None of these observations should be taken as conferring approval on Trump or his noxious campaign. But I think our Clown-in-Chief put his finger on a lot of ways that poor whites feel marginalized-- and it's not all about either money or the fear of liberal policies.I did not specify what I found "noxious" about Trump's campaign. For the most part, I did not like Trump's clownish persona, five parts vulgarity and five parts narcissism. Both of these factors resulted in him making awkward statements like this one:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
— Donald Trump, announcement speech, June 2015
Now, at the time I heard this, I did not agree with the Left's dominant interpretation, that Donald Trump was revealing his deep and thoroughly entrenched racism against people of color. To me he was simply following in the tracks of numerous Republicans before him in objecting to the incursions of illegal aliens. A more sensible politician would have foregrounded his remarks against said aliens by leading with something along the lines that, "even many of the illegals may be good people, nevertheless there are criminals and rapists among them, etc." Trump was simply a terrible speaker, and at some other time, his clumsy words would have sunk his campaign immediately.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has frequently said (and I paraphrase) that for years the Left constantly accused any number of relatively centrist conservatives of being racist, with the result that over time the Right became so inured to such accusations that they decided that they might as well support a candidate who refused to apologize when twitted with accusations of deep-dyed racism.
Shapiro's idea is persuasive. He has pointed out that although current pundits have championed John McCain against Trump, liberals in the past often used the same rhetoric against earlier conservatives that they now use against the Donald. Recently on THE VIEW Whoopi Goldberg asserted that if Democratic Congressman John Lewis said that someone (such as Trump) was racist, then that person was indubitably racist. Then Shapiro noted that Lewis had made the same pronouncement against John McCain that Lewis made against Trump. Somehow, this nugget of information was not communicated on THE VIEW, and even John McCain's daughter Megan seemed either sanguine about, or ignorant of, Lewis's denunciation of her father.
In the end, though, Shapiro's concept may be a little too intellectualized. One should not forget that most "insider" Republicans did not support Trump during his campaign, and that he derived much of his support from the rank-and-file. Some voters may have liked Trump for explicitly monetary issues, as with employees of the coal industry. However, I think Trump gained ground not because he was definitively racist, but because he projected an indifference to being called racist.
In other words, Trump's very existence was a thumb in the eye to the Left's shame culture, which insists that nothing is more worthy of total condemnation than white racism. (Thus, the Donald's "both sides" Charlottesville remark far outpaces George Dubya getting the country mired down in Iraq in order to make money for the oil companies.) Sadly, Trump himself is not capable of enunciating an actual credo that might fight back against the virulence of shame culture; he merely says whatever he wants to say and basks in the attention it earns for him. Half the time conservative intellectuals like Shapiro ends up denouncing Trump's more inflammatory statements, and Trump merely goes on to his next bothersome tweet.
Trump may or may not go on a second term. I don't believe that his presidency will bring about the sort of sea-change necessary in order to reverse the incursions of ultraliberal shame culture. Still, to the extent that he subverted that particular dominant, perhaps he will serve as an "opener of the way" for a greater intellectual examination of the issues-- a proliferation of the spawn of Jordan Peterson to counteract the tides of Sartrean ideologues.
5 comments:
Several problems. Trump's statement was a flat out lie. Statistically mexican immigrants (especially first generation ones) are LESS likely to rape murder steal or commit crimes. The Average trump voter is more likely to be a rapist and murderer. Secondly, Trump has a LONG history of racism (the central park 5 incident).
Shame culture as you describe it doesn't exist. The ugly truth is that most centrist rightists WERE ALREADY RACISTS and were merely responded for being called out on their poisonous views. Ben Shapiro said that Palestinian arabs were subhuman animals, ignored countless cases where police have gunned down black men in cold blood and is generally a piece of shit.
The "classical liberals" are really just neo nazis prettying up their rhetoric
I deleted your last couple of posts because they weren't arguments, just rants. This post isn't much better, but at least it's a partial response to what I wrote.
Again, your stats are suspect because everything you quote is designed to make your side look as stainless as the newfallen snow, while your opponents are as black as pitch. That's inane in the extreme. The idea that every Trump voter is racist is a fantasy that Lefties tell themselves, nothing more, and all of your accusations regarding Trump's alleged history of racism are just unsubstantiated drivel. I don't doubt that he's done racist things from time to time, because he's a mammothly insensitive individual. But that's not the same as being a doctrinaire racist.
Yes, I've heard Shapiro accused of being a racist because he doesn't like Palestinian culture. I defy you to produce an actual quote in which he's attacked Palestinians or any Muslims for being "subhuman." As an Orthodox Jew he's threatened by the Muslim hatred of his people, with their frequent promises to push all Jews into the sea, so I don't doubt that he's castigated their culture. But that's not the same as calling the people themselves subhuman. Moreover, while it's not impossible someone could find some questionable remark in Shapiro's history, that's a long way from demonstrating that he's any more a doctrinaire racist than Trump.
Wrong. Shapiro's comments basically said that "Jewish settlements are awesome" Arabs like to "live in sewage." That's basically saying they're animals no matter what prettying attempts you use to justify it. When Andrew O'Neil called him out on it he got angry and called him a lefty (which is rather rich). Notably Shaprio shamelessly ignores that the palestinians DID try negotiations in the 90s and were offered deals that ranged from insulting at best to outright bad faith at worst (the palestinians would have had NO control over their own water supply airspace borders and roads and due to the later they could basically divide any state into little cantons for as long as they want. In short Arafat would have been the worlds biggest idiot to have taken THAT offer), or that Israel ALSO fully intended to violate partition and DID in fact commit atrocities such as the Deir Yassin Massacre and Lydda Death march. Shapiro ignored ALL of this and said that Palestinians should all be expelled.
And Trump's history of racism isn't just from time to time.
1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to black tenants and lied to black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to discriminating before.
1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
1988: In a commencement speech at Lehigh University, Trump spent much of his speech accusing countries like Japan of “stripping the United States of economic dignity.” This matches much of his current rhetoric on China.
1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.
1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.
1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”
2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a black contestant, for being overeducated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”
2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”
2010: In 2010, there was a huge national controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” — a proposal to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Trump opposed the project, calling it “insensitive,” and offered to buy out one of the investors in the project. On The Late Show With David Letterman, Trump argued, referring to Muslims, “Well, somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”
2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first black president — was not born in the US. He even sent investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a ”carnival barker.” (The research has found a strong correlation between “birtherism,” as this conspiracy theory is called, and racism.) Trump has reportedly continued pushing this conspiracy theory in private.
2011: While Trump suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the US, he also argued that maybe Obama wasn’t a good enough student to have gotten into Columbia or Harvard Law School, and demanded Obama release his university transcripts. Trump claimed, “I heard he was a terrible student. Terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”
So no. He IS a racist. That he surrounds himself with white nationalists and white supremacists really is just more of the same. The guy's a racist POS.
You may have had a point against Noah Berlatsky but now you're basically an apologist for the worst conservative ideals.
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