Victimhood Culture

Is There Hope For Conservatism In Generation Z?

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

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Generation Z does not automatically share the same predilection for leftist identity politics as the Millennial generation which precedes them. But can conservatives do enough to appeal to this newest group of emerging voters?

Many conservatives, myself included, have been worrying a lot about how we can better resist the relentless encroachment of leftist identity politics and the regressive, illiberal social justice warriors at the movement’s vanguard. But what if we have now reached Peak SJW? What if the spell is wearing off and a new generation is emerging with less time for the pervasive victimhood culture spawned by the 1960s radicals and their fragile children? And if so, how can the Right appeal to this generation (or at least cease driving them toward the parties of the Left)?

These are the questions explored by Sam White over at Country Squire magazine, in a thought-provoking piece which explores how conservatives might find favour with (at least some) young people again.

Sam writes:

Corbynism has been painted as rebellious and anti-establishment, but underneath the endorsement from Stormzy and the party leader’s appearance at Glastonbury (not that Glastonbury is pushing any boundaries) it’s nothing of the sort. If the current Labour leadership’s schemes were ushered in, they’d lead to constraint and conformity. And the new establishment would be authoritarian to a degree that its youthful supporters had not felt before.

There wouldn’t be much of a celebratory mood in the air then, as it slowly became clear that all that rebelliousness was nothing more than a carefully-managed means to an end.

Conservatives should be highlighting all this, and at the same time pushing the message that a free market model provides the best possible mechanism by which for changes to occur organically. Crucially, that model is how we safeguard the capacity to change, but it isn’t a change in itself.

If the Conservative Party were to realign around its libertarian element, then it might achieve resonance among younger voters, particularly those who come after the Millennial Red Army. Generation Z are shaping up to be open to a conservative message, and will surely react against the postmodern nonsense bought into by Millennials. Conservatives must be ready to meet them.

And the message should be simple: that the right-wing will safeguard classical liberal values and ditch victimhood-fetishizing identity politics. And it ought also to be made clear that socialism represents the polar opposite of all this: it’s a half-fossilized ideology that would usher in micro-management, politically correct hectoring, and state imposition.

The idea of the Conservative Party realigning around its libertarian element seems ludicrous at first glance, considering how few genuinely small-government, pro-liberty MPs exist within the party (and the even smaller subset of those whose views are vaguely coherent and pragmatic rather than ideological fantasy).

But then one remembers how Jeremy Corbyn first captured his party and then vast swathes of the country with a hard left message that his opponents and nearly all the commentariat dismissed as being terminally unpopular, and suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so unrealistic. One also thinks of how devotees of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were able to establish a beachhead within a Conservative Party which still fully bought into the statist post-war consensus. And suddenly the idea of a radical shift in the Conservative Party seems feasible, if still unlikely.

Of course, such a shift would require somebody with vision and political courage – a conservative version of Jeremy Corbyn. And necessarily somebody without very much to lose, given the high probability of failure. Like him or not, Jeremy Corbyn possesses this conviction in spades, and even many people who are none too keen on 1970s socialism respond warmly to his candidness and the fact that he is unwilling to apologise for his beliefs. It is hard to see anybody within the current Conservative Cabinet playing a similar role on the Right. Indeed, all of the candidates most hotly tipped to succeed Theresa May are either grasping opportunists (Boris Johnson) or bland nonentities with no clearly articulable political philosophy of their own (Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd).

But even if the Tories were to search deep within their party and find a leader with moral and ideological backbone, could they make political traction with any group of voters by standing up to the identity politics Left? Sam White argues yes:

Conservatives needn’t pay regard to the social justice diktats which have taken over left-liberal discourse and muffled people’s rational capabilities. Simply by speaking directly and honestly, the politically correct narrative can be disrupted. And if that ruffles some left-wing feathers then all the better, let’s refuse to apologise and then offend them some more.

[..] The Conservative Party ought to be rejecting SJW new-leftism unequivocally. Why not just state it clearly? If you value the sovereignty of the individual, if you want the freedom to say what you like, create what you want, and make of yourself what you will, then steer well clear of collectivist movements.

A serious party would throw out badly defined hate crime regulations, reject the CPS’s garbage about policing what people say online, and get a grip on the police force so they stop tweeting photos of their trans-friendly, rainbow coloured cars.

There’s a gap in the market right now as common sense, libertarian ideals go under-represented, and there’s a Conservative Party that needs revitalising.

I don’t disagree with Sam in principle, but I do believe that the approach he advocates would require a degree of political courage and holding one’s nerve that I have not yet seen in any potential future leader, with the partial exception of Jacob Rees-Mogg (who disqualifies himself from serious consideration in several other ways and is therefore irrelevant).

We have seen time and again the ability of the social justice, identity politics Left to summon national outrage, to raise a mob, to hound people from their jobs and careers and even to incite violence when they sense a threat to their illiberal worldview. Even when it transpires that the target of their fury is innocent of the charges levelled against them, the damage is often done and no retraction or apology is forthcoming – see the inquisition against decent people like scientists Dr. Matt Taylor and Sir Tim Hunt.

We have seen, too, the unwillingness of senior politicians to take even the mildest stand against a leftist orthodoxy which demands 100 percent compliance on pain of excommunication from polite society. Even on his way out as Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron equivocated and resigned rather than stick to his guns and defend what were presumably his true, religiously-motivated feelings about gay marriage. And regardless of one’s feelings about gay marriage (this blog is supportive), how many conservatives will have watched these various witch hunts play out in the news and concluded that to speak out on other issues like climate change, the gender pay gap, affirmative action or radical gender theory means career suicide and likely social ostracisation as a bonus?

In short, it would take almost superhuman bravery to stand in the face of this potential hurricane. Even Jeremy Corbyn didn’t have to fear such public opprobrium for stating his political beliefs. When running for the Labour leadership, despite being on record as supportive of dictatorial leftist regimes and terrorist groups from the IRA to Hamas, Corbyn was still very welcome in polite society, and regarded at worst by most his critics as a harmless curiosity from the past. By contrast, if a conservative politician were to publicly question or doubt the “institutional racism” of swathes of British society, denounce affirmative action or even state that there are just two sexes and genders, the dinner party invitations and television interview requests would dry up instantaneously. To even state political opinions held by a plurality of people effectively makes one persona non grata in Westminster and other elite circles.

Therefore, given the hostile environment and lack of courage seen in our politics, we will likely have to look for salvation from outside, in the form of Generation Z. As Sam White correctly points out, this emerging generation – unscarred by the great recession, less coddled (so far) by helicopter parenting, more individualistic and sceptical of identity politics narratives preaching collective racial guilt – may yet react against the politics of their older siblings and illiberal, leftist parents.

And this is why it is more vital than ever that the Conservative Party stop bickering over which of three or four identikit centrists replace Theresa May, and instead articulate a positive conservative vision with concrete policies that actually inspire young people rather than continue to screw them over. In short, they need to do precisely the opposite of what they accomplished during their car crash of a party conference in Manchester.

The newly-minted young adults of today are still politically up for grabs. There is nothing written in stone which decrees that they must become the perpetual property of a moralising left-wing movement which combines 1970s statism with 21st century, self-obsessed identity politics. Many of these new voters can still be called to a higher, better and more conservative purpose if only somebody was there to show them that there is more to conservatism than droning on about the deficit, apologising for their principles, chasing after Labour and messing up Brexit.

Tick tock, fellow conservatives.

 

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How To Use Social Justice And Identity Politics To Ruin Your Unborn Child

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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No, your child’s life does not depend on you teaching them to be an insufferable social justice activist or an artificially frail victim-in-waiting

Imagine being married to the kind of spouse who writes an open letter to her husband and publishes it in Everyday Feminism, insisting that she take the lead in all parenting decisions as you raise a mixed race child together because she is black while you are white.

Imagine being publicly instructed that it is your solemn duty to raise a social justice warrior child, the newest member of the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, whether they want to follow down that dismal path or not.

Well, the poor husband of Adiba Nelson doesn’t have to imagine, for he is living the nightmare. For a start, Nelson addresses him as though she were an android, which cannot be pleasant (unless he happens to be one, too):

Husband, for the last few years, we’ve been very firm in our decision to not have a child of our own.

You have two sons from your previous marriage, I have my daughter, and that has seemed like plenty. I’ve been so firm in this decision that I’ve gone as far as telling friends that they’re wise to only have one, or none at all.

Then about two months ago, we had a change of heart, and lo and behold, we’re taking steps to prepare for pregnancy.

And so the scene is set.

However, there is no blood test you can take or vaginal swab I can provide that can prepare you, White husband, to raise our Black child.

Yes, our Black child. Because even though our child will technically be biracial, having a biracial child who is half Black means you have a black child (by social, legal, and sometimes medical standards), and that comes with a whole new set of rules.

While your oldest White child may be targeted for his mental illness, statistically speaking, our Black daughter is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police. So yes, there are some things you need to know before we embark on this journey.

Because in the words of Aladdin, you are about to enter a whole new world.

A whole new world, yes. A whole new world of pained continual racial awareness at all times and a laser-like focus on what divides rather than unites us; a whole new world of corrosive victimhood culture, combined with an infantilising trend among adults to affirm one another (and their children) well in excess of their merits, setting them up for future failure.

And then comes the agenda:

1. We’re Raising a Social Justice Activist

Today, more than ever in our lifetime, this is crucial. Not just to the world that our child will grow up in, but also, to our child’s survival.

The world at large will see our child as Black when it comes to crime, academia, housing, and everything else, but it will question their loyalty to their Jewish heritage when they stand up for the rights of people that look like me.

It’s crucial that we remind our child that one identity and experience does not negate the other, but that as a Black individual living in this country, it’s our collective responsibility to ensure that everyone is entitled to (and receives) fair and just treatment.

By that same token, we also need to teach them how to leverage their access to Whiteness and all of the privileges that come with it to help achieve this goal.

We need to gird them with the confidence, wherewithal, and history of both our heritages so that they can not only speak out against all the -isms with knowledge, but also with empathy.

It’s critical to our child that they understand that while they are in fact, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, and African American, the beautiful bouncy curls and caramel colored skin that earned them oohs and aahs as children can also earn them an all expenses paid trip to Rikers Island, or worse, the morgue.

We are raising a social justice activist. Their life depends on it.

Their life really does not depend on becoming a Social Justice Warrior; this cannot be emphasised enough. Using this kind of overwrought language may help to imbue the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics with a nobility that it would otherwise lack, but it does not make the statement true. In fact, while nobody should discourage political activism, it is probably true that becoming a social justice activist and involving oneself in various conflicts with an often militarised police force actually increases rather than lowers mortal risk.

More:

2. I Need You to Follow My Parenting Lead in Public

Black people are exonerated at an exponentially higher rate than other races (four times more than Latinx folks and 1.2 times more than White folks), which means that our child is more likely to be arrested, tried, and convicted for something they didn’t do – simply because of the color of their skin and the kink in their hair.

So if we’re out and about and I scold our child for touching things, or I preface every outing with “when we go in the store, you stay right by my side, and you don’t touch anything,” it’s not me being mean.

It’s me educating our child (as subtly as possible) in the ways of the world, so that we aren’t one day paying for court appeal after court appeal.

Adiba Nelson might call it “educating our child in the ways of the world”. Others might view it as constricting their curiosity and imbuing them with a paranoia and vulnerability which they ought never to possess, certainly not at such a formative age.

More:

3. If We Have a Daughter, Fill Up Her Cup of Self-Worth on the Daily

Yes, to the point of obnoxiously overflowing. I really mean that. Obnoxiously. Overflowing.

As Black women, our styles, beauty regimen, body shape, and facial features have historically been mocked, shunned, and in the case of Sarah Baartman, even put on display in a traveling circus.

When we’ve been nothing but ourselves, we’ve been told it is not good enough, not pretty enough, not right enough – simply not enough.

However, when these same looks, regimens, and shapes are worn, relished and co-opted by other races, it becomes socially acceptable, the hot new fad, and all the rage. But you know this. This is nothing new to you. What you may not know is how to counter this.

Well, I’ll tell you.

To proactively counter this, from minute one of her girlhood, she needs to hear the words “hello beautiful girl,” and every day from that day forward (unless she tells us otherwise).

From the moment we teach her her first anything – rolling over, holding her head up, tracking with her eyes – she needs to be told how fiercely intelligent and unstoppable she is.

Because what could go wrong with filling a child with so much unearned positive affirmation that entering adulthood (or, god forbid, the corporate workplace) is set up to become a traumatic event due to lack of continual praise?

What if Adiba Nelson’s daughter isn’t “fiercely intelligent and unstoppable”? That is not to speculate that she will be ugly and dim (though both are a possibility). But she may be dreamy and artistic, have street smarts rather than book smarts or be known for her empathy and sensitivity rather than as an indefatigable warrior queen. All parents probably project something of themselves onto their young or unborn children, but Nelson seems to have predetermined that her child must become SJW 2.0 or else consider her life a failure.

And what’s all this about the husband having to defer to the wife when it comes to parenting techniques? As the social justice warriors would say: Um, doesn’t that, like, totally reinforce existing harmful gender role stereotypes?

Nelson then leaves her husband with this motivating pep talk:

Husband, being the father of a Black child will not be easy, because by nature (and history), it forces us to confront the fact that the world we thought we knew is not the world we know at all.

There will be times you will feel a rage you didn’t know existed because of someone’s “innocent” microaggression towards our child. However, those moments will be countered with earth-shattering bliss as you watch our child break through every ceiling with ease.

And when those moments come, I’ll turn to you, give you some dap and whisper in your ear, “Congratulations, husband. We did that.”

But today, as we prepare ourselves to bring a beautiful Black child into this world, I only have one thing to say to you.

You got this.

How incredibly condescending. How arrogant, to assume that a fully grown man and existing parent of two children (not to mention somebody Nelson presumably loves and respects enough to have willingly married) requires public guidance and cajoling in the art of raising their new daughter, simply because she will emerge into the world with slightly darker skin than his own.

What chance does this child stand if it isn’t merely exposed to infantilising victimhood culture through the education system but is marinated in that culture from birth at home? How much harm stands to be done to this child as she is raised to view the world entirely through the intersectional prisms (or should that be prisons?) of race and gender theory?

Thank heavens that I didn’t have to put up with any of this nonsense growing up as a biracial child myself. Thanks heavens that I was raised to relate to people as fellow humans rather than members of separately siloed racial identity groups, and not to see colour (I know, I know, how triggering to hear such a thought expressed today).

I fear for the child that Adiba Nelson and “husband” are about to raise together. But then I remember that children do love to rebel against the faith and values of their parents, and that gives me hope. May Adiba Jr. grow up to be a huge ideological frustration to her mother and a thorn in the side of the social justice and identity politics movement.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 48 – Insufferable Middle Class SJWs Decide To ‘Liberate’ Working Class Students

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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Working class people at Oxbridge do not need to be “liberated” and turned into a designated victim group by meddling, power-hungry campus SJWs

Apparently St. Hilda’s College at Oxford University plans to appoint a “class liberation officer” to watch over the welfare of lower-income students and formally enshrine their status as an official victim group to be fussed over and grievously pitied by the over-active university SJWs.

Huffington Post reports:

An Oxford University college is to appoint a “class liberation officer” to protect working-class students from being called “chavs” or being insulted over Primark clothes.

Students at St Hilda’s College voted to create the post after it was suggested that working-class students are under-represented at the prestigious university and suffer from “microaggressions” and classism.

According to the motion, the post will act “in a similar way” to appointments including the “RE Officer, LGBTQ+ Officer, Women’s Officer and Disabilities Officer to represent students who self-identify as being part of this group.”

One student at the college told the Sunday Times: “Insults such as ‘chav’, chav-themed social nights and questions such as ‘why are you wearing Primark?’ can make poor students feel upset and worthless.”

This is absolutely pitiful, yet entirely emblematic of the way that the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics works on a university campus level. Identity politics cultists only maintain their power and influence by claiming to speak on behalf of various “oppressed” groups, and by exaggerating that oppression to comical proportions in order to justify the various perks and restrictions on free expression which are inevitably demanded. And this inevitably leads to a ratchet effect, with more and more subgroups of people being identified as “vulnerable” or “oppressed”, and ever-smaller problems being cast as intolerable harms done to them.

It was therefore only a matter of time until the overwhelmingly middle class SJW brigades decided that the next involuntary beneficiaries of their enlightened do-goodery would be working class students, none of whom require a dedicated student union officer to fight their corner. In fact, there is nothing more patronising and offensive to students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds than the idea that they somehow cannot make it on their own at Oxford without the help of dedicated student union officials protecting them from harm.

Jacob Furedi says it best:

I heartily concur. I grew up in a poor, single-parent household in Essex and attended Cambridge University, and in my time there I was never made to feel unwelcome or at risk of emotional “harm” because of insults about my background. In fact, I would have chafed at the very idea that some busybody union official saw it as their duty to watch over me, as though I were any less capable of navigating university life than a privately-educated fifth generation Oxbridge student.

This move by St. Hilda’s college to create a so-called Class Liberation Officer is offensive beyond measure, and any good that might come from preventing or punishing random insults is vastly outweighed by the further segregation of the student body in to separate rival special interest groups, perpetually jockeying for position and seeking to cast themselves as the most oppressed in order to gain maximum perks and benefits.

From my personal experience fifteen years ago, Oxbridge students are smart and sensitive, and more than capable of forming friendships across racial, religious or socio-economic divides without the help of some godawful student union facilitator or the constant invigilation of a “liberation officer”. But you know the one surefire way to immediately make everybody painfully conscious of class and economic status? Yep, you guessed it – seek to actively divide the student body along these lines and you create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Working class students, just like working class people outside of the increasingly rotten university system, are of absolutely equal intrinsic worth to those from wealthier backgrounds. What’s more, they are more than capable of organising and standing up for their own interests when occasionally necessary throughout history (see Selina Todd’s excellent book “The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class” for a great narrative), and pulling together as part of the broader society the rest of the time.

Working class people do not need rescuing or “liberating” from “oppression”, least of all by busybody SJWs on the lookout for more victim groups to represent. To be liberated, one must first be enslaved. And if pinch-faced, upper middle class SJW do-gooders at Oxford view poorer students or the other minority groups under their watch as slaves then they should urgently check their privilege, for they are the only real oppressors in town.

 

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Donald Trump Victory Reaction: Jessica Valenti’s Insults and Self-Righteous Outrage Will Not Win Back Trump Voters

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

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Hating on Trump supporters may feel good, but it comes at a high price

Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti prefers to wrap the comforting blanket of moral outrage tight around her and hunker down for a long and dehumanising war of attrition against Donald Trump supporters rather than put the national interest and social cohesion of America over her own short-term desire for catharsis.

Following on from the Mike Pence / Hamilton the Musical saga, in a piece entitled “Vote shaming Trump supporters is fair. What they have done is shameful”, Valenti spits:

You don’t get to vote for a person who brags about sexual assault and expect that the women in your life will just shrug their shoulders. You don’t get to play the victim when people de-friend you on Facebook, as if being disliked for supporting a bigot is somehow worse than the suffering that marginalized people will endure under Trump. And you certainly do not get to enjoy a performance by people of color and those in the LGBT community without remark or protest when you enact policies and stoke hatred that put those very people’s lives in danger.

Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid. I was recently accused by a writer of “vote shaming” – but there’s nothing wrong with being made to feel ashamed for doing something shameful.

Before concluding:

Whether it’s Pence at a play or your Trump-voting uncle at Thanksgiving, there are people right now who should be made to feel uncomfortable. In a time when there is so much to protest, so much work to do, the booing is necessary – shame on us if we ever stop.

Valenti has learned nothing – absolutely nothing from this election. She would rather stew in her own ideological bubble, wallow in her own supposed victimhood and demonise a vast swathe of the country for their decision, yet expect these people to listen to her advice when it comes to picking a candidate in 2020.

Or perhaps Valenti doesn’t actually care whether many of the Trump supporters actually vote for her favoured Democratic candidate. She would be more than happy for them to sit at home on election day 2020, let down by Trump and unmotivated by anyone else, their lives continuing to become steadily worse, their economic position and job security still being eaten away without any attempt at remedy from Washington. Perhaps Valenti is fine with all of that – I doubt that she personally knows or counts among her smug little friendship circle a single person like those she is busy demonising in her Guardian column.

Valenti tries to invoke the politics of victimhood to make Trump voters (too often portrayed as a homogeneous bloc by leftists who would otherwise recoil from stereotyping) seem like the cruel oppressors here. Yet she is blind to the possibility that people fortunate enough to live in New York City and act on stage in the biggest hit musical theatre show of the decade – and the Brooklyn-dwelling US Guardian columnists who cheer them on – might be the ones with privilege and airy disregard for those without power and influence in the modern world, rather than a a hateful white, male auto-assembly worker in Michigan or a call centre worker in Wisconsin.

Being the bigger person means having empathy for those who disagree with you, even those who spurn and insult you at times. It means having the humility to consider the possibility that while Donald Trump may indeed be a bad president-elect and a worse man, many of the people who voted for him did so not as an endorsement of his worst qualities but through lack of a less-flawed messenger for the ideas he advocated which (rightly or wrongly) resonated with people. It means having the courage to consider that maybe some of those ideas might actually have merit.

Jessica Valenti does not need to be the bigger person today. She can probably afford to indulge in her Trump tantrum – which unfairly targets millions of decent Americans along with the man himself – through inauguration day, and perhaps a little longer. And to be clear, this blog is not suggesting that Valenti has no right to be upset by the result, or to express her objections to Donald Trump, just that she should find a less bitter, more constructive and narrowly-targeted way to do so.

But if Valenti and her fellow left-wing anti-Trump cohort want to win back political power, it would help an awful lot if she, together with many of the other transparently privileged media commentators and celebrities in the country were to put a sock in the tirade, get out of Trump voters’ faces for a few minutes and actually considered trying the Good Cop approach to outreach and persuasion for a change.

But who am I kidding? She won’t do it. After all, it just feels so good to stamp one’s feet and shout at the Evil Bad Men (and self-hating women) who picked Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. And the pursuit of that warm glow of self-righteous outrage blinds the Jessica Valentis of this world to the fact that with every new column, they only strengthen Trump’s support and set themselves back even further on the path to genuine political renewal.

 

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Identity Politics Gave Us President Trump; More Identity Politics Will Not Make Things Better

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

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Identity politics cultists created Donald Trump, President-Elect Edition, and from much of their subsequent complaining they haven’t learned a single thing from their mistake

Blogger and polemicist Phil Hendren is in unsparing mood as he takes the identity politics Left to task for their role in provoking the alleged “whitelash” which confounded the opinion polls and made Donald Trump president-elect of the United States last Tuesday.

Hendren’s critique is worth quoting at length, as he writes:

Of course, the political earthquakes have been followed in each case with a sentimental reaction that is both odd and downright scarier than the actual earthquake. This has been coupled with a lack of self-awareness by the losing side.

Be it Brexit or Trump we’ve seen knee-jerk reactions that ponder upon whether democracy is such a great idea after all. Amazingly we have idiots screaming about fascism whilst simultaneously suggesting that something be done about the pesky plebs that voted one way or the other.

They moan about bigotry whilst suggesting that the franchise be removed from certain people who are not suitably intelligent or are too old to be trusted with a vote - call me old-fashioned but that is bigotry right there.

You listen to analysts who say they are “just reporting the data” that tell you Trump scored well with “white males without a college degree”. Has there ever been a more obvious coded dog whistle for “stupid white trash”?

The same thing happened in Britain after the Brexit vote. People started arguing that it was those with less education that voted Leave, the implication being that the stupid unenlightened were to blame.

It astounds me that, as the hand-wringing goes on, there persists, even in defeat, a complete and total contempt for some part of the electorate by the chattering class and the elite.

Don’t they get it? Do they really not see that it is precisely that attitude toward the great unwashed that has caused them to lose? Don’t they also realise that they’re witnessing the ultimate end game of their own orthodoxies?

For the past 20 years, the dominant orthodoxy in the West has revolved around the politics of Identity. We’ve been constantly reminded that humanity should be pigeonholed into groups based on race, gender, sexuality or the Other.

The elephant in the room of this orthodoxy has been the marginalisation of the considered dominant social identity, be it so-called ‘cis-gender’ (essentially a pejorative for someone who’s gender identity is in line with their biology) ; heterosexuals; or good old whitey - aka ‘the oppressor’.

Is it any wonder that these groups have reacted by taking on the clothes of Identity Politics themselves? Anyone that claims to be shocked or disgusted by this development is, to put it as bluntly as I can, a fucking idiot.

If you constantly dehumanise people by making them the sum of arbitrary labels, and then you push the view that each of these groups is structurally disadvantaged by the oppressor then you inevitably structurally disadvantage the oppressor who begins to feel, rightly or wrongly, oppressed.

It isn’t fucking rocket science.

The vote for Brexit and the vote for Trump do not represent some sort of uprising of white supremacy, or the normalisation of misogyny and racism. They represent the inevitable consequence of this misanthropic orthodoxy that has infected the chattering class, the Academy and the elites.

Did I vote for Brexit? No, I was a reluctant (and regretful) Remainer. Would I have voted for Trump? Hell no. He’s an illiberal social authoritarian that supports ridiculous left wing protectionism, but I get why people did.

Until the elite and chattering “enlightened” class begin to realise that they’ve created this. That they are to blame for it, these political earthquakes will keep on coming.

My emphasis in bold.

As an anti-Trump conservative watching the reaction to Trump’s election with amazement and concern, I am absolutely stunned by the lack of introspection and self-awareness displayed by much of the Left.

As this blog has already noted, Donald Trump supporters propelled their man to the White House largely by following the proven playbook of the leftist Social Justice Warriors, and they were able to do so because of the pervasive victimhood culture which has been nurtured and aggravated in America by a succession of cynical politicians and activists.

As Hendren rightly notes, if you atomise society into “separate but equal” identity groups based on race, gender or sexuality, you inevitably spark an arms race of perceived oppression and claims of vulnerability which far exceed the actual real oppression which may still exist. Grievance group is pitched against grievance group in the battle of public sympathy, with only one constant – that “cisgender” white men are always portrayed at the top of the Hierarchy of Oppression, always cast as the villains – whether they live in a New York condominium with gold-plated elevators or an Appalachian trailer park on the outskirts of a town being ravaged by crystal meth and heroin addiction.

I’ve warned about this before, in the context of the oppressive climate faced by young conservatives on college campuses, pointing out that it will not be long before those with conservative views tire of being bullied, censored and portrayed as “hateful” by the social justice mob which the tacit consent of spineless university administrators, and begin to use the same language of vulnerability and victimhood to elicit public sympathy for their own plight. Conservatives see other “identity groups” taking this approach and winning their battles to silence criticism and elevate themselves to a privileged, untouchable position on campus, and already we signs of some harried conservatives adopting the same approach.

So it is outside the university campus too, in wider society. Many millions of decent, non-racist and non-sexist people, often (but not exclusively) white, have been told increasingly stridently that questioning open borders or very recent new norms around gender identity and sexuality is tantamount to “hate” – that they are, in fact, bigots. Leftist identity politics cultists have increasingly deployed the nuclear option accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia against anybody who displays the slightest hesitation in embracing their worldview, leaving no way to distinguish and flag genuinely racist, sexist or homophobic opinions or actions when they occur.

And now we face the worst-case scenario, a white working class which sees other minority groups claiming vulnerability and oppression to demand sympathy and claim perks, and which has decided to think of itself as an oppressed minority group too. A very large, very powerful minority group, as it turns out.

We even get an eerily prescient prophecy that this will come to pass in a 2008 essay by Mark Schmitt in Prospect Magazine, written six months prior to the election of Barack Obama in his battle against John McCain.

Schmitt suggests:

That leaves Republicans with a single alternative, one that’s embodied in the slogan of McCain’s first general-election advertisement: “The American President Americans Are Waiting For.” It’s the politics of identity–not necessarily racial or ethnic identity but identity as an American. The blog FiveThirtyEight.com, which has been gathering all sorts of data relevant to the Electoral College vote, recently noted a fascinating demographic fact: About 7 percent of people refuse to answer the Census questions about ethnic origin and instead write in “American.” Those defiant Americans are overwhelmingly found in the states and counties that turned away from the Democratic Party in 2000 and 2004–the Appalachian belt running from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio–which are also the counties where Barack Obama has done worst in the primaries.

David Frum calls explicitly for this brand of identity politics, declaring that while the Republican Party’s issue positions have evolved over the years, “there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood,” whereas Democrats “attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: … intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays–people who identify with the ‘pluribus’ in the nation’s motto, ‘e pluribus unum.'” In case it’s not clear, in Frum’s Latin, “pluribus” means “parasites,” and he tells us helpfully, “As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger.”

In Frum’s book, this ugly bit of identity politics is carefully nestled within thousands of words about policy. And this is how the code is supposed to work. The GOP’s attack on “liberals” was always an attack on people not quite like “Americans”–secular, cosmopolitan, educated, egalitarian.

[..]

Traditionally, the phrase “identity politics” has referred to the Democratic coalition’s caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted. Identity politics on the left, according to this very conventional wisdom, opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right. And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close. Obama is not Jesse Jackson; Hillary Clinton is not former Rep. Pat Schroeder. He chose to campaign on national reconciliation, she on bread-and-butter economics and her expertise on military affairs. Whereas McCain–a man whose known positions on the war and on the economy are deeply unpopular, whose other positions are endlessly shifting, whose party and ideology are rejected–is recast entirely in terms of his biography, his honor, his character, his American-ness.

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus “pluribus,” unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain’s slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn’t salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else–ideas, competence, governance–is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, “The American President Americans Are Waiting For.”

“The American President Americans Are Waiting For”. “Make America Great Again”. Schmitt wasn’t too far off in his prediction of the winning message, albeit eight years later than originally planned.

Read the whole article if you have time – the foreshadowing is quite spooky.

This is in significant part why Donald Trump will be taking the presidential oath of office on 20th January 2017 – because the American Left succeeded in shattering American society into a fractured group of warring special interests and victim groups, claiming nearly all of them for its own side but leaving the largest – the white working class – to the Trump-led Republicans.

And still they don’t see it. Still they rail against the ignorant, inbred hicks with their backward, racist ways. Still they treat the plurality of Americans who voted for Donald Trump as stupid, unwitting enablers of fascism (at best) or actively hateful “deplorables” at worst, unaware that every further such comment only serves to prove to the white working class that they are indeed under attack, and that they were right to band together and vote based partly (even largely) on the solidarity of identity.

At some point, somebody fairly prominent on the American Left is going to have to wake up, reach this conclusion and then have the courage to stick their head above the parapet and urge their fellow travellers to stop their destructive course of action. With their hysterical anti-Trump rhetoric, the American Left not only obscure Donald Trump’s many real and tangible flaws, they actively feed the monster which they fear the most.

Now that the populist Right are catching up with the new rules of the game, playing the identity politics card is turning into something approaching Mutual Assured Destruction. Sure, you can do it, but pandering to the politics of identity is now all but guaranteed to provoke an equal and opposite reaction from those being singled out as oppressors. And whoever wins on any given day, the country is left more divided, more bitter and less able to knit back together with goodwill when it comes time to govern.

The American Left needs to step back from this madness. Now.

 

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