How Donald Trump’s rise exposed the smugness of liberals

From the time Donald Trump announced his candidacy, with a speech in which he called Mexican immigrants ‘rapists’ and ‘drug dealers’, to his latest speech as the Republican nominee, most liberals in America and even around the world, have treated his Presidential bid with disdain, a joke that simply couldn’t come true. They dismissed him at every step, preferring to mock him instead of trying to understand how he managed to rack up almost 14 million votes along the way, reportedly the most a Republican nominee has ever received. He is the first political outsider to win the Republican nomination since the legendary General Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.

Rather than analysing his rise, or trying to understand why he was gaining support from people, they simply labelled him a demagogue, a racist, an idiot, a swindler, a con-man, a liar and a man completely unqualified for office. They spent time agitating about his statements - whether it was the ‘blood coming out of her wherever' comment on Megyn Kelly, his attack on Carly Fiorina, a lie about Muslims cheering on 9/11, his idea to ban Muslim immigrants, his fight with the Pope or a thorough analysis of his past.

Along the way, major liberal outlets of all hues and colours including Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Washington Post and the New York Times continually attacked his candidature, throwing off the veil of appearing unbiased. Ariana Huffington wrote a scathing piece titled We are no longer entertained, while Buzzfeed terminated its ad deal with the Republican Party because of Trump.

All liberal outlets, to one degree or another, behaved like their hero Jon Stewart, who was once described by Gerard Alexander in an NYT column as the ‘Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness’. John Oliver, the man who is seen by many as Stewart’s successor, also targeted him with the ‘Make Donald Drumpf Again’ segment, and liberals everywhere celebrated it like it was the end of Trump. As if a comedy segment was all that was needed to bring The Donald down.

For long, liberals of all shades across the world have behaved in a manner of depravity, wallowing in their own sense of smugness, believing that they are innately superior to conservatives and everyone else.

They’ve treated Trump’s supporters as barely human, racists without two brain cells to rub together, and everyone single attempt to besmirch Trump, whether it’s his past or his comments, simply makes him stronger.

Every listicle against him literally translates into more votes. Every strong op-ed calling him a ‘unique threat’, strengthens the resolve of his voters who feel that they’ve been deeply cheated by the powers-that-be.

For better or worse, Donald Trump’s rise, like Brexit, has torn down the illusion that liberals have lived under for so long - that the values they espouse are the ones shared by everyone around them. Even now, those of a liberal persuasion fail to comprehend Trump’s rise, or try to understand why he is that popular. To truly interpret Trump’s rise, we have to go back, way back to the values talked about by philosopher Aristotle in his book titled Politics.

In that particular tome, one of the greatest Western philosophers who ever lived, Aristotle explains the basic human motivations and factional conflict that leads to someone voting for a divisive figure like Trump. In an essay, Carson Holloway, political scientist and Associate Professor of the University of Nebraska explains how individuals act together for ‘profit or honour and their opposites’, to improve their livelihood.

He argues: “There is an obvious sense in which Trump’s supporters are acting in defense of their own perceived economic interests. In contrast to other candidates, Trump is distinctive because of his strident denunciations of illegal immigration (as well as his occasional suggestions that even legal immigration is presently at too high a level) and of America’s free-trade policies of recent decades. Yet it is not difficult to see how such phenomena are contrary to the interests of Trump’s largely middle- and working-class supporters.”

He explains that while free-trade and immigration might be good for a community in the long run, most people don’t care about the long-run. They are bothered about the present and in the present their jobs are going to people (either legally or illegally in America or outside) who are willing to work for far lower wages.

Similarly, they are fighting for their honour, to strive for equality since they believe that the leaders of political parties are ‘no longer seeking to advance the economic interest of working people’.

In that brilliant essay, Holloway signs of by saying that even if Trump loses, it’s important not merely to ‘deplore the effects but to address the causes, the underlying inequalities of profit and honour’ that generated the conflict in the first place.  

The common people of America, those that love their Old Glory and the Constitution, people that love their WWE and NASCAR and country music, regular, good-hearted people, actually see someone who is willing to hold up the 'American way of life'. That he refuses to play by stifling rules of modern-day political correctness, makes him an even greater hero in the eyes of his supporters.

But the fact that what Trump suggests as the ‘American Way’ is a lie and that America became the greatest nation in the world because of immigrants and multi-culturalism is something that his followers have completely overlooked.

Perhaps Trump’s rise will awaken the hibernating liberals across the political system, who seem to have forgotten the very values that liberalism stands for. Being a liberal doesn’t mean standing up for other liberals, but allowing everyone an equal say. A true liberal will not try to silence the conservatives, but try to meet them midway to explain their position.

The 19^th Century philosopher John Stuart Mill had once famously said: “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” Liberals across the world seem to have taken his quote to heart. America, the world’s greatest democracy, needs its liberals to get rid of their smugness and search their soul for where they went wrong and how they managed to alienate so many people at the same time. Perhaps, that will be Trump’s greatest legacy.