Most Analyses Today Are Wrong. Here’s One That’s Right.

I think there’s truth in the analysis in Gorka: Roy Moore’s Victory in Alabama Primary a ‘Revolutionary Moment in American Politics’. The Trump and Brexit wins were not about nationalism, populism, or authoritarianism.  

I think when people attribute those wins, and the continuing sentiments they represent, to those things they’re not really thinking it through. Instead they’re falling back on the same old off-the-shelf ideas and labels. The thinking seems to me to be unimaginative, glib, easy, safe, lazy, path of least resistance, inside the box, Procrustean.  Further, nationalism, authoritarianism, and populism just happen to also support left-wing stereotypes of the right. Could this have anything to do with the fact that academia and the media lean strongly left?  Nah. Couldn’t be.  Pure coincidence. 

Instead, as the article suggests, those wins were about personal and national sovereignty and about democracy, rightly understood. Sovereignty and democracy are markedly different from nationalism, populism, etc. It’s a mistake to conflate them.  Sovereignty and democracy, are, in a nutshell, manifestations of the moral foundation or liberty, and/or of the ethic of autonomy. 

There’s a deep human desire to not be dominated, bullied, or oppressed. And we get together to take down those bullies.   – Jon Haidt, here.

Those elections, and the continuing movement they represent, were backlash against the bullies: against The Construct of the White Working Class Zombies. They were about restoring personal identity, dignity, autonomy, sovereignty, self direction from those who’ve stolen it, and who despise those they’ve stolen it from.  

Look at this guy. He can’t even process the idea that he should charge more for his product. Why? Because “These are farmers,” and it wouldn’t be right. 

He’s a deplorable. He’s one of the white working class zombies who disgust the left.  

But it’s him and people like him who are the backbone of America in every possible sense.  He, and people like him, through their farming and their mining and all the other dirty jobs they do, and through their bourgeois values, provide the platform from which bullies like Obama and Hillary and the Democratic Party ooze their seething hate and dripping condescension back at them. 

It seems the backbone may have finally found its cause, its voice

I hope its true. The country needs them.