by Brett Stevens on July 20, 2017

The Obama years represented a high-water point for Leftism in the West because people realized that Leftism has put us on a path to suicide, and that the only way out is to roll back our conversion to Leftism and find something that works instead.

Interestingly, this began happening when the people who had been most fooled by Leftism began to apply the management theory they used at work to the future of the West, and came up with a giant gaping void. They realized that what seemed good was in fact bad, resulting in civilization collapse conditions:

According to Murray, the migrant crisis perfectly encapsulates this exhaustion. In some ways, itâ€™s a case of competing virtues: the desire to be virtuous to the rest of the world is competing against justice for the people of Europe. Increasingly, virtue is winning out over justice because a misguided commitment to hollow notions of â€œrespect,â€ â€œtolerance,â€ and â€œdiversityâ€ has supplanted the deep roots of European civilization. The problem, argues Murray, is that European values have â€œbecome so wide as to become meaninglessly shallow.â€

Our modern time is guided by a religion of the ego known as individualism. In this religion, “virtue” is a matter of how one appears to others, so anything egalitarian is good because it is always popular with large groups. In turn, that promotes the individual who makes fawning speeches about “equality,” so it is seen as a high degree of personal morality in the bourgeois middle-class filter which praises success and ignores long-term consequences to civilization, because the only question is the Self and its level of comfort and wealth.

The groups awakening are not who one might expect. In America, the group that created the Tea Party re-grouped around Donald Trump and made him president. But they are not the working poor as reported by some media outlets, but instead, the affluent and “educated”:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. They hold more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally. They are also more likely to describe themselves as â€œvery conservativeâ€ and President Obama as â€œvery liberal.â€

Not surprisingly, these results were borne out when the same group rallied behind Donald J. Trump in his run for President:

The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. Thatâ€™s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But itâ€™s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. Itâ€™s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both. …Trump votersâ€™ median income exceeded the overall statewide median in all 23 states, sometimes narrowly (as in New Hampshire or Missouri) but sometimes substantially. …However, while Republican turnout has considerably increased overall from four years ago, thereâ€™s no sign of a particularly heavy turnout among â€œworking-classâ€ or lower-income Republicans. On average in states where exit polls were conducted both this year and in the Republican campaign four years ago, 29 percent of GOP voters have had household incomes below $50,000 this year, compared with 31 percent in 2012.

When we look across the sea, we see the same pattern true of Brexit voters:

In fact, most leave voters were in the south: the south-east, south-west â€“ indeed the entire south apart from London voted leave. …Furthermore, most leave voters are middle class, or at least were of the generation whose housing and pension windfalls put them squarely in the category of wealth. …The more enlightening figures are those that plot voting against housing; yes, social and council tenants voted leave, but so did those who owned their houses outright, the people we might describe as societyâ€™s winners. By housing type, the only groups where remain prevailed were private renters and people with mortgages.

Calling these political events “populism” may be incorrect, as more accurately they are a revolution of the managerial class, who because they handle business and human psychology at their jobs, are more capable and informed regarding how to run human organizations. They looked into the abyss and did not like what they saw, and now they are pushing back.

The enduring question remains how to appeal to these people. They will buy “green” products, support charities and vote for what they think is best for the nation because they realize their fates are contingent upon the value of the economy, which to a large degree reflects the stability of the nation. These are good places to start.

Each time they see a Rotherham, a G20 riot, an Antifa attack on Berkeley, a $20 trillion debt, an Evergreen college, a Benghazi, or any other massive failures that go unnoticed by most people and the media, they get the sinking feeling that their society is becoming Brazil. To them, that means a loss of wealth, power and opportunity for their kids.

Convincing them of identity politics alone will not work, but showing them that identity plus a non-tyrannical yet non-democratic leadership structure will make greater stability and thus greater opportunity will appeal to them. They like the idea of fairness in opportunity, whether “equal” or not, so that their offspring have a chance to rise as well.

In the past, they were liberal because they saw only the upside, which was fewer restrictions on commerce and therefore, more growth. Now they are seeing that growth results in a reduction in quality, and that in turn causes a reduction in value and increase in social instability, and they want to return the poor-quality product (Leftism) to the store and find something better.

Tags: brexit, donald j. trump, voters

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