In a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, professor Jordan Peterson posed a very interesting question to the liberal panel.
How is it, he asked, that left-wing democrat types, like Maher, are reaching out to Donald Trump supporters to empathise with them, change their minds and welcome them back into the fold. American society has polarised in a way that’s not good, Peterson said. And the left as an entity appears to have made no effort to endear itself to disillusioned Trump voters who could feasibly switch to democrat in future elections.
Maher responds in typical liberal fashion — by doubling down on his outright dismissal of Trump and all those who support him.
There’s nothing novel about this kind of attitude. Liberals and leftists alike have long peddled the perception that Trump is nothing more than a low-IQ tyrant who succeeds by pandering to the innate stupidity of the underclasses. One can’t help but notice that there’s an intellectual arrogance that has infected large portions of the anti-Trump crowd.
It was CNN’s Don Lemon who said that after 25 years in the news business, the ‘most easily offended’ and ‘least tolerant’ people he came across were liberals and progressives. Recently we have seen some telltale signs that this is the case.
The insistence that ‘white fear’ was Donald Trump’s ticket to the White House. The flat-out dismissal of anxiety about immigration as only ever stemming from bigotry. The baseless belief that if only those poor, uneducated republicans knew what was best for them, they’d have done what they know deep down is the right thing and embraced the anointed saviour of women.
So what on Earth could be the reason for this insufferable smugness that has driven so many neutral voters and even indoctrinated leftists in droves toward the political right?
The answer is that the new left is bent on self-destruction. It has a vested interest in its own downfall. We know this.
It’s no secret that the currency of the social justice narrative is victimhood. Like many political entities throughout history, the modern left indoctrinates its followers by fostering an anxiety amongst them. Specifically a perception that minority groups are being violated and exploited for the benefit of a ruling class made up of oppressors — who are supposedly the beneficiaries of privilege.
We know that minority groups vote overwhelmingly left of center in the vast majority of Western nations and it seems highly likely that this has something to do with this anxiety that they are somehow being taken advantage of — and that government authoritarianism is the only plausible solution.
Notice how winning elections seems to contravene this analysis of society — how can one play the victim while simultaneously winning in the democratic arena? And so we might speculate that, on a subconscious level, social justice types never really wanted to win the 2016 election — despite what a rational observer might think.
For the new left, Trump is almost too good to be true — he’s the perfect scapegoat for the role of the evil white man in the social justice framework — the ultimate proof of concept for the idea of white privilege and male supremacy.
And with a man like Trump at the head of Western Society, the moral superiority of the left seems almost self-evident to those who subscribe to the social justice religion.
Trump gives leftists an irresistible excuse to retreat into the shell of arrogance — to embrace victimhood and all the sympathy that comes with it, while lashing out at those who don’t agree with accusations of racism and sexism. So what are the consequences of this?
Well, as you might expect, the left in many Western Nations has all but abandoned its traditional white working class base and has turned instead to ethnic minorities — the traditional victim class in the social justice mythology.
It does seem that increasing the rate of immigration by embracing open borders policy represents the left’s strongest chance at acquiring enough voters long-term to justify its continued existence.
Should this tactic fail, however, one thing is certain; if the left continues to publicly overestimate its intellectual superiority, Trump will win again in 2020, and this time by a landslide.
