I do wonder of the Left is willing to listen? No, they won’t – they’ll chalk up the Prez loss to “bad messaging” (standard excuse) or BIGOTS, MISOGYNISTS, XENOPHOBES, JINGOISTS, HOMOPHOBES, RACISTS, CHRISTIANIST (add more adjectives as you see fit)! But there are some people speaking to EXACTLY why folks voted for Trump and here’s a few the reasonings (reformatted, emphasis mine):
- FLASHBACK: Peter Turchin: Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Society Frays. “Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse. . . . We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.”
- CLIVE CROOK: Revenge Of The Deplorables. “If you can’t manage genuine respect for the people whose votes you want, at least try to fake it. However, forgive me if I go further. It really ought to be possible to manage some actual respect. The complaints that Trump is addressing deserve better than to be recast in caricature then dismissed with contempt. . . . Elite opinion admits of only one answer: People are more stupid and bigoted than we ever imagined. Without denying that there’s plenty of stupidity and bigotry to go around, I think it’s more a matter of elite incompetence. Elite opinion heard the rebels’ complaints, but instead of acknowledging what was valid, it rejected the grievances in every particular and dismissed the complainers as fools or worse. The elites weren’t deaf. They were dumb.”
- STEPHEN L. CARTER: Trump and the Fall of Liberalism. “Too many of my progressive friends seem to have forgotten how to make actual arguments, and have become expert instead at condemnation, derision and mockery. On issue after issue, they’re very good at explaining why no one could oppose their policy positions except for the basest of motives. As to those positions themselves, they are too often announced with a zealous solemnity suggesting that their views are Holy Writ — and those who disagree are cast into the outer political darkness. In short, the left has lately been dripping with hubris, which in classic literature always portends a fall.”
- “Running around in my mind is a burning question. It is for the people protesting the outcome of the general election. What sort of government is it that you believe you want? Clearly you do not accept our constitutionally guided Representative Republic.”
- Glenn Reynolds: In an email to students, the University of Michigan’s President, Mark Schlissel, wrote: “Our responsibility is to remain committed to education, discovery and intellectual honesty — and to diversity, equity and inclusion. We are at our best when we come together to engage respectfully across our ideological differences; to support ALL who feel marginalized, threatened or unwelcome; and to pursue knowledge and understanding.”
But when you treat an election in which the “wrong” candidate wins as a traumatic event on a par with the 9/11 attacks, calling for counseling and safe spaces, you’re implicitly saying that everyone who supported that “wrong” candidate is, well, unsafe. Despite the talk about diversity and inclusion, this is really sending the signal that people who supported Trump — and Trump carried the state of Michigan, so there are probably quite a few on campus — aren’t really included in acceptable campus culture. It’s not promoting diversity, it’s enforcing uniformity. It’s not promoting inclusion, it’s practicing exclusion. And, though it pretends to be about nurturing, it’s actually about being mean to those who don’t fall in the nurtured class. Schlissel says he wants the University of Michigan to be “a welcoming place for all members of society,” but how welcome can students who backed Trump feel in the wake of this performance?
After all, these same voters have watched as every Republican candidate in recent memory has been accused of waging a “War on Women.” If Democrats are going to claim that Mitt Romney and John McCain hate women (and they did), then they shouldn’t be surprised when voters ignore them when they say Donald Trump hates women. If every Republican is a misogynist, then no Republican is.
While many liberals have dismissed the idea of political correctness as a right-wing manufactured hysteria, it is in fact a real thing. That Trump has stretched its meaning to encompass pretty much any horrible thing he wants to say makes its existence no less real.
Conservative white Americans have watched (often fearfully) as liberal cultural elites demand that everyone fall in line with their agenda or risk being called a homophobe, racist or misogynist. The concept of persuasion and debate has been overridden by a quest for immediate and forced cultural conformity. My friend Sally Kohn, the liberal commentator, summed up the left wing view fairly honestly when she told me in a recent debate over free speech that, “If [conservatives on campus] feel like they can no longer speak against positive social change, good.”
This is a paradigm where honest disagreement about abortion makes one a woman-hater, holding orthodox religious views on marriage equates to gay-bashing, and refusing to cop to white privilege — even if you are a working class white person struggling economically — defines you as a racist.
- I THINK THEY REALLY BELIEVED THEY’D NEVER LOSE AN ELECTION: ‘I Won:’ The Left will not enjoy living with its own precedents. “The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, the same people who until ten minutes ago denounced federalism — which they mischaracterize as the doctrine of ‘states’ rights’ — as an instrument for the suppression of African Americans are now embracing secession, which, in the American context at least, has a little bit of its own racial baggage.”
There’s an open letter to the Daily Bruin being circulated among UCLA faculty about how the faculty is united to defend our students of color, LGTBQ, etc…. And how UCLA is a safe space for them.
There is no mention of the increasingly violent riots–yes, riots. There is no mention of numerous trumped up (pun intended) false claims being made. There is no acknowledgement that not everybody at UCLA voted for Hillary. There is no acknowledgement that such a letter might alienate conservative faculty and students, making the former wonder about whether UCLA is a safe place for them to work and the latter whether it is a safe place to go to school.
Do you think a similar letter would have circulated to reassure our conservative students if Hillary had won? Do you think faculty would be united to offer those students a safe space?
No? Me neither.
Me? Just look at the adjectives above – I’m tired of being labeled as such (and yes, I’ve been called pretty much all of them) so Trump got my vote. WHY in God’s green earth would I ever vote for someone of the Party that labeled me a “clinger to my gun and bible” and a deplorable (after all, go here to see what Progressives really think of us and our beliefs).
My vote was meant as a poke in the eye to Progressives. What, you thought that I’d just sit here and take it from the likes of you who stand for EVERYTHING that I despise politically?
