National Affairs by Claire Hoy — A defeat for the elite

November 17, 2016 · 0 Comments

They still don’t get it.
So secure in their superior smugness, pretty much the entire U.S. political-academic-media-entertainment elite had already popped open the champagne and were simply waiting to see how much their heroine, Hillary Clinton, would win the election by.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. Almost 60 million voters, regularly maligned by the collective Establishment as beneath contempt and unworthy citizens — “deplorables,” to cite Clinton herself — decided that between two seriously flawed candidates, they’d rather take a chance with Donald Trump.
And so it is that the most improbable presidential candidate in U.S. history actually won, and the losers continue to smear those who had the unmitigated gall to vote for him.
In what has become a typical reaction from a shocked pro-Clinton media, Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno, the day after the vote, wrote of Trump’s victory:
“This is indeed a conspiracy — of racists and reactionaries, white supremacists, misogynists, Islamophobes and xenophobes, isolationists, sexual scavengers, haters.”
And, oh yes, just to underscore the point, most of the losers are also quick to point out that Trump’s victory is due to — dare we say it? — angry white voters.
Since more than 60 per cent of Americans are white (and I suspect they’re not all angry) it means that the majority of Clinton’s supporters were also white. But obviously there are the angelic white people, i.e. Democrats, and the evil white people, i.e. Trump voters. In their eyes as well, there is simply no rational way to explain the 30 per cent of Hispanics who voted Trump, a higher percentage than the last two socially acceptable failed Republican presidential hopefuls. But there you have it.
I’m glad I didn’t have to choose, and I suspect many voters on both sides were firmly squeezing their noses as they voted. Had I voted it would have reluctantly been Trump. Why? To keep Clinton from liberalizing the Supreme Court.
But somebody had to win, and if the losers really are as wonderful as they believe themselves to be, they would accept the fact that the vote from an out-of-work coal miner in West Virginia is every bit as valid as a multimillionaire movie star from Hollywood.
It’s called democracy. And instead of the losers continuing to march in the streets waving banners proclaiming “Not my President,” — when, in fact, he soon will be — they should stop maligning the millions of Americans who voted Trump (including more than 40 per cent of American women voters, by the way) and start working toward fixing what ails their country.
But many of them are so arrogant, so self-important, they simply can not bring themselves to admit that despite their tireless efforts to turn Trump into a monster and his supporters into snarling bigots, they failed.
It can’t be their shortcomings or the shortcomings of their candidate that sealed the deal. So it must be that the winners are idiots, which is pretty much what the Star’s Heather Mallick wrote in her column crediting the complete collapse of the U.S. education system for Trump’s win. After all, no thinking person could ever vote for Trump. So they must be stupid, eh?
And so it goes. Those accustomed to getting their own way, to huddling in safe spaces and rushing to a counsellor at the first sign of ill fortune, are convinced that the end of time has arrived and America is doomed.
Few seem prepared to admit it, but in his Post column last week Conrad Black published what he called a “powerful mea culpa” by Will Rahn of CBS against the “unbearable smugness” of the media, including himself.
“Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking ‘we did it’ feeling in the press . . . we were brave and saved the republic . . . Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss reporters covering him. They hate us. And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters . . . We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly cast, we believe we have access to a greater truth . . .”
Yes, there is a lot of hate out there. But from where I sit, most of it is coming from the Clinton side, the self-declared champions of freedom, truth and democracy; people who truly believe that as long as you agree with them you are a good person. But if you disagree, well, you’re a disgrace to humanity. Or worse.
They lost, but they still haven’t gained any humility or the courage to admit that their routine dismissal of the lesser-classes were the building blocks for Trump’s unlikely triumph. hoy