Neoliberal Centrist Dad, Episode 7

Why Trump won

While I genuinely thought that Harris was going to win, I was not the least bit shocked that Trump was victorious. In retrospect, I realise a lot of what went into my idea that Harris would win was wishful thinking, as well as selective bias. I didn’t want Donald Trump to win, mostly because I’m scared of what he’ll do on foreign policy, what his plan to deport millions will look like in practice, what his presidency means for Ukraine, how he will turbo charge right-wing populism throughout the world. I looked past the fact that Harris wasn’t a great candidate - and the degree to which this became clearer the longer the campaign went on. I also hoped that the greater weaknesses of the left in general wouldn’t bring the Harris campaign down. In the end, I think they did.

The Democrats can win in four years, no question. I would also argue that a Trump victory is good news for Starmer and his party, mostly because it is so bad for the Tories. Farage can represent pure Trumpism for those who want that, the Lib Dems are there for the anti-Trump vote, and Labour are the only ones trying to find a practical way through everything. This leaves no space for the Conservative party as it is currently configured.

However, for the Democrats to win in four years’ time - and the same principle applies to every centre-left party across the west, including Labour - they must face up to some of the huge own goals scored and the massive structural problems the left has overseen during the past five years in particular, ones that are continuing to cause huge electoral damage. I think what clinched the victory for Trump was the manifestation of these issues for the left - and how they have rotted the electorate’s relationship with the Democrats and centre-left politics in general.

The most common-sense types on the centre-left, the ones not totally captured by ideology, will tell you that “the trans debate is difficult”. It is not. There are two sexes, men and women. In very rare cases, a person of either sex might have gender dysphoria, which means essentially that they have the brain of the other sex. If you’re a grown up, have had an adequate amount of therapy ruling out other possibilities and you want to live as the opposite sex to the one you were born into, fine. But self-identification is a terrible idea for numerous reasons. Two of the biggest are that it one, allows people who might have psychological problems to identify as trans by mistake (often with massive, irreversible medical complications involved), two, that it allows any man, including some with less than pure intentions, access to women’s spaces. That’s before we get to the fact that offering the option of anything to do with changing one’s gender to children is an even worse idea than self-ID.

See, not hard. What’s amazing is that the above viewpoint would have been considered the most extreme liberal position even ten years ago. Now, it would get you cancelled from every metropolitan liberal left dinner party (which doesn’t worry me, I never got invited to them anyhow).

Rejecting the extremes of trans ideology is vital if the centre-left wants to start winning consistently again. The embrace of it has been alienating women en masse from centre-left parties across the west who are at best mealy-mouthed about this stuff, at worst, fully embracing of it. We saw that play out in the US election – there was an idea that women were going to flock to the polling stations to vote against Trump because of women’s rights issues, particularly abortion. This might have happened, given what a huge issue abortion rights are in America, had the Democrats and the wider US centre-left not handled trans issues over the last few years terribly, clouding the picture greatly.

But men, particularly young men, are an even bigger issue for the Democrats, and indeed, all centre-left parties across the west. Yesterday should be a wake up call on that front.

A lot of young men voted for Donald Trump yesterday. And while I am not a fan of Trump myself, I get it. I think the whole “toxic masculinity” narrative has been a total disaster for the centre-left, more so than even the trans stuff. Young men are being told constantly that they do not matter, that they should shut up, that they have privilege, that many of the things they like to do for fun are somehow “problematic”. This is why someone like Andrew Tate has such a seemingly inexplicably large following – who is creating a positive view of masculinity from a liberal left perspective to balance this stuff out?

All of this has created a gaping hole for Trump that he has happily driven into and parked his bus. Call me naïve, but when you spend all your political energy pissing off both men and women, what’s left?

This is before we get to the liberal left being patronising to poor people and ethnic minorities, bathed in a sort of smugness that is off-putting even to people who are sympathetic to the same basic aims, while at the same time, generally underestimating their opponents. “We’ll take care of you, but you have to do what we say and believe exactly what we tell you to believe,” has not turned out to be a winning slogan.

In a democracy, you have to take the electorate as it is – you can’t wish for it to be something different and hope that works out for you. I have no doubt the American voting public are willing to be liberal on a great many topics - look how far gay rights has come over the last decade, for instance – but there are limits. They aren’t going to go along with the idea that biological sex doesn’t exist, or that all young men should shut up and check their privilege. Ultimately, that is going to backfire on you. Just like it did to the Democrats yesterday. You want the Trumps of the world to stop winning? Stop making it easy for them.