Donald Trump

Leftist Shaming Of Conservative White Women Is Anti-Feminist

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

White women vote for Donald Trump - US midterms 2018

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Some women fail to vote for progressive candidates because they happen to be conservatives. Accusing them of acting against their own self-interest — or at the behest of the “white supremacist patriarchy” — is offensive, condescending and presupposes that women should vote based on a more limited palette of issues than men

The US midterms brought some results which were fairly encouraging for Democrats, but also a number of prominent disappointments – charismatic longshot Beto O’Rourke’s failure to unseat Senator Ted Cruz in Texas, the likely failure of Democrats to win senate and gubernatorial races in Florida and disappointment in Georgia.

And predictably enough, the crazy wing of the progressive left know exactly who to blame for these setbacks: traitorous white women who sucked up to their fascist overlords by voting for conservative candidates.

No, seriously:

You see, these white women voted for the “wrong” candidate. Because in the dystopian world inhabited by the Women’s March and others, there is only one allowable political opinion, and all women must vote in a bloc for that option. This might strike you as not being quite what the American founders intended, or what should happen in any healthy democracy for that matter – but nonetheless, the 59% of white women who voted for Ted Cruz are thought criminals, gender traitors and must be publicly shamed before being reeducated.

Telling an entire class of people that “there’s a lot of work to do, white women. A lot of learning. A lot of growing” is incredibly condescending. In fact, the language brings to mind the scolding comment a parent might make to a misbehaving child, not the kind of rhetoric which has ever persuaded a grown adult to change their mind on a given issue ever in the course of human history.

But it turns out that the Women’s March are positively respectful and restrained compared to some other activists:

Charming. Katie Herzog of The Stranger analyses the impetus behind these angry expressions of incomprehension:

While I understand the impulse to blame anonymous populations for our problems and defeats, it’s not hard to see why people bristle at this kind of message. Blaming white women for not electing Democrats is based on the false presumption that white women are a homogenous population, that we are all supposed to be allies for the great feminist cause.

[..] White women are not a monolith. We don’t all know each other. We don’t all go to the same church or yoga class. Some of us, in fact, don’t go to church or yoga at all. White women, like all populations, are a large, unwieldy group made up of individuals with an array of concerns and values, and less than half (48 percent) of white women lean Democratic. The fact that conservative women voted for Republican candidates should be no more surprising than the fact that liberal women voted for Dems, regardless of their race.

[..] As the election results in Missouri, Texas, Georgia and elsewhere show, plenty of white women reject the idea they should vote Democratic just because they are women. They don’t feel like “foot soldiers of the patriarchy,” as feminist Mona Eltahawy put it, and I’m guessing plenty of them don’t even believe in the patriarchy at all. They’re not going to change their votes because progressives they’ve never met think they have some kind of obligation to vote for Democrats because of their double-x chromosome.

Exactly so. Maybe, just maybe, some women voted Republican because they are more than the sum of their reproductive organs, the sexual harassment they may or may not have experienced, their alleged brainwashing by the patriarchy or any other identity politics wedge issues. Maybe, just maybe, the white women being so sanctimoniously lectured by  the woke brigade are human beings and American citizens who base their votes on a variety of factors, just the same as everyone else.

Yet the progressive identity politics brigade would have it be otherwise. Foreign policy, fiscal policy, education and trade? Not the concern of womenfolk, apparently. Civil liberties, free speech, science and innovation, religious freedom, church and state? Don’t worry your pretty little minds about any of those complicated issues, ladies, they’re above your pay grade. Just vote for the party that keeps banging on about your genitalia and reproductive organs.

We see exactly the same phenomenon in Britain, with the establishment Remainers trying to thwart Brexit increasingly resorting to panicked cries that leaving the European Union is a plot of the patriarchy designed to “hurt women”, and should thus be opposed on feminist grounds. Continuity Remainers (those who want to overturn or disregard the result of the 2016 referendum) arrive at this conclusion by creating a tenuous logical chain in which they assert without evidence that Britain’s attitudes and laws concerning women’s rights will revert to Victorian standards upon severance from Brussels, and that Brexit will inevitably lead to a recession which would decrease government tax revenues, which would automatically result in spending cuts which would automatically fall on those elements of the welfare state on which women disproportionately rely.

Again, there is zero expectation that women might support Brexit for the same reason that motivates male Leave voters, be it arguments about democracy, governance, self-determination or immigration. No, Remainers reduce women to the role of passive consumers of government services who should be expected to vote according to whatever they are told is in their material short-term interest rather than entertaining any highfalutin notions about what is best for the future of the country as a whole. This is an incredibly paternalistic argument – one, in fact, which would not have been out of place in Victorian society. But today we hear these sentiments openly and proudly expressed by leading politicians, celebrities and activists agitating to keep Britain a member of the European Union.

Given the degree to which the Republican Party has not only made its peace with Trumpism but (with very few exceptions) cravenly failed to stand up to or condemn the president’s worst excesses, I would have had trouble voting for any candidate with (R) next to their name this election cycle. But unlike the Women’s March and other prominent voices of progressive wokeness, I believe that the white women who did vote Republican in the midterms did so after engaging in the same kind of civic thought process as any other American citizen. I would not be so arrogant to assume that they are brainwashed by the patriarchy or seeking to lord their first-among-second-class-citizen status over women of other ethnicities.

Moreover, haranguing and abusing women for failing to vote the “correct” way its about as strategically sensible as a car salesman reacting to a wavering customer by running out of the showroom after them, yelling abuse and insults, and telling them to bone up on their automobile knowledge before daring to set foot in his dealership ever again.

Herzog goes on to explain the blatantly counterproductive nature of responding to the fact that conservative women vote for conservative candidates by shouting at them:

There are reasons not to blindly shout about “white women” when you’re pissed about the outcome of the election. For one, why the hell aren’t you shouting at white men? They vote for Republicans at even higher rates than white women. This women-blaming rhetoric reeks of misogyny, which may be ironic considering it comes primarily from progressive women. Regardless, it won’t fix anything. The way to win races is to actually appeal to voters (or to suppress them), and the only way to appeal to voters is to either try and change their opinion (and good luck with that) or to meet them where they already stand.

[..] Blaming and shaming conservative white women will not win elections. If Democrats want to win this population over, they need to find a message that actually appeals to them, and faraway progressives screaming “white women do better” is not it.

Yet this seems to be the primary strategy right now:

It’s hard to see how New York Magazine writer Hillary Kelly’s plan to “drive [her] ass down there next election and personally talk to as many of these fools as possible” can fail, given that she clearly intends to meet with them on a basis of mutual respect.

The mind struggles to comprehend how anybody – let alone people who consider themselves part of the cognitive and moral elite – could possibly still think, after all the evidence of 2016-2018, that haranguing people, criticizing and shaming them will somehow make them see the error of their ways and turn them into fellow woke progressives.

But self-flagellation has become such a big part of the required performative routine for the progressive left – witness the endless seminars and university courses popping up, focusing on how to deal with one’s “internalized white supremacy” – that the true believers have apparently forgotten that the rest of us are not whipped into waves of ecstasy by being told how evil, oppressive and stupid we are.

Intersectional identity politics ruins everything. It forces us to focus on what distinguishes and divides us from one another rather than that which unites us – which is slow-motion suicide in a multiethnic democracy like America. As an academic concept, intersectionality undoubtedly has its uses as an analytical framework, but for an increasing number of activists it has become the only lens through which they view the world. For these people, everything is now seen in terms of personal identity, and everyone is judged according to where they fall on the oppressor/oppressed matrix.

Strong electoral mandates, however, are won by building a positive and forward-looking vision which everyone can get behind regardless of gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. And if you want to build that coalition, the very worst thing you can do is expend the bulk of your energy making well over half the country feel bad and/or guilty about inherent personal characteristics which they did not choose, cannot change and have no reason to apologize or be ashamed.

If progressives do not learn this lesson rapidly and disown the intersectional extremists who are willing to tear apart society’s fabric in the name of their ideology, they risk defeat after electoral defeat. And given their reckless behavior and toxic agenda this might be quite satisfying to behold, but for the fact that they will drag the entire country down with them.

 

UPDATE: 9 November

There is undoubtedly some validity to the claim that historically speaking, the feminist movement was largely led by heterosexual white women to the exclusion of gay women and ethnic minorities, and though this is hardly surprising given that white people were the majority, a degree of resentment is perhaps understandable. The solution is to be more inclusive in the future without fixating on past wrongs which cannot be changed. But recasting white women as Vichy-style collaborators in female oppression will only drive more and more women away from the movement; and meanwhile, the rest of the country looks on with revulsion while this most self-obsessed of revolutions busily eats its own.

 

Screen Shot 2018-11-09 at 01.59.24

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The Mainstream Media May Be The Worst Enemy Of The Resistance

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The hand-in-glove partnership between the mainstream media and the progressive “Resistance” may pay dividends in the midterms – but if so, it will likely also be their undoing in 2020

Here is CNN’s Don Lemon calling white men the greatest terrorist risk to the United States live on air last week – moments after sanctimoniously calling for an end to divisiveness or demonizing certain groups, and all without a hint of irony.

Don Lemon is not an Op-Ed contributor to CNN. He is not marketed as a fire-breathing Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham character; no, Don Lemon puts himself forward as a news anchor on a supposedly objective cable news network. And yet here he is, saying in the aftermath of the recent horrific mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh:

We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban – you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban. So what do we do about that?

This is the kind of social justice and identity politics bilge which just a few years ago was uttered only by screechy protesters on liberal arts college campuses as they protested about Halloween costumes or some other “genocidal” attack on their feelings. Yet now in 2018 these exact same sentiments, once the province of fringe lunatic academics in the pseudo-social sciences, now emerge from the mouth of one of America’s leading television news personalities.

Here is that same network’s star White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, goading the Trump administration with his sassy little take on the ability of the president to bring about sweeping constitutional changes to birthright citizenship by executive order:

 

You’ll note that no such tweets accompanied any of the sweeping Obama executive orders relating to immigration or any other matter, presumably because Acosta either agreed with them or just hadn’t read his pocket Constitution at that point.

And here is Jim Acosta again, tweeting the famous lines from the poem “The New Colossus” affixed to the Statue of Liberty, following a highly choreographed confrontation in the White House press briefing room last year in which the CNN White House Correspondent forgot for a moment that he is supposed to be a reporter and not a student activist:

 

Switching networks for a moment, here is the banner image recently used by the NBC news Twitter account – an image of the caravan of asylum seekers and economic migrants slowly working its way through Mexico toward the United States. This is about as firm a planting of one’s corporate or editorial flag in the sand as it is possible to make:

NBC news Twitter banner image - migrant caravan - journalistic bias

I am slowly giving up being angry at the way the mainstream and prestige media carry themselves like small- (and large-) D democratic heroes while utterly failing to cover the country on which they report with anything approaching objectivity, or make editorial decisions from any other perspective than that of the progressive elite. Now, my anger is giving way to fear.

If Democrats underperform in next week’s US midterm elections then it will largely be thanks to a huge negative assist from the establishment media, which has given an enormous motivational boost to conservatives of all stripes thanks to skewed and hyper-reactionary coverage of the very presidency their own greed for ratings helped to bring about. But this self-foot-shooting is actually the better scenario for the left and their media allies, compared to the alternative.

Though they don’t yet realize it, the nightmare scenario for the Left is that the love-in between the progressive “resistance” and the establishment media – a journalistic class which has been driven mad by Trump’s constant taunting into dropping their thin veneer of objectivity and revealing their true ideological colors –  actually works this midterm season, at a time when many conservatives and Trumpists do not show up to vote.

Why? Because a strong Democratic showing in the midterms will only encourage the prestige media in their collective mania, and lead to a doubling down on the various anti-conservative tactics – the bias, the gaslighting, the double standards and false equivalencies which mean most conservatives are forced to begin any argument proving they are not a Nazi while most progressives are allowed to commit the most egregious sins multiple times before their media halo begins to tarnish even slightly.

Two years of this unhinged and irresponsible reaction to the Trump presidency has succeeded in uniting even many Never Trump conservatives behind the administration and the GOP this midterm cycle. That may not be enough to prevent Democrats from making significant and encouraging gains in the midterms on Tuesday, but two more years of this behavior at an even greater level of intensity than we have thus far seen (and be assured: it will only get worse) may be all it takes to win Donald Trump a second term. You can bet that the president is counting on it.

Many nominal conservatives – myself included, though my political values are far from alignment with the Trumpian GOP – were almost as depressed by the victory of Donald Trump as were Democrats. Many felt that this was no longer a political party they recognized, or wanted to be associated with. But something odd happens when you realize that virtually the entire prestige US media has used the Trump presidency to jettison any remaining pretense of objectivity and openly plant their flag on the progressive side. Something odd happens when views which were entirely mainstream only a few years ago – views which were even espoused by darlings of the political Left – are now being used by leftist activists and sagely nodding network anchors to mark you out as a hate-filled extremist and enabler of fascism.

When that happens, suddenly the distasteful people on your side don’t seem quite so bad.  When that happens – and I’m not saying it’s necessarily right or praiseworthy – suddenly the idea of a president who can thwart and enrage your own political tormentors becomes a little bit more palatable. When that happens, in short, conservatives are more likely to hunker down, put their differences aside and march to the polling booths to re-elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.

And if that happens, given another mandate and with no more elections left to fight, the country will likely see what Trumpism can really do when it is unleashed and made angry by hysterical, partisan journalistic attacks – as if such attacks are even necessary given everything legitimately objectionable that the administration and the man are actually doing.

I don’t want that. I didn’t want Donald Trump to be president in 2016, and frustratingly I will become a US citizen a matter of days too late to vote for someone else in 2020. But just as I see governing elites stubbornly refusing to learn from the mistakes which brought the populist rebuffs of 2016 (good in the case of Brexit, much less so with Trump) now I see the journalistic class – who are very much part of that elite – almost engaging in a competition with the woke wing of the Democratic Party to see who can do more to usher in a Trump second term.

There will come a time, I am convinced, when we look back on the footage of Don Lemon slandering an entire ethnic group for being “dangerous” white males, Jim Acosta engaging in melodramatic activism in the White House briefing room and NBC News changing their Twitter image the way a tween might add a filter to her Snapchat and marvel that the supposedly serious, prestige media could ever have debased itself in such a way – and done so in a way which potentially wrought such harm on the country.

The problem is, if that day does not come before early 2019 then I don’t see there being sufficient time for a course correction prior to the 2020 general election. And currently there is zero sign of that epiphany dawning on the Don Lemons and Jim Acosta of this world, or their editors, or their paymasters. We are dealing with people who need to be smacked in the face with the consequences of their smug, self-satisfied, sanctimonious hectoring multiple times before the message sinks in – if at all.

And all of us must suffer for their selfish obstinacy.

 

Don Lemon CNN - White men are the biggest terror threat to United States

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Preserving The Legitimacy Of The Supreme Court Must Outweigh Partisan Anger

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Protesters on steps of Supreme Court - Brett Kavanaugh confirmation - SCOTUS

Conservatives lived with what they saw as a left-leaning, activist Supreme Court for decades without undertaking serious efforts to undermine the institution. But while the American Left rightly decries the various attacks on governmental institutions in the Age of Trump, their anger at the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh is leading them to do precisely that which they say endangers the Republic

I spend a lot of time criticizing the American news media, and rightly so since there is a lot to criticize in this so-called renaissance of print journalism in the Age of Trump. I often single out the New York Times for particular criticism – their claim to run a scrupulously impartial and ideologically neutral newsroom is risible when their opinion pages are stacked 10-1 with not just left-wing progressives, but the kind who have drunk deep from the well of social justice and are now utterly high on the most poisonous distillation of identity politics dogma.

But I also feel compelled to give credit where credit is due. While the New York Times and other prestige media outlets may devote large portions of their time and resources to misrepresenting conservatives and stealthily promoting leftist agendas, today their Opinion email bulletin featured a progressive Op-Ed writer who actually sought to lay out the conservative perspective in good faith for the benefit and enlightenment of Times readers, rather than misrepresenting the conservative perspective to generate cheap outrage.

Addressing the ongoing rancor generated by the nomination and confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Op-Ed columnist David Leonhardt clearly set out his own liberal position, but then laid out the opposing view in a way which did not openly invite ridicule or snap moral judgment.

Leonhardt begins:

In this polarized era, most of us don’t spend a lot of time genuinely trying to see a political issue the way that the other side does. And it’s often worth doing so. Let me give you an example.

He then goes on to state his own personal view (entirely in line with progressive thinking) that the Court is supposedly dominated by an “extremely conservative and partisan majority” sufficient to justify Democrats looking at potentially extreme ways to curb the institution‘s power.

But then Leonhardt says this:

But here, roughly, is how some conservatives think about the Supreme Court:

In the mid-20th century, a liberal court regularly overruled the popular will or blocked the democratic process. It happened most famously on abortion, but also on school prayer and other subjects. And even though Republicans won the White House in five out of six presidential elections starting in 1968, the court remained left of center, partly because a few supposedly conservative justices didn’t turn out to be conservative.

Yes, the current court is more conservative than the country, these conservatives might say. But we know how you liberals feel right now. Don’t go undermining an entire institution of government just because you have some complaints about it.

The Left does not like to be told of its glaring faults and hypocrisies, particularly by one of their own, so we will no doubt soon see what happens to the career trajectory of David Leonhardt. But laid out here, with no attempt at distortion, is the basic thought process behind most conservatives’ attitude toward the Supreme Court.

To be clear, I personally would not have nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the court over concerns about his views of executive power, and I would not have confirmed him after his performance in the confirmation hearings (yes, it’s natural to be angry at what you see as false accusations, but going on a conspiratorial rant about the Clintons is the antithesis of the impartiality which should be shown by a Justice of the Supreme Court, particularly one whose background was in the Republican presidential administration of George W. Bush). There are other judges with similar judicial philosophies who would have been better for conservatives from both a constitutional perspective and the short-term political perspective of the nomination process (cough, Amy Coney Barrett).

But while I would much rather have seen a different justice confirmed to the ninth seat on the Supreme Court, at this point I am more concerned about the hypocrisy of those on the Left who rend their garments about the damage which President Trump is doing to vital American institutions, while also actively seeking to undermine public faith in the court and even enthusiastically contemplating the idea of stacking the court to restore it’s leftward tilt, should they acquire sufficiently strong control of Congress after the midterms.

The dangers posed by President Trump’s erratic, ego-driven leadership are very real, and the precipitous decline in public faith in key institutions of government is a corrosive acid eating away at the American democracy. But those entirely valid fears are recast as cynical partisan pandering when their chief expounders are also doing their darnedest to destroy trust in institutions after having suffered a setback on the Supreme Court. And as a result of this cynical behavior, people are less likely to take the warnings seriously.

Worse still, the Democrats’ pain threshold is apparently so low that they could not tolerate a potential originalist/textualist (or more cynically, rightward) shift on the court for even a week before they started openly agitating to undermine the institution. Say what you want about the Republicans, and there is much to say – particularly concerning their disgraceful refusal to even consider Merrick Garland, President Obama’s eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee – but conservatives watched as the Burger, Rehnquist and Roberts courts handed down many decisions which they regarded as unconstitutional. Decisions which decisively reshaped the fabric of American life. And while nobody would say that Republicans took defeat gracefully or played the part of happy warriors, at least they did not try to stack the court or mount targeted efforts to delegitimize the institution altogether.

One can disagree with the originalist and textualist judicial philosophy which may now come to more prominence in the Supreme Court’s deliberations, but it is a valid and serious worldview worthy of respect, certainly no less so than the “living constitution” alternative. The answer to political setback is not to take one’s toys and go home in a temper – it is to seek to persuade voters that the progressive alternative is better such that Democratic senators and presidents are elected who can nominate like-minded individuals to the Court. The answer is not to falsely claim that theirs is the only pure and neutral interpretation of the constitution while the conservative perspective is uniquely partisan and dangerous.

Congress already has a rock-bottom approval rating, with hardly anyone respecting the legislative branch of government. The divisiveness of the Donald Trump era has seen one group hold out the present head of the executive branch to be worshipful and almost divinely given while the other group thinks he is Literally Hitler. That leaves only one branch of government held in significant public esteem – the judiciary, led by the Supreme Court.

Is undermining remaining public trust in the third branch of government and sawing the third and final leg off America’s governmental tripod the responsible thing to do right now? Is it even the most politically lucrative thing to do in the short and medium term, given how the Kavanaugh saga has energized the Republican base and put a handful of once–competitive seats further out of the reach of Democrats?

My opinions on how best to move forward are currently in flux, but I am attracted by propositions that the Supreme Court should no longer be populated with the same nine lifetime appointees, but rather by federal appeals court judges selected at random for shorter terms, on a staggered basis (see this Vox piece, which is sadly also a prime example of how the Left see theirs as the only legitimate point of view and recent progressive leanings of the Supreme Court not something even worth mentioning). Of course, this change is about as likely as President Trump admitting that he is a Russian stooge, resigning Nixon-style and flying away in a helicopter as a bemused nation watches him go. But it seems like a good potential approach, and one which would do much to depoliticize the highest court (even if the nomination of federal appeals court judges then became somewhat more contentious as a result).

But realistically, we go forward with the institutions we have in the form we have them, staffed by the people whom due process has put in charge. And there is a simple choice to be made by the American Left: do they press ahead and burn away remaining public faith in the Supreme Court, or do they commit – as conservatives did, when they saw that they would keep losing and losing at the hands of the judiciary unless they took a long-term approach to regaining influence – to advance their goals utilizing the legitimate, existing (if flawed) processes and institutions available to them?

Last week I attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court for the first time, hearing the somewhat dry but still fascinating case of New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira being argued before the then-eight sitting Justices of the Court. Sitting in the public seating, soaking in the weight of history within those walls and watching some of the best-credentialed lawyers at the top of their game argue before eight eminent and generally well-intentioned jurists was an unforgettable experience, especially given that I am now studying law in the shadow of that court, right here in Washington, DC.

This case was about employment rights and whether long-distance transportation workers were required to resolve workplace disputes through compulsory arbitration rather than through the courts – an edict which currently varies depending on whether the individual is a waged employee or an independent contractor (an increasingly irrelevant distinction in today’s economy). This kind of case is the Supreme Court’s bread and butter – deciding disputes whose facts would make most people’s eyes glaze over within thirty seconds, but which nonetheless need to be resolved in order to give direction to lower courts and advance the broader course of justice in the United States.

This was not one of the few hot-button social issues which attract hordes of placard-waving protesters to the courtroom steps. The case certainly matters, but primarily to the litigants involved and those who share their interests – transport corporations, unions and the like. Does the Left really want to wage such war on the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court that even these workaday cases become seen by half the country as fraudulently or illegitimately decided? So that lobbyists, pressure groups and corporate interests feel more emboldened to undermine every negative decision and even mount targeted campaigns against specific Justices as a result of their opinions?

I share some of the American Left’s concerns about America’s direction, particularly the slide toward authoritarianism and protectionism (though I hold the Left equally if not more responsible for these phenomena than the Trumpists, who are largely a symptom, not a cause of America’s malaise). But for the life of me I fail to see how waging an all-out assault on the remaining credibility of the most respected branch of the United States government redounds to the Left’s long-term advantage, results in a more functional country or a more harmonious society. All I see is more bitterness, more mutual distrust and more negative energy fueling the ever-growing vortex of our ongoing culture war.

The Left have every right to be angry with some of the circumstances of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and with cynical Republican political behavior prior to that. But they do not have the right to enjoy decades of often-amenable Supreme Court decisions, and then seek to tear down an institution vital to all Americans the moment they believe it may no longer adequately serve their progressive purposes.

In that regard at least, the price of the Left’s present paroxysms of rage may be more than this beleaguered country can bear.

 

Brett Kavanaugh swearing in ceremony Supreme Court - SCOTUS

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MSNBC Goes To Flint, Learns Nothing

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Flint Michigan - Chris Hayes - Michael Moore

 

The Establishment Left’s strangely non-diminishing sense of entitlement was on full display in Flint, Michigan

Today, Chris Hayes of MSNBC broadcast a special live town hall from Flint, Michigan, the place made famous by the poisoning of its water supply and the near-criminal incompetence of some of the people responsible for the public’s safety. Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore has also made the Flint story a personal cause of his, and today both he and Chris Hayes were together, live before a local audience, to talk about national politics viewed through the prism of this beleaguered town.

At one point in the panel discussion, Hayes introduced a number of local people who were non-voters; people who either did not vote at all in the 2016 general election or who voted for down-ballot candidates but refused to cast a vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton for president.

Almost to a person, these non-voters talked about the fact that despite having been Obama voters in 2008 and 2012, they could not bring themselves to vote in 2016 when the Democrats offered no “inspiring” candidate. One got the sense that many of them may have gladly voted for Bernie Sanders, had the Clinton and Democratic Party machines not unfairly muscled the Vermont senator out of the race, though this was not explicitly stated by anyone during the segment.

For the life of him, Chris Hayes simply could not understand this position. It did not compute. At one point, he told one of the non-voting interviewees that MSNBC viewers were likely “throwing things at their televisions” in reaction to what he was saying. Hayes interrogated each guest as to how they could possibly have abstained from voting for Hillary Clinton when a Republican governor had presided over the poisoning of their town’s water supply. He implied that their desire for an “inspirational” presidential candidate was childish and irrational, and that the obvious choice would have been to swallow any misgivings and vote for the Democratic Party presidential nominee.

This exchange highlighted as clearly as anything else the divide within the American Left – the establishment, coastal Left and the once solid-Democrat heartland left-behinds, if you will. The likes of Chris Hayes (and that mainstream brand of left-wing thinking for which he is a mouthpiece) simply cannot understand why a rational voter would spurn the boring, uninspiring technocrat put forward by the Democrats when the consequence of not voting was the election of Donald Trump. Despite having heard testimony from many people about the long-standing issues and decline facing the town – issues which ate away at the community throughout President Obama’s two terms – Hayes was seemingly unable to understand that another continuity technocrat offering more of the same was the last thing that this community wanted or needed.

Michael Moore cut to the heart of the issue:

Why did people stay home knowing that the result was going to be possibly Donald J. Trump? That’s some serious anger at what the system has done to fail this city.

 

Like most people, I have my issues with Michael Moore. But credit where it is due – Moore was warning about the dangerous complacency of the Democrats and the visceral anger against the status quo in many communities at a time when establishment leftists were rolling out the grand coronation of Hillary Clinton, oblivious of (or unconcerned by) her utter lack of popularity among people who were sufficiently left-wing and non-racist to cast their prior votes for Barack Obama.

Nobody of any significance on the mainstream Left heeded Michael Moore’s warning to take the Donald Trump threat seriously before the election, and the past two years have been their reward. And even now, in the middle of a pilgrimage to a part of middle America which shrugged its shoulders and abandoned the Democratic Party in 2016, still the chief attitude is one of incredulity that people could have been so stupid / naive / selfish / childish / utopian (delete as applicable) as to demand a Democratic candidate in possession of a clear set of guiding principles and an understanding that globalization has been eating away at towns like Flint as surely as is their contaminated water.

Technocracy is not always a bad thing – at a time when regulations and systems of government are infinitely more complex through necessity, experts are needed to administer the system and keep the machinery of state running effectively. However, technocracy is not well-suited to navigating through periods of disruptive change or crisis. What works well when the economy is in steady-state and there are no significant changes afoot in society or industry does not work well when the economy is in difficulty or when huge realignments are taking place on the national and international level.

Conservative scaremongering about her supposed extreme socialism aside, Hillary Clinton was the quintessential technocratic candidate at a time when the people of Michigan and elsewhere needed a candidate who recognized that for them, the status quo was not something to celebrate and build upon; that the structural changes which had delivered nothing but good things for the likes of Chris Hayes and many of us “coastal elites” were not necessarily anything to celebrate in places like Flint.

More than one of the people interviewed on MSNBC who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election have themselves run for public office in the months since. There is no crisis of political engagement or motivation here. There was only a crisis of ignorance and arrogance among a party hierarchy which believed it could impose their preferred candidate and have people like the inhabitants of Flint, Michigan swallow their distaste and offer up their vote.

And after spending a day in Flint in the company of Michael Moore, I am not sure that Chris Hayes, his core audience or anyone within the Democratic Party leadership are any closer to grasping this essential fact.

 

Michael Moore - Chris Hayes - Flint

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The Real Resistance

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

Protest Sign - Dump Trump Kill Brexit

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The good aspects of this populist insurgency need saving from horrified (and increasingly organized) antidemocratic elites – but also from cynical and incompetent populist leaders who are squandering our last best hope of democratic renewal

I have struggled of late to bring myself to write much about politics. The temptation to offer the odd hot take on Twitter can never be fully avoided, but while I usually find myself with enough time to write only one of every five articles which pop into my mind, these past months I have struggled to generate more than a couple of vaguely original ideas or pieces of commentary in the space of a month.

The reason, I have come to realise, is that for all the furious words being written and opinions expressed, nothing much seems to be changing. Despite a political discourse which has rarely been more shrill, with unbridled hysteria on both sides and nearly every aspect of life being sucked into the black, inescapable vortex that is our ongoing culture war, neither side is making definitive progress. As at the Western Front in 1915, both sides have dug into hardened positions in anticipation of a long, drawn-out stalemate. Both sides double down on their dogma and rhetoric, both sides continue to defend or even embrace the worst elements of their own cause because the enemy does likewise with his; both dehumanise one another and suggest that what was once seen as sincere and legitimate political difference is now irrefutable evidence of moral turpitude.

Both sides feel that they are losing an existential fight; both feel under attack and in retreat. On a superficial level, the progressive left (and here I use the term to describe those who broadly hold socially liberal, secular, intersectional, economically redistributive and de facto open borders political views) have more cause to be alarmed – after all, they have to deal with what they see as the “twin disasters” of Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom, as well as rising populism throughout Europe and much of the world.

However, as someone who fits into neither the populist or elitist category but perhaps has greater sympathy for the former, I see only danger, risk and oncoming ruin for the populists. My gnawing fear is that an increasingly inept Trump administration which fails to deliver on even his more decent campaign promises and a botched Brexit leading to economic damage and future ongoing “vassal state” status within an unreformed European regulatory ecosystem may come to represent the dismal high water mark of populist achievement. Such has been establishment shock at the political success of the populists, such is their determination to wrest back control and such is their domination of the main levers of influence and power (media, business and culture) that it is those gathered under the banner of unaccountable supranational and technocratic government who now march with a spring in their step, and those who believe in the nation state, democracy and self-determination who find ourselves endlessly on the defensive.

All of which might not be so bad if the temporarily-displaced elites had learned anything meaningful from their electoral rebukes, engaged in some introspection and returned chastened and humble, with a newfound willingness to consult and be guided by the people they lead rather than continuing to implement their own highly Utopian vision of the future with no consultation or consent. But of course there has been no such introspection, and there is precious little humility to be found among those who lost control of the political narrative in 2016.

President Trump is bad, but the people whose self-serving incompetence in government gave us President Trump in the first place are still very much present, unrepentant and with their credibility intact. Brexit negotiations may be lurching toward disaster, but the people whose uninspired leadership and scant regard for democracy helped give us Brexit in the first place soldier on with reputations intact, peddling the myth that everything was fine before the EU referendum came along, and that Brexit can be thwarted with no adverse societal consequences.

If the people who believe they are morally and intellectually better than Donald Trump voters and Brexiteers want to win, they need to do more than stand laughing or indignant at the sidelines as the worst elements of these camps drive their populist train off the rails; they need to actively come up with something more attractive; a unifying, compelling national vision which amounts to something more than just rolling the clock back to the day before the EU referendum or US presidential election. But instead we see little other than smug self-satisfaction and blind hatred of (or contempt for) those who took the populist side, born of the delusion that populist incompetence in government somehow discredits their basic cause, and that political elites can therefore press on with their own discredited and failed agenda without incurring any negative consequences.

But the populists are by no means innocent. It is very easy to strike a trendy rhetorical pose against unloved ideas and institutions, but much harder to grapple with cold hard reality and propose policy changes which respect democratic input while also standing a chance of lasting success in the real world. One of the hardest things in recent months has been witnessing thinkers, writers and organisations I once broadly respected choosing the path of least resistance, playing to their respective galleries and choosing outraged purity over sullying themselves with necessary compromise.

Thus we see this year’s Orwell Prize for journalism awarded to someone who sniffs out and extrapolates wrongdoing in the EU referendum Leave campaign to the delight of her establishment audience, but shows zero curiosity about malfeasance in the Remain campaign (or the relative impact of each). And thus we are subjected to otherwise-compelling contrarians like Brendan O’Neill of Spiked magazine actively harming the cause of Brexit by ignoring all nuance when it comes to the trade and regulatory relationships under discussion, turning the most momentous issue to face Britain in decades into just another facet of the culture war.

It must be easy to write when possessed of great certainty that one is indisputably morally superior and on the “right” side of history (or at least that one’s actions and side will be recorded as being on the right side of history). I often envy the leftist, identity politics-soaked social justice warriors and their enablers within the political class for possessing such fervor. It is much harder to write day after day when one fears that one’s side will ultimately lose, and that one will be remembered as a cranky obstacle to glorious progress at best, and as something akin to a Jim Crow segregationist at worst. Every tweet or blog post them becomes not a small brick in the foundation of some glorious building for which one can claim partial credit, but rather just another nail in the coffin of one’s own future reputation and ultimate legacy.

And right now, I think the chances of defeat for conservatives, traditionalists, democrats and nation state defenders are very high indeed. In Britain, the UK government’s mishandling of Brexit and the atrophy of our self-governance capability may yet vindicate every hysterical warning about the folly of leaving the European Union’s unwanted, antidemocratic political-union-by-stealth. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s impulsive, often proudly ignorant or counterproductive policies and bigoted rhetoric tarnish the valid causes he supports (like greater immigration control) by mere association, rendering them toxic, while the reputations of some truly awful people are laundered thanks to their cynically ostentatious opposition to Trump.

In all of this, the media is firmly planted on one side, unable to report objectively on issues of concern to so-called populists by virtue of having so few reporters and editors drawn from the relevant social and demographic circles. And virtually every element of our culture, from classical and pop music to television and even corporate culture, are marching to the beat of divisive, intersectional identity politics with its avant garde gender theory and disdain for those institutions which are the bedrock of a stable society. In such circumstances it is small comfort to be right when one’s own side stands on the verge of total defeat.

And yet it is not in my nature to bow down before these forces and declare “I, for one, welcome our new antidemocratic, technocratic, authoritarian and coercive SJW overlords”. I don’t welcome them. Even if things go as badly as in my most pessimistic moments I fear they may, I believe it is still important to stand up and argue in the public square, register dissent, bear witness to what is happening and force the progressive side to defend their ideas on logic and merit rather than wallow endlessly in their feelings.

Conservatives and true liberal democrats, people who believe in government of the people and the right to freedom of speech and thought, should be under no illusion at this time – we are losing the decisive battle. A few standout conservative podcasts, YouTubers and bloggers are no match when the other side has a vice-like grip on the entire culture and is snarlingly intolerant of the slightest dissent to the extent that they willingly throw their own leaders and figureheads under the bus for thoughtcrime infractions.

I hope that this defeat can be reversed, but doing so will require millions of people who currently sit at home quietly shaking their heads at what our political elites and culture-makers are doing but otherwise raising no public objection to stand up and be counted – and quite likely incur social or economic cost – which they have not been called upon to do before.

I have just started reading “The Benedict Option“, a book by an American Christian conservative blogger I much admire, Rod Dreher. The book is a warning to Christians (particularly aimed at but by no means limited to traditionalists) that the demands of their faith and those of our culture and “polite society” are drifting decisively and definitively apart, and that the time may soon come when faithful Christians are forced to choose between practising their faith according to their conscience and maintaining their current social and economic standing.

I see a similar fork in the road coming the way of all conservatives and moderates, religious or not – indeed, anyone who is not a staunchly progressive social justice warrior or otherwise happy to accede to that particular worldview. Already we see businesses and charities seeking to adopt progressive positions on social issues as corporate policy, mandating speech and behavior which would force employees and volunteers to violate their own beliefs or else face disciplinary action. Already we see censorious activist mobs seek to dictate where private companies advertise or sell their product. And already, dissenters are paying the price when they stand up and refuse to go along with these coercive demands.

In a few weeks I shall matriculate at law school in Washington, D.C., where I will spend the next three years earning my law degree. Being on an American university campus, it would be infinitely easier – professionally, socially and otherwise – for me to simply delete my blog and Twitter account, and pretend to anyone who asks (and it will certainly come up; already I have had to give notice of my “preferred pronouns”) that I hold the standard suite of progressive leftist political views which are almost de rigeur for students and within the legal profession. But that would be a lie, and I will not do so. Will professing my religious and political beliefs cost me potential friendships and career opportunities? I would be naive if I thought otherwise. Will I find my own free speech threatened or stifled at times? Quite possibly – I have spent three years documenting on this blog what happens to free speech advocates and identity politics heretics on American college campuses, and it is often not pretty. But so be it.

And so even if it brings less joy than it once did, I will keep writing, speaking and standing up for both the expression and validity of traditional, time-proven values and honest political opinions which were considered perfectly mainstream just a few years ago, but which are even now being recast as fundamentally hateful and ignorant by zealots who would reshape the world with their uniquely totalitarian conception of tolerance.

We all have a duty to take a stand, and this is what I shall do, from my own very marginal and unscrutinized place in history. I encourage others to undertake a brief personal inventory and consider whether there is more that you could do at this juncture with your own time, talents and resources. Because right now, we are losing the war. Worse still, some of the gravest long-term threats we face come from the supposed leaders of our cause, and too few of us are willing to admit this painful truth.

Help is not going to come from outside; we go to battle with who and what we have at hand. Unlike the people who melt down over a presidential tweet or democratic referendum, or who cynically downplay their own immense power and privilege to cast themselves as latter-day victims, it is we who are engaged in the real resistance of our time.

The Resistance - Clenched fist protest - US flag

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