28 Reasons Why The Left Must Alter Its Strategy If It Wants To Win In 2020
With Midterms around the corner, it’s also time to start thinking about the Presidential Election in 2020. Throughout this Trump term, there has been increased frustration and unrest throughout many communities in the country. As 2020 approaches, the Left must start to strategize for the election and begin to analyze the newfound needs of the country. Read on to find out why the Left must alter it’s strategy to win 2020:
1. In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote, “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
2.“If everything’s racist,” a Latino policeman said to me, “nothing’s racist.”
3. “Trump is to politics what KISS is to rock ‘n’ roll,” someone says. Someone else does a parody of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, turning it into Donald’s World. This is virtue-signaling, whose effect is less than zero.
4. An Australian sex educator suggests that parents ask their babies for their consent before changing their diaper.
5. There is now a school of animal obedience training that eschews punishment.
6. Tim Parks emails me: “Liberals don’t get how much Trump is their child. Trapping us up for so long in their correctness, their can’t-offend, their sense of guilt, they created their monstrous opposite. The #metoo movement is an exacerbation of the same spiral. All men suddenly feel they have to apologize for being men, all whites for being whites, etc. And suddenly people love an appalling guy who won’t apologize and champions whites.”
7. Interviewed by the Guardian, English documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux says, “For all Trump’s awfulness, I can’t help but admire his shamelessness, in an odd way. Or maybe not admire but be fascinated by it and maybe envy it. In a shame culture, he seems to have figured out that if you refuse to be shamed, it gives you enormous power.”
8. The University of Washington Q Center SAFE ZONE certificate reads, “I hold myself accountable to: listen and affirm; address prejudiced words and actions in an education [sic] manner; continue to further my personal education around queerness.”
9. Toke Dahler, the student union affairs officer at Leeds University in England, defends its ban on controversial speakers: “Our single most important task is to ensure that students feel safe in our building. A student union is for students. It’s our right to decide who comes in our building. This is not about being safe from views that we don’t like. This is about being traumatized. People get traumatized in the outside world, and the student union is a safe space.”
10. Linda Bellos, a feminist who was denied permission to speak at Cambridge University, says, “They think that what I might say [about policies pertaining to transgender people] is going to be offensive to them; therefore, I can’t say anything. That is absolutely mad.”
11. Richard Spencer says, “In the current year [2016], one’s career can be ruined and one’s life destroyed if you express anything other than admiration for a man who wants to cut off his genitals and say he’s a woman. In the current year, a white who takes pride in his ancestors’ accomplishments is evil, but a white who refuses to accept guilt for his ancestors’ sins is also evil, maybe even more so. In the current year, white families work their whole lives to send their children to universities where they will be told just how despicable they are. In the current year, the powerless lecture the powerful about how they don’t recognize their privilege. In the current year, a wealthy Jewish celebrity [Seth Myers?] bragging about the ‘end of white men’ is the one speaking truth to power. In the current year, if you are physically strong, you are fragile; black is beautiful, but whiteness is toxic; government doesn’t stop crime but subsidizes it; white privilege is very real, but race is just a social construct; and if facts are too disturbing, you can always retreat into the ‘safe space’ of box juice, teddy bears, and endless empathy where reality doesn’t have to matter anymore.”
12. UC Berkeley lists the use of the phrase “America is the land of opportunity” as a micro-aggression.
13. I receive a memo that reads, “Dear English Department, We have received a public records request that requires us to help [the university] ‘provide a list of all trigger warnings for potentially upsetting or distressing content’ that any of us may have issued in the course of our job responsibilities. The request does not define ‘trigger warning.’ The College has, however, provided the attached syllabus as an example of what a ‘responsive record’ documenting a ‘trigger warning’ might look like. . . . Syllabi and course descriptions are the likeliest places to find ‘trigger warnings.’”
14. Sometimes the values that reign in academic/literary culture seem completely divorced from the values that reign in the Trumpian universe, but in actuality they’re utterly interdependent.
15. Lorrie Moore says, “It’s my male students I’m worried about now. They have no idea how to act, what to say. They’re completely lost.”
16. The Washington State legislature proposes to allow people who view themselves as “non-binary” to change the sex on their birth certificate to read “X.”
17. Librarian-NPR book reviewer Nancy Pearl claims that, after reading and enjoying a novel set in contemporary Detroit, she thought about moving from Seattle back to her “native” Motown. She considered becoming an “urban pioneer.” In other words, she would “discover” a city that was founded by Antoine de la Mothe-Cadillac in 1701 and is now 82% black.
18. In Vimi Bajaj’s essay on V.S. Naipaul in the Writer’s Chronicle, she argues that he was a great writer only early on, when he was compassionate, and is now no longer of interest, because he hates most of humanity; such a formulation would eliminate everything from Petronius’s The Satyricon (1st Century A.D.) to Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015).
19. The key points of Rebecca Solnit’s comically tone-deaf November 2016 essay, “Bird in a Cage,” appear to be that 1) she visited a black man on death row at San Quentin; and 2) she has a few more readers for her easy polemics now than she used to.
20. The moment a Filipino employee briefly enters the narrative in an episode of This Is Us, it’s impossible not to know that he’s going to help—rather than hinder—Toby’s attempt to stop a box from being delivered to his and Kate’s house.
21. Trying to write a screenplay with a Tinder addict, the project collapses, because the Tinder addict has zero comprehension that his perspective (that of a straight, white, handsome, late-30s hipster with the perfect job and the perfect dog) matters to absolutely no one anymore.
22. At a book festival in D.C., I’m one of two straight, white, male, late-middle-aged, Jewish writers, and only one of our photos can be included in the program.
23. The three principal NYT theater critics—Alexis Soloski, Jesse Green, and Ben Brantley—conduct a symposium on the state of American theater in the age of Trump. All are sublimely oblivious of the extent to which they each embody everything that drove five million Obama voters to Trump.
24. The American chattering class’s incessantly uses the time-buying, throat-clearing, “backstory ‘So,’ to jump-start the response to a question and to imply that the answer is immeasurably more complicated than the naïveté of the question implies.
25. In 2000, Al Gore, asked whether he prefers to watch baseball indoors or outdoors, conducted a cost-benefit analysis. Bush, asked the same question, said he enjoys sitting outside in the sunshine.
26. Promoting her book The Trouble with Reality, WNYC’s Brooke Gladstone says, “My facts reflect the world as it is. Trump’s facts, as a rule, do not. I do not know the facts of his supporters, not really. I only know they voted for Trump, which is inconceivable to me. Which is to say, I can’t conceive of it.”
27. On NPR, a woman discusses her idea for a new app, NutriFriend, which will tell you, based on information gleaned from social media, whether the person you’ve just met is likely to have a positive or negative effect upon your attempt to eat right.
28. The cable TV installer complains about the difficulty of finding a parking space, the convoluted and ineffective process by which Xfinity processes work orders, the clueless customer call service center in the Philippines, his earnest Latina co-worker who wins the bonus trip to Vegas every year. Only after he leaves do I realize he was angling for a tip (bonding between white guys), which I forgot to provide and which will provide for him further ammo.