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Election 2016 Part 5: Left-Wing Self-Examination

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In the most recent installment of this series, I discussed the massive and vocal cadre of sore losers and sour grapes on the left.

[Again, I voted for neither Trump nor the Clintons, and as such, stand independent of partisanship here; indeed, in an earlier post, I condemned a sore-winner element in the ranks of so-called conservatives.]

In fairness, however, not all left-wingers were such bad sports about the fact American democracy worked as designed. Other liberals admirably took to self-analysis and introspection, looking inward and at themselves and one another, collectively, in the search for what went wrong, instead of reflexively and emotionally blaming the omnipresent other. These leftists I respect and uphold as aware and analytic thinkers, even as I disagree vehemently with their opinions on issues. To wit…

LATTE PARTY
The rise of someone as outwardly onerous as Trump rightly compels the left do so some soul-searching in many ways. One is with the direction of the Democrat Party, where a leftist analog to the Tea Party, rooted in the far-left/socialist, more ideologically pure Sanders/Warren wing, already is gaining groundswell support against the Goldman Sachs wing that dominates the party. For laughs I’ll call this insurrection the Latte Party.

Do you expect the same leftists who decried the rise of the Tea Party on the Republican side to behave similarly toward the Latte Party revolt in their own ranks? I doubt it, except for those few who truly buy fully into the corporate/globalist model of neoliberal leftism, which really is an ideological self-contradiction if ever there was. At least the Latte Party nee Sanders socialists are genuine in their ideals, instead of sellouts to the system like Obama, the Clintons, and their political sycophants.

I actually support the Latte Party ideal in principle, even as I disagree with damn-near everything they stand for issues-wise, because they do agree with Trump’s campaign talk on one of the few substantial ways I also do: the swamp needs to be drained. The globalist Bilderberg puppets and one-world-governance sellouts need to go — from Republican and Democrat parties alike.

THE INTROSPECTIVE LEFT
Finally! It took long enough. The best thing the left wing can do is what too few already are: looking inward and blaming themselves for their own bigotry and intolerance toward the right, and toward the ignored minority of working-class Rust Belters who ultimately made the difference in tilting just the right states Trump’s way. Unsolicited advice: for your own sake, liberals, listen to those few who have a clue what really went wrong and what to do about it.

For starters, you can find no clearer voice than Nicholas Kristof in this remarkably introspective and brilliant column. Take note, too, it may be the only time I ever compliment Kristof on anything. Then take heed and understand what he is trying to tell you! The fact that a majority of left-wing academics in one peer-reviewed study would engage in overt religious discrimination in hiring (a Federal crime, violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964!) should go against everything for which “progressivism” has struggled; yet there is the cancer, right in liberalism’s own gut.
When just one single Princeton faculty member and a janitor contributed to the Romney campaign in 2012. So much for “diversity” on campus. Is it any wonder the “intellectual elite” is seen as distant, detached, unrealistic, insular, ivory-tower, and (ironically) ignorant? Complain about that perception all you want, but it exists for a reason. Fix that reason.

Then given the often ferocious pro-Hillary partisanship involved, the condescension, dismissiveness, and glib invalidation of others’ concerns are but a mild terms for how the media behaved leading up to this election! This column, also from the left, offers motivation to return to balance, impartiality and treating opponents like they are worth hearing. As the author rightly alludes, the left has been masterful at preaching empathy but wretched at practicing it with regard to the right, evangelical Christians, and poor whites. Fair-use excerpt:

    Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid. It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. … We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. … That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line.

Clearly the Trump voters (and again, I was not one) did not react as desired by the left when told to shut up and get in line. Instead they turned out en masse, motivated as never before, to install a President even less qualified than Barack Obama (something I thought impossible eight years ago).


These ladies have a point. Remember, I did not vote for Trump. Yet I sympathize with the plight of the great majority of those who did, who are non-racist, non-sexist, who just want to have a better life, who don’t want government interference in their personal and business issues, nor Federal theft of their hard-earned wages to subsidize sinful causes and waste and bureaucratic inefficiencies. I don’t think Trump will provide that, but after the last eight years of a failed radical-left-wing Presidential experiment, the most extreme leftism this nation has known in the White House, I don’t blame Trump voters for their desperation.

For all of these corrective behaviors and nuggets of wisdom directed by a minority of seeing leftists toward their foaming brethren, my expectations that they have turned a leaf and will seek compromise with the right are low, given life experience and given the deep-seated core of anti-conservative resentment simmering or boiling (see above) from so much off the blue side of the sociopolitical spectrum. This includes the anti-conservative bigotry that motivates false-flag crimes and hate-crime hoaxes framed to look like they came from the “right”.

An election was won or lost, depending on your perspective — or mine from the third-party view, where we lost regardless. Yet life does go on. Get over it. Grow a thicker skin. Acquire a sense of humor. Enjoy the entertainment as your favorite pundits trample all over Trump and his surrogates for their buffoonery, tomfoolery and general ineptitude. Most importantly, get about improving your nation and loving your neighbor (even if it means tough love). Don’t just say stuff on social media, actually spend a chunk of your life to serve your society and country in some way.

The final chapter of this series of essays will cover select state (Oklahoma) and local (Norman-area) ballot selections and their implications.

Election 2016 Part 4: Left-wing Anguish, Hate and Violence

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In the previous installment of the Election 2016 series, I discussed hazards to conservatives and conservatism from the ascendancy of Trump to highest office. Now let’s look at what’s happening on the left. To summarize, quite a lot of people need to be taught, as they should have been by parents, how to behave when things don’t go their way.

THE ANGUISHED LEFT

Liberals immediately began weeping and gnashing teeth over how such a horror can take place. Naturally, being driven by emotion and feelings more than rationality and reason, many leftists dove straight into over-the-top, “I can’t cope!” type melodrama on social media, and posts to the effect of, “Now is not the time for kindness and reconciliation, not yet.” Not the time for kindness? Wow. I feel so sorry for those consumed by such bitterness.

Then there were the soft, pampered, coddled, overly tender little snowflakes at colleges around the country whose precious little naive worldviews have no conceptions for real-world harshness and developments that don’t go their way. Emotion, not rationality, reason and logic, drive every fiber of thought. This is another existence (and it’s not life, but existence) for which I have profound pity. It only creates more self-made victims. How exquisitely ironic and fitting that so many have adopted diaper pins as their collective pity-party symbol. And now we even have a gaggle of left-wingers ironically jumping on the bandwagon of a new Red Scare — which looks, sounds and smells exactly like the pattern of conspiracy theory-mongering they accuse the right of doing.

Many on the left cannot comprehend that their party (political party as opposed to pity party, though there is currently little difference) put forth a deeply, deeply flawed candidate infested with corrupted ethics and rotten to the core. Instead they launch bogeyman conspiracy theories and desperate stabs in the dark to blame the FBI director, who spinelessly failed to recommend prosecution for stuff that would have landed a mere proletariat like me in jail by now, the third-party candidates (bullshit…they took from Trump as well!), “racist and xenophobic” bogeymen under every bed, and all manner of other lame excuses for the sorry, sad-sack performance of their own candidate and repudiation of their ideals in the most critical parts of the electoral marketplace.

THE HATEFUL AND SOMETIMES VIOLENT LEFT [Or: Yes, I was in Portland!]

Even before the election, various incidents of violence against Trump supporters (another example, among many) and destruction of property sneaked through the media; who knows what happened that was not widely publicized.

Fortuitously, I was in downtown Portland on unrelated business on election night, and on the next, spent a time out there observing the “civil disobedience”–deliberately embedded for an hour or more within the protestors, who had no idea I was an unsympathetic infiltrator. Here’s what I posted to Facebook friends from the streets, just upwind of tear gas and listening to both the flash/bang grenades and megaphone demands from a wave of law enforcement:

    I wandered through some of it. Tons of cops and choppers everywhere. Tear gas and flash-bang devices on occasion but nothing unmanageable. Stoner “riots” are entertaining and not very dangerous. These hipsters have trouble bench-pressing a phone book, much less hurting anybody.
    …
    Yes, it appears some of these morons did break stuff. Cops mostly were dispersing and not arresting people.

    Understanding urban meteorology/airflow does help one to stay upwind of the tear gas.
    …
    There definitely was an element that had cell phones ready and waiting [for cops to make a mistake]– as if a form of wishful entrapment.
    …
    [Earlier, on the opposite side of the river:] I was shooting calm-looking water reflectives while standing under the bridge, right alongside a group of ~100 people singing, chanting and beating drums around a makeshift bonfire. Cops came and dispersed them right after I was done. At least they weren’t breaking stuff like those anarchist idiots downtown!

However, on the two following nights after I left, the protests did get physically violent in a few locales of Portland, and I would attribute that more to out-of-town and out-of-state professional paid agitators that we’ve seen in other civil disturbances in places like North Dakota, Ferguson and Baltimore. After the surprise election results, it took some time to get the hired hooligans into town.

My end report: Most of it was civil, but not all. The cops did an amazing job considering a small percentage of the crowd consisted of anarchist thugs breaking stuff, setting fires and hurling objects. Far larger numbers were spewing hate speech directed at at Trump and his supporters. How ironic it was to see people yelling “Love trumps hate,” while carrying “F*** Trump!” signs. Even worse scenes unfolded in other cities such as Oakland, where police endured barrages of bottles, rocks, and Molotov cocktails.

I did not realize that “Love trumps hate” involves destruction and violence.

Want more evidence of hypocrisy? Over half the arrested protestors in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon! If you don’t vote, you have no credibility at all in protesting the results. Go home and play on your PlayStation whilst choking down those kale smoothies.

As a third-party voter and an eyewitness to what happened one night in Portland, I can assure you BOTH sides have a lot of hate and intolerance to weed out of their ranks, not just the so-called “alt-right” as claimed by so-called “progressives”. The vitriol spewing from the left only reinforces, in Trump supporters’ eyes, their decision to vote for him. Is that your goal?

WISE ADVICE

Those who protested the election results really need to heed the words of the President for whom they voted last time, applied to themselves. As a reminder:

    “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about. Go out there and win an election.”
    — Barack Obama, 2012

Remember? Or is what’s good for one shoe not applicable to the other?

And oh by the way–stop breaking stuff and trying to hurt people. That also hurts credibility. Ever hear of Martin Luther King and his rightful advocacy of non-violent protest? We also have seen false-flag “hate” incidents (for example) committed by the left, and even before this election cycle. Those who commit false-flag crimes for propaganda truly are a “basket of deplorables”.

Assassination wishes against the President-elect also exploded across Twitter and other social-media commentary spaces. Death threats are evil, criminal, dignify no further exposure, and will not be legitimized by re-posting here. You easily can find more than enough if you try, because regardless of any lip service to the contrary, results (which are what matters) show Twitter corporately cares nothing about being a willing vector for the threat to commit a Federal capital crime. These illustrate the extreme yet still present element of the Left that need to be policed by the party that preaches peace and tolerance.

In the next chapter of this set of BLOG entries, I’ll turn to the more thoughtful, rational element of the left wing and offer credit where it is due.

Election 2016, Part 1: Trump Wins. How?

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Folks have been asking for my thoughts on this election, probably anticipating thundering hammers of prosaic smack talk or “I told you so!” gloating. If that’s what you expect, you are going to be disappointed, so stop here and go chew happily on some caramel candy. If you expected fast reaction “insta-punditry” catering to ten-second attention spans, it already is obvious by the passed time of thoughtful reflection that your wish will not come true. However, I respect the intellect of my audience, and unlike some disturbingly melodramatic Hillary supporters I’ve seen, I have confidence you can cope with some temporal delay to process this mess in a more deliberate manner.

Issues this weighty don’t deserve an “insta-pundit”, and if you have read anything of the sort, flush it down the toilet, because no such elaboration can be delivered with credibility of analysis, nor careful consideration to the forces at work here. Hell, even after over a week, there is far too much to examine to do this situation justice. “Insta-punditry” is for shallow, simpleminded fools. Read this slowly: it takes time.

Now, some time has passed — probably still not enough. Here is what I have digested and processed so far, standing off to the side of the partisanship this cycle, and observing the foolishness foisted by both sides.

First, “President-elect Trump”. Damn, that sounds bizarre, even after over a week to get accustomed. I didn’t think it was possible. I believed that his awful campaigning and oratorical abilities, and the shameless selling out of most media for the Clintons, combined with the usual small but potentially meaningful number of voting improprieties, would ensure her victory, if by narrow margins. I was dead wrong. I take no pride in the other things I said that have come true, while also fully admitting I did not anticipate this result. As noted above, I thought the Clintons and their machine, combined with The Donald’s own disturbingly self-immolation tendencies, would halt his best effort to grab the working-class votes in key states, thereby inflicting upon us her brand of banana-republic rule.

Wrong. [Take note: when I am wrong, I damn-well admit it!] Instead we’ll get Trump’s own brand of banana-republic tomfoolery, which has begun in his highly disappointing selection of fringe nutjobs, Washington political insiders, and Wall Street oligarchs — the very people he seemed to oppose throughout the process. Trump is betraying you already, fellow conservatives who voted for him, and don’t say I did not warn you of this. He is not conservative, and has no integrity.

There was no self-interest on being right about him. I couldn’t stand the idea of a Clinton II presidency either, for reasons that I won’t elaborate more than briefly below, as they are now moot. The thought of Trump in the White House, while marginally better in some ways such as the higher probability of a conservative Supreme Court for many years beyond the coming presidential term, was (and remains) frightening for the sake of safety from both nuclear war and Big Brother intrusion into private lives. Plus, the guy has behaved in reprehensibly irresponsible and immoral ways.

As I’ve promised for months, and firmly held through the voting process, I voted third-party at the top of the ticket (for the first time in my life!), then true to form, the most conservative candidates at every position on down. In summary, I selected neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump due to:

  1. The Clintons’ inconsistency with issues, inattention to national debt and domestic spying, untrustworthiness, dishonesty, corruption, blind ambition, ruthlessness, cunning, cold-bloodedness, corporate globalism, audience-pandering, inauthenticity, greed, pretension, grossly insulting words toward segments of opponents (more below), willingness to stomp on whomever they could to gain power, and overall personal immorality and lack of professional ethics.
  2. Trump’s inconsistency with issues, inattention to national debt and domestic spying, untrustworthiness, dishonesty, corruption, blind ambition, ruthlessness, impulsiveness, carnival-barking idiocy, lack of even temperament, incoherence, impracticality, greed, pretension, grossly insulting words toward segments of society, willingness to stomp on whomever he could to gain power, and overall personal immorality and lack of professional ethics.

Wow, they really weren’t all that different after all, were they? No wonder they were the two most unpopular candidates in history in several polls. Personally, I found both candidates so repugnant, so loathsome, so bereft of personal and professional morals and integrity, that to pick either was thoroughly unconscionable.

Yet Trump somehow came across to just barely enough people, in just the right states to get Electoral College advantage, as being a little less evil than Hillary, a little more sympathetic to the commoner. That was important, or as he would say, “bigly” and “yuge”. What else happened?

I won’t waste time to explore a thousand speculative avenues here, because the answer logically is straightforward and should be clear to anyone paying attention. Bottom line: Trump won the Electoral College by flipping Rust Belt industrial states that went for Obama four years prior. In short, he somehow turned a lot of Obama voters into Trump voters.

Or did Obama himself turn his own voters into Trump voters through his own actions and failings? Valid question! Think about that.

This table from NPR reveals the game changer, in stark numbers:

THOSE WITHOUT A COLLEGE DEGREE IN INDUSTRIAL NORTH

MINNESOTA
2012: 53% of electorate, 52-46 Obama
2016: 44% of electorate, 55-38 Trump (net gain: R+23)

WISCONSIN
2012: 58% of electorate, 51-47 Obama
2016: 55% of electorate, 56-40 Trump (net gain: R+20)

IOWA
2012: 57% of electorate, 52-46 Obama
2016: 57% of electorate, 54-40 Trump (net gain: R+20)

MICHIGAN
2012: 54% of electorate, 56-43 Obama
2016: 58% of electorate, 49-45 Trump (net gain: R+17)

OHIO
2012: 60% of electorate, 53-46 Obama
2016: 56% of electorate, 51-45 Trump (net gain: R+13)

PENNSYLVANIA
2012: 52% of electorate, 57-42 Obama
2016: 52% of electorate, 52-45 Trump (net gain: R+12)

In more detail, NPR claims that Clinton effectively lost nearly 5 million votes that went to Obama and Trump effectively kept Romney’s. [This is numerical, in bulk, not the same individual voters of course!] Simply keeping Obama’s black-voter total from 2012 would have won her Michigan and Wisconsin. She obviously failed to inspire that level of support. This is squarely on her, though Obama’s festering disaster of a presidency did her no favors.

No, I declare firmly, it wasn’t just “bigots, racists and homophobes” that made the difference, as the left likes to claim with glib self-righteousness. Rather inconveniently for their arguments, a lot of the same blue-collar, ex-union (or even current union, if still employed) industrial workers who used to pull a rote vote for Democrats, as demanded by their labor leaders, have gotten laid off, denied economically the promise of the nation’s founding right to pursue happiness, and flipped Republican. Many of them voted for Obama; and one does not vote for a dark-skinned man with a middle name of Hussein if one is racist in America.

As a final nail in the coffin of the false narrative that bigotry was the reason for Trump’s success, please slowly and carefully consider this story of a left-wing, dark-skinned, Muslim, immigrant, woman voter who picked Trump. She was not an isolated instance either, even if her combination of typically Democrat-voting characteristics was rather unusual for a Trumpling.

Trump carried a higher share of minority and blue-collar votes than Romney. Had the latter not run such a squishy campaign, nor come across as a distant and detached rich oligarch, we would be entering the second term of President Mitt right now. Instead we have another rich oligarch who is pretending not to be distant and detached, but who will sell out to assimilate into the very same Borg he claimed to be fighting.

So much of this was a backlash to a backlash to a backlash too, as I have pointed out before regarding the last midterms. Thanks a lot, Mitt. Thanks a lot, Obama. Thanks a lot, W, a good man who was terribly misled. Thanks a lot, Slick Willie the sexual predator. Thanks a lot, President Read My (Lyin’) Lips, a good man who learned too late not to make promises he couldn’t keep.

Enough of the logistical, logical answer, let’s look at the emotional one, because (sadly) emotion plays a role in this too. Hillary truly lost this election the moment she callously referred to Trump voters as a “ basket of deplorables“. Never mind that she was talking about the (smaller than the 50% “half of” that she thinks) fraction of them who are racist or sexist, the perceptions was that she was insulting anyone even considering a Trump vote. That included a lot of women, as well as a surprisingly large minority of minorities. “Deplorables”, all — in a world where, too often, perception is reality.

This was her version of Romney’s “47% moment“, but worse. This is because she had the bulk of corporate mass media blatantly and unapologetically on her side, and still couldn’t overcome a great gaffe that (unlike Romney’s) her legions of fawning “journalistic” sycophants were trying to ignore or gloss over as trivial. It was the same short-fused, shortsighted, ignorant intemperance that led her to refer to Bernie Sanders supporters as “basement dwellers” — a needless insult which many of them did not forgive.

Collectively, bigger mistakes seldom have been made in electoral politics at this level, in one campaign. You do not, I repeat, DO NOT, insult both your opponent’s supporters and doubters on your side that you hope to bring into the fold! She paid the price. Because of how revolting her opponent was to so many people, and despite her own nearly-as-bad level of disapproval in polls, this election was hers to lose. In a close game, team Hillary’s quarterback then fumbled the ball to Team Trump inside the one-yard line with first down and seconds to go, no Trump timeouts, in a scenario where all she had to do was kneel down on the field and it’s game over. Team Trump returned it for a touchdown with no time left. Unfortunately, in a game between these two, we all lose, regardless of the winner.