Think pieces mourning the fall of multiculturalism drift through the fetid pool of the media and its smaller foreign policy pond is afloat with almost as many pieces mourning the multinational order.
In these revisionist histories, the resurgence of racial tribalism among Trump voters in the heartland and explosions of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe (aided by the ubiquitous vast Russian conspiracy) did in the great multinational and multicultural projects. Brexit and Trump killed the liberal order. Wealthy right-wingers and the Russians had secretly financed a campaign to undermine human progress.
Nonsense.
Trump and Brexit were responses to the collapse of liberalism. The collapse was accelerated when supposedly liberal political movements on both sides of the ocean endorsed two tribalisms. On the European side of the ocean, the EU tossed aside its post-national pose to back Muslim tribalism and its mass migration at the expense of the nation-state. On the American side, the Democrats abandoned even the pretense of believing in equality to fully embrace the pettiness of tribal identity politics.
The authorities were no longer creating a newly equal order, but recreating an old tribal one in which some people were more equal than others. And once that became obvious, their old working-class white constituencies backed Trump in the US and backed Brexit in the UK. Their votes didn’t break a liberal order. Instead, the votes reflected a recognition that liberalism no longer existed; only tribalism did.
The left resents these defections by the white working class, but it was the left that truly defected. The old lefty romance with the working class has left behind only a handful of artifacts, like mementos from an old relationship, a fondness for expensive prole wear, folk music, stories about old coal miners (not the current despised polluters), and occasional forays into trying to live on a few dollars a day. But even two generations ago, the left was trading its working-class costumes for ethnic togs and jewelry.
These days the left romanticizes race the way that it once did class. But class can be shifted, race can’t. It was one thing to demonize capitalists and another to demonize entire races. Class war could be rationalized as an effort to make society fairer by sharing the wealth, but race can’t be shared. No Communist revolution can redistribute skin color or any other fixed attribute of human biology. Tolerance and equality were liberal answers to racism, but they could never be lefty answers.
Instead of redistributing wealth, the left began redistributing racial power. It inveighed against the boogeyman of racial tribalism even as it was busy creating it. To a leftist, racism against white and black people, the national aspirations of a Briton or a Pakistani, a Frenchman or an Algerian, can’t be equated. The moral authority of the oppressor can’t be compared with the moral authority of the oppressed. But what people increasingly saw was the rebirth of racial tribalism and national chauvinism at the hands of the very people who had supposedly been fighting to tear down tribalism and chauvinism.
The white working class found itself on the wrong side of a class and race war. And it fought back.
The badges of mourning for the old liberal order are being flaunted as a talking point by the chattering classes. But these hollow exercises of grief are disingenuous coming as they do from the actual killers.
Race relations in the United States collapsed under Obama. The collapse wasn’t the result of a backlash against Obama’s race. If that were the case, he would never have won two presidential elections. It resulted from policies that he implemented whose purpose was to cause racial division. Unlike liberals, leftists had never believed in the races getting along. They profited from conflict, not coexistence.
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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