The cultural dominance of the left has turned voting right into an act of cultural rebellion, by Ross Douhat. Here’s an insightful article into the current western cultural and political scene from September, before the election. The left have recently come to dominate culture, and they politicized it:
The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line. …
Late-night television … [has become] liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines. Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.
It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure. …
For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory.
But it has alienated many:
Outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion. …
This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. … Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever. …
Something like this happened once before: In the 1960s and 1970s, the culture shifted decisively leftward, but American voters shifted to the right … That Nixon-Reagan rightward shift did not repeal the 1960s or push the counterculture back to a beatnik-hippie fringe. But it did leave liberalism in a curious place throughout the 1980s: atop the commanding heights of culture yet often impotent in Washington, D.C.
See also Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected by Peggy Noonan.
hat-tip John
