Are Donald Trump Supporters Idiots? The Surprising Line Of Thought Connecting Donald Trump, Camille Paglia, And Michel Foucault

We are still witnessing the fallout from the postmodern fashions of the last fifty years. In fact, the contemporary fad for intersectionality has its roots in the postmodern tradition, according to an excellent essay by The Charnel House.

Postmodernism has been defined as “a suspicion of metanarratives.” Intersectionality is the study how different types of oppression intersect — for example, the oppression suffered by a black, female, trans woman will be worse than the oppression suffered by a black, female cis-gender woman. Unless other factors mitigate, the former lady wins the Oppression Olympics.

I was interested to see the Charnel House essay, as a person who graduated from university in 2008, having read lots of Derrida and Foucault. Postmodern theory was very stylish when I was a student, and there were whispers about intersectionality, but none of these things had yet entered the popular imagination via the Twitter and Facebook-fueled SJW movement.

I watched with interest after graduation as this began to happen (thanks, Mark Zuckerberg).

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Instagram exploded in the years after I entered the workforce, and I witnessed the mainstreaming of postmodern philosophy (suspicion of meta-narratives, rejection of the Enlightenment belief in a fixed, objective reality that can be measured and understood, obsession with the power of language and the slipperiness of language, and the idea that we must try to control language and make it more amenable to our social justice goals) as third wave feminists and other SJWs found each other on the internet.

The howls of the language-obsessed anguished became louder and louder as the sexy selfies of the Instagram set got more and more risque. I started to think that female body image anxieties were being played out en-masse in wacky new ways on social media.

Some young girls were tatting up and loudly declaring their right to be protected from negative assessments (“I have a right not to be offended”), while a separate, shiny-haired cohort was posting ever-sexier shots of their bared breasts and buttocks, spending hours getting that lighting perfect when perhaps their time would be better spent otherwise. The manifestations were different but I had a sneaking suspicion, like the wide-eyed boy encountering the rock monster in Never-Ending Story II, that it was “all part of the same thing.”

When I started writing for Inquisitr, the word “narrative” was thrown at us on a regular basis. Kim Kardashian’s mom was obviously hiring us to push a narrative, we were told (I promise you I have never met the woman). The US government was paying journalists to write articles conforming to the anti-Putin narrative, apparently. Oddly enough, much of the “narrative” talk came from high schoolers who love pop music — the contemporary tween scene is a hotbed of social justice skirmishing, righteous outrage, and tender, open wounds. I’m not kidding. We, journalists, were accused of conforming to a narrative (eg. Louis Tomlinson from One Direction is straight) when the real story was thought to be very different (a group of homophobes in One Direction’s management company will stop at nothing to cover up the fact that Louis and Harry Styles love each other).

I started to wonder if the postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives is being taught at high school level now.

The effects of these trends are becoming truly disturbing. Spiked has just reported that outrage over sexism is holding science back. And it’s actually women who are suffering from this the most.

Scientists now have to resort to ignoring very real differences in the functioning of male and female brains. Apparently, saying that male and female brains are different is now considered sexist and unacceptable.

Humans are not ruled by biology – that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Are you comfortable with the idea of a bunch of spoiled, over-sensitive university activists holding back the development of new treatment options for older women? I’m not.

Because drugs are by default tested on male cells, it is women’s health that is being put in peril because of this failure to speak openly.

We live in a world where everything is thought to be a patriarchal scam and/or mediated through language. People are constantly on the lookout for neo-liberal, neo-colonialist, and patriarchal meta-narratives that might be restricting their self-expression, and which must be shaken off like so many Taylor Swift haters (male scientists tell you you’re a biological woman? Doesn’t matter. Western science is just another meta-narrative to be rejected, a hotbed of male bias and patriarchal agendas. So ink that “he” on your birth certificate, girl!).

[Image by Evan Vucci/AP Images]

Gender is now considered a social construct or a “performance” rather than a biological trait. Your local doctor will approve a gender reassignment if you stroll in and say you’ve been feeling a bit woman-y lately, then address you as she or zir or whatever you feel most comfortable with. Scholarship and scientific progress are suffering.

The identity obsession of the contemporary left is well-known, and some say that the Trump victory was essentially a great, big “Enough!” delivered at the ballot box in response to the excesses of the contemporary left.

Chris Hedges called Trump’s victory “the revenge of the lower classes.” In an essay for Truthdig, he quotes Richard Rorty, who said back in 1998 that we will see a build-up in “the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates…”

Many people, taking their cue from Hillary “basket of deplorables” Clinton, posted nasty comments about “low-information voters” on social media as Trump gained momentum. The idea was to shame Trump supporters as ignoramuses or good old-fashioned losers.

Hedges’ essay is insightful, but he overlooks a few things. Firstly, attending college is no longer a guarantee of a good education or a prosperous life. Western economies are stagnating. The student loan system is out of control, and some say we are in a higher education bubble, where the quality of education has declined as the price has risen.

The humanities have suffered especially. Camille Paglia has stated that Foucault-obsessed professors destroyed the humanities in the West when they “shamefully stampeded” after the French theorists. Paglia has given talks saying that it’s criminal to force humanities students to waste time deciphering all the “corkscrew, bad translations” assigned to them by professors obsessed with French theory.

[Today’s students] don’t know how to write! They don’t know how to write!

As if that wasn’t enough, the Alzheimer’s example at the beginning of this piece shows that identity-obsessed leftists are now compromising the development of the sciences, not just the humanities.

A sluggish, PC corporate culture and out-of-control trade deficit mean that growth in Western countries is mainly happening in sectors like banking (brilliant for zapping money back and forth through second-and-third-order methods like credit default swaps, which helped to sink the economy in 2008 and will continue to help billionaires inflate their bank accounts by claiming obscure tax breaks) and in Law (someone’s got to take on all those campus date rape cases).

Stuck in this broken system, millennials are the first generation who expect their lives to be worse than the lives of their parents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE

Entrepreneur and Trump supporter Peter Thiel says “the sheer size of the US trade deficit shows that something has gone badly wrong. The most developed country in the world should be exporting capital to less developed nations. Instead, the United States is importing more than $500 billion every year. That money flows into financial assets. It distorts our economy in favor of more banking and more financialization, and it gives the well-connected people who benefit a reason to defend the status quo.”

When Ivanka Trump spoke about her father’s love of building — actual bricks-and-mortar building — it was a breath of fresh air to many people who are tired of these industries that sustain themselves by adding layer upon layer of needless abstraction, hoping that nobody notices that they don’t actually do anything.

You’re not sophisticated, you’re a fraud. This is not financial wizardry, it’s a cork stopping our society’s development.

Competence in the building trade is easy to spot. Incompetence is impossible to hide.

The deregulation of the higher education sector, the influx of Foucault-obsessed humanities professors and the proliferation of safe spaces on campus means that most students emerge from their college days less capable, not more capable, of dealing with life. They’ve got massive loans, they’ve lost their ability to write or think clearly due to too much exposure to the Deleuzes and Guattaris of the world (Richard Dawkins is with me on this), and they believe they have — get this — a right not to be offended (I’m pretty sure there is no such thing.)

As in the case of Alzheimer’s treatment, it is women who are most imperiled by all this. A generation of women are being encouraged to “follow their dreams and the money will follow” (read: pursue a totally bogus life path that will never work out), spend the best years of their life crying in safe spaces (someone called you fat once? Go ahead and wallow in your victimhood, we’ve built a space especially for you), chase arrogant alpha males who “pump and dump” them with impunity (don’t you dare discourage her from this either — it’s simply wrong to shame a woman for her sexual choices) then finally have a nervous breakdown at 33 when they find themselves alone, as reported by Breitbart.

The truth is, men get along okay without women, unlike women, who become shrieking, neurotic messes if they’re still single in their 30s.

Notorious Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was on to something when he said “the women I know who are in their thirties who’ve been told they can have it all, they’re living in a horrible apartment they don’t like with a cat, they’re miserable, they hate all their friends. They’re not happy people!”

So to all those pronoun-savvy gender studies graduates with massive student loans calling out Trump supporters for their language: think twice before you post something so smug.

Have you really been enriched by your college experience? There is a strong possibility you have been scammed, or at least misled in many areas.

[Featured Image By Evan Vucci/AP Images]