hen election results started pouring in, in 2016, I was an undergraduate student in the US in my sophomore year. On election night, I was surrounded by a group of like-minded friends. We were studying at a university where the student body mostly had uniform liberal views on social and cultural issues, in a state that leaned heavily towards the Democratic Party.

Like those around me, I found it hard to believe how so many Americans could vote for someone like Trump, given his record of racism and sexism. The values I cherished, and I believed America stood for, were not represented by the party that wanted to ‘make America great again’.

The ideological homogeneity of my surroundings, coupled with the naivety of a young impressionable mind had blind-sided me into not realising that the narratives propagated by the Democratic Party were convenient political ploys.

For quite some time, the Democratic Party has been focused on aligning itself behind popular stances on prominent sociocultural issues. They have chased opinions instead of forming any. Performance on issues that actually mattered to the American public has either been ignored or relegated. Nowhere was this more........

© The News on Sunday