“Deplorables:” The Bigotry Behind the Impeachment Attempt

Democrats: Party of Elites (and Elitists)

From the Wall Street Journal:

Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate in recent history to lose popularity after a defeat, and she seems determined to keep it that way. Speaking in India over the weekend, she blamed Donald Trump’s election on voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights . . . don’t like women, you know, getting jobs . . . don’t wanna, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.” She also claimed that “married white women” supported Mr. Trump in response to “pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son—whoever—believes you should.”

More interesting than this “basket of deplorables” redux, though, was Mrs. Clinton’s commentary on the role of economic concerns in the 2016 contest. “There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won,” she said. “But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” To scattered applause, she continued: “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

This is an unexpected twist in the debate over Mr. Trump’s rise. Analysts on the center and right have tended to emphasize the economic factors that made Mr. Trump’s victory possible, noting that voters in regions with stagnating incomes and diminishing job opportunities are likelier to be drawn to populism. Many on the left, meanwhile, have argued that economic concerns are simply an excuse for bigotry. “Economic anxiety” is even a running joke on progressive Twitter — a sarcastic response to reports of racism among Republicans.

But now Mrs. Clinton herself has endorsed the “economic anxiety” thesis, albeit in a backhanded way. She sees her electoral disappointment in economically downscale regions not as a political failure but a source of validation—and, apparently, an indication of those voters’ failings. Similarly, last September she told Vox that the Electoral College is “an anachronism” in part because “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States.” Should those voters have more of a say?

Since Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party has usually been identified as the party of the “common man,” and its adversaries as defenders of wealth and economic privilege. Jackson earned that reputation for his party by reducing property qualifications for the franchise for white men. But the Democrats’ most recent standard-bearer sounds an awful lot like the 19th-century conservatives who thought political representation should be tied to wealth. This is a significant moment in America’s partisan realignment.

Not merely “significant” but stunning. But not new either. In the 60s, when leftist students and activists were marching against the Vietnam War — indeed, rooting for a communist victory — construction workers were marching in support of the war, and were demeaned as “hardhats” by the left.

And the conflict over social issues like abortion has long been one that pitted affluent liberals against working class conservatives such as the famous “Reagan Democrats.” Thomas Frank’s 2005 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? lamented how working class voters didn’t vote “their own interests,” but voted Republican because of social issues.

Hillary’s snobbish elitism is not new. But it’s not been so blatantly expressed by a presidential candidate until Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” speech. And now she has doubled down.

Political Correctness

Whatever their actual beliefs (and Obama probably pretty much thought the same way) no candidate has so blatantly and overtly embraced political correctness. The essence of political correctness is the view that there is no legitimate disagreement with the standard leftist agenda. Oppose Black Lives Matter and you are a racist. Oppose gay marriage and you are a homophobe. Oppose abortion and you are a sexist. No debate or discussion allowed.

The Reality of Social Class and Politics

The reality, of course, is that Trump voters were not at all the poor white trash that the elitist Democrats make them out to be, as the 2016 Exit Polls show. While Trump did particularly well with whites with no college degree, he carried a plurality of whites with a college degree.

Clinton did carry those with postgraduate degrees (by a 58% to 37% margin), but there is no reason to believe that people with postgraduate degrees are any more “enlightened” than other groups. All graduate education is vocational, and simply socializes students into a particular occupation —  typically one whose interests are served by liberal policies.



As for income, if the richest people are the most productive (a notion that the left traditionally abhorred), then the most productive people split evenly between Trump and Clinton.



Hillary is using something called the “ecological fallacy” — confusing the aggregate characteristics of a unit with the characteristics of the individuals in it. So while affluent areas are indeed the quite liberal, it doesn’t follow that affluent people are. The same goes for education. Put another way, plenty of rich and well-educated conservatives live in those affluent areas, where they are unfortunately outnumbered by the liberals.

But more fundamentally: do you really want to assume that the rich and well-educated are the most enlightened? Or does wealth and education (which is often indoctrination) corrupt?

On that issue, the Democrats have come down on the side of the elitists.

Update

What Hillary actually said is even worse than the journalistic descriptions of it. Watch the entire response to the question below:

The Real Deplorables

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Democrat Identity Politics Backfires

From Reason Magazine, an analysis of the “New Nationalism” from Jonathan Haidt, via the BBC:

Q: And what is it that you think is the outcome of this new division of globalists versus the nationalists because there appears to be not just a sense of acute polarization but actually intolerance on both sides.

Haidt. Yes, I think that there are two disastrous outcomes; two things I am very, very worried about for my country, and for all of the Western democracies; it’s the same thing. One is identity politics on the Left has been brewing for a long time. I’ve been a professor since 1995 at the University of Virginia and now at New York University; so I’ve watched identity politics get stronger and stronger; more focused on matrices of oppression – straight white males this and straight white males that — and after a while, as I forget who pointed out in the current election, if you keep treating white men as an identity group, you keep saying that “they are terrible; they are evil” — eventually they become just like another identity group and they voted their racial interests, in a sense you might say. So identity politics on the Left eventually triggers identity politics on the Right.

Translation: the people whom the elitist liberals despise have revolted.

They resent being called “bitter clingers” or a “basket of deplorables” and they fought back in the one arena were the have the most political power — at the ballot box. This was true of white males (the great villains of identity politics) but also of the women who like their husbands and boyfriends (a majority of married women voted for Trump) and decent people who dislike the racial, gender and sexual hustle.

A Trump vote was a very blunt instrument, since Trump was a deeply flawed candidate, but given the choice between the arrogant elitists and Trump, Americans who were tired of being demeaned, tired of being told they had to accept being victims of discrimination, and tired of being told that they needed to change to be like the elitists, revolted.

Welcome to the Club

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Hillary Clinton: Elitist Snob Demeans Lots of People

It was the id of elitist liberals showing itself, the now famous comment by Hillary Clinton about how Donald Trump’s backers belong to a “basket of deplorables.”

But Clinton has a long history of demeaning people whom she stereotypes as not sharing her elitist liberal views. From Front Page Magazine:

Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark revealed her utter contempt for ordinary Americans, which stretches back decades. Before an adoring audience of wealthy elites, Hillary dismissed millions of American citizens, who happen to support her opponent Donald Trump, as being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” She said they are “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Hillary Clinton had no compunctions about branding millions of her fellow citizens “irredeemable” and “not America,” while saying on another occasion that we must show “respect” to our enemies and “empathize with their perspective and point of view.” Moreover, she wants to vastly enlarge the basket for “refugees” admitted from the Middle East, without sufficiently robust vetting in place first to make sure that jihadist terrorists don’t find their way into that basket.

After coming under withering attack for insulting so many hardworking, patriotic Americans, Hillary half-apologized: “I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong.” What is really wrong is Hillary’s 100 percent condescending attitude towards ordinary Americans who do not inhabit her insular bubble of self-righteous snobs. And her condescension is a deeply ingrained character trait she has evidenced for years in her attitude towards stay-at-home moms, working people, parents who do not want government interference in how they raise their children and people with religious beliefs that are not in accord with her secular progressive ideology.

Stay-at-home moms, for example, are not worthy of Hillary’s respect. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, she strutted her status as a career woman while putting down those women who regard being a mother a full-time job.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Hillary declared, “but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

The truth is that Hillary rode her husband Bill’s coattails in Arkansas and Washington to promote her own career as a partner in the Rose law firm and then onto the national stage.

“You know, I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary remarked during a joint 60 Minutes interview with her husband.

The only problem is that Hillary not only stood by her man while he was carrying on multiple affairs. She ran interference for Bill, demeaning and allegedly intimidating those women who had dared to come forward to tell the truth. Demeaning ordinary women who were exploited by her husband gave Hillary no pause as long as it helped advance the Clintons’ political fortunes.

Working people in industries that do not fit Hillary’s progressive ideology, such as combating climate change at all cost, are also disposable. In March 2016, Hillary added to her disposable basket the coal miners, who have risked their lives to help provide the fuel that powers this country. “We are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she vowed.

Parents who want to be left alone to raise their children according to their deeply held moral values are also not worthy of Hillary’s respect.

Commenting in “Harper’s Magazine” in October 1992, Christopher Lasch, professor of history at the University of Rochester, pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s writings demonstrate how “from her perspective the ‘traditional’ family is, for the most part, an institution in need of therapy, an institution that stands in the way of children’s rights—and an obstacle to enlightened progress.”

Consistent with her “It Takes a Village” collectivist philosophy, Hillary enthusiastically supported the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which her husband signed as president. This treaty potentially pits children against their parents. Irrespective of the child’s age, parents would not have the final say on their child’s access to materials the parents find to be morally offensive.

Article 12(1) provides that “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Article 13 of the Convention guarantees each child the legal right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.” (Emphasis added)

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides for free legal services and access to the courts for any child who thinks that his or her “liberty” has been violated by a parent.

The United Nations, through an unaccountable committee of experts, would have the power to monitor each State Party’s compliance with the Convention’s provisions and to establish norms in implementing the Convention that may become part of customary international law.

Thus, if a child does not want to accompany his or her family to the family’s house of worship, the parents risk being dragged into court by the resisting child if the parents do not submit to the child’s wishes. The parents are responsible for keeping a roof over the child’s head and making sure the child is well taken care of. But when it comes to matters of faith while the child is in the parents’ care, the rules of the global UN village put the ultimate decision-making power into the hands of the child and the state.

Indeed, Hillary wants to change ordinary Americans’ religious beliefs that get in the way of her progressive globalist agenda. At the Women in the World Summit last year, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008. People with such beliefs belong in Hillary’s basket of “deplorable sexists,” as far as she is concerned.

Hillary Clinton’s contempt for the beliefs, livelihoods and concerns of ordinary Americans is deplorable, not the millions who were targets of her invective.