Allies, Real And Imagined

     Coalition politics, if practiced too optimistically, can make its allegiants see things that aren’t there. That’s most emphatically the case on the Left.

     Remember Hillary Clinton’s masturbatory “Why aren’t I fifty points ahead?” declamation? It was a classic case of a politician having swallowed her own bullshit and being duly poisoned by it. She believed she had a divinely appointed destiny to become The First Woman President. Her treatment of her inner circle was such that after a while, only those who were willing to tell her exactly what she wanted to hear remained around her. By the time Election Day rolled around, no one who could see the true state of affairs received any credence from her.

     But a self-deception of such magnitude must begin somewhere. In this case, it finds its roots in the fevered exhortations of the most enthusiastic “social-justice” activists associated with Democrat Party politics: gender-war feminists, rabid open-borders types, and the racialists and similar oppression-flacksters whose personal fortunes are indissolubly bound to ever-expanding government. These people were almost as thoroughly deluded as the candidate herself. They firmly believed that “their time” had arrived. They were willfully blind to the counter-evidence, and they helped to shield Clinton from it.

     Allies of that sort are worse than any declared enemy. Though a declared enemy has an obvious interest in clouding your vision, you’re unlikely to cooperate with his efforts.

     The cherry on the slag heap is that even now that the election is over, those allies continue to do their damnedest to maintain an impenetrable screen against the true state of American political opinion...though their motives aren’t what they were before Donald Trump’s smashing victory.

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     The persistent notion that Clinton “really won” the election because her official popular vote total exceeded Trump’s is as fallacious as many other left-wing claims. It’s been established that many hundreds of thousands of non-citizens cast ballots that were counted with the rest. Moreover, an enormous number of absentee ballots remain uncounted; state election officials don’t bother with them unless they exceed in number the margin between the two highest-polling candidates, which is not the case in any but a very few states. Absentees have traditionally favored the Republican heavily, Given all that, it’s probable that Trump won the popular vote quite as handily as he won the Electoral College tally. However, those determined to see what they want to see will continue to maintain otherwise; it’s likely that an objective refutation will be forever lacking.

     Alongside that, the Left is invested in the promulgation of fallacious notions about why Trump won: racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and the like. That’s a large part of why one particular figure – Trump consigliere Stephen Bannon, formerly executive editor of Breitbart.com – has been targeted for vilification and for why the Left-aligned media are assisting passively in the effort. It’s exceedingly difficult to demonize sixty million voters, many of whom voted for Barack Obama twice, as racists, xenophobes, et cetera. However a smear campaign against a single individual can often score despite the available objective facts to the contrary; witness the attempt by the “social-justice warriors” who dominate science fiction’s Hugo Awards to smear Brad Torgersen as a racist despite his having married a black woman.

     Finally for this morning, consider the intent behind the George Soros funded / MoveOn organized disturbances in several American cities. Those rioters aren’t going to change the results of the election. Not one Electoral College vote will flip because of their “demonstrations,” despite all the Left’s efforts to intimidate the EC into faithlessness. Moreover, those paying them, busing them, and egging them on know it. So why do they do so?

     A baseball maxim about managers’ arguments with umpires is applicable here: “You’re arguing for the next one.” By inflaming unruly crowds in major cities, the organizers are attempting to leave an impression in the minds of state and municipal officials and voters generally: next time it will be worse. While an attempt to intimidate that spans months or years has obvious drawbacks, there is some statistical evidence for its ability to leave a persistent legacy of fear in people’s minds. Additionally, the organizers might hope that the riots will predispose local officials to make concessions to local activists about other matters.

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     Despite the energy and resources the Left is pouring into these efforts, I expect that this time around, they will prove disastrous to its aims. First, the emergence of a new, harder to intimidate “silent majority” of Americans who really are fed up with the Left’s accusations and demands contributes significantly to my prediction. Owing to the Internet and the associated rise of “alternative media,” these people know how numerous they are. That allows them to deduce the relative weakness of their detractors. It’s hard to persuade an opponent that he’s outnumbered when he has hard evidence that he outnumbers you.

     Second, the identities of these allies of the Left are also far clearer than in previous decades. Their slime trails can now be traced a considerable distance backward. Many have records that range from unsavory to outright criminal. That’s not good for the general opinion of the Left’s self-touted virtue.

     Third, the ugliness of many Left-aligned public figures’ statements and behavior cannot be concealed. Entertainment celebrities, popular leftist voices on Twitter and Facebook, and other persons involved in the foofaurauw have blotted their reputations for a long time to come. To expect that open condemnations of white Americans and women and minorities who voted for Trump will alter those persons’ political opinions is counterintuitive, to say the least. Yet the volcanic public rages of the Left’s more prominent figures continue.

     These persons and organizations are not the sort of “allies” I’d want “helping” me. What about you, Gentle Reader?

     (For alternative treatments of the above phenomena, please read this excellent article from the esteemed Ace of Spades, and this emission from the now-proven prescient Ann Coulter.)