I’m going to begin this article with an apology. This was promised as a piece in response to the Class Lists referendum, but leaving writing somewhat to the last minute has meant that any thoughts or ruminations I have about Cambridge’s traditions of putting exam results up on bits of paper outside a building seem utterly meaningless. Instead, what I want to talk about is voter-shaming and social media as an echo-chamber and the way in which this silences a mass of voters leading to a ‘surprise’ result. What we saw play out in the Class Lists debate is perhaps an interesting microcosm for understanding what can happen on a much larger scale in the US election and the EU referendum. 

Before the referendum on Class Lists was officially announced, lines were already drawn up and sides were taken. A narrative was quickly created – largely by the campaign to scrap Class Lists – in which opting to get rid of Class Lists was the ‘right’ vote to help combat the University’s issues with mental health, archaic tradition, and diversity. To vote to keep Class Lists therefore made you a ‘bad’ person, intolerant of and insensitive to the issues of others. The people voting to keep Class Lists were vilified, and The Tab’s endorsement of their campaign helped to perpetuate this. 

What happens when you vilify a significant segment of an electorate is not that you change the way they vote. Brexit showed us this. Instead, what happens is they become alienated, disenfranchised, disengaged. Some people respond to this by becoming increasingly vocal and radical, as we saw with many of the Trump stories making sensationalist headlines this summer. Whether you consider it reasonable or not, much of the British press and establishment was so aggressively anti-Brexit that it was a natural response for many of the Brexiteers to feel outcast – and therefore to club together and create their own dialogue outside of the mainstream. This validates their views as they disengage from the opposition, often (in the case of Brexit and Trump) choosing to label their opponents as a construct or conspiracy of the establishment. Once thus disengaged, there is no longer any obligation to play by the rules by which ‘normal’ politics operates, leading to an exponential rise in extreme views. 

However, there is also a second group of voters who support Class Lists, Brexit, and/or Trump who do not respond to the vilification by speaking louder to each other, but rather by becoming silent. And this is where the real problem lies. Whole groups of people have been made to feel that their personal opinion is wrong, invalid and something to be ashamed of. This means that they do not tell people how they are voting, and do not engage in the debate. We all, no matter which way we voted, are then surprised by the result. I don’t think many of the 55 per cent of voting students who supported Class Lists felt during the debate that they were in the majority, but there was a silent, anonymous solidarity to be found in the ballot paper. 

The problem here goes beyond confounding polling predictions. The silencing removes an entire group of people from the discussion, meaning that there is no opportunity for persuasion, reasoned debate or compromise between the two sides. This deepens the sense of division in the electorate, which becomes extremely problematic once the votes are counted. When a result is as close as the EU referendum, Class Lists, or the US election, what must be recognised is that both sides have some points which a significant number of people support. The outcome, then, should not become a binary dichotomisation of one side ‘winning’ and the other becoming alienated and forced into submission. What needs to happen is an appreciation of the fact that the best solution must lie somewhere in the liminal space between the two, as clearly neither is ideal.

White female votes have turned their back on women of colour

But we don’t like this liminal space. Sensationalist media and our desire to join a ‘side’ create a dialogue in which it’s hard to come out as being somewhere in the middle, seeing value in both arguments. There is a pressure to have an opinion, and you are framed as a traitor by each side by not committing fully. This schism once more disenfranchises and alienates a large group of people with more nuanced or ambivalent views, and they in turn become more likely to vote in protest against the perceived establishment.

Voting today is such a public act. Gone are the days of coy traditional Britishness where one should not reveal one’s vote. Instead, in the run up to Brexit I was inundated with opinion-based Facebook statuses, the liking of which was deeply political. This perpetuates an echo-chamber effect, in which people feel validated in their opinions as their friends who tend to be voting the same way (being often from similar backgrounds) provide support and parrot back the same opinions, creating an unrepresentative and misleading image of the electorate. Once more, the silent divergents feel excluded, further fomenting those feelings of division and disenfranchisement. 

But these silent divergents have won. CUSU will support Class Lists; Brexit will occur; Trump will become the next US President. Since the results of the American election have been announced, my newsfeed has been filled with status after status expressing anger, shock and disbelief at this result, and asking who are these people who voted for Trump. But the point is that these people aren’t an abstract entity: they are ordinary people who exist among us. And if we want to have a say in the complex political procedures which have now been triggered we need to talk to them, not rage at them