Love For Sale: Clinton's Gated Community Is Repossessed

The Vulgarian is at the door, America. But if you think we want Babs Streisand warbling her way to Winnipeg, guess again.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential drubbing was a stunning rebuke for a most American institution: the gated community. Not the gated community of white privilege. No, this property has no guardhouse, no pristine lawns and sprinkler systems. You won’t find it listed on MLS. There is no tennis court shimmering in the midday sun.

This community is Entitlement Estates, a self-policing zip code of attitudes and self reinforcement about the rough beast that slouches beyond the progressive fence. For snowflake socialists it’s the comfy place where clever is mistaken for smart, legal taken to mean proper. A place where one set of rules applies to us, while another applies to the “deplorables”..

“This groupthink unites in white cultural guilt, the need to atone for people, places and events in some tortured past. A cultural self-contempt about race, sexual orientation, women and the environment that announces your deep compassion. A need for self abasement that speaks to your humility.”

The entitlement oozed from shattered Democrats on Tuesday who claimed that (in defiance of the 50 million who said otherwise) this wasn’t their America anymore. Faced with irrelevance, CNN resident radical Van Jones explained away the defeat as “White-lash”.  As if the fault did not lie in his own stars.

They believe that folks should wake up each day with the weight of historical shame crushing them. They are frustrated when they employ this shame to intimidate the Others— and it doesn’t work. They’re upset that deplorables brought a gun to this fight after seeing harmless Mitt Romney get ventilated in 2012.

This default groupthink finds its muse in white cultural guilt, the need to atone for people, places and events in some tortured past. Cultural self-contempt about race, sexual orientation, women and the environment that announces your deep compassion. A need for self abasement that speaks to your humility. Most of all, a craving for authenticity.

The targets of the culture scorn oozing from places like SNL have no issues with their authenticity. Unlike the glitterati, searching for identity, Donald Trump’s deplorables know exactly who they are. ”The press took Trump literally but not seriously,” said one pundit. “His supporters took him seriously, but not literally.”

This state of mind is Whoopi Goldberg’s unhinged revisionism on The View. Bruce Springsteen singing his wobbly Woody Guthrie protest songs. It’s people who just can’t get enough of Will Ferrell’s pitiless George W. Bush impersonations. Or Samantha Bee's smug Obama worship.

It’s the Silicon Valley billionaires who talk like St. Francis of Assisi but build moats to keep the unwashed from their doors. It’s NIMBY for me, refugee resettlement for you. As Mark Steyn writes, it’s not realizing that “You need a candidate who connects with people, not with Katy Perry.”

It’s also the diffident snobs of the Republican elite who were schooled in the primary by Donald Trump but still cling to the idea that they’re somehow relevant. Again, Mark Steyn: Trump “has done the republic a useful service by demonstrating you can wing an entire presidential campaign and still do better than Mitt (Romney) and the entire consultant-industrial complex.”

The progressive cloud is a cultural enclave protecting itself from them. The people with garish taste in clothes. Tailgaters at football games. Clingers with their (thanks, president Obama) God, guns and pro-life devotions. The NRA. James Woods. The NASCAR nation. Ted Nugent. Folks in border states— including 29% of Latinos— freaked out by millions of undocumenteds arriving in their town. 

Scary people. Not us. Others. Who must be kept at arm’s length. And who now have the last laugh.

To the elites behind the gates like Time magazine, Donald Trump is the physical embodiment of their contempt, with his orange hair and garish golf resorts. (http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/57ff876352dd73e9008b486f-840/cupc4c3umamqkz8.jpg) He’s a product of the kind of wealth they secretly crave for themselves— but without their supposed refinements. He arrived on the political scene like some unwanted table companion on a Caribbean cruise. A bulldozer who threatened the family china with his bumptious friends. A libertine who espoused all the gated’s attitudes on sexual liberation— without the panache of Leo or Lena. Not the kind you have over for cocktails in the Hamptons.

While it was important for the gated minds to know every one of Trump’s character flaws, a more selective memory was required when it comes to the Clintons down the street. Accountability was not a big deal on Clinton Boulevard. 

So Whoopi and JayLo wrote off Hillary's “bogus” email scandal as a  clerical error, like dialing a wrong number. “Hey, everyone has a bad day or two.” The Clinton Foundation did something good on AIDS— not sure what— so bug off on the “miscellaneous expenses”. Those poor boys in Benghazi? Victims of a racist video.

This wonderfulness was carefully recorded by the camp followers of the fourth estate who indulged themselves in a political dialectic typical of a PoliSci 100 student. They compared Trump to Hitler or Mussolini. They gave oxygen to Clinton’s Russian conspiracies and voter suppression gambits. They comforted one another by demonizing what they chose not to understand.

And they completely missed the story in doing so. “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations,” said George Orwell. In which case, Election 2016 was very good public relations inside the gated community of liberal values. They'll have a long time to savour the results.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy. Bruce is the host of the 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.