For the politically demented, 2016 was a vintage year. Well, at least for those whose blood warms when seeing their foes splay and spasm like wounded squid. Watching pious progressives meltdown in real-time has become something of a spectator sport.
Now, this sounds a little abrasive, perhaps. But after eight years of slumberous yawping from President Obama and his global claque of clapping seals, to even stem the tide of liberalism feels like victory.
Only time’s sorest losers can’t quite understand why they lost. After all, everyone they know agrees with them. Every member of the clan can thumb to the latest piety; recite the current number of genders (72, at time of writing), the manifest reasons why Donald J. Trump “is not my president,” and why Great Britain just cannot survive leaving the European Union, despite once dominating a third of the planet.
How can this be? They ask expensive and opportunistic therapists. Well, it turns out that groping swathes of ordinary people didn’t quite get the memo on the benefits of outsourcing their good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas; they missed the part where an endless supply of third-world labor would magically enrich their own prospects. They still struggle to bend their heads around social and economic chaos billed by their betters as a prelapsarian Eden.
Not a day goes by where the citizens of nowhere don’t glibly denounce the decisions of their subjects. Those who voted to leave the European Union “didn’t know what they were voting for”; Trump backers were “uneducated,” “ill-informed,” to say nothing of “deplorable”; the Big Red Bear coaxed them into voting “against their own interests.” On both sides of the pond, the Remainers and the Resisters riffle through the same playbook.
They have a simple plan to make it all better. Yes, those used to airbrushing minor and major deficiencies with an Instagram filter, are simply going to stop Brexit and Trump from happening.
A second referendum! This time the rubes will vote the correct way. And impeachment. The Stepford students, egged on by their professors, will defenestrate the president of the world’s only superpower, and nobody—not those pesky hayseeds, anyway—will notice.
They’ll do this for the good of everyone they refuse to speak to, or allow to speak. And history, with its bending arc of justice, will thank them for it. Gracious? You bet. Modest? TBC.
Except the real world isn’t governed by Facebook “likes” and virtue-signaling petitions authored by the mentally desolate. Parochial as it may sound—voters, no matter their acquaintance with brunch or bikram yoga, get a say. A petrifying prospect.
Now, it is not for want of trying, nor for absence of irony. The revolution will be Facebook-Lived.
Every week since the tempestuous referendum in June last year, right-on types garbed in EU drapery like dime store piñatas have thronged the streets of London and other righteous enclaves, keen to rejig—forcibly—the loathsome Untermensch and their flaccid minds, imploring their Resistance comrades across the Atlantic to do the same. They’re on the cusp of total victory… much like Harvey Weinstein is a paragon of chivalry.
Most puzzling are the motivations of the iPhone insurrectionists. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were death blows to the neoliberal status quo; the decadent monument of a cadaverous political class long beyond its use.
Now, their grievances are no mere trifle. Since the financial meltdown in 2008, and the radiant lack of bankers in bracelets, a potent and wholly-justified anger has bubbled toward establishments across Europe, and the United States.
But Remainers and their Resistance brethren are training their fire on friendlier forces, not the thimbleriggers who plunged the West into wanton chaos. After all, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs funneled millions into the Remain campaign to keep Great Britain tethered to the floundering EU; Hillary Clinton was the Wall Street nominee. Those most vocally opposed to the president, and Brexit, are of oligarchic stock.
Though, hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned. Far from coming to terms with a rather rudimentary concept of democracy, the Resistance wheels out the same tired lines, from the same tired people, from the same tired era.
Hillary Clinton’s recent gallivant across Great Britain was characteristically chafing. She “respected” the Brexit vote, she lied, before plucking the prophecies of economic doom from the fraying playbook of the politically demented. The resolve to see Brexit through, I hunch, strengthens each time Mrs. Clinton bumps her gums, à la Obama’s “lead from behind” velvet fist.
Alas, it is already over. Populists are parking tanks on establishment lawns in politically temperate climes like Germany; a conservative-nationalist won outright in Austria; the Italian elites are due a drubbing next year, and President Trump will be lighting up Twitter until 2024, whilst his Czech kindred spirit is on course to win this weekend’s general election. The EU high command is quite rightly terrified, and the Democrats are increasingly unmoored from reality.
But, that is the thing with the jilted—they’re always the last to know just how crazy they look to everyone else. Hell, watching them meltdown is better than football.
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