Fine rhetoric, Obama, but you missed the cultural car crash of your era

Cameron Stewart, The Australian, Thursday:

For almost four years Barack Obama pulled his punches with Donald Trump. No longer. Instead he has eviscerated Trump on the national stage like no former president has ever done to his successor. Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention was as brutal and as cutting as anything he has delivered in his career, hitting Trump squarely between the eyes on issues of character, record and legacy.

So, what’s the left doing to get some sanity back in the White House? Sam Harris, Spectator magazine podcast, August 13:

(If Trump wins in November) I will largely blame the far left for its dishonesty, its panic and its absolute bonkers calls to abolish the police in the US, even in the highest crimes parts of our cities … If anything is going to get him re-elected it will be that kind of craziness. So, to my eye, the left seems to be doing everything it can to get Trump re-elected.

OK, when did the left go gaga? Matthew Yglesias, Vox, April 1 last year:

… white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter. This change amounts to a “Great Awokening” — comparable in some ways to the enormous religious foment in the white north in the years before the civil war. It began roughly with the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, when activists took advantage of ubiquitous digital video and routine use of social media …

How are all those “white supremacists” doing? Eric Kaufmann, The Australian, April 5 last year:

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence (as white majorities shrink in the West, leads to) a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalisations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks … (The shutting down of honest debate about this white cultural anxiety) created an opportunity that populist right-wing entrepreneurs (such as Trump) rushed in to fill.

Greg Lukianoff, Twitter, Friday:

In (our book The Coddling of the American Mind) we tried to get to the bottom of what changed in 2013-14. Why was there a return to demands for speech restrictions? Why was medicalised language used to justify censorship?

Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish, August 1:

Looking at stories (in The New York Times) from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency … (such as) non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatising, queer, transphobia, whiteness, man­splaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.

Nathan Robinson, The Guardian, January 4:

Did we learn nothing from 2016? Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians — and Joe Biden would lose. (Biden’s supporters) know he can be rambling and unintelligible. They know his record is unimpressive … (but) to them he has the most important quality of all: he can beat Donald Trump. Nothing you can say about the former vice-president’s record, platform or mental state matters next to the argument that he is the best hope Democrats have of getting Trump out of office. There’s just one problem: it’s a myth. It is a myth just as it was a myth that Hillary Clinton was a good candidate against Trump.