Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

i know that is crude. i think people should get yelled at for being racist as much as possible and the fact that the taboo against racism was shattered this year is one of the most horrifying developments i've seen in this country in my lifetime. however, the democrats are just not going to win by scolding people.

i think treeship and i are on the same page

i consider myself lucky to live in a tolerant state, but i don't think we are especially tolerant because the civics classes in our public schools are super great or because our college students are super woke or whatever. i think we are lucky to have a strong economy and its totally obvious to most people here that that economy depends in large part on immigrants, people on visas, etc. and that makes it easier for people not to be racist, because it's in their self-interest not to be.

i mean i honestly don't know much about the economy of the rust belt or the south or the bible belt, so i don't know if it's possible to convince people there that immigration and diversity will benefit them.

however, the democrats are just not going to win by scolding people.

― Treeship, Wednesday, November 16, 2016 11:41 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Forget winning for now. There's a president-elect proposing brutally racist policies while in control of both houses. Getting people to recognize *that* racism seems to me a far greater priority than having them do some serious soul-searching atm about their own.

ok well i'm not pro ... scolding people (except people on ilx, obv)

i get what you're saying BUT if i had trump's ear (which i don't) i would probably advocate against a muslim registry (for example) by arguing that it will make muslims less likely to cooperate with the govt in counterterrorism efforts rather than arguing that it's an affront on human decency and fairness or whatever (which it certainly is!)

xp to lion in winter

make people hate the koch brothers so much they forget about minorities when they go into the voting booth.

― Treeship, Wednesday, November 16, 2016 10:36 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure this works when a candidate actively churns up this level radioactivity, i mean half the country believes that inner cities are hell holes and that all muslims want to destroy them so....why would they buy that the koch brothers are a bigger threat? speaking of things that seem abstract

xp to the late great - it's not really his ear i'd want. a lot of his proposed policies -- mass deportation, daca repeal -- aren't actually popular with a majority of americans. i can't imagine sinking social security or medicare is either. i'd like to keep them that way.

deej otm throughout the thread

I don't know what causes racism but it's sure as hell not economics. way deeper than that. economics does not cure, or even paper over, racism. and economics is not a problem with a <<solution>>, where we just make The Good Economy and then all other problems melt away because that's of some base superstructure or somesuch stoner Marxist shit. the state economy itself will always be in contention, under socialism capitalism whatever; and as long as race is a salient dimension people will contest it along those lines, too. it's just wishing the problem away to say, let's just solve the economics

also I disagree with vahids economic reason for saying california is non-racist. I highly double Californians can all form a chain of arguments starting with "lots of immigrants and black people in my state" and ending with "more money in my pocket". maybe it's not civics class either but it's not that imo

*the state of the economy itself

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dominant form of racism in trump's campaign was xenophobia/nationalism, which has been on the upswing across the world because 'economics' (/other disruptive aspects of globalization)

racism isn't something people just have when they're poor & forget when they prosper.

seriously sometimes ppl itt sound like musty elitist academics and i know you all are like, living out in the world, it's weird to read this thread

imo "california" is not a haven of enlightenment. don't get it twisted. your *city* might be. maybe your neighborhood. but drive a ways & there's plenty of folks who talk & think like that middle-america part people keep hammering about.

it's not OTHER PLACES. it's near you. closer than you think. no-one goes to those places except people who live there and then it's just decades of feedback loop. that's how "this" happens.

xpost to iatee: yeah but at the same time, trump's campaign and success is unthinkable without his career as the leader of the birther smear campaign. which i guess you can try and link back to xenophobia, and from there suggest a primarily economic-disruption root, but it wouldn't be my first explanation.

xp- i think my point is, there is always winners/losers in economics, whether the losers blame race or not seems like a separate question, and the winners are often just as racist as the losers

no-one goes to those places except people who live there and then it's just decades of feedback loop. that's how "this" happens.

― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, November 17, 2016 12:54 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this hits hard

yeah nice post VG

Racism and prejudice have more motives than just being an economic loser and wanting to feel better about yourself. Some people just enjoy the thrill of power in dehumanizing and brutalizing others, and holding a position of superiority to that extreme degree. The current ideology in the US isn't really that far off from the ideology of the SS, so the Trump really shouldn't be a surprise here. I remember worrying something like this was going to happen even 6 years ago.

Over the past few years, what have we experienced here ... demonizing Muslims and Middle Easterners, demonizing the poor, condoning torture, wide-spread private prison labor drawn along racial lines, justifying brutality and a culture of violence, might makes right, etc. Open those doors, and out comes Trump and his boys.

The winners need racism: it's how they distract the losers, so the losers don't notice who is really robbing them and/or blame the little guy instead.

The winners in this game, in my experience, are people who have a lust for power and aren't really known for the existence of empathy in their personalities. In the past they used to shoot people on sight for demanding 14 hour work weeks instead of 16.

We have a lot of people who were given a raw deal in this economy. People who aren't guaranteed vacation time or benefits by federal law, people who aren't guaranteed affordable health care, people who aren't guaranteed much rights of anything that they enjoy everywhere else in the civilized world. Then you have the people totally screwed in this economy.

For the most part we've all been abandoned by the people running the show here, studies have shown we have 0% say in how things are governed, and a lot of people have gotten royally screwed over. We're also in a culture that's been stewing in demonizing the other/exploiting others as objects/worshiping the powerful, as an intentionally-constructed belief system that's been promoted on our main media outlets and by our two major political parties (Republicans more than Democrats, obviously, but Democrats aren't blameless here, either, because they get the checks from the same people).

And now we've got a neo-Nazi with the ear of the president-elect. Color me surprised.

i think i need to go back to detaching from ilx political threads for a minute. not a jab at any posters here, honest. just feel like i can't take another thousand or three thousand posts trying to suss out the relationship between race and class in america, like thank god this election came along so we can finally crack open this never-before-discussed question. that really sounds pettier than i mean it to because the conversation about such things around here is definitely like many leagues more nuanced and intelligent than i get in most other daily venues but it's really not helping me keep my head in the game or do anything useful. i mean i'm sure i'll still end up posting stuff anyway but it'll just be low-grade one-liners, i hereby swear not to contribute anything to the conversation or anybody's day.

as a swan song for the moment: to the guy looking for a "socially liberal, economically conservative party" type deal: first of all, if you are sincere in your posts, welcome to these threads, i don't think i've seen you around before and we always say we are interested in more of a dialogue with conservatives since the boards skew left. that said, i've been struggling to make sense of some of your posts tbh since they seem kinda detached from the reality i live in or reflect some baseline assumptions i just don't share, or maybe experiences of yours that i don't know about.

that might be a statement more about me than it is you, but my eyebrows do go up with some of your comments about health care (i think this was you) and also about immigration, where you invoke a narrative around 'americans' who are 'working and paying taxes' - - - - you do realize this this 100% describes immigrants, documented and undocumented alike? sorry, i should dig up the specific post, it was just this morning i think, but the thread flew by and i was on my phone and i couldn't really get into it. this is not a really great answer i know. i was at a rally/walk-out in the name of undocumented college students today, there were some really powerful and brave speakers taking the megaphone. i heard so much courage, so much determination and righteous indignation, and so much pain in the dehumanizing circumstances they've lived under for the majority of their lives. we really really have to unmake mental habits that divide the world up into populations that do or don't deserve our consideration, our recognition of them as being as human as we are. i don't think this is what you set out to post about, but to me, where i'm coming from, at least today, it is what you are posting about.

anyway on the 'economic conservative but not racist' tip i stand by my comments in this post here HIRALLY CLIMPS FOR PRESIDETN • US presidential elections part VII and in conclusion i would like to say i have been otm in this thread, except for the five hundred times i thought and acted as if trump had no chance of victory. very few of my jokes from the preceding months strike me as very funny now.

wanted to cosign re: vg's excellent post

i know you all are like, living out in the world

no, this is wrong, i am not

anyway on the 'economic conservative but not racist' tip i stand by my comments in this post here HIRALLY CLIMPS FOR PRESIDETN • US presidential elections part VII and in conclusion i would like to say i have been otm in this thread, except for the five hundred times i thought and acted as if trump had no chance of victory. very few of my jokes from the preceding months strike me as very funny now.

― dustalo springsteen (Doctor Casino), Thursday, November 17, 2016 12:54 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was a good post

the linked one i mean. the post in this thread was alright though, too

This is being shared on facebook
"Mitch McConnell, KY senator (202)-244-2541or (502)-582-6304
Ben Sasse, NE senator (202)-224-4224 or (308)-233-3677
Jeff Flake, AZ senator 520-575-8633 or (602)-840-1891
John McCain, AZ senator (602)-952-2410 or (928)-445-0833 or (202)-224-2235
Lindsey Graham, SC senator (202)-224-5972 or (864)-250-1417
Susan Collins, ME senator (207)-622-8414 or (207) 780-3575
Rand Paul, KY senator (270)-782-8303 or (202)-224-4343
Pat Toomey, PA Senator (610) 434-1444 or (202) 224-4254
Paul Ryan 202-225-3031

just in case you need to vent."

So thought I'd pass it on

imo "california" is not a haven of enlightenment. don't get it twisted. your *city* might be. maybe your neighborhood. but drive a ways & there's plenty of folks who talk & think like that middle-america part people keep hammering about.

uh yeah, i'm pretty sure I posted upthread about growing up in one of "those" places. On the other hand, I looked up the election results in my home town, which was solidly republican for decades, and a significant majority voted for Clinton. Granted they voted to keep the death penalty and expedite executions like the town I knew and left. But I think the economy was a large reason for this shift from red to blue. I think either a lot of the middle-american people got gentrified out, or the population increase has been significantly more urbane liberal people who are willing to commute longer distances in exchange for bigger and cheaper houses.

(Doctor Casino) I've been posing here for more than a decade now, on and off. I think you misunderstood my posts. I have never been a republican, ever! Though I do agree with some of the core principles, same with the democrats. As time passes I find less and less to agree with republicans on but I still can't completely side with the democratic party. And I haven't said anything about immigrants. I mentioned what many of my co workers have said to me because they voted for trump. I've never posted on political threads before, because I usually don't like talking about politics.

a fairer economic system is not a cure for racism. however, it could help alleviate one particularly noxious form that racism has taken this campaign: scapegoating minorities.

There's been a lot of talk of bubbles. My bubble - which is to say, my inner-burb block of 20 houses and an apartment complex or so - features Jewish families, Indian immigrant families, Irish immigrant families, Spanish speakers, a gay couple, blue collar workers, academics, artists, professionals, the unemployed, stay at home parents, retirees, teachers, section 8 housing, families with kids in college, families with newborns, tiny 100 year old homes, bigger new construction homes ... and that's just my block, off the top of the head. If I am in a bubble, and what my bubble is missing is asshole Trump voters, then I think my bubble is doing ok and their bubble is the one that needs to burst. In fact, this election was partly a response against having their bubble burst. Oh, poor (middle class) white working class, it's not the 1950s anymore, what to do?

Has this been posted? https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/798876695629545473

Jordan tries to take a look at polling, and changes in poll results, pre- and post-Comey Letter to see how much it contributed to what we saw.

I'm responding to got no reason not to hold them in contempt. we are talking about some deeply contemptible motherfuckers here, whose meaning I may've misinterpreted.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

aight since i've been called dumb and self-righteous on this thread (not by al tho) i guess it's up to me to prove it.

when i look at trump voters, i don't think most of them are actively racist. i see people who care so little about values, have so little commitment to their personal beliefs, that they will without hesitation vote for a racist because, i don't know, "lesser evil" or "email server" or "he doesn't mean it" or whatever festering load of shit they've swallowed to justify their actions. i just don't see any way that i can ever trust or respect somebody like that.

i'll take any judgment people want to put on me. i don't care about the "optics", i'm not running for president, i'm not so much as running for dogcatcher, i'm probably not even a good person deep down. i'm not going to go out and confront trump voters on this to their face, but neither can i swallow the hurt, anger, betrayal, and hatred i feel towards what people who voted for trump have done.

The living embodiment of Poe's Law: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/?tid=sm_tw

I mean the guy is almost certainly overstating his effect on anything besides his own pocketbook, but $10,000 a month for propagating fake news to eager idiots is scary. My mother-in-law, my aunt, and several of my first and second cousins were among the people eating that stuff up. All of them Trump vogers.

Re: factors that won the election for Trump, concurrent with the Comey bullshit was someone on Trump's staff finally duct taping oven mitts to his hands for a week+. If he'd still been crowing on Twitter he probably would've sunk himself, but the American public's inability to remember anything saved the day.

One thing about what Late Great writes, which I've seen written many places, is this idea that racists should be treated like children. Explicitly. What happened to treating people with respect, like an adult human being? Aren't we condemning them as too dumb to function as adults, if we're basically saying they have the abilities of five year olds?

Thing is, of course, in society in general, and this is true in the US, but also extremely common in debates about immigrants in DK, minorities are never treated like kids. Even 12 year olds are treated like adults. Whenever the discussion becomes about something bad that happens in immigrant neighborhoods - honor killings, misogyny, unemployment - and side goes 'well perhaps with investments and more education, they could...' it gets cut off: 'no, they need to take responsibility for themselves!' But when white people fuck up society much more severely than any terrorist has ever managed to do, the immediate response becomes 'right, what can we all do for them to make sure they don't do it again'

It might be true, though, many many Trump voters have the cognitive ability of a small child. And as the baby boomer generation will get even older, that won't get better. And there's another truth in here, which is that we simply can't write off the white people, not yet, while minorities, as the name indicates, don't matter enough politically to get their wishes taken seriously. But in the end, that's a question of power, not rights. We're treating stupid white people with kid gloves, because they've just shown they have the power to fuck things up if they don't get their will, no matter how unfair and stupid that will is. And they don't hesitate to use it.

In the end, it will change. The boomer generation will die off, and they will be thought off as the worst people ever. That is the main light in the tunnel, at some point the Clinton coalition will become stronger than this. How to get their earlier, how to get some of the deplorables to abandon ship, that I don't know.

American public's inability to remember anything saved the day.

yeah this was for sure deflating. the number of people who stamped their feet in the ground after the Access Hollywood tape and shouted, "holy shit, this guy is horrible", watched as a dozen women accused him of doing exactly the thing he bragged about doing, and then two weeks later were like....well that's all in the past

can't remember if ilx thinks Yglesias is an asshole or not but he's otm here

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/17/13626514/trump-systemic-corruption?utm_campaign=mattyglesias&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

hey sorry for the long drunken late night post. to jacobsanders, i should go back and actually find the posts if i'm going to call you out on details - mea culpa.

Regime-friendly banks receive a light regulatory touch while their rivals are crushed.

This would be a more terrifying prospect if there was a bank that the mainstream Republican or Democratic party ever met that they didn't like. Now banks who like the Preident-Elect, that's another matter.

speaking of vox, this article seems relevant to our ongoing discussion:

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/11/17/13642864/trump-election-empathy-baratunde-thurston

Did Republicans really cry over Romney's loss? Pics or it didn't happen.

a tear-streaked binder of women

Donald Trump made racial attitudes more important in the general election, too. I showed earlier that racial resentment, unfavorable opinions of African-Americans and ethnocentrism were significantly stronger predictors of whites’ preferences for Trump or Clinton than they were in hypothetical match-ups between Clinton and Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

Many of these same racial attitudes are also heavily influenced by education. College-educated whites and whites who live in highly educated areas of the country have long been much more racially tolerant than other white Americans.

It turns out that this relationship between education and racial attitudes explains a very large portion of the education gap in white support for Trump. Indeed, the graphs below show that the negative effects of education on white support for Trump vanishes after accounting for attitudes about both African Americans and immigrants.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/16/the-education-gap-among-whites-this-year-wasnt-about-education-it-was-about-race/

"The boomer generation will die off, and they will be thought off as the worst people ever."

sadly, they are all trying to live to be 200 years old. i keep waiting for them to start getting daily fetal cell injections or something in order to keep the reaper at bay.

covered by the medicare they don't want to pay for

Basically he finds a lot of evidence that if education affected your attitudes about race generally, that has an extremely close parallel with trump support, to the extent that if you control for education affecting your attitudes about race, the effect of education on trump support disappears

(Maybe this is obvious but I had to read it twice to get it)

xpost i can vouch that JacobSanders has an impeccably progressive attitude toward otherwise underrepresented private-press LPs.

JacobSanders do you love free market capitalism and think its potentials limitless if it were only 'truly' free...or are you just trying to deal with the current setup?

― conrad, Saturday, 12 November 2016 14:48 (five days ago) Permalink