Even now, at age 67, I continue to be amazed at how my mind works. On the night of Nov. 5, as I watched Pennsylvania turn from blue to red on a Toronto TV screen, I waited for the anticipated jolt of alarm to sink my nerves. chest.
But what I was feeling wasn't anxiety, it was excitement.
What the hell was going on here? I hate Trump. He wears his ego like a neon placard, and endless riffs of “Look at Me” spill from his mouth. He has no oratory, no dignity, no class. And I'm not even going to get into the weeds of his moral character.
The point is, I'm not a fan of that guy. Still, I couldn't mistake the nudge from my subconscious. It meant that I was rooting for him. I was rooting for him. It made no sense. Was I a sociopath or what?
The next day, my son said, “This isn't about Trump.” “It's about your anger at the left.”
surely. My irritation with the progressive left started out as a small hum, but over the past few years it has swelled to a trumpet blast. It began in the spring of 2020, and has so far hinted timidly that locking down an entire nation could do more social damage than accepting the possibility that a few grandmas might be infected with the coronavirus. That's when people started shouting abuse at the people who did it online.
Since then, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has exploded on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, and online. Every subculture, no matter how esoteric, began to cry out for recognition (or “centering” in DEI parlance). Two spirit natives? An incarcerated woman with HIV? A non-binary semi-professional athlete? They all had a long list of grievances and demanded the government give them some ointment.
This new movement is based on two ridiculous ideas. One is that a particular group permanently needs additional assistance because of the harm it has suffered in the past. Opponents aptly call this “the soft bias of low expectations,” but another is that unequal outcomes between groups only result from: It's about getting. systematic discrimination. Cancel culture, the DEI movement's executive arm, corrals these ideas by taking the microphone away from anyone who dares to challenge them. It betrays the movement's subconscious urge to squash free speech like an insect.
the oppressor and the oppressed. perpetrator and victim. And above all, black and white. It's all so messy. Coleman Hughes, author of The End of Racial Politics: An Argument for a Colorblind America, considers his blackness to be a form of racism. the least noticeable things about him. Similarly, I'm not interested in looking at people through colored glasses.
in inspiring article Paul Kix explains for the Free Press how progressives have turned their backs on interracial marriages like his. Friends who would have congratulated him on his marriage just 10 years ago now tell him that, as a white man, they cannot understand mixed-race children. How sad is that?
I'm also not interested in denigrating men – a pet project of the New Left. This one is toxic, that one is toxic. Never mind that we owe much of our civilization to the ingenuity of our ancestors, from iron mines and printing presses to the jet planes that brought us the world. The fact that no one is giving them credit for their work speaks volumes about the level of misandry within us.
Apparently all of this troubled my subconscious and caused it to turn to Orange Satan that fateful November night.
Jonathan Haidt, author of the book The Righteous Mind, argues that our reactions to social and political events are not based on rational thought processes; deep-seated intuition — what Haidt calls our “moral taste.” Rational arguments about morality then emerge to justify these preferences.
Well, my moral preferences have been driven by an increasingly bigoted, intolerant, and yes, racist left over the years, but even if Trump had to make it happen, Team I would have liked to see Blue scaled back.
In my post-election social media confessional disgorgement, I learned that I was not alone. Millions of other people are just as fed up with the New Left as I am. They felt guilty about the election results for the same reasons I did. political commentator wesley yang said it best: “I still have an ominous feeling about Trump… but my schadenfreude against the Democrats is completely unchecked. I wanted to see them pay the price for their derangement.” .”
Democratic strategists, take note.
Gabriel Bauer is an award-winning journalist and author based in Toronto. her book “Blindsight is 2020.” Published in 2023.
