Watch the video of alt-right — excuse me, fucking goddamn nazis praising Führer Trump and making Nazi salutes and questioning the humanity of Jews and liberals, and then try to tell me that racism isn’t what got that orange asshole elected. My wife’s father, my uncles, my grandfather fought in a brutal war to end that fascism, and now the Republican party has brought them to power here.
Hail Trump
? Christ.
Oh, but we’re TOTALLY NOT repeating what happened in 1930’s Germany…
/s
It’s everywhere. Schools are littered with swastikas, the “new” nazis are sig heiling all over the place, the Klan is celebrating. It’s a brave old world.
Oh yes, and white people are protesting for the preservation of their race.
Sure, but get ready for the searing, full-throated condemnation from the Trump camp.
WMDKitty,
Well, no. After all, the Nazis didn’t have nukes.
Do they know that Ivanka is Jewish?
“Oh, I’ll grant Hitler’s rhetoric has been kind of extreme, and I do think he’s being very harsh on the Jews! But you’ve got to admit they’ve been given too many privileges lately. Who’s looking out for us real Germans?
And anyway, being in government is bound to mellow him out. We’ve got checks and balances in place, it’s not like he rules alone. And he’s a real outsider, he’ll bring in fresh ideas and sweep out the stables! We should give him a chance.”
–The comfortable German middle class, ca. 1933
excuse me for sharing this thought.
just realized they could use a “wriggle defense”, claiming they didn’t vote for him because of his racism. that his racism is just an aspect of him that they disregarded.
ugh
even if so => no excuse, waasn’t like he didn’t advertise his racism, making it perfectly clear he’s racist. that alone is the deal-breaker (to put it in his vocabulary).
psheww
there I said it. blame me if any try to actually use it. *slapping wrist*
“They” could also use a “peas made me do it!” excuse; it was either vote for teh trum-prat or eat a pea. Both are intolerably horrible, make you puke, and are totally lacking in the common sense of, say, a rock, but only one is likely to affect you as soon as you do it.
But wait! Perhaps it’s not that he’s questioning the humanity of Jews for bigoted reasons; he’s doing it because he’s feeling economically ungood as the president/director of a bigoted institute which just got the government it wants, who happens to advocate “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to make an “ethno-state” based on “very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence,” thinks MLK was a “fraud and degenerate,” and that it ain’t necessarily so that “the political and social advancement of non-Whites is inherently moral and wonderful.”
I mean come on, that screams “the economy, stupid” to me…. Underneath the suit, there might be a skinhead rock t-shirt and a pair of jeans with an empty wallet, right? Has anyone checked? Maybe he’s a telepathic reptilian who’s merely making you believe he’s a raging bigot, when really that is the farthest thing from the truth? Who the fuck knows?
Where is Indiana Jones when you need him?
Where’s the Godwin crowd when you need them? We fucking called this. It’s not a god damn Godwin if he’s literally Hitler!
This dude on Facebook was calling me emotional for saying that Trump had called for ethnic cleansing, and for my pointing out that this leads to genocide almost invariably. We should give him a chance first!
(A chance at starting the ethnic cleansing I guess?)
Zeppelin @6,
Don’t forget that Hitler’s promised to invest in infrastructure. Just wait till you see the autobahns!
Hitler, making Germany great again!
Scary! What is the relation between the alt right and the Christian Right? I heard that the alt right are neo-pagans or atheists and anti-Christian. Yet both are far right and pro-Trump. Correct?
Why? Why? Why do we have history if we’re so utterly unable to learn from it? What use is our intelligence if it doesn’t prevent us from potentially ushering our own extinction? Has there ever been such a viciously self-destructive species as ours before? I never thought I’d be living moments like these, never in a million years. World War 2 seems so pointless now… just a belated victory for Hitler, a way to plant the putrid seed of his ideology in the minds of enough evil people to ensure that his horrible vision could come to fruition one day. My hopes and dreams of youth are officially dead. I’ve thrown the ashes in the wind without ceremony or care.
#14 Ragdish There is no such thing as the “Christian Right” as their version has nothing to do with Christianity.
You are otherwise correct, but it doesn’t matter to my Drumpfheteer former friends. They became former when I quoted them the part in their Bible about one of their favorites–Matthew–when his boss was talking about the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the imprisoned, the sick, and he told them ‘when you refused to help the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’ So even the pseudoreligious and pseudoChristians Drumpfh evil pieces of shit can go bleep themselves.
This fundamental hypocrisy makes them blink a second, then try to change the subject. Apparently their book was missing that page.
Drumpfh supporting Nazi filth and fake religious filth can go bleep themselves.
The only way that Trump can be disassociated with these people is to publicly denounce them (not on Twitter and Facebook, but at a press conference) and with same demeanor as when said he was going to build a wall and deport Muslims.
Until they turn against him, #TrumpisaCoward
I know of no data that shows that racism was what got the orange asshole elected. We can be confident that the racists who voted did vote for him, and that includes the open racists and the closeted racists. But the average working class Republican voter need not be racist. I happen to live among quite a few Trump voters, and counted many as close friends over about 15 years (oddly), & these people are not racist. Blacks and Latinos who voted for Trump (not a large % but the #s are still surprising) are probably not racist in the way that Trump seems to be.
Calling them all racists is a bit like saying that you and I voted for Hillary because we think politicians need to cozy up to Wall street bankers and delete evidence needed in an investigation. I voted for Hillary for a variety of motivations, and I was willing to overlook her flaws. Likewise, the people I know who voted for the orange asshole did so for various reasons, and I know that they were meanwhile disturbed about the racist and misogynist and many other problems with this candidate. I can still strongly fault them for their poor judgement, but it was not racism that made them choose.
Here is an article that surveys the motivations of why people voted for the orange asshole. No one says they are racist.
handsomemrtoad,
Jesus fucking christ on a pogo stick, how dense can you be? Look at the list in my 26 (and keep in mind that it is just partial), do you really have any question about the intentions of Trump? I mean, are you really waiting for the mushroom cloud to be your smoking gun?
Here’s a suggestion, go read the Nazi etc. thread, follow the links there, and then come back.
Sorry, wrong thread.
I wasn’t aware that “economic reasons” was actually pronounced “Sig Heil”. Learn something new every day I guess.
Marcoli,
The people who voted for Trump voted for him either (a) because he is racist or (b) despite his racism or (c) not realizing that he is racist.
Regardless, the effect is the same.
re @18:
using the excuse I fabricated in @7, eh?
* I see you*
re @18:
rephrasing what I wrote @23:
you are simply ‘pointing out a distinction without difference’. /spock
This is an extremely important question. On the one hand, I’m tempted to think of them as competing factions in the Trump/far-Right sphere. On the other, a good portion of atheism and secularism (in Europe and the US) seems to have been – as I’ve suspected and feared for a while – captured by the religious Right. I think this has been spearheaded in the US by the AEI, but in Europe, too, you’ll find calls for secularism often serving as cover for anti-Muslim Christianity.
Bannon is clearly pro-Christian Right, as this bit of nonsense indicates:
It’s stupid on so many levels: French resistance fighters and leading organizations were frequently Communists, while the Church often collaborated; resistance movements didn’t necessarily resist the Holocaust, which is the most defining question; US soldiers on D-Day were from all over the US and not just “Kansas City or the Midwest” (not to mention that Kansas City is in the Midwest); the atheistic Soviet Union was on our side; capitalists, and not just in Germany, were very happy to support the Nazis; continental Europe was taken back from European fascists, who grew from European imperialism and capitalism; many leaders of the “Judeo-Christian West” opposed the liberation of oppressed, colonized peoples; atheism is not foreign to (though it isn’t owned by) “the West”;…
It’s often said of the Nazis that they were atheists and anti-Christian pagans. I’ve mentioned the book Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany once or twice recently, and it seems more relevant than ever. It’s a lesson to institutions today:
Given the enthusiasm of organized white evangelicalism for Trump, their Islamophobia, and their connections to the Christian Right in Russia (even if evangelicals might be repressed there), it’s difficult to see how/why they would resist the alt-Right elements in the movement even if those proved to be anti-Christian, but there’s little indication they would.
Here are two more telling quotes from that 2014 Bannon interview:
The atheist-secular Left needs to assert itself urgently.
Shorter: Despite some superficial indications to the contrary, there’s little historical or contemporary reason to believe the alt-Right and religious Right won’t cooperate.
Salty @ 25, I agree. But how do we organize? We are, I fear, too divided.
Except that being willing to vote for Clinton despite her flaws is actually nothing like voting for an unqualified, idiotic, arrogant, belligerent, racist, sexist, lying, cheating pigfucker whose every expression throughout the campaign indicates he plans to destroy every remaining decent shred of our country. “Both sides” here are not up to the same thing, they are not just as bad, and they are not even comparable. Fuck you very much for saying so.
I don’t give a shit that you know some Trump voters. I do too, along with I’m sure lots of other people here (those in the US). So that does not give you any special insight or authority which we do not have, and it isn’t relevant that anybody knows such people anyway. Voting for him was inexcusable.
How could this matter to you? It was a racist choice because of the racist effects it has, whatever it was that made them choose that way.
You are not telling us anything here, except that we are not mind-readers, as everybody already knew. You apparently think you are and can tell us what their choices were really, secretly about, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Or it’s as if you think “racism” would exist in that one infinitesimal moment when they chose, unobservable from everyone including the person choosing, then it immediately disappears again. But that is not how it works. From here on, that moment certainly does not mean shit to people who experience racism, even if you did have the ability to tell us anything coherent about the deepest and most complex inner workings of a fucking Trump voter, because racist shit is happening and will happen because of their choice, no matter what sort of crap happened to be sloshing around in their heads at the time.
This is part of the problem as well, though. Like it or not, for the last 20 years it has been remarkably common in political discourse for people on opposite sides to compare each other to nazis, fascists, communists, and just about every other totalitarian regime in recent memory. Valid or not (and I agree that it IS very valid in the case of the Horror-Clown), emphasizing the parallels to another historical event in an attempt to be predictive is actually harmful: it takes up more intellectual and physical space than the horrifying things that he is actually doing, right now, that he is somehow not being held accountable for. It obscures the point to those without the context to see it, and makes valid criticism of him read as just more of the same, expected, extreme political fencing that has been going on forever (in my living memory, at least).
He’s wrong, and terribly emphatically so, but charge against what he’s actually done and actually doing, not at what someone else did, however strong and tempting the parallels are. The man and his actions are sufficiently bad enough that there is plenty of material to rally against and work toward defeating.
It’s almost impossible not to try to predict the future by what happened in the past, but as a dear history professor of mine often repeated, history isn’t a magic crystal ball that will predict the future, and the _only_ thing we ever learn when we try to use it as such is how to do it again with a higher body count.
Again, I emphasize that for the most part, I agree with what you’re all saying here: the man is completely inept, a racist, sexist buffoon with authoritarian tendencies and followed closely by some very dangerous and scary people, and he needs to be contained. I’m just scared that this is getting undermined by the rhetoric that many have learned to dismiss as “regular” political discourse.
Jake Tapper was not happy with that headline.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/vacationing-jake-tapper-blasts-cnn-on-twitter-for-running-anti-semitic-chyron-on-his-show/
Calling people who voted for Drumph is just abbreviation for “did a very racist action”
IOW characterize the action not the person
Tpyo: word got dropped
Calling people who voted for Drumph “racist” is just the abbreviated word for the phrase “performed a racist action”
I think this is relevant (Jonathan Pie rant):
https://www.facebook.com/796085293847699/videos/1044777035645189/
Blaming Trump’s election on racism is like blaming heroin addiction on heroin.
I believe the point is that groups (b) and (c) could be peeled off to vote for a non-racist candidate in future, and that lumping them all in together makes that more difficult.
@Dunc, 35:
Yeah, but doing that would require they stop masturbating over their ideological purity for 30 seconds and actually face political and social realities.
Jake, @36: I was trying to be diplomatic.
Everybody’s angry, and a lot of people are legitimately scared. Being a dick about it is not helpful, and it’s certainly not going to persuade people to listen to you. You’re exhibiting exactly the same sort of behaviour that you’re decrying.
Marcoli #18,
Thanks for that link. It’s interesting how many of these people voted for Trump for reasons that are just flat out wrong, like that he is a good buisinessman or that he will fix the economy for the common man.
@ Dunc #37: Exactly.
As Jonathan Pie said, the left has stopped debating. They have claimed moral victory and simply denounces anybody that disagrees. You can argue that the right has done the exact same thing, but that doesn’t get us anywhere.
I don’t think people understand just how Clinton was perceived by the opposition. I visit a couple of firearm-related forums, and from what I can gather few actually like Trump. They just hated Clinton so much more. People wanted change, they were desperate for it, and Clinton represented everything that is wrong with the current system.
Let’s face it, politicians never listen to anything but money and votes. You cannot change a party from within, so the only way is to vote for the opposition. Whining about it doesn’t help, blaming the voters is simply living in denial.
The difference between Trump and Clinton is that Trump actually listened to people. He might not care about them, but at least he pretended to listen. Clinton simply ignored them.
@Erlend Meyer #39 “Clinton simply ignored them” (vs. Trump actually listened to people). I am so sick of reading shit like that. So Clinton didn’t listen to people but she won the popular vote by biggest margin among several recent elections in modern era? Clinton didn’t listen to women? To Blacks? To Gays and Lesbians? To people with disabilities? To white anti-racists?
I am so sick of this shorthand shit about Clinton. If any were not racists who voted for Trump (and I find that impossible since no one could not know that Trump was racist so accepting that fact in our president was itself racist) then plenty of those supposed non racists were sexists! The hatred of Hillary was so gross, so unreasonable, and its effect still shows up in comments like yours, and yet she still won way more votes! Think about that before you make comments about what Clinton didn’t do,
Seconding feministhomemaker @40; as of late Pharyngula has become a hotbed for racism apologia; it’s even driving away the most sensible commenters.
@Erlend Meyer
That’s demonstrably false. Clinton constantly talked about, and had detailed policies to resolve the problems of everyday USAians. She was talking, she was responding to their problems.
Thing is she also responded to the problems of black & latino Americans, immigrants, global issues such as climate change, or minority issues such as LGBT rights. She listened, she responded. But she didn’t treat hetero white male issues as paramount and she wasn’t willing to listen and pander to people screaming nationalism, hatred and bigotry.
Perhaps maybe it’s you who weren’t listening to what she had to say?
Sure, before Trump sauntered onto the scene eighteen-ish months ago, racism didn’t exist. Also, racists are the real victims for having their prejudices catered to in exchange for a vote.
@37, Dunc:
I ran out of diplomatic before the election.
I spent months warning people this would happen, and every single time they’d spew bullshit excuses, with one of the big ones being: “The only reason you oppose Clinton is because of your obsession with ideological purity!”
Now that I’ve been proven right (and dismissed as “smug” by tone trolls who can’t bear to admit it) I have to watch the people who dismissed me beforehand doing every single thing they falsely accused me of doing.
I’m as angry and scared as the rest of us, but I’m the only one who warned about this disaster in advance and (thus far) the one of the few who seems to be doing something about it, so forgive me if I ran out of fucks to give about everyone else’s anger and fear.
@40, feministhomemaker:
That’s certainly some impressive but meaningless stats you just quoted.
If offered the choice between eating your favorite food and your second favorite food, which would you prefer? How much would you prefer it over the other?
If offered the choice between eating a soggy spam sandwich and bowl of rat poison, which would you prefer? How much would you prefer it over the other?
I think it’s a fair bet that the degree to which you prefer the soggy spam sandwich over the poison is far greater than the degree to which you’d prefer your favorite food over your second favorite, but it would be silly to argue that this implies you like the soggy spam sandwich.
No. She damn well didn’t.
Clinton is already complicit in the mass bombings of at least five countries inhabited primarily by brown people.
This fact is already well-known, so I find it impossible to believe that anyone didn’t know she was a racist beforehand.
If voting for Trump makes you a racist, the same is true for Clinton.
Alt right atheists are part of a theocratic totalitarian movement.
I disagreed a lot with the late Christopher Hitchens. But in regards to fascism and nazism he was spot on. At their core, ultra-right wing ideologies are theistic with deification of the leader (e.g. der Fuehrer) and their spiritual quest for a whites only homeland. Atheists committed to such movements abandon all reason and only end up falling into the Orwellian Ingsoc trap of absolute obedience to Big Brother, doublethink and happily accept that 2+2=5.
Oh joy, another game of Circular Firing Squad…
@42 =8)-DX:
Except that she’s a pathological liar. Nobody with the slightest knowledge of Clinton’s history would believe her sudden change of heart on the campaign trail; promising liberal policies to get into office and enact conservative ones is the MO of the DLC that the Clintons were huge drivers of.
That she was making it clear even on the campaign trail that all of her promises were lies didn’t exactly help her case.
Perhaps maybe actions speak louder than words.
Honestly, the entire campaign was one non-stop cycle of Clinton supporters pointing to a great thing Clinton said and her critics pointing out that it was completely at odds with what Clinton did.
@43, snuffcurry:
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make but I think you may have misunderstood the analogy.
Newsflash: TRUMP WON! That revolting piece of shit actually won. When you loose to a giant turd you can’t assume that you smell of roses. And don’t give me that popular vote-crap, that was part of the deal from the start. Has the Dems ever tried to change this system?
Fact: In 2008 Obama got 53% of the votes (best in 20 years) and 365 electoral votes. That was a black man, a son of an immigrant, with a quite “muslim-sounding” name. If the US could elect that man as president, how racist can the people really be? Has people really turned more racist in the last 8 years?
Sorry, I just don’t buy it. I know the world is full of racists, and with Trump in power we can expect them to become more vocal. But that Trump won because (close to) the majority are racists?
Jake Harban:
Even now, you keep focusing on Clinton whilst ignoring how much worse the prospects under Trump are.
Trump has been President-elect for what, two weeks or so? And already stuff such as featured in the OP is beginning to manifest, even as his administration’s protagonists are being revealed.
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
Clinton had some political power for some time, she was not that good. Bad, even.
Trump is beginning to get such power, and it’s gonna be far, far worse.
(Everyone kept telling you about the lesser evil being better than the greater, you kept ignoring them — now you’re finding out what that entails, O Clinton-basher, Trump-enabler. You’re gonna have to live with that, and it was others who told you so. And you’re not gonna enjoy it when it finally sinks in)
Erlend Meyer @48
Read this. It’s aimed more towards people who voted for Trump, but the point about “I voted for Obama so I can’t be racist” still stands.
I know. It’s a sorry state of affairs. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past several days, and will stay on it. If anyone has practical suggestions (that aren’t “donate to X”), please share them.
I don’t deny that people are racist. Most people are, to some degree. We are all messy, incoherent and irrational animals, saying one thing while doing the complete opposite. But just how racist can the public be considering that they voted for a black president twice? I don’t think it’s enough to explain this election.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this result is boding well for anybody, and certainly not the minorities. But simply blaming and shaming the voters isn’t going to solve anything. It’s not like he’s the first right wing POS to win an election, this is happening all over Europe as well. And I think it’s crucial that we at least consider the possibility that the left has lost touch with the people.
How is it possible that 1/3 of hispanic/asian/others voted for him?
Well, that is utterly terrifying. People keep claiming Trump isn’t really as bad as he seems (a claim I find no merit in), but let’s assume for a moment that this is somehow actually true, and the Donald has been totally misunderstood and isn’t in reality the Orange hued bigot he appears to be; if you think about it for a moment, it swiftly becomes clear that it doesn’t actually make the situation any better.
Even if Trump is not a flaming racist idiot (I won’t say if he isn’t actually a misogynist – that ship has long since sailed), then he still used racist sentiment to accrue power. Is the cynic who is prepared to say and do anything, and align himself to anyone, to get power really all that favourable to the true fanatic? Especially when a person who is prepared to say anything to take power may well be prepared to do anything to keep it? Any number of tyrants throughout history have in truth had no political ideology beyond their own aggrandizement, and Trump is showing all the warning signs of being another.
And even if Trump is by some miracle not a potential dictator in waiting, but is under it all a true proponent of democracy, that still doesn’t make things all that much better – Trump ran a campaign fueled by lies and bigotry, and now all the neo-fascists of the Alt Right have seen first hand what that kind of flailing White Nationalist hatred and fear mongering can do when yolked to political purpose by a slick campaign team, even when the candidate in question is a buffoon. Some of the most toxic and hateful elements of American society can only have been emboldened by that experience (as the linked video in the OP amply, and nauseatingly, demonstrates), and even worse Trump has made a legion of oppressive and tyrannical promises to just that constituency, which leaves him well and truly riding the tiger – if he tries to get off now he will inevitably be mauled. And since he has left behind a ready made movement of organized reactionary bigotry and a route to power for them to exploit, if he does demonstrate an uncharacteristic display of integrity and human decency and refuse to advance their bigoted agenda, then he could easily find himself replaced by a candidate who is all too willing to deliver what he promised, including religious tests for entry into the US and treating women like sexual chattel.
At the risk of being indelicate, this electoral result has screwed us all over, big time. Even if Trump were to mature in office and become something less than a walking apocalypse (unlikely I know), then the damage is still already done. I fear that we are not just dealing with one outlier candidate anymore – this is now the age of Trumpian politics, and more candidates like him are inevitable. Worse, they now have the precedent of a Trump win, so it is likely more like him will win again in the future. How many more President Donald Trump’s can the USA, and the world, afford? How long before one of them actually lives up to the full billing of their bigoted and oppressive campaign promises?
@ Gregory #53: But what do you suggest we do? Keep offering people candidates they don’t want? Keep pushing the same policies that got us to where we are now? The way I understand it people are so desperate for change that they were willing to vote for Trump to get it.
1/3 of hispanics voted for a man calling them criminals and rapists. 42% women voted for this misogynist. If that doesn’t get your attention, what will?
@Erlend Meyer #48
Presumably you haven’t heard of systemic racism and subconscious bias. Liking or even voting for a black man doesn’t remove a lifetimes-worth of biases or suddenly transport one to a society without racial discrimination. Especially if the majority of those in power are still white men.
@53: Remember, Trump did not increase the Republican vote that much in those crucial states that flipped the result. If the Dems can just get back to turning out the numbers they did in 2012, then they will win again. It’s not like a huge wave of white supremacists suddenly appeared from nowhere – most of those people have been out there and voting Republican forever. Normally, there aren’t enough of them to tip the balance. They can only win when Dems stay home, or are prevented from voting.
Erlend Meyer @ 54;
You provide a better alternative to an openly racist, committed misogynists under multiple accusation of sexual assault. You fight the monstrous idea of neo-fascism with the only weapon that truly works long term – a better, stronger, more enlightened idea.
If ‘giving the people the candidate they want’ means a line up of bullies and bigots, then we are already lost. Fortunately, I still have a higher opinion of the US electorate, and humaity at large, than that. Trump got into power by a combination of rallying hardcore bigots and using a slick schtick that preyed on people’s fears and insecurities. The bigots are a lost cause, but the millions who voted for him out of fear and/or desperation are not. Such a narrative is difficult to counter, but not impossible, and four years under an at best incompetent and at worst oppressive Trump administration will certainly have taken whatever shine people may have imagined they saw off that particular apple, hopefully making it easier to ensure that four years of catastrophe don’t become eight. Assuming, that is, that America will actually see more elections in four years – I wouldn’t put it past Trump to declare a convenient state of emergency just before this troublesome presidential voting business is about to start up again.
Why do you assume it doesn’t have my attention? What makes you think that gulling vulnerable people into voting against their own interests is in any way a new invention in politics? Trump is not revolutionary as a candidate; he is an established political trend taken to a horrifying extreme. It is not that a candidacy like his was impossible to predict, but rather that we had all hoped that we weren’t that far gone yet. We were clearly wrong.
As I said in my last post, this election has hurt the democratic project in a very profound way, and it will have inevitable repercussions for the future. For the next four years, we are going to be in very hot water whichever way we jump, but that does not mean that I am counseling despair, far from it. Either we throw up our hands and abandon hope, or the fight back begins now, and I know which option I choose. But it can’t be undirected struggle, fueled by no more than knowing what we hate. We need a strategy that works, and a means to counter the easy answers to complex questions that Trump and co. like to peddle. You can’t fight shallow, exploitative populism with more shallow, exploitative populism and expect anything other than a race to the bottom. A truly better alternative doesn’t promise a magic wand to make all your problems go away, and that is why it is a harder sell.
@=8)-DX #55: You’re right, and I’m not claiming that Obama is evidence that the war on racism is won.
@ Dunc #56: I don’t think”getting 2012 back” will work. I fear we’ve reached a tipping point that require new ideas and new people.
Dunc @ 56;
True, and that is another part of the puzzle – voter suppression is obviously a crime of monumental proportions, and that it is allowed to occur within the world’s most influential democracy is scandal of vast proportions, but good old political apathy is also a peril many people don’t appreciate. Ludicrously large numbers of people didn’t come out to vote in even this most important of elections, and every person who either can’t vote or can’t be bothered to vote magnifies the influence of extremist groups until they do hold the balance of power. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that a democracy has been taught this lesson the hard way, and yet we always seem so quick to forget it again. I hope our collective memory lasts at least four years this time.
I’m talking purely in terms of the electoral arithmetic. Take the six states that flipped from blue to red, plug in the 2012 Democratic numbers, and five of them (representing 70 electoral college votes) flip back.
I really like the low-maintenance high and tight hair with a flop on top. Damn nazis have RUINED IT! Between the pork pie hat-wearing neckbeards and the nazis I’m gonna have to go full on hippie. :( #firstworldproblems.
“Views about race mattered more in electing Trump than in electing Obama”:
@7, slithey tove:
Funny you should use the term deal-breaker.
Before the election, I would often ask: “What’s your absolute deal-breaker? What’s so disgusting that you would never support anyone who did it period?”
The response was usually some variant of: “I don’t have one.” Often coupled with accusations that my insistence on drawing a line somewhere was selfish “ideological purity.”
@49, John Morales:
Did you forget to put your brain on this morning? That’s the only explanation I can think of for the sheer concentrated stupidity of this post.
For months, I’ve warned that saying: “Clinton may be horrible, but she’s the lesser evil!” was not a winning strategy. For months, I’ve warned that pursuing lesser-evilism would just get Trump elected.
And I was right. Completely and utterly.
Now that you’re facing the consequences of having ignored my warnings, your reaction is to suddenly pretend that you were giving the warnings and I ignoring them? That’s a level of chutzpah right on par with Trump announcing that he’d warned us that global warming would provoke a crisis in Syria only for the left to tell him that global warming was a hoax.
I will concede one thing— your lesser evil argument was persuasive. Across the Rust Belt in several different swing states, voters went to the polls to choose between a Wall Street toady who ruined their towns and livelihoods by pushing “trade” deals like NAFTA and a racist who planned to end those “trade” deals entirely. And a great many of them chose the lesser evil— while neither candidate was liberal, Trump was still clearly an improvement over Clinton.
So congratulations. Your constant whining that everyone should vote for the “lesser evil” is the exact thing that won Trump the election.
Which means the level of chutzpah of your comment is more on par with someone telling you that getting punched in the face is painful, then punching you in the face, then scolding you for having “disregarded” their warning that getting punched in the face is painful, and then gloating about how you deserve to suffer for having “ignored” their warning.
@50, rq:
I don’t think that’s really relevant. If I’m reading Erlend Meyer correctly, their point isn’t “if a person votes for Obama, it proves they’re not a racist” but rather “if the country as a whole was willing to elect Obama, then the country as a whole is not racist enough to genuinely prefer Donald Trump’s white supremacist views.”
Which does fit with the rest of the available evidence; only about 25% of the electorate voted for Trump and of those that did, a substantial majority only chose him because they felt he was the lesser evil.
@54, Erlend Meyer:
Of course. The Democrats reign supreme. We must support them completely and without question. Virtuous are those who show their
faith“pragmatism” by embracing candidates they oppose in service of the Almighty Democratic Party. Should you find yourfaith“pragmatism” wavering or find yourself beset bydoubt“ideological purity,” simply repeat the Holy Prayer: “Lesser evil. Lesser evil. Lesser evil.”Nope. People voted for Trump because they are bigots due to an inherent moral defect innate to who they are. Considering any other reasons for Trump’s success is “racism apologia.”
Gregory Greenwood@#59:
The electoral college is voter suppression. And there’s voter suppression on top of that.
that it is allowed to occur within the world’s most influential
democracyoligarchy is scandal of vast proportionsFixed that for ya.
There are no consequences for ignoring an ignorant, hateful, ideologue without a coherent program. You still don’t have one and are just trolling. You aren’t engaged in any development of candidates. Stop your inane trolling.
From where I stand, part of the problem is all this “horse race” thinking. In a functioning representative democracy vote is not and should never be a “winner takes all” competition, it should be the evaluation of what people as a whole want. And government should then work towards a proportionate and acceptable compromises according to that vote. Unfortunately no government around the world works that way, because people are too invested in “us versus them” and “winners decide, loosers suck it up” thinking.
Clinton did not lose, Trump did not win. Clinton was not elected, Trump was. That is not a distinction without difference, that is a very important distitinction.
Saying “news flash, Clinton lost” implies that this was entirely due to some failing on her part that Trump did not have. In a horse race, where the playing field is equal, this is logical conclusion, the loser does overwhelmingly lose due to some failing with regard to the winner. However in a vote this does not logically follow. It might be so for following reasons:
1) The playing field is not equal. Electoral college makes it unequal, as does voter supression (both overt and covert), voter intimidation (ditto).
2) The polititians are not the sole active elements in the process, the voters are an active element too. The outcome of a vote does not reflect on the politician(s) who got elected, but upon the people who elected them.
Hence my conclusion, that since a significant portion of US people voted for a openly racist and mysogynistic man when the alternative was a woman who was less bad in every observable aspect, a significant portion of US people is either overtly racist or has no problem with overtly racist policies. And that is a distinction without difference.
Jake Harban @ 44;
I seem to remember you claiming that a Trump win would be less of a problem for America and the world than a Clinton win, because Trump would be hamstrung by a Congress who would be opposed to his policy agenda. You asserted that an established political operator like Clinton was more threatening than a rank outsider like Trump because the checks and balances in the system would pull his teeth.
Given how things have turned out, perhaps you are in no place to make out that you have such clear political foresight? Trump is sitting upon a Republican controlled Congress who can get through pretty much any policy they like that doesn’t require a super-majority, and even a super-majority only needs a few of the more conservative Democrats to go their way. With many Supreme Court judges being close to retirement, Trump will also most likely be able to shape the character of the Supreme Court for decades to come, and given his recent political appointments of hardliners (he has even recently issued a tweet trying to push the UK government into turfing out the current UK ambassador to the US and replacing him with Nigel Farage), it is a near certainty that his Supreme Court Appointees would make the late and unlamented Scalia look like a progressive by comparison.
This is the outcome you declared to be preferable to a Clinton win. At least have personal integrity enough to admit it, rather than making out that you were the only canary in the coal mine before the election.
@57 Gregory Greenwood:
I’m pretty sure “giving people the candidate they want” means a liberal. Someone who actually does what Obama said on the campaign trail. Sanders would have fit the bill, though there are better people we could run in 2020.
People seem to be greatly underestimating the extent to which the election was swung by left-leaning and independent voters simply staying home rather than turn out to vote for a triangulating “I support whatever I need to say I support to get elected” right-wing Democrat like Clinton.
Unfortunately, the Democrats have been nothing if not complicit in the crimes of right-wing Republicans. From eagerly endorsing Bush’s war and torture and other travesties, to 2006 “impeachment is not on our agenda” to Obama’s “look forward not backward” while continuing the Bush atrocities, it’s clear that we need to shake up the Democratic Party before we can trust them with our support.
Because if we continue the trend that started with Reagan, then in 2020 or 2024 or 2028, all the people who are denouncing Trump’s policies today will be endorsing them and the Democratic candidate who implements them all because it’s less evil than what the Republicans have cooked up by then.
Marcus Ranum @ 64;
Sadly all too true. As a Brit, it took me years to more or less get my head around the US electoral college system, and I still for the life of me don’t understand why the US bothers with it. Then again, we can’t talk – our own system of constituency seats is a travesty in its own right, and when we had a referendum on vote reform a few years ago we wouldn’t countenance any change, still less the proportional representation system that might actually make some kind of sense.
You see – you Americans really are a chip off the old block after all…
Er… sorry about that…
@65, Troll:
Do you ever get bored trolling? Maybe you should at least get some new material— “If you don’t have a perfect solution, then you’re not allowed to notice the problem or criticize my role in causing it” is a bit worn out at this point.
@67, Gregory Greenwood:
You must be misremembering. I argued that the Democrats can’t blame the Republicans for the disaster they caused after the 2008 election; when someone mentioned the filibuster as an excuse, I argued that, by that logic, Trump wouldn’t be so bad as long as the Republicans didn’t have a “filibuster-proof” majority.
This would be the outcome of a Clinton win. What you don’t seem to comprehend is that DLC Democrats like Clinton create the conditions that allow fascism to fester— if she won, it would be treading water as a storm rolls in; a delaying tactic that leaves us less prepared to deal with the disaster when it comes.
@69, Gregory Greenwood:
The electoral college was designed with the specific intention of making slavers’ votes count more than non-slavers’ votes.
It’s still serving that purpose today and doing a wonderful job of it.
Jake Harban @ 68;
I fervently hope you are right on this much at least. I want to believe that progressive policies can still win the argument of ideas (I refuse to use the loaded term ‘marketplace of ideas’ in this context)
And this is where you and I have parted company ever since I fist read your posts. Politics is not an ideal system, – we work towards an ideal, but it is vital to recognize that the road toward it is neither smooth nor level. All too often, it is necessary to do something unpleasant – even humiliating – today to ensure that there will be a tomorrow for us to strive to improve. By refusing to support the admittedly very problematic candidate of Clinton in order to keep the walking catastrophe that is Donald Trump out of office, all too many of those Left leaning voters chose to mortgage the future of America and possibly all of humanity against their personal sense of outrage or political disappointment. It was petty, self-obsessed and, worst of all, staggeringly shortsighted, and now all of society stands to pay the price for the situation those voters helped to engender through an inability to swallow their precious pride when it really counted.
If you aren’t prepared to take a knee for your principles when the chips are down, what are those principles really worth? When your indignation matters more than the future, is it not true that your only real intellectual and ideological commitment is to your own illusory sense of personal moral superiority?
@Jake Harban #63
What a load of codswallop. You act as if you and the people you interacted with directly influenced the media coverage of election topics. Many, many people I saw were giving positive reasons to vote Hillary, and nothing some blog commenter like you said was likely to change the actual media’s strategy which was “we’ve nothing new or interesting on Clinton, so lets write fifty articles about her emails.” The only place your argument strategy could have had an effect was in convincing democratic voters to choose Bernie over Hillary, but I’d wager most people on this blog voted Bernie. Once it was clear the US’s dems choce Hillary, *any* strategy could retrospectively be seen as just a “lesser of two evils” strategy, since you can’t just insert a perfect candidate half way through the election.
Jake Harban @ 70;
Fair enough then. Either way, we seem to be well into worst case scenario waters now.
I don’t think Clinton can be principally blamed for the circumstances that surrounded Trumps victory – a world wide Rightward shift in politics is afflicting humanity at the moment, and Clinton is at most more symptom than cause. As it is, that storm you talk of is breaking in the here and now, and we don’t exactly seem very prepared for it. As I mentioned up thread, what Trump does in office is the obvious immediate threat, but what bothers me most is the legacy he will leave after he is gone from the White House. Those Supreme Court appointments could easily bedevil the US for decades to come, and could be used to roll back fundamental rights for marginalized groups even under a future, more progressive government.
@ 71;
America’s problems always come back to racism and the misbegotten abomination of slavery, don’t they? You would think an artifact of oppression like that would be so shameful that it would have been done away with long since.
Jake, you were repeatedly warned that Jill Stein, was a non-viable, meaning electable candidate.
Polled in at 1% of the national vote, clearly unelectable
I TOLD YOU SO!
I WAS RIGHT!
Don’t like being told you were wrong, stop with your screeds. The facts will be there whether you recognize them or not.
I got a question for marcoli and people arguing similarly:
How do you call someone who says “I am ok with the discrimination of people based on their religion. I am ok with the killing of black people at the hands of the State. I am ok with women being sexually assaulted and then denied the right to have an abortion. I am OK with anti-semitism. I am ok with discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Sure, it’s not on my active list of priorities, but I’m ok with all of it as long as I get some not really specified things I really, really want.”
@76: Selfish? Most people are, to some extent… I’d make the same judgement about someone who was OK with the drone murder of civilians in Afghanistan as long as they got to keep their access to healthcare and the right to abortion.
Newsflash: people vote their own interests.
And if there had been that choice, the judgement would be more than valid.
Only that so far
– there is no indication that Trump will demilitarize US foreign policy. To the contrary.
-apart from big industry and billionaires, the only boons Trump allows anybody to keep is white and male privilege which, unlike healthcare and abortion access, are actually immoral.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 76;
Good point – you would think that the phrase ‘bigot’ (suitably modified with the qualifiers, ‘racist’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’ and ‘transphobic’, or the straightforward ‘disgusting’) would cover it nicely. Saying that you don’t care enough about your fellow citizens to vote for the candidate who doesn’t want to take away their rights (because you think other political issues matter more than the recognition of the humanity of people who aren’t like you) still makes you a bigot, even if you never shout a bigoted slogan yourself.
But apparently we aren’t allowed to say that, lest… what, exactly, I wonder? Will the bigots vote for a bigoted candidate again next time if we don’t pretend they aren’t bigots or something? Should we say ‘thank you, may I have another?’ to stave off the repeat racism of unrepentant racists? In my experience making nice with bullies rarely does much to improve their disposition, instead tending to further embolden them. Maybe if the apathetic Left was made more clearly aware of just how many Alt Right bigots there are in society, and how dangerously powerful they have become, then those Left leaning (or not even Left leaning; just rational enough to see how dangerous an Alt Right administration truly is, whatever their own underlying politics) voters who couldn’t be bothered to vote in the election might just get off their collective backside next time and actually take a stand for once. Playing down the severity of this situation will serve only to reinforce the grip of Trump and by extension his hard line support base, on power.
This is in response to several different people. See the graphic at the bottom of https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2016/11/21/an-inconvenient-truth-about-many-democratic-voters/. While racist views are significantly more common among people who supported Trump in the primaries than supporters of other candidates in either party, there are plenty of people holding racist views among those who supported the other candidates. People with racist views can support candidates with less racist appeal. Among Democratic primary voters, more racists supported Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders, while at the same time more black people supported Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders.
Depending on the question, between 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 of the US public hold racist views. It is entirely possible that this sector turned up more in 2016 than in 20012 and 2008, but there is reason to think at least some of this group voted for Clinton, and even Obama.
Dunc @ 77;
As Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- points out @ 78, there is scant chance of Trump meaningfully demilitarizing US foreign policy. Indeed, the low casualty rate amongst US military personnel of drone strike warfare is very likely to appeal to the Donald, and during the election campaign he advocated the use of indiscriminate bombing campaigns against civilian targets to ‘break the will’ of terrorist groups to fight, an attitude he has reinforced by stating that he has no problem with Russia’s heinous military actions ion Syria so long as they ‘knock the hell out of ISIS’. With him, fundamental healthcare and abortion access is lost alongside more bloodshed, not less, so you present something of a false equivalency here.
Do they? Are you sure about that? The modern art of politics is to convince people to vote against their own interests, usually by means of fear. Why do you think Trump made such a fuss about the imagined threat from Muslims entering the US, and tried to cast Mexican migrants as mostly ‘bad hombres’ hell bent on rape and murder? Do you honestly think Trump’s fantasy of a wall on the US southern border (that he has already rowed back from markedly) was ever actually about border control policy rather than simply functioning as a prop in a bit of convenient political theater? How do you think the out campaign in the UK won the Brexit referendum? It may have had something to do with Farage (Trump’s best buddy from across the pond, and very much a like minded political operator) and the broader Out campaign engaging in relentlessly racist smearing of migrants as a ‘foreign invasion’ using EU free movement laws to ‘destroy Britain’s identity and freedoms’. They also liked to claim that the migrants entering the UK were all terrorists and/or rapists, murderers and thieves. They even used propaganda images all but indistinguishable form those employed by the Nazis to do it. How was cutting off access to one of the most important markets and free trade areas in the world of benefit to the UK? How was throwing our legal system into chaos for years to come while thousands of new laws have to be drafted of benefit? Where is the advantage of having to try to renegotiate free trade deals all over the world when we didn’t have even a smalls fraction of the civil servants necessary to do so, likely leaving our exports at a severe disadvantage for years to come? I am far from convinced that significant swathes of any given electorate even understand their own best interest at a governmental level, let alone consistently vote for it. Add in a cynically manipulative campaign that trades on ignorance and background levels of largely unspoken (but still influential) bigoted attitudes, and it really isn’t all that difficult to get people to vote against their own interests, as demonstrated by women and members of ethnic minorities voting in such numbers for such an openly misogynistic and racist candidate as Trump.
Mr. Spencer and his compatriots should all go out and get a DNA test done. They are relatively inexpensive these days and the results can sometimes be surprising. He might find out that his parental haplogroups aren’t all from northern Europe. He might learn that he has DNA from North Africa, the Middle East or even Asia. Then there’s that pesky Neanderthal DNA. He may have as much as 4%. How does that fit in with the master race? There’s also the chance that he has American Indian DNA. Ashkenazi DNA? That could be embarrassing for an anti-Semite. Actually, the more I think about it, the more strongly I feel that a DNA test should be an absolute requirement for everyone on the alt-right and especially his National Policy Institute. We wouldn’t want to have any Jews masquerading as Aryans would we?
@78, 81: Feel free to consider my aside as hypothetical. I don’t believe that Trump actually will be less militaristic, but that’s not the point I was making.
@81: OK, their perceived interests. I would have thought that was obvious enough not to need stating.
I do not know who is responsible for this catastrophe outside of those who voted for it regardless of their motivation. The only thing I am sure of is that there will be a lot of work to do clearing it up at the end, when ever that may be.
uncle frogy
Gregory Greenwood:
There are some additional arguments in favor of the electoral college (all wrong if not patently absurd, but they do exist), which don’t have much to do with racism, at least not explicitly. There are a lot of paranoid classist assumptions, going all the way back to antiquity if you know your Plato, that “the mob” are not to be trusted, so we need an enlightened class which will have rights on our behalf.
There are also misguided claims that candidates would only pander to a few heavily-populated urban areas (as opposed to a few swing states like now, as if that were better), but this makes no sense because all of the urban areas combined don’t make up such a large chunk of population (nowhere near a majority), so gaining their support at the expense of the rest of the country would certainly be a losing strategy. But notice also that “urban” strongly correlates with black/brown people (and liberal/progressive ones, once the party lines became more and more about that distinction starting with F.D.R.), so we’re more or less back to where we started with a goal of disenfranchising certain groups of people.
It’s not that we haven’t tried. At one level, amending the constitution, which is the only way to completely abolish the electoral college, is purposefully made to be very difficult. There are also a large number of small states which wouldn’t benefit (because they have more influence with the EC in place) from such an amendment or other legislation that would circumvent it. Notice that we’re counting states again and not people (just as the electoral college winner can lose the popular vote). Because many features of our system, including the amendment process as well as control over elections and election laws, put so much emphasis on the authority of states and their state/federal legislators, you can have a large number of people who oppose it but can’t do much directly to change the situation.
Perhaps another big part of the explanation is that some people have this very strong illusion, reinforced every time they get what looks like a ballot and hear the media describing it as a democratic process, that they do have voting rights when it comes to the president/VP. That item is there (I think always as the first bubble) on the same ballot-looking thing with all of the other candidates and ballot measures, for which you genuinely do have a right to vote.
You tell people that we have this absurd system so that in fact they do not have such rights in the case of the Pres/VP (in this, the land of the free, birthplace of modern democracy, the place which revolted against taxation without representation, etc.), and at first many do not want to believe you or think you’re exaggerating or something, because so many things in their experience seem to be indicating otherwise. What we have is also a stupidly complicated system, so even getting the message across about how the entire thing works is difficult, and by that point your time in most conversations has expired, so constructively addressing the question of how to actually change it is not given much thought.
Then of course, on the internet, generally well-meaning people from foreign countries come in, with their even foggier impressions of how things work here, which just derails things even more. You’re not going to solve this by making preferential ballots or campaign finance reforms or eliminating other types of voter suppression, as nice as those may be, to fix whatever special thing you think is the big source of the problem at the moment…. For the president/VP, we simply do not have voting rights. Electors elect them, not us no matter how our “ballots” look or how much money flows where or whatever else your concern is — that’s a fundamental issue which all sorts of other (sometimes quite reasonable) reformist measures cannot address. So one way or another, it gets lost in this big confusing mess of other proposals which also never get implemented and can seem almost hopeless or pointless.
Dunc @ 83;
Doesn’t the point you were making still rely on drawing a false equivalency between the use of drone warfare being the hypothetical price of continued basic health care and abortion rights, and the racism of Trump’s campaign being the price of the maintenance of undue White male privilege – the benefits in each scenario are not the same, either ethically or in regards to their practical benefit to society. I take it the general point you are making is that people vote selfishly over issues that concern them personally (not something that is true in all cases, but probably holds for many people), which flows into your next argument;
And if a candidate is able to manipulate the dialogue and thus shape that perception, then we are back to people voting in pursuit of a perceived interest that runs counter to their actual interests. Manipulation of the electorate into voting in a fashion that harms their own prospects and that of the country is a separate issue from banal selfishness.
And for that matter, so is voting predicated upon racism. Voting in line with a racist ideology rarely advantages most of the people who hold that ideology, certainly in the long term. It is not a rational cost/benefit analysis that informs such actions – bigotry is rarely so reasoned. Instead, people are whipped up by inflammatory rhetoric and then given a target for their rage and frustration who is a convenient other they can hate without having to deal with the complexities of taking the action that might actually improve their lot in life. In short, they are manipulated into acting against their own interests through the exploitation of their resentment, anger, and unfulfilled sense of superiority, much the same way that the fearful are stampeded into such a vote through preying on their paranoia and insecurities.
And then there is also the fact that some people draw catharsis from ‘sticking it to the establishment’ through their vote even when that harms their interests very profoundly, a narrative that Trump traded on extensively in this election. The factors at work here are far more complex than the simple interaction of competing notions of self interest, whether perceived or actual.
consciousness razor @ 85;
Interesting stuff. I fully understand the point about the difficulties in constitutional reform, and it is a shame that the way things work over there has left the US saddled with a racist and classist electoral system. The whole business is so excessively complicated that it seems suspiciously as though that complexity is intentional; if most people don’t understand the intricacies of the system that is helping to disenfranchise them, they are poorly positioned to oppose it, still less get the momentum together to effectively demand reform of it. That is all very convenient from the perspective of anyone who benefits from the status quo, including (contrary to his anti-establishment rhetoric) Donald Trump.
@86: The primary benefit Trump claimed to offer for many people was the promise of jobs. The re-invigoration of American manufacturing. Now, I don’t believe that he’s going to deliver, but that is what he was promising. And yes, a lot of people will put up with a lot of bigotry directed at other people for that promise.
It’s also not true that a person invariably votes in their perceived/actual self-interest. Some people evidently do act altruistically at times, or at any rate with more regard for others than for themselves.
So what we end up with is Dunc claiming that sometimes certain people vote for their perceived interests, even when that perception is not veridical, while others don’t vote that way. This idea, supported by a “hypothetical” judgment (i.e., one which was made actually and not hypothetically) about a choice that isn’t even on the table, isn’t captured very well by an apparently categorical and confused statement like “Newsflash: people vote their own interests” which I guess is supposed to seem obvious and non-trivial, while also meaning something very different from the literal words on the page.
So it’s a deepity, but the weirder part is that we have better words for what’s described in #76. Even as a non-native speaker, Giliell understands well enough that in plain fucking English we do accurately label behavior like that racist and sexist and bigoted and so forth, the best description of which is not just “selfish.” That was clearly the point of addressing marcoli et al, who try and fail to argue otherwise: that they are wrong to be denialists about the racism, sexism, etc., of such behavior. Why did it turn in this other wacky direction, where the claim seems to be that really it’s just that people are always selfish, but not just that and not really and not always?
Dunc #88
Not happening. Jobs left because of the costs of manufacturing were higher here than elsewhere. If labor is your most significant cost, and your product is in a cost competitive market, it won’t return to America. Which is why assembly plants for higher priced cars/SUVs are staying, but the econo models are going to Mexico.
A lot of the new jobs will be with places like where I retired from. A specialty chemical company mostly making excipients for the Pharma industry under Q7A/FDA/cGMP guidelines. The Pharma companies are willing to pay a premium so that when FDA/other national regulatory organization audits the Pharma company, they ask about ingredient “balderdash”, the Pharma company can say “We buy from company ‘Watzitnaem’. we last audited xx/yy/zz, with no adverse findings, including unresolved 487’s”. The government auditors skip then several pages of now irrelevant canned questions to their next relevant questions. Worth the premium to the Pharma company.
Not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. Some of them are very very low-information voters who seem to be very proud of being very very low-information voters. They don’t care that they are low-information voters, just as they don’t care that Trump said a lot of racist stuff and is filling his Administration with racists.
But we are on an airplane, see. And criticizing the pilot will make the plane crash. Even if the pilot said he was going to throw a bunch of people out of the plane over the ocean. So sit down and shut up and ignore the fact that the current pilot questioned the previous pilot’s credentials for eight years. Why do you hate America?
The bottom line is that people, for whatever reasons, who perceive they were being done wrong, were promised they would have that metaphorical dog to kick to pieces: “you’ll be able to kick those brown people in the teeth! You’ll be able to knock immigrants on their ass!”
That’s what white people, who are always looking to blame someone else, wanted, and that’s what Trump promised them. It’s all ism: racism and sexism. White people are getting bolder by the second, proclaiming their need to preserve their race, by which they mean, “we need to be on top of the people pile again, with everything in it’s right and natural order, white is right!”
Trump also promised white Christians the path to what they want the most: the ability to stomp on people, grind them to dust and blood, to offer up to their psychopathic god. “No more queers!” “No more abortion!” “No more contraception!” If you haven’t already read about all the legislation on these matters, paint yourself as a willfully ignorant dumbfuck. It’s happening, and it’s happening because that is what these people wanted. No way out of that.
It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you don’t think your relatives are horrible bigots, or your friend who voted for Trump really isn’t a bad sort, or whatthefuck ever excuse you have cooked up. Unless you’re going to argue they are brain damaged, and couldn’t really understand all the blatantly bigoted shit which spewed from Trump’s mouth non-stop, there are no excuses. NONE.
By attempting to excuse people, you’re just another witless cog in the normalisation machine, helping to normalise fascism and unspeakable crimes against people, all people. STOP DOING THAT.
WAKE THE FUCK UP.
I know some working class people who supported Trump. They all happen to be white, both male and female. I realize that some of the working class people who supported Trump are not white and that some of the whites who supported him don’t consider themselves racists. I hope that’s sufficient caveat.
However, the vast majority of the working class people who supported Trump are white, and the vast majority of them express varying degrees of bigotry. For example, they want something done about crime, they want “law and order.” This was one of Trump’s whipping posts (as it was Nixon’s), even though crime has been on the decline for decades. But these are dog whistles that refer to black/brown crime and social unrest. These are scary…to white people. White crime and social unrest are not scary, and are practically invisible to them.
What is clear from this election is that the Republican party successfully exploited the divide between white working class people and black and brown working class people, the divide between blue collar working class people and white collar working class people, and the divide between female working class people and male working class people.
Divide and conquer works so well.
As for Clinton, I presume most of you know that her approval ratings were through the roof right before she declared. Can we say definitively that the change in attitude toward her was a misogynist reaction to a woman running for president? Perhaps not, but it certainly smells like smoke.
re 91:
not directed to you use of the metaphor, just referencing it to explain my response to the metaphor’s concept.
The metaphor being that the country is the airplane, Drumph the incompetent pilot, the citizens the passengers.
Some compare it to passengers complaining about the incompetent pilot and expecting the plane to crash because he’s so incompetent, with the tsk tsk tsk that such is essentially suicidal. pffft
My use of the metaphor is slightly different. I hear the first, as telling the passengers to stop complaining even though the pilot is incompetent because they are on the plane and they are powerless.
I just don’t understand what is so wrong with everyone getting upset that the plane they are on is being mishandled, putting their lives at risk. |__?__| So we must stop complaining because our complaints won’t stop the crash, so just accept it as inevitable?
to stay in the metaphor [dangerous I know] the plane with that pilot hasn’t yet left the runway. There is still a method to replace him with the pilot he shoved his way passed (guess who).
*shit* we’re still foaked, no matter how it’s spinned [sic]
re @91:
Let me repeat myself.
bullshit.
Even if they don’t think they are voting for someone with his racism simply because he offers empty promises, is still an act of racism.
OKAY they’re nor racist, but voting for Drumph was racist. Tell those voters they did a racist act. only True non-racist(TM) will respond with “sorry” rather than the more common, “Me proud I voted for the guy that will make us grate again, think what that b*-*-*scum woulda dun”.
Meet An Electoral College Voter. He’s a Trump fan.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls wrote:
There would be one way to do it: tariffs that push the cost of imported goods well past what it would cost to both hire Americans and also build the necessary factories. However, doing something like this would also cut America off from the world market, and American-based companies (like Apple, for instance) would end up never selling another product abroad ever again as reciprocal tariffs go up against the U.S.
And the big winner in this would be China. They’re already hard at work at replicating the design and development expertise that is currently centralized in the U.S., and they’d happily fill the vacuum caused by the U.S. leaving the world market should that occur.