On October 25 2017 23:54 Danglars wrote:+ Show Spoiler [insanely long quote chain] +On October 25 2017 06:44 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 25 2017 04:23 Danglars wrote:On October 25 2017 02:42 ChristianS wrote:On October 25 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On October 25 2017 00:27 ChristianS wrote:
Here's the thing that confuses me. Trump supporters are an amorphous group without public statements or actions for us to scrutinize and determine what they believe. It's hard enough to demonstrate whether someone is racist or not when you can look at their words and actions; it's probably impossible to have a good evidence-based discussion on whether Trump supporters are racists or not. I think you should spend some more time rereading myself and xDaunt's comments explaining what happened. You might push past what's hard to scrutinize and learn from left-wing sources and help demonstrate your own flawed thinking. Start around the RNC convention and read through to a couple months past the inauguration. If your interaction is to dismiss people on the right stating why the Trump-lovers and reluctant Trump voters made their choice, maybe you prefer to live in the dark or set too high of standards for discussion. Can I say this whole post (including the bits quoted below) felt incredibly patronizing? I meant trying to judge the nature of Trump supporters as a whole, not specific ones. I feel comfortable enough with my understanding of where you and xDaunt are coming from, thanks, and have better things to do than reread every xDaunt and Danglars post in this thread since June of 2016. Or do you think that you and xDaunt are perfectly representative of the millions of people that support Trump? It was somewhat intentional. My default reaction to seeing this "amorphous" and "difficult to scrutinize and determine" is to point out that much of what's lacking has been supplied in this forum. You should be much better informed about the various desires and reactions Trump voters had compared to leftists in other left-dominant forums and news outlets. You're much better off synthesizing the characterizations and evidence for them from our argumentation and then proceeding to cut back where you think it lacks. It's high time some of the poor takeaways were pruned and some of the more obvious takeaways were adopted. You're really in the position of asking the pitiful few on the Right here to increase your understanding again having missed the last twenty or thirty pages on the topic. I think some of this bears repeating, and I'll repeat myself, but I'm not about to steer the discussion back into the big tenets if your #1-4s show the last ones were similarly ignored. I won't be in the business of convincing the unconvincable. I'll just wait until two more elections (at this point, maybe narrowly lost elections) bring up a couple more of your presuppositions to the chopping block. I'll restate what I said a different way, and maybe you'll see how everything in this paragraph is completely non-responsive: We've played the "is it racist?" game plenty of times in this thread. When it's a celebrity or politician or some other specific person, we can analyze their specific words and actions, and then argue about what those specific words mean, whether they could be interpreted in a non-racist way, how much benefit of the doubt the person deserves based on past behavior that may or may not also suggest racism, etc. And even when we have all that evidence to look at, the conversation is exhausting and never goes anywhere because ultimately we're trying to say something about this person's internal thoughts and beliefs that we can never directly observe. In the case of Trump supporters as a whole, the situation is even worse, because there are no specific words or actions of the group as a whole that we can analyze. There's not even a guarantee that all of them are racist or none of them are; in fact, it's almost guaranteed otherwise, because they're a huge, disparate group of people whose only defining commonality is that they voted for Trump. As such, any discussion into "are Trump supporters racist?" sounds like a useless discussion, because we can't really know for sure, and we can't really generalize about all of them anyway. I sincerely doubt that rereading every bait xDaunt posted or every cute mimicry of a liberal you posted since June 2016 is going to change that, especially since I've read most of them already anyway. You clearly just thought I was saying something I wasn't, and then decided to get condescending about it. Maybe you thought it would make you look smart, but it just makes you seem like a dick. Well, that's your choice. I can't really justify more work persuading you on this topic. I'll only restate that the binary racist(at least somewhat racist & variants)/not a racist misses the topic. I tried to elucidate crossing areas like RINO conservatives that campaign on immigration and flip once elected and the lack of conservatives that fight, but you're still too narrowly focused and maybe have a bad framing for the topic. Show nested quote +But it's not hard to show Trump said a lot of racially inflammatory things (i.e. things many of us liberals would consider racist). That was a constant theme of his campaign, so the obvious question is, why? I can imagine a few explanations:
1) Trump's not racist, he's just an idiot who says dumb (sometimes racially inflammatory) stuff; and Trump supporters don't like it, but they tolerate it because he has other things going for him.
2) Trump's racist, so he says racially inflammatory stuff; but his supporters don't like it, they just tolerate it because he has other things going for him.
3) Trump's not racist, but he says racially inflammatory stuff because his supporters like it when he says that stuff.
4) Trump's a racist, but he only says racially inflammatory stuff openly because his supporters like it when he says that stuff.
Looking at how both the primary and general went, I see little evidence that Trump's racially inflammatory comments were a detriment to his campaign. The Judge Curiel thing maybe hurt him a little in the polls, and the Khizr Khan stuff seemed like it did, but that might have just been the convention bounce for Hillary. Meanwhile "they're rapists and drug dealers," dragging victims of violent crimes committed by Hispanics out in front of rallies, etc. didn't seem to hurt him at all. Nor did people pointing out his buildings discriminating against blacks in the 70's. Nor did people bringing up the "Black guys counting my money! I hate it" stuff.
At a certain point, you have to consider the possibility that either 3 or 4 was at least partially true – that part of Trump's surprising success stemmed from people underestimating how much people wanted to hear their politicians say racist stuff. This isn't to say that all Trump supporters are racist, or that racism is the primary reason Trump won, but it is to say that if race doesn't factor into your explanation of Trump winning, or if it does only in the form of "non-racist people were tired of being called racist so they voted for a guy that says racist stuff," you're missing something. It's not hard to show he violates politically correct norms in ten ways. I'll give you a breathtakingly obvious opinion: He says derogatory things about everything and everyone, including people that work for him. It's just you want to box in one type of statements and say this alone should be considered without looking at the whole. It makes talking about categorizations with you a remarkably fruitless exercise. I'll even give you the Arpaio pardon as an overtly racist act--too early, too insensitive of his actual acts, and a rather simple case study. There's this rather dumb idea people like to push sometimes that if you're just a dick to everyone, it's not possible to be racist. It's usually expressed humorously, in which case people can at least hide behind "just saying it ironically," but it really does display a complete misunderstanding of what racism is and means. If I cut a guy off on the freeway, and then go home and accuse my black neighbor of stealing my lawnmower (I just KNOW it's him!) it's not less racist to assume the black guy stole it just because I'm a dick in other scenarios, too. There's this rather dumb idea that a president who claims crowds were bigger and frequently talks all kinds of nonsense suddenly means it specifically going against the norms of racial discussion. He's not a precise man with his language. He lurches everywhere. Suddenly one lurch is this deep insight into who he is and what he thinks. And this is all besides the fact that the norms needed to be thrown out for a while now and twenty minutes of apologies for every one minute talking about disproportionate impact topics. Again with thinking I said something I didn't. Where did I claim a deep insight into who he is or what he thinks? I never even suggested I could distinguish between my possibilities #3 and #4, the primary difference between them being whether Trump is racist or not. I may think Trump is a racist, and we can have that conversation if you want to, but I didn't presume to prove it here. If I wanted to, I'd probably start with this: you granted the Arpaio pardon was overt racism. I assume you'd also grant the housing discrimination in the 70's, and that the "black guys counting my money" thing is pretty racist (although maybe you'd believe Trump didn't actually say it). How about Central Park Five? More importantly, after all this why is it so hard to believe that the man behind all that stuff might be a little bit racist? Why is it so hard to believe I think you present a flawed case and your attempts to wrap up what Trump could be (ex. dumb or playing to his base, rather than smart and recognizing flawed racial conversation in US) show you're trying to go broad understanding of the possibilities and flaw short. Then you collapse into strawmanning the other argument in "he's a dick to everyone" trying to come at it as not an excuse for racism. I might as well flip it on it's head and ask you why do you assert all this racist campaigning when it addressed forgotten topics in ways understood by his supporters? Is it so important to you to make him out to be a big racist that you ignore and twist? We have one nice gap between housing discrimination in 60s/70s and Arpaio well after everyone arrived at their conclusions. The middle is presuming the conclusion from politically incorrect dialogue and then cherry picking and mangling quotes to justify that conclusion. Frankly it's sad. Show nested quote +For the rest, he never said "they're rapists and drug dealers," the American media ignored repeat offenders of people that got deported and jogged back in multiple times (build the wall), and it makes sense to point out that illegal immigrants aren't screened. Every time Trump said a racially inflammatory thing, there was an adjacent nuanced policy position that he could have been describing which is not inherently racist. Historically, politicians have been pretty careful to clarify they weren't saying the racist thing, they were saying the adjacent nuanced policy position. Trump took no such care. In this case, the "(Mexican) immigrants are a pox on our society because they're so prone to crime" argument isn't necessarily what Trump is saying – but he's not trying very hard (or else he's failing miserably) to disavow that position. The weird thing that I think the rest of Republicans are starting to notice is that if you don't try very hard to disavow the openly racist position, the base gets a lot more fired up. If you bring out the mother of a girl that got raped and killed by some German guy that overstayed his visa, they'll quietly clap for you. But if you bring out the mother of a girl that was killed by an undocumented Honduran drunk driver, you can barely hear her over the screams and cheers. Ultimately, the policy proposals follow suit. Republicans don't talk about how we should make sure immigrants who commit violent crimes see prison either here or in their home country. They talk about how we need a wall to keep all the Mexicans out. They don't talk about how while the evidence we have says illegal immigrants are less violent than the general population, we should improve our mechanisms for dealing with immigrants when they do commit crimes. They talk about how (in absence of any statistical evidence) immigrants as a whole are making our communities less safe, and for the safety of our women and children we need to track them down and deport them. You'll really have to actually give the direct quotes. Paraphrasing Trump does not work for you. He didn't increase Republican shares among hispanics because his speech was so obviously inflammatory. He said a lot of things because the broad takeaway was he was going to treat border security, immigration, jobs, and repeat violent offenders seriously. Instead of ignoring all these things (not racist to ignore repeatedly deported violent offenders), he made a mark that he was listening and he would take it seriously. That's why it was absolutely warranted to bring up victims because topics like Kate's Law were missed among bipartisan consensus that a few more repeat rapists catch and release were called for in a broadly low-violence population. Not a pleasant thing for the victims in society, but people on your side pick who gets to be victims and who doesn't get to be victims, however unconvinced I am that you specifically choose to ignore victims according to your own ideology. You've just gone entirely off into your own world here. In the segment you quoted, what did I even attribute to Trump? Somehow you've managed to simultaneously imagine arguments I never made, and entirely skip over what I was saying, which is that for all of the stuff he said, you can conjure a non-racist policy position that he might be flailing at. The problem is, he does very little (if anything) to clarify he's talking about that nuanced non-racist policy position and not other obvious racist positions, and a racist could very easily listen to him and think he was talking about what they believe. More commonly, I expect, people who don't self-identify as racists can see his speech and take it as permission to believe racist things and convince themselves they're not "really" racist. If you wanted to talk about legal loopholes around criminals in immigrant communities (e.g. criminals getting deported instead of tried here, then not getting tried in their own country for the crime, then being free to reenter and strike again) you could talk about trying to close those loopholes (e.g. trying the criminals here, or making sure whatever government we hand them to tries them for the crime). I never once heard Trump suggest anything close to this. It was all "look at this horrible thing a Mexican did, we need a border wall to keep them all out." The circumstances don't actually matter that much – it doesn't matter if he was Mexican or some other nationality, it doesn't matter if he wasn't tried because he was an immigrant or if he just skipped town and the cops can't find him, it doesn't matter if he was actually illegal or not. It just matters that a Hispanic male committed some unspeakable crime against a white person. This is why we need to build a wall (and make them pay for it)! If you want to read a non-racist policy position into all that you can. But it'd be hard to imagine someone not walking away with the false impression that Mexican immigrants commit more crimes per capita than the general population. It'd be even harder not to get the impression that it's all Mexicans, not just the violent ones, that we're trying to keep out. When you supply direct quotes that aren't direct quotes, and offer paraphrases that miss the summary by a mile, I call you out on malattributions to Trump. If you're not redressing those mistakes, that's your choice. We can't proceed if you're basing your accusations in things he didn't say and repeatedly do so. Show nested quote +You're missing everything here. It's pretty sad. I want to say you have an open mind behind all these missed opportunities to see both sides, but I keep hearing evidence to the contrary in every post. The dialogue had fallen flat, so America picked the wrong man asking the right questions. The other option was essentially ChristianS's view--you don't understand the basics of what's going on, you look back and can't properly re-examine what made you missed the train, and people have started giving up convincing the race-narrative types of the errors of their ways. Was there any actual substance to this paragraph besides "I'm so smart, I understand everything, you're so blind you don't even know you're blind"? If you think I'm wrong about something, present evidence. If there's a possibility you think I'm missing, argue for it. Or if you can't be bothered, don't post. Honestly, you're getting more superior in tone than GH. You tried to capture all the possibilities and stopped short in spectacular fashion. It was a little demeaning, I'll admit. But my big takeaway from your attempted summation of the race issue is only indicative of your ignorance on the issue. It's partly informed by past attempts to explain the goals within the constitution without desiring to read the Federalist Papers describing them, as sold to the states to sign on and make this great nation. Here, you're missing the history of amnesty without border enforcement, inaction on sanctuary cities catch-and-release, concomitant punishment of States trying to enforce immigration law by the courts, RINO inaction/corruption on illegal immigration for cheap labor and dodging a divisive topic, Mexico's angle on remittances, drug trafficking, and I'm sure I'm missing some. If you had nailed two or three of these in this broad topic while trying to peg attitudes broadly, I wouldn't have seen the need. It happened that you want to box in comments + reaction without looking at the broad picture, which is absolutely not appropriate here. Simultaneously, I wanted to mention the reason why people are less and less inclined to argue the point because you never make headway in understanding. If you're referring to my original 1) through 4), my possibilities were basically: -Neither Trump nor his supporters are racist. -Trump is racist but his supporters aren't. -Trump isn't racist but his supporters are. -Trump is racist and so are his supporters. What possibility is it you're saying I missed? Is Trump in some quantum superposition of racist and not racist? Have his supporters discovered some new state of mind which is neither racist nor not racist? I'd buy the idea that people can't be cleanly divided into "racist" and "not racist," so it's less 4 possibilities and more a continuum, but I'm certain that's not what you're saying. So presumably once again, you've interpreted me to say something and then, faced with arguing straight up or leaning into the condescension, you've chosen the latter. But hey, I didn't know that when you wanted to assign me a reading list before I was allowed to talk on teamliquid.net that you'd take it so personally when I declined to do the assigned homework. Pardon me while I go find 85 essays and articles on racism that I'll require you to read before you're allowed to discuss race on the internet. I don't know how much I need to keep responding to the rest of your post, because you seem to have a version of me in your head already, and you two seem perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation without me, but let's just finish out this post. Uhh #1 presumed he was an idiot to say such things, when he knows his base is tired of politically correct language on the acceptable positions. #3 presumes his motivations for saying what you term "racially inflammatory" things is to please his base. "He's not racist but". Hilarious. He had a good gut knowledge of the political layout in this case. One immigration policy is morally acceptable, one immigration policy is racist and talking about it is racially inflammatory. He had to use speeches to show he rejected the racist term, rejected the perverted language, and he'd actually fight for the issue. He did that with bombast. "Racially inflammatory" is a politically loaded term, born out of the death of language. Consider if I had called Hillary's "racial kowtowing to political orthodoxy" and asked you if she believed it was necessary or was only doing it because her supporters wanted her to. Also, all your setups miss the purpose of "Mexico doesn't send its best ... some are very good people" speech. Without screening, you're letting the criminals in with the rest and we have documented evidence of deported re-offenders. The victims of such crimes should be heard and addressed not dismissed as too politically inconvenient. But now it's too racially inflammatory to address and show the audience you won't cave like nearly every politician before you. Behold the death of the language and its attendant political analysis. You do yourself an intellectual disservice to lump his speech into the racially-provocative basket and assume that's where the language should be. Show nested quote +Trump single handedly took the dialogue from discussing what type of amnesty when to when will border security be implemented and what kind. It's only in a corrupt Republican party that doesn't understand the base's views on immigration (and wants it to forget the Reagan amnesty sellout that never gave the promised accompanying border security) that made Trump necessary. That includes what flies as inflammatory now (you have a point behind several layers), and that includes why Trump gained over Romney in the hispanic vote. And how did he manage to change the discourse so? There were conservatives all along trying to say things like "We can't have amnesty until we deal with issues x y z," including whatever border security issues you think Trump did a good job drawing attention to. There were conservatives all along talking about sanctuary cities, and border walls, and even mass deportation. But somehow the discourse changed dramatically when you got a guy willing to say the Mexican government is sending over drug dealers and rapists. Somehow the discourse changed dramatically when you got a guy willing to say that literally all Muslims should be banned from entering the country. Is it possible that such language tapped into some deeper sentiment in the population – one that goes beyond pure policy proposals? You're noting that Trump brought about a dramatic change in discourse. I don't disagree. But part of how he got so much fire behind him was by leaving the door open to racists whenever he talked. Didn't explicitly endorse them (not usually, anyway), but left things open enough to interpretation that those people could look at him and say "yeah, that's our guy." I think that's evil, and must be opposed; you obviously disagree, but feel free to clarify on which point you disagree. It wouldn't be hard to show that the racists and white supremacists of the country clearly think he's their guy. It wouldn't be hard to go back through Trump's statements and show a lack of disavowal for racist positions directly adjacent to what we can generously assume are the non-racist positions he's pushing. It would be more work than I have patience for to go back to the pre-Trump era, and find conservatives who were more careful in their proclamations, but the sheer fact we don't remember them is pretty good evidence they weren't able to pull anywhere near the same support. Correlation =/= causation, I suppose, so you might argue that while Trump was very successful, and he didn't try very hard to disavow the racist positions, and other conservatives who did disavow the racist positions had nowhere near the same success, that's all purely coincidence and Trump was successful despite his incautious racial positions, not because of them. But would you really find that persuasive? Two big ones: Gang of Eight Immigration Bill, and Jeb Bush's frontrunner campaign "they come out of love" style amnesty statements. Rubio forever wears the label of selling out his conservative supporters' stance on immigration by trying to compromise through an amnesty bill with token enforcement (really, unenforceable provisions). Conservative Republicans remember that betrayal and saw just how strong he was coming out on immigration, which brought the duplicity in the limelight. The second aspect is how much money Jeb raised with such a pro-amnesty position on all the issues. He was declared the frontrunner, articles were written wondering if anybody could catch him. He had all the pro establishment campaign team on his side, all the advisors, all the stuff we hated about George W Bush here for all to see. Trump made immigration his stand out issue from the start and brought necessary contrast to everybody's sinking feeling seeing the Jeb Bush campaign and Marco's about-face. The only other Republican in that packed field that had standing on the matter was Cruz, maybe a little on Scott Walker. I didn't ask if there were any Republicans that were pretty pro-amnesty, but thanks for the examples anyway I guess. I asked why when Republicans made hardline immigration arguments, but didn't phrase them in such a way that you could confuse them for blatant xenophobia, did they not get the same support Trump did? Since Pat Buchanan conservatives have been taking these positions. Where were the Trump supporters then? If you're still missing why the language and forcefulness was necessary, this whole exercise is fruitless. You asked how he managed. He went over the top (Mexico pays for it). He was well-advised that other politicians had talked a big game but dropped it upon election. He staked out positions (no amorphous 'border security') and riled up crowds that showed people he was serious (or convinced enough of them). If you think he threw out illegal immigrant repeat offenders just to be inflammatory (out of racism) or to please his supporters with inflammatory (cater to his base), then you're dead wrong. Show nested quote +You're still missing the quote on what Trump said, so I'll be waiting for a real characterization and not a third bad attempt (not Mexican government, not that it was all he singled out the country was sending). Dunno why it's my job to Google for you, but here you go: Show nested quote +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. Show nested quote +But I can’t apologize for the truth. I said tremendous crime is coming across. Everybody knows that’s true. And it’s happening all the time. Show nested quote +The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc. Now reading those, which of these positions sounds closer to what Trump is saying: 1) Large numbers of illegal immigrants are coming across the border, and while most of them are just peaceful people looking for a better life, a small percentage (smaller than the percentage in the American population generally) are violent criminals. And for that small percentage, our systems aren't very good at ensuring justice – either because we don't have good oversight of these communities so it's hard to track the offenders down, or because these criminals often get deported rather than tried for their crimes, leaving them free to reenter the country and strike again. 2) A bunch of Mexican drug dealers and rapists are coming across the border, the Mexican government is sending them, there's an epidemic of crimes being committed by Mexican criminals against good Americans. So I want to keep all the Mexicans out. Again with putting your construals front and center. It instead shows he recognizes that you cannot screen illegal immigrants for people known to be rapists, drug dealers, and the rest. They're already operating outside of America's laws. There's good people and there's violent offenders. You would prefer that he points out the percentage of offenders is small to avoid this stupid racist tag. That's not how politics works. Noncitizens and criminal lawbreakers that go on to commit a violent offense are in addition to our own population. We don't make the decision to import mostly illiterate people from impoverished states based on their violent crime rates compared to ours. That's not the goal. Every deported rapist that re-enters to rape again is another argument for a border wall along most of the length of our border. It's not that we get so many nonviolent economic migrants among them that everything's fine on the balance. There's no policing and no criminal justice system/immigration system if deportation orders don't mean they stay deported and can't enter again. His supporters (I didn't support him in the primaries) and myself knew what he was saying. The Mexican government profits by sending their poorest seeking opportunities to the US. As in, they have very little reason to police the border from their end. They'll get remittances and can levy taxes on the remittances and/or use them to fund the economy and create economic growth in their own country. It should be pretty obvious that Mexico has a very great interest in keeping the border porous. And, same as before, "in many cases" refers to the fact that tens of thousands of murders are attributed to illegal immigrants, with far more drug offenses (I think 2014 that population represented 75% of the convictions for drug crimes, US Sentencing Commission). But again, there's such a flood of people that you can get a low percentage from that. It still doesn't change the fact that America should not bear the burden of the costs of violence because more murders/rapes that comprise a smaller percentage of the flood of illegal immigrants is still more murders/rapes from people that shouldn't be in this country. That is why Trump supporters want a strong border so legal immigrants that violently offend can be deported and stay deported. Show nested quote +I don't see much progress until you can criticize Trump on what he said, not on what you thought you heard. I say this in contrast to future times I'd join you in saying Trump was wrong to say this. You're missing an "until" in the Muslim quote, and I don't know what country you live in to think Trump was talking about pure policy proposals. I'd love to see this campaign where he talked pure policy proposals ... they were very few and far between e.g. tax plan. Do you really think it makes it much better that he only temporarily wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country? Not, by the way, "temporarily" in that he had a specific end date in mind, just "temporarily" in that hypothetically we might start letting some of them in again at some point. I don't think he was talking pure policy proposals either, but I'm curious what you thought he was talking about? I saw a lot of commentary on how Mexicans and Muslims are ruining our country and we need to preserve America for "real" Americans, but presumably you either didn't see those things or somehow don't think those things are incredibly creepy. Yes. That's the plain meaning of "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on." States that don't track or can't track their radical islamic terrorists represent a security risk. We can argue about what better vetting looks like and what America's role is in tracking threats overseas in failed states or state sponsors of terrorism, but please be honest about what the starting point is. Show nested quote +He got so much fire behind him because Republicans believed he would get serious about the immigration problems in the United States. I'm not with you that he tapped into racist sentiment. I'd put that so low on the percent affected that we'd have to start talking about Hillary's courting of Communist party sentiment and the conversation would collapse. It's not a force and and wasn't a force during the campaign. That conversation might actually be pretty interesting once we got to the point that "Communist party" would be more directly analogous to "KKK/neo-Nazis" in that parallel. I don't think the KKK and neo-Nazis were the primary racial undercurrent he tapped into; I think it was regular people who are probably pretty nice people if you ran into them in public and got to talking, but secretly harbor some racist attitudes they might not even fully recognize themselves. To try and then carry the analogy back in the other direction, Hillary might not have particularly dogwhistled at card-carrying Communists, but she might have appealed to people who didn't identify as Communist but did have a few leanings that are at least a little Communist, even if they don't recognize them as such. (Or if she didn't make such appeals, at least Bernie might have.) And at any rate, I bet you (or at least most conservatives) would say exactly that about much of the left: that they subtly or not-so-subtly appeal to Communist or Socialist attitudes that a lot of people might have without realizing they're Communist or Socialist. I give the example to say we gain nothing focusing in on tiny groups in the US like they were some big presence that Trump is stoking. You don't go on about "leaving the door open to racists" when that group lacks a large presence. It would be as stupid as saying Hillary left the door open to Communists (leader of the party encouraged his members to vote Clinton) by not disavowing them. You give them false prominence by calling attention to them, and you surrender language meant to address the bigger section of your supporters by stupidly wondering if it'll embolden flat earthers or antivaxxers or commies or antifa or criminal vegans activists. That's why it is incredibly stupid when you say "part of how he got so much fire behind him was by leaving the door open to racists whenever he talked." Wrong. That group is too negligible to be included in a part. I would sooner accuse you of being a secret communist/at least open to communist ideology for not seeing how commies were a part of why Clinton managed a popular vote win. But I think you recognized my original point, so I'll leave it at that. Show nested quote +It results from slander by the left, the media, and the DNC that this country's got a huge racist population and wants a racist president to support their views. It's that the opponents estimate America to be this evil racist place that gives rise to stupid people saying that he didn't disavow the racist positions hard enough. To borrow a bit of your condescension, here your ignorance on racism is really showing. Even in times when the country or world were (as conservatives would widely acknowledge) in the throes of blatantly racist cultures, it wasn't really that the majority of the population were Klansmen. Most people probably harbored a few racist prejudices, turned a bit of a blind eye to oppression against other races, and just generally got uncomfortable with reforms that upset the status quo. It doesn't mean (at least to my view) that they were evil. He barely disavowed racist positions at all! He couldn't even go so far as to apologize for previous racist actions. The response about his housing discrimination in the 70's wasn't "I was wrong to do that, I've since realized just how wrong it was, nobody should do that." It was "eh, it was the 70's, everybody was doing it." There's not even an acknowledgement that it shouldn't happen! Show nested quote +That's one sticking point that will never change: the great danger was that Trump would talk a big game on immigration and sell out his voters like almost every other Republican candidate in the last forty years. It wasn't a matter of being cautious about inflammatory speech, because the speech policing has already gone so far overboard that he would've reaped that characterization regardless (see: Romney, McCain, George W Bush, George H W Bush). It's a political play and right up Trump's alley and he hit it out of the park.
I really wish the country's dialogue allowed such nuanced talking positions because I would never consider Trump a necessary evil in that case. We've lost it and I doubt we can recover it. Sorry. I'd be curious at some point to hear you reiterate a top 5 of causes you thought were so important that it warranted electing a mendacious authoritarian racist (my characterization, not yours, I know). Are there really so many crimes committed by illegal immigrants every year that you think it's worth throwing the dignity of the Republican Party and the Presidency (if not the entire United States) for a chance at achieving some reduction? Not today, though – this quote chain has gotten long enough, and I'm a little tired of being talked down to. If you feel like having a somewhat less condescending conversation in the future perhaps we can revisit it. It's worth talking about illegal immigration even if the percentage of violent offenders is low relative to the size of the incoming population. A country without borders and without enforced border laws is hardly a country at all. The citizens should have a voice to determine the rate at which noncitizens enter to work legally. Workers in America are not simply who felt like coming in any given year. We'll obviously need guest worker programs for seasonal farm labor and a simplified legal entry process to help low-skilled laborers.
This quote chain is getting long enough that my browser is lagging trying to preview it, so I don't know that a point-by-point response is practical anymore. I won't lie, I'm a lot less inclined to do the work for the pedantic attitude you're taking with the whole thing. But even without that, I'm not sure it would be very productive discussion anyway. Particularly when much of our disagreement seems to stem from underlying questions, and a lot of the specifics we're debating tend to reach an impasse because of differences on those underlying questions.
Let me try to boil down my hypothesis as much as possible – maybe I overstated it somewhat, or got out in the weeds on irrelevant aspects of it, but it comes down to this. Racial prejudice is a natural human tendency. Evidence for this is abundant. But what exactly that looks like is not as easy to define. Dressing up in bedsheets and getting swastika tattoos are not natural human tendencies, so if you're picturing the KKK and neo-Nazis when I talk about appeals to racism, you're not getting it. While well-defined ideologies like that are certainly racist, the vast majority of racism is much less intentional than that – it mostly lives in the ignorant and ill-informed parts of regular people's brains, influencing their beliefs and decisions in ways they don't even realize (If we have to have another "what is racism" conversation, we can, but I'll try to avoid relying too much on a specific definition in hopes we can skip that).
I'll dig back into one specific from the quote chain because I think it's relevant to this central dispute – rates of violence in immigrant versus native populations. The underlying question that I think it's circling around is this: are we more or less safe because these immigrant populations are living in the US? Stated another way, would we be safer if we kept illegal immigrants from coming in?
The metric you seem to want to use to answer this question is the absolute number of crimes committed per year. I have to imagine you either haven't thought very hard about that, or I'm misunderstanding you in saying you want to use that metric, because that metric is frankly idiotic for answering this question. Example to easily demonstrate this: El Salvador had ~6500 homicides in 2015. The United States had ~16,000. Which do you think is a safer place to live?
Every other member of society, illegal immigrant or no, has some statistical chance of committing a murder someday, so if you went by absolute number of crimes committed, you'd come to the conclusion that every new person makes us less safe. But every new person also has a chance of being the victim of one of those ~16,000 murders each year, meaning you're less likely to be killed. Per capita murder rates of populations are the obvious way to answer the question – if a high-murder-rate population enters the country they'll bring the average up, and if a low-murder-rate population enters, they'll bring it down somewhat. If a certain population is especially non-murderous, they'll make you safer by immigrating.
+ Show Spoiler [Statistical Aside] +Per capita rates aren't a perfect answer, because they assume every member of the population is perfectly interchangeable and equally likely to be the victim of a murder. If a bunch of illegal immigrants entered the country and swore a pact to each other that they would only murder white people, then even if their murder rate was quite low, you'd be less safe. In actuality, the math probably cuts the other way – most populations are more likely to murder amongst themselves than to murder outside their communities, so the illegal immigrants are probably far more likely to murder other illegal immigrants than to murder non-immigrant Americans. That is to say, looking at their per-capita murder rate would probably overestimate, not underestimate, the danger they pose to you and me.
Donald Trump sold the narrative in 2016 that we need to build a border wall and execute mass deportations in order to keep ourselves safe. At present I have seen zero evidence that non-immigrant Americans would be any safer if such a policy were enacted. That isn't to say there aren't legitimate arguments to have strong border enforcement. I would much rather have an iron-tight border and a fair, well-functioning immigration system that lets people in as long as they have something to offer to the United States. But that isn't now, and has never been what was on the table. When a politician makes broad-brush portrayals of Mexican immigrants as bringing drugs and crime into our country, and tries to sell me the idea that our women and children are constantly under threat from the foreign menace, I know enough to recognize the "safety" argument is bullshit. But aforementioned natural human tendencies give that argument a certain primal persuasiveness to average people. An alien threat is created in their minds from a group of people about which they know very little, and what little they do "know" is from stereotypes about drug dealers and gang members and rapists. The imagined threat isn't even to them, so much as it is to their wife, or their daughter, making them even more primally inclined to want to respond to this threat.
If you don't see that response in Trump supporters all I can tell you is I'm not the blind one. If I asked Trump supporters whether an illegal immigrant or a native-born American is more likely to commit murder, I'd be absolutely stunned if a sizable majority didn't answer the former. If I asked them how many murders they think happen every year by illegal immigrants, I'm virtually certain there'd be 4 or 5 digits in the number (Trump said "thousands" at one point, not specifying the number as annual, making it not technically a lie but certainly implying one). If I thought my wife or daughter was at high risk of being raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant, I'd want them all deported too. Every bit of Trump's rhetoric on the issue has been designed to feed those fears in people, with zero effort to clarify or clear up racial misconceptions and prejudices that should absolutely be expected to pop up with rhetoric like he's used.
The rest – fury at establishment conservatives for breaking their promises on immigration, frustration that the immigration system as a whole is so fucked, etc. – is beside the point I was making. Those are probably also factors in Trump's rise, maybe even more prominent ones. I only said race was a significant factor, not the only one.
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