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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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There's no question in my mind that the oligarchs in the U.S. want to encourage racism and culture wars, in order to keep lower-class Americans at each others' throats rather than united against the bourgeoisie. It's also true that populist dictators have leveraged, and continue to leverage, anti-immigrant and other racist viewpoints in order win support and push their twisted ideologies on their entire country. Trump is, without question, an example of a would-be dictator who's in the pocket of billionaires and is appealing to Christofascists in hopes of going back to the White House in lieu of jail.
That being said, articles like these which insinuate that Trump's campaign is primarily about racism is a repetition one of the key, fatal mistakes that Hillary Clinton's campaign made in 2016. It's also not a good way of fixing the "us vs. them" environment that allows the oligarchs to keep thriving.
While it's hard for us to understand their motivations for doing so, some voters in the black, Latino and Asian communities still support him. It's irresponsible and short-sighted to pretend these voters don't exist, so it becomes necessary to concede that while many of Trump's supporters are indeed racist, there are still some legitimate ideological reasons why certain people continue to embrace conservatism. And if you actually want long-lasting change in this country, you have to engage with those people and not dismiss them as being just as deplorable as the rabid Trump cultists.
Granted, it's getting harder with each passing week to justify supporting Trump for non-racist reasons, as seen by the fact that some conservative influencers have started walking back support for him. That being said, there remains a perception (no matter how invalid) that Kamala Harris is an insider, a cog in an inherently corrupt political machine, while Trump is the guy who's going to drain the swamp. I know perfectly well that Trump is way more corrupt than Harris, but the 'drain the swamp' narrative sticks because some Democrats have been just as subservient to the oligarchs as Republicans. Even when they controlled the White House and Congress, they didn't undo the Reagan-era tax cuts for the wealthy, or cut the billions of dollars in spending on defense contractors, or pass any reforms that would make our government more accessible to non-elites (like term limits or ranked choice voting).
The status quo isn't working out too well for the majority of Americans, and the Democrats represent a continuation of that status quo. A lot of these disaffected Americans just want to see the system "shaken up" in hopes of seeing an improvement. The "vote them all out" sentiment is popular for a reason. Hopefully, those people realize we already gave Trump a chance in 2016, he didn't fix a damned thing, and it's not going to be any better for them if he gets a second term. However, Democrats in the U.S. (just like Labour in the U.K.) are going to have to deliver some significant improvements in the quality of life for the common folk instead of serving the oligarchs first and foremost. Otherwise, we're just going back to conservative leadership in a few years, and the next would-be dictator might be less incompetent than Trump was in staging a coup.
It's not insinuating anything. It's make a very factual statement. It's so exhausting that you and others come to the defense. Their core is 100% racism. Accept this and then we can finally start moving forward.
Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump's supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to 'start moving forward'?
I'm honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren't? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.
I'm not saying we shouldn't call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn't about to do it. But like, that can't be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn't work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.
When we're focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That's not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, "See what monsters they think you are? We know what you're really like."
If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn't mean we can't also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.
This is why the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying "this is wrong". Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of "Yes We Can" and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.
"Or We're Fucked" isn't a very good campaign slogan, as we've seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they're not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don't have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.
Dress for the job that you want.
If you want to get something done, you're a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that's passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.
Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.
Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they're in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they're a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.
If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.
Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I'm skeptical.
Why are you going off on some rant about how to win the election? What you're saying is correct about how to approach the election and that's not the subject of this post or this conversation.
Trump and the majority of his supporters are a bunch of god-damned racists. Welcome to reality.
You directly quoted and replied to a sentence referencing Trump's presidential campaign. It is perfectly reasonable for people to assume you are interested in discussing the upcoming presidential election.
No, I was discussing the racism. No need to change the subject.
Do you even read the usernames of the people you reply to?
No. Do you always jump in and answer questions for other people without identifying that you're doing that? I asked millie why they were going off on a rant. Nobody asked you. You're welcome to participate anyway, but you might want to make it clear that's what's going on.
They weren't "going off on a rant", though. They were responding to something you said and it was a pretty good reply too with a lot of detail and thought put into it. If you didn't want to discuss the election, you shouldn't have quoted a sentence about the election. Getting all snide and dismissive after the fact is very strange behaviour on your part.
I quoted about the racism. The election was incidental and I didn't discuss that part at all, but did discuss the racism.
And now, you're changing the subject. Is it so hard to stay on subject? What is your objective here? Distraction from the original topic? What are your thoughts on the racism? I really don't care to hear you blather on about anything else.
I don't know why you keep saying this. Do you still think I'm someone else you replied to earlier?
You didn't respond to what I wrote and instead went off on a tangent. Try to stay focused. Try to read for context.
What are your thoughts on the racism?
Also there is no healing the divide, that's an insane idea. You don't sit at the same table with people who want to kill and maim and destroy other people. Fuck that stupid shit, you all spent decades sitting on your thumbs while this crap was cooking - you can't heal shit now
Young people are the ones inheriting this issue from the people who did this for 'decades', and are having to deal with it. Old people in the Democratic Party should not be absolved of blame for their inaction for decades over the spread of racism on the Right and doing nothing, but, concurrently, young people shouldn't be blamed for the 'sins of their fathers', when they're clearly trying to change the party. I would personally love if we could ditch the DNC as a political apparatus, and let them all die in bankrupt obscurity, but using this as a weapon against people who are now actually trying to push change is just itself serving to bolster their racist opponents.
And there is in fact one matter where trumpists are right - the media is a complete and utter shitshow, it's like they're insane. I guess the far right and capital go hand in hand but this is fucking ridiculous.
Painting "the others" as killers and destroyers is exactly the sort of rhetoric that racists use to dehumanize minorities. If you want the population at large to believe that we're better than the racists, then we have to actually be better than them-- not fall into the trap of thinking like they do.
Sure, some Trump supporters are inherently broken people that you can't even have a civilized conversation with. No one is denying that. I'm saying that some are just very misguided and although we're all very tired of dealing with them, writing them off as lost causes is only going to make our current problem bigger.
Modern psychology can successfully deprogram former cultists; we do not march these people straight into a wood chipper.
I understand where you're coming from, and I do agree in general. Just feels like this should not be a priority right now, especially considering that any deprogramming is extremely more difficult than going nuts in the first place. But then again I don't think that there is any equivalence when I say that trump cultists are nuts and when they say that all of us other people should be killed.
There's also a significant percentage of people there for the patriarchy and misogyny, and just think they're "one of the good ones so the leopards won't eat MY face", so they ignore the parts of the MAGA platform that target them. For example, women who vote for Trump usually aren't doing it because they're misogynistic, the racism and transphobia might be bigger draws but they believe the misogyny won't be applied to them. Same with Black and Latino men who are there for the patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia, but think the old white guys will accept them. Same again with the "Gays for Trump" folks, and the TERFS who support him.
There's a big difference between saying "a majority of his supporters are racist" and "their core is 100% racism." This is exactly the trap you have to avoid if you want to start moving forward.
There's also a big difference between defending racism and pointing out the fact that-- like it or not-- some Trump supporters are minorities, and that forces us to accept that there's something besides racism at play here.
Is this exhausting? Absolutely. Trump should not even be eligible to run for public office as far as I'm concerned, and yet here we are, dealing with the third straight Presidential election where we have to ask ourselves why his polling numbers are as high as they are despite how thoroughly awful he is as a human being. And because people are tired, we're willing to accept an easy answer rather than dig deeper.
But if we dismiss this recurring nightmare yet again by saying that only racists voted for him, there's no point in trying to debate a racist, so we should never engage with any Trump voter, ever, until the End of Time? Then progress isn't going to last very long, because we'll have failed to understand why some people believe so strongly that the system is broken that they'd rather vote for a convicted felon than someone who is actually qualified to be President. That sentiment is only going to spread if we don't figure out why so many people are feeling so disaffected.
It's like we've discovered a weird lump on our collective pancreas. It's uncomfortable, we don't want to think about it, and we all hope that it'll just go away, but no. You have to biopsy that thing. Ignoring it would be irresponsible.
Core != All ; "their core" == "a majority of his supporters" -- This inherently allows for the dimwits that are so fucking stupid that they support him and his racism even though they are black as well as any other what aboutism you'd like to conjure up.
There are low-income people who constantly vote against their own best interests and ensure they will stay poor. It happens. There are stupid people in the world. By gutting education, Tump and his lackeys seek to make even more stupid people to lead around by the nose.
We can start having the other conversations when we can nail down that it is an absolute truth that Trump and his core are racist.
Okay, I think we're on the same page; we're just saying it two different ways. Trump and his core/inner circle are racist? Yes, agreed. There are low-income people who are voting against their best interests, and gutting education makes it even worse? Yes, also agreed.
The key point I'm trying to make is: it's not inherently the fault of these lower-income people that conservatives have actively tried to keep them stupid. Lumping these unlucky rubes in with the actual malefactors isn't helpful, it's just kicking them when they're already down.
Yes, it sounds like we are. Unfortunately, you saw how difficult that was to get aligned on something so simple. Yet, until everyone is aligned on that, the excuse making will continue. Those who know and are racist are provided free cover and distraction. Those who don't know don't know who to believe, so they stick with what they think they know.