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发帖数: 106 | 1 Ian O'Doherty is a columnist who works for the Irish Independent. His "iSpy"
column is published Monday-Thursday. On Fridays O'Doherty publishes a
rather more serious column containing his opinion on a chosen subject in "
The World According to Ian O'Doherty." He was formerly with the Evening
Herald.
Tuesday November 8, 2016 -- a day that will live in infamy, or the moment
when America was made great again?
The truth, as ever, will lie somewhere in the middle. After all, contrary to
what both his supporters and detractors believe -- and this is probably the
only thing they agree on -- Trump won't be able to come into office and
spend his first 100 days gleefully ripping up all the bits of the
Constitution he doesn't like.
But even if this week's seismic shockwave doesn't signal either the sky
falling in or the start of a bright new American era, the result was, to use
one of The Donald's favourite phrases, huge. It is, in fact, a total game
changer.
In decades to come, historians will still bicker about the most poisonous,
toxic and stupid election in living memory.
They will also be bickering over the same vexed question: how did a man who
was already unpopular with the public and who boasted precisely zero
political experience beat a seasoned Washington insider who was married to
one extremely popular president and who had worked closely with another?
The answer, ultimately, is in the question.
History will record this as a Trump victory, which of course it is. But it
was also more than that, because this was the most stunning self-inflicted
defeat in the history of Western democracy.
Hillary Clinton has damned her party to irrelevance for at least the next
four years. She has also ensured that Obama's legacy will now be a footnote
rather than a chapter. Because the Affordable Care Act is now doomed under a
Trump presidency and that was always meant to be his gift, of sorts, to
America.
How did a candidate who had virtually all of the media, all of Hollywood,
every celebrity you could think of, a couple of former presidents and
apparently, the hopes of an entire gender resting on her shoulders, blow up
her own campaign? I rather suspect that neither Donald nor Hillary know how
they got to this point.
Where she seemed to expect the position to become available to her by right
-- the phrase "she deserves it" was used early in the campaign and then
quickly dropped when her team remembered that Americans don't like inherited
power -- his first steps into the campaign were those of someone chancing
their arm. If he wasn't such a staunch teetotaller, many observers would
have accused him of only doing it as a drunken bet.
But the more the campaign wore on, something truly astonishing began to
happen: the people began to speak. And they began to speak in a voice which,
for the first time in years in the American heartland, would not be ignored
.
Few of the people who voted for Trump seriously believe that he is going to
personally improve their fortunes. Contrary to the smug, middle-class media
narrative, they aren't all barely educated idiots.
They know what he is, of course they do. It's what he is not that appeals to
them.
Clinton, on the other hand, had come to represent the apex of smug privilege
. Whether it was boasting about her desire to shut down the remaining coal
industry in West Virginia -- that worked out well for her, in the end -- or
calling half the electorate a "basket of deplorables," she seemed to operate
in the perfumed air of the elite, more obsessed with coddling idiots and
pandering to identity and feelings than improving the hardscrabble life that
is the lot of millions of Americans.
Also, nobody who voted for Trump did so because they wanted him as a
spiritual guru or life coach.
But plenty of people invested an irrational amount of emotional energy into
a woman who was patently undeserving of that level of adoration.
That's why we've witnessed such fury from her supporters -- they had wrapped
themselves so tightly in the Hillary flag that a rejection of her felt like
a rejection of them. And when you consider that many American colleges gave
their students Wednesday off class because they were too "upset" to study,
you can see that this wasn't a battle for the White House -- this became a
genuine battle for America's future direction. And, indeed, for the West. (
Emphasis mine)
We have been going through a cultural paroxysm for the last 10 years -- the
rise of identity politics has created a Balkanised society where the content
of someone's mind is less important than their skin colour, gender,
sexuality or whatever other attention-seeking label they wish to bestow upon
themselves.
In fact, where once it looked like racism and sexism might be becoming
archaic remnants of a darker time, a whole new generation has popped up
which wants to re-litigate all those arguments all over again.
In fact, while many of us are too young to recall the Vietnam War and the
social upheaval of the 1960s, plenty of observers who were say they haven't
seen an America more at war with itself than it is today.
One perfect example of this New America has been the renewed calls for
segregation on campuses. Even a few years ago, such a move would have been
greeted with understandable horror by civil rights activists -- but this
time it's the black students demanding segregation and "safe spaces" from
whites. If young people calling for racial segregation from each other isn't
the sign of a very, very sick society, nothing is.
The irony of Clinton calling Trump and his followers racist while she was
courting Black Lives Matter was telling.
After all, no rational white person would defend the KKK, yet here was a
white women defending both BLM and the New Black Panthers -- explicitly
racist organisations with the NBP, in particularly, openly espousing a race
war if they don't get what they want.
Fundamentally, Trump was attractive because he represents a repudiation of
the nonsense that has been slowly strangling the West.
He represents -- rightly or wrongly, and the dust has still to settle -- a
scorn and contempt for these new rules. He won't be a president worried
about microaggressions, or listening to the views of patently insane people
just because they come from a fashionably protected group.
He also represents a glorious two fingers to everyone who has become sick of
being called a racist or a bigot or a homophobe -- particularly by Hillary
supporters who are too dense to realise that she has always actually been
more conservative on social issues than Trump.
That it might take a madman to restore some sanity to America is, I suppose,
a quirk that is typical to that great nation -- land of the free and home
to more contradictions than anyone can imagine.
Trump's victory also signals just how out of step the media has been with
the people. Not just American media, either.
In fact, the Irish media has continued its desperate drive to make a show of
itself with a seemingly endless parade of emotionally incontinent gibberish
that, ironically, has increased in ferocity and hysterical spite in the
last few days.
The fact that Hillary's main cheerleaders in the Irish and UK media still
haven't realised where they went wrong is instructive and amusing in equal
measure. They still don't seem to understand that by constantly insulting
his supporters, they're just making asses of themselves.
One female contributor to this newspaper said Trump's victory was a "sad day
for women." Well, not for the women who voted for him, it wasn't.
But that really is the nub of the matter -- the "wrong" kind of women
obviously voted for Trump. The "right" kind went with Hillary. And lost.
The Irish media is not alone in being filled largely with dinner-party
liberals who have never had an original or socially awkward thought in their
lives. They simply assume that everyone lives in the same bubble and thinks
the same thoughts -- and if they don't, they should.
Of the many things that have changed with Trump's victory, the bubble has
burst. Never in American history have the polls, the media and the chin-
stroking moral arbiters of the liberal agenda been so spectacularly,
wonderfully wrong.
It was exactly that condescending, obnoxious sneer towards the working class
that brought them out in such numbers, and that is the great irony of
Election 16 -- the Left spent years creating identity politics to the extent
that the only group left without protection or a celebrity sponsor was the
white American male.
That it was the white American male who swung it for Trump is a timely
reminder that while black lives matter, all votes count -- even the ones of
people you despise.
You don't have to be a supporter of Trump to take great delight in the sheer
, apoplectic rage that has greeted his victory.
If Clinton had won and Trump supporters had gone on a rampage through a
dozen American cities the next night, there would have been outrage -- and
rightly so.
But in a morally and linguistically inverted society, the wrong-doers are
portrayed as the victims. We saw that at numerous Trump rallies: protesters
would disrupt the event, claiming their right to free speech (a heckler's
veto is not free speech) and provoking people until they got a dig before
running to the media and claiming victimhood.
But, ultimately, this election was about people saying enough with the
bullshit. This is a country in crisis, and most Americans don't care about
transgender bathrooms, or safe spaces, or government speech laws. This was
about people taking some control back for themselves.
It was about them saying that they won't be hectored and bullied by the
toddler tantrums thrown by pissy and spoiled millennials, and they certainly
won't put up with being told they're stupid and wicked just because they
have a difference of opinion.
But, really, this election is about hope for a better America; an America
which isn't obsessed with identity and perceived "privilege;" an America
where being a victim isn't a virtue and where you don't have to apologise
for not being up to date with the latest list of socially acceptable phrases
.
Trump's victory was a two fingers to the politically correct.
It was a brutal rejection of the nonsense narrative which says Muslims who
kill Americans are somehow victims. It took the ludicrous Green agenda and
threw it out. It was a return, on some level, to a time when people weren't
afraid to speak their own mind without some self-elected language cop
shouting at you. Who knows, we may even see Trump kicking the UN out of New
York.
Frankly, if you're one of those who gets their politics from Jon Stewart and
Twitter, look away for the next four years, because you're not going to
like what you see. The rest of us, however, will be delighted.
This might go terribly, terribly wrong. Nobody knows -- and if we have
learned anything this week, it's that nobody knows nuthin'.
But just as the people of the UK took control back with Brexit, the people
of America did likewise with their choice for president. |
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