Trump May Have The Electoral College Sewn Up But He Doesn't Control The Culture
These are heady days for the pushback in Western society. Brexit slammed the window on the fingers of the tenured globalists trying to cede British sovereignty to the technocrats in Brussels. Italian voters followed suit with their rejection of their current leadership under Matteo Renzi.
The reactionaries’ grand slam, however, was the election of Donald Trump. The political pulverizer led a bloody rout of the liberal folks on the coasts of the American map. While stunned progressives still comfort themselves with Hillary Clinton’s win in the presidential plurality, the GOP laugh all the way to complete dominance at the executive, Congress, state houses, governorships and, soon, the Supreme Court levels.
As a result, while Trump stamps out Obamaism in America, even his bitterest enemies on the right (we know who you are Mitt Romney) have come into line with the man from Manhattan.
But before conservatives and business types celebrate the end of the (Un)Affordable Care Act and countless executive orders signed by POTUS 44, they’d best be advised to take a sober second look at the world they’ve inherited from Barack Obama. While the levers of power are in the hands of Trump and his cronies, the war for the culture of America during the next generation has effectively been lost since 2008.
The growing Latin, black and immigrant communities are proving resistant to the free hand of the market, preferring a social-democratic state apparatus to keep from assimilation by the white majority that still dominates the U.S. There is hope that an economic boom under Trump might calm them somewhat. No one is betting that hand, however.
More importantly, the left’s culture war has conquered the hearts and minds of those emerging from the school systems of America and Canada. Dating back to the dawn of the 20th century the lunatic fringe has long frolicked within academe. Big-picture thinkers have sought to inculcate a loathing of the American political model within their students.
They got tantalizingly close in the 1960s, only to fall short. While their flower-power prescriptions of socialism, Marxism and Maoism failed miserably in the testing, they’ve never been completely discredited.
Which left them in place when Obama completely unleashed the dogs of relativism eight years ago. With the heavyweight champion of the faculty lounge in the White House, they pushed an ultra-rad menu of environmentalism, racial reconstruction, sexual dissonance and self-loathing upon students and their unfortunate parents who paid for this brainwashing.
At the government level, the hip political class was no restraint on faux stories of campus rape (Rolling Stone), suppression of free speech or cultural shaming playing out within the ivy-covered walls. The unionized public service, ever anxious to expand its influence, welcomed the expansion of the welfare state produced by the college radicals under Obama.
Their handiwork was soon everywhere in legislation from transgendered washrooms to neutral pronouns to the victim politics of Black Lives Matter. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/academic-extremism-comes-to-canada/article33185073/ ). Here in Canada, where there is no effective cultural opposition, the earnest progressives rule without question.
More worrisome, these utopian upstarts have found eager partners in the cultural industry. Movies, TV, music and social media are now dominated by a stream of white self-loathing and radical feminist pandering. The lecturing of VP Mike Pence by the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton was a handy reference point for their dominance in the arts. Its apogee is Saturday Night Live’s weekly diet of hatred for things white and/or male. Or in the late-night assaults on traditional American values by progressive wits such as Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah.
The culture capitulation created the second— and most tortured form— of cultural submission: the abject surrender of corporate CEOs to the Green movement's polemics. The recent acquiescence of 60 so-called "deniers" in the energy business to the hustlers of the Al Gore liturgy is a perfect example. (http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/peter-foster-canadas-elite-useful-idiots-endorse-the-liberal-governments-plan-to-eat-them-last)
Mind you, the oil patch was not surrendering because it had had a revelation on climate change. It still believes as fervently as ever that global warming theory is a tailing pond full of poses and pretensions from scientifically illiterate wards of the state.
The signatories collapsed because they have seen they cannot reverse the culture war that raged in colleges and government board rooms the past decade. This tsunamii of social stigmatization probably includes being lectured by their own kids on the value of green citizenship. With the media devoting ten hysterical climate stories to every one promoting literacy on climate, they’ve decided to take a knee and hope that Justin Trudeau’s children of the corn will, in the words of the Financial Post’s Peter Foster, eat them last.
While the Tea Party folk still have plenty of energy left, the suits in Houston, Calgary and New York City are exhausted from trying to convince Rockerfeller and Kennedy heirs that their faucets don’t spew flames. They believe that they might do a deal with the devil that protects corporate earnings and gives them peace and quiet at home.
It’s a fool’s errand of course. So while exultant conservatives might think that the radical left is as spent as Monty Python’s dead parrot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuW6tQ0218), they’d best remain vigilant about the colleges, the culture industry and the bureaucracy. They lurk in the wings, waiting for an Obama Redux to compete their pogrom on western values.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy. Bruce is the host of podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. His career includes successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald and the Globe & Mail.