The Democrats and the Left are still working their way through the seven stages of grief over the election. Many of them continue to be in denial as to how so many people could have voted for Trump and made the popular vote even close at all.
In their defense, this wasn’t just an election loss. It was the single most humiliating defeat probably in American history. They spent eight years doing nothing but selling hatred and fear of Trump. They pulled out the stops, from Hollywood to the Justice Department. Headline after headline told the Democrats that all of the evil known to mankind was embodied in this one man, and all they had to do was stop him, and their village could live on peacefully.
Trump became the monster, the volcano that required sacrifices so that it didn’t destroy the crops. He was the Devil riding into Salem. He was HITLER. Now, they’re grappling with 77 million people in America who don’t believe their hysteria anymore. It’s been punctured at long last.
But those are the rational ones. There are still many of them trapped inside the fear bunker who are now trying to survive in a country they view as full of Nazis and bigots, full of hate and white supremacy. Or else toxic masculinity won the race, and now how to raise their daughters in a country full of rapists?
But if they’re honest with themselves, really honest, they will have to face the truth. Sure, they abandoned the working class. Joe Biden got out of the race too late for them to mount a proper campaign. Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate (I threw that last one in there, though it’s a truth they have yet to accept or admit). Elon Musk rigged the election (yes, they are saying that).
But they have yet to address one fundamental question about why they lost: Why aren’t they cool anymore? Being cool means thinking critically, but that was abandoned years ago on the Left. It means being a rebel against the system, but they are the system. It means being counterculture, but they are the culture.
True, it’s hard to be cool when you are crippled by mass hysteria, and when every tweet by Trump is the end of the world, I know because I felt it too. But it started even before that, even before Trump. One might say the Left losing their cool opened the door for the rise of Trump. Why? Because Trump is and has always been cool.
He was cool in the 1980s when being rich was cool, and saying whatever was on your mind that disrupted the status quo was cool. In the 90s, he became an icon in hip-hop culture. Maybe things shifted a little when he starred on a Reality-TV series, those weren’t cool, and especially once he got into politics as Obama’s rival, that most definitely was not cool.
But in 2024? Trump is cool. MAGA is cool. Putting on the four words on a red trucker hat is like Marlon Brando sliding into a leather jacket in The Wild One.
The Left has gone so far over the rails now with their newfound religion of “Woke” - where breast scars and abortions are rites of passage, blue hair and nose rings are standard wardrobe — but underneath it all, they’ve lost their cool because they believe, more than anything, in obeying the system, in conforming, in following the rules.
They’re so devoted to the rules, in fact, that they’ll scream at you if you dare break them. They’ll SHAME you for stepping out of line for one reason or another. It’s “cultural appropriation,” or it’s demeaning the homeless. Unless you follow their carefully constructed rules of utopia, out of utopia, you must go.
But none of that is cool. It’s the opposite. It’s strident, punitive, a total drag. Putting on the MAGA hat and dancing the Trump dance is like flipping the bird to the rules. It feels good. It feels liberating. It feels …. cool.
It took Trump exactly eight years for the “Hitler delusion” to evaporate and for people to see him as he really is rather than how the media has always defined him. The breaking point was when a bullet narrowly missed killing him in Butler, PA. It was dramatic enough to snap many people out of the spell.
One of those people was Gen-Z Twitch streamer Adin Ross, who suddenly loved Trump, as did many others, including Elon Musk. Once the spell was broken, it was much easier to see how the media distorts the truth.
Ross not only interviewed Trump but he gifted him with a Rolex, and a Cybertruck emblazoned with the iconic fist pump photo on its side. Then they did the Trump dance outside of Mar-a-Lago.
As someone who forced myself out of Trump Derangement Syndrome and have gotten to know the real Trump and the real MAGA over the past four years, it was nice to see a shift in how so many people saw the real Trump, especially young people. After I saw that Adin Ross interview months ago, there could be no denying it. Trump and MAGA are cool.
Says Bridget Phetasy on Dumpster Fire:
It isn’t that all of them on the Left aren’t cool. If you managed to stay above the madness of political discourse and you never went all in with Trump Derangement Syndrome, you can still emerge now as cool, like Keanu:
It’s more about what the Left has come to stand for, the future they have mapped out for us, a world without cool. Strident Puritanism is not cool. Taking every single joke literally and seriously is not cool. And TDS is most definitely not cool.
There is no way to be cool when people like this define your movement:
Cool isn’t marching up and down the street in a Handmaid’s Tale costume. Cool isn’t scolding people for not using the correct pronouns. And cool, most certainly, isn’t Jennifer Lawrence, Katy Perry, Demi Moore, or Beyonce telling us what we should care about and how we should vote.
How can Scary Larry ever be cool?
When you have bands like Green Day and the Foo Fighters throwing baby tantrums and screeching about fascism, not to mention John Cusack — JOHN CUSACK — awash in the mass delusion that Trump is Hitler, you know the car has derailed.
Neil Young pulled his songs from Spotify, and poor Rob Reiner checked into a mental health institution because of the election.
Ellen Degeneres and her wife Portia moved to the UK because 77 million Americans voted for Trump. It reminds me of this line from The Silence of the Lambs, “Oh, Clarice, you’r problem is you need to get more fun out of life.”
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter might have been terrifying, but he was cool.
To Be a Rock And Not to Roll
When I was growing up in the Reagan era with my perm and my leg warmers, I never really thought about Left or Right, Democrat or Republican. I thought about cool and uncool. Republicans most definitely were not cool. But then, neither were the Democrats. There was nothing cool about Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. Anyone who was well-behaved and who wore pantsuits could never be cool.
When we bought tickets to a Bruce Springsteen show, when the new Stephen King book came out, or the latest Hollywood film, we didn’t think about the politics. We didn’t prepare ourselves to be schooled or “fixed” by or judged by them. We were just participating in American culture, chasing whatever we liked.
I think about how Hollywood was a monument to cool for so long. Harrison Ford in American Graffiti. Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces.
Rock stars were cool, the Jimmies were cool —Hendrix and Page. It’s a toss-up between them, really, as to who is more cool, but Stairway to Heaven is, to me, the epitome of cool—especially that guitar solo.
In Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous he has whole conversations about what it means to be cool and uncool.
By now, it seems clear that cool isn’t even an objective on the Left anymore. Why would anyone care about being cool when they believe the world is about to end any day now? Democracy is about to end. This country and our freedoms are about to end. There will be mass arrests, concentration camps, climate change. Cool? Who needs it.
Then again, it’s not like any journalist would ever really ponder these questions - how the once cool side is no longer. To find any objective read of what defines cool, I had to dig farther back, before 2016, when all media was transformed into a Trump hate machine. Here is one from The Atlantic in 2014:
Any casual observer would recognize Trump and MAGA in everything he’s describing there—rebels, rule-breakers, high on charisma, low on caring what other people think. In other words, Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, who just happens to be like very type of person most on the Left, would call MAGA or “toxic masculinity” or a man with white privilege or an “incel.”
But Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club was cool, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
It’s not that hard to see how we would emerge in 2024 with Twitter freed to become X, a living, breathing meme factory, and Trump and his posse walking into the UFC, the epicenter of cool.
Putting on the MAGA hat now is the rebel spirit that says, we’re kind of done with the trauma junkies, the moral arbiters, the sneering judgments, the rules — And now, it’s a new day.
My generation, Gen-X, was born skeptical, taught to question authority, and cautiously approached every rule. That’s why we have always felt out of place. We weren’t Boomers or Millennials. We were stuck in the middle as observers.
c That’s partly why Gen-X voted for Trump in such large numbers. We recognize something in him that is a big middle finger to the status quo, and we’re into it. Also, we’ve been called upon to save America from the clutches of fanaticism.
This is especially true for my daughter’s generation, Gen Z, who have been overprotected, coddled, shielded from the harsh reality of life, and always told to obey and follow every strident rule lest an army of scolds destroy them. They were the generation that tasted the kind of freedom Trump offered for the first time, and once they tasted it, they couldn’t get enough of it. Can you blame them?
So yeah, finally, Generation X got to be heroes, at least for one election. But just as Judd Nelson doesn’t quite fit anywhere at the end of the Breakfast Club, we are continually adrift in a country caught between worlds. We’ll never be popular and that’s okay. We know what everyone watching the Breakfast Club back in the 1980s knew - being popular has nothing to do with being cool.
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