The COLLAPSE of the left: from the party of free speech to the party of... censorship?The latest round of anti-Trump protests reveal the impending collapse of the postmodern Democrat party...
During the first two months of Trump's second term, I have noticed that the sheer volume of protests has far exceeded what took place in DC during the first months of his first term. I noticed something else, too: the crowds are far older than any time in the past. What does this tell me? Well, for one it says that young people are not the ones taking to the streets of our nation's capital anymore. Trump gained significant ground on the younger demographic in the most recent election. While MAGA was considered to be a fringe political movement populated mostly by old white men in 2016, it is now the dominant political force in Washington, DC. That brings us to the present day, where the protests have been more voluminous and frequent than anything I can recall during my previous 16.5 years in this Godforsaken city. Another notable difference between these protests and those of the past: they are more censorious than ever before. While protesters were weary of anyone filming during the civil unrest of 2020, this new batch of picketers have taken it to a new level. Take, for example, what happened to my colleague Matt Miller when he dared to wear a DOGE t-shirt to a recent protest in front of the United States Capitol.  We experienced similar resistance when confronted at anti-Netanyahu protest on a public street in what was formerly known as "BLM Plaza" in front of the White House:  This development begs the question, "what happened to the left?" When I moved here in 2008, I was pro free speech. On the heels of two Bush terms and the passage of the privacy-destroying Patriot Act, I thought that put me on the political left. Not so fast. Over the course of Obama's two terms, I watched a transformation take place. The left, at first gradually and eventually all at once, began to coalesce around the radical wing of the party that was so “progressive” that they sought to silence and destroy anyone who didn’t view progress on their terms. When Trump took office in 2016, this allegedly empathetic world view was juiced up on steroids and used to justify a wide open border, anti-wall policies and the accusations of racism for anyone who disagreed.
At one time in our past, it was the dogmatic Jesuits who coined the phrase, "The end justifies the means." Over time, the Christians have become the open-minded ones, and the so-called progressives are now the keepers of the new dogma: Scientism and the secular worship of the almighty government. From the moment he came down the golden escalator in 2015, corporate media brands that controlled the news narratives were in cahoots with the Democrats to "RESIST" all things Trump. Fast forward nine years, these atrophied institutions no longer have an iron grip on how Americans perceive the world. The more they lose ground, the more they dig in their heels. Therein lies the genesis of the censorious left. The problem is, the more that never-Trump activist journalists and politicians double down on silencing their enemies, the more they lose people who traditionally voted blue. The average American does not want to be told what to do. They want to go to work, earn a dignified paycheck, and be left alone inside their homes. The paradigm-shifting moment happened at the end of Covid, when the group of Americans who were skeptical about big pharma went from being largely granola-eating hippies to hillbillies who voted for Trump (also don't forget black men, who took the vaccine in lower numbers than any other demographic). When I returned from the pandemic to coach the Georgetown hockey team in the fall of 2021, the head coach had gray hair that reached down to his shoulders. "Whoah, coach! Check out that hair!" I joked in front of the eighteen to twenty-four-year-old men as we gathered again for the first time in a year. "I'm not cutting my hair until every single Trumper gets the jab." He said with conviction in his eyes. He didn’t know it, but I hadn’t gotten “the jab,” although the students surrounding us knew I had the same hillbilly DNA as the MAGA hicks who my coach detested so much. "Oh really? OK. Well what about all the black people?" I replied. The guys on the team burst out in laughter because I had said the quiet part out loud. In the midst of the American political pendulum swinging from left to right, I had zeroed in on a critical chink in the armor of the tribal left's contention that it was only the MAGA's who were refusing the vaccine, refusing the military industrial agenda, and refusing the censorship of our discourse that took place during the Black Lives Matter protests and the rollout of the experimental jab. And yet, four years after the BLM BS, more black men cast votes for Trump than they did for any other Republican candidate in the last 48 years. Go figure. As it turns out, the divide in America is not ultimately between left and right, it's between the Puritans who settled the cities, created the laws, and the Hillbilly entrepreneurs who settled the frontier. Across these two approaches, the American way was forged. It was a bridge between the rugged individualists and those who favored federal power and a nation of laws. As the political parties of America have oscillated over the centuries, the traditions of the puritans and the hillbillies have identified with different political parties based on the era in which they lived. The Democrat party was once the party of the South and—after William Jennings Bryan's populist movement at the turn of the 20th century—FDR transitioned the Democrat party from the Party of Jim Crow to the party of the working class. Thirty years later JFK and LBJ brought minorities into the fold with their sponsorship of the Civil Rights legislation that reaffirmed the rights of blacks in the South. Now sixty years after that, from the ashes of the failed attempt to create a post-Covid "New World Order,” a new realignment is taking place. Trump's Republican party has become the party of the working class, and the Democrats have found nothing but repeated failures since their turn towards identity politics, Critical Race Theory, and the idea that the grand narratives upon which our nation were founded needed to be tossed entirely into the wind. As it turns out, constantly berating the American people with the idea that America is inherently a terrible and racist place will no longer work. The postmodern left's entire ideology was built from the idea that America and its legacy of slavery means that we are a nation whose original sin cannot be undone. Yet over the course of Biden's presidency, millions flooded through a porous border precisely because of the opportunities that this great country can afford anyone lucky enough to reside within its states. The Democrats built their entire worldview around critiquing the status quo, the problem here is that a critique is not an ideology that can stand on its own... or at least not for very long. That's why young people, minorities, and independents abandoned the Democrat party by the millions in 2024. They are sick and tired of being told that their country is bad, that unfettered immigration is good, and shut up if you disagree. This transition from being the party of free speech and anti-war, to the party that touts an endorsement from a NeoCon like Liz Cheney or her dad, Dick, and a party that supports censorship online, is exactly why the Democrats have found themselves in the disempowered position that they occupy today. At its core, Trump's popular-vote victory was due to one simple fact: he was running as a change candidate, while Kamala Harris was not. Trump was running as an outsider who would upset the status quo in Washington, and Kamala ran as the inheritor of the Uniparty that has screwed over working class Democrats and Republicans alike for over 40 years. The fake moral superiority that originally kept so many from voting for Trump is evaporating more and more by the day. The victim mentality has been shown for what it is: a shameless power grab that has less to do with empowering the disenfranchised, and more to do with the power brokering elites maintaining control of the present state of affairs. The worship of Saint Fauci over God and the utter failure of “trusting the science” to remedy the pandemic has shown America the house of cards that was pandering as a sturdy foundation of rigorous research and truth. The strategy of shouting down skeptics as “anti-vaxxers” or “conspiracy theorists” has yielded the opposite effect from what was intended. If the left wants to blame anyone for Trump's return to the White House, they should look no further than their policies over the last ten years. If they want to claim victim status, then the should look to the policies that victimized hard working Americans: shuttering their businesses, forcing a brand new drug into their veins, all after shipping well-paying middle class jobs overseas. The party of tolerance has become the party of get onboard with my agenda or else. The postmodern left no longer brings new ideas to the discourse because their dogmatic ideology is as rigid as the Catholic Church. This means that it is the left who is striving to conserve the current paradigm rather than to create something new. Trump's coalition with Christians, working class men and women looking to renew the dignity of the middle class, minorities, and youngins has shown that the Republicans are a more diverse party then the Democrats would want you to perceive. Trump's experience with a two-tiered justice system and endless censorship pounded his platform into one that encourages open debate and a return to equal justice for all, not just those who fall within one's own political tribe. The Republican party was originally founded in the 1850's as an anti-slavery party. After the Civil War, they dominated America's national politics for over forty years. This was during the Gilded Age, and as the gap between the rich and the poor grew ever wider, the Democrats were provided with an opportunity to steal the working class vote from the GOP. Today, at yet another period when the middle class is struggling to make ends meet, the Republicans are the ones stealing the Dem platform from under their feet. What the future holds is yet unclear, but if previous American political shifts are any indicator, the Democrats have a long road of losing ahead.
You're currently a free subscriber to PolitiBrawl. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
|
Sunday, March 23, 2025
The COLLAPSE of the left: from the party of free speech to the party of... censorship?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment