Where Worlds Collide

Colum Paget has a long screen on Trump’s election and the failure of the middle-class left

In many ways Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the apex of this champagne-feminist madness. I don’t blame Hilary, who I think is unfairly hated, and who in some ways strikes me as a modern Lady Jean Grey: surrounded by people telling her she’s going to be Queen without really having done the work to make it possible. The insider skinny was that Bill Clinton was constantly bemoaning the need to reach out to rural and working class whites. However, he was overridden by ‘experts’ who, as so many people in leftist politics now think in terms of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘patriarchy’ basically said “Fuck those redneck neckbeard dudebros, this is about a woman getting to be president.” Thus the campaign appeared to be about Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem ticking off an item on their feminist bucket list.

He may or may not be letting Hillary off the hook here. The failures of the political establishment were many, and one of them was making her the candidate in the first place. The time was wrong for an establishment technocrat, and her combination of middle-class identity politics with subservience to Wall Street was never going resonate outside the bubble.

The liberal left needs a new vision to replace the one that has clearly failed, and needs to build a broad-based popular movement that can actually win elections. Which means that pundits or political bloggers who don’t get why Hillary lost and double down on failed ideas do not deserve anyone’s attention. Some of their screeds can be boiled down to little more than “Voters are over. Voters don’t have to be your electorate“.

Trump’s victory is a disaster not just for America but for the whole world. Like Brexit, it was a wholly avoidable disaster by a complacent and out-of-touch political establishment who were so deep in their filter bubbles they didn’t see it coming.

It wasn’t just that Hillary was the wrong candidate. Will Rahn of CBS News reflects on just how badly the press, inlcuding himself, screwed up.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

…

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

That last line is quite telling, and I have seen the way journalists like David Aeurbach and Liana Kernzer got blacklisted and subject to personal harassment for not keeping to the party narrative.

Auerbach’s Twitter is full of righteous anger now, and you can understnnd why.

A lot of people have compared the US elections with 1930s Germany, and there are indeed parallels. But do you know what it reminds me of?

The years leading up to “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

No historical parallel is exact, of course, but look at the similarities. An electorate that’s become polarised along tribal lines? The idea that the winners’ ability to completely screw over the losers is the legitimate spoils of victory? The use of gerrymandering and other electoral trickery to entrench the rule of one tribe?

Eventually in Northern Ireland, the centre couldn’t hold and things spilled over into open violence, a low-intensity civil war that lasted decades and cost thousands of lives.

Let us hope this is not America’s fate, and whoever wins tonight will govern on behalf of the whole nation rather than just their own tribe.

One of the two candidates almost certainly lacks the empathy or the wisdom to do that, and I don’t need to say which one that is.