The Oprah Winfrey mistake

Melanie Phillips:

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Ever since her speech at the Golden Globes, Winfrey has been excitedly talked up as a Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election. The thinking is that Donald J Trump’s astonishing trajectory has shown the old politics is dead. Now an equivalent global celebrity is needed to defeat him. Winfrey is widely loved, has instant name recognition and makes people feel good about themselves. What’s not to like?

Well, plenty. First, such thinking shows the shallowness of the fundamental objection to Trump: that America’s highest office of state has been degraded by electing a political neophyte with no experience of governing.

Choosing a rival candidate from the same mould would mean that those who want the old political order to be urgently restored have instead decided to abandon it altogether.

Second, it mistakes the reason Trump was elected. Whatever you may think of the flaws in his personality and temperament, his voters were motivated by the concerns he promised to address: the need to uphold the constitution after its erosion by the Obama administration, to revive jobs and prosperity and restore America’s standing in the world.

Those voters believed this could be achieved only by someone from outside the system. Winfrey, by contrast, is the ultimate insider within the Democratic establishment. What important ideas does she stand for? Nothing other than the Oprahfication of American culture: self-empowerment and self-actualisation, otherwise known as sentimentalism, narcissism and fakery.

Take, for example, her promotion of Rhonda Byrne’s hit book The Secret, which suggested that wishing for something hard enough would make it happen. Winfrey promotes such wishful thinking. As she said in her Golden Globes speech, even people who had suffered harsh lives shared “an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning — even during our darkest nights”.

Ah yes, hope and change....
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Oprah has also embraced the liberal bent to eagerly seek the death of those who disagree with liberalism.  Like too many liberals she is a intellectual lightweight.  She would be a worse disaster than Obama.