US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8702

On September 10 2017 06:03 LegalLord wrote:
So I remembered something I thought worth mentioning. As often happens, I got a ballot for one of the many local elections that came around. Nothing special, just a few local city positions. But as I usually do, I looked up all the candidates. The Democrats actually seemed like pretty solid fellas, and they did get my vote. Mailed it in and then just watched.

What struck me was how universally bad the Democrats were at campaigning. Here they had some high quality progressive candidates for the picking but they put in no effort in getting them elected. The Republican candidates had a strong mailing campaign, calls and personal visits from the candidates in question, and very prominent, poignant ads. The Democrats had... flimsy template websites if any at all, a few awkwardly placed road signs, and pretty much nothing else.

The result was a clean sweep by Republicans. Sad thing is the Democrats didn't even do so badly, they just all individually lost. Given similar success rates across the country I suspect that there is a systemic campaigning ineptitude on the part of Democrats that makes this keep happening. Many winnable elections were lost to awful campaigning. Over and over again.

On September 10 2017 06:21 Azuzu wrote:


Couldn't you also say this about Democrats that thought the candidates "weren't progressive enough"?

On September 10 2017 06:33 GreenHorizons wrote:


Gahlo's sorta right, in at least many of the people calling themselves progressives will vote establishment if they think they have to.

I mean Democrats don't have any active politicians that have notably higher approval ratings than Trump (worst ratings in history), but Bernie is the single most popular active politician in the country. It's pretty clear who should be following who.

On September 10 2017 06:33 GreenHorizons wrote:


Gahlo's sorta right, in at least many of the people calling themselves progressives will vote establishment if they think they have to.

I mean Democrats don't have any active politicians that have notably higher approval ratings than Trump (worst ratings in history), but Bernie is the single most popular active politician in the country. It's pretty clear who should be following who.

On September 10 2017 07:17 Sermokala wrote:
The path to victory for the dems is a lot easier then the republicans if the republicans have no real ideological foundation anymore and Trump makes the party look worse to moderates then bush did.

On September 10 2017 07:08 ChristianS wrote:

Not directly related, but I'm curious: have you read Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in the Atlantic about Trump? If so, what are your thoughts?

I haven't finished reading it and I'm not sure I fully understand it on a first read, but it seems like he's arguing fairly persuasively that the popular narrative of the 2016 election - that the Democrats got too far up their liberal elite asses on social justice issues and failed to offer any solution to the economic ills of the ailing white masses - is, if not totally wrong, at least deeply inadequate. He criticizes Bernie quite a bit for that exact narrative.

If the narrative he's criticizing is correct, the Dems' strategy in 2020 seems obvious: put up any vaguely-literate white guy, maybe from some midwestern state, and talk about liberal economic policies. If Coates is right, though, I don't think the answer is clear. If Trump has convinced a significant population that anything short of thinly veiled white supremacy is "political correctness" that must be destroyed, I honestly don't know what the best path to victory is.

Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

On September 10 2017 07:30 Toadesstern wrote:

didn't you yourself in the end refrain from voting or voted something else? Or was that just postering and you ended up swallowing the bitter pill that was voting Hillary?

On September 10 2017 08:32 LegalLord wrote:
We talking this Coates piece in the Atlantic? I looked through it to see what's up. And let me just say: what utter, inane, and blind drivel. It not only tries to establish Trump as a force for white supremacy and racism (which perhaps is a defensible argument, regardless of whether I agree with it) but framing everything and everything that happened - conspiracy theories, Russia, election victories, weaknesses of Democrats, everything - all in terms of trying to shoehorn everything into a narrative that it's all racism. I even scanned to see if he would mention the Hillary "deplorable" comment, a great indication of the kind of dismissive sentiment that might drive people towards Trump, even if just to smite the other side - but no dice. It's all because white people are racist and they love Trump's shitty provocative actions like the sexual assault tape, not for any other reason whatsoever. I would have a hard time finding anything less close to the truth than whatever that long-winded steaming pile of turd was.

But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.

Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen,” or the white workers) and the “servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor—much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.

Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class.

On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:

"I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham." (GH: Why would anyone want to tear down a statue of this guy?)

Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery,” the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was white slavery.” Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least enjoyed “surety of support in sickness and old age.”

When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.

But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written.

The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those—one in five—openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: So, one of the reasons that integration was so successful by court order in the South was the South tends to operate countywide school systems. And that meant that white parents wanting to flee desegregation couldn’t just simply move into a white town to get away from these orders. But what we’re finding in Alabama, and really across the country, are white communities, wealthier white communities, wanting to pull away from these regional or countywide school districts and form their own racially isolated, much more wealthy school districts. And that’s happened in Jefferson County, Alabama.

The reason I looked at that case, in particular, is, most of the time when white communities want to—they’re called school district secessions. When they want to secede from a larger school district, there’s very little scrutiny, and we don’t actually get to see their motivations. But the school system that this town, this suburban community called Gardendale, wanted to split off from was under a desegregation order, so they actually had to go to trial, and there was discovery. And in that discovery, the racial motivations of the white people in that community became very clear. So it provided an unusual opportunity to actually explore why communities who say they want to break off from local control are often motivated by race.

AMY GOODMAN: That trial is fascinating, that you write about. And in it, the judge actually reads from Brown v. Board of Education. Especially for young people who don’t even know what that is, more than half a century ago, explain what happened then and why it applies now, and why this judge found it important to recite it in court.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: So, Brown v. Board of Education, of course, is the landmark Supreme Court ruling that found legally mandated school segregation unconstitutional.

AMY GOODMAN: Back in 1954.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Back in 1954. Prior to that, we operated under the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine, which said segregation of black citizens was legal and constitutional as long as it was equal. Of course, it was never equal. But Brown doesn’t actually deal with that. It deals with citizenship. And it’s basically saying that the separation of black students from white denies them their full citizenship.

The way that we kind of commonly learn this history, though, is the Supreme Court makes this ruling, and then we all agree segregation was bad, and we integrate our schools, or we tried really hard. But actually what happened was there was massive resistance, both in the North and the South. And it takes a very long time for school desegregation to occur, where it occurred at all, largely because of these court orders.

What was so fascinating about this trial, though, is many federal judges have basically taken the position that these court orders, some of them 50 years old, have gone on too long and that there’s no more segregation for them to deal with. But Judge Madeline Haikala, who was appointed by President Obama, has been one of the rare federal judges who is taking these rulings very seriously. And I was reading through the court transcripts. There was just this amazing moment where she’s interviewing the superintendent that the all-white school board of Gardendale appointed, and found out that he—on cross-examination, it came out that he had never hired or worked with a black teacher in his career, even though he was coming down to, basically, Birmingham, Alabama. And so, I think—she declined to be interviewed for the story, but it’s clear that she calls a recess, she goes and gets copies of the Brown ruling and begins to question him about had he ever read the ruling, and then reads parts of it, particularly the parts about how segregation demeans black students, aloud. And it was amazing moment. I’ve written about school segregation for more than a decade. I’ve sat in on these trials. I’ve read transcripts. I’ve never seen a judge do that before.

On September 10 2017 10:23 KwarK wrote:
Is failing to understand the issue a point of pride to you xDaunt or can you really not see why a disadvantaged group seeking equality and an advantaged group seeking to preserve the inequality aren't equivalent?

On September 10 2017 10:30 xDaunt wrote:

Oh, I fully understand the purported justification, I just reject its sufficiency wholeheartedly. People like Coates make it very easy to do so.