Been lurking on this site a bit and finally decided to venture into the lions’ den. And I’ve done that today—with whip and chair in hand—because I want to send you all a message from the other side of the aisle.
Many of you are gnashing their teeth over most or all of Donald Trump’s policy decisions. You have been squirming since November 2016. I understand your unease, but unfortunately, I’ve got some bad news for you:
You have no one but yourselves to blame.
Because you…allowed this to happen.
Trump’s voters may have elected him, and the Republican Party—with varying degrees of reluctance—may have decided to back him, but it was you—the Democratic Party, the liberals, the left—who did more than anyone else to create the polarized political atmosphere that made his ascension possible in the first place.
Everything Donald Trump is doing that you hate, everything he’s doing, has done or will do, the utter erasure of Obama's legacy—all of it is your fault. This is all on you, because without you Trump would never have had even a ghost of a chance at winning.
It was all you.
Is you.
Only…you.
You did it.
You made this possible.
You created Donald Trump.
You, with your toxic identity politics. You, with your idiotic crap about 56 genders and micro-aggressions. You, with your “trigger warnings,” and your ridiculous safe spaces filled with Play-Doh and crayons. You, with your relentless drive to silence anyone who disagrees with you. You, with your masked ANTIFA riots and your shouting down of conservative speakers at universities.
Behold your handiwork. Look upon what you have wrought.
You unleashed this monster. Donald Trump is you in the mirror.
You.
You've had Trump coming. You've had Trump coming for a long, long time.
After all, long before Donald Trump declared he was running—to the amusement of the liberal media and the Washington establishment, who didn’t stop laughing until election night—and long before Hillary Clinton dismissed half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” we American conservatives had long gotten used to being kicked around by you liberals, and I say that from personal experience. I grew up a Republican. I still consider myself a Republican, despite the fact that I voted Democrat this time around. Yet in America today, it’s usually not a good idea to say that you're a Republican. It’s not wise to say that out loud where someone can hear you. Honestly, there have been times where I’ve felt like I’m part of a banned movement in hiding or something. That’s what it feels like to be a Republican in America, because the general attitude of many on the left toward us was (and still is): “You dare disagree with us? You dare? You must be racist, xenophobic, sexist, bigoted or all of the above. Where's your white hood, you neo-Nazi?” Indeed, many liberal Americans no longer distinguish between these things and the Republican party itself. So when the GOP sided with Trump after a long and bruising political primary, it only confirmed to many liberals that your smug sense of superiority was justified and that your ideological opponents were worthy only of utmost contempt—an opinion many of you had already held for eight years and change.
I mean, remember how much fun everyone had making fun of George W. Bush? No one thought there would ever be another president so capable of producing comedy gold. But all those jokes about Bush were never just about him, were they? You didn’t stop at the man in the White House; you attacked and mocked and took a great big shit all over conservatives, their lifestyle, their worldview, their religion, their politics and their values, and when Obama was elected in 2008, you cranked that knob up to 11 and then broke the knob off.
Oh, yes! Remember those halcyon days, liberals? It was your time! Your time at last! Time to finally hit back and put those racist sexist misogynistic Christian conservatives in their place, and you did your darnedest to do just that. The only problem, which you could not see at the time, is that by striking out on behalf of supposedly marginalized groups that had gotten the short straw in the past, you created a new marginalized group altogether. Ironically, conservatives became the ones who felt increasingly isolated and unwanted, the ones who were being slapped down, shut up and pushed away. So I have to wonder, with a year on from the election, with all this in the rearview mirror:
Was it worth it?
I hope you think so. I really do, because you hammered them so long and so hard that they were willing to turn to a man like Trump to save them. That’s how desperate they became, how desperate you made them. Day in and day out, everywhere except Fox News, the mantra was the same: “Conservatives are evil, they hate women, they’re racist, they hate immigrants, they’re stupid because many of them go to church, they want to kill millions of Americans by repealing Obamacare, they’re rednecks and bigots and ignorant.” It felt good to be on top after eight years of Bush, didn't it? But in your ecstatic glee, you did the one thing no victor should ever do: you treated your defeated foes the way the Allies treated Germany after WWI. You kicked them while they were down, humiliated them, spat on them, shamed them, squeezed them to the point of desperation, and in their desperation they turned to the only person who seemed to listen to them. And it didn’t take long for them to start yearning for revenge.
And it wasn’t just at the ballot box, either. At colleges across America, for example, liberal students’ pursuit of "social justice" has left many people feeling that their right to free speech was being stifled, and I sure as hell remember feeling that way when I was a grad. I knew what I could and couldn't say around campus, and God help you if the PC brigade caught you using the wrong terminology. Expectations for teachers to reshape their lessons around the phenomena of “micro-aggressions” and “triggers” has led many faculty members across the country to question their ability to educate students at all without fear of offending them. As a result of PC culture, universities are no longer a forum for freedom of thought and expression. They are no longer a place to bounce around ideas and debate philosophy without fear of retribution or public disgrace. They have become a haven of far-leftist attitudes that ruthlessly seek to silence any voices of opposition, and I say that from personal experience. The worst mistake I ever made when I was in college was to dare voice aloud the opinion that America might not, in fact, be the most malevolent force in geopolitical history.
And speaking of history, that brings us to yet another facet of the left’s hubris. Liberals today tend to think that history is always on your side, and Obama himself returned to this phrase and argument repeatedly throughout his presidency. It is deeply embedded in the minds of many of you on the left, and it indirectly contributed to your catastrophic defeat on election night.
Obama, for example, was quite given to quoting Martin Luther King's most famous quote, that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. So if you're deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” by the liberal left, then you're by extension viewed as a moral deviant on the same level of the Southern pro-secessionist fire-eaters during the Civil War and the defenders of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Case in point: upon passage of his health care law, Obama said, “Tonight, we answered the call of history.” But when Republicans tried to point out the glaring flaws of Obamacare, Democratic Senator Harry Reid criticized them for not “joining us on the right side of history” and even went so far as to compare them to defenders of slavery. Yes, because daring to disagree with a healthcare plan based on incompetent legislation and poor financial policies is clearly equivalent to saying that it's probably okay to own fellow human beings as chattel.
As a result this kind of hubris, the left wields History as a weapon and uses it as an excuse to constantly pat themselves on the back. But this perspective is shortsighted at best and downright dangerous at worst, and there is a downside in the accompanying sense of smug inevitability that such a viewpoint tends to instill in its adherents.
For you on the left, History is not a vast, unpredictable, untamable force. You see it almost as a person, as someone who might be standing next to you in line at the gas station or the grocery store. You see History as the chairman of the board at Planned Parenthood. In your eyes, history has a lifetime subscription to news outlets like The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos. It follows Ana Kasparian and Lena Dunham on Twitter. It truly cares about whether transgender or gay people are allowed to use the appropriate bathroom. In fact, our dear friend History was probably hanging out at the Javits Center on election night, and like many of Clinton's supporters gathered there, it probably collapsed into a quivering puddle of tears right around the time Wisconsin flipped from blue to red and Hillary's vaunted "blue wall" of electoral votes came crashing down.
The political dangers of how you lefties view history should be obvious.
First, this perspective assumes--just assumes, without any forethought or consideration--that entire classes of people and whole demographics are now retrograde and undeserving of political consideration. After all, why on Earth would Democrats bother to try to appeal to working-class white voters if they are stamped with the disapproval of History? Those in Clinton's campaign who suggested doing just that were treated as embarrassments who were out of touch with the unstoppable liberal tide of the future.
Second, this perspective becomes a justification for every imaginable type of repugnant overreach. According to you, History favors trying to get nuns to sign up for contraceptives they didn’t want and morally opposed. Their protestations were callously ignored. History, you say, is a huge fan of forcing small bakeries to bake cakes for gay weddings even if the bakers didn’t want to bake them, and if the bakers put up a fuss, History thinks it's a great idea to organize boycotts to force their businesses into bankruptcy. History, you believed, was just as intolerant of dissent as you yourselves have proved to be. To you, there was really no amount of social or political coercion on behalf of social liberalism or “social justice” that History wouldn’t heartily embrace.
What arrogance. What a…blasphemy.
The third erroneous conclusion brought about by your perverse maltreatment of History is the idea that the nation-state is bound inevitably to decline in importance as institutions like the EU grow in power. Granted, the EU looks just a little bit shaky right about now, but I'm sure the left is confident that History will yet prevail. For example, in a trip to Germany in April, Obama deemed Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming a massive wave of migrants as “on the right side of history.” Never mind that her recklessness has caused a political backlash in Europe. Never mind that many of these refugees seem to have little to no interest in assimilating into their new environments. Never mind that the number of terrorist attacks on European soil has skyrocketed. Apparently, neither Obama nor Chancellor Merkel ever considered that some people might consider it more progressive to tighten national borders rather than leaving the gates wide open.
And by leaving your blinders on, you leftists and liberals who so confidently associated yourselves and your cause with the tide of the future inflicted upon yourselves an unprecedented electoral wipeout that has already of Obama’s political legacy into the dustbin of the past. TPP? Dead. The Clean Power Plan? Dead. The Paris Accords? Dead. The Clean Water Act? Dead. Obamacare’s individual mandate? Dead (and thank God for that, since it was gouging my wallet every month). DACA? Looks like it’s on the way out? The Iran Nuclear Deal? I’ll be surprised if it survives until 2020. For now, the Republican party now controls the White House, the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress while also controlling most state legislatures and governorships.
History, it would seem, has an awesome sense of humor. And this, all of this, is what you have wrought: A culture of quashing dissent and intolerance of differences of opinion. And on election day, conservative Americans finally decided to send a clear message that they'd had enough of being kicked around.
Trump’s rise in popularity—and ultimately his election to the presidency—was partly the result of a long-building reaction to grass-roots liberal activism that came to dominate the cultural landscape and claim victory upon victory in the social arena. And no matter what the issue of the day happened to be—abortion or gay marriage or transgender rights or what have you—it was always accompanied by that same condescending disdain from you that saw Republicans and their views as nothing more than relics of a dead era. Trump’s extraordinary rise to the Oval Office evolved out of this frustration. And it grew even stronger as Clinton’s campaign, to my utmost dismay, increasingly became an extension of liberal America’s smug style of debate—an attitude that no longer disputed on grounds of policy or intellectual differences, but on the issue of the integrity of the right altogether. There are so many examples of this that it’s impossible to name them all, but if I had to point to one specific incident that really encapsulates the smug style of liberalism that fueled the rise of Donald Trump, I’d have to point you at Samantha Bee.
In March, Samantha Bee’s show issued a formal apology to a young man who had attended the Conservative Political Action Conference and whom the show had blasted for having “Nazi hair.” As it turned out, the young man was suffering from Stage 4 brain cancer—which a moment’s research on the producers’ part would have revealed: He had tweeted about his frightening diagnosis days before the conference. As part of its apology, the show contributed $1,000 to the GoFundMe campaign that is raising money for his medical expenses, so now we know the price of a cancer joke.
It was hardly the first time Bee and her show, Full Frontal, had gone, guns blazing, after the sick or the meek. During the campaign, Bee dispatched a correspondent to go shoot fish in a barrel at something called the Western Conservative Summit, which the reporter described as “an annual Denver gathering popular with hard-right Christian conservatives.” He interviewed an earnest young boy who talked about going to church on Sundays and Bible study on Wednesdays, and about his hope to start a group called Children for Trump. For this, the boy—who spoke with the unguarded openness of a child who has assumed goodwill on the part of an adult—was described as “Jerry Falwell in blond, larval form.”
Now I want you to put yourself in that boy’s shoes for a moment. Think about the moment Bee’s producer approached his mother to sign a release so that the her young son could be humiliated on television. Was it a satisfying moment for Bee and her cohorts, or was it accompanied by even the smallest glint of recognition that embarrassing children is a pretty despicable way to make a living? Imagine what that must have been like: the boy waiting eagerly to see himself on television, feeling a surge of pride that he’d talked about church and Bible study. Now imagine how he felt the moment he realized that it had all been a trick—that the grown-up who had seemed so nice had only wanted to hurt him.
Though aimed at blue-state sophisticates, incidents like these are an unintended but powerful form of propaganda for conservatives. When conservatives see these harsh jokes over and over—which echo down through the morning news shows and the chattering day’s worth of viral clips, along with those of Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers—they don’t just see a handful of comics mocking them. They see HBO, Comedy Central, TBS, ABC, CBS, and NBC. In other words, they see that Donald Trump is right: that the entire liberal establishment landscape loathes them, their values, their family, and their religion. It is hardly a reach for them to further conclude that the news shows on these channels are run by similarly partisan players—nor is it, as we’ve seen, at all illogical. If you’re a conservative, it’s made abundantly clear that liberals think you and your family are a bunch of trailer-park Oxy-snorting cousin-humping half-wits who divide their time between retweeting Alex Jones fantasies and ironing their Klan hoods.
And people wonder why Trump amassed such a following! I was a “Never Trumper” Republican. I thought he was an obnoxious jerk, and I didn’t vote for him. But that doesn’t mean I’m unable to sympathize with those who did, because I most certainly do.
Unlike too many of my fellow Americans, and in the spirit of fostering greater understanding, I went out of my way to talk to Trump supporters after the election. It wasn’t hard to find them, either, because I live in a red state. I met them in grocery stores, on the sidewalk, and in the park. They all had their own reasons for voting for the Donald, but one reason I heard cited more than any other was, “Donald Trump speaks his mind.”
And it’s true. He does. And he doesn’t care what people think about it, either.
Millions of people voted for Trump not because they agree with every single one of his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. And the vast segment of the electorate that flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as “an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness” did so because they view political correctness as a shackle on free speech. They view it as a weapon wielded by smug leftists in ivory towers who jump down the throats of ordinary folks—in another words, anyone living in the giant nebulous void between California and New York City—who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements and buzzwords of progressive society. Here’s an example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Now, many other people think they're wrong, or that they should change that opinion. Some might argue that holding such a viewpoint is insensitive to the trans community. You could even argue that it flies in the face of modern social psychology.
But many people still think that there are two genders. And political correctness, which you have taken to its most repressive extreme, is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright for saying so aloud. To you, any other way of thinking, any other way of looking at the world is no longer acceptable. You don't even debate anymore because you believe the left won the culture war. So now, if you’re on the right—or even against the prevailing liberal view—you’re a freak. You’re racist, you’re stupid, you’re evil, you are a basket of deplorables. How do you think people are going to vote when you talk to them like that, when you attack them or even threaten their jobs for raising their opinions in public? How many times does the vote not have to go your way before you realize that the key is discussion? If you are unwilling to discuss and debate like civilized people, you are creating the environments in which Donald Trump and people like him can rise. It’s so easy, and you have not only lost the art, but refuse to re-learn it!
How much more authoritarian can you people be? How much more illiberal and collectivist can you people be? How much more willing can you be to divide people? What is it going to take for you to see just how toxic and destructive your embrace of identity politics has proved to be?
That’s why all of Trump’s voters—the ones who lied to the pollsters because they feared being targeted, the ones that voted for Obama twice in 2008 and 2012—waited until they were in the voting booth. Once that curtain closes behind you, no one is watching anymore. There is no blame or shame or name-calling or labelling, because in there you can finally say what you really think and that is a powerful thing.
When are you liberals going to learn that talking down to people, holding everyone living between California and New York City in contempt, does not work? When are you going to learn that patronizing the silent majority and shouting down dissenting views does not work?
It doesn’t work with the poor, who see Hollywood moralists living large in five-star hotels, lecturing about global warming while increasing their own carbon footprint by hopping around the world in their own private jets. It doesn’t work with workers, who’ve seen the Democrats shut down or outsource their factories and gut their communities in the name of free trade. It doesn’t work with people in the inner cities, who’ve seen their jobs taken and their streets made violent by the mass unfiltered immigration from the Third World, which you liberals hail as a sign of your broad-mindedness without ever considering the impact on the people living outside your ivory towers.
It’s time to stop moaning. It’s time to stop whining! It’s time to stop ignoring your opponents, or worse, trying to silence them! It’s time to stop thinking that banning or shouting down speakers you don’t agree with somehow achieves something! It’s time to stop thinking that reposting an article on your Twitter feed somehow constitutes meaningful political discussion! It’s time to stop thinking that reading the Guardian or CBC somehow makes you a liberal, or that buying Al Gore’s latest lecture on Itunes somehow lowers your carbon footprint! And if my “mansplaining” of Trump voters is “triggering” you, you can either go off and sulk in your safe space with your crayons and coloring paper, or you can engage me and debate me and tell me what I’m getting wrong. Saying you’re “offended” doesn’t work anymore. Hurling labels and insults and shutting down dialogue doesn’t work anymore! Stop thinking that everyone who disagrees with you is evil or racist or sexist or ignorant and talk to them!
This why I watched, throughout the whole election, as people cheered Donald Trump’s theatrics, his insulting behavior, and even his hints of narcissism solely because the enforcers of good-think are outraged by it. In a ‘you can’t say that!’ culture, where certain words and thoughts are not allowed, Trump says them, over and over–and then, when challenged, refuses to back down. In a society that emphasizes human frailty and accepts low horizons, Trump called for making the US ‘great again’, and suggested that people can succeed like he has. And in a world where masculinity is now described as toxic, Trump relishes the opportunity to present himself as the tough guy.
Ultimately, for many Trump voters, it was never wholly about his ideas or policies. It was about protest. One might even call it a form of vengeance.
How could you have not seen this coming? This backlash was building for years, and you didn’t see it because you refused to even acknowledge its very existence. You created your echo chamber and wrapped ourselves in the blanket of your own self-righteousness, never thinking of the people who’d been left out in the cold, never once considering that at least some of their grievances might be legitimate.
An oversight of which I, too, am conspicuously guilty.
Only a deeply corrupt and out-of-touch political establishment could have provoked a revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump’s rise on racism or xenophobia, you should blame it yourselves—you who never saw this coming and still don’t understand--or refuse to understand--why so many Americans would rather have Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites—elites who, almost to a man or woman, are on your side of the political spectrum.
But do you know what I did that you didn’t do? Do you know what I did that many of my fellow Americans still refuse to do?
I went out and I talked to those people, the so-called “deplorables.” Instead of looking down my nose at them, as you have, I did everything I possibly could to open a dialogue with them.
Like so many of my countrymen, I woke up the morning after election night with the stomach-churning certainty that everything I’d been told for more than a year was lying shattered at my feet in a thousand pieces. I could not understand, I simply could not fathom, why anyone with any gray matter between their ears could possibly vote for Donald Trump. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It made no sense to me, and that is what made it so terrifying. I did not understand these people. So, as the post-election protests and riots raged in some of America’s major cities, I decided that I had to try and understand them. What made them vote the way they did? What drove them to cast their ballot for Trump rather than Hillary? The more I thought about it, the more curious I became, and as my curiosity grew, so did my determination to grasp the incomprehensible.
So I went on safari in Donald Trump’s America. Instead of shunning Trump’s voters, I deliberately sought them out.
I’m not ashamed to say that talking to those people overturned everything I thought I knew about them. I met women who voted for him, and not just white women either. Black women voted for him because he promised to clean up the inner cities, where too many communities of African Americans live below the poverty line. I met with Hispanic women, many of them immigrants who’d entered America legally, who voted for him because of his promise to crack down on illegal immigration. To them, it was deeply offensive to see illegal migrants being coddled and given handouts while they waited months or years to gain legal entry to the United States. For many Hispanic men who voted for Trump, the same was true. One by one, every stereotype, every preconceived notion I’d ever had of these people was systematically destroyed. But more than anything, what really made my head spin about Trump voters wasn’t how difficult, but how easy it was to understand their motivations. And for the vast majority of people I spoke with, racial tensions or prejudices played no part in their decision to vote for Trump. As Mr. Evers, a handyman in his mid-forties from Metairie, told me: “I’m trying to pay the bills and put food on the table for my kids. I don’t have time for that shit.”
From talking to many of Trump’s working-class supporters, I also learned of—and learned to share—their deep resentment of the way they are looked down upon and written off as bigots. You dismissed their concerns about controlling the border or fighting domestic terrorism as inherently racist, and placed these topics off-limits. Rather than engage or try to convince Trump’s supporters, you, the cultural establishment, and the media all alike simply denounced them as a basket of deplorables with unacceptable views, and sought to silence them via public shaming or more coercive methods. Supporting Trump was seen not only as a political stance, but as a form of defiance. It became their way of saying, “Screw you, I’m not shutting up.”
You and the crowds of demonstrators that have periodically flooded America’s streets share something in common with many of America’s politicians and media pundits: you all still refuse to understand how Trump got elected, or why millions of Americans continue to support him. Even now, recent polls show that more Americans support Trump’s various executive orders on immigration than oppose them, but you wouldn’t know it based on the media coverage.
The failure—your failure, my failure and everyone else’s—to understand why these measures are popular with millions of Americans stems from a deep sense of disconnection in American society that didn’t begin with Trump or the 2016 election. For years, millions of voters have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.
Nowhere is this disconnection more visible than in the American Midwest, in places such as Akron, Ohio. It is, in many ways, it’s an idyllic American town.
Except for the heroin, of course.
Like many suburban and rural communities across the country, Akron is in the grip of a deadly opioid epidemic. In the summer of 2016, a batch of heroin cut with a synthetic painkiller called carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer, turned up in the city. Twenty-one people overdosed in a single day. Over the ensuing weeks, 300 more would overdose. Dozens would die.
The heroin crisis in Akron is playing out against a backdrop of industrial decline. At one time, the town was a manufacturing hub, home to four major tire companies and a rising middle class. Today, most of that is gone. The tire factories have long since moved overseas and the city’s population has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. And Akron is not unique. Cities and towns across America’s Rust Belt, Appalachia and the deep south are in a state of gradual decline. Many of these places have long been Democratic strongholds, undergirded by once-robust unions.
These Americans are hurting. They have been hurting for years. This is what you lefties still refuse to realize, and this is exactly what Trump was talking about when he spoke of “American carnage” in his inaugural address. These are the forgotten people, the ones who have not shared, to a fair extent, in the fruits of globalization. These are the people that the American political system failed, the people that Obama failed.
The people you, the left, failed.
You sit here frothing that Trump’s supporters are, almost to a man, racists and bigots. But they’re not racists and bigots. Some of them undoubtedly are, but most of them are not. And if ypou people really do believe that all sixty or so million Americans who voted for Trump did so out of nothing but sheer malice, then I take pity on you. Because it means you still refuse to recognize what’s right there in front of you, that you still refuse to see the underlying problems that made his ascension possible in the first place.
And that means you are also part of the problem. Like I once was.
Where you see Trump's administration as a whirlwind of chaos and incompetence, his supporters see an outsider taking on a sclerotic system that needs a good shaking-up. That’s precisely what many Americans thought they were getting eight years ago, when they put a freshman senator from Illinois in the White House. Obama promised a new way of governing: he would be a “post-partisan” president, he would “fundamentally transform” the country, he would look out for the middle class. In the throes of the great recession, that resonated. Something was clearly wrong with our political system and the American people wanted someone to fix it.
But change didn’t come. All they got was more of the same. Obama offered a series of massive government programs, from an $830 billion-dollar financial stimulus, to the Affordable Care Act, to Dodd-Frank, none of which did much to assuage the economic anxieties of the middle class. Americans watched as the federal government bailed out the banks, then the auto industry and then passed healthcare reform that transferred billions of taxpayer dollars to major health insurance companies. Meanwhile, premiums went up, economic recovery remained sluggish and millions dropped out of the workforce and turned to food stamps and welfare programs just to get by. And many Americans asked themselves: “Where’s my bailout?”
At the same time, they saw the world becoming more unstable. Part of Obama’s appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, restore America’s standing in the international community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability. Instead, Americans watched ISIS step into the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary tale. At home, ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they did in Europe. And all the while Obama’s White House insisted that everything was going well.
Sure, lefties. Try telling that to people in communities like Akron, Ohio.
Donald Trump was their primal scream. He was—and is—the Molotov cocktail they hurled at the whole rotten edifice of the political establishment. Mark me, and mark me well: millions of Americans didn’t vote for Hillary not because she’s a woman, but because she represented no palpable change whatsoever. To many, she personified the self-serving corruption of the Washington political elite, and the more you touted her as the most qualified candidate, the more Americans saw her as the ultimate insider. Millions of your countrymen felt forgotten, slapped down, silenced and sneered at. They had seen their communities gutted, their jobs shipped overseas, and their interests and concerns ignored by a political establishment that no longer cared enough to listen.
But as long as you keep treating everyone else on the political spectrum so poorly, as long as you keep writing off the grievances and opinions of conservatives and…well, everyone else but liberals as nothing more than racism and bigotry, as long as you keep treating political correctness like holy text, you are going to keep losing. Donald Trump's victory was, in the words of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, "the biggest 'f--- you' in history," and that's the first and only time I've ever agreed with Michael Moore about anything.
And by dismissing millions of Americans like these as existential threats to the integrity of the country rather than political opponents, many of you liberals made it abundantly clear that you didn't see a place for them in America at all. And since the left wing refused to listen, these voters swung right. They did so not because they are filled with hate, but because you deliberately pushed them away. You never quite understood that, though, so when these voters started buying MAGA hats, they only validated your sense of self-righteousness. And so you went into election night thinking that conservatives were in a state of collapse and the left was unstoppable.
My, how the tables have turned.
We can and should address the disadvantages faced by minority groups, but Trump’s victory has also demonstrated—in the clearest manner possible—that your no-holds-barred brass-knuckled take-no-prisoners style of unmitigated social activism and sneering condescension can and does have consequences. After all, when any public challenge to the prevailing liberal doctrine can put your career at risk, when you face being labeled for life as a “racist” or "sexist" for daring to disagree, those of us rash enough to harbor opposing viewpoints are really left with only two viable options: throw in the towel and concede total defeat, or retaliate.
Conservatives and other disaffected voters, by electing Trump, obviously chose the latter. And nowhere was the rebellion against the left more clearly illustrated than in places like the Rust Belt states, where blue-collar workers by the thousands scrapped decades of loyalty to the Democratic party and voted for Trump instead. Why? Because the Democrats have long abandoned the economic issues that had locked that vital constituency into their party's support base, and as a result, those voters rightly felt like you no longer cared about them anymore.
And for all the press coverage about the supposed heinousness of Trump's supporters, it wasn't Republicans who blocked traffic, looted stores, set things on fire and destroyed property during the post-election protests, which should rightly be seen as an extension of your mulishly stubborn unwillingness to accept the results of our great nation's democratic process. Indeed, even after all this time, many of you on the left are still struggling to understand why your side suffered such an unprecedented rout.
You lost, at least in part, because of your unwillingness to compromise, your inability to be magnanimous in the face of victory, and your childish refusal to be graceful in the face of defeat.
I can't say that any of this is a big surprise to me. Can't say I'm all that bothered by the plight of the Democratic Party and the left, either. I mean, it's not like there weren't people on the left who were arguing for years prior to the 2016 election that things were going to badly for you if you did not fix this. You cannot treat people with this kind of utter contempt and expect them to just fall in line afterward. Telling an unemployed auto worker from Michigan to "check your privilege" after he's lost his job and been forced to take a second mortgage out on his house tends not to go over very well. j
But you didn't listen, and you don't care, and because you didn't listen and you don't care, you are stuck with Donald Trump. And things are not going to get any better for you until you realize what the problem is, until you accept that the left is the problem. It’s not someone else. It’s not the right or the alt-right or KKK. It’s you. What you represent, what the riots at Berkeley represent, what ANTIFA and the left now represent, is even worse to more people than not having government-subsidized healthcare. That is how repellent your ideology has become! Millions of voters knew Trump and the Republicans would try to repeal and replace Obamacare, but they still went and voted for them anyway because they viewed the alternative--you--as even worse. That is not going to change until you change, and until you change, until you get rid of identity politics and all the neo-Marxist cultural garbage you’ve been pushing, until you liberals become liberal again, you will be stuck with right-wing governments from now and into the long-distant future because you will not be able to present a viable second option. There will be no such thing. And I can’t believe I need to remind anyone about this, but just because someone voted differently than you did doesn’t make them an enemy. I know I certainly didn’t unfriend any Hillary voters on Facebook, or cut off contact with some buddies from my college days because they voted for Trump. The whole idea of America, and indeed the entire Western world, is founded on the notion that people can get along just fine despite having different political opinions. But you rejected that notion, and America, in due course, rejected you. And yes: that includes me. I can and will vote Republican in 2018, and I will vote for Trump in 2020 if he runs for re-election, not because I particularly like the man but because I want to keep you people as far away from the corridors of political power as humanly possible. And millions of Americans feel the same way.
You liberals made your bed. Now quit bitching and fucking lie in it.