Twilight Of The Cultural Tastemakers

Robert Mariani Opinion Editor

A lecherous egomaniac isn’t the kind of person you’d expect to be an exorcist, but an exorcist Donald Trump is. Like parting a demon from the flesh, he rid the United States of the most corrupt presidential nominee in the country’s entire history.

This is a pretty enormous (de)feat. The Democratic Party failed to win any of the three houses and now controls the lowest number of state legislatures in history despite its PR arm, the mainstream media, doing everything it possibly could to demonize Trump and downplay Hillary Clinton’s scandals. The presss’s gambit involved trading away long-term credibility to push their already overwhelming bias into the red zone just this once for short-term electoral gain.  They shot their proverbial load and made history, but not in the way they were expecting: trust in the American media hit its lowest point ever.

That’s because the electorate isn’t a machine where you can press bias buttons and get the candidates you want, but a system that can react to that kind of vulgar manipulation. This election in particular was a referendum on the cultural radicalism that is de rigeur in academia, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the press – our nation’s most powerful institutions.

They won the culture war, and the massacre in North Carolina is a stark example of the victor’s justice. After the people of North Carolina pre-empted any attempts to force their daughters to share the bathroom with mentally troubled men, every single dominant cultural institution in the country unleashed a no-holds-barred attack on the Tar Heel State in the name of transgender ideology. The Justice Department, Silicon Valley billionaires, entire sports leagues, and top Washington lobbying machines all joined hands to punish average people for resisting the cultural radicalism that has come to define the Democratic Party.

They don’t want debate anymore because they don’t need a debate anymore. The victory was total. If you are out of line with LGBT ideology, you are a bigot. If you have reservations about abortion, you are a misogynist. If you don’t want to import a third-world underclass in ever-greater numbers, you are a racist. Nobody can get a word in edgewise and come out unscathed. That’s power.

But it’s not despite these facts that Trump won, it’s because of them. Adherents of the ruling ideology called half of Americans retarded yokels and the retarded yokels heard them. Every Slate and Bustle article attacking Trump for being a supposed racist and woman hater was as good as money in his campaign coffers. Lena Dunham might as well have been an RNC operative by marrying her psychotic identity politics to her support of Hillary Clinton. The left overplayed its hand, and what was once power is becoming a liability.

This loss of unquestioned cultural dominance is going to come as a shock to American progressives; fish don’t perceive the water they swim in until they are yanked onto a boat. Or maybe it’s already come as a shock? The year leading up to Trump’s victory was punctuated by left-wing hysteria over a ludicrously defined-down version of “harassment” on social media. The media lost its mind when progressives on Twitter “fell victim” to a microscopic version of what conservatives have always had to deal with in a hostile cultural environment: public shaming and name-calling.

The left’s delusions of persecution were only magnified by Trump’s victory. Their media was relentless in its claim that Trump was a threat like none other in history (except for Hitler, of course), who would jeopardize everything they hold dear from every possible direction. People are confused by the almost inevitable lacunae between narrative and reality, necessitating the creation of hoaxed stories of racial attacks committed by suspiciously perfect Trump-hat-wearing villains. Does this happen because it’s “stressful to hold a theory of universal menace against the evidence of our senses?”

Trump was just a symptom, maybe. A man who was at the right place at the right time. What more could he be, with all his blemishes?

Whatever the case may be, here’s hoping that the American left will be forced to gain perspective and participate in the same kind of moral accounting that they’ve never had to do in their warm cultural cocoon. This might result in a rightward cultural shift similar to what we saw with the New Democrats in the 1990s. If this doesn’t happen, then just as well; the Democratic Party will accelerate its descent into an impotent organ built around third-world-style ethnic-patronage politics and pleasing rich gender ideologues in New York and San Francisco.

For any of those on the left who are reading this, Donald Trump’s victory doesn’t mean that the country is collapsing. It means that your ideology’s position of unquestioned domination is.

Robert Mariani is the opinion editor at The Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter.