U.S. Politics: Would You Like A Warranty With Your Magic Beans?

[DanteGabriel]

59 minutes ago, Vin said:

So while I agree that we have differences with the republicans and we'll never see eye to eye on certain points ,I wholeheartedly denounce and disagree with this sensationalism and demonization of them . This polarization that so many seem to revel in is abhorrent to me and I believe we should seek common ground and unity based on compromise and sincere and respectful dialogue not try to shame people and shout them down with chants of "fascist/Nazi" .

I think we haven't looked at the Republican Party with clear enough eyes. To be clear, I'm not talking about individual Republican voters, but the national organization and its various tentacles. I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party is a racist organization. It drives votes based on white racial grievance. It explicitly used the Southern Strategy to do this. It continues to try to disenfranchise minority voters, to transfer social services from black and brown people to white people. It has allowed itself to nominate and defend a virulent racist. Trump used to be a Democrat, right? Why'd he run as a Republican? Why is David Duke a Republican? Why are these open Nazi and white supremacist candidates running as Republicans? Because the Republican Party made itself the party of white racists. Maybe not all registered Republicans are racists, but darn tootin the racists know where their bread is buttered.

You may disagree with this assessment, but doing so tells me a lot about your own racial complacency. You're taking it as a given that an organization so large and that so many people can't be racist. You seem to start from the premise that this party, or these people, can't be racist, and then work your logic backwards to support that. Oh, it's just Richard Spencer and a handful of Nazis. It's not baked into the very fabric of life in this country.

You disagree with the characterization of the United States as a white supremacist country when the 3/5 value of a black person was literally written into the Constitution. When there were race riots against desegregation in living memory. When black people are still pulled over, abused, and incarcerated at rates far beyond whites. When black parents have to lecture their kids about how to handle an encounter with police, because a rude word or a rolled eye can lead to beating, wrongful arrest, or death. When a black person shopping or walking down the street or driving a nice car can get stopped and harassed, not just because the police saw them and got suspicious, but because some fragile white person felt threatened by a black person's proximity. You can deny these facts or handwave them away if you want, but that would be revealing too.

It would be revealing of a complacent white person who doesn't think about the injustice others experience daily. Who would rather escape inconvenience than have true equality. The kind of both-sidesing, comfort-seeking, truth-avoiding moderate that MLK Jr pointed out as a bigger problem than the Bull Connors of the world.

[Rippounet]

18 minutes ago, Vin said:

Sorry , but collective guilt is an impasse for me.

Who said anything about guilt though? Once you acknowledge how racism has been, and still is, deeply ingrained in the dominant Western ideologies you can act on that information and no longer have any reason to feel guilty about it.
You seem to be using this concept of "collective guilt" to dismiss any deeper analysis on racial issues.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

1 hour ago, SweetPea said:

Voting for someone doesn't mean you support all of their views. I really don't understand what's so hard to understand about this. 

The issue is that voting for a person with such racist views - despite any self-professed disagreement with said views - simply indicates that such views are "tolerable." And one hardly has strong moral standing, if any, in the matter of racism if one finds it a tolerable quality for "leader of the free world." Such meek toleration of open racism simply lets racism run amok, which hardly makes one much better than one who is openly racist. These are the "moderates" that MLK Jr. spoke against:

Quote

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

You may not be a "racist," but you sure as hell are empowering racism.

[DMC]

6 hours ago, Vin said:

Whataboutism. 

I'm aware what the term means, thanks - and as for the rest of this response, I already agreed that not every Trump voter is racist.

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

No offense, but yours is the "cliff notes version" here. The terrible state of the Soviet economy did not foreordain as much as you seem to think.
To be clear, I'm not part of the "Gorbachev ended the Cold War" school (led by Garthoff), but no serious scholar of the period would deny hat the West was incredibly lucky with Gorbachev. The economic factor alone may explain Gorbachev's rise to power and most of his attempts at reforms, but they definitely aren't enough to explain the peaceful outcome.
Fun fact... Henry Rowen once told me that in his opinion Soviet economic weakness should have been seen as a destabilizing factor. Which is really funny considering his role in the story (he met Reagan with Charles Wolf and Andrew Marshall in April 86).

I don't see how including the Soviet's failing economy - as well as Brezhnev, detente, glasnost, and perestroika - makes mine the cliff notes version.  Gorbachev was integral, sure, but so was all of that in the process, and it's important to mention.

4 hours ago, butterbumps! said:

When you're saying "not racist," are you treating euphemisms like "culturally anxious" as a separate category not under the umbrella of racism?   This is a genuine question.   I'm admittedly in a very blue area, but know a fair number of Trump voters and continued supporters.  Even those who are "good people"-- people who are incredibly decent and kind when it comes to those in their "in-groups," including, for example, neighbors who aren't white-- are super racist once you scratch the surface a little in my experience, though they'd get indignant at being told their beliefs are racist.   Others I know are more garden variety Republicans who just voted for the R, but even they are pretty "culturally anxious" once you start asking pointed questions.  In my experience, even in the most charitable cases, they are wholly indifferent to people who don't belong to one of their in groups.

Yes, I am.  While I'm not familiar with describing what you are particularly as "culturally anxious," this seems to be one of the issue - especially around here - with rendering everybody racist.  Take a bunch of studies on the 2016 election and they'll tell you that racial resentment played a huge role in the outcome.  But racial resentment does not necessarily mean racist.  This is something many don't realize, and journalists interpreting such studies are irresponsible in conflating. 

The racial resentment scale is measured in varying ways depending on the researcher, but generally it entails asking items like this.  A respondent can score sufficiently high on that battery without "being racist."  In fact, many white people from both parties have scored high on the scale since its inception - it's hardly a recent phenomenon.  Anyway, the point is plenty of respondents can hold racial resentment - and researches can design surveys to increase or decrease this percentage - more because they have been manipulated by through certain outlets to think of such issues in a racial context throughout the years.  Not necessarily because they hold any particular overtly racist sentiments.  For instance, take a look at Gilens' (1999) Why Americans Hate Welfare:

Quote

The question Gilens poses is how do we account for these perceptions of welfare recipients as undeserving and the racial attitudes, in particular the attitude of blacks as lazy. To understand how the poor have been portrayed in the media, Gilens traces the media representation of the poor over the past forty-five years in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report as well as television news coverage for three historical periods, 1968, 1982- 83 and 1988-1992. From 1950 through 1964, the poor people portrayed were predominantly white, but from 1967 through 1992, blacks averaged 57 percent of the poor portrayed, almost double the proportion of blacks among the poor in the U.S. In addition to an increase in the portrayal of blacks in pictures of poverty, during the period of 1972- 1973, when there was general widespread public opinion of problems with welfare, African Americans were represented in 70 percent of the stories indexed under poverty and in 75 percent of the stories indexed under welfare (p. 123).

Gilens suggests that this misrepresentation in the media contributes significantly to Americans' opposition to welfare. The deserving poor - the elderly and the working poor - are typically portrayed as poor white individuals whereas poor blacks have appeared mostly in stories about welfare abuse or the underclass (p. 154). The stereotype of blacks as lazy is an image that has prevailed throughout history, and as stated earlier this perception was found to be a strong determinant to non-blacks opposition to welfare

 

4 hours ago, butterbumps! said:

I mean, it's not just racism, but also misogyny, homophobia, nativism-- kind of like all these people are convinced that these "others" are hostile and taking resources, attention and specialness away from them or something.  They feel like victims, and it seems to strengthen their sense of in group sensibility, as well as sense of who's "out."  But, again, I think when you scratch the surface of that, it's bigotry.   I could be wrong.   What's your take on what motivates them other than racism (or bigotry in general)?

To be clear, I agree a large part of it has to do with the in/out-group dynamic, affective polarization, and how that has metastasized to all forms of bigotry among the party that is overwhelmingly white (and dominated by white males).

[Vin]

13 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I think we haven't looked at the Republican Party with clear enough eyes. To be clear, I'm not talking about individual Republican voters, but the national organization and its various tentacles. I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party is a racist organization. It drives votes based on white racial grievance. It explicitly used the Southern Strategy to do this. It continues to try to disenfranchise minority voters, to transfer social services from black and brown people to white people. It has allowed itself to nominate and defend a virulent racist. Trump used to be a Democrat, right? Why'd he run as a Republican? Why is David Duke a Republican? Why are these open Nazi and white supremacist candidates running as Republicans? Because the Republican Party made itself the party of white racists. Maybe not all registered Republicans are racists, but darn tootin the racists know where their bread is buttered.

You may disagree with this assessment, but doing so tells me a lot about your own racial complacency. You're taking it as a given that an organization so large and that so many people can't be racist. You seem to start from the premise that this party, or these people, can't be racist, and then work your logic backwards to support that. Oh, it's just Richard Spencer and a handful of Nazis. It's not baked into the very fabric of life in this country.

You disagree with the characterization of the United States as a white supremacist country when the 3/5 value of a black person was literally written into the Constitution. When there were race riots against desegregation in living memory. When black people are still pulled over, abused, and incarcerated at rates far beyond whites. When black parents have to lecture their kids about how to handle an encounter with police, because a rude word or a rolled eye can lead to beating, wrongful arrest, or death. When a black person shopping or walking down the street or driving a nice car can get stopped and harassed, not just because the police saw them and got suspicious, but because some fragile white person felt threatened by a black person's proximity. You can deny these facts or handwave them away if you want, but that would be revealing too.

It would be revealing of a complacent white person who doesn't think about the injustice others experience daily. Who would rather escape inconvenience than have true equality. The kind of both-sidesing, comfort-seeking, truth-avoiding moderate that MLK Jr pointed out as a bigger problem than the Bull Connors of the world.

Yeah ,the thing is I believe we're running on completely different tracks , I come from an individualist background and philosophy while you're arguing from a collectivist one . 

I am not swayed by "you're not doing enough" and " it's telling " arguments. That's just a different approach to shame people . I hold fast to the principle that the smallest and most important minority is the individual and I refuse to descend into tribalism. 

Agree to disagree . 

11 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Who said anything about guilt though? Once you acknowledge how racism has been, and still is, deeply ingrained in the dominant Western ideologies you can act on that information and no longer have any reason to feel guilty about it.
You seem to be using this concept of "collective guilt" to dismiss any deeper analysis on racial issues.

I never had any reason to feel guilty about . Never did . I am responsible for my actions ,nothing more ,nothing less .

 

[Vin]

3 minutes ago, DMBouazizi said:

I'm aware what the term means, thanks - and as for the rest of this response, I already agreed that not every Trump voter is racist.

 

I just responded to you saying I'm using made up words that's all . 

 

[DanteGabriel]

And now that Vin has run out of his intellectual depth, it's all "I don't have anything to worry about" and "not my problem." It's cool, I didn't really expect more than that.

[Vin]

2 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

And now that Vin has run out of his intellectual depth, it's all "I don't have anything to worry about" and "not my problem." It's cool, I didn't really expect more than that.

We have fundamental disagreements mate . I don't see us getting past them and don't see the point of continuing in this route ,just circling each other . 

But go ahead and claim superiority if you like . No skin off my back . 

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Jace, The Sugarcube said:

Who is David Duke? I've never heard of David Duke. I know nothing about White Supremacy.

I'm so happy Donald Trump circa December 2015 reads this thread!

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

This is my experience as well. A majority of Trump supporters aren’t out and out racists, but his core supporters are, and I’d say that’s at least 1/3 of his base. However, most of his supporters, when pressed, reveal that they hold some if not many bigoted views, and unfortunately as we get more tribal, group think takes over and they retreat to their corners and increasingly embrace the bigotry.

Yes, that's a much easier to sum it up than I did.

36 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I think we haven't looked at the Republican Party with clear enough eyes. To be clear, I'm not talking about individual Republican voters, but the national organization and its various tentacles. I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party is a racist organization.

Yes I agree that's fair, and it has adapted to this pretense in a number of permutations since the moment LBJ signed the CRA.  And while I can't quickly find a clip, those permutations are as unnatural, ugly, and disturbing as all the aborted attempts at cloning Ridley in Alien Resurrection when the last one begs "kill me."

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

45 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I think we haven't looked at the Republican Party with clear enough eyes. To be clear, I'm not talking about individual Republican voters, but the national organization and its various tentacles. I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party is a racist organization. It drives votes based on white racial grievance. It explicitly used the Southern Strategy to do this. It continues to try to disenfranchise minority voters, to transfer social services from black and brown people to white people. It has allowed itself to nominate and defend a virulent racist. Trump used to be a Democrat, right? Why'd he run as a Republican? Why is David Duke a Republican? Why are these open Nazi and white supremacist candidates running as Republicans? Because the Republican Party made itself the party of white racists. Maybe not all registered Republicans are racists, but darn tootin the racists know where their bread is buttered.

You may disagree with this assessment, but doing so tells me a lot about your own racial complacency. You're taking it as a given that an organization so large and that so many people can't be racist. You seem to start from the premise that this party, or these people, can't be racist, and then work your logic backwards to support that. Oh, it's just Richard Spencer and a handful of Nazis. It's not baked into the very fabric of life in this country.

You disagree with the characterization of the United States as a white supremacist country when the 3/5 value of a black person was literally written into the Constitution. When there were race riots against desegregation in living memory. When black people are still pulled over, abused, and incarcerated at rates far beyond whites. When black parents have to lecture their kids about how to handle an encounter with police, because a rude word or a rolled eye can lead to beating, wrongful arrest, or death. When a black person shopping or walking down the street or driving a nice car can get stopped and harassed, not just because the police saw them and got suspicious, but because some fragile white person felt threatened by a black person's proximity. You can deny these facts or handwave them away if you want, but that would be revealing too.

It would be revealing of a complacent white person who doesn't think about the injustice others experience daily. Who would rather escape inconvenience than have true equality. The kind of both-sidesing, comfort-seeking, truth-avoiding moderate that MLK Jr pointed out as a bigger problem than the Bull Connors of the world.

Dante, you really don’t even have to dig very deep to show the inherent racism of the Republican Party as an organization or how they view their supports. All you need is Lee Atwater’s famous quote about dog whistles, which I wish I could post, but I’m not touching that thing with a 10 foot pole from my work comp. Hopefully someone else can post it to put this nonsensical discussion to rest.

[DanteGabriel]

6 minutes ago, Vin said:

We have fundamental disagreements mate . I don't see us getting past them and don't see the point of continuing in this route ,just circling each other . 

But go ahead and claim superiority if you like . No skin off my back . 

If you disagree that the Republican Party is a racist organization, do you have anything to back up your assertion besides the unwillingness to believe that so many people could be racist?

[Jace, Extat]

9 minutes ago, DMBouazizi said:

I'm so happy Donald Trump circa December 2015 reads this thread!

Yes, that's a much easier to sum it up than I did.

Yes I agree that's fair, and it has adapted to this pretense in a number of permutations since the moment LBJ signed the CRA.  And while I can't quickly find a clip, those permutations are as unnatural, ugly, and disturbing as all the aborted attempts at cloning Ridley in Alien Resurrection when the last one begs "kill me."

Weird, I can't find it either.

Maybe it's not totally surprising. I mean who the fuck would want to sit down and cut then upload that upsetting shit for free?

[Week]

Ah, the sweet reveries of libertarianism and individualism -- so seductive in PoliSci 101. The joys of not being responsible or caring about anything happening beyond of the immediacy your corporeal form (white skin strongly recommended -- differing experiences may result if not white).

Wrapped up in myriad justifications that provide the warm and fuzzies. Unfortunately, when in practice in society, it is a bunch of nonsensical dog-shit. 

[Vin]

18 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

If you disagree that the Republican Party is a racist organization, do you have anything to back up your assertion besides the unwillingness to believe that so many people could be racist?

I don't agree that the republican party is just some ploy with the grand goal to oppress minorities ,no.

I believe it has a great chunk of prejudice that comes from their anti welfare ideas and their skewed priorities that value money over people and I agree that they have bunch of hardcore racists backing them . So ,yeah I concede that there's racism in there but that doesn't make your broad brushes true . Nor does it prove that there's no reason to talk to them .

 

 

[butterbumps!]

43 minutes ago, DMBouazizi said:

Yes, I am.  While I'm not familiar with describing what you are particularly as "culturally anxious," this seems to be one of the issue - especially around here - with rendering everybody racist.  Take a bunch of studies on the 2016 election and they'll tell you that racial resentment played a huge role in the outcome.  But racial resentment does not necessarily mean racist.  This is something many don't realize, and journalists interpreting such studies are irresponsible in conflating. 

The racial resentment scale is measured in varying ways depending on the researcher, but generally it entails asking items like this.  A respondent can score sufficiently high on that battery without "being racist."  In fact, many white people from both parties have scored high on the scale since its inception - it's hardly a recent phenomenon.  Anyway, the point is plenty of respondents can hold racial resentment - and researches can design surveys to increase or decrease this percentage - more because they have been manipulated by through certain outlets to think of such issues in a racial context throughout the years.  Not necessarily because they hold any particular overtly racist sentiments.  For instance, take a look at Gilens' (1999) Why Americans Hate Welfare:

 

To be clear, I agree a large part of it has to do with the in/out-group dynamic, affective polarization, and how that has metastasized to all forms of bigotry among the party that is overwhelmingly white (and dominated by white males).

Thanks for that.  I think I'm missing the distinction being drawn between the two terms, though.   Where does "racial resentment" end and "racism" begin?   Using this more nuanced terminology, do you think there's an appreciable number of Trump voters/ supporters who do not harbor racial (or other) resentment?  I think the original poster was suggesting that some people voted for Trump without having any race (or bigotry)-related motivations.  I think it's hard to be a Trump supporter without some degree of "cultural anxiety"/ "racial resentment," or at minimum, a complete indifference to people who aren't just like you.

 

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, Vetrani Weekić said:

Ah, the sweet reveries of libertarianism and individualism -- so seductive in PoliSci 101. The joys of not being responsible or caring about anything happening beyond of the immediacy your corporeal form (white skin strongly recommended -- differing experiences may result if not white).

Wrapped up in myriad justifications that provide the warm and fuzzies. Unfortunately, when in practice in society, it is a bunch of nonsensical dog-shit. 

The last episode of the Van Jones show I was able to catch featured a libertarian. He was black and on the Van Jones show so the audience, and even myself, seemed pretty open to the dude at first.

Then the words "I want to have money. Everything else, that's secondary to making sure I can have money" came out of his mouth and we all realized together that some stupidities really are universal.

[Vin]

4 minutes ago, Vetrani Weekić said:

Ah, the sweet reveries of libertarianism and individualism -- so seductive in PoliSci 101. The joys of not being responsible or caring about anything happening beyond of the immediacy your corporeal form (white skin strongly recommended -- differing experiences may result if not white).

Wrapped up in myriad justifications that provide the warm and fuzzies. Unfortunately, when in practice in society, it is a bunch of nonsensical dog-shit. 

Sorry mate but I don't wanna jump through hoops for ya . If you believe you have some moral duty to feel or do something then go ahead. just don't  try to compel me to do it too .

[SweetPea]

20 minutes ago, La Albearceleste said:

No, it really isn't. If you support a candidate who is racist, who has racist policies and who says racist things, to say that they don't support racism would be nonsensical. It would literally make no sense: it would defy the meaning of the word 'racism'.  

This is getting ridiculous. I support environmentalism, I believe in climate change, I'm pro-choice, and the list of my disagreements with Trump goes on. I still would have voted for Trump. Doesn't mean I support him on any of those things. If the level of your argument is that you're going to tell me what I believe in, this discussion is pointless.

 

Quote

No, I really didn't and yes, it is. You want to exclude people who voted to support a racist candidate from the label 'racist' because you don't see that behaviour as crossing the threshold you've set for 'racist'.

Repeating your strawman over and over again won't make it true.

[DanteGabriel]

2 minutes ago, Vin said:

I don't agree that the republican party is just some ploy with the grand goal to oppress minorities ,no.

I believe it has a great chunk of prejudice that comes from their anti welfare ideas and their skewed priorities that value money over people and I agree that they have bunch of hardcore racists backing them . So ,yeah I concede that there's racism in there but that doesn't make your broad brushes true . Nor does it prove that there's no reason to talk to them .

 

 

I don't think the racism of the Republican Party is the ends, but its means. I think the Republican Party uses racism to get poor white people to support their goals of eliminating social services, lowering taxes on rich people, and deregulating corporations.

What of my broad brush statements do you disagree with?

And if there's a bunch of racism animating the Republican Party, why isn't it racist? Do they have to literally reinstate Jim Crow laws to convince you of its character?

[butterbumps!]

12 minutes ago, SweetPea said:

This is getting ridiculous. I support environmentalism, I believe in climate change, I'm pro-choice, and the list of my disagreements with Trump goes on. I still would have voted for Trump. Doesn't mean I support him on any of those things. If the level of your argument is that you're going to tell me what I believe in, this discussion is pointless.

But this is not about what you may believe in personally, or at least not exclusively.  Voting is an act of support.  Voting was an action taken to put the racist and his racist policies into power.  This has been referring to literal support.   What you believe in your heart makes no difference when you take action that legitimizes and gives power to (i.e., "supporting" through the act of voting) something you may not personally agree with.  The parts of your vote are not disaggregated according to the beliefs in your heart.

ETA: not sure why you'd have given your vote to Trump if you genuinely believe in those things you list, but I'm sure your reasons are very wise and sensible.