The Trump Balloon Is The Perfect Metaphor For Liberal Protest

Kyle Mulholland
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

The Trump Baby balloon is 20ft tall, cost £16000, and is the perfect metaphor for liberal activism. That is to say that while it makes headlines it is ultimately useless and full of hot air.

Liberals, in the modern parlance, are people with generally progressive beliefs. They believe in principles of fairness, equality, and emancipation for minority groups. They want to adjust the system in the hope of erasing injustice. These are all noble ideas and I share every single one of them. In my eyes, supporting these ideas is the minimum when it comes to being a good, ethical person, along with saying thank you to bus drivers and leaving the room to fart.

Unfortunately, liberals will always fail at achieving their objectives. Liberalism is a capitalist ideology, and while they hate social strife and oppression, they are VERY invested in the system that creates all of it. This means their activism amount to trying to put out a forest fire by frantically squeezing a sports cap bottle at it.

Mad (at) Libs

Riling up conservative ire is a huge industry, tapping into a wellspring of outrage is the modern equivalent of striking oil. One thing that gets conservative teeth grinding more than anything is a prominent liberal celebrity.

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They seem to froth at the mouth whenever figures like Justin Trudeau, Obama, or taoiseach Leo Varadkar advocates something considered progressive. Trudeau, in particular, finds himself driving the pistons of the outrage machine because of his open and public endorsement of feminism and minority equality.

Of course, maybe conservatives would seethe a little less if they realised how ineffective these liberal icons actually are.

Sisyphus Libs!

Of course, all of this advocacy falls down as soon as you look at the real, material effects of what these liberals get up to. Tredeau, despite his woke bae cred, isn’t doing much for women’s rights when he sells weaponry to Saudi Arabia; Obama may be charming, but that didn’t really matter to the thousands of civilians he obliterated with drone strikes; and Varadkar hates poor people so much, and loves giving mega-corps handouts at the tax payer’s expense. Each of these men has spent a lot of money on building an image of perceived progressiveness, but their actions pander overwhelmingly to the interests of global capital; which rarely helps, and often hinders any fight for equality.

This type of contradiction isn’t limited to politicians, figures like Bono, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson position themselves as progressive paragons who are out to bring liberty, fraternity, and equality to the world. They are renown for emptying cascades of money into charity and forging new paths for mankind.

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Again, all of their pontificating and charity work actually does fuck all to tackle systemic issues. In the background, they’re often undoing any good they may have done. Bono stashes his money away in tax havens; Musk likes to do a bit of light union busting and tosses money to the US Republican party (who are less than kind to progressive causes), and Branson is an oligarch who literally got rid of his British citizenship in order to dodge tax.

Lib And Let Lib

It seems that when it comes to liberal activism, it’s all show. The main problem is that all of these attempts (whether genuine or not) to address inequalities and oppression are hampered by the fact that they’re simultaneously attempting to succeed under capitalism.

To succeed under capitalism you have to do two things: Hoard wealth, and incentivise profit over everything else. This means that no matter how progressive you are, if you support capitalism, you either have to condone or take part in these.

Hoarding wealth means that you have to literally pull resources out of the system and keep them for yourself. Everyone does this, and for the most part, its fairly harmless, everyone puts money away for the futures. Unfortunately, hoarding becomes a problem when you do it with turgid, gigantic, throbbing mountains of money. Piles of money so immense that you could never hope to spend it all, even if you bought a jet ski every day for the rest of your life. This leads to a situation where one person can hold wealth that goes above and beyond that needed for their material needs. This wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the fact that some people have so little wealth they can’t even sustain themselves.

Artist’s impression

Profit is the main objective of capitalism, nearly every business, organisation, and government prioritises it. The best ways to increase your profits is to cut costs, and more often than not these cuts hit labour. This is done via downsizing, mechanisation, lobbying to reduce minimum wage, or just outsourcing your work to an impoverished country where they can get away with treating their workers like serfs.

Glib Libs

Liberal activism will always be hobbled by the ball and chain that is capitalism. Feminism will fail women workers languishing in sweatshops, environmentalism will wilt in the face of industrial pollution, and anti-war activism will be overshadowed by the profits of arms exports.

I don’t doubt that liberals genuinely want to right these wrongs, but until they reject capitalism they’ll be like a man in a dark room pawing for the light switch but missing every time.

Until the day they do reject capitalism, all their efforts will be like the Trump Balloon; lurid and totally hollow.

Kyle Mulholland

Written by

Tall boy writer with nice hair.

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