Pocket

Trumpton

As so many of us predicted, 'social justice' radicalism has undermined the left completely. They're unable to win elections even against living cartoon characters.

So, the chickens have come home to roost for the political left. Those of us who've been predicting this day for years might feel some vindication, where it not for the likely awfulness of the regime that we're now going to be confronted by. The intelligentsia seems to be in chaos after having been proved wrong yet again, and no-one knows what's going to happen next.

One of the most alarming things about the New World Order is that no one seems to know what it is. Some claim Trump is a 'closet liberal' and that it's all been a clever ploy. Some claim he's a straight up fascist, which his campaign would seem to suggest. Some claim he'll build the wall, some that he won't. Some claim LGBT people are going to be genocided, others that Trump is better on gay rights than Hillary. The threat to deport Muslims seems to be popping in and out of existence on his website like like the Cheshire cat on amphetamines. America seems to have no idea what it just voted for.

However, one thing that all thinking people can agree on: this represents another massive failure by the western political classes. These people haven't taken a breath since mocking Nigel Farrage for saying he 'didn't believe experts' before they are exposed as clueless once again. The early 21st century has been defined by nothing so much as the failure of 'experts' to predict almost anything successfully, the exception being Nate Silver's prediction of the 2012 Obama election victory, which now looks like a fluke given his prediction of a thumping Clinton win this year. From the 'End of History' to the 2008 financial crisis, from the Arab Spring to the refugee crisis, from ISIS to Crimea to Brexit, the 'experts' seem to see nothing coming until it hits.

This year's Nate Silver was Michael Moore, a man who has been a bit of a class act through the whole sorry debacle. Admittedly, I joined the throng of people mocking him when he made statements about how women have 'never started a holocaust or a school shooting' (Brenda Ann Spencer being one of the disproofs of this statement). However, we all say/believe some dumb-ass thing from time to time. What distinguished Moore from the rest of the democrat elites was that he has a connection to working class people, he's a true lefty rather than a democrat political careerist or a gender-studies hustler. Furthermore he switched his support to Hillary when that seemed to be the only option and the right thing to do. I've disapproved of the way that Clinton supporters attacked people who wanted to vote for a third party: people have the right to vote however they like. But in Moore's case he was swallowing a lot of pain to vote for Clinton to keep out the greater threat, and I respect that.

The failure of the left in 2016 is something that a lot of us saw coming, and it's very much a failure of modern feminism. With the collapse of the socialist left after the cold war, the left became middle-class and gentrified, and it's thinking became based off third-wave feminism and critical race theory. This ultimately manifested in the ideology of 'social justice'. When I first encountered this ideology in 2011, I knew that it was going to lead to disaster. The 'new left' was essentially an ideological weapon for the new 'boss class' of college educated women. Previously feminism has recognized that the system served the interests of a wealthy elite of white men, but that most white men weren't in this elite. In Virgina Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" she muses that the sexist discrimination she experiences at her university is all of a part with the fact that many men will never even be allowed on the university grounds, let alone take a degree course there. However, once the major battles of feminism started being won, and women took their places in the boardroom and on the editorial board of the Huffington Post (a 'no boys in the treehouse' publication it would seem) so this broad understanding of social injustice had to go. For many college-educated wealthy-background women the realization that breaking the glass ceiling also meant becoming part of the oppressor class would have sat very uncomfortably. Entering into the offices of power bought responsibilities to those beneath you that rich people of either gender would often rather not consider. Thus feminism became a means for well off, well educated, mostly white women to hide from their privilege.

Suddenly men, or at least white men, were all alike. All of us enjoyed 'privilege', all of us where on the 'lowest difficulty setting'. Anyone from the working class will, of course, recognize sci-fi writer John Scalzi's statement that "White male is the lowest difficulty setting" as being an old Tory sentiment: The poor, at least the white poor, are poor because they're lazy or stupid. They're on the lowest difficulty setting like everyone else, so their failure is on them alone. College-educated rich women however, were oppressed because they still weren't getting the same payoffs from society as their male peers. They weren't equally represented in the boardroom, or on literary award lists, or in the 'Richest top ten'.

But there's something hinky about this glass ceiling, though no-one can deny it exists. Who are these men who are blocking educated women from taking up lucrative positions? The left would have us believe they're just 'men' and leave it at that, but it's not the underclass white man, growing up in poverty and dodging the cops, who is blocking the middle and upper class woman from her just rewards. Nor is it the men of many racial minorities, also growing up in poverty and dodging the cops. The oppressor of the college-educated white woman is the college-educated white man. The man from the same wealthy class as her. Her father, her uncle, her brother, or her husband.

As a white man from a working-class background, I find it difficult to applaud the 'progress' of the upper classes suddenly realizing what a smart move it is to pack out power positions in society with their daughters as well as their sons. Frankly one is left wondering why they didn't click to this wheeze sooner. Why did you make your daughter fight for the position? Was it to 'build character' or something? But with the rise of the 'femocracy' we can all applaud as Donald Trump drops Ivanka into a plum position along with Eric and Donald Junior. In the meantime the working class woman finds that, even if she gets a degree, doors are not open to her in the way they are for women born into the connected classes. The working class man finds that his employment is going overseas. Many working-class people of color find that nothing changes for them, despite all the concern about whether actors of color win Oscars or whether the Hugo awards are too white.

The great battles of the past years have been the Culture Wars, in which 'liberal' lefties have exhibited the opposite of liberal tendencies. Indeed, the modern political left is so middle-class that it resembles the days of Mary Whitehouse, being obsessed by pointless protestant Christian values of decorum and decency. Is there too much boobage in video games? Are female characters sufficiently covered up in 'sensible armor' or preferably in a high-tech burka like Seamus Aran, that completely conceals their gender? I don't doubt that this constant warring in our cultural spaces is another thing that's made numerous lifetime enemies for the political left. While western foreign policy has reduced the middle east to a live action Goya nightmare, global warming has begun to lay its clammy fingers on our planet and inequality has risen to new highs, the latte left have mostly been concerned with fighting internet misogyny and attempting to enforce total ideological purity in universities.

In many ways Hillary Clinton's campaign was the apex of this champagne-feminist madness. I don't blame Hilary, who I think is unfairly hated, and who in some ways strikes me as a modern Lady Jean Grey: surrounded by people telling her she's going to be Queen without really having done the work to make it possible. The insider skinny was that Bill Clinton was constantly bemoaning the need to reach out to rural and working class whites. However, he was overridden by 'experts' who, as so many people in leftist politics now think in terms of 'white supremacy' and 'patriarchy' basically said "Fuck those redneck neckbeard dudebros, this is about a woman getting to be president." Thus the campaign appeared to be about Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem ticking off an item on their feminist bucket list.

And it wasn't a campaign that did much to court female votes. Threatened with a 'special place in hell' if they didn't vote Hilary, and dismissed as only attending Sanders rallies because "that's where the boys are" (a very strange accusation, which if taken at face value implies a failure by the Clinton campaign to attract fit young hunks) the democratic grand-dames seemed to treat 'women' like Gorean slave girls, expecting unquestioning obedience, loyalty and submission. When 'women' inevitably rebelled the first hot takes from feminist outlets roasted white women in a manner that white men may have found rather familiar. Well, they had been promised a special place in hell, and outlets like slate magazine wanted to make good on that promise. Almost certainly 'feminism' has this year made some long term enemies in its core demographic.

But the most damning evidence against the modern left came out of some of the analysis of voting patterns. Voting Trump correlated very strongly with white mortality rates. Put simply, white people who are dying early under the current regime voted for change. Personally I can't say I blame them, though many people on the well-off left clearly could. What's most disgusting about this revelation is that there's an obvious synergy between the things that are killing whites (mostly despair and drugs) and the things that are killing working class minority groups (though the latter also have to contend with the police to a greater extent, I think). However, rich leftists, trained to believe that all whites are privileged and that 'social justice' is a zero-sum game between whites and everyone else (rich people always think everything is a zero sum game) were unable to join these dots. If they were less racist towards whites (a sin they insist does not exist, and so commit on a regular basis) they would have realized that they could energize a common interest across people of multiple races and backgrounds, and might have won the election.

The 2016 US elections ring the changes on a political ideology that's become self-serving, out of touch, elitist, bigoted and at times downright insane. What it's been replaced with is almost certainly no better, but perhaps the series of shocks as "we, the people", reject a left that's not even noticeably left-wing will cause the political left to re-examine what it has become, and go 'Back to Basics' to rebuild a social vision for everyone, including whites. Or perhaps the madness of 'social justice' runs too deep, and people cannot lose their habits. In that case the left we have needs to be tossed into the dustbin of history, and a new political movement and parties needs to be created to present a more inclusive vision of society.