faded into oblivion. I remember when such a reality seemed unimaginable, when I too would demand all others do their duty and pull the lever for blue, but it’s been a long eight years.

In 2016, like many young girls inspired by the prospect of a female-centric future, I voted for Hillary Clinton. As a nineteen-year-old liberal-minded daughter of immigrants, I saw a candidate who seemed to represent everything I cherished: intellectualism, women’s rights, and freedom. That fall, I voted in the basement of my parents’ apartment building for the first time in my life, prancing out of the booth with a cheeky “I Voted” sticker on my chest and my democratic values lodged inside my heart.

As a sophomore at Columbia University, I would often get into arguments with my grandparents about the antics of Donald Trump: around that time, “the locker room talk” scandal was all the rage. My grandmother, a Soviet immigrant with a deeply intellectual background as a retired professor of chemistry, would brush it off as typical “boys will be boys” behavior.

I remember feeling perpetually bewildered that my biggest role model, a woman who had lived through and escaped the oppressive regime of the Soviet Union, where neighbors snitched on one another to the KGB and the press kowtowed to the whims of Joseph Stalin, would support a candidate that John Oliver and Trevor Noah told me would erect an American Third Reich. We were Jewish, after all.

During the several months leading up to the 2016 election, I attributed my grandmother’s scorn of the Democratic Party to her senility—at the end of the day, it was she who had taught me everything I stood for, emphasizing the value of diverse perspectives in the literature she had both grown up with and had been barred from, insisting that a woman could be both a powerful career woman and a loving mother, and parroting her favorite talking point that we should never take our American freedoms for granted.

So I was rightfully perplexed by her allegiance to Donald Trump. Trump did not stand for the pursuit of knowledge. Trump substantiated the anti-feminist predictions of Margaret Atwood. And Trump certainly did not understand the fragility of our freedoms.

Trump did not have values.

Yet on the morning of Wednesday, November 9th, 2016, walking into an exam for my 10am Abnormal Psychology lecture at Barnard College (Columbia’s all-girls sister school), I was taken aback to find that the morning’s most abnormal behavior patterns were not in the exam questions but on the faces of my classmates, many of whom burst into the classroom noticeably bawling, insisting that they were unable to sit for the exam because of the election result. The professor acquiesced and moved the exam to the following week, leaving me annoyed: I had spent countless hours studying for a scheduled exam, and now, because of the whims of these women, the students who had adequately prepared themselves would have the rest of their week derailed.

And what were they crying over? No one had died. Barack Obama would still be president for the next several months. We would have a cretin for a president for the next four years, but had these girls never heard about the checks and balances of the American government? Did they really think that they—members of the privileged elite whose parents were paying 80k per year for them to attend one of the best universities in the world—would be personally affected by the reign of Donald Trump?

And what was more astonishing was that my classmates—girls who supposedly represented the apex of female empowerment—did not seem to embody the feminist strength my grandmother had taught me.

My grandmother knew that, as women, we would always prevail through life’s slings and arrows. My classmates were, instead, incapable of sitting for a forty-five-minute exam because they had read on their phones that the world was ending. This was not feminism; this was its antithesis.

Back across the street at Columbia, away from the far-left Barnard fever, I expected to be met with a dose of sanity—liberal-minded people like me who, although critical of Trump, would spend the day brainstorming solutions to keep democracy alive instead of narcissistically upending everyone else’s lives to make space for their mental health crises. Instead, a fever had set upon campus even more ominous than that we would witness four years later in March of 2020. These students, either melodramatically sulking to class or barricading themselves in their dorm rooms, genuinely believed that Trump’s presidency would be the end of liberal democracy.

So why was I—someone supposedly on their side—so radically unaffected by the election? Did I not have a heart? Did I not care about the future of America as much as everyone else? Or did I know that Trump was not as terrifying for America as the media made him out to be?

I had rarely dabbled in politics. In high school, I tended to eschew political conversations because of how famously divisive they were. Yet I was taught that America was the land of candid conversation, so I looked forward to having discussions with my peers and professors. I returned to my dorm room that evening expecting to have such a candid conversation with my roommate. Instead, I was quickly branded a misogynist for daring to ask why everyone seemed so upset that afternoon, permanently shattering my relationship with my roommate for the year to come.

“But wait!” I wanted to scream. “I’m on your side!”

In the months that followed, I began paying more attention to politics. I read up on the philosophical foundations of our government and followed Trump’s every action. In Trump, I began to see not so much a raving lunatic as, in the words of Sam Harris, a man who simply desired to “build condos and play golf.” Trump may not have been the greatest president of all time, but he didn’t seem as determined to undermine our system of government as the Left claimed.

Meanwhile, on campus, the menacing spirit of November 9th did not diffuse. Rather, over the next several months, it permeated classrooms, infecting the rhetoric of my professors, and suffocating the voices of the handful of my classmates who, like me, dared to pose slightly oppositional questions. This antagonism was perhaps most apparent in my far-left English classes, where I was dubbed a misogynist for my unorthodox thesis on the works of Sylvia Plath. It also existed at the campus Hillel and on the board of my literary magazine’s editorial team, which chose to prioritize submissions from underrepresented demographics regardless of quality, because, as our secretary so aptly put it, “If they’re writing about oppressed minorities, it has to be good.”

How did liberalism, once the label for all things good and free, devolve our publication into a monstrosity akin to Joseph Stalin’s Pravda?

Graduating Columbia, I was left not with the open-minded experience I was promised in my acceptance letter but rather with a conviction that still haunts me today: the Intellectual Left does not stand for freedom of expression. The Intellectual Left is concerned solely with shutting down dissenting viewpoints in order to entrench a fanciful narrative that functions to shut down opposition. This absence of free speech was exactly the chaos my family had fled in the Soviet Union.

Yet reflecting on Trump’s term for years later, I realized that my classmates’ prediction was, in many ways, correct: we would witness the downfall of society during Donald Trump’s presidency. Yet it was neither he nor Republicans to blame. Instead, gradually and insidiously, we witnessed our institutions replicate what I had observed on the campus of Columbia University that somber morning in November of 2016: a narcissistic tendency to blow all dissenting viewpoints out of proportion and refuse to engage in open discourse. This status quo inspired me to found a project of my own, Pens and Poison, this past May to provide a space for free discourse on literature without the ideological bent I had identified in America’s prevailing literary institutions.

Trump may not be an intellectual. Trump may not have set values. But the values of the current Left oppose everything I was taught to cherish. And if to me—the freedom-loving daughter of immigrants who once spiritedly voted in favor of Clinton—a valueless, anti-intellectual, volatile candidate seemed slightly more appealing this time around than a multicultural woman who claimed to uphold democracy, then the Democratic Party has failed us as an institution.

And while I still could not bring myself to vote for Trump given his penchant for antisemitic comments or his responsibility for the attacks of January 6th, I sympathize with the 71 million Americans—many of them young and multicultural—who put their foot down and proclaimed “enough is enough” in the face of the Left’s puzzling anti-liberal intellectual stance.

Until the Left returns to a state of normalcy, tolerating diverse viewpoints and upholding the values of freedom of expression, we will be left with many undecided voters, who, like me, could not bring themselves to cast their vote on November 5th.

As I dole out apologies to my 95-year-old grandmother, who always taught me the values of liberalism and freedom, I become increasingly crestfallen that her prediction was correct: the Left is not normal, the Left is not free.

Yet maybe, as we ride out four more years of Trump, we—the freedom-loving people of America—may band together with a sober mission: to ensure that our treasured institutions always allow thought, dissent, and openness. Only then can we transcend both the anti-intellectualism of Trump and the radicalism of the Left.