As the campus stares dumbfounded at another Trump victory, many on the left still do not get it. “How could Trump win? Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, and even Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, and who would ever vote against those celebrities? All my friends support Harris; if they didn’t, we would not be friends. All my followers heart my story when I make grandiose political statements that if they ever opposed I would block. So if Trump won the answer must be racism.
Wait, Trump received 45 percent of the Latino vote, sorry the Latinx vote,. all Trump voters must be racist against blacks. Wait, Obama won Latinos handily; well it must be sexism. That is how Trump won: everyone is racist and sexist and if I keep telling them that they will vote for the left again. This outright denial is only professed by the supposed “educated elite.”
Many on campus and in America do not get how Trump won; it is Saturday Night Live’s 2016 election skit all over again. The hubris from the left, seeing no way their candidate could lose, and then blaming the loss on bigotry of voters. The only thing missing was Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock cracking jokes at the left’s expense in real time. In large part, the loss was because of the economy. Despite what the experts, who said inflation was transitory and who redefined the common understanding of a recession, claimed about Trump’s economic plans, Americans begged to differ when they looked at their grocery bill.
But there is another integral reason why Trump won which goes beyond the economy, Kamala Harris not being a good candidate, or even this election. The answer is morality. It has been common political parlance to follow Bill Clinton’s chief strategist James Carville’s advice “It’s the economy, stupid” but current times seem to undermine the wisdom of the phrase. Especially with the Republican gains in the working-class and minority vote, typically the backbone of the Democratic party. Democrats still provide massive expenditures of government funds but voters are still abandoning the party despite Republicans distaste of the government waste that accompanies welfare programs.
Why are these voters abandoning the party of their fathers? The answer is morality. Before 2015, political arguments on the internet were classified as culture war issues. Social justice warriors battling it out with the alt-right on Twitter all day was seen as periphery to real politics, taxes and deregulation The SJWs were confined to college campuses and the alt-right the dark far reaches of the internet, and while the alt-right has mostly remained that way, with notable exceptions such as Charlottesville, the SJWs crept into control of the Democratic party. The term woke was adapted to describe these SJWs and a whole slew of ever-evolving language was implemented such as non-binary and BIPOC set apart those in the know. Those who were classified as woke even started using new terminology to describe everyday things, heterosexual to describe what used to be commonly known as straight, and cis-gendered to describe people who did not change their gender.
At first the parties outwardly stayed the same: Republicans wanted to cut taxes while Democrats wanted to expand social programs. Then things started to change. Safe, legal and rare changed to shout your abortion, and everyday conversations were turned into minefields, one mistake with pronouns leading to broad condemnation. But the problem is that while these rules are strictly enforced in a college setting and within elite circles, in the words of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis “I don’t know what pan-sexualism is, but I know I don’t my five-year daughter anywhere near it…” a sentiment shared by most Americans who do not live on a college campus or in New York or Los Angeles. But a sentiment not understood by those who live on a college campus or in liberal cities on the coasts.
Americans have started to recognize the creep of SJW values in their own lives, many companies are asking for pronouns as part of introductions — a foreign concept to most people 10 years ago. This creep has transformed politics from that of how much tax money should be raised, from who should it be raised, and where it should be spent, to forcing morality back into the political realm. Placing morality back into the political arena has caused a cosmic shift in the political landscape seen in the growing number of working-class people and minorities turning Republican. Before, Catholics could put up with safe, legal and rare abortion for social programs but are much less comfortable with legalization through all nine months being the only policy of Democrats. The current exodus of the working class and minorities is only the beginning and if the left does not wisen up to this they may be in for a lot more Trump-like trouncings. Because it’s not the economy stupid, it’s the morality, stupid.
Armand Chancellor is a fourth year student in the Brooks School of Public Policy. His fortnightly column The Rostrum focuses on the interaction of politics and culture at Cornell. He can be reached at [email protected].
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