The Only Middle Finger Available: If Trump wins, it will be as a gigantic rude gesture to the cultural Left.

Did you destroy historical monuments? Burn private businesses and wreck homes? Ambush police cars and beat up pro-Trump people? Then this is for you.

Rich Lowry  "If Donald Trump wins a second term, it will be an unmistakable countercultural statement in a year when progressives have otherwise worked their will across the culture.

"After months and months of statues toppling and riots in American cities and a crime wave and woke virtue-signaling from professional sports leagues and absurd firings and cancellations, the year would end with a stunning, stark rebuke of all of that.

"If Trump manages to pull off an upset in 2020, it will be as a gigantic rude gesture directed at the commanding heights of American culture.

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"It would be hard to understand a Trump victory outside this context.

"It’s easy to see what might be the reasons for a Biden victory, which seems much more likely at this point: a massive turnout among Democrats who fear and loathe Trump; a pandemic that still isn’t under control; a lead on almost every issue, especially on health care; enough appeal in the Midwest and among a few erstwhile Trump voters; a promise of a return to normality." . . . 

. . . "He’s the vessel for registering opposition to everything from the 1619 Project to social media’s attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden story.

"To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture.

"This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.

"If Trump wins, though, this cultural element will be the subtext, and maybe just the text — he’d be, even more so than now, the president as affront, and he would be felt as such by all the woke progressives and fellow travelers who are accustomed to believing that they represent a steamroller of history.It may well be that Biden will get over the top by implicitly promising a diminution in cultural strife, by which he presumably means a slower pace of woke cultural change (with the Left considerably less agitated than it has been in the Trump years)." . . .