The left is weighted down by a cart full of narrative bubbles, all of them on the verge of breaking. What do I mean?
The overreach of Obama was to culminate in the ascension of Hillary Clinton. The further cementing of the weaponized bureaucratic superstate could secure decades of one-party rule. Regardless of who the knuckle-dragging electorate elevated to Congress or even the White House (if you are willing to believe that this hasn’t already happened). With Media, entertainment, and education propaganda mills in progressive lock-step the ruling class could run the nation from on high behind their wall of pencil-pushers and millions of pages of rules with the consent of the chattering classes.
But in November of 2016, a majority of states ignored the Left’s inflated narratives and picked the “wrong” president.
Everything the Left has done since then looks increasingly like a fish flopping on the dock. Each move is increasingly dramatic as the progressives refuse to give up their absolute devotion to lies embedded into the corrupted fabric of their being. Falsehoods, myths if you prefer, inflating the narrative bubbles that middle America appears to have rejected when it chose Donald over Hillary.
We could speculate ad nauseam on the why or what-for. But Scott McKay offers some thoughts over at Spectator.org in a piece titled “Self-Busting Myths – The Left can’t seem to do much well anymore; not even spinning its usual narratives.”
The American Left’s myth-making and invention of useful narratives starting in the middle of the 20thcentury and running to about 2010 will go down as one of the more successful efforts at shaping culture, both political and otherwise, in human history. Controlling the discussion, amid abject failure in government, education, and business (Detroit, for example, or Solyndra, or what they’ve done to Yale or the motion picture industry), has been a feat defying proper explanation. They’re to be congratulated for their skill in masking, if not weaponizing, their failure through narrative.
Democrats can’t run an inner city? Accuse everyone else of racism — including the middle class, white and black, who run screaming to the suburbs to escape the failing public schools, rampant crime, cratering infrastructure, and naked corruption.
Can’t compete in business? Inflate a “green energy” bubble by concocting the global warming crisis and demonizing fossil fuels as bringing on the apocalypse — and then pump billions of taxpayer dollars into absurdly unsustainable business models manufactured by major political donors as little more than payoffs.
American leftist education doesn’t compete globally in hard sciences and math? Create “social justice” as an imperative and inject cultural Marxist indoctrination into every subject, so that STEM subjects are stigmatized as racist and sexist.
This has gone on for decades, and it has countless examples.
The election of Donald Trump suggests that voters are beginning to see or at least sense the contradictions between what Democrat-socialism promises and what it delivers. Gun-free zones are more dangerous than armed lawful citizens. The planned economy, most recently in the form of the unaffordable what happened to my care act, is incapable of delivering on a fraction of its promises. All of it, whatever it turns out to be, has to be paid for by someone else. It is a price that comes in the form of stagnating wages, a decreased quality of life, and outright unemployment, (while the ruling class prospers).
Put another way, the left’s shibboleths are increasingly propped up by unsustainable narrative or policy priorities. Senseless overexertions of inanity and enough people have noticed.
Free people and free markets shouldn’t need or want them. Certainly not as much as the progressive infrastructure that feeds on them. But until Trump, many have felt as if they didn’t have a loud enough voice in Washington. Some standard-bearer willing to suffer the slings and arrows while throwing a few of his own. That a handful of Senators, a gaggle of House members, and the odd talking head, are not enough. The electorate has asked for a new course. One that the bureaucratic super-state and its political masters must oppose if it is to retain the power and influence it has grown to cherish.
I think these few are still not enough. That, to many, they will prove inadequate to the cause. But there will be victories.
It took the left decades to push us toward this tipping point. Coming back from the edge–if it is even possible–won’t happen in four years or even eight. Be patient. And while being patient, use whatever voice or means you have to trumpet those who have taken a stand while exposing those failed political class prescriptions they seek to unmake.
We’ve seen what progressive ‘success’ looks like in urban enclaves trapped under decades of jackbooted Democrat rule. It is the neo-slavery. A sad, subsistence, lifestyle stuck in war-zones perpetuated by progressive policy. The exchange of bread-crumbs for electoral fidelity to the hand that barely feeds them with false promises that if you suffer under their yoke long enough a new day will dawn.
The Government managed centrally planned perfection of the human condition, a heaven on earth.
We have examples of what this “heaven on earth” looks like; the old Soviet Union, the prisons of Cuba, and in failed states like Venezuela. We see it in the narrative bubbles of American ‘Democrat-Socialists’ who (with whatever sincerity they can muster) insist that their version will end differently for you under their expertise.
It won’t.
Your misery under this program is preordained, and they know that. They are struggling to protect the upper-class lifestyle and power that your obedience and tax dollars afford them. The narratives exist to preserve their promised land. A lavish lifestyle lived on plunder protected by the Media, entertainment, and education propaganda mills which are in lock-step with the ruling class. Narratives with gaping holes that if exploited, could bring an end to Progressivism’s golden age of mythmaking.
