Yesterday’s ‘Democrat fightback’ and ‘resistance to Trump’s rhetoric’ – journalists are literally calling it that – was next-level cringe. It occurred during Trump’s 100-minute speech, the longest Congress talk in 60 years. As Trump bashed Joe Biden and bigged up Elon Musk, the Dems came over all soixante-huitard. Fury coursed through their ranks. Then the revolt started. The Squad’s Rashida Tlaib held up a scrawled sign saying ‘That’s a lie!’. Dem representative Al Green ‘shook his cane and pointed his finger’ and cried ‘You have no mandate’ to cut Medicaid. How the regime must have quaked at the sight of this revolution!
The way some hacks are talking about this tantrum masquerading as a protest you’d think it was a modern-day storming of the Bastille. The Dems’ ‘stirring’ acts of rebellion will have ‘given hope to the Resistance’ and sent a message to ‘the world’, said the Guardian. Nurse! Even leftists who’ve been disappointed with the Dem establishment seemed to get a moral kick from this political pantomime. So far, the ‘resistance’ to the Trumpist tyranny has been ‘splintered’, but now we know it’s ‘getting better’, fawned Vox. Perhaps, it said, we’ll soon see the ‘aggressive resistance’ we really need.
Can these people hear themselves? Overpaid politicians holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like ‘False’ and ‘Liar’ are not ‘the Resistance’ – they’re the establishment cosplaying as campus radicals for likes and headlines. In one especially squirming scene, some Dems ‘removed their outer business wear’ to reveal black t-shirts with the word ‘RESIST’ in ‘bold white letters’. Their delusions of radicalism are off the scale. Resistance is when young Iranian women rip off their hijabs or Kurdish revolutionaries fight the neo-fascists of ISIS, not when politicians on $174,000 a year put on a t-shirt their stressed intern ordered from some hip printer on 7th Street.
This wasn’t an uprising – it was an orgy of vanity. The Democrat benches were a sea of self-satisfaction. The face of every member of this ‘Resistance’ was etched with pride as they held up their dumb signs mocking Musk or branding Trump a liar (original!). The revolting Dems have ‘shown the world what they are against’ – now they need to show us ‘what they are for’, said the Guardian. I’ll tell you what they’re for: themselves. They co-opted the paraphernalia of protest to make a garish display of their own virtue.
There was rank hypocrisy, too. Some of the Democratic congresswomen sported pink suits to signal their fury with Trump’s ‘sexist’ policies that negatively impact women. Hold on – didn’t the Dems just torpedo a Republican bill that would have forbidden blokes (‘transwomen’) from taking part in women’s sport? Literally the day before the Democrats brought a ‘wave of pink’ to Congress, they shot down a bill that would have preserved the liberty and dignity of women and girls who just want to play sport without some hulking fella pushing them around. Honestly, Trump is Betty Friedan reincarnate in comparison with these woke wreckers of women’s rights.
Rarely has the gulf between the elite’s virtue-signalling and its real-world destructive behaviour been so starkly illustrated. These congresswomen sign the death warrant of female sports one day and then swan around in pink the next to show what feminist bravehearts they are. These are incalculable levels of cant. If you think we’re going to take lectures on women’s rights from a political class that will happily sacrifice a girl’s right to sport in order to placate their own Oberlin-attending offspring, you’ve got another thing coming.
This preening display exposed the truth about ‘the Resistance’. It was always the establishment larping as rebels, shamelessly plundering the history and the style of protest to add a gloss of legitimacy to their pursuit of their own class interests in the populist era. From those coastal movers and shakers who wore pink pussy hats to the Ivy League radicals who shouted ‘Nazi!’ every time they heard the name Trump, this was the elite mourning its waning cultural power, not a revolt against The Man. ‘The Resistance’ is The Man. I knew that eight years ago when Stylist magazine gushed that Hillary Clinton had joined the resistance. I mean, come on.
The smug wailing in Congress sounded to me like the death rattle of ‘the Resistance’. These were the last gasps, I hope, of the ancien regime. At some point they’re going to have to fess up to the fact that the real rebels in America are those tens of millions of working people who voted for the overthrow of the old politics, not the pampered muppets defending that old politics. Can we have the word ‘resistance’ back now, please? It’s too important to let it be stolen by a knackered old ruling class that has the gall to disguise its ruthless self-interest as glorious rebellion.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The way some hacks are talking about this tantrum masquerading as a protest you’d think it was a modern-day storming of the Bastille. The Dems’ ‘stirring’ acts of rebellion will have ‘given hope to the Resistance’ and sent a message to ‘the world’, said the Guardian. Nurse! Even leftists who’ve been disappointed with the Dem establishment seemed to get a moral kick from this political pantomime. So far, the ‘resistance’ to the Trumpist tyranny has been ‘splintered’, but now we know it’s ‘getting better’, fawned Vox. Perhaps, it said, we’ll soon see the ‘aggressive resistance’ we really need.
Can these people hear themselves? Overpaid politicians holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like ‘False’ and ‘Liar’ are not ‘the Resistance’ – they’re the establishment cosplaying as campus radicals for likes and headlines. In one especially squirming scene, some Dems ‘removed their outer business wear’ to reveal black t-shirts with the word ‘RESIST’ in ‘bold white letters’. Their delusions of radicalism are off the scale. Resistance is when young Iranian women rip off their hijabs or Kurdish revolutionaries fight the neo-fascists of ISIS, not when politicians on $174,000 a year put on a t-shirt their stressed intern ordered from some hip printer on 7th Street.
This wasn’t an uprising – it was an orgy of vanity. The Democrat benches were a sea of self-satisfaction. The face of every member of this ‘Resistance’ was etched with pride as they held up their dumb signs mocking Musk or branding Trump a liar (original!). The revolting Dems have ‘shown the world what they are against’ – now they need to show us ‘what they are for’, said the Guardian. I’ll tell you what they’re for: themselves. They co-opted the paraphernalia of protest to make a garish display of their own virtue.
There was rank hypocrisy, too. Some of the Democratic congresswomen sported pink suits to signal their fury with Trump’s ‘sexist’ policies that negatively impact women. Hold on – didn’t the Dems just torpedo a Republican bill that would have forbidden blokes (‘transwomen’) from taking part in women’s sport? Literally the day before the Democrats brought a ‘wave of pink’ to Congress, they shot down a bill that would have preserved the liberty and dignity of women and girls who just want to play sport without some hulking fella pushing them around. Honestly, Trump is Betty Friedan reincarnate in comparison with these woke wreckers of women’s rights.
Rarely has the gulf between the elite’s virtue-signalling and its real-world destructive behaviour been so starkly illustrated. These congresswomen sign the death warrant of female sports one day and then swan around in pink the next to show what feminist bravehearts they are. These are incalculable levels of cant. If you think we’re going to take lectures on women’s rights from a political class that will happily sacrifice a girl’s right to sport in order to placate their own Oberlin-attending offspring, you’ve got another thing coming.
This preening display exposed the truth about ‘the Resistance’. It was always the establishment larping as rebels, shamelessly plundering the history and the style of protest to add a gloss of legitimacy to their pursuit of their own class interests in the populist era. From those coastal movers and shakers who wore pink pussy hats to the Ivy League radicals who shouted ‘Nazi!’ every time they heard the name Trump, this was the elite mourning its waning cultural power, not a revolt against The Man. ‘The Resistance’ is The Man. I knew that eight years ago when Stylist magazine gushed that Hillary Clinton had joined the resistance. I mean, come on.
The smug wailing in Congress sounded to me like the death rattle of ‘the Resistance’. These were the last gasps, I hope, of the ancien regime. At some point they’re going to have to fess up to the fact that the real rebels in America are those tens of millions of working people who voted for the overthrow of the old politics, not the pampered muppets defending that old politics. Can we have the word ‘resistance’ back now, please? It’s too important to let it be stolen by a knackered old ruling class that has the gall to disguise its ruthless self-interest as glorious rebellion.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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