The Faustian Times
In the weeks leading up to President Trump's inauguration, many negotations and subsequent deals were announced with multinational corporations based domestically and abroad. Many of these deals involved corporations such as Carrier maintaining operations domestically and keeping at least a portion of jobs they had planned to export to countries like Mexico where it would be easier to employ staff.
Still other negotiations Trump carried out lead to companies like Japanese conglomerate SoftBank vowing to create 50,000 jobs in America. Trump has also now officially withdrawn the US from the TPP and further promised to backtrack US commitments in NAFTA. All of these protectionist policies would have been firmly in line with the liberal platform a mere 10 years ago. So why is it that the Political Left now behaves so dismissively of a President implementing policy they once held as the cornerstone of their platform? Why the ingratitude and hostility?
The answer to this question is quite troubling in its implications:
Cultural Marxism - The Fuse is Lit
The aim of Marxist theory in the 20th century and late 19th century was to create a worker's revolution by dividing the proletariat (laborers) against the bourgeoisie (business owners) and instigating class warfare that would eventually see the business owners murdered and their assets seized by a new political class that would use the discontent of the proletariat to establish their own order. While the Marxist strategy ran its course for some time in Russia, China, and parts of Southeast Asia, in the US and western Europe it was never able to fully materialize.
The rise of the middle classes in the US and Western Europe reduced the percentage of working class as a percentage of the population. Social mobility also increased, affording many of these previously disgruntled workers the opportunity to become business owners themselves by joining the ownership class via small business.
After the Post-World War era Marxists required a new tactic in order to continue to pursue their parasitism via academic institutions and thus the Frankfurt School's Cultural Marxism was developed. The primary innovation of Cultural Marxism was to shift divisions within economic classes to divisions between Oppressed and Oppressor, Victim and Victimizer. This change in tactic proved extremely effective in sowing dissention in the west, creating new factions and political interest groups based upon scaling levels of victimhood (the Oppression Olympics).
As an added benefit, the Cultural Marxists intuited that there would be very few mechanisms within a Democratic system that could counter this growing phenomenon effectively. In fact, the nature of Democracy would favor advocacy along the lines of identity politics and prove itself very effective at rallying numbers quickly.
Today many feminists, transgender advocates, BLM activists, etc. already enjoy some level of financial wealth and stability and cannot be dissuaded from their advocacy in the same way a factory worker can be dissuaded from causing trouble by being offerred better employment opportunities. In fact, Cultural Marxism engenders a toxic feedback loop that causes many of these groups to become more demanding and violent as political and academic institutions try to appease them.
Consequently, the Political left in the West, having seen the effectiveness of this strategy has shifted its focus as well from previuosly protectionist policy to the simpler and more effective strategy, pure and unapologetic identity politics. The consequence is someone like Donald Trump, a cosmopolitan New Yorker promoting strong protectionism, becomes nonetheless a hated enemy because he threatens to interrupt the identity politics feeding frenzy. By prioritizing working and middle class interests and the economy as a whole, Donald Trump has given the Social Justice Left what they see as a legitimate Casus Belli. Their behavior in just his first two days of office demonstrates their willingness to escalate tensions accordingly.
The Zero-Sum Game of the New Left
The Zero-Sum strategy the left has chosen, while highly effective in the last decade (and particularly the last five) is headed to a dead end. Already the election of Donald Trump signifies a repudiation of their tactics by the abandoned working class left (Michigan and Wisconsin in particular stand as the most salient examples). The same disenfranchisement can be seen amongst white men in general, who are continuously labeled oppressors merely for existing and are finding it increasingly difficult to raise a family due to the prohibitive costs on marriage imposed by Radical Feminists. It is becoming increasingly more difficult and costly for white males, particularly in leftist urban centers, to advocate for identity politics that go against their own interests.
The left's academic institutions will also soon find themselves in a budgetary disaster as the student loan bubble inevitably bursts. This financial correction will demand a reformation (or complete overhaul) of the University system, one which will severely detriment their ability to continue to implement their agenda. Those who depend upon welfare and government subsidy will also encounter the same problems as the US is forced to reconcile with $20 trillion of national debt.
However, as leftist identity politics have been growing in their influence at an exponential rate in the last decade, it will take sometime after these corrections hit for their momentum to cease. In that interum period, a huge potential for social unrest and violent confrontation is possible on the scale of which the West has not seen since the French Revolution.
Indeed, Cultural Marxism lit a fuse that is both quick burning and highly volatile in its explosive power. It has created a generation of Millennials who would rather see civilization burn than renounce their identity politics. All those who oppose them should give up the naivety that they will continue to follow western norms of politeness and civility. In a sense, by becoming social justice warriors, any remnant of their individual agency has been subsumed in a counter-cultural phenonmenon that cannot be stopped until its final detonation. As we progress deeper into the Trump era, those who value their life, limb, and property are advised to stand clear of the blast that is coming.