thecoppercow:

I’m grimly fascinated that we had the exact same sequence of reactions and events happen for Trump as for Brexit. Literally. it’s almost uncanny. It’s the same script, just with bigger characters.

1. So you have the initial blow, where you realise that a plurality of your fellow citizens hate the sight of you so much, they will vote to destroy their own economy, tank their currency, and make their own lives worse provided that they see less immigrants/more white supremacy. (Btw – the shock isn’t that you only just realised how many of them there are, or that they’re so good at hiding until there’s someone that explicitly calls  them – you knew that already since you were, what, 6,7? No, the shock is the ‘normals’ who claim they aren’t bigots, but see such things as a candidate endorsed by the KKK, a woman stabbed, shot with a homemade gun, dragged across the street and hacked at by a man shouting ‘Britain First!’, and yet still think ‘nah, that doesn’t put me off, I’m gonna vote for their side’. That’s where the pain hits – your neighbours willing to throw their lot in with racists, antisemites, sexists, homophobes, willing to legitimise them, embolden them.)
2. But then you expected that, really, and you can grasp the reaction from the racist bit of the right. But then what about ‘your side’ – the left? Turns out, that whenever a whitelash happens, white male Bernie Bros and Corbynistas react …the exact same way as the right, at first. They hail this event as a failure of neoliberalism, a ‘fightback against the elite’ (the elites being, uh.. you mouthy women who keep going on about rape culture, gay people who won’t shut up and be happy, brown and jewish people who, well, exist.) Lefty pols that claim to be the ‘rightful’ champion of minorities (”of course you’re on our side, we’re best for you, where else would you go?”) act like they’re a trivial, bougie concern. That’s the second slap in the face. They utterly ignore the racial resentment. They pretend working class = all white. That black and asian minorities being poor or hit by globalist crises is just the way of the world, but when canvassers spoke to voters and heard ‘send them all home’, they were expressing economic anxiety. That despite stats suggesting the poorest communities actually breaking for the Dems, and the strongest Trump votes being in areas that had actually started to see growth, this was 100% about neoliberalism. The white left utterly ignores the rise of nationalism, and concentrates on populism. I’m glad to see a lot of the LGBT+/BAME American left calling this out right now, good on youse.
3. Then, when the white left (and white liberals, and moderate white conservatives) deign to acknowledge that ‘hold on, nationalism and racism and sexism and bigotry *is* actually quite a large part of this ‘fightback against the elite’ thing!’ comes the third smack in the face. This is the bit that got to me. It happened a couple weeks after Brexit, and I see it’s just picking up pace in the US after Trump, now. This is when the ‘rational, academic, intellectual leftists’ come out. They will rationally and intellectually acknowledge that hmmm, yes, racism and bigotry was a factor in this backlash. They’ll finally agree with what you knew already – that minorities have been used as scapegoats. Then they’ll tell you that you’re the problem, and that we should ~understand~ Trump voters. That we should empathise with Brexiter’ fears. That racism and sexism don’t just come out of nowhere, they were manipulated into it, and that the liberal elite (you) need to understand that. They’ll post graphs and stats about how Brexit voters are being “stigmatised” and tut, asking you to reconsider. (my favourite was ‘omg, this family won’t allow their kid to hang out with a racist family! how close-minded! We’ll never convince them at this rate!”) They’ll argue that tarring people who voted for racism with the racist brush and asking them not to be racist will only make them… racist. They’ll point to your tears, your anger, your fear and disappointment at what your country thinks of you, how some people literally want you dead, and equate that to the anger that white voters had when they shouted ‘P*kis go home!’, say you’re putting voters off. They’ll say “see that fear and confusion you feel now? Now you know how white racist voters have felt in a changing world for the last few years.” (I’m paraphrasing for clarity, but not exaggerating, that was an actual, ‘sensible’, ‘lefty’ academic quote.) The thing is; you aren’t actually trying to convince any voters, nor should you have to – as a minority, you’re allowed to be just angry. But they’ll expect you to be utterly unmoved, entirely sympathetic to the people who’ve just admitted they want you gone, and avoid ‘metropolitan liberal elitism’. It’s how you’re expected to empathise with Trump voters but you are not given any empathy when you mourn, that is the third “fuck you” from your side. What @the-eleventh-blog​ rightly pinpointed as a kind of gaslighting, almost.

I’m quite interested to see what will happen in April 2017, in France. I wonder if Corbynistas and Bernie Bros and the white french left will react the same way in the face of a party that literally calls itself the National Front. (I wonder if the leftists who pride themselves on how rational and unemotional analysis will finally agree that there’s no need to ~understand~ neonazis, that we understand them well enough. Doubt it.)