Donald Trump's debt of gratitude to Chelsea Manning

The Left says the world has gone mad and that the Right is to blame. How else do you explain President Donald J Trump? But the myopia of culture war politics cuts both ways.

The radical Left, like the radical Right, is so blinded by partisanship that it can’t see the wackadoos and the freaky-deakies in its own ranks.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Chelsea Manning – my nominee for Person of the 21st century.

Manning is 29, five-foot-two, blonde with pretty blue eyes. Her childhood in Oklahoma and Wales was a mess; after drifting through low-paid jobs, she joined the US army. In 2009, she was deployed to Iraq. Evidently, Manning hated it because she went rogue and used her computer skills to pass on classified material to WikiLeaks.

“Listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” she told a friend in that breathless “Lol” tone that the kids use on Facebook. More than 720,000 secret diplomatic and military documents were stolen. In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail.

In 2017, Barack Obama let her out. The turnaround in Manning’s fortunes was astonishing. Not only did she pose for Vogue in a sporty red swimsuit but she was also named a visiting fellow of Harvard University.

This last absolution was too much for Michael Morell, a former CIA leader, who quit as a non-resident senior fellow at Harvard in protest; and too much also for CIA director Mike Pompeo, who called Manning an “American traitor”. The fellowship was cancelled. Manning labelled America a “police state” that silenced the “marginalised”, a regime that has no time for the voices of those brave enough to transition from male to female.

Oh, sorry, didn’t I mention that before? Yup. Chelsea used to be a man. She was called Bradley.

Chelsea Manning poses in a red bathing suit for Vogue magazine — Manning posed for Vogue in a sporty red swimsuit

The US, of course, isn’t a police state: if it was, Manning would still be in jail – or worse. But instead of thanking her lucky stars and stripes she was born an American, she has rebranded herself as a rebel against the straight, white elite. She embodies our new, hyper-identity politics – the view that the personal is political, that because women and gays experience “marginalisation”, it’s inevitable that their politics will be shaped by that perspective.

There’s a lot of common sense in that analysis, but one of its limitations is that it often ascribes a false moral hierarchy based on how underprivileged you are. All too often, it confuses narcissism with righteousness.

Let’s be generous to Manning. The kindest interpretation, submitted by her defence counsel, is that she honestly believed she could change the world by revealing how the US prosecutes its wars unethically. The information she released probably wasn’t too serious anyway.

If all this is true, then Barack Obama’s commutation was an act of compassion, but it doesn’t change the nature of Manning’s crime. To say that she was just a soul whose intentions were good is to say, for sake of a hyperbolic analogy, “When I drove my bus into a wall to avoid a squirrel, I honestly thought it was the right thing to do and, hey, none of the passengers died – so why am I going to jail?” Because you drove the bus into a wall, you dolt. And Manning broke her military oath, risking the security of America and her allies.

US solider Chelsea Manning, when she was Bradley — Manning before she transitioned to a woman Credit: Reuters

Now she has the nerve to resurface as some oracle of minority rights, as if she represents anything but herself. Her rescinded fellowship was on “LGBTQ identity in the military.” That’s outrageous. As though the experience of being gay or trans in the military might be reduced to listening to Lady Gaga while you betray your country. The reality is that gay and trans people serve with loyalty, courage and with the barest minimum of fuss about their private lives.

Manning’s behaviour legitimises a Right-wing reaction in the eyes of many voters, such as Trump’s recent attempt to ban trans people from the military on the grounds of financial cost – even though the US military hasn’t historically paid for sex change ops. And even if it did, the price tag (an estimated $2.4 million to $8.4 million) would be a fraction of the military’s surprisingly generous budget for tackling erectile dysfunction ($84 million).

Somewhere between Manning’s belief that America is fascist and Trump’s defence of masculinity is the dull, grey reality of facts, figures and the ordinary lives of perfectly ordinary straights, gays, whatevers who don’t want to be part of this Left v Right soap opera, yet find their lives turned upside down by it.

I’m not blaming the election of Trump on Manning. I am saying that the radicalism of parts of the Left has for a few years made a Right-wing push back more likely, and more likely to be extreme.

Politics is pretty Newtonian: actions are met with reactions. A world in which a troubled kid from Oklahoma who betrayed her comrades is offered a Harvard fellowship is one in which a reality TV star can be elected president. And it’s a world the rest of us have to live in.