Did Trump’s victory really “destroy the leftists’ long-term game plan”?
Exhibit A seems to prove otherwise.
We all complain about how leftism has penetrated and taken over just about every conceivable institution, from the media to academia to the federal bureaucracy and political structure.
It seems unstoppable. As leftists like to say, it’s the arc of history.
The writer who uses the pseudonym Zombie at Zombieblog disagrees, and the Trump election is the proof, Trump’s Victory Is a Pivotal Turning Point in Human History.
It’s lengthy, and definitely read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt (bold in original):
Western society is super-saturated with leftist propaganda. Politically astute non-leftists see it everywhere and complain about it incessantly — because it is ubiquitous. In fact, most of our waking hours are spent noticing, commenting upon, getting outraged by and then futilely combatting the endless, relentless leftist slant to everything in modern culture.
Every news broadcast. Every movie. Every lesson in every classroom. Every social signifier in public. Every poll. Every TV show. Every tribal shibboleth. In ways large and small, overt and covert, subtle and blatant, the society around us is infused with progressive ideals and agendas, whether you realize it or not.
And it’s not just the entire preschool-through-PhD educational system, the entire media/entertainment complex, and most interpersonal environments; increasingly, under Obama especially, the federal government itself has become an inescapable agent of coercive progressive propaganda imposed on us with the full force of the state.
But what is the purpose of all this propaganda?
…. The entire purpose of 60 years of slanted media and slanted news and slanted education and social pressure and brainwashing and deception and indoctrination — all of it, everything we complain about every day, all day, for years and years and years — the purpose of all this is to get people to vote for the most left-wing candidate in each presidential election. The goal is to bring about a self-imposed silent revolution in America, a democratically elected socialist government voted in by low-information rubes unaware of what they’re doing….
And then November 8, 2016 happened, and BOOM: It was all revealed to be a lie. Not only did the indoctrination fail, but the general impression that the relentless indoctrination had always been successful was itself a gigantic meta-deception….
This election didn’t merely expose the failure of six months of campaigning by the Democratic Party. This election exposed the failure of SIX DECADES of leftist propaganda to have any cumulative effect at all.
The Left has to now go back to the drawing board and come up with an entirely new playbook. And once they do, it will surely take decades to implement.
But the best part? The Left doesn’t understand any of this, and they won’t reformulate their playbook….
That’s why Trump’s victory is so historically significant: It is a major paradigm shift in the arc of history that completely destroys the leftists’ long-term game plan, past, present and future….
I’m not so sure about that.
Certainly, Trump’s victory was a yuge blow to the hardcore, anti-Western, anti-American (and usually anti-Israel) leftist agenda.
What Trump does with the win will be the difference. The institutionalized left is not going to go away so quickly, particularly in academia, which serves to mainstream the most insane theories of social justice. I’ve seen how fringe ideas on gender, white privilege, the patriarchy, and so on, within less than a generation become the norm. The craziest ideas that were laughed at as the ranting of lunatics get taught to college students who then become social justice warriors screaming in the faces of anyone who disagrees.
I see nothing to suggest things are going to get better soon.
Exhibit A:
(LANGUAGE WARNING)
Only a thoroughly corrupted, intellectually perverse educational system could produce Exhibit A. The people who created Exhibit A will not give up easily, and figure they can outlast a Trump.
If Trump’s victory is to bend the arc of history, as Zombie suggests, it will have to unbend the arc of the indoctrination that takes place in the educational system. That’s not a matter of educational “reform” or charter schools, not that either of those is bad. It will require the institutional and financial equivalent of a sledgehammer, not a scalpel.
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Agreed. This isn’t over and the paradigm shift has occurred…yet. There are millions of indoctrinated people still swarming around the country. As long as they get benefactor money, they’ll continue to agitate.
To Trump’s credit, he does appear to be going for a shift. He seems like he’s undercutting the black activists on CNN by going to NFL players and other stars that can make inroads into black communities. If he can make a dent there, I don’t think there’s a good chance the left wins a Presidential election for at least a decade (unless something catastrophic happens).
Dreams and Visions, they’re so nice and satisfying! Sadly, reality has a nasty way of intruding though…
Trumps election is only a break in the onslaught of liberalism. The progressives have no problem ‘living a lie’, just look how people cling to the tenets of Marxism – a totally failed ideology.
For America to return to the principles she initially espoused herself to, my opinion is that the country will have to enter a time of deprivation worse than the Great Depression. If a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat. Entitlements – what’s that? When people can only advance themselves through their labor and skills, then America will be great again – we will be willing to BUILD to meet our expectations.
As for the Liberal Progressives and Globalists (anti-sovereign, no borders Statists) – they are not going to surrender ‘their’ dreams just to accommodate the dreams of the working man. President Trump is an ‘anomaly’, an ‘outlier’, for the era in which we live. What’s going to happen in 4 or 8 years when he leaves office? Will another strong Patriot be able to extend his pro-American policies?
Agree with Ms. Eastman….”not so sure” that Trump’s election was a strategic inflection point in the Left’s march forward.
But it was a tactical inflection point and one of considerable importance. Constitutional norms, while eroding, had heretofore limited leftists to suasion and moral coercion, better known by its Stalinist label, political correctness. It was a remarkably efficient means of social, hence political control, famously identified by George Orwell.
The weaponization of shame (hardly new in Western society) was now turned towards political ends. To work such a system requires cooperation from the shamed. In the case of conservatives, this meant the GOPe, and underlying networks of publications, non-profits and public intellectuals.
Trump’s campaign, style, rhetoric and victory ended these controls. One theory for the Left’s subsequent meltdown is that it had no Plan B for shame, other than to turn up the volume. Its histrionics have now exposed the movement’s essence—a small pack of Carrie Nations followed by a larger gaggle of press.
The Left will eventually recover its balance but will have to invent a new means of social control. The old system will not return.
Prof J wrote it FWIW.
Posted by William A. Jacobson Sunday, December 25, 2016 at 1:00pm
“t’s lengthy, and definitely read the whole thing.”
Ohhhh, since when do we have to actually read an article before commenting on it?
Merry Christmas!
The Leftists won’t go down without a fight.
I predict the rise of a far-left version of the TEA Party Movement in the next few months. This “grassroots” group will be well-funded and well-organized. Unlike the TEA Party, it will use offensive and unlawful tactics in an attempt to intimidate Trump and his supporters.
They’ve tried that before. It worked about as well as anything else socialists try to do.
Not that I object to their wasting time and money on it.
Reagan was a lot more against the progressive fascists and he didn’t stop them.
The Leftists still control academia, the MSM and the entertainment industry. We still have a lot of battles to fight – and we need to start winning those battles rather than abandoning the battlefield.
This is a neverending struggle. Whether it takes two years or twenty, they’ll be back. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Thoughtful article.
I see a weakness here:
Yet the public in recent years has become much more sophisticated. Now we do know. And we can never un-know, once our eyes have been opened.
You or I can never un-know. But we won’t last forever. Since the Progressives control education, they can basically start all over at any time, with those who don’t un-know. And the next time around, they’re more likely to ensure that their charges never do know.
Another problem is that the American courts are generally isolated and insulated from the populace. No matter how many voters see through the façade, there will be a huge delay in making the courts pay any attention. Consider the intellectual crime of “gay marriage”, an offense against a basic tool of communication—the English language—and one which has been imposed on the entire country by the whim of a very few people who wear silly robes to work. Similarly, witness the indefensible violence done to the Bill of Rights by the simple refusal of the courts—even the Supremes in Heller—to acknowledge the plain meaning of the phrase “shall not be infringed”.
Waiting for these old judges to die off is not a terribly satisfactory way of handling the creep of Progressive totalitarianism.
The article is right in the sense that the important aspect of Trumpism is that it’s possible to fight this. Of course Trump has tremendous financial resources of his own; most of us wouldn’t be able to pull off what he’s done, even if we had his motivation and energy. But basically, the important part of Trumpism is an idea—
STOP SURRENDERING.
His technique is simple, but apparently still too sophisticated for far too many of his critics. Attack and counterattack. Blow off their complaints. Complaints work against a person like Bush, who’s too polite to tell critics to just f— off. Trump is not so polite, and he’s been lambasted for it. But it is not Trump’s weakness. It is his strength.
“The entire purpose of 60 years of slanted media and slanted news and slanted education and social pressure and brainwashing and deception and indoctrination…is to get people to vote for the most left-wing candidate in each presidential election. The goal is to bring about a self-imposed silent revolution in America, a democratically elected socialist government voted in by low-information rubes unaware of what they’re doing.”
Absolutely spot-on. And progressives admit (when they think nobody else is paying attention) that this is exactly what they have done.
From WikiLeaks (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599):
“…we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly.”
As I like to remind people who voted for Hillary “‘Unaware and compliant’ doesn’t apply to me because I, at least, was not ‘compliant’ – this refers to you.”
“I see nothing to suggest things are going to get better soon.”
Putting aside the meaning of “soon”:
I see Trump’s election and his cabinet choices of successful, can-do, achievers, some of them literal fighters, as a suggestion that first steps are being taken toward changing the dynamics mentioned in the excerpt.
With respect to things getting “better,” I think the greater willingness of people to say “Merry Christmas” this year itself suggests movement, albeit tiny so far, in that direction.
You can’t fix stupid, but you can put a hell of a pump knot on it’s head.
‘Certainly, Trump’s victory was a yuge blow to the hardcore, anti-Western, anti-American (and usually anti-Israel) leftist agenda.’
You’re kidding right? In what universe is the election of a leftist, a blow to their agenda?
You mean other than the fact he isn’t picking leftists for his Cabinet? Personnel is policy.
The importance of the Trump Revolution is that it gives the world some breathing room.
Prior to the American Revolution, society was controlled by the political, financial and religious elites. Following the American Revolution, the proletariat gradually became an equal force in society. Around 1900, the Progressive Movement, composed of “social justice activists”, began a campaign to strip the elites, of that time, of their power and instill it in a new elite class. This was accomplished by strengthening the proletariat and then gaining control of this increased power in the hands of an new elite. The new elite had the same goals as the old guard elite, to hold onto power and control society for its own benefit. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. But, the new elite was more clever than the old elite.
The Progressives had learned that it was impossible to fight the power held by the diffuse proletariat, once the masses became unified. So, they embarked upon a program to do two things. The first was to keep the masses from unifying. This was accomplished by continuing to foster racism and other forms of discrimination. This set the various segments of the larger population against each other. The second part of the program was to make the majority of the citizenry dependent upon the elite for their basic necessities. Economic Balkanization, the producers vs those supported by the producers, is merely another way to keep the masses fractured and increase dependance on the elite for their survival. Of course, proper education is necessary to insure that the masses are both unaware of this manipulation and possess a favorable view of the general trend toward enslavement.
The EU, Chinese economic dominance and the Obama administration were all indications that the program was nearing the point where it would be irreversible, without destroying the existing society. The rise of first China and then the second and third world economies, at the expense of the economies of the 1st world countries, such as the USA and the nations of Europe is designed to destroy those areas, as their economies collapse. The EU was designed to allow the current elites to control the entire European continent. And, the Obama administration did a masterful job of pushing the economic and social aspects of the USA to the point of extinction. Another 4 to 10 years and the Progressive victory would be assured.
Then along comes the deplorables in the US. These people struck back at the elites and unified enough to significantly influence society. All they ask for is freedom from oppression. Sound familiar? And, just as the American Revolution spurred the rise of popular government in the late 18th century, this new revolution is doing the same thing. But, just as the elites on the 18th and 19th century did not go quietly, neither will the new elites.
The Progressives will continue to do all in their power to fight the new populism. This is about power and position and the elites have no intention of losing any of that. So, their willing drones will continue the attack, using any method which may provide results. But, with the election of Donald Trump, the rest of our society has time to combat the actions of the elite. It Trump supports the desires of his supporters, then the elite will be kept back on their heels for the next four years.
Progressives are easy to spot. They advocate for the increase in central government authority. They refuse to compromise on any subject. Their idea of bipartisan cooperation is doing things their way, only. They will oppose any measure which increases personal liberty for anyone other than themselves. And, easiest to spot, is their supreme arrogance. They are totally dismissive of anyone who holds an opinion different from theirs. And, they embrace any position will keep the society fractured.
If you can recognize them, you can fight them.
I will simply counter that the generation immediately after this bunch, the “Post 9-11’ers”, consider this group a bunch of losers (based on a sampling of the comments of my teen son and his friends). Several wore “Trump” buttons and t-shirts to school. I suspect that the professors will be in for a rude awakening in 4 years when the high school class of 2020 makes its way to college!
Don’t get a lot of pushy leftists in my county, but on the morning of the 24th at Tim Horton’s I had one, a person of feminine qualities without the requisite plumbing, interrupt my reading on my tablet to ask if a nuclear war had started. Not wanting to get into a conversation I said I was just reading a social site.
Didn’t stop the jerk, he started up on the nuclear war threat now that Trump was to be President.
I decided not to be nice and when he left he was muttering about the need for less hate in the country.
I wasn’t letting him off with a last word as he was leaving and said in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout Tim Horton’s that hate would be going away at noon on the 20th of January for the first time in 8 years.
I’ve never shied away from these jerks, but I’ve gotten to the point that I will no longer talk to them in a normal tone. I say bring it on anywhere anytime.
In “The Republic”, Plato is attempting to answer the question, “What is The Just”. To do this, Plato invents a “republic” which would exemplify justice. Shockingly, it is a totalitarian dystopia which is governed by an privileged elite. Only the elite is allowed to have children – the babies of the non-elite are taken and left to die. All children above a certain age are taken and raised by the state. Plato accurately described the leftist totalitarian regimes of our times over two thousand years ago.
Some have concluded that Plato was a totalitarian. An alternative explanation is that Plato was merely describing what happens when Justice is elevated to a position of ultimate value.
What the video above shows is the idolatrous worship of Justice by Social Justice Warriors. Justice is unworthy of worship.
“All children above a certain age are taken and raised by the state.”
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Hillary the crook would have only been more of the same that a once free nation suffered under the Obama regime/failures. That they really believe that ‘OUR children belong to them’… Melissa perry told us so/ and Hillary and her ‘it takes a community to raise a child’…is more of the same in their past actions/future plans to further indoctrination our children and relieve parents of their own rights and responsibilities to raise THEIR own children as they wish to do so… The lefts totalitarianism began a long time ago as they began to push their notion that children can only be raised in their progressive liberal/Marxist ‘collectives and communities’ rather than by the morals/ethics/etc that their OWN parents wish to teach them to respect. It’s one area we the people need to take back OUR control of… the liberal indoctrination centers, aka public school systems from K-Post Grad.
Fascism has always been a threat to America and other democracies of the world. But the threat has never been from within, as it is now.
The fascist left put their bubblehead, ‘Barack Hussein Obama (and his commie mommie Valerie Jarrett) into office for 8 years. Obama/Jarrett have sowed the seeds of war within this country, in particular their seeding the country with radical muslim immigrants.
The fascist left will continue its war (and that’s what it is) on our freedom and our way of life. We must retake our learning institutions and our media or we will lose our nation.
We know that conservative value are stable and lead to long term success. We’ve been watching this happen in America for 200+ years.
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In the early and mid 20th century, a great many liberals thought communism was vastly superior to our democracy and many even traveled to their Nirvana Russia. (Some were forced to go there to avoid being tried as a spy for the Soviet Union.) All of them discovered that Russia was nothing of what they thought is was and became extremely disillusioned.
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Today we are seeing this all replayed. Liberals want more socialism without ever really having experienced it. Liberals are defending Islam and talking about how superior and enlightened is over Christianity without ever having lived in a Muslim country. I predict that very soon, Islamists will force their religion down our throats and it will be at this time that the liberals will discover the actual horror of what they have been pushing for so long. Of course, when this happens, none of it will be the fault of the liberals who have a horizontal learning curve. This will likely coincide with the introduction of even more socialism that will result in the failure of the economy. The result will be disastrous. The huge effort will become how to pin these failures on Trump so the public will continue to support the never ending failures of the Liberal Left mindset.
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I predict that we are about to enter one of the most trying times in history. The question will be whether we decide to learn from these upcoming times or continue to live foolishly. Think of it this way. When everything is collapsing around you, where there is little to no rule of law, and when it becomes every person for themself, then would you want a conservative alpha male leading the family (conservative approach) or would you prefer Pajama boy (liberal approach)?
I am in total agreement with Zombie’s writings. But what the world doesn’t want to recognize is this is spiritual warfare as well. [Ephesians 6:12] All that the Leftists do is nefarious and long reaching. They do not have humanities best interests at heart. Old sins cast long shadows.
The hardest task we face is how to discredit and destroy the modern university system, and replace it with some other form of training.
It is past reform, and must be destroyed.
My political mantra is: Resist Socialist Oppression!
It really gets the hard core left wing fascist pigs worked up when the first hear it.
This is what a hundred years of social engineering hath wrought…it won’t end well for anyone.
I believe that what Trump’s victory has done is to change the rules around presidential elections by forcibly expanding the definition of what is acceptable. That’s good in some ways, no so much in others. The way that it is good is our “rules” in the Republican party eventually became so restrictive that we could no longer nominate someone who was muscular in their policy preferences. Romney and McCain were apologetic candidates, and even W. catered to the milquetoast with terms like “compassionate conservatism”. Trump grants license to his successors from both parties to color outside the lines.
Trump loves it, and he’s at his best when the ignorant ones underestimate him. He’s been feasting on that for 2 years, and continues to.
A big part of the problem up to now has been conservatives’ (and centrists’) tendency to discount radical activity and influence, with an eye-roll and a sigh, “That’s just SO immature.” Now it’s no longer possible to ignore how successful the Left has been in spreading its poison, especially to younger people through the schools.
Reagan’s warning, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” now makes sense because we’ve seen it for ourselves. That awareness is the first step.
SJWs will always double down.
Was November 8, 2016 a major inflection point in American history or merely a speed bump? Time will tell, but the answer lies with the American People, most of whom would prefer to be left alone and not riled up. The Left’s victories have always been facilitated by a Leftist’s desire to be infuriated and a Conservative’s desire to watch their kid’s T-ball game. If DJT really wants to change this country’s direction, he really needs to defund the Left and end government’s bankrolling of Leftist causes.