The Future is Conservative. Let’s Deal With It.

The streets of Cambridge are teeming with life: gaggles of important-looking professors in overcoats, groups of blindfolded and shaky-legged club initiates, a turkey or two. And planted outside of college dorms across our little blue city, one can still find Harris-Walz signs and flags incongruously declaring “When we fight, we win.”

Nearly a month after election day, Harvard students are still reeling from the results and our campus has frequently lent a tender hand, with houses offering mental health breaks and some professors even canceling class. But this coddling is self-defeating: If we care for the places that have brought us up, we cannot linger on political chagrin. Instead, we must work to make them better.

Particularly vulnerable groups are naturally and justifiably afraid for the future. But unlike the 2016 election, which resulted in largely disingenuous threats of American liberals’ mass exodus to Canada, the push to the right today is inescapable.

Across the globe, democratic values face a steep decline as populist regimes are sharply rising. My parents are Romanian immigrants, I was born and raised in Canada, and I am pursuing my studies in the United States. In the next few years, it’s quite possible that each of my national identities will be represented by leaders spanning the conservative to far-right spectrum – Pierre M. Poilievre in Canada, Donald Trump in the U.S., and ​​Călin Georgescu in Romania.

These leaders all claim to speak for those who feel they’ve been consistently cast aside and let down by their governments. Their talking points are nearly identical, their rhetoric expectedly cast in a pro-nationalist light, but they offer respite from unappealing and ineffective liberal agendas that continue to neglect young, marginalized, and working-class voters.

This enthusiastic swing to the right suggests these parties are filling important niches that the left continues to overlook. Worldwide, people are dissatisfied with their material conditions — the cost of groceries, scarce housing, and a lack of economic opportunities — and turn to the only politicians promising radical change.

Meanwhile, leftwing parties continue to sink deeper into political quicksand, scrambling to maintain trust as they fail to take hardline stances on the issues that matter most.

Unwilling to unequivocally endorse true progressive values on the border crisis, large corporations’ chokehold on the American public, and pressing global conflicts, Harris lost the little momentum that Biden’s resignation and “brat summer” had afforded her.

We can’t keep making the same mistakes. As college students, we seem to find some aspects of civil engagement more challenging than others. We’ll proudly wear “I voted” pins and virtually deify our favorite candidates, but we have little interest in understanding the beliefs and concerns of our peers, let alone the conservative majorities who continue to make electoral gains in the U.S. and beyond.

Our commitment to bipartisanship should extend beyond preaching intellectual vitality at the first sign of political disagreement. Rather, the liberal masses on our campus must reckon with the fact that a populist majority exists and that this group approaches political issues with a completely different set of baseline beliefs. Mutual understanding is made impossible when we are unwilling to step into the shoes of our ideological adversaries and entertain, for a moment, a different reality.

If we hope to heal the cracks that threaten to bifurcate not just Harvard, but populations worldwide, a shift in philosophy is essential. Understanding that we are not an island — that many of our peers come from states worse off than ours or countries with regimes far more dangerous than anything we’ll experience under Trump — is critical to building a productive perspective.

At Harvard, we audaciously build mighty belief systems informed disproportionately by Instagram reels, staunchly defending half-baked opinions cultivated over the course of our short lives. Instead, we ought to challenge our frame of reference and step out of our comfort zone. Speaking to non-Harvard affiliates about everything from politics to their upbringings carries unparalleled value.

Engaging critically with policy rather than party, with person rather than opinion, is a promising first step toward improving the status quo of campus dialogue.

So, staring down the barrel of conservative governance, I feel even more Romanian, Canadian, and American (albeit, symbolically) than ever before. I know there is room for progressive change, and I’m ready to fight for it.

Julia S. Dan ‘26, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Government Concentrator in Adams House.