Written by Jackson Trahant
Looking back at the four years that I’ve spent studying political science and philosophy at Harding, I have appreciated becoming part of the literati of politics. I’ve studied my Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; I’ve milled through J.S Mill and paid my 12 dollars for a copy of the Communist Manifesto, which I’m sure Marx would hate. I’ve written papers on Kautsky’s influence on modern Socialism and Mao Zedong’s rise to international prominence. Policies that would’ve meant nothing to me as a freshman now engage me in discourse (if they don’t fill me with rage), and I’ve formed what I think are some pretty educated opinions on all things politics. Sadly, coupled with this appreciation remains a quiet contentment, the acceptance of a fact that has made itself clearer every day: The last four years have changed nothing at all, at least as far as wider society is concerned, about the validity of my political opinions.
This fact first presented itself almost a year ago, while I was working a shift as a server. My boss’s husband asked me who I thought would win the 2024 presidential election, knowing that I studied such things. I answered trepidatiously, aware that such topics can arouse emotional responses; given that he was the husband of my boss, I decided to be careful in my wording and deliberate in my reasoning. The effort I’d gone through to anxiously defend my logic was in vain; as soon as I gave him my thoughts, he disregarded them in favor of his own, saying he’d seen some pretty convincing polls online, despite having been the one to ask.
This feeling of impotence was cemented in an argument I had with my mom eight months ago when she was visiting for Spring Sing. The topic of the conflict in Gaza came up, and my mother and I got into a heated debate. At one point I brought up how ridiculous it was for her to argue with me on the matter, considering that the same semester, I had written a 10-page paper, quoting 20 scholarly sources, on the history and nature of said conflict. I recognized then and now that that does not make me an expert. People dedicate their entire lives to international affairs and come up short to solve such complex issues. But up to that moment, I was the closest thing to an expert on the matter that she had ever met. She could not have cared less. She even seemed to think that my education blinded me to the truth, and that only by not studying the issue beyond public news sources kept her from bias.
I’ve talked to my political science professors, praying that they would tell me it gets better. Evidently, it doesn’t. They don’t talk politics outside of work, no matter how passionate they are about the fields of study they’ve spent decades teaching and researching. They turn down the questions like the one my boss’s husband presented. They go quiet when family members pipe up about what they saw on the news. They’ve given up hope of sharing their knowledge about political philosophy and government because they’ve come to expect their wisdom to fall on intentionally ignorant ears. Had my professors and I chosen to study engineering, I highly doubt that strangers would come up to me and argue about CAD models. Had we studied ecology, no one would have claimed that our academic community had categorized elephants into the wrong genetic class. But, because we chose political science, suddenly every axiom is under scrutiny, every piece of evidence subject to disregard as “part of the narrative.” So while I plan to graduate school to continue my passion for this seemingly futile endeavor, I do so knowing that I’m fighting an uphill battle against common opinion to make my opinion matter.
