Joe Hildebrand: 'The right made Trump President but the left will keep him there'

Donald Trump is likely to beat the more "woke" candidates in next year's presidential election. Photo / AP

OPINION

It has long been predicted that the left will eat itself but even the most diehard right-wing optimist could never have foreseen the giant human centipede now munching its way across the globe.

The past few weeks alone have proven there is no violation of New Left orthodoxy too great or too small, nor too surreal or hypocritical, to escape the tsunami of shit-filled silt that consumes all in its path and converts it into the selfsame excrement that sucked it in.

Michael Leunig, once a folk hero of the Melbourne pastoral progressives, found this out when he unknowingly phone-shamed young mothers, thus proving himself an irredeemably sexist monster with a few strokes of the pen. Clearly he hadn't kept up with the latest manifesto.

But as has been noted by my colleague Tim Blair, Leunig himself joined the mob outrage against fellow cartoonist Bill Leak after he was hounded to an early grave by the social media mafia for a drawing highlighting indigenous disadvantage.

Mere weeks after Leak's death Leunig publicly called his cartoon "cruel" and "a terrible mistake". Now he knows how it feels to be the target of such venomous hate. Were Leunig to embrace his new misogynist mantle he might observe that karma's a bitch.

Likewise Barack Obama, a global bastion for the left the world over, has declared he is over the left – or at least the now-dominant part of it that seems to mistake social media outrage for social change.

Obama is without doubt one of the most highly intelligent and decent US presidents ever to hold office. Certainly his administration had many flaws, the greatest of which was a tragic and fatal policy failure in Syria, but he is certainly not stupid and he is certainly not conservative.

This is what he had to say: "This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're politically woke, and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws."

He went on to further define what he called this "danger".

"There is this sense sometimes of 'the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that's enough … Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb. Then, I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because, 'Man, you see how woke I was? I called you out.' You know, that's not activism. That's not bringing about change," he said.

And of course instead of bringing about any change, all the woke Twitter activists got outraged about how unwoke Obama turned out to be.

North of the border, Justin Trudeau also got a taste of what we might now call the Leunig Lesson. The insufferably smug Canadian prime minister, whose most famous quote was telling everybody what year it was, was all but undone at the last election after it emerged he had a shoe polish fetish that would put Al Jolson to shame.

The Trudeau blackface scandal led to him being dubbed "the prime minstrel" and forced his party into minority government, even though there was not a shred of evidence his stupid antics had an iota of malice or racism behind them.

Indeed, in the perfect proof that identity politics is one giant circle jerk, it was the Conservatives who leaked the photos knowing that it would detonate Trudeau's bourgeois left-wing base.

And there are countless other examples of left-wing cannibalism across the planet, from Jeremy Corbyn's cheerless combination of socialism and anti-Semitism to Bill Shorten's allies threatening internal warfare if the failed ALP leader is blamed for failing the ALP.

Meanwhile groups of activists like Extinction Rebellion have managed to turn the popular mainstream cause of climate change action into a Pythonesque sideshow that has managed to piss off just about everyone with paid employment and access to soap.

Even the climate strikers have abandoned the climate supergluers.

So how well is the hard left's Frankensteinian campaign to purge all but the clinically brain dead going when it comes to their stated objective of beating the right?

Donald Trump is likely to beat the more "woke" candidates in next year's presidential election. Photo / AP

About as well as you'd think. In the UK Boris Johnson is odds on to romp home in the general election, with a double-digit lead over Labour and simply double the vote of the Liberal-Democrats. There hasn't been a surer bet outside of Biff's Sports Almanac in Back to the Future 2.

Meanwhile Donald Trump, widely derided as the dumbest president in US history and subject to every judicial, special and impeachable inquiry you can imagine, is uncannily positioned to pull off another surprise victory.

In the six vital swing states that delivered Trump his poll-defying win – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina – Trump is well in the hunt. Polling conducted and published by The New York Times – hardly a Trump cheer squad – shows there is only one Democratic candidate ahead of the Donald in these key electoral college battlegrounds.

That candidate is Joe Biden, a man who – despite seeming to be under the constant influence of an aneurysm – has some kind of connection with middle-American voters and is probably the Democrats' best chance of beating Trump.

And, of course, as dictated by the laws of the left, Biden's primary support is slipping and at this stage the momentum is with Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic nomination.

Unsurprisingly, this is the best possible outcome for Trump, according to the same Times poll. It shows Biden beating Trump in four out of six states – including the Florida mother lode – tied in Michigan and down by 2 points in North Carolina.

But up against Warren, the same poll shows Trump ahead by 6 points in Michigan and 4 points in Florida, 3 in North Carolina, even money in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and behind in Arizona by only 2 points.

In short, the candidate least likely to beat Trump is the Democrats' new favourite.

This is entirely emblematic of the new disease that has overrun progressive politics. It is a culture that promotes ideological puritanism over electoral pragmatism and will happily consign itself to defeat again and again with all the resolve of a kamikaze pilot.

The right made Donald Trump president but the left will keep him there. And they will continue to keep conservative governments in power until they learn how to listen to mainstream middle and working-class people instead of constantly condemning them for not agreeing with every last wailing woke warrior.