I’ve been intrigued by repeated media and social media outbursts about the racism in Trumpian ranks. Certainly there is some racism in the ranks – I won’t deny that.
But much of what is perceived as racism isn’t about race per se but rather about how race and, for that matter, gender, have been used within the last quarter century as a principal weapon of cultural Marxism.
All revolutions and social struggles release a sort of nervous energy that never dissipates. The intense libertarian/Jeffersonian energy that was released during the American Revolution, while perhaps waxing and waning over the last quarter millennium, has endured and even mutated significantly. In a sense, the civil rights movement bears a striking resemblance to the libertarian/Jeffersonian tradition – not surprising given that the movement is partly the ideological offspring of this libertarianism – and, like its progenitor, released its own energy a half century ago.
To put it another way, the civil rights movement is mutating too, and one of the effect of this mutation is that racism and other forms of intolerance are being defined up, in a manner of speaking, to more ambiguous forms of human behavior. This is where it has taken on very palpable cultural Marxist hues. It’s no longer considered sufficient simply to accept Martin Luther King’s expressed hope – now immortalized in high-school and college history textbooks – that all men and women one day will be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. One is expected to not only to tolerate but even to embrace a whole array of attitudes now days. Many see this as a form of proto-totalitarianism that is increasingly being expressed in unusually virulent and disturbing – not to mention, Kafkaesque – ways, particularly on many college campuses.
Are the vast majority of Trump voters aware of these cultural Marxist trends? Of course not. But they see these disturbing social and cultural trends unfolding in society, particularly on college campuses, and they’re screaming, “Enough!” And, predictably, they are met with the charges of intolerance and bigotry.
That is one factor among several that have accounted for the Trumpian revolution – or counterrevolution – or whatever one chooses to call it.
Call me a deplorable and irredeemable bigot or whatever other term the left develops to stock its rhetorical quiver, but the majority of rank-and-file Trump voters are seeing these cultural Marxist trends playing out in society, and they are concluding that this is not the way they define being an American and living in a free country. I believe that the vast majority of Trump voters are as committed to civil discourse as anyone else, but they refuse to submit to anything resembling an Orwellian social order.
They may not be as educated as the average Hillary voter, but they perceive emerging trends that simply do not bode well for liberty, at least, as they have understood that term all their lives. And, predictably, they’re pushing back.