There were two very important editorials in today's Wall Street Journal that I'm sure most of its loyal readers glossed over. The first is a piece about how Liberals need to have a long look in the mirror about who is really at fault for the rise of Trump in the USA and ultra-nationalism in the EU and elsewhere. Here's the link. The second is a piece about how Liberals are going to have to rethink how they treat ever utterance and Tweet by Trump, as exhaustion will quickly overtake the wave of outrage they have been riding since he was elected. Here's the link to that piece. These are important opinion pieces about how the Left needs to change in order to be an effective force against these new political movements. If you have access to the WSJ, I highly recommend you read them. Because, as far as I can see, the Liberal political movements of the world are getting their asses kicked in local elections, and one party rule, regardless of the party, is never healthy for any country. Even though I dislike many of the policies of the left, I want them to be an effective fighting force against the worst deprivations of the right.
The problem in the USA currently is that the Democrats spent the last 6 years running this country through executive fiat after they lost their super-majorities in the first mid-term election of the Obama White House. They ran the country this way because they felt they had to, but also because they could not conceive of a future where they were not in charge of the executive branch of the US government. I get the feeling that both France and Germany in the EU have been doing much the same things, and are now perilously close to seeing Mrs. Merkel in Germany lose her re-election and see Marine Le Pen in France, if not take over the government there, continue to gain political power. The reason for this is because the left all around the globe have been in power for so long, and have isolated themselves from the people they supposedly represented for so long, that they are unable to truly understand the backlash they are facing. With that level of isolation, and policy making in an echo-chamber, they now find themselves unable to fight off the advances of their rivals. That very echo-chamber has sowed the seeds of their own defeat, and I fear a world where ultra-nationalism controls the helms of all of the world's super powers.
So, for any Liberal who truly doesn't understand how Trump beat Hillary, who truly doesn't get why Brexit won a majority of the vote, and who can't understand who would possibly vote for ultra-right leaning politicians, read these articles. They, better than I, will explain how your smarmy self congratulations over policies that did real harm to real people have rankled with the electorate. How every time you fought a battle for political correctness to the point of ruining someone's life that they and their friends took notice and began to hate you. How every time your politicians showed up in a limo to a $1000 a plate fundraiser to talk about how more needs to be done for the less fortunate, while doing little but expanding the well-fare state, infuriated many of the people you were supposedly trying to help. Basically, read those articles and understand, truly, how you all became the morally repugnant elite of the first world, and why your asses are getting kicked by people you think of as abhorrent. You've allowed previous successes to turn you into Marie Antoinettes saying "let them eat cake" as the revolution comes to your doors (I realize this is apocryphal, but it's a good analogy). You've become the limousine liberals that you likely once vowed you would never become. Please, for the sake of the world, do a better job. Because the rise of nationalism has, historically, signaled the beginning of a rough patch in human history.
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