Trump’s vote is a visceral repudiation of Obama’s smug America
Democrats made everyone feel oppressed — and no group more so than white, uneducated, working-class voters,
WHEN Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many people viewed it as the culmination of a movement towards racial equality that had begun in the 1960s.
Eight years on, it is apparent that Obama’s election also represented the high water mark of another socio-political movement, one where the parameters are more difficult to define but where the implications were further reaching.
I am writing of how the left won the US culture war and began, through its abuse of said victory towards progressive ends, to erode the political centre and polarise the nation to such an extent that its decent working-class base was willing to elect a reality TV star who picked up politics as a hobby a year ago.
The left, as a cultural force, is more than just the modern US Democratic Party. That is but one of its three wings. The second wing is academia and the third is the media.
Leftist professors have been shown to outnumber their conservative counterparts 12 to one on leading US college campuses. Conservative academics have reported feeling the need to hide their politics in order to achieve tenure. The mental gymnastics and intellectually lazy absolutism that these political echo chambers create produce ideologies far removed from those left of centre ones from which they are derived.
The danger of this is manifest. Third-level institutions serve as thought leaders for the left in much the same way as the Church has historically done for the right. But while the right has worked for two decades to overcome the lazy moral preening of its evangelical wing, the left has allowed the academic ideal of intersectional progressivism, whereby all human endeavours are reduced to a paltry game of winners versus losers, to overtake its message of socially equitable liberalism.
To claim allegiance with minorities, be they blacks oppressed by whites, women oppressed by men, or gays oppressed by straights, is to bask in a sense of unearned moral superiority and to change the question of policy into one of vaguely defined notions of good versus evil. Is it any wonder that out of such a Petri dish as the college campus comes the stories of the past few years, of deans stepping down over controversial Halloween costumes, or of racially segregated safe spaces to which students can flee if they feel their identity is being marginalised?
Thanks to Bill Clinton’s 1996 Telecoms Act, six companies (Comcast, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, CBS and Viacom) own 90pc of the country’s media outlets. With the exception of Fox, all of them are left leaning.
Donald Trump could hardly go a day during his campaign without mentioning how the media was biased against him but, unfortunately, this was not simply another of his mad assertions. For at least a decade, Americans have been turning away from mainstream media sources with complaints of obvious bias. What’s more, like in academia, it is common for those working in the film and television industries to feel the need to hide their conservative allegiances in order to succeed professionally. Hollywood might know nothing of policy but it’s good at creating a villain, and creating a villain is itself much easier than to create a hero at a time when one-issue voting is more prevalent than ever.
Obama’s presidency was where these three wings met. Here was a cool young black man with little term experience and a unique ability (unlike Hillary Clinton) to galvanise every minority in the book. His election in 2008 spoke for itself, but in the following eight years divineness skyrocketed as it became more apparent that anybody who could possibly be oppressed was oppressed — and that everybody else was secretly an oppressor.
In this decade, the words racist, misogynist, homophobe and bigot have been thrown around ad nauseam. Steadily improving race relations have been set back at least two decades by a wave of dubious hate crime cases propped up by the media.
Obama has regularly spewed debunked statistics to make a case for minorities but, as Trump rightly pointed out, refused to use the words “Islamic extremism” in the wake of terror attacks for fear of any critique of Islamic doctrine or culture being conflated with a criticism of individual Muslims. Discussion of policy has simply ceased to matter.
Obama’s approval ratings are higher than Ronald Reagan’s were at the end of his administration, yet the election of his successor stands as the biggest repudiation of a two-term president for more than a century.
If Obama is wondering how he ended up being succeeded by a reality TV star, he need only look in the mirror. This might seem like an extreme characterisation, but, in an age where feelings seem to be the single most important factor in deciding legislation, it would behove us not to try to erase the experience of the workingclass, non-college-educated white voter who for so long defined the centre of American politics, and the traditional pre-Obama backbone of the Democrat voting base.
Theirs was a feeling of being smothered by politically correct language, of being afraid to speak up as the media reflected back to them a world that they weren’t necessarily ready to sign off on.
Trump’s only real quality was a lack of sheepishness. He was the wolf who came along right after the left had cried wolf for the last time. The people who supported him knew what he was, but it was impossible to gauge how bad that was in a world where they also seemed to be bad by virtue of their existence. Trump did not win this election — the left lost it by creating the only political climate in which a joke candidate had a shot.