Liberals are the most self-destructive people on the planet. Knowing what makes their opposition tick, they continue to act so insufferably, so disingenuously moralizing from an upper-middle-class pedestal, that Trumpism has been able to masquerade as counterculture. The radical wings of social justice and the middling liberalism of The New York Times are united in their mediocrity, in their contempt for democracy, hatred of the working class, of their snide assumptions that liberals are ‘just smarter’, more educated, more empathetic, and above the idiocies of the masses. The modern liberal craves a managerial class of experts to decide on everything. The rejection of this elitist bureaucracy is such a powerful emotion among the working class that forces such as Brexit and Trump have become completely cultural. The political is now cultural, and in order to be subversive, one must now reject the sensibilities of the upper-middle class, the liberal class, which has failed.
The ‘end of history’, the triumph of Western liberal democracy, has resulted in a violent globalism that created a refugee crisis through wars in Iraq, Lybia and Syria, and now the very same liberals who drive the death of the EU are chastising ordinary people for wanting to leave the EU. Trump, instead of a natural result of late-capitalist fury at the failure of liberal institutions, is being shallowly viewed as purely driven by racism and sexism. The working class are bigots, so says feminism, so says the left. The working class are uneducated and stupid and we, the holders of humanities degrees, we, the readers of The New Yorker, are completely and utterly above them. It is this condescending mindset that makes the modern left utterly appalling to subversive and conservative minds alike, and with a lack of true leftist populists, with the rejection of Bernie Sanders, all the left has is technocracy. Hillary Clinton, the argument from ‘experience’, the argument from imperialism, globalism and rank financial speculation and party corruption over the holding of any principled values. Luminaries such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, used to represent the light of the left. They used to expose technocrats, lifeless bureaucracies, insipid thoughtless cogs fighting purely for the status quo and worshipping it for all it is. Now, the left defends the status quo relentlessly. The media and journalistic class believes that European bankers in Brussels, and massive terror watch lists in the United States, are only rejected by uneducated bigots and stupid libertarians. Now the left, in love with cultural policing, language policing, and social self-exaltation, has become a brave new establishment where diversity and feminism are a part of neoliberalism. The left, in 2016, is dead.
#ImWithHer is the cry of gender essentialists who are so beyond reason that Hillary Clinton as an individual, Wall Street funded and unrepentantly hawkish, is considered a gentle alternative to Trump purely because she, in some broken metaphysics, represents the dignity of all women everywhere. What strange theology.
The Obama administration, which illegally bombed Lybia, which funneled guns into Syria, which has bombed seven different Muslim countries, is considered the flagship against the bigotry of Donald Trump. What is worse? Language that denigrates Muslims, or actually murdering thousands of innocent Muslims? For the middle class scolds who say that anyone with a soul MUST vote for Hillary, clearly they think actually KILLING marginalized people is more forgivable than saying mean things about them. And people are confused as to why the guilt-tripping and moralizing of the liberal establishment is failing to gain traction? People are confused why right-wing populism is on the rise?
The Make America Great Again hat is iconic. It is subversive. Wear it in the corridors of power, the New York Times, the capital building, and you look like a rube. The rube, to the out-of-touch media class, is actually the new punk. To be an atheist liberal is trite and boring. To be a Christian anti-globalist right-wing populist is fascinating, dangerous, and interesting. This vitality is what the left lacks, and what Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both have. This lack of vitality is what makes the Clinton left so miserable, and so disingenuous when it raises broken liberal institutions as the answer to populist cravings.
The EU, like the United States, is ripe for recession. The same parasitic financial speculation that led to the 2008 crisis is coming around again, and it will be the insipid Democrats who advocate, again, for a bailout with no changes to the fundamental structure of broken ‘rational’ institutions. The far-right, as predicated by anyone paying attention throughout 2016, will seize the red-blooded pulse of the people when the left is advocating for more of the same. It has already chosen Hillary Clinton – it has already sang its death-knell.
Ordinary people are bigots, and democracy doesn’t work because people are stupid. Such is the middle class reaction to Brexit, and again, ‘bougie knows best’. The most privileged among us, university graduates, people with jobs in the media, people who went to elite Ivy League and private institutions, the ‘experts’, inspire anyone who craves subversion to rebel against them. The only vitality that comes from these people is inside those who resist them.
Consider the way in which Hillary Clinton supporters make the case for their technocratic cog. They moralize. They tell you that you are simply a bad person, a tacit pro-Trump bigot, if you do not support her. They tell you that you are obligated, on behalf of the oppressed, to resist the big mean man instead of the imperialistic neoliberal consensus that like a cancerous tumor has solidified around the Clinton-Bush-Obama legacy. It is this very legacy that led to the rise of Trump, the threat of a Jeb Bush ticket in 2016. Jeb Bush was routed by Trump precisely because the right has woken up and no longer wants these dynasties of free trade, globalism and endless war to be in office. The left, in its infinite blindness, has chosen a candidate who embodies all three of these anti-human stances.
The academy has made the left lose class consciousness and divert itself almost entirely to race and gender. The Obama legacy, then, is defended even though it is the legacy of a moderate Republican. The de-fanging of the subversiveness of homosexuality, the Dan Savage-ization of a punk lifestyle rendered flaccid on the shores of political correctness, has led immoral hacks like Milo Yiannopoulos to carry more energy than the entire gay establishment of docile, boring figures who have no fight left in them. The modern left is mechanical. It functions like clockwork – every four years it is time to vote for an abyss who won’t cut social programs over an abyss who might. No energy can come of this situation, only the circling of the drain.
And that is the path we take. The sad truth is that Bernie supporters have more in common with Trump supporters than Hillary. Of course they do. The issue of oligarchy, of corporatism, of a government bought and sold decades ago is merely a side issue for most liberals. Why? Because they do not care about, and have never cared about, democracy. The values of the educated are self-affirmation, ego and constantly failing to predict the future despite all the assurances of the ‘experts’. The ‘experts’, shat out of the Ivy League to grab the string of the present and weave it in a flawless circle into tomorrow. They do not question conventional wisdom, they do not stand for people over profit, and so in Brexit the people rejected the ‘experts’. Eductation and knowledge is being demonized by the populists because it has been made into inert servitude by the colleges across the country. Colleges produce drones, in every field, in every graduate school. They produce people who tow party lines and spew ridiculous shit that makes white poor people and black poor people distrust one another more than they distrust entrenched elitists like Hillary Clinton. As Tupac noted at the end of To Pimp a Butterfly, by age 30, the black consciousness in America has been so beaten down by systems of power that any compromise with oppression is accepted.
The Hillary supporters, who heckle the ‘privileged’ for not voting for their conqueress, forget their own blatant privilege. The middle class votes. The ‘educated’ ‘policy wonks’ who follow politics closely, they all vote. It is the poor, and poor black people, who have long given up on liberal institutions, who do not vote. It is those who supposedly have the most to lose from right-wing economic policy who do not vote. Middle class chumps like me and you always vote.
But the middle class moralizers, scolds, and hand-wringers are blind to this. Ezra Klein and his ilk task me with upholding technocracy, or handing the keys over to the barbarians. Well, the technocrats are barbarians, so why should I ever raise my hand for their decadence purely to oppose a new form of barbarism they don’t like?
The concept of white supremacy is a weapon for educated elitist white people to feel power over other white people. The rubes, the bigots, the conservatives, the uneducated…how much ego, superiority, and smugness comes from walking down the streets feeling elevated above the hordes because you see what they do not see? I am certain every leftist feels good about themselves in this way. It is for themselves, for no one else. It is the revenge of the pasty readers over the frat boys, to dismiss them all as idiots.
And some are. But almost all of the ‘educated’ also are. I fail to believe anyone who has been properly educated, immersed in intellectual history, shown both sides of any given issue, can be ignorant to what is happening to the world through the failure of the traditional left.
The mantle of the people is borne exclusively by anti-immigration right-wing populists. The more the left cries ‘bigot, idiot, rube’, the more people grow sick of the left’s self-certainty and move to the forbidden and edgy spaces of Trump and UKIP, Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. The more they embrace being outsiders, the more people are attracted to them. As anti-racism and feminism become co-opted by MTV, as political correctness becomes the new ‘say no to drugs’ and all ‘educated’ people are expected to believe one truth on immigration and social issues, the more the center will fracture and the dissidents will move right, not left.
I am stating a case, and the denial of this case will continue to seal the death of the left. Where does the left thrive? To me, it is fringe figures such as Chris Hedges, Jeremy Scahill, Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald – the left that critiques its rotten liberal center as much as it critiques the right.
The left of Hillary Clinton, of Elizabeth Warren, of Al Fraken and Barney Frank, of ‘side with the educated technocrats against the unwashed hordes’, has no life and is already morally dead. It has only the same repetition, the lesser of two evils, that has sucked the life out of democracy for generations.
The upper-middle liberal class is blaming poor and working class people for the rot of the country. They can no longer criticize corporate elites in good faith, because their star candidate is a corporate elite.
If you are a liberal, please try to understand the cultural and emotional core of all this, as well as principled opposition to Hillary Clinton. If you don’t, the right will sweep the West in the years to come.
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Interesting article. Hope u are well.
Good stuff yet again!