By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, December 07, 2016
In the vast tsunami of leftist grief that has washed over
the land in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking presidential victory, no
flotsam has been as prevalent as Hollywood gliterrati weeping and screaming and
gnashing their teeth while donning only the most stylish and expensive
sackcloth. Most recently, near-sextuagenarian Madonna lamented, “I was
devastated, surprised, in shock. I haven’t really had a good night’s sleep
since he has been elected. We’re f***ed.”
Some of the shock of Trump’s victory is surely due to the
bubble that exists in Hollywood and New York, the Pauline Kael–esque sense that
nobody could have voted for Trump.
But some of it also derives from celebrities’ self-assured belief that they
have an outsized impact in the world of politics. Clearly that view infused the
Clinton campaign: Hillary trotted out Lena Dunham of Girls fame, she of the false rape accusations and gleeful
admissions of sexually abusing her sister, on the campaign trail all year long;
Clinton advocates such as Elizabeth Banks took time off from producing bad a cappella sequels to film ads; singers
and actors all joined to make a difference by producing a glossy version of
Rachel Platten’s maddening “Fight Song.”
And not only didn’t those things matter, they actually
helped drive voters away from
Clinton. They exacerbated the image of Clinton as an out-of-touch elitist who
spent her free time hanging out with Katy Perry, even as Donald Trump, at a
stadium in rural Ohio, took yet another boisterous swipe at elitism.
But it wasn’t just because these celebrities were rich
and out of touch that Americans were put off by them. It’s because those
celebrities were the people most likely to judge red-state Americans as rubes —
nasties intent on targeting Muslims and gays and blacks and women. The unearned
moral superiority of America’s celebrity class rests in their open condemnation
of flyover Americans as brutish louts, and their self-parodying belief that
they are civil-rights heroes. Hollywood (wrongly) believes that it singlehandedly
ended segregation; Hollywood (rightly) believes that it had a heavy hand in
promoting same-sex marriage. Hollywood sees itself as the moral vanguard.
Americans reacted badly to that.
Why did they react so badly to the celebrities in this
particular election cycle? Ironically enough, it’s because the Left had already
won the culture wars.
Most Americans, not just celebrities, vote as they do
because they have a moral vision of themselves and the universe in which they
are heroes or victims, never perpetrators. For decades, the Left consistently
put front and center its vision of an America in which Republicans were
victimizers: Either they were evil racists, or they were John Lithgow–in-Footloose holier-than-thou sexual
prudes, or they were old-style Mad Men
sexists looking to shove women back into the kitchen. Celebrities helped push
these narratives through the stories they told, the movies they filmed, the
books they wrote.
And Americans accepted the critiques.
Americans accepted racial equality. Americans celebrated
female empowerment. Americans went libertarian on sexual behavior.
And the Left had to go searching for a new civil-rights
struggle with which to cram conservatives back into their “victimizer”
cubbyhole.
There was, however, one problem: All the good
civil-rights issues have been dealt with already. And so the Left, which
focuses all of its efforts on social issues, was relegated to pushing
crime-increasing myths about the evils of cops; the celebrities were forced to
pretend that men peeing next to women was the next great Martin Luther King,
Jr.–style struggle; Democrats were forced to march on their next target, not
merely church involvement in state, but private beliefs of churchgoers.
And herein lies the biggest problem facing the American
Left: America is the most tolerant country in world history. There are no more
serious civil-rights struggles for the Left to push. In fact, the Left now
pushes against civil rights in its
ignorant search for the new struggle: Religious bakers must be destroyed if
they won’t bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; young girls must be forced to go
to the same bathroom as middle-aged men, hosts on HGTV must be policed for
belief in Scripture regarding sexual sin.
No wonder Americans reacted by telling the Left to shove
it.
That phenomenon could very well continue. The Left has
run out of aggressors to target; instead, they’ve become the aggressors,
self-righteous morality police dedicated to wiping out dissenting thought. Americans
aren’t up for that sort of thing. We think we’re pretty tolerant people, and,
by and large, we are. Trump won, at least in part, by refusing to kowtow to the
Left’s newest social crusades, in word if not in deed.
In Die Hard,
villain Hans Gruber misquotes Plutarch: “And when Alexander saw the breadth of
his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” The Left will
never recognize that simple fact — and so they will push ever onward, steadily
encroaching on liberty and driving a blowback they cannot comprehend.
No comments:
Post a Comment