Oh boy. You know the left has had a bad day on the job when Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols comes out as a Brexit-supporter and defender of Donald Trump because “the left-wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as racist.”
In case you are not up to speed on the 1970’s music scene, the British punk rock band Sex Pistols made a ruckus with politically charged songs like “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen.” Let’s just say people were offended, mostly conservatives. Sex Pistols were as anti-establishment as you could get in those days, and therefore darlings of leftwing radicals.
Fast forward forty years and Johnny Rotten, whose real name is John Lydon, is still anti-establishment. In the meantime, the cultural and political establishment has shifted to become thoroughly globalist, corporatist and all things left. Lydon is therefore now pro-Brexit and a fan of U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) and its leader Nigel Farage who supported Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. He even had a few nice things to say about Trump.
“The Donald. He’s a complicated fellow,” the rocker said on “Good Morning Britain” Monday. “As one journalist once said to me, is he the political sex pistol?”
Rotten, who holds American citizenship, agrees Trump shares the Sex Pistol’s anti-establishment qualities.
“There’s many, many problems with him as a human being but he’s not [racist] and there just might be a chance something good will come out of that situation because he terrifies politicians,” Rotten shared. “This is joy to behold for me. Dare I say, [he could be] a possible friend.”
While this is a delightful turn of events, in a joyful sort of way, it is also an image of both the cultural and political hegemony of the left and of the rising counterculture. When leftists brand Trump and everyone right of Mao as a racist, they do it in the exact same way that condescending upper-class Brits used the term “common” to brand ordinary people. “Common people” was to them a derogatory term, in the same way as “common criminal.”
Progressive snobs talk about “flyover country” with the sneering implication that ordinary Americans are unsophisticated brutes who refuse to give up their regressive ways. Therefore, when a hero of the far left comes out in support of Brexit and paints a picture of Trump as a champion of the working class, it might produce a sufficient burst of their bubble so as to cause a tiny glitch in their matrix. Most of them will just ignore it because it doesn’t fit their narrative, but some may become sufficiently perturbed to take notice.
Although Sex Pistols is as far away from conservative values as you could possibly get, conservatives should stand up and take notice. There is an ongoing broad popular uprising against the elites, and the conservative grassroots movement is part of that.
The real news story here is that minds are changing, and unlikely allies are emerging. Many people are awakening to a new political landscape. They know what they are against, but they are searching for an alternative, which has yet to materialize.
As always, such a historical moment of cultural self-contemplation is unstable. It will not last long, but will eventually pivot towards one preferred solution over all others. That’s both scary and a huge opportunity. If conservatives seize the moment, the political zeitgeist can swing toward the right solution.
However, it can just as easily slip the other way. Do you remember how popular Ron Paul was among millennials for a brief instant in 2008? The moment passed, and they shifted over to Bernie Sanders in 2016.
In 2016 the general electorate ended up voting for the change candidate, Donald Trump, but that was a victory that can easily be squandered. Voters have been sending Republicans to Washington to get rid of Obamacare for many years now, and now when they finally have all the power, they failed to do it.
That’s embarrassing.
The Republican Party can survive such a failure if corrected before the next election cycle, but if they keep on failing, the voters will punish them. As a result, the populous may pivot again to a Bernie Sanders. If that happens, the moment for conservatives to shine may have vanished for a long time.
