The Modern Left is a unified body of ideological hegemony that embeds its principles into every aspect of culture. Anyone who considers this news was either born yesterday or detached from the hip from modern political discourse. One would be mistaken to attribute the undying leftism of academia and Hollywood to an anachronistic nostalgia for the progressivism of the 1960s. The modern, progressive Left has little interest in squabbling over policy positions or defining their own principles outside of their comparative “tolerance.”
Moreover, as Harvard Law graduate Ben Shapiro observes, their paradigm of discourse finds its gravitational center around a sort of churlish virtue signaling. To be opposed to the principles they set forth is to be called a bigot; to present the conservative argument against racial tribalism is to be thrown in league with former KKK-legacy David Duke, an American white nationalist. It is intellectually easier to dismiss one’s opponent as a bastion of hate and backwards thought than to acknowledge the possibility that there are intelligible individuals who disagree with the progressive Left.
To the reader up in arms with the sentiments expressed in the previous paragraph, clutching at their pearls to deem this author an unfeeling dogmatist, you can now empathize with the collective weekly experience of The Mirror’s conservative readership, as they’re assured that “[Donald] Trump … isn’t as racist or offensive as he likes to make himself seem.” According to last April’s Mirror article “The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Trump Himself,” we’re told that “Trump [used to be] a Democrat … making it clear that he can’t be as terrible as he [seems].” Moreover, as we all know, it is definitionally impossible for our friends on the Left to be “racist” or “offensive.” Those unfortunate monikers are reserved for evil, scary Republicans like Jeb Bush. We’re also reminded that Trump’s supporters, or as the author tolerantly and tenderly describes them, “racist hate mongers,” support him not out of “fear,” but because he embodies the myriad “racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia that many Americans feel.” As a constitutional conservative, I cannot stand the European ethno-nationalism of Donald Trump. However, to call all Trump supporters “racist hate mongers” is nothing more than a ringing example of the sort of undying hatred Leftists hold toward individuals who disagree with them on policy. It is this nose-in-the-air, high-minded, moral superiority complex that leads to enough outrage to support candidates like Donald Trump.
To understand the remarkable divisiveness of the political landscape, one would be remiss not to discuss the very powerful tactics of media outlets like NowThis, Mic and Attn:, and the remarkably clear paradigm they set forth: germane conservatives are nothing more than the political manifestations of your grandmother’s racialist id, and ought to be fought with the political unanimity of tolerant millennial minds. These outlets engulf the social media feeds of most young folks, where half-baked, two minute rundowns of current events are presented with the guise of objectivist awareness-raising. The videos are often centered around topics like the obscurantist, irrelevant reaction of Twitter’s outrage faction to a double-speak interpretation of the tweet of a Republican senator, or two-minute shorts on the policies of the Nordic countries with a sort of pubescent lust one associates with a hormonal teenager.
Doused with a feigned objectivity and mocking spirit, the videos project that it is not simply that those political figures depicted therein have perhaps the wrong view on policy, it is a larger moral failure attributable to ignorance or bigotry that the dissenters hold the positions that they do. Anyone who has had a discussion with a millennial leftist understands the blithering, self-righteous paternalism with which they treat dissenting viewpoints and the root of this self-aggrandizing certainty is unmistakably found in the blind intelligence of these subversively partisan videos. The danger of the NowThis movement is not solely their implicit claim to present the full story of a controversial topic in two minute segments, but moreover the snarky, yellow boldfaced text, and the cutaways to celebrity reaction .gifs that reassure the viewer that they sit fully entrenched on the right side of history, giving them license to mock the know-nothing imbeciles who dare disagree with the hip, relevant policy prescriptions of Attn:.
These videos and all they stand for — the mainstreaming of Jon Stewart-style conservative-mockery — is not productive if a country is truly interested in unity despite political differences. Jonah Goldberg of National Review perhaps makes this point most astutely — when the media cries wolf often enough and joins in the malarkey of the ever-tolerant Joe Biden who claimed to a black audience that Mitt Romney wanted to “put y’all back in chains” — when the wolf in Trump’s clothing comes along and you level these same claims of intolerance, you may finally be right. However, not a single soul will be listening. Moreover, if progressives despise Trump as much as it seems that they do, avoiding a repeat of the ethno-nationalist populism embodied in Trump can only be done by ceasing to call actual constitutional conservatives homophobic, racist, sexist or some other -ist resting upon the unfounded claim of bigotry simply because they disagree with the Left politically.
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