THE LAST DITCH An Englishman returned after twenty years abroad blogs about liberty in Britain
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Donald Trump just won the greatest jury verdict in history

They still don’t get it - spiked

They still don’t get it - spiked.

The linked article is right. They (the woke left) still don't get it. I hope they never do. One of my leftist friends prefaced a phone call this morning with a whole minute of "how could that happen?" about the US election result. I let her talk uninterrupted out of pure interest in what she would say. Essentially, she wanted a new electorate because those fools keep getting it wrong.
 
I've had similar conversations with a friend in Poland upset about the right-wing PiS former government there. He raved about the idiots who voted for them and I patiently explained that calling them names wouldn't solve the problem. He needed their votes if PiS was ever to lose so should focus on developing policies and arguments that would appeal to them, rather than abusing them.
 
Here in the UK, Gordon Brown was caught on a live microphone calling a nice old lady – a classic Labour voter of the old pre-woke school – a "bigot". Other members of the Labour Party are also inclined to sneer at the people whose votes they need. Our Foreign Secretary will now have to represent the British people to Americans whose President he's abused and defamed in language that would be childish and OTT even in student politics. 
 
To a rationalist, it's an odd approach to democracy to dig in when losing a vote and to double down on policies the voters rejected. Yet the Left's response these days is quasi-religious in its intensity. Rather than review their rejected policies or engage with voters they need to win over, they'll sulk in their tents. Within days, I promise they'll be saying they weren't left-wing enough.
 
I only played at politics in my youth. I turned down an invitation to go on the Conservative Party's candidates list.  I don't claim to have relevant expertise or experience in that field. I was trained in advocacy and persuasion though and had decades of experience of commercial negotiations. I can say with confidence that no-one was ever abused, reviled or mocked into changing their point of view. 
 
The Left is poor at persuasion partly because their beliefs are quasi-religious. They are right, regardless, and anyone who doesn't agree is a heretic. They're also rather neglectful of political evangelism because they've established a deeper level of control. They own the "Deep State" (the modern term for what used to be called "the Establishment") so elections don't matter as much as they should. During 14 years of allegedly "Conservative" government in Britain, we moved steadily to the Left. The state's payroll grew. Its influence in everyday life burgeoned. Taxes rose. The response to a national emergency - the COVID pandemic - was totalitarian. Worst of all, the largely state-funded education system indoctrinated our youth in leftist thought.
 
The Tories achieved nothing that reflected their stated principles. Partly because their principles were weak. Partly because they were embarrassingly mediocre and incompetent.  But mainly because the Deep State "blob" was immovable.
 
The Left's complacency will be their downfall however. The American people have just shown that they see through their games. They've elected a President who they knew full well has been convicted of multiple felonies. They're called "low information voters" by their tormentors, but they had that information for sure. They elected him despite him being called a fascist (and despite being called fascists themselves for supporting him). They elected him despite being told by every show business influencer who could be brought to bear that their democracy itself was one vote away from being lost.
 
It wasn't any failure in propaganda that lost Kamala Harris the election. It was the voters' impatience with being denigrated, sneered at and abused by a political elite high on its own sense of entitlement. Trump isn't a moral role model for them. They don't want him (or anyone like him) around their daughters. They know his flaws, but this isn't one of them. He doesn't look down on them and he has the humility to ask them for their vote as a single united people.
 
The best thing about this election is that it seems the minorities farmed by the Democrats - blacks, latinos, women, gays – have refused to stay on the Left's plantation. They've divided according to their ideas, not their identities – as any rational humans should. The biggest loser is not Harris but Obama – who insulted every black man in America by accusing him of harbouring a sexist reluctance to vote for a woman. They didn't vote for someone from the same "identity group" or (God help us) "Community" as themselves. Yes Harris is a woman, but that's not enough. Is she competent? Is she moral? Would she have reached the heights she has if she were not a woman? They asked themselves those questions, came to differing conclusions and then voted accordingly. 
 
Identity politics is the most dangerous and divisive phenomenon in modern politics. The Democratic Party in America and the Labour Party in Britain are utterly caught up in it. They existed before identitarianism and they can exist after it. To survive the terrible errors they've made they're going to have to abandon their prejudices and stop assuming that people belong to them if they fall into certain – politically meaningless – categories. It's racist. It's sexist. It's demeaning. And America has rejected it. This was not a victory for the orange-skinned community. It was a triumph of reason over leftist bigotry. 

Comments

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Amanda Tomasoa

Well said

patently

Spot on.

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