At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper – no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.
- Winston Churchill.
I have a Make America Great Again hat. I wear it. It annoys people.
Trump is an incredible oaf, a bore, a braggart, and the personification of the "ugly American". He's ignorant, in all likely hood a sexist, too friendly with pseudo-dictator Putin and willing to stoop lower than a flat worm's nutsack if it will win him votes.
On these points I entirely agree. And yet enough 'little' men (and a lot of little women too) voted for him to make him President of the United States. This is incomprehensible to the establishment, the political liberati, their vanity mirror the MSM and Those Who Know Better. Collectively they have responded both here and in the U.S with the most absurd public tantrums ever to accompany the democratic election of a president. These usually involve charges of antisemitism, racism and homophobia and culminate in dark mutterings about "Fascism".
Trump, you see is the new Hitler.
No really.
But where’s the evidence? It’s difficult to be an anti-Semite when your daughter has converted to Judaism and your son-in-law and most trusted senior adviser is an ethnic Jew. And policy-wise you’re shaping up to be the most pro-Israel president ever. Your credentials as a homophobe are doubtful too if you say you're fine with same-sex marriage and you are the first Republican presidential candidate ever to mention LGBTQ people in your convention speech ("I promise to do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens.") And would a true racist have appointed Ben Carson to his cabinet or made Ajit Pai chairman of the Federal Communications Commission?
If you think Trump is the new Hitler, you don’t know much about the old one.
I put this insanity down to the failure of school teachers to read The Boy who Cried Wolf to their charges twenty years ago. My new-entrance teacher, Miss Benning, certainly read it to us, imparting a lesson about the value of truth telling and at the same time saving herself from the teacher-hell of constant tell-tales. Smart lady.
The Left needs to keep its powder dry. "Fascist" and "Hitler" are among the worst words in the arsenal of political invective. They should be used with care. For when someone comes along who really deserves them we'll want their power. If they become nothing but limp epithets denoting a vague straying from left-wing orthodoxy, what terms will we use when we really need to sound the alarm? Go in for a bit of hyphen happy neologism? "Super-fascist" perhaps, or "Mega-Hitler"? Super-fascist-mega- Hitler?
You see the problem. And what has the Don done exactly to deserve this comparison to the Fuhrer? Winning a democratic election? No. Lefties will insist, it's his policies.
Which ones? Protecting the borders of his country? Sending back illegal immigrants, people who have snuck into the U.S for economic gain. The smugness of Kiwis about this staggers me. We just don’t have this problem. We don’t need walls because we have water; having to swim thousands of miles of ocean is disincentive enough. If Indonesians ever take up long distance swimming, we may develop a different attitude.
Protecting the prosperity of his citizens? Cancelling the TPP and promising to renegotiate other free trade agreements are challenge-able on economic grounds, but hardly on moral ones. According to U.S bureau of Labor statistics the percentage of native born men working or looking for work is the lowest it has ever been in U.S history. The Don wants blue collar jobs for these men, many of them vulnerable "Rust Belt" workers hit hard by the 2008 Great Recession.
How dare he.
The so called "Muslim ban"? A temporary moratorium on citizens of seven countries visiting the U.S that is so anti-Muslim that it exempts 87% of the world’s Muslims? That Islamophobic monster.
Of course, it’s not his policies. It’s him. At the heart of this instinctual rage against the man is simple snobbery. They don’t like his type. Old straight white guys. They’re "deplorable".
The Deplorables. If there was one utterance that should have instantly disqualified Hilary from the Oval office it was this. To dismiss your opponent’s voters in this way – the citizens who you hope to govern – is deeply anti democratic. No matter what nasty things Trump said about his opponents he carefully avoided attacking their supporters.
They can criticise his policies, abhor his personal style, lament his deficits in intelligence and charm, but when they use the F word or question his right to be president, the Left are attempting to turn mere snobbery into a political virtue and worse, paying an unintentional compliment to fascism, by employing its smearing, bullying, free speech denying tactics.
I have a Make America Great Again hat. I wear it. It annoys people. The right kind of people. The people who need to be annoyed: the intolerant left.