Trey Parker, half of the duo that created South Park and self-described Libertarian, once said, ‘I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals.’ He goes onto say that, ‘What we’re sick of—and it’s getting even worse—is: you either like Michael Moore or you wanna f***in’ go overseas and shoot Iraqis. There can’t be a middle ground. Basically, if you think Michael Moore’s full of shit, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we’re both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us.’ He made these statements more than a decade ago: they fell on mostly deaf ears then, and evidently still do. He sees a middle ground, where people can disagree both with Michael Moore and with bombing Iraq: apparently a lot of people don’t share this view, to the detriment not just of America, but of the entire world.
The unfortunate polarisation of politics, not just in America, but in the Western world as a whole, is partially to blame for these types of elections. In America, Democratic media sources see Republicans as, by and large, rednecks complaining about lack of guns and an excess of minorities, while Republican media sources see the Democrats as inner-city liberal elitists who think their educations make them better than the rest of the country. The problem is, both of these extremities exist, but as minorities of the whole: much of the mainstream media perpetuates the stereotype of one or the other. These messages do nothing to unite people in the middle ground and everything to divide them into extremes, and it’s at this extreme that Donald Trump manifested.
Today is no exception: everywhere the left wing media is publicly lambasting slightly less than half of the voting populace as idiotic, racist, misogynistic hicks: the left wing media’s derision of Trump supporters as these types of people is a big part of the reason they’re Trump supporters in the first place. The people who voted for the man feel like they’re downtrodden and forgotten about by career politicians in Washington; they saw Trump as a way out, a straight talking breath of fresh air in a barren Washington landscape. They were between the devil and the deep blue sea, and for them the wild unknown was a better option than Hillary Clinton. Never mind whether or not these people truly are the downtrodden and forgotten about it, because at the end of the day that doesn’t matter: they believe they are, and they voted accordingly
The extremes of both sides of politics are to blame, meaning the left wing has to accept their part in making a Trump White House a reality. The only way to move forward is to get back to the middle ground. Barack Obama did this successfully. Were a third term a legal possibility, it’s hard to believe that Trump could’ve beaten him, but that’s a question to which we’ll never know the answer, and those expending time and energy wondering whether a third Obama term, or a Bernie Sanders campaign, or a Joe Bidden campaign could’ve defeated Trump are detracting from the fact: his rhetoric worked, and many of the people simply didn’t like nor trust Hillary Clinton. Whether the allegations of corruption against Hillary are true is immaterial: people believed they were, or simply didn’t like her enough to vote for the alternative.
The middle ground is the only way democratic politics has ever really worked: compromises need to be made, otherwise instead of celebrating a Democratic presidency in four years, we’ll more than likely be commiserating a second term of Trump. It’s important to find distinction between disliking the man for his policies, while coming to an understanding with his supporters for their point of view. The simple solution is to deride his whole support base as racist, sexist and bigoted; unfortunately, if the solution were simple we never would have had a Trump White House.