This blog doesn't often post "internet stuff", but there's a journalist named Ian O'Doherty, who writes for a publication called the Irish Independent, with a compelling take on circumstances that resulted in the election results in the U.S.A.
First the preamble to Ian Doherty's article, from an email.
"It's interesting that such a perceptive analysis comes all the way
from Ireland. From outside the USA it has been clear for many years that the
country was stumbling and the average American knew it, they could see it all
around them. Average Joe and Jane Citizen have seen their jobs exported, being
replaced more and more with a welfare state. The hope and expectation of a
steady job that provided a good living and the opportunity to own their own
home, secure a comfortable retirement and a solid future for their
children has faded along with their buying power. The elitist overpaid
politicians, entertainers and influential journalists genuinely believed they
represented the average American, that their identity was the American
identity. They had no clue or empathy of the struggles and helplessness of
trying to just keep a roof over your head and food on the table which is the
life of so many people. These people are the true middle class America and they
don't want handouts or welfare, they want meaningful jobs so they can build a
future and maybe engage in the American dream again. They aren't stupid or
uninformed, they know they have been suckered for years and they finally saw a
slim chance to change the system in favour of the common working person again.
In Donald Trump the majority saw the only possibility to change the system that
had for years been grinding them down. Can he do it? Only time will tell, the
next four years certainly will be interesting."
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| Did this "reasoning" lead to Trump's victory? |
The following is Ian's article. Highlighted phrases were by anonymous contributors to the email.
From: A Two Fingers to a
Politically Correct Elite": by Ian
O'Doherty
Ian O'Doherty is a columnist who works for the Irish
Independent. His "iSpy" column is published Monday to Thursday
and contains news articles blended with comedy and shock-jock opinions.
Tuesday, November 8, 2016 - either a day that will live in infamy, or
the moment when America was made great again? The truth, as usual, will
lie somewhere in the middle. After all, contrary to what both his supporters
and detractors believe, Trump won't be able to come into office and spend his
first 100 days gleefully ripping up all the bits of the Constitution he doesn't
like.
But even if the American election's seismic shock-wave doesn't signal either
the sky falling or the start of a bright new American era, the result was, to
use one of The Donald's favourite phrases, huge. It is, in fact, a total game
changer.
In decades to come, historians will still bicker about the most poisonous,
toxic and stupid election in living memory. They will also be bickering
over the same vexed question - how did a man who was already unpopular with the
public and who boasted precisely zero political experience beat a seasoned
Washington insider who was married to one extremely popular president and who
had worked closely with another? The answer, ultimately, is in the question.
History will record this as a Trump victory, which of course it is. But it was also
more than that, because this was the most stunning self-inflicted defeat in the
history of Western democracy.
Hillary Clinton has damned her party to irrelevance for at least the next four
years. She has also ensured that Obama's legacy will now be a footnote rather
than a chapter. Because the Affordable Care Act is now doomed under a Trump
presidency and that was always meant to be Obama's gift, of sorts, to America.
How did a candidate who had virtually all of the media, all of Hollywood, every
celebrity you could think of, a couple of former presidents and apparently, the
hopes of an entire gender resting on her shoulders, blow up her own campaign?
I rather suspect that neither Donald nor Hillary know how they got to this
point.
Where she seemed to expect the position to become available to her by right -
the phrase "she deserves it" was used early in the campaign and then
quickly dropped when her team remembered that Americans don't like inherited
power - his first steps into the campaign were those of someone chancing their
arm. If Trump wasn't such a staunch teetotaler, many observers would have
accused him of only doing it as a drunken bet.
But the more the campaign wore on, something truly astonishing began to happen
- the people began to speak. And they began to speak in a voice which, for the
first time in years in the American heartland, would not be ignored.
Few of the people who voted for Trump seriously believe that he is going to
personally improve their fortunes. Contrary to the smug, middle-class media
narrative, Trump voters aren't all barely educated idiots. They know what he is; of course they do. It's
what he is not that appeals to them.
Clinton, on the other hand, had come to represent the apex of smug privilege.
Whether it was boasting about her desire to shut down the remaining coal
industry in Virginia, or calling half the electorate a "basket
of deplorables", she seemed to operate in the perfumed air of the elite,
more obsessed with coddling idiots and pandering to identity and feelings than
improving the hardscrabble life that is the lot of millions of Americans.
Also, nobody who voted for Trump did so because
they wanted him as a spiritual guru or life coach. But plenty of people invested an irrational
amount of emotional energy into a woman who was patently undeserving of that
level of adoration.
That's why we've witnessed such fury from her supporters - they had wrapped
themselves so tightly in the Hillary flag that a rejection of her felt like a
rejection of them. And when you consider that many American colleges gave their
students Wednesday off class because they were too 'upset' to study, you can
see that this wasn't a battle for the White House - this became a genuine battle
for America's future direction. And, indeed, for the West.
We have been going through a cultural paroxysm for the last 10 years - the rise
of identity politics has created a Balkanised society where the content of
someone's mind is less important than their skin colour, gender, sexuality or
whatever other attention-seeking label they wish to bestow upon themselves. In
fact, where once it looked like racism and sexism might be becoming archaic
remnants of a darker time, a whole new generation has popped up which wants to re-litigate all those
arguments all over again.
In fact, while many of us are too young to recall the Vietnam War and the
social upheaval of the 1960s, plenty of older observers say they haven't seen
an America more at war with itself than it is today.
One perfect example of this new America has been the renewed calls for
segregation on campuses. Even a few years ago, such a move would have been
greeted with understandable horror by civil rights activists - but this time
it's the black students demanding segregation and "safe spaces" from
whites. If young people calling for racial segregation from each other isn't
the sign of a very, very sick society, nothing is.
The irony and hypocrisy of Clinton calling Trump and his followers racist while
she was courting Black Lives Matter was telling. After all, no rational
white person would defend the KKK, yet here was a white women defending both
BLM and the New Black Panthers - explicitly racist organisations with the NBP,
in particularly, openly espousing a race war if they don't get what they want.
Fundamentally, Trump was attractive because he represents a repudiation of the
nonsense that has been slowly strangling the West. He represents -
rightly or wrongly - a scorn and contempt for these new rules. He won't be a
president worried about micro-aggression, or listening to the views of patently
insane people just because they come from a fashionably protected group.
He also represents a glorious two fingers to everyone who has become sick of being
called a racist or a bigot or a homophobe - particularly by Hillary supporters
who are too dense to realise that she has always actually been more
conservative on social issues than Trump.
That it might take a madman to restore some sanity to America is, I suppose, a
quirk that is typical to that great nation - land of the free and home to more
contradictions than anyone can imagine.
Trump's victory also signals just how out of step the media has been with the
people. Not just American media, either. In fact, the Irish media has
continued its desperate drive to make a show of itself with a seemingly endless
parade of emotionally incontinent gibberish that, ironically, has increased in
ferocity and hysterical spite in the last few days.
The fact that Hillary's main cheerleaders in the Irish and UK media still
haven't realised where they went wrong is instructive and amusing in equal
measure. They still don't seem to understand that by constantly insulting his
supporters, they're just making asses of themselves.
One female contributor to this newspaper said Trump's victory was a "sad
day for women". Well, not for the women who voted for him it wasn't.
But that really is the nub of the matter - the 'wrong' kind of women obviously
voted for Trump. The 'right' kind went with Hillary. And lost.
The Irish media are not alone in being filled largely with dinner-party
liberals who have never had an original or socially awkward thought in their
lives. They simply assume that everyone lives in the same bubble and thinks the
same thoughts - and if they don't, they should.
Of
the many things that have changed with Trump's victory, the bubble has burst. Never in American history have the polls, the media
and the chin-stroking moral arbiters of the liberal agenda been so
spectacularly, wonderfully wrong. It was exactly that condescending, obnoxious sneer towards
the working class that brought them out in such numbers, and
that is the great irony of Election 2016 - the
Left spent years creating identity politics to the extent that the only group
left without protection or a celebrity sponsor was the white American male.
That it was the white American male who swung it for Trump is a timely reminder
that while black lives matter, all votes count - even
the ones of people you despise.
You don't have to be a supporter of Trump to take great delight in the sheer,
apoplectic rage that has greeted his victory. If Clinton had won and Trump
supporters had gone on a rampage through a dozen American cities the next
night, there would have been outrage - and rightly so.
But in a morally and linguistically inverted society, the wrong-doers are
portrayed as the victims. We saw that at numerous Trump rallies - protesters
would disrupt the event, claiming their right to free speech (a heckler's veto
is not free speech) and provoking people until they got a dig before running to
the media and claiming victim-hood.
Yet none of Clinton's rallies were shut down by her opponents (unlike Trump's
aborted Chicago meeting) and the great mistake the anti-Trump zealots should
have learned was that just thinking you're right isn't enough - you need to
convince others as well.
But, ultimately, this election was about people saying "enough with the
bullshit". This is a country in crisis, and most Americans don't care
about transgender bathrooms, or "safe" spaces, or government speech
laws. This was about people taking some control back for themselves.
It was about them saying that they won't be hectored and bullied by the toddler
tantrums thrown by pissy and spoiled millennials, and they certainly won't put
up with being told they're delorable, stupid and wicked just because they have
a difference of opinion.
But, really, this election is about hope for a better America; an America which
isn't obsessed with identity and perceived 'privilege'; an America where being
a victim isn't a virtue and where you don't
have to apologise for not being up to date with the latest list of socially
acceptable phrases.
Trump's victory was a two fingers to the politically correct. It was a
brutal rejection of the nonsense narrative which says Muslims who kill
Americans are somehow victims. It took the ludicrous Green agenda and threw it
out. It was a return, on some level, to a time when people weren't afraid to speak
their own mind without some self-elected language cop shouting at you. Who
knows, we may even see Trump kicking the UN out of New York.
Frankly, if you're one of those who gets their politics from Jon Stewart, CNN
and Twitter, look away for the next four years, because you're not going to
like what you see. The rest of us, however, will be delighted.
This might go terribly, terribly wrong. Nobody knows - and if we have learned
anything this week, it's that "Nobody knows nuthin". But just
as the people of the UK took control back with Brexit, the people of America
did likewise with their choice for president.
It's called democracy. Deal with it."
...and in Canada? Hmmm.
