Take it from a metropolitan liberal – we are why Trump won

There are many reasons why Donald Trump has won another presidential election. A big one, that many people who are now in mourning won’t be able to acknowledge, is that the metropolitan liberal left, of which I am a part, has been going down a particularly self-destructive path in recent years. If metropolitan liberals hadn’t done so many things wrong, Trump almost certainly would have lost.

The good news for the Democrats in the US is that they can make the changes needed over the next four years in order to win next time. The bad news is that most of the changes they need to make involve giving up on shibboleths that a lot of them will be loath to give up on.

Even the more common-sense types on the liberal left, the ones not totally captured by ideology, will tell you that ‘the trans debate is difficult’. It is not. There are two sexes, men and women. In very rare cases, a person of either sex might have gender dysphoria. If you’re a grown-up, have had an adequate amount of therapy to rule out other possibilities and you want to live as the opposite sex to the one you were born into, fine. But self-identification is a terrible idea for numerous reasons. Two of the biggest are that it, one, allows people who might have psychological problems to identify as trans by mistake (with massive, irreversible medical complications involved), and two, that it allows any man, including some with less than pure intentions, access to women’s spaces. That’s before we get to the fact that offering the option of changing one’s gender to children is an even more terrible idea.

See, not hard. What’s amazing is that the above viewpoint would have been considered the stridently liberal position even 10 years ago. Now, it would get you cancelled from every metropolitan liberal-left dinner party (which doesn’t worry me, I never got invited to them anyhow).

Rejecting the extremes of trans ideology is vital if the centre-left wants to start winning consistently again. The embrace of it has been alienating women en masse from centre-left parties across the West, which are at best mealy mouthed about this stuff, and at worst, fully embracing of it. We saw that play out in the US election. There was an idea that women were going to flock to the polling stations to vote against Trump because of women’s rights issues, particularly abortion. This might have happened had the Democrats and the wider US centre-left not handled trans issues over the past few years so terribly, clouding the picture greatly.

But men, particularly young men, are an even bigger issue for the Democrats, and indeed, all centre-left parties across the West. Trump’s victory should be a wake-up call on that front.

A lot of young men voted for Donald Trump. And while I am not a fan of Trump myself, I get it. I think the whole ‘toxic masculinity’ narrative has been a total disaster for the centre-left, more so than even the trans stuff. Young men are being told constantly that they do not matter, that they should shut up, that they have privilege, that many of the things they like to do for fun are somehow ‘problematic’. This is why people like Andrew Tate have such a seemingly inexplicably large following – who is creating a positive view of masculinity from a liberal-left perspective?

This has created a gaping space for Trump that he has happily driven into and parked the bus. Call me naïve, but when you expend all your political energy pissing off both men and women, what’s left? There really aren’t enough nonbinary folks out there to make up the difference (sorry).

This is before we get to the liberal left being patronising to poor people and ethnic minorities, bathed in a sort of smugness that is off-putting even to people who are sympathetic to the same basic aims.

In a democracy, you have to take the electorate as it is – you can’t wish for it to be something different and hope that works out for you. I have no doubt the American voting public are willing to be liberal on a great many topics – look how far gay rights have come over the past decade, for instance – but there are limits. They aren’t going to go along with the idea that biological sex doesn’t exist, or that all young men should shut up and check their privilege. Ultimately, that is going to backfire on you. Just like it has for the Democrats.

You want the Trumps of the world to stop winning? Stop making it easy for them.

Nick Tyrone is a journalist, author and think-tanker. His latest novel, The Patient, is out now.