I have found my favourite image from yesterday’s historic election in the US. It isn’t a too-bronzed Trump wobbling to ‘YMCA’ after his victory speech. It isn’t any of those candid shots of Kamala campaigners sobbing into their flags. No, it’s a still of Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell looking baffled beyond belief by the results. There they are, the two podcast ponces, a couple of bloviators who’ve somehow managed to convince the centrist dads of the turbo-smug suburbs that they know everything there is to know about politics, looking positively dumbstruck. Or perhaps just dumb. It’s delicious.
I know Schadenfreude is a cheap emotion. But it is eight long years since us Brits last saw our puffed-up opinion-spouting classes go grey-faced in response to a democratic vote (Brexit), so give us this, please. Stewart and Campbell were in the US with Guardian aristocrat Marina Hyde – I am so sorry, America – for a special recording of their surreally successful podcast, The Rest is Politics. For any American who might have accidentally tuned in to this YouTube whinge-fest in cut-glass tones, it must have felt like 1776 again. Fear not, this time the imperious Brits will be on the first Virgin Business flight out of your cursed nation, especially now that Trump’s won.
Stewart’s ashen-faced bewilderment at the incoming results will have been tinged with embarrassment. For he had predicted that Kamala would ‘win comfortably’. He even informed his almost 600,000 followers on X that he had ‘bet the maximum I was allowed to bet’ on Harris taking the White House. Here we had one of the best-paid political podcasters in Britain, a bloke worshipped as a sage by the kind of people who read Byline Times and piss themselves over Led By Donkeys’ sh*t stunts, calling one of the most important elections of our time catastrophically wrong. I guess we should be grateful his wrongness didn’t kill anyone, which is more than can be said for his co-host.
‘Obviously if I’ve totally miscalled this, it would be a massive lesson in humility’, said Stewart before the election: ‘[It] would suggest my whole framework is cracked.’ You said it, buster. It was his explanation for the cracking of his framework that was really revealing. He got it wrong, he said, because ‘all my friends out in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, [were clear]: Trump was nowhere to be seen.’ And I wonder what kind of friends Stewart has in America? I wonder if they are, to a man, irritating Trump-haters? I wonder if they’re the kind of NYT-reading Yanks who tell every Brit they meet: ‘Wow, Brexit sucks.’ I bet they are. I bet Stewart was certain Kamala was going to win because he did not once breathe the same air as someone who wanted Trump to win.
And so the man who made a documentary for Radio 4 about The Long History of Ignorance exposes his own ignorance of America and her people. And he’s not alone. Centrists across the West are shell-shocked. They can’t believe what the oiks of the Rust Belt have done to them. They can’t believe there are people out there who care more for the economy than they do for Lady Gaga’s breathy paeans to ‘tenacious’ Kamala. They can’t believe populism is still brewing and bubbling – didn’t we get rid of all that nonsense when we took a Saturday off from brunching in Highgate to march through the streets with our faces painted blue in tribute to the EU? What’s going on?!
The meltdown of the centrists is a wonder to behold. This is America’s ‘darkest dawn’, cried rhyming-slang-in-waiting, Ian Dunt. Emily Maitlis yelped on live TV that Trump is ‘batsh*t’, which is rich from someone who is essentially a Halloween version of Princess Diana. The Guardian put out a news notification that said, ‘Trump becomes the first convicted criminal to win the White House’. This really is all they have left, isn’t it? Sly asides to titillate depressed posh people on X? Smug jokes aimed at tempting suicidal liberals off the ledge? Utterly incapable of understanding Joe Public – both here and in the US – the Guardian opts to become the court jester of the c**terati instead.
Their sadness will give way to seething soon. It already is, in fact. Witness Otto English – the wanker’s wanker – wailing that ‘millions of Americans are misogynistic, climate-change denying, racist fucking lunatics’. The walking, talking mid-life crisis Paul Mason says America is now ‘in the grip of the fascist process’. Nurse! ‘What fresh hell is this?’, asked James O’Brien, the privately educated shock jock who makes a living from telling the non-privately educated plebs how dumb they are. I can’t believe ‘that psychopath’ is president again, ‘God help us all’, cried Jason Manford. And we can’t believe you call yourself a comedian. We’re all confused, mate.
Has anyone checked on Steve Bray? He might be buried in shock under a mountain of megaphones in Parliament Square. And can someone pop into that pub where the patchy-bearded bros of Led By Donkeys hang out to make sure they haven’t overdone the Camden Hells? We should probably put a call into social services in Tuscany too, check up on Polly Toynbee. Seriously, not since the gammon of England voted to leave the EU has the piss of the elites boiled at such a high temperature. I’m loving it. They can dress it up as a ‘liberal critique’ of Trumpism as much as they like, but we all know what it really is: the conceited rage of the privileged classes who can’t believe the lower orders have defied their moral hectoring yet again. More, more!
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced
Stewart’s ashen-faced bewilderment at the incoming results will have been tinged with embarrassment. For he had predicted that Kamala would ‘win comfortably’. He even informed his almost 600,000 followers on X that he had ‘bet the maximum I was allowed to bet’ on Harris taking the White House. Here we had one of the best-paid political podcasters in Britain, a bloke worshipped as a sage by the kind of people who read Byline Times and piss themselves over Led By Donkeys’ sh*t stunts, calling one of the most important elections of our time catastrophically wrong. I guess we should be grateful his wrongness didn’t kill anyone, which is more than can be said for his co-host.
‘Obviously if I’ve totally miscalled this, it would be a massive lesson in humility’, said Stewart before the election: ‘[It] would suggest my whole framework is cracked.’ You said it, buster. It was his explanation for the cracking of his framework that was really revealing. He got it wrong, he said, because ‘all my friends out in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, [were clear]: Trump was nowhere to be seen.’ And I wonder what kind of friends Stewart has in America? I wonder if they are, to a man, irritating Trump-haters? I wonder if they’re the kind of NYT-reading Yanks who tell every Brit they meet: ‘Wow, Brexit sucks.’ I bet they are. I bet Stewart was certain Kamala was going to win because he did not once breathe the same air as someone who wanted Trump to win.
And so the man who made a documentary for Radio 4 about The Long History of Ignorance exposes his own ignorance of America and her people. And he’s not alone. Centrists across the West are shell-shocked. They can’t believe what the oiks of the Rust Belt have done to them. They can’t believe there are people out there who care more for the economy than they do for Lady Gaga’s breathy paeans to ‘tenacious’ Kamala. They can’t believe populism is still brewing and bubbling – didn’t we get rid of all that nonsense when we took a Saturday off from brunching in Highgate to march through the streets with our faces painted blue in tribute to the EU? What’s going on?!
The meltdown of the centrists is a wonder to behold. This is America’s ‘darkest dawn’, cried rhyming-slang-in-waiting, Ian Dunt. Emily Maitlis yelped on live TV that Trump is ‘batsh*t’, which is rich from someone who is essentially a Halloween version of Princess Diana. The Guardian put out a news notification that said, ‘Trump becomes the first convicted criminal to win the White House’. This really is all they have left, isn’t it? Sly asides to titillate depressed posh people on X? Smug jokes aimed at tempting suicidal liberals off the ledge? Utterly incapable of understanding Joe Public – both here and in the US – the Guardian opts to become the court jester of the c**terati instead.
Their sadness will give way to seething soon. It already is, in fact. Witness Otto English – the wanker’s wanker – wailing that ‘millions of Americans are misogynistic, climate-change denying, racist fucking lunatics’. The walking, talking mid-life crisis Paul Mason says America is now ‘in the grip of the fascist process’. Nurse! ‘What fresh hell is this?’, asked James O’Brien, the privately educated shock jock who makes a living from telling the non-privately educated plebs how dumb they are. I can’t believe ‘that psychopath’ is president again, ‘God help us all’, cried Jason Manford. And we can’t believe you call yourself a comedian. We’re all confused, mate.
Has anyone checked on Steve Bray? He might be buried in shock under a mountain of megaphones in Parliament Square. And can someone pop into that pub where the patchy-bearded bros of Led By Donkeys hang out to make sure they haven’t overdone the Camden Hells? We should probably put a call into social services in Tuscany too, check up on Polly Toynbee. Seriously, not since the gammon of England voted to leave the EU has the piss of the elites boiled at such a high temperature. I’m loving it. They can dress it up as a ‘liberal critique’ of Trumpism as much as they like, but we all know what it really is: the conceited rage of the privileged classes who can’t believe the lower orders have defied their moral hectoring yet again. More, more!
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced
5 comments:
Don't harsh my buzz man! We all know the Brits are a bit myopic when it comes to pollitics, they've been living in a socialist hell since the 1930's poor ole chappies.
Thank you Brendan, great essay on the human condition.
Such grace in victory! What kind of a person, upon getting the desired result, would immediately write such a column? A gloat from start to finish. Yes, a decisive victory, to be acknowledged, but we have yet to see the result over the next four years. And maybe a note of feeling for Harris who gracefully conceded. It must have been difficult after working so hard. Such a contrast to Trump’s four years ago, claiming ever since that he won.
Gawd, O'Neill is just the educated version of the chap who put up a tweet featuring Kamala Harris's stepdaughter in tears, and invited ridicule.
Wonderful column. I haven't laughed as much in such a long, long time. Let us hope this Trump era is the start of the roll-back of the woke loony left and the water melons, as well as the out and out Communists that have crept into every government institution, media, and judiciary.
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