That explanation makes a lot of sense, but at the same time, I do hope it is wrong. Lawrence O’Donnell and his panel, too, display some cautious optimism, that Trump might finally have gotten to a point where so many of his promises fell through (in a way visible even to die-hard supporters), and where he has alienated and insulted so many of his supporters, that the ledge he’s been clinging to may crumble.
Other presidents have long blank spaces between scandals, like for months or years at a time.
Trump scandals himself multiple times per day.
Thus, his popularity is always pegged at the bottom of the range.
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Well… the bottom, relatively speaking. There’s still plenty of room below.
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Also very true, but that can’t be all of them. While they are all “guilty” of supporting, or at least tolerating his many flavors of bigotry, there must be a substantial fraction to whom his economic, and social promises are the primary reason for supporting him, and those might still break away at some point.
Also, he’s a show business man. If he understands anything, it’s ratings. That’s why he never stopped campaigning. I would imagine that he and his staff are glued to the polls, and 95% of his statements and travels are designed to micro-manage his ratings, and counter any kind of budding discontent with a new performance.
And yet, they’re willing to tolerate his obvious and blatant racism.
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Nobody cares
That’s certainly true and hard to argue with, if all you’re interested in is making a moral statement, or putting nazism (or any other brand of fascism) in a historical narrative. To deal with an ongoing political situation, that has to look at what drives these people, and what may or may not cause them to move either way, I think we can do better than that.
But that’s the point that many of us are making, in an attempt to get you to listen. By all means, let’s vote the fuckers out. But your statement above is naive. You’re talking about people attending a Klan rally, sheets and hoods and all, who claim they’re just in it for the tax cuts.
Narrator: No, they’re just racists.
Stop worrying about what motivates them. Stop trying to convince them why they made a mistake in 2016. They aren’t going to move. And never turn your back on them.
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while I agree it matters what people’s motivations are, we must also understand that their choices in this world can have consequences. Much like the people who voted for the nazis out of reasons other than antisemitism, they still contributed to the events that happened when the nazis came to power, because for them, their economic anxiety trumped not being an antisemite. it was an acceptable enough position that they voted for it, knowing what it was.
Even if Trump voters voted for him for reasons other than bigotry against Latinos, they helped to empower that bigotry by their vote. Trump started out his campaign, not on an economic platform, but on proclaiming that undocumented immigrants are an existential threat to (white) Americans. People voted for him anyway.
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As far as how much Trump can get away with, I do hope you’re right – but – smarts or (in Trump’s case) no smarts, he has money, and the effect of that, I’m sure, is magnified by others with money who have interests in helping him, either for ideological or personal reasons. Trite, but money buys power, and with enough of that, money can keep you out of jail. That, plus a lopsided SC, a GOP blind to the US Constitution, and Trump loyalists here and there in the justice system, gives me great concern.
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Never. When I have moths in my closet, I research what they like and what they dislike, and I don’t resort to yelling at them.
You’re calling me naive, but that’s your approach to politics? Of course we must not make concessions to them, or get dragged into a discourse normalizing their racism. But every single Trump supporter who can be convinced not to vote for him again is a tiny victory. Let him still be a racist prick, you don’t have to get chummy with him, but get into his thick head and give him a reason to stay at home in November 2020.
edit: I’m not talking about those:
fuck them. but that’s not the 60-odd million people who voted for Trump. If you have only one moral category for all of them, that’s fine with me. But I don’t think you can do politics effectively without making at least a tactical difference between the totally disgusting and the slightly-less-disgusting.
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I’d argue that a lot of those voters were casually bigoted and perhaps blind to it: the kind who would agree that “little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day” are better with money than African-Americans, or who think that all 12-year-old African-American boys who like to play basketball have a strong chance of playing in the NBA (imagine the kind of privileged and blinkered fool who’d believe that).
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Hey! I didn’t mean to make any assumptions about this kid, I merely meant to suggest that they could sue for a lot more than a measly 50k, by playing in court for the mere potential he might have had in sports, and that they destroyed! It was explicitly stated in the article that he will be unlikely to do sports with his injury, but when I say it it’s suddenly racist?
That’s about equivalent to saying if a Jewish kid had brain damage, parents could sue because he could have been a doctor or a lawyer.
You can make your point without perpetuating racist stereotypes.
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Thanks for saving me some keystrokes. Well said, and more succinct than I could have hoped to be.
Unfortunately, privilege blindness and casual bigotry – including amongst those who don’t explicitly support Il Douche – have played a large part over the last several years in downplaying the urgency of the threat of right-wing populism (and its eternal fellow traveller, bigotry). As I noted above in my reference to Niemoller’s poem, anyone who does that is a naive fool at best.
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I seriously doubt that mere “naivete” was the motive here.
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This is ex unshaved_weirdo, I’m really sorry to have gaffed into something that was insulting. I’m not American, I’m not always clear on what symbols are connected with racist stereotypes. I swear I wasn’t assuming anything about what that kid might be good at, how the hell would I know. All I meant to say is, isn’t that a good strategy to have the cops pay maximum $$ for an assault. Of all the things that might have been even remote possibilities and that they have destroyed - in this case, use of his leg - pick something that would have paid extraordinarily well, and try to have them pay damages on THAT basis. It’s tactical, to make them pay for what they did! Not about some weird, racist idea I have about that kid’s actual life.
think that all 12-year-old African-American boys who like to play basketball have a strong chance of playing in the NBA
Please, why on earth would I make such a weird assumption. I may be rather thick sometimes, but I have more than three brain cells.
Holy Neville Chamberlain, Batman!
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Because you said something to the effect of “the kid could have been an NBA star” in the topic about the kid who was shot by the cops. That’s quite a leap to make about a 12-year-old boy who the articles said liked both basketball and football and wouldn’t be able to play either again, a 10+ year prediction that no lawyer working to secure an award for his family would make due to the high improbability of any adolescent making the pros in the future.
Frankly, I highly doubt you would have made such a statement about the victim if he was white. The moderator here and others agree that you came off as stereotyping. If you’re too thick to get that, you’re best off sticking to your promise to LANCB (which, of course, they never do – the last word of their wisdom must be heard!).
By the way, we’ve all heard the excuses of: not being an American; English not being a first language; being a poor communicator; being a sweet summer child; etc. many times before from you and others who, despite those self-acknowledged shortcomings (in the context of an American site), continue to make sweepingly offensive proclamations here and then find themselves consistently shocked when there’s negative feedback. Eventually they either get banned or, like you, request anonymisation. The thickest of them always come back.
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In the era of pervasive internet when it’s now technically possible (though EXTREMELY inadvisable) to attempt to “talk” to hundreds of people a day and “convince” them of things… let me ask you, what human could sustain this effort?
Avoiding this is not due to a lack of empathy but a realization that people are not, in fact, endless wells of empathy, and given a chance the infinite mass of “people that disagree on the internet” would suck all the empathy out of us like vampires, leaving us none for our children, families, people we actually like etc.
Back in the days when you could really only talk to maybe a dozen people in a day, this “let’s talk to them individually and sway them to our side” strategery might have been tenable. In the era of every human having a 24/7 connected smartphone in their pocket, it is not. Attempting that strategy today won’t just merely not work… it is frankly more likely to kill you.
(And that’s putting aside the thousands of partisan and even outright racist personalities and channels already talking to them via direct person-to-person channels on the internet today. This ain’t your father’s ABC, NBC, CBS any more.)
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