The Editor,
The Monthly
In American Berserk (The Monthly, March 2017), Don Watson, like other liberal-left critics of the new US President, gleefully resorts to a visceral mauling of Donald Trump as a ‘a scam artist, an ignoramus, a professional liar, a colossal and malignant narcissist, a vulgarian’.
This ad hominem approach, however, skates over why Trump won the white working class vote, and with it, the election. It is this majority class segment that is screwed by globalisation – by the off-shoring of jobs and the import of cheap immigrant labour, by job-destroying and sovereignty-sapping ‘free trade’ agreements. The globalisation umbrella also shelters multiculturalism and it is the law-abiding, tax-paying, English-speaking, white worker who is the victim of Diversity’s social pathologies of crime, terrorism, Islam, welfare costs, urban congestion, unaffordable housing, environmental pressures, the fraying of shared cultural values, and ‘politically correct’ restrictions on free speech.
Instead of addressing these legitimate concerns, however, Watson lectures the “white trash” on the statistical risk of terrorism, patronises them for not knowing their own interests, and derides them for falling prey to an ‘America First’ populist who “exploits the need of every mug for hope” thus demonising white workers as backwoods rubes of “heartland” America, the gap-toothed racists and misogynists of ‘fly-over country’ who, shamefully, vote the wrong way.
The contemporary left prefers to be a slum-dweller in the political ghettoes of identity politics, obsessing over skin pigmentation, chromosomes, ethnicity and religion, from where it lobs the thought-grenades of ‘racism!’ and ‘Look, over there! Islamophobia!’ whenever cherished multicultural pieties are questioned. To question border controls, or immigration, is to blaspheme against the Cult of Diversity.
The Western left used to oppose the free movement of capital, goods and services but now opposes Trumpian ‘economic nationalism’ and fails to see that the boundary-free movement of (the cheapest) labour is the Fourth Horseman of the Globalisation Apocalypse. Self-indulgent Trump hysteria by the left has little to say to the popular desire to reject the political-corporate globalist elite and take back democratic, plebeian control of society.