Musings about certain common attitudes on the left before and after Trump’s victory

I just wanted to take some time to jot down my thoughts regarding some of the hypocritical attitudes that I have found within certain leftist circles before and after the election of Donald Trump.  This has gotten quite messy, and it’s not written like an article.  These are just some musings, some of which are quite detached from each other.  I am not making a “point”, as such, except to point out instances when certain people on the left (often called “regressives” at this point) can be as hateful and condescending as those on the right whom they think are on the complete opposite of the spectrum.  If you want to read more about that, then feel free to continue.

First, I’ll give a bit of a background to show that I’m not a right-winger.  As I mentioned before, I was a Bernie Sanders supporter from the beginning, and even donated a bit to his campaign.  Bernie was not the perfect candidate, as no candidate is.  Speaking of imperfection, I was particularly taken aback when he gave up and let Black Lives Matter take over his stage during his rally.  To me, that showed a lack of leadership and a willingness to give up.  But most other things about him stuck a chord, and I knew that he was doing his best to help America’s downtrodden.  But he lost in the primaries.

Throughout my life, I have by most measures been on the side of liberals.  For example, I have always been against the religious right and for things such as civil rights including gay marriage.  I have always cared about the environment (and Trump’s ideas are frightening in this regard).  Up until this election, I had always voted for Democrats for president (except for Ralph Nader in 2000, and that wasn’t because I liked Ralph Nader, but rather because I disliked Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s vice presidential pick).  I was lukewarm about Kerry (I didn’t like him, but the alternative was more Bush), and excited about Obama (especially during the first election, with the second election being more about keeping Mitt Romney out).  Even this 2016 election, I voted for all Democrats, except for an unaffiliated candidate...and Donald Trump.  Yes, this was the first time I ever voted for a Republican for president, but I did feel that he was the lesser of the two evils, or at least would “shake up the corrupt system, including both political parties”.

The reason for voting for Trump in 2016 is due largely to the rise of the social justice warrior (SJW), also called a “regressive (leftist)” in recent years.  Their hypocrisy mixed with virulent race-baiting and inability to act in civil ways contributed heavily to my choice.  I believe that two things need to happen with the left.  The first is that the SJWs tone down their rhetoric and start this “tolerance” that they have been talking about for so long.  The second is that the Democratic elite who doesn’t truly care about truly progressive causes as much as gaining power and enriching themselves need to be destroyed to make way for people who actually care.  Trump is not a great candidate by any means, but I believe that the real losers after Trump’s victory are the elites in both the Democrat and Republican Parties.  The insiders never wanted Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump to win.  This was always a Jeb Bush VS Hillary Clinton fight, with the victor being determined even before the election, as no matter the result in that scenario, the victors would be all of the special interests - major corporations, financial firms, and their lobbyists.

As bad as some of Trump’s ideas are (like a lack of caring about global warming), I don’t see him as “Hitler”.  Many people have been intimating that Trump would be the next Hitler (just like Obama was “The Antichrist” to religious loons).  Instead of being a “Hitler” figure as is often claimed by his opponents, I rather see Trump as a Narendra Modi or Brexit...or even a Ronald Reagan (a celebrity who promised a new “Morning In America”) or an Andrew Jackson (who is actually one of my least-favorite presidents due to his signing of the 1830 Indian Removal act, but he also fought against a precursor of the Federal Reserve, started the Democratic Party, and was not at all a “gentleman” or “scholar” like previous presidents up to him had been).  The fact that most opponents of Trump think of him as a new Hitler shows that they have a very simplistic understanding of history, with perhaps only a few historical figures known to them, so they are unable to see much stronger similarities with people they have never heard of.  Either that, or they are purposefully using the “reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy to scare people.

Now, let me talk more about the hypocrisy of a sizeable group of leftists.  These people have made me feel unwelcome among their ranks, and to me, they represent a threat just as much as right-wingers, and in some cases maybe more.  But one thing is for sure...they have a lot more in common with the extreme right than they would like to believe, including hypocrisy and demonization.  Here are some examples.

During the election, I heard many things about Donald Trump, but instead of simply believing it, I looked in depth to see if it was true and a lot of things turned out to have been quite opposite what was being claimed.  A lot of times, the same critics would be on both sides of an argument, depending on what was more helpful to their cause at the moment.  For example, some claimed both that Trump being in the white house would lead to WWIII, and that Trump was friends with Putin, depending on which of these claims was more injurious to him at any given time.  Of course, both claims are blown wildly out of proportion, but on top of that, they basically cancel each other out.  There is really only one country Americans think about when it comes to WWIII, and that is Russia.  Yet if Trump and Putin get along so well, why would a WWIII start?  In actuality, while I don’t think that Clinton’s election would have led to WWIII (as that’s a pretty wild claim in itself), a top general (Joseph Dunford) did say that a “no-fly-zone” over even part of Syria would not be feasible, as it would require the US to go to war with Syria and Russia.  If anything, that would be more likely to spark WWIII.

Also, Democrats have said both, “There’s no way that Donald Trump can deport 11 million people!” and “Donald Trump is going to deport 11 million people!”, depending on which of those particular phrases is more useful at any given time.  When they want to scaremonger, they say that Trump will deport all of those people.  When they want to say that Trump’s solution is not well-thought-out, they claim that there is no way he can deport all of those people.  So those claims also cancel each other out.  Taking a more nuanced middle position, I would guess that deportations of illegal immigrants, especially criminals, will increase substantially, but yes, many of the 11 million people will remain.  A message will be sent to those who had plans on immigrating illegally, however, so illegal immigration would also slow substantially.  Yet nobody would utter such an outcome, as it is way too nuanced.  It is the same with Muslims, as even Trump’s own site says ONLY that they will “Suspend the issuance of visas to any place where adequate screening cannot occur, until proven and effective vetting mechanisms can be put into place.”  That’s it.  Wow…  It’s a lot less radical than people make the “Muslim Ban” out to be.  Some of this idea about Trump’s positions are understandable, due to Trump’s own flamboyant “plain-speak”, but as someone (Peter Thiel and Salena Zito, I think) said, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Hillary supporters have said that Trump’s 2016 win is due to “racists”.  How is it that Trump’s win is due to all of the “racists” while Barack Obama won in 2008 and in 2012 back when whites made up an even larger percentage of the electorate?  Obviously, while there is probably some more or less constant minority of racists, they do not have anywhere near the power to elect a president by themselves.  One example to back this up is that in Iowa in 2008, white males broke 49% to 49% for Obama and the state as a whole went to Obama, while in 2016, white males broke 62% to 31% for Trump.  If you think that huge jump in numbers is due to many white males progressively becoming so much more racist over the past eight years, you’re trying too hard to push your narrative.  In addition, the fact that a larger percentage of Hispanics and blacks voted for Trump in 2016 than voted for Romney in 2012 should tell you something.  So claims that “America voted for Trump because Americans are racist” is a very simplistic and largely incorrect conclusion.

I also heard about the “non-college-educated whites”, also called “idiots” by “tolerant” people.  Well, two things about that.  First, when all was said and done, the percentage of college-educated whites voting for Trump nearly reached the same level, so there ended up being very little disparity between education levels at all.  Secondly, how about telling us about the way non-college-educated blacks and Hispanics voted.  It’s only fair.  Surely, non-college-educated blacks and Hispanics voted for Clinton.  But if you said that, it would sound dismissive...and yes, racist.  “Why are you putting these people down, just because they didn’t go to college!” they’d scream to the elites.  Yet if only referring to whites, the “tolerant” among us can use that as proof that only “stupid people” voted for Trump.  In fact, although the majority of both college-educated and non-college-educated non-whites went to Clinton, it turns out that non-whites who graduated from college were slightly more likely to vote for Trump than those who didn’t graduate from college.  This shouldn’t tell you all that much, but that’s the point.  People have been pointing to certain figures to further their narrative, but whenever other figures are found which don’t support one’s own narrative, they are ignored.

Another example of hypocrisy is that regressive leftist Americans can sympathize with the feelings of any ethnic group, as long as it’s not other Americans.  The most regressive leftists will tell us why it’s completely understandable that people would vote Hamas (a terrorist group that advocates for the complete genocide of Jews) to get in power.  After all, the people who voted for Hamas are sick of poverty as well as angry at the “illegal settlements” (sound familiar?) popping up (well, ironically not in Gaza, where all Jewish settlements were removed, but still).  Yet they have no desire to understand the mind of a Trump voter, thinking that their anger arose simply from the ether.  In other words, they ask the question “Why do they hate us?” all day long and the answer never blames the people who hate if they are non-American, but never ask the question, “Why do we hate them?” when Americans get fed up with something the same way others do.

This is just as true on the right, but while I once thought that the left was more civil, it turns out that just like many radical right-wingers, regressive leftists don’t just disagree with you…  They hate you, and they think they are SO far above you, based on a difference of opinion.  They are filled with a kind of very outspoken and public hate-filled moral superiority that is most closely resembles that of the very religious (whom they should not want to copy).  Yet as a vegetarian I’m sure that if I showed such outward contempt towards most of these same people, not for the crime of “picking the wrong candidate”, but for the crime of “uncaringly murdering animals every single day for their own selfish reasons”, I’m sure they would be appalled at my behavior.  How dare I talk to them like that!  And how would the media and the majority of the left wing react if a bunch of vocal vegans were on TV smashing windows and blocking roads?  I wonder.  Certainly, vegans rightly skew to the left but make no mistake that the majority of the moral crusaders out in the streets are not vegans and would be horrified if other groups acted the same as they did...even with causes that are just as important to those other groups.  It seems like it has come to the point among radicals on both sides that “I can do this because I’m right...but those others can’t do the same exact thing because they’re wrong.”

Celebrities can be hypocritical...and maybe even “racist”, too.  Some celebrities claimed that they’d move to Canada if Trump got elected.  Notice that not one of them wanted to move to Mexico or anywhere else on the American continents.  And they’re rich so it’s not like they would have to work some manual labor job there.  They could just relax if they wanted.  But they still don’t want to go.  Why the preoccupation with going to a country predominantly made up of people of your own culture, I wonder?

I have not touched on the problems that I have with the Clintons, because that is out of the scope of this, but I will just touch on some comments that Hillary gave in one speech.  She said that this election was “between division and unity”, “between strong and steady leadership and a loose cannon who can put everything at risk”, “between an economy that works for everyone or an economy that is even more stacked for those at the top”.  She was against “division”, but I guess she didn’t realize that she was dividing things right there.  Saying that you want unity instead of division, and then dividing everything into two polar opposites is basically doing what you are accusing others of.  Hillary Clinton has unfortunately been consumed with the kind of extreme political correctness that social justice warriors subscribe to.  It got to the point where she called a cartoon frog a symbol of white supremacy.  This is what she was fighting against...a cartoon frog.  And when you look at how that frog was used as a symbol, white supremacy barely registers.  But she thought that the American public was as out-of-touch with the world of internet memes as her handlers were.  There are no doubt many areas in which Hillary Clinton would make a better president than Donald Trump.  The environment immediately comes to mind.  But make no mistake...she has been just as divisive as she claims the other side to be.

Similarly, after the election, protesters chanted, “We’ll never be divided!  The people - united!” while blocking streets and not accepting the outcome of an election.  It is the height of hypocrisy for people to say that they care about unity while disregarding the workings of democracy (or whatever system is legally in place in our “republic”) and injecting vitriol into a situation that can’t be changed.  I don’t even like bringing up her name and thus giving her any kind of platform, but the internet celebrity Laci Green tweeted just before the election results: “Regardless of the outcome, we are clearly a deeply divided and broken country. So much work ahead to mend, heal, and restore the U in USA.”  This was when she was pretty sure that Clinton would win.  As soon as her favored candidate didn’t win, she changed her tune and tweeted, “We are now under total Republican rule. Textbook fascism. Fuck you, white America. Fuck you, you racist, misogynist pieces of shit. G'night.”  ...Not exactly the best example of working to mend, heal, and restore the UNITY in the USA, is it?  And I’m sure that many of the 43% of white voters (including me) who voted for Obama in 2008 do not take kindly to her saying, “Fuck you, white America.”  In fact, it makes us think that Laci is, in fact, the racist, based on how she can throw an entire race under the bus whenever she feels like it, but on the surface pretends that she is the most tolerant, non-racist person on the planet.

And what was all that about it being un-American to not accept the outcome of an election?  I heard that a lot when Trump was playing with the idea...and not so much since the  #NotMyPresident hashtags and massive protests.  On the contrary, I have heard from left-leaning sources that these protests are “healthy for a vibrant democracy”.  Yet I’m sure that if something like this had happened among Republicans after Obama won in 2008, such protests would not have been called “healthy”, but rather “an expression of the most vile racism that consumes America”.  Of course, massive protests DIDN’T happen back then, but you can see the hypocritical change of narrative based nearly completely on whether those doing the protests are with you or against you.  The funny thing about the protests and protesters is that they say they are for peace, yet many of them are deliberately causing damage.  Even funnier still is that they are largely protesting in Democratic strongholds.  For example, in Multnomah County (the county that Portland, Oregon is located in) Trump only won less than 18% of the vote, while Clinton won 76%.  Yet protests swelled in the place where only 18% voted for Trump, and there was a lot of damage there.  I’m not saying that protesters should damage any areas, but since they are already doing so, I also wanted to point out their monumental impulsive idiocy.  I really wanted to see how all these people who pretended to be so moral and upstanding would act if the result were not to their liking, and I found out.

Thankfully, Clinton and Obama do have the grace and dignity to not only accept the outcome but also to say that they will try to help Trump succeed (even if they are against a lot of his ideas).  This is much better than what many Republican leaders said when Obama won, namely that they would do whatever they could to make sure that he would be a one-term president (which didn’t work, by the way).  The way Clinton and Obama are acting is the mature way to go about things, and I hope that more of their supporters will follow their lead.

I wish that more liberals could use all of their moral outrage against even greater evils.  For example:

This comment is acceptable for a liberal to say: “If you voted for Trump, screw you.”

This comment is NOT acceptable for a liberal to say: “If you believe that a murderous pedophile warlord is the greatest man to have ever lived and has given us the best laws to govern humanity, and all who don’t believe should be tortured forever, screw you.”

To me, the second comment is MORE progressive and helps MORE women and minorities (including me, an atheist).  Yet while the first comment is “A-OK”, the second has become “haraam”.  In other words, the question, “How do you expect me to respect or even tolerate someone with an ideology that hates everything that I am?” is fine if that said ideology is not all on board with baking wedding cakes for gay couples, yet that question is vitriolic hatred of other cultures if the ideology instead advocates throwing gays off rooves.

I have noticed that some people have taken to using terms that they probably would view as proof of racism if things were reversed.  For example, one person on Google+ who is nice enough but is still quite angry at the results has called Trump-voters “Trumpanzees”.  While I don’t think comparing humans to animals is a put-down, because I generally prefer non-human animals, “Trumpanzee” is definitely used as an attack.  Is it a racist attack?  Of course not.  But imagine of the right had called Obama-voters (like me, twice) “Obampanzees”.  If so, this word would have been proof that America is racist, and comparing the president-elect and his supporters to non-human primates is a not even thinly-veiled attack on black Americans.  From this example, we can see even more hypocrisy.  We should either use such attacks against each other and think nothing of it, no matter who is targeted, or we should not use such attacks against each other.  But if you think you can use such attacks against the other side but they can’t use it against anyone you like, that shows insincerity.  So I recommend that people either stop the attacks or stop complaining when someone tells you that Leslie Jones will be starring in Harambe: The Motion Picture.

Trump’s victory may not lead to great things, or even many good things.  But I think that the radicalism of regressive leftists needed to be fought against, and if something good can happen on that front just over the next 4 years, and the left can get its act together to challenge Trump in 2020, that will set things on a better path.  Also, I must admit that I just like seeing these righteous crybullies not get what they wanted.  I know that the hypocritical pre-Brexit UK government was extremely close to banning Trump from even entering the country as a candidate.  Now, they will have to play nice with him.  I love to see shock and horror on the faces of elites, and to have hypocrites get their just desserts.

In a previous Google+ post made when I believed that Clinton would win, I urged Clinton voters to call her out when she does things that they don’t agree with, instead of simply supporting her.  Since Trump is the victor, I intend to do what I urged others to do, and call Trump out when I see major problems with his policies, and there are certainly many.  So when I see something that he (or probably even more likely, Mike Pence) is trying to get done that I feel is bad for the country and the world, I will stand up to it.  I have never been a supporter of the right wing, and I think that if only liberals could get their act together, they would have a lot of potential.  I really hope that the left is able to shed its regressive extremism on the one hand and its aristocracy on the other hand.  Because if it remains as it is, and I am forced to pick the lesser of the two evils, I can’t guarantee it that I will always still pick their side.