How the Left created Donald Trump
Open Democracy
Listen to the wild claims that Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and even our own Boris Johnson have made about the coronavirus – claims “entirely independent of anything that might actually be the case” – and you grasp the essential feature of today’s populist politicians, says Bob Brecher. They’re utterly “indifferent to truth or falsehood”. They don’t disguise it. What they say “makes no claims to be true: it just expresses what they feel at any point in time”. For them, language is not a tool for justifying opinions, it’s a weapon for asserting them. Yet the sickening truth is that the Left is to blame for the emergence of this “post-truth” politics. It was left-wing thinkers of the 1970s who sought “to protect socialist beliefs from the increasing material success of the Right” by espousing postmodernist theory. Insisting that all claims about the world are essentially ideological – geared to preserving political or economic power – the postmodernists argued that to engage with anyone who doesn’t share your view is “a deluded waste of time”. The Trumps of this world have been only too happy to agree. The Left “has acted as a Trojan horse for today’s populist takeover”.
It has been a bad few weeks for “gender reveal” parties, where an unborn baby’s sex is unveiled in a spectacular way. First, a firework at one of the parties sparked a wildfire in California; then the “biggest gender reveal ever”, on Dubai’s Burj Khalifa building, faced a backlash. Syrian influencers Asala Maleh and Anas Marwah celebrated wildly as the landmark turned blue – but were accused of “waste” amid claims that the stunt cost tens of thousands of dollars. Even the woman who invented the trend, blogger Jenna Karvunidis, has despaired. “For the love of God,” she pleaded, “stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis. No one cares but you.”
Another victim of the pandemic is the Japanese woman dubbed the “world’s oldest porn star”. “I’ve been shooting every year since I became 81,” says Yuko Ogasawara, now 84, and she is very frustrated that Covid19 has put filming on hold. “I want to keep working,” she says. “I told my oldest son, ‘Isn’t it great to stay young?’”