I recently saw the following Tweet from Stu Cameron (007 fan) on Facebook, spread by a group calling itself the “Teanderthal Party” — because implying that conservatives are less evolved than the rest of us is what the mainstream “left” has been reduced to.
My response to Stu (with his misogynistic hero icon) is as follows:
In truth, I’ve seen nothing but changed minds from the Trump supporters I know.
In 2016, most Trump voters I know supported him tepidly, with many qualifications. Almost apologetically, really. They didn’t want me to think that they endorsed his stupid racism and demagoguery. Most felt it necessary to explain that they were really voting against the neocon agenda, media-controlling primary-rigging corruption, and corporate fascism (middle class-cratering, slavery-permitting “trade” pacts and Wall Street plunder) — represented so perfectly by the establishment candidate.
But now THE NOMINAL LEFT HAS MANAGED TO CHANGE THE MINDS OF SO MANY default Trump supporters…
* With RussiaGate lunacy (empowering the neocon agenda, swallowing whole their “Iraq WMD” exceeding propaganda)…
* With endless hate pouring out of the left, focused on Trump’s hair, makeup, weight, age, family…
* With homophobic memes about Trump’s “boyfriend” Putin, exposing the left as utter hypocrites…
Our Tweet-fixated, personality politics has turned most of these establishment-abandoned folks into GENUINE TRUMP FANS… which they never were before.
Mainstream hate, mostly hypocritical and reactionary, has made Trump their working class “hero” — even as he’s increasingly giving the neocons and Wall Street everything they want, even as Trump’s tax cut plunders their future hopes…
(Which these center-right victims of neoliberalism really haven’t figured out yet.)
It’s identical to the way that the center-left rallied around President Obama, even as he was assiduously rescuing the Bush/Cheney/Wall Street agenda and putting it on steroids…
We rallied around Obama mostly as a reaction to the unhinged, reactionary hatred of conservatives — because supporting Obama sure as hell had nothing to do with his policy agenda, which was all we’d ever fought against when it was coming from the Heritage Foundation and Republicans.
It’s an enormously sad clusterfuck of a situation. The mainstream “left” has gone back on itself completely, calling Trump a “traitor” for speaking of rapprochement with Russia, even denigrating Trump’s efforts at diplomacy with North Korea…
I never thought I’d see the mainstream left behaving exactly like the deranged right of the 1990s and 2000s. But here we are.
This is precisely how divide and conquer works.
And it’s a tragedy for liberals, who with their empty histrionics have done nothing but discredit themselves and serve the interests of their worst enemies, including Trump.
When you consider, also, the way the left has refused to take the Democratic Party to task for moving to Trump’s right and rigging one election after another — refused to demand much needed reform from the party that lost to a reality TV sideshow ignoramus…
We’ve all but guaranteed Trump’s reelection.