Scrolling through Twitter last Sunday afternoon, willing away a collection of end-of-term essays, one tweet stood out. A news organisation posted: “Shopkeeper’s monkey pulls off girl’s headscarf in Libya, sparking violent clashes; at least 16 people killed and 50 others injured.” Four days of fighting had followed, with tanks and mortars involved from the second day. The monkey was, sadly, also killed. For not the first time in a strange year, it felt like reality had outdone parody.

Commentators – be they on the pages of newspapers or on Andrew Marr’s sofa – have been uniquely challenged by the events of 2016. Famously, in their book Superforecasting, Tetlock and Gardner used experimental data to show that the average ‘expert’ is no better at predicting political and economic events than a dart-throwing chimp; in fact, often the chimp comes off better – and that has never been easier to believe than now. Just this last month, ‘psychic’ monkeys, dogs and sharks all did what the head of Cambridge’s Politics department, Professor David Runciman, and so many others failed to: predict Donald Trump’s election victory.

Worse still, commentators’ explanations – often offered within hours of the occurrence of events they had hitherto said would never happen – seem, to me at least, to be severely wanting. If I had a pound for every time I have read ‘left behind by globalisation’, ‘tide of populism’ or ‘post-truth politics’ recently, my student debt wouldn’t seem nearly so bad. What do these phrases, bandied about the national comment pages and echoing onto Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines, actually mean?

Take, for example, ‘tide of populism’. What is populism other than a name we give democracy when we don’t like its result? How does the image of populism conjured by the rhetoric of some embittered Remain-ers – of the hoodwinked working classes who didn’t understand what they were voting for – reconcile with American populism, where Trump won among voters earning over $50,000, and Clinton among those earning under? And what of the fact that Marine Le Pen’s National Front is now the top choice of France’s 18-to-30-year-olds, while young people in Britain overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU? Suddenly, the story doesn’t seem so simple.

“I hope we get to hear more from the ordinary people whose opinions are changing the world”

In uncertain times, it is tempting to seek comfort in the grand narratives commentators offer in punchy op-eds – giving us an easy explanation from our political perspective of choice. But these will only leave us likely to be shocked again. As Anna Jennings wrote in Varsity two weeks ago, central to many of these grand narratives is vilification. That pejorative term ‘populism’ thrives on the creation of a belief that there isa mass of people to whom you are morally and/or intellectually superior – treating voters, as Anna says, as an abstract entity rather than people living among us.

Indeed, this is something I felt keenly in Cambridge in the lead-up to 23rd June. Even those with the thickest of skins would struggle not to feel insecure when openly one of a very small minority here voting to leave – part of a vilified wider group. I didn’t encounter anyone who didn’t respect my views when I explained them, but when someone you don’t know well hears you’re voting Leave, and you see their troubled, awkward surprise, wondering if you’re a racist, the power of the political stereotype becomes clear.

I don’t suggest that the ‘dart-throwing chimps’ in the press should go the way of the unfortunate monkey in Libya, but we do need to widen the sources from which we synthesise our own opinion. We should be suspicious of anyone claiming to have a perfect answer to huge questions in their short newspaper piece. (Don’t worry, I do see the irony…) For one thing, the case Tetlock and Gardner make for ‘superforecasting’ (the use of big data) is a compelling one, which provides an antidote to blowing individual events out of proportion and context. In fact, celebrate or lament it, central to Vote Leave’s victory was this method of getting to know the electorate, using sophisticated software run by physicists to decide whom to target.

Vilifying voters prevents us from understanding our differences

Surely, though, algorithms can only get us so far. Apart from anything else, they aren’t overly accessible to the casual follower of politics. Perhaps we could also do with paying greater attention to people themselves – the real life constituents of the abstract entity – and not only the ones who we allow into our social media. Something we have tried to do in Varsity this term is to bring you opinions on events from people who are also participants in some way: Joanna Banasik’s piece on attempts to ban abortion in Poland, Gracelin Baskaran’s on race in America, or Jenny Young’s on Scottish independence would all have been much different were they not written with the benefit of lived experience.

So I hope we get to hear more in the media from the ordinary people whose opinions are changing the world, especially when they seem incomprehensible to us. Let’s start with the 62 million who voted for Trump. And I hope that in Cambridge more and more people – especially international and Year Abroad students – will be willing to share their stories in Varsity. If we only listen to an elite commentariat and our friends we risk retreating into a world of false binaries, easy answers, and self-satisfied superiority. Despite the hysterics, the election of people we don’t like won’t kill democracy. But giving up on trusting and understanding our fellow citizens might