For better or worse, the conservative element of the Republican party characterized by politicians like John McCain and Lindsay Graham is effectively dead, in the sense that it is unlikely to obtain the critical mass required to win in future elections. The demographics aren't on their side, and, lacking a 21st century outreach strategy, their fraction of the zeitgeist of our country is ever-dwindling. Under Trump, it is looking more and more like their role to play will be as obstructionists. Trumpism, the anti-establishment wave from the right, was the last nail in the coffin. People were fed up with being told what to think or to believe about the state of things rather than hearing about what policies could be enacted to directly improve their economic situations. I personally don't believe that the ethos of Trumpism will survive past Trump's term in office, be it 4 years or 8, unless a similarly iconoclastic maverick rises up to take the reigns, and Trump is too rare a phenomenon to be replicated that quickly. But Trump did what he needed to do to play his part in reviving our democracy, which was to destroy and humiliate the stuffy old right-wing guard, and I believe that something similar will need to happen on the left if they want to retain their relevance. Standard-bearers like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, career politicians who are no more than stand-ins for Wall Street special interests, just aren't going to cut it.
Like many of my fellow millennials, I backed Bernie in the primaries. Not because I agreed with many of his ideas, but because I thought he was the only honest and fundamentally decent human being in the pool. Free healthcare and education works in smaller, more homogeneous nations where the government is not so heavily in debt, but it won't work here, or at least not yet. But were Bernie elected, I would have at least felt like my interests were being taken into account in the decisions made at the executive level, in some way. I ended up very unenthusiastically voting for Gary Johnson in the general election if only because I'm a libertarian on most issues and I thought I'd regret voting for Trump or Clinton even more in hindsight, but in my heart I didn't believe he had the chops.
Following the primary, Bernie could have attempted to redirect the energy of his movement to do to the Democrats what Trump did to the Republican party, but this didn't happen. Instead, he was co-opted by their establishment without much fight, and is now being used primarily as a means to put out fires. The Democrats are deploying him to try and calm down the protest mood in around America when it is directed towards them rather than at Republicans, and where mobs have tried to overrun town hall meetings and have even brought the fire to Schumer's doorstep. Perhaps Bernie is too old anyways, and he missed his one chance. But who will rise in his absence? So far, it is looking as though it will be no one.
The race for DNC Chair is the perfect example of the crisis the Democratic party faces. In the middle we have Tom Perez, who was forced to skulk over to his Twitter to do damage control after admitting that there was, at the very least, a heavy hand on the scale during the primaries. Even though Hillary lost the election, for some reason it is not yet considered kosher to criticize any of the assclowns in Clintonworld, and the media still behaves as though they are campaigning for her. Flanking Perez are Keith Ellison, with his former ties to the Nation of Islam and ambiguous comments on 9/11 trutherism, and Sally Boynton-Brown, a white woman who hates white people even though over 60% of registered Democrats are in fact whites. That someone like Boynton-Brown is cheered on by her peers is indicative of the level of cultural degeneracy of our age. What of the soaring lyric poetry and humanism of Percy Shelley, or Da Vinci's consummate masterpieces, or the rich logical frameworks of Bertrand Russel? The modern left has decided that all of that cultural legacy is good for nothing, because the trouble with it is that unfortunately it is ill-suited for virtue-signaling in 140-character blasts. And in any case, educational traditionalism or any acknowledgement of history is probably racist, or sexist, or a validation of the patriarchy, or something like that. Who needs it when today you can get a history degree without having to take a history class?
One of my favorite rappers from the current generation, TDE's Isaiah Rashad, has a song called 'Shot You Down.' The track is a braggadocio where Rashad vents his frustration at wack rappers, the ones still rocking cornrows with beepers in hand. "No sensitive niggas, I shot you down / no bitch-ass rappers, I shot you down / no Hypebeast pussies, what you do now?" he sings on the chorus. I can't help but think whenever I listen to it about how good of a metaphor this is for the DNC contest and the democratic party of today. Who will come along to shoot down all the pussies, and all of the loserly, sensitive bitches, whose beings are so infested with the germ of weakness? The ones like Tom Perez who need Hillary's permission to speak, or like the self-flagellating Boynton-Brown? Where is the Nietzschean superman who will come along to destroy the decaying morals of yesteryear, and transport us beyond the pointless dichotomies?
A good example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the left was Milo Yiannopoulos's appearance on Bill Maher last night. Love him or hate him, Maher is one of the most high-profile liberal comedian-pontificator guys on TV, alongside his fellow media-establishment-friendly traveling companions like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah. I don't own a TV, but I had been looking forward to this and so I caught it after the fact on Youtube. And what a letdown it was! It ended up barely being a conversation. Maher seemed afraid of letting Milo enter too deeply into making any of his points, and the ten minute segment was a series of abrupt start-stops, not really coalescing into much of value for either side. It might have helped Milo sell a few extra copies of his book, but only by way of exposure and not because the audience got to hear anything about what makes Milo tick.
What was even more disappointing was the last minute pull out by The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, who must have been wary about alienating a portion of the small fanbase he has acquired since he first gained traction as a Bush critic- a readership that has grown little in the years between. Similar to how MSNBC is a bunch of liberals and Joe Scarborough, The Intercept, still nonetheless one of my favorite outlets for independent journalism due to their much-needed focus on issues like surveillance and whistleblowing, is more and more becoming Glenn Greenwald and a bunch of left-leaning lightweights who take their cues from their corporate counterparts. Milo was entirely correct when pointing out that when you don't show up to debate, you lose- point blank. To this point, perhaps Scahill would reply with a something-something about not wanting to give Milo a platform, but the problem is that this isn't how the real world works. It's no more than a convenient rhetorical abstraction for the left, and the gulf between their world of friendly, politically correct abstractions and the world of reality, where dirty and messy things like biology and evolution and the art of persuasion reside, grows ever wider. As Milo himself points out, your arguments will become weak and begin to rust when you don't have anyone to debate and match swords with, and this begins- unsurprisingly- with allowing the debate to occur.
On a side note, Milo vs. Maher was a good example of why independent media is continuing to gain ground over cable TV. Would you rather listen to Maher say nothing of interest for 10 minutes before moving onto another similarly vapid segment with his next guest, or would you rather listen to Joe Rogan dive deep into a cultural soul-searching with professor Jordan Peterson for 3 hours, encompassing the history of western politics (pausing and resuming as needed)? I'll take the latter.
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p.s., After writing the title to this article, I decided to go to Project Murphy, the face-melding bot accessible via Facebook messenger, and type in "What if Donald Trump was Miley Cyrus in wrecking ball?" The result can't be shown here, but is worth a look if you're someone with similarly devious tastes...