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Guest post: "We can't compete with Trump's hate - and we shouldn't"

271 replies

JosephineMumsnet · 09/11/2016 15:27

I'm not sure how many Brexits today is supposed to be worth. I started to lose count at around 3am. Then again, the shock is not quite the same as that of the morning of 24 June. If anything, given 2016's track record, it would have felt odd for the US election to go any other way.

Perhaps I have no right to be upset. After all, I'm not even American and even if I was, every expression of dismay will be that of a member of the smug liberal elite (since that is now what anyone who is not virulently right-wing has become). Even so, the parallels between politics in the UK and US seem to be overwhelming. We are witnessing a thuggish take-over by far-right bullies who pose as anti-establishment heroes, men who pretend to smash up the system while their own dominance remains untouched.

Donald Trump – just like the UK's Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage – is someone whose privilege has exempted him from having to follow the same rules as everyone else. He has been able to pose as a rule-breaker even though the normal rules of engagement never applied to him in the first place. Being a woman meant that Hillary Clinton could never have behaved as Trump did and got away with it. Yet precisely because of this she was dismissed as a member of the elite propping up the establishment. But Donald Trump is the establishment and it is rotten to the core.

George W Bush's victory in 2000 might have been bitterly disappointing – not to mention mired in controversy – but this is a disaster of a different order. Bush may have been racist, misogynist, classist, a warmonger, but he was within the bounds of what one might call a small-d democrat. Trump is not.

The dark turn taken by 2016 politics in both the UK and US has involved a shift to mob rule via the threat of violence. Mainstream UK newspapers call judges enemies of the state; Farage calls for Leave voters to take to the streets to 'get even' with politicians intent on 'watering down' the results of a vague, advisory referendum; a female politician is murdered in broad daylight by a far-right activist; and the man who hinted at the assassination of his female opponent is voted into the White House.

A contract has been broken. The likes of Trump and Farage would suggest that it is a contract that has enabled the elite to exploit the people. They would suggest that doing away with the superficial niceties of political discourse rightfully undermines those who use connections and educational advantage to manipulate others. But dispensing with the niceties means nothing if you replace them with threats and even more lies. It simply leaves us with nowhere to go.

I worry about how the left will respond to this disaster. Following Brexit many of us looked to ourselves, seeking refuge in self-blame. After all, if there's something you could have done, then perhaps you could do it now? But I do not want to see conversations about how Democrats should have listened more to 'the people’s' concerns about immigration and racial diversity. Plenty of those who voted for Trump were not the dispossessed; they were white college-educated men, drunk on years of being told that their dominance was under threat. There is no point in the left attempting to appease people who think this way. You just become a fellow hater, albeit someone whose mediocre, half-hearted hate can never compete with the full-blooded, unbridled hatred of men like Trump.

We need something more solid than that. This morning JK Rowling – whom I'd love as our PM – tweeted this: "We stand together. We stick up for the vulnerable. We challenge bigots. We don't let hate speech become normalised. We hold the line." That is what we must do. That is all that we can do. We know who is put most at risk by Trump's victory. The worst thing we could do is to sell them out on the basis that a politics that represents everyone is just too much to ask.

Rich white men are a minority. They do not have the right to intimidate everyone else into submission. This particular battle may be lost but people with compassion, love and the will to do right are not going anywhere.

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originalmavis · 09/11/2016 16:51

Very nicely put.