Last Thursday night, Donald Trump cast himself as the only hope for stopping America’s descent into a Fury Road-style hellscape. Off stage right were two less well-known but no less important actors in Trump’s ongoing drama, his daughter Ivanka and alt-right miscreant Milo Yiannopoulos. Ivanka played her part in Cleveland and Milo online, but together they illustrate how the contemporary far-right uses social liberalism to season its reactionary politics. In 2016, social liberalism is not only the official ideology of the ruling class but also a key tool for ascendant right-wing nationalists like the Trumps. If progressives do not reclaim their social values for themselves, there will be dangerous consequences for both their movement and for the people they most need to serve.
In a profile of Milo and his avant-garde brand of racism, writer Park Macdougald notes in New York Magazine that Yiannopoulos gets so much traction with his young audience because he claims to stand against “a flailing American elite [that] has elevated a corporate-diversity-training version of multiculturalism into one of the primary justifications for its continued rule.” NYC Pride, for instance, notes on its website that sponsoring Pride is a “great way” to “[build] a strong New York presence for your brand,” with the logos of Walmart, Wells Fargo and Citibank among numerous others filling out the page. Calvin Klein, a company cited for gender discrimination in its Sri Lankan and Filipino factories, employed no less an avatar of cool than Young Thug to proclaim in its latest ad campaign, “There’s no such thing as gender” while an off-screen voice tells him he looks “hot in a dress.”
The Fortune 500 is also the leading voice on the state level for liberal social issues. In the backlash to North Carolina’s awful “bathroom bill,” Paypal, the NBA and Deutsche Bank announced plans to pull operations, personnel and events from the state. A similar dynamic occurred in Indiana when now-vice presidential candidate Mike Pence signed a bill that originally allowed restaurants to refuse service to gay customers. In both cases, the Republican governor in question partially backed down, and CEOs like Apple’s openly gay Tim Cook got to take partial credit for defeating laws rightly compared to Jim Crow.
Of course, there is nothing self-evidently wrong with major private sector actors supporting social change. In one sense, it’s a testament to decades of thankless work by gay rights activists that brands as mainstream as Bud Light now want to be associated with the movement’s increased visibility and cultural capital. At the same time, welcoming business wholeheartedly into the progressive coalition stands to undermine many of the left’s other values, most crucially credible opposition to economic and wealth inequality.
As “Twilight of the Elites” author Chris Hayes put it after the Brexit vote, “I don't want a future in which politics is primarily a battle between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-nationalist backlash.” The “Fromage not Farage” signs visible during many pro-EU demonstrations suggest that future might already be upon us. As with the UK’s centrist parties, the Democratic Party is likely to be led by people animated by their own kind of identity politics: that of affluent professionals congratulating themselves on their superior sense of decency while the gulf between the haves and have-nots widens. “We,” University students will increasingly tell ourselves, “are better than they are, with their bigoted views and cluelessness about what cultural products to prefer.” People who might well be racists but whose communities are increasingly consumed by drug addiction and suicide will receive only disdain, their ignorance precluding them from our understanding, much less compassion. Their tribal resentment will only increase in tandem with ours.
All the while, the Ivankas and Milos of the world will use the class marker of social liberalism to pitch a more palatable version of what Trump is hocking. In the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, Milo Yiannopoulos wrote on Breitbart, “THE LEFT CHOSE ISLAM OVER GAYS. NOW 100 PEOPLE ARE DEAD OR MAIMED…” More recently, Ivanka Trump employed her considerable personal charm to sell a man with a distinguished history of promoting misogyny and winking at white supremacists as “color blind and gender neutral.” In a profile illuminating not just Ivanka but also the people in her social circles, Jessica Pressler writes, “Before the campaign, New Yorkers liked what we saw reflected in her — she was wealthy and successful and driven but seemed fundamentally decent. Now she is mirroring something else, which is that many of us are willing to overlook ugliness in exchange for success.”
In short, beneath a superficial veneer of tolerance, people who imagine themselves above crude bigotry can find themselves its accomplices. In this perilous moment, the left’s continued claims to decency rest on not making the same mistake.
Gray Whisnant is an Opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.
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