The truth is that Trump
frightens me to death.
Had I been an American
I would certainly not have voted for Clinton, but at the same time I would have
found it very hard to vote for Trump. Trump
won the presidency not because of the
fact that he was Trump, but despite
it.
I see him as a sort of
Frankenstein’s monster, compounded out of the organised intolerance of the
modern leftwing liberal movement and the derogation of duty by those whose job
it was, and still is, to oppose it.
Toleration doesn’t mean
approval. It means the—sometimes
reluctant—acceptance of the other’s right to exist or to behave in a particular
way. In most cases, it is a form of
compassion. But equally toleration
demands the same treatment in return.
Now the people who
promoted and continue to promote the liberal agenda, and those who benefited
from it from the 1990s onwards, are as vocal as ever on the matter of
tolerance, except that it is now a purely one-sided tolerance, meant to apply
solely to themselves and the causes they support. They are not opposed to intolerance in
principle.
To some extent this is
due to the invasion of their territory by the Left. The famous ‘no free speech for fascists’ has
now morphed into ‘no free speech for anyone
who disagrees with us on anything’.
Nor is it merely a
passive prescription, a matter of simply covering one’s ears and refusing to
listen. It is focused, dynamic and aggressive.
If one has opinions out of sync with theirs then they will do everything
in their power to cut you off at the knees.
Nothing is beyond them—especially with the internet as a weapon.
Their aim is an
ostensible ‘equality’, but, as in all these things, the closer one approaches
to this notional equality, the more the temptation grows to go the whole hog to
overall control. The ‘new decency’
demands a new humanity; and this is to be achieved not through argument or
persuasion, but rather through an underhand process of making people feel
uncomfortable about themselves and socially out of step.
Rather like Pavlov’s
experiments with dogs, but somewhat more sophisticated, for decades now film,
television, newspapers, fashion, books, education have been engaged in the
process of pouring poison into the ears of what was taken to be a sleeping population.
Yet as the recent
American presidential election showed, there is still a large proportion of the
population resistant to the process. For
years they had been hunkered down under the unceasing barrage of liberal conditioning,
afraid to open their mouths lest they be ridiculed as Neanderthals or bigots,
or lose their careers or businesses through on-line vigilantism.
The sad part of the thing
is that it took Trump to galvanise them.
What he was saying in his garbled way was what those of influence, who could
see what was happening and disagreed with it, should have been years ago saying. Except that they were too busy hiding along with
the rest.
Trump was the beneficiary
of this conservative cowardice, which presented him also with a huge wellspring
of frustrated public resentment to exploit.
It was all a matter of who drew first.
And fair play to Trump, he alone had the chutzpah to go for it.
But in the
circumstances, one imagines that even ‘Mr Ed’, had he been capable of making
the appropriate noises, would .have been a shoo-in.
