The US was polarised before Trump was elected and the divisions will outlive his presidency

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

On a summer’s evening last week, a woman and her friend sat at a table outside a restaurant in a northwest suburb of Washington DC. A group of screaming Black Lives Matters protesters confronted diners demanding they raise their fists to show solidarity with a rally against the shooting of black man Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin days before. One woman refused. Dressed in black, the protesters ramped up their aggression, shouting at the 47-year-old urban planner and, chanting “white silence is violence”. Though her dining companion complied, Lauren B Victor still refused to raise her fist.

While the howling protesters moved on, Chuck Modiano, who identified himself as a “citizen journalist”, kept shouting at Victor. He said he wanted to understand why she resisted showing solidarity.

“What was in you that you just couldn’t do this?” Modiano asked. “They all did — all the other tables. You were literally the only one of 20 other people. So there was something in you that was different from all the other people.”

Victor described feeling under attack. She said she had previously marched in BLM protests but she didn’t think it was right for hundreds of shouting people, fists raised, to coerce diners into submission.

1) In a scene that played out several times Monday, a Black Lives Matter protest that began in Columbia Heights confronted White diners outside D.C. restaurants,  chanting “White silence is violence!” and demanding White diners show their solidarity. #DCProtests pic.twitter.com/fJbPM76vb0

— Fredrick Kunkle WaPo (@KunkleFredrick) August 25, 2020

BLM confrontations

BLM protesters confronted diners at other restaurants in nearby Quincy Street, shining lights in their eyes, shouting “White privilege”, “No Justice, No Peace” and “Fire, fire, gentrifier – black people used to live here”. A young man who refused to submit to the coercion tried to explain that he worked for a non-profit group that helps black people with mental health issues.

It made no difference. These scenes were repeated elsewhere.

A few days later, this is how The New York Times reported the murder of a man in Portland, Oregon in a clash with BLM protesters: “A man affiliated with a right-wing group was shot and killed Saturday night. A caravan of supporters of President Trump had driven into downtown Portland.” Journalist Mike Baker put it down to a merger between “protests against police violence and presidential politics”. Note the emphasis on the murdered man: he was affiliated with “a right-wing group”; he wore a “a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group”. There was not a skerrick of curiosity about BLM politics, let alone the thug who pulled the trigger.

New sectarian divide

The removal of Donald Trump won’t heal political divisions embedded in the US. The polarisation between left and right existed before he came to power and will outlive his presidency. With politics becoming the new moral battle ground in an increasingly secular world, this is the new sectarian divide.

A leader as controversial, confrontational and unfiltered as Trump doesn’t just fall out of the sky. He remains the product of a Republican Party that failed to understand its own ideological narrowness, unable to speak to blue-collar workers, the Reagan Democrats long ignored by both sides of politics.

Those who wield power on the left of American politics have never been able to accept that Trump is their baby too, and that Barack Obama help to gift Trump to the nation as the legacy of his presidency. America’s first black president won a Nobel Peace prize for winning the election but did not manage to improve race relations. The anti-PC Trump is the inevitable product of the cultural corruption of the left.

Hollywood was a terrific booster for Trump. Inadvertently, of course. In 2016 Robert De Niro led Hollywood’s heavy lifting with a YouTube video where he declared he wanted to punch the “punk” Trump in the face.

In an equally moronic move last week, Bette Midler tweeted this after first lady Melania Trump spoke at the Republican convention: “Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.”

Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.

— bettemidler (@BetteMidler) August 26, 2020

And this: “Get that illegal alien off the stage!”

#beBest is back! A UGE bore! She can speak several words in a few languages. Get that illegal alien off the stage!

— bettemidler (@BetteMidler) August 26, 2020

Midler has since apologised, but her default setting, to slam and try to censor a migrant with different views, captures the hypocrisy of the modern left.

Biden didn’t speak out

If Joe Biden wins November’s presidential poll on the back of a backlash over Trump’s handling of coronavirus, there is no evidence of the Democrat being able, or willing, to unify a divided country. At the Democrat convention Biden continued his journey to the far left. He didn’t speak out against violent mobs looting Democrat-led cities for fear of treading on the toes of the radical left. Yet this issue transfixes and terrifies middle America.

Biden has nothing to say about cancel culture either. Yet this political weapon, used by many on the left to shun, shame, sack and censor people who express different views, is another fault line dividing American politics. A July poll by Politico/Morning Consult reveals 46 per cent of Americans believe cancel culture has “gone too far”, with 49 per cent saying it has a negative impact on society.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden takes off his mask as he arrives at a campaign event to speak on the coronavirus pandemic in Wilmington, Delaware.

BLM protesters strongarming diners into submission is the most recent manifestation of an institutionalised cancel culture that is turning into a civil war. Major newspapers push aside opinion page editors if they stray from the orthodoxy. At universities, academics with different views are shunned. Corporate America is not much better. Not even comedians get a free pass from the practitioners of cancel culture.

Cancel culture

Trump gets culture. That’s why cancel culture was a central theme of the Republican convention: “Americans are exhausted trying to keep up with the latest lists of approved words and phrases,” he said. “The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it.”

The President may not be the purest of warriors, given his own propensity for sacking people, but up against a tongue-tied Biden, Trump’s message gets a clear run. “We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture,” he said at his July 4 address at Mount Rushmore. “Cancel culture is driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.”

US President Donald Trump arrives to deliver his acceptance speech for the Republican Party nomination for reelection during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington.

Trump exposes the moral bankruptcy of a political movement that, incredibly, calls itself progressive. It cannot plausibly advocate for inclusion when its followers work across politics, the media, Hollywood, academia and corporate life to exclude those who disagree with its proliferating herd of sacred cows. Not even a few words of admonishment from Obama slowed the marauding enforcers of cancel culture in the US.

That raises the deep and abiding dilemma for the left. Should its latest candidate win the presidency, Democrats will have to own the problem of a growing radical left-wing movement that chooses violence, looting and fascist-inspired coercion as a means to solving racial divisions. Trump is a symptom, not a cause of America’s political divide. And the bumbling Biden will prove no cure for what ails America. More likely, the violent plunderers, the loitering thugs who demand submission with BLM politics, and those cleansing institutions of intellectual diversity will be emboldened by the presence, and silence, of their man in the White House.