This article was shared from ‘Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children’
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump ambushed his opposition with a simple tactic; he played the role of a provocateur. Through tweets and rhetoric, Trump made one provocative statement after another. And Democrats eagerly took the bait, bite after bite.
Caught up in their zeal to disparage Trump, Democrats jumped at every opportunity to use his statements to paint him racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic and generally unfit for the office of president. That’s to be expected as political campaigning has largely devolved into a parade of negative comments about one’s opponent.
Yet Democrats weren’t content with verbally assaulting the candidate; proudly wearing the badge of righteous indignation, they took to denigrating Trump supporters. The left was indignant because it views prejudice and bigotry, in all their various forms, to be the reasons—the only reasons– their views of what’s right were rejected.
We the “deplorables” rejected the left’s views
Hillary Clinton brought the commentary to a resounding crescendo by stating, “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
Clinton graciously lumped only half of Trump supporters as deplorables, yet her comment showed a broad contempt towards anyone who took exception to the liberal party line. The next day, Clinton tried to walk back her comment stating, “Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong.”
With her own righteous indignation in full bloom, Clinton was clearly blinded and unable to see that her statement had a negative impact that extended well beyond the “deplorables” she was targeting.
In her mea culpa, she acknowledged only that her percentage, not her insulting a broad base of citizens, was wrong. Now, months after the election, the left is still lost and foundering in the sea of righteous indignation.
Although racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and a host of other “isms” and phobias certainly exist, they are not the raison d’etre for every negative response to the liberal agenda.
Yet to the self-righteous left, anyone who expresses an opinion counter to the liberal view of the world is in fact a racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, or fits into some other deplorable category. Further, liberals blame people so labelled as the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election.
“Angry white men?”
That philosophy is perfectly exemplified by an article in the Huffington Post entitled, “Angry White Men Triumphant.” The article opened by stating, “For the past eight years, America has had an African-American president. Faced with the prospect of a white woman succeeding him, America instead just elected an angry white man as president.” The writer then went on to double down on leftist self-righteousness- “Was it a backlash against our first black president? Or rampant misogyny towards Hillary Clinton? Or just free-floating rage against a changing culture that is becoming more tolerant and multicultural by the year? It’s impossible to accurately say, really. The only thing that can be said for certain is that angry white men are now dominant.”
The left’s own fault
Nowhere on the left is the Trump victory seen as a repudiation of Obama’s policies, or ineptitude or economic failures. Nowhere on the left is it understood that Hillary Clinton was defeated because she represents a continuation of Obama’s policies.
No, to the left, angry white men are in charge because voters rejected a sitting president because he’s black and a candidate because she’s female.
The left also casts blame on the misogyny of “angry white men” within the electorate for Clinton’s defeat. But it conveniently ignores the cause of that anger, which also dwells in women, white and black. The anger has nothing to do with Clinton being a woman and everything to do with her being perceived as an agent of the economic and emotional hardship imposed by eight years of Obama’s policies.
So the left continues adrift, unwilling and unable to understand that the anger about which they are righteously indignant is not a consequence of misogyny, racism, homophobia or xenophobia. It’s a consequence of an administration that has rallied for every conceivable minority cause, yet has ignored and thereby exacerbated the plight of working class Americans.
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