Brexit and President Trump within a few months of each other! 2016 will go down as a bad year for the politically correct, leftie luvvies who for too long have believed they monopolized the truth and have seen dissent from their righteous path as a sign of stupidity and ill intent.
The left has for years been living in an echo chamber, hearing only the sound of their own voices reaffirming to them the virtue of their cause. How a majority could back the alternative is met with disbelief, not contrition. Alternative opinions are greeted with disdain and hostility, and this creates the very building blocks of the bubble, suppressing discord and silencing dissenting voices. Only the approved opinions are heard.
This is the soil in which swathes of today’s youth have grown into Social Justice Warriors, creating a movement infecting college campuses, social media feeds and political organisations with intolerable self-righteousness and suppression of free speech.
The left is of course not alone in dismissing dissenting opinions, but the vitriol they reserve for political opponents is unique and is rooted in a feeling of profound moral superiority. Differing opinions must be based on a moral defect and are not to be respected. Take the UK’s Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn, where even the party’s own MPs are fair game if they do not subscribe to the Corbynista agenda. Even the hallowed institution of Democracy is not sacred if it produces the wrong result. Witness the protests following the US election result.
The SJW’s are most concerned with the fate of minorities, whom they see as victims to be protected from a multitude of perceived injustices. The irony is of course that in their pursuit of the chosen cause they engage in the same stereotyping that they chastise their opponents for: woman, black, Hispanic, gay, lesbian or handicapped; you tell me your demographic and we will tell you how to vote. Recently Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who is homosexual, was denounced as ‘not a gay man’ by a prominent LGBT magazine when he announced he was supporting Trump. Only the loathed heterosexual Caucasian male is seemingly allowed to have opinions of his own, though implicitly the wrong ones.
In the eyes of the SJW crowd, any misstep from the narrow righteous path excludes you from the pool of acceptable people. The farce around Donald Trump’s decade-old lewd comment in the back of a bus could not have illustrated it better. To the left-leaning media and the SJWs a throw-away comment, made in what was thought to be a private conversation, should be enough to disqualify Trump from holding the office of President. But it turned out to be time for a wake-up call: in the bubble of the Huffington Post or the Guardian it may be, but out in the real world different rules apply.
To regain political relevance, the left would have to step out of the bubble and engage with the real world – start debating opponents, not chastising them. Indignation may buy you brownie points with your SJW friends but is unlikely to do anything to opponents other than intimidate them into silence. So, next time one finds oneself exposed to the insufferable self-righteous smugness of the SJW snowflakes one should not despair. Instead, in silence, thank them for living in a bubble condemning them to irrelevance.