Is this list still up to date?
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enabling a racist regime is considered a bit racist by most people. for anyone who isn’t racist, a racist candidate is an immediate no vote.
there are people who voted for trump who don’t admit they are racist, or aren’t self aware enough to realize what they just did and were okay with doing.
the good news is people can change and become more educated and informed and broaden their world views.
not all racists voted for trump, some likely voted for hillary. all people who voted for trump supported someone racist.
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Only one person had the opportunity. She - or those who selected her - botched it.
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So, just so I’m clear, you have allowed that there was no actual right-ward movement of the Democratic party on policy at any point, but that they only appeared to shift right, due to Hillary Clinton being a bad communicator and executive who appealed to a mere majority of voters. Is that an accurate summary of your position?
I mean, the idea that the presidential candidate is the only person with agency in elections, the rest of us mere bystanders to the power they wield, all journalists toiling away in futility, activists organizing in vain as the candidate utilizes their Bully Pulpit to direct Messaging Rays at the Overton Window, which in turn, controls the behavior of voters from its argon tank deep in the bowels of the Smithsonian is compelling. I’ll give you credit, it seems air-tight and internally consistent, we should keep repeating this cycle every 16 years.
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One thing you cannot say about the 2016 campaign is that the GOP handed the nomination to Trump on a sliver salver.
From day one, it was 15+ men and women against Trump. This helped him more than anything else, giving him more air time and more of a chance to hone his sales pitch.
Compare that to the Democratic primary campaign, which amounted to “It’s Her Turn This Time, Let’s All The Rest Of Us Take A Step Back”. Good training for the general campaign, if you want your candidate convinced that she can win without even breaking a sweat.
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LOL, she won it. She won more votes, across the country. People were given a clear choice in their candidates, and more people chose Hillary, before superdelegates even casted a vote. What are you even talking about?
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There were seventeen (I think) candidates who declared for the GOP nomination, almost all of them nationally known governors or legislators.
The Democratic candidates included, besides Clinton, one ex-governor, one ex-senator, and one current senator who was not even a Democrat. Every other leading Democrat apparently got the memo and stayed out.
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WHAT MEMO? You get that for your claim to have any gravity, there has to be actual evidence that people used the “my turn” argument, right?
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Can we pretty much conclude by now that “Globalism” is just code for the “Great Zionist Conspiracy” that these neo-nazi pukes have been yammering about for years?
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If you voted for Trump you voted for a racist candidate running on an overtly racist platform. Every single Trump voter decided his racism and sexism and xenophobia weren’t deal-breakers.
“I just wanted the trains to run on time” doesn’t excuse voting for a fascist regime.
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I’ve seen research that shows that when people become stressed in various ways, their prejudices and entrenchment in dogma get worse. So it was economic insecurity that got Trump elected - by exacerbating people’s racism and religious bigotry.
I also saw something about a study that was done where they created a biography of a fictitious politician, and showed it to two groups of people. One group thought that the ambitious politician sounded really great on average, and the other group largely thought the politician was appalling. The difference between the two groups? The first was given the fictitious biography attached to a male name, the second was given the biography attached to a female name. It’s not like we didn’t know that America was misogynistic as hell, especially when it came to women in power, but it’s nice to have incontrovertible evidence.
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This is implying that the regime of Hilary Clinton would somehow not have been racist. The American government is institutionally racist. It isn’t individual racists that make it that way. That is why, under Barack Obama, who is presumably the least-racist president we’ve had in a while, we still got the systematic slaughter of brown people worldwide, mass deportations of immigrants, the continuing mass-incarceration and police shootings of black people all over America, the foreclosure crisis which saw millions of mostly-minorities stripped of their homes, etc.
In this telling, it doesn’t really matter who you vote for for President, we’ll still get a racist regime, and what’s needed to fight racism is not voting for the person who says they love black people most, but ending racist institutions - chief amongst them, a white supremacy which favors the wealthy white elite that lives on the coasts and creates wars against brown people overseas. It’s arguable that, if Trump had actually been who he said he was instead of just a huckster, that isolationist, pro-worker policies would have been better for non-whites than the continuing neoliberalism we would almost certainly have gotten from Clinton.
The most frustrating thing about this election is we had the right answer (Sanders), but we sailed past it for a contest between two shitty alternatives.
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As others have pointed out in this thread, the list of racist Presidents is long. People have been voting for racists - Democrat and Republican alike - for decades. It was never a deal-breaker. This is a fucking racist country down to its roots. Trump is not different from the past. There was no sudden outbreak of new racism here.
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No? I don’t know about you, but I spent a good part of my early twenties fighting corporate globalization. The WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, various transnational trade agreements, etc., are not a conspiracy, they are real, and they have done huge damage to the world (and America). Are you implying that this is not a reality? That people on the right are not decrying this, and it’s all just closet anti-Semitism?
The so-called “left” embrace of finance capital (the main beneficiary of neoliberalism) is the real travesty. I wish people who considered themselves progressive/liberal/whatever would start recognizing the utter failure of their politics and start looking at the actual problems at work in the world, instead of myopically asserting that any critics of the current global order are conspiracy nuts/racists/whatever.
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Wait, what? So, Barack Obama declaring that he is here to stand between Goldman Sachs and the people with the pitchforks, rather than, say, joining the people with the pitchforks, is not a shift to the right? What about, say, supporting deregulation of derivatives? The end of Glass-Steagall? The passing of NAFTA? The handing off of power to the WTO? The utter failure to prosecute the huge number of crimes committed before and during the Great Recession? Are these, somehow, left-wing policy moves to you?
Bill Clinton ran as a “third-way” triangulation of political space. His whole thing was shifting right in order to steal votes from Republicans. If you don’t think this was a rightward shift, and that this generation of Democrats is way to the right of where Democrats have been traditionally, I don’t know what world you are looking at.
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Wow, just look at the diversity in that ad! I mean, the one white dude has a beard and glasses!
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Seriously, quit blaming Hillary for losing a rigged election. The primary (pun intended) advantage Bernie would have had over her in the general election was that he hadn’t had $x billion of PAC money spent over 8 years in turning the public perception against him. Turning him into a monster that wasn’t real. As you demonstrate, it was highly effective.
Let’s add that there wasn’t just overt racism in Trump’s campaign, but misogyny a-plenty. It worked on more than just Trump supporters, if you look at the numbers.
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No, I’m saying that the fact that she refused to make core progressive values central to her message very strongly suggest that she had zero plans to do anything about them. Adding them to a platform is easy to shuffle quietly away from later on, but it’s very difficult to bury video of you saying “Yes I will bust my ass for a $15 minimum wage, public college funding, a proper progressive taxation system and a massive overhaul of America’s consumer protections”.
I think that Hillary was moderately socially progressive (at least ever since it polled better than being socially conservative, ugh). I also think she would have stuck by reforming aspects of American healthcare, because it’s very popular across the board. But I think she would have paid token / lip service at best to the, let’s say top 50 or so concerns of most prog Dems.
I said “probably more progressive than the visible portion of her platform and campaigning would suggest”. But I think that the visible portions, as in the stuff she talked about most versus the stuff she DIDN’T talk about, was extremely conservative, at least in terms of how most of the world would categorize it. I didn’t mean that I thought she was particularly progressive, except for some relatively low-impact social stuff that is exhaustingly non-controversial these days among liberals and moderates (gay is okay, racism is bad, women are equal, WOW what a brave and inspiring message!!!).
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The connection is there. The most obvious is the use of “globalism” by neo-nazis like Steve Bannon and its use in “alt right” screeds seen today.
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Trump may not be the most racist person who ever ran for President but he is likely the biggest outlier compared to the norms of his contemporaries.
And his rhetoric has consequences.
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