New Normal Digest #6
Trump election: leftist Democrats lost big, and they seem too dense and too lacking in self-awareness to figure out why.
Abandoning the working class in favor of official narratives.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) may be a leftist, but he’s not stupid. In fact, he seems to be one of the few signs of intelligent life on his side of the aisle these days. He took Democrats to task following Trump’s solid rout earlier this week saying “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Story here. That’s part of the story. Another part of the story I outlined two days ago: voters are sick and tired of being lied to. For the past four years we’ve dealt with an administration built on lies.
In that article I noted the weeping and gnashing of teeth by leftist Democrats, and how their published statements indicate how they just don’t get it.
Take for example this woman, identified in this Reuters article as Krista Wilson, a Democrat from Raleigh, N.C.:
… it was a “hard day to be a woman” following the victory of Trump, who was convicted on 34 criminal counts in a hush money case, impeached twice and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial. Quoting this person:
“I’m afraid for the state of the country that people would vote for a convicted felon, someone who is unstable, who incited violence, and who uses fear and racism to motivate voters — that they would vote for him over a highly-qualified woman….”
What a litany of official narratives!
The problem is: the average voter who voted for Trump for president either doesn’t believe those allegations are meaningful, or doesn’t care! Why would he—or she—refuse to believe them? Because all the players that brought them about are leftist Democrats! Almost with no exception.
Rule of law? We don’t need to follow it, we need to restore it.
“Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do….”
The above is typical. I could cite hundreds of exemplars of leftist writers both in the U.S. and overseas who don’t get it and are still getting over the shellshock realization that American voters are, more and more, rejecting the left.
Take for example this piece, from U.K.’s leftist The Guardian. Rebecca Solnit, credited as the publication’s “U.S. columnist” and an author who writes about so-called man-made climate change, writes:
Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.
The idea that so many of these people believed Kamala Harris was qualified at all, much less “supremely qualified,” is a complete mystery to me. I do not know what to say to people who have watched the era since Biden stepped aside, observed her meteoric rise in stature without having won a single primary vote—and having displayed total incompetence managing the one task she’d been assigned, managing the U.S. southern border—and not realize they were seeing a mass media creation, a “manufacturing of consent” (Chomsky, from the day when a few leftist writers actually displayed intelligence).
Solnit is far from finished. The above is just her first paragraph. Continuing:
We knew what the problems were, and we wanted to fix them. The principle problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem.
Jeff Bezos gets it: corporate media has lost its credibility.
It is true enough that “mainstream news media” has failed, but not for the reasons she offers: mass media ceased, quite some time ago, to be a credible source of news and information as opposed to an aggregate of corporate entities dispensing what those in power want the masses to believe.
Hence official narratives: about January 6 and the assortment of allegations against Trump, Covid, the so-called vaxes, Russia-Ukraine, Israel, the economy, immigration, and Joe Biden’s cognitive state, among others.
If corporate mass media ever becomes a truth-dispensing enterprise again, maybe its pronouncements will be believed again. But now, with this election, it should be clear: they have a lot to overcome!
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s multibillionaire CEO and owner of the leftist Washington Post, is no fool. Recently he stated:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
This is an important statement. Bezos goes on to make the case that endorsing candidates leads to a clear public perception of a biased media.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
Bezos’s move has cost the Post over 200,000 subscribers. He had to know that would happen, which leads me to believe this was a principled move.
He’s right, though. If corporate mass media is going to restore credibility, it’s going to take more than a mere refusal to endorse candidates.
Telling the truth, as I’ve argued, will do for a start.
Almost all coverage of Donald Trump during the election season was negative. Almost all coverage of Biden when he was still the candidate was positive; contentions that he was cognitively impaired and that this was being covered up were dismissed, typically, as conspiracy theories. Then, when Kamala Harris become the candidate, almost all coverage of her was positive.
No one with functioning brain cells could have failed to see the bias!
No one with a functioning brain can miss the fact that mainstream corporate media remains in the firm grip of its narratives, which are essentially the narratives of leftists and open-borders globalists.
“Our people rejected us!” The arrogance of the average Democrat.
A separate problem is the arrogance of these people—an arrogance I spotted decades ago.
They believe they know what’s best for everybody!
For example, it is clear that not just white men voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but the percentage of black men and Hispanic men supporting Trump took a quantum leap in this election.
Example: one activist moaned, “The demographic shifts for us were just so brutal. Our people rejected us!”
“Our people?” They’re not your people. They’re just people, and they have minds of their own.
Black men and Hispanic men are increasingly realizing that the Democrat Party has taken them for granted all these years while doing nothing that benefits them. They are wisely turning away.
The problem, which I’ve written about many times previously, is the arrogance of Those Who Push People Around, political Platonists who believe themselves to be knowledgeable enough, wise enough, and morally superior enough, to tell the rest of us what to do any how to live.
These people then react with extreme hostility when Those Who Want to Be Left Alone push back, as they did on November 5.
The “crisis of masculinity,” the death culture, and the radical feminist cold war against men (and the unborn).
There is no “crisis of masculinity.” That’s another official narrative. What we have are two things: first, a legal and cultural ambience which has not just purposefully disadvantaged and disenfranchised men, but has also invalidated them psychologically. What does this mean?
Everyone wants to be validated. Men and women. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, all others. This is how we’re wired. This is part of what it means to be human. What it means to be validated: your life matters. You’re not a mere blip somewhere off stage, who knows where?
I think this is why the phrase Black Lives Matter resonated the way it did. The movement that developed around the phrase may have been something totally different, but it played on the idea of validation.
So men, like women, want to be validated, and policies—and cultural tendencies—that they see as rendering them superfluous are going to prompt a backlash, later if not sooner. That is part of what has been happening. After all, well before the election it was clear that men were moving to the right even as women were moving to the left.
Second, we have what I call the death culture. This is the culture in which the lives of the unborn are considered expendable (but not just them as we’ll see).
Women were supposed to vote for Harris because she defended “women’s reproductive rights” (sometimes rendered “women’s reproductive freedoms”).
Euphemisms for abortion, of course.
Clearly this wasn’t a winning issue. It sounds blunt, but the majority of men probably don’t care. Those who do, and especially if they have a Christian worldview, their thinking might be something as follows:
That’s not about the “right to do as you please with your own body.” Because it’s not your body we’re talking about but the body of the new life that is growing inside you. That life, with complete human DNA, is separate from your life even if for the time being it is dependent on your life. This is not ideology, conservative or otherwise. It’s biology.
Radical feminists will reject this, of course. Some American feminists are exploring a movement that seems to have begun in South Korea where a radical feminist movement appears to have sprung up over the past few years in the wake of the Trump triumph. Its advocates call it 4B. I don’t know what the ‘B’ stands for but the ‘4’ is for the four things these women plan to withhold from men: sex, dating, marriage, children:
The basic idea: women swear off heterosexual marriage, dating, sex and childbirth in protest against institutionalized misogyny and abuse. (It is called 4B in reference to these four specific no-nos.) The mostly online movement began around 2018 protests against revenge porn and grew into South Korea’s #MeToo-esque feminist wave.
Interestingly, I presume from this that homosexual marriage is still okay. Appropriately woke. Author Alaina Demopoulos goes on to decry Trump’s embrace of “manosphere” figures like Joe Rogan, not realizing what we said above which is that the cultural left created the “manosphere” by attempting to emasculate men and “cancelling” those who refused to be emasculated.
I don’t know whether this will catch on or not. Demopoulos cites an unnamed “TikTok creator” (usually the type): “Girls it’s time to boycott all men! You lost your rights, and they lost the right to hit raw! 4b movement starts now!”
I wonder if these people believe this is at all helpful. If misogyny is bad—and it is, when it’s the real thing—then isn’t misandry (hatred of men) also bad?
The really bad news: Western populations are not reproducing themselves at replacement rates.
None of this is a good idea in societies, including native-born Americans, who are no longer producing children at replacement rates (somewhere between 2.1 and 2.2. children for every couple). Marriage has been in a tailspin for quite some time as populations of singles (and divorcees) have gone up.
I personally know men who have been life-long singles and have given up. I can’t blame them.
This will fuel the cause of those who, like David Stockman just did, attack Trump from a Libertarian direction arguing (among other things) that the U.S. economy needs immigrants in order to grow and that Trump’s “deportation” plans jeopardizes that. While he focused almost exclusively on economic considerations he did drop this bombshell.
In fact, there were 131.721 million native born workers on payrolls in October 2019, which compares to just 130.546 million on October 2024. Meanwhile, foreign born employment grew by nearly +4.0 million or 14% during the same 5-year span.
To be sure, this flat-lining of native-born employment is not due to laziness or union obstacles to hiring. There have been no native hires because such workers were never born in the first place, owing to the fact that native-born birth rates have been below replacement levels for more than three decades.
That is to say, growth of the American economy is utterly and completely dependent upon migrant workers and will be as far as the eye can see because the native born population is now actually shrinking. [Emphasis mine.}
It is unfortunate that immediately after this observation, Stockman goes right back to attacking Trump.
But then again, as Winston Churchill once observed:
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
This, in my view, is the existential national crisis that is brewing on the horizon, the lack of children traceable to the disintegration of the American family, visible to those of us who think in terms of the long view, invisible to feminists, Libertarians, and others fixated on the present and treating the (re)election of Donald Trump as if it was the existential catastrophe.
I doubt this last was on American voters’ minds when they voted for Trump in the face of all the Democrat Party official narratives. What was on their minds was probably the price of groceries and the disruption of their communities by migrants which they blamed on the Biden-Harris administration. Or they might have been thinking about the two dangerous foreign wars that have erupted during this administration’s four-year tenure. Some might, as I argued the other day, just be sick and tired of being lied to 24-7 by Democrat-controlled corporate media.
No one is arguing that the Western ruling class hasn’t done extremely well during the Biden-Harris tenure. The official economic narrative reflects this, and not the 22 percent average rise in the price of groceries during this period, or the even more astronomical rise in housing costs, or the epidemic of homelessness now that affordable housing is out of some Americans reach even if they are working full time.
If we focus just on the past four years, they’ve been an ongoing dumpster fire for ordinary, nonrich, not-elite Americans who do not work inside the Beltway or Silicon Valley or as hedge fund multibillionaires. The Democrat Party has become the party of this ruling class. Thus the average leftist Democrat is oblivious to what is really going on, and among American political figures, only Bernie Sanders put his finger on it.
But this is why Trump won even the popular vote despite four years of consistent lawfare and corporate media attempts to destroy his life and the lives of his family members. This is why most leftist Democrats are likely to remain in the dark about what smacked them in the kisser this week.
_________________________
Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
Should you purchase any (or all) books from Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star review (if you think they merit such).
