Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How the left wastes its energy

The left fritters itself away on causes with mostly symbolic value

There are only three infallible rules in advertising. Be distinctive. Make a lot of noise. And try to feature a cute animal somewhere. Had Donald Trump followed my advice and bought a springer spaniel he would have won California.

For a man with such tiny hands to be elected to the world’s highest office, I think we can all agree, is a tragic loss to proctology. But it is also a remarkable lesson in how to play the media. Hillary had $2 billion to spend; what Trump miraculously found was that with each outburst of political Tourette’s, he got more airtime than her, and for free. So eager were the mainstream and social media to express their horrified disdain for his latest outrage that they were effectively donating to his campaign. By exploiting the media’s virtue-signalling reflex, Trump had found the thermal exhaust port on the liberal Death Star. The more he was attacked, the stronger he grew. As James Lindsay wrote back in June, ‘Liberals, want Trump to win? Keep calling him racist’:

People left, right, and centre — but especially on the right — are justifiably sick and tired of being called bigots and having almost every-thing in social politics reduced to smear campaigns about bigotry. The over-application of terms of bigotry as a means of silencing disagreement with a left-bending social orthodoxy has become, shall we say, ‘problematic’. As a result, words like racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe and the rest have become conservative dog-whistles that mean ‘honest and brave’, and ‘willing to speak his mind (without fear)’. Like the inappropriate application of an antibiotic, the incessant misuse of these terms has created a superbug.

The commentariat were right in one way: Trump’s support was fuelled by hate. But it was mostly hatred by one class of white people for another class of white people.

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