The contemporary identitarian Left spectacularly failed to understand, engage with or even acknowledge the fundamental economic and social concerns which motivated these American workers to back Trump, particularly those arising from immigration and other aspects of globalisation, which negatively effect the working class. The left’s policy prescription is for more of the same, whilst ignoring its own past culpability in the promotion of economic globalist measures such as the abolition of import tariffs or the welcoming of mass immigration in the name of ‘diversity’ (to disguise the material interests of the cheap foreign-labour bosses).
Illustrative of the left’s lack of accountability is for past, and present, policies which have harmed workers’ interests is the issue of Trump’s tariffs, which by raising the cost of goods imported from certain overseas countries, protect the developed world’s industries from competition by low-wage, low-regulation, low-quality countries.
The Left’s political tone-deafness has resulted in denial that the workers could have legitimately rejected the left’s failed politics. The left’s psychological defence mechanism has been to blame others for the left’s failings. That is why what started as contemptuous mockery by the liberal left (and their new establishment playmates) when Trump announced his candidacy has since turned into savage, round-the-clock denunciation once he was elected. It is childish and tiresome.
The Left happily draws succour from the mainstream media. During the “honeymoon” period of Trump’s first hundred days in office, 90% of coverage by America’s three largest television networks (CNN, NBC and CBS) was negative (Harvard’s Shorenstein Centre on Media, Politics, and Public Policy) whilst their coverage in 2017 and 2018 was 92% negative (Media Research Centre). This should be easily understood by the Marxist Left which used to understand the mainstream media’s purpose of serving the capitalist class by promoting an ideological climate favourable to profit-making (including the media’s material stake in corporate advertising revenue), not least because it was the Left, and the trade unions, that copped the media hammering. But now the anti-Trump Left allies with its media enemies in the cause of Trump-bashing – this would be the mass media which hardly anyone, other than fervid anti-Trumpists, trusts - the ‘news’ media garners a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in barely one fifth of the US population, with just 23% trusting newspapers, 20% trusting in television news and 16% putting heir faith in Internet sources. By contrast, the Left willingly suspends its historical scepticism towards the capitalist media and embraces each bit of breathless anti-Trump of ‘news’, speculation and simple abuse as the latest missile which will surely, this time, hole Trump below the waterline and sink his populist brand of politics.
Still sore at their political failure, the left has turned up the volume of its hysterical anti-Trump rhetoric in order to distract attention from a policy and ideological debate which they lost. The New Left’s response to Trump has been a spluttering, emotionally-charged rage. Observe the frankly unhinged emotional fury that left-liberal (and orthodox right) anti-Trumpists have been reduced to in just thinking about Trump or saying his name. At one extreme, profanity-laced temper tantrums have ensued - not for nothing is the liberals’ fanatical hatred of all things Trump labelled as ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ that foaming-at-the-mouth affliction that affects all those who, as a self-defence mechanism, displace their own political failings into despising Trump.
TDS is a sign of political desperation by the left and indicative of a short-sighted refusal to look at Trump’s appeal to the US working class, a constituency that once looked to the left for policy solutions and political vision but which now finds a Trump-cursing left consumed by identity politics, viewing everything through race, sex and other ‘identity’ filters.l developments they disapprove of, for the challenge it poses to their embrace of divisive identity politics instead of class politics.
The new Left prefers to be a slum-dweller in the political ghettoes of identity politics, obsessing over skin pigmentation, chromosomes, gender identity, ethnicity and religion (Islam), from where it lobs discussion-killing epithets such as ‘sexism!’, ‘transphobia!’, ‘racism!’, ‘Islamophobia!’ and other cuss words whenever cherished multicultural and other identitarian pieties are brought into question.
The new left’s retreat from class has ben near-monolithic The Australian-born British-based journalist and documentary film-maker, John Pilger, is one of the few leftists to dissent, saying:
“Today, ‘Identity’ is all. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s … [‘deplorables’] abuse was handed out at an LGBTQI rally as part of her cynical campaign to win over minorities by abusing a white mostly working-class majority. Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this”.
The identitarian Left has largely abandoned the white working class in favour of a coalition of the identity-based fringes, what Clinton called a “rainbow of discontents” - Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, refugees, immigrants, the LGBTQI community, Muslims and other identity groups – enlisting them in what she hoped was a “basket of lifelong Democrat voters” (to counter what she called the irredeemable “basket of deplorables”). The US Democrat Party is accelerating its transition from its FDR New Deal persona as an avowedly, union-based party in the class interest of workers to a Black and Hispanic Party. The party is now seen as such by the white working class: 45% of Clinton’s 2016 vote was non-white. Her Democrat party used to capture a majority of the white votes in America but Democrats haven't been able to persuade a majority of white people to vote for them in any presidential election since 1948 (with the exception only of the aberrational Democrat landslide of 1964). If the traditional (white) people won't elect the Democrats anymore, then the Democrats would have to elect a new (immigrant) people by bringing in millions of ringers from overseas to shore up their electoral base. STATS HERE!!!!!
In the face of Democrat contempt for the material interests and cultural values of the white working class, it was neither surprising nor shocking that sufficient numbers of them rallied to Trump as their political hope. Trump said what they knew, that, for example, Mexico has taken American workers’ jobs and in return dumped their criminal riff-raff on American communities. The Left, of course treats such basic reality calls as taboo, as racist. Thus has the new Left been content with self-consoling emotional therapy based on strident Trump-bashing. This Trump hate is not only anti-democratic because it rejects the majority will of the people but it is also an implicit condemnation of Trump’s white working class supporters, the traditional, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying, English-speaking working class.
The political future for the blinkered, Trump-raging left can look bleak. For as long as immigration and economic globalism rule the planet, the class conditions that gave rise to Trump in the US are not going to go away. Trump did not give birth to the new populism, he is the result of it.
It is far easier instead for the New Left to resort to faux explanations for the Trump triumph. A favourite bogey of the left is portraying the ‘racist’ ‘Alt-Right’ as a powerful and sinister Svengali manipulating a lazy public mind. The excuse of misogyny is also routinely asserted for Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss, despite Clinton’s share of the total female vote being just 54% of the total female vote (whilst white women chose the ‘misogynistic’ Trump over the ‘feminist’ Clinton by a massive 28 percentage points) which leaves an awful lot of misogynistic women out there.
‘Populism’ came in for a drubbing. The term is used by the left as pejorative shorthand for bad (but popular) policies served up by a master showman, a quasi-fascist demagogue preying on people’s baser instincts and proffering ‘simplistic’ solutions to complex, sophisticated political problems. Populism should, rather be seen for what it basically is - ‘giving the people what they want’ or democracy, in other words.
Populism is portrayed by the left as dark and scary but is simply a legitimate response to popular mainstream issues like economic inequality, trade protectionism, supra-national power (the EU, for example), immigration, and law and order. Populist movements raise valid critiques of the status quo, and of the very real anti-democratic power of political and economic elites, which is why it rarely appears in mainstream discussion as anything but an insult. The left use the political concept of populism as a near neighbour of fascism.
Fascism, for its part, has found favour with the left in utterly non-fascistic times. The myth of a resurgent fascism under Trump serves the left’s purpose of writing off as far right anyone who criticises Trump (or Brexit, for that matter). Getting labelled “far right” is astonishingly easy in the Trump/Brexit era, when the heated imaginations of much of the mainstream and harder left would have us believe that the White House is occupied by the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and that the nearly 63 million Americans who elected him are “white nationalists” or “alt-right” or similar fascist-ready foot soldiers.
This infantile equation of the historical horror of fascism with a democratically elected, pro-worker American politician simply debases the meaning of the term fascism and dishonours the victims of the Holocaust. The overuse of the ‘fascist’ slur downgrades the historic experience of actual fascism by reducing fascism to merely a disagreeable political opinion. The ‘Trump equals fascism’ theme is historically illiterate and a sign of the political desperation of all anti-Trumpists whose political vision had been rejected by the 2016 American electorate, especially its working class.
The left has never accepted that they had lost the battle of ideas and policies to Trump with his signature, populist campaign themes of the economic and social destructiveness of neo-liberal, multicultural globalism which includes the factory-shuttering effects of sovereignty-sapping ‘free trade’ agreements, the off-shoring of manufacturing industries to low-wage countries, the job-displacement arising from the import of cheap immigrant labour, the community-eroding social effects of mass Third World immigration, the multiculturalist ‘politically correct’ restrictions on free speech, the terrorism and general incompatibility of Islam with Western, Enlightenment values, and so on.
is rightly perceived by Trump voters as contempt directed at themselves. For how else could a man slandered as a bozo and a fascist be elected other than by those of similar ilk who do not possess the liberals’ finer sentiments or college degrees and who would be the first to join in any passing pogrom by Fuhrer Trump’s goose-stepping brownshirts. The liberal elites see Trump voters as ‘white trash’, the backwoods rubes of ‘heartland’ America, the gap-toothed racists and misogynists of ‘fly-over country’ of the Rust Belt manufacturing states who, shamefully, abuse democracy by voting the wrong way. The new Left essentially blames the Trump-voting electorate for being unfit for democracy.
If all else fails, as it has, there is always a sick assassination chic of the possibility (and sub voce) desirability of assassinating the President.