Hearing Without Listening
Thomas Friedman recently wrote an article that epitomizes the aloofness of the cloistered elites in their ivory towers. The article (worth the read) does an excellent job detailing the humiliation and rage from Trump supporters without quite getting it. Joe Biden can’t reach out to Trump voters any more than Clinton could with overtures to Republicans like myself. Biden can’t reach out to Trump supporters because Biden isn’t the problem. Thomas Friedman is the problem.
Photo by Charles Haynes, from Wikimedia Commons
It’s His People, Stupid
Even if you assume Biden is at full mental capacity, he’s shown no willingness to stand up to the radicals in his own party. He secured the nomination by adopting large portions of Sanders’s platform and picked a vice president based primarily on race and gender. Biden, in his prime, was a loyal party man; it’s clear that Biden the candidate does whatever his Democratic handlers tell him to. He’s shown no willingness to stray from the party line or condemn the excesses of his own partisans.
These same partisans are the ones harassing people at restaurants. They are the ones who crossed the line with Kavanaugh, they’re the ones attacking George Washington, and they’re the ones censoring our daily communications. In short, they’re the ones pushing intersectionality and critical race theory. All the nice words and peace, love, and compassion in the world will mean nothing from a candidate who fully intends to empower the exact people responsible for this humiliation.
Critical Race Theory and Social Control
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Friedman overlooks the main factor in the humiliation of Trump supporters. Critical race theory and intersectionality – known colloquially as the “Oppression Olympics” for their tendency to award oppression points based on race, gender, and sexuality – are the main tools used to attack and humiliate Trump supporters and, ultimately, any American refusing to toe the ‘woke’ line.
Clearly, this group has upped the ante in the past few months with the tactics of humiliation. In 2016, if you didn’t want elitists talking down to you, you simply avoided academics and Hollywood. Now, by hiding behind an uncontroversial slogan (BLM), critical race theory – and its accompanying humiliation of Americans and Christians like Drew Brees and Terry Crews – has infiltrated every aspect of American life.
Today, you can’t go to a restaurant without being harassed, and you can’t watch a football game or shop on the internet (since, you know, COVID restrictions) without being bombarded with BLM messaging. With BLM messaging comes the Cultural Marxist subtext of self-flagellation, a requirement to kiss the ring to make up for the original sin of being American/Christian/white (or whatever privilege you have to compensate for).
Trump the Troll
To understand how left-wing overreach will win Trump the election, it’s important to understand Trump’s electoral strategy. Essentially, he’s a troll. He says things that get his opponents on tilt, and when they go too far it galvanizes people who may not be pro-Trump but whose hand is now forced by the excesses of the Resistance.
Remember, Trump won the primary with 41% of the vote*; 59% of Republican primary voters DID NOT vote for Trump. Yet, the secret of Trump’s remarkably consistent if unimpressive approval rating has been his historic, near-uniform approval among Republicans, most of whom preferred another candidate.
*This number is especially impressive considering it includes contests after Trump became the presumptive nominee.
A Growing Number of Deplorables
How did he go from a small group of ‘Deplorables’ to a party representing just under half of the nation? The excesses and abuses of the Resistance – most notably the Kavanaugh hearing and the Russia Hoax – galvanized Trump-skeptical Republicans to rally behind the President. Simply put, the willingness to use mobs and shady legal tactics to destroy and coerce created a threat greater than any posed by a fat orange man sitting in a room tweeting.
With the degree and uniformity with which the establishment has rallied around the anti-Trump cause under the guise of BLM, expect the number of deplorables to grow. After all, the restaurant-goers being harassed by BLM mobs aren’t necessarily Trumpers. Football fans generally go to games to escape the anger of the day-to-day world – forcing them to take a knee, which they likely already have to do in some form at their jobs, is just going to piss them off further.
As the BLM mob becomes more aggressive and liberals like Friedman feel more and more comfortable forcing left-wing politics on people trying to go about their lives, expect more and more Americans to begin to feel ‘deplorable’.
Trump the Roto-Rooter
In many ways, Trump is a mirror. In addition to his trolling tactics, part of the reason for Trump’s electoral success has been the ‘flexibility’ he touted in the debates. Having no real record or core political beliefs has allowed a wide range of supporters to look at him and see themselves. It also explains why media types like Friedman, along with academics, bureaucrats, and tech giants, have such a visceral reaction to Trump. They are obsessed with Trump’s corruption because they, themselves, are corrupt.
They constantly complain about Trump’s attacks on American institutions without asking whether those institutions deserve to be attacked. Especially in the media, many journalists have come to believe themselves so immune to reproach that they see any criticism – even pointing out mistakes – to be an attack on the First Amendment. Bureaucrats in many cases are more concerned with protecting their own power and prestige, even if it means keeping in place an outdated and inefficient bureaucratic system.
In fact, Trump’s attacks on institutions aren’t undemocratic – they are the reason we elected him. America’s elite institutions, from the bureaucrats to the media to tech giants, have become so fat, lazy, and condescending that we elected somebody to challenge them. Rather than take the message, they have doubled down on the humiliation tactics. We’ll see how that works for them this time.
In the interim, if Thomas Friedman wants to know the secret to Trump’s success, he needs only take a look around his own newsroom.