Professor: Trump's Refusal to Feel GuiltyStole Liberals' Main Weapon

No white guilt, no American guilt, no Republican guilt, no male guilt.

5.11.2017

For years, conservatives have been told that just by existing, we're wrong. We've been told to "check our privilege," so we have. We've been told that American exceptionalism is rude to other countries, so we've tempered it. We've been told that everything we've been brought up to believe is somehow racist, patriarchal, and bigoted, so we've paused and evaluated our beliefs. Then came Donald Trump who absolutely obliterated the way the Left tries to make the Right feel.

An excellent article by Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein at American Greatness discusses how Trump stole the left's main weapon:

In the last 50 years of culture wars in America, there has been no stronger weapon than guilt. It is the Left’s great hammer of progress. It figured powerfully in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, women’s liberation, and same-sex marriage. Guilt runs through the teaching of U.S. history from 5th grade through college. It colors controversies over affirmative action, transgender bathrooms, and the glass ceiling. The entire careers of Leftist commentators from the self-righteous Bill Moyers to the self-regarding Ta-Nehisi Coates rest upon it. If we add up the successes guilt has brought to progressive causes and identity politics, we realize just how important guilt is to the Left agenda. Without it, in fact, the Left fails.

So how did Trump destroy their guilt-inducing power? By refusing to accept it.

He has no white guilt. He doesn’t feel any male guilt, either, or American guilt or Christian guilt. He talks about the United States with uncritical approval—“America First”—and that’s a thought crime in the eyes of liberals. It ignores slavery, Jim Crow, the Indian wars, Manzanar . . . Donald Trump would never refer to America as beset by the original sin of racism, as Barack Obama did frequently, and that makes him worse than a conservative. President Trump is a bigot.

He enjoys the company of attractive women and makes no apologies for it. A man of proper male guilt would have bowed out after the bus tapes were released during the campaign, but there he was in the second presidential debate talking about jail time for Hillary.

And he wouldn’t say, “Black Lives Matter,” either, a slogan that implies whites don’t care about black lives, but insisted, “All lives matter.”

Finally, while Christians, especially Catholics and Evangelicals , are supposed to feel guilty for their doctrine on gender roles and abortion, President Trump quickly dropped gender identity from Title IX and nominated a religious conservative to the Supreme Court.

Bauerlein goes on to write, "If you can persuade an opponent that he’s wrong about a political issue, you can win the day’s debate. But if you can make him feel guilty about his opinion, you’ve got him on the defensive forever." Philosopher and theologian Ravi Zacharias is fond of using the old adage, "Any stigma can lick a good dogma.” And so the left stigmatized us, and we cowered. No more.

The gift Trump has given the Republican party is the power to reject the guilt. He doesn't care about the labels, he doesn't care about the stigma, he doesn't even care what they think of him. Or, as Glenn Reynolds summed up, "He rejects their assumed position of moral and intellectual supremacy. Which is both fair, and painful, because that position has always been a lie."

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr