America's soft fascism disguised by code words is now out in the open.
Shortly before he died, Reagan’s strategist Lee Atwater explained the game plan of the Southern Strategy in a matter-of-fact clinical policy. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n***r’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater emphasized. “So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” But Donald Trump doesn’t do abstract and that is what has sent the GOP into a tizzy.
Nixon and Reagan mastered this by adapting to the new racial terrain carved out by the Civil Rights Movement. As Nixon aide John Ehrlichman explained to Harper’sDan Baum in 1994, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against black[s], but by getting the public to associate . . . blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing” the drug “we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
But that lie was infinitely effective in driving policy. In 2008, the NAACP reported that “five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.” Consequently, blacks comprising just 13 percent of the U.S. population made up “59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.” Packaged and sold as keeping neighborhoods and families safe, the Nixon administration’s well-targeted lie, which was expanded upon by Ronald Reagan, and taken up by Democrats such as Bill Clinton to prove that they could be “tough on crime, too,” has worked masterfully. Because many states disfranchise those with felony convictions, the Sentencing Project reports that 2.2 million African Americans or 7.7 percent of black adults have been legally stripped of their voting rights; as compared with 1.8 percent of the non-African American population.…
And that’s the problem. What the GOP is really mad about is that Donald Trump has made visible what many have tried so hard to hide.AlterNet
Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage
Carol Anderson
See also
Carol Anderson
See also
Back when Dick Cheney was being hailed for calling out Donald Trump’s racism, I notedone aspect of that radio interview that largely escaped notice: his embrace of the myth that the American continent was empty when his Puritan ancestors got here.Should be "the myth of (white) American exceptionalism."
Cheney didn’t stop there. He then emphasized that one of his ancestors arrived as a religious refugee, a Puritan. “A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.” Cheney suggested, then, that the place was empty when William Cheney arrived in the 17th century. “There wasn’t anybody here, then, when they came.”
Tom,
ReplyDeleteDo you just scan the net and cheery pick all the anti Trump invective to meet your confirmation bias?
...and by the way, if race matters (does it?) it also matters from the white point of view too.
This post is chiefly an indictment of the GOP playbook that the establishment has tried to avoid being convicted of by using code words and dog whistles. Trump has basically said, forget being politically correct, just say it in plain English.
ReplyDeleteAnd another thing. Whites are not the reason blacks experience the social pathologies rampant in their communities. It's far more complex than that narrative.
ReplyDeleteI am not claiming that Trump is either racist or bigoted. I don't know. But his strategy depends on locking in the GOT and a significant portion of which is. 89% of Republicans were white in 2012.
ReplyDeleteIn my view, Trump is a master persuader who likely don't believe anything that doesn't play in his favor. He would be comfortable running as either a Democrat or a Republican. He saw a better chance with the GOP. He perfectly understands the dominant mindset of the base and has parlayed it to secure enough delegates to win the nomination on there first ballot, which is had to do to be sure of winning. (But the Establishment has not given up yet, either.)
Now, we'll see how good he is at winning the presidency if he is in fact the nominee instead of the presumptive nominee.
I feel confident in predictin that his campaign is not going to be about actually issues but appeals to emotion and destroying the opponent. Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign honcho and Roger Stone, erstwhile campaign honcho until he became too toxic, were partners of Lee Atwater. This will be the dirties campaign in anyone's memory.
Trump plays to win and is will to do what it takes. If that means appealing to the dumbfuckistan vote, so be it.
And another thing. Whites are not the reason blacks experience the social pathologies rampant in their communities. It's far more complex than that narrative.
ReplyDeleteI would argue with that. Certainly the situation is complex and a solution elusive, but one of the reasons is systematic discrimination, a lot of it based on white exceptionalism. Not just those of African descent but also all non-Europeans. The US is improving though. When I was young, it also included southern Europeans. And before that, "no Irish need apply."
Moreover, where I live there is overwhelming evidence of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural integration in an area that twenty years ago was almost exclusively white, as Iowa still mostly is. There is a huge racist backlash inIowa against Latinos, who normally do the dirty work, like at meat packing plants. But Iowa City is a university town, so it is very liberal in comparison to the rest of the state, especially western Iowa. Think Steve King.
Here's another one.
ReplyDelete'Anti-Racism Educator Explains How Trump Appeals To Whites By 'Othering Other People
Tom,
ReplyDeleteI simply don't believe in collective guilt. "Whites" being the primary reason for the black socio-economic condition is simplistic nonsense. Hell, my dad grew up in North Dakota in the 40's with no electricity or indoor plumbing and yet was a caring and thoughtful citizen throughout his life. The whole premise of so called white exceptionalism is divisive and counterproductive to fixing what clearly ails the black inner city populace around the US.
And I care about the plight of blacks as much as any one, you included. I went to an all black school in kindergarten and first grade in Huntington, West Virginia. My mother's maiden of honor in her second marriage was her fellow BLACK social worker in Huntington.
I don't have a racist bone in my body. And I'll guarantee you I have more black friends as a 55 yr old white male myself than any white person at this website has--by a long shot. Yet the whole white/black divide, engineered by hustlers of both races is the very mindset that drives a permanent wedge between the races. One thing I will say though is that well intentioned white inspired social engineering at black expense has been an abject failure, and that failure is far more induced by liberal side of the ideological spectrum than the conservative.
...oh, and Trump is not a racist anymore than I am.
Jesus, Tom, Tim Wise? That's cherry picking. Trump's whole platform is far more advantageous to blacks and other LEGAL minorities than anything both political parties have offered up the past two decades.
ReplyDeleteMy experience is starkly different, often in shocking ways that I would not have expected or even anticipated, even in "liberal" areas.
ReplyDeleteI am also aware that many of the US elite look in many whites as "white trash" or "trailer trash" even though they don't live in trailers.
There is a lot of bias embedded in class and status. That bias extends far beyond ethnicity, too.
There use to be a saying in the Northeast about Boston Back Bay blue bloods, "The Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God."
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge provides a good example:
Historian George E. Mowry argues that:
"Henry Cabot Lodge was one of the best informed statesmen of his time, he was an excellent parliamentarian, and he brought to bear on foreign questions a mind that was at once razor sharp and devoid of much of the moral cant that was so typical of the age....[Yet] Lodge never made the contributions he should have made, largely because of Lodge the person. He was opportunistic, selfish, jealous, condescending, supercilious, and could never resist calling his opponent's spade a dirty shovel. Small wonder that except for Roosevelt and Root, most of his colleagues of both parties disliked him, and many distrusted him."
Tom,
ReplyDeleteI don't expect you to agree with me. We obviously have different experiences that inform our views on the subject. That's OK. I can respect that.
But let's be honest. It's virtually impossible to have an honest discussion on race. The best I've seen is over at UNZ.com. Obama and others of his liberal ilk, of course, wants a banal, scripted discussion, informed by ideology and restricted by PC writ large. But bottom line to my mind is that if race hustlers set the rules of engagement, we'll never find common ground among the races. Might as well find our balkanized enclaves and hope for detente.
...and to keep us sort of on topic, Trump is popular in large part because he isn't politically PC, which has infected virtually all aspects of American dialogue. The zeitgeist is getting its comeuppance and good. Race is just one part of that limiting equation.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that it is only race, but otherness, that afflicts US identity-based interest politics. This is one of the weaknesses of democracy, as Libertarians correctly point out. The majority can and often does suppress the minority, as it minorities, based on identity and otherness.
ReplyDeleteThe foundational reason is the prevailing level of collective consciousness, which is insufficiently universal to handle democracy well. The institutional remedy is legal through establishment of rights and responsibilities that protect minorities from discrimination.
But much more than that is need for a well-functioning and integrated society. This requires a proactive approach that has been lacking, and playing to identity politics is the wrong direction.
What I am particularly concerned about in this election cycle is that appeal is being made at least implicitly to the lowest level of collective consciousness and that is likely to have dire social repercussions as an unintended consequence of a campaign based chiefly on persuasion.
BTW, collective consciousness is different from mindset, which is chiefly ideological and cognitive. Collective consciousness includes cognition, affect, and volition, as well as that which is consciously aware and subconscious or subliminal.
ReplyDeleteThis is why persuasion is more effective than reasoning. The GOP has understood this for a long time. The Democrats, not so much.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteCollective consciousness works with the parochial. Doesn't work so well with the multi-cultural melting pot. That simply could be an immutable condition. Historically speaking it seems to be the majority report and history is a better teacher than wishful thinking..
Malmo, I didn’t read the bit Tom clipped as necessarily a hit piece. I thought she was going after an entrenched GOP attitude since the Reagan days. The historical bits were fascinating.
ReplyDeleteMany Latinos may be registering--and they are far more civic-minded as a group than white people are--but whites are still a majority. I think what this might portend is a record turnout this year.
Since my judgment about Obama was off by a mile in 2008, I am far more circumspect about my supposed insights than I once was. That said, I think he’s playing Pied Piper.
I mean, the goal is Get The Job. what you do once you get there is another matter.
ReplyDeleteI never heard racist remarks come out his mouth when I lived in Manhattan; nor did I hear about it from people who knew him. He hires the United Nations to work on his projects.
MRW,
ReplyDeleteHere's what she wrote at the beginning of her article:
"The racism fueling Trump’s campaign and his followers, however, is so overt, that it is undoing decades of hard covert work by the GOP."
That sounds to me like the moorings of a hit piece, no?
That sounds to me like the moorings of a hit piece, no?
ReplyDeleteI don't think so. The piece is about explaining why the GOP establishment is so livid at Trump. I thinks she makes a good case for this being a reason.
Something similar can be said about Pat Buchanan, who probably most resembles Trump as a campaigner regarding political correctness. The difference is that Buchanan apparently believes the stuff he says, whereas that is not necessarily the case with Trump and in many cases, I think it is playing (pandering) to the base.
I think I have a pretty good idea of how Buchanan would have governed had he ben elected, but I don't have the same sense with Trump. He is a wild card, as Obama was, but in a different way.
What I am convinced of is that the GOP has been playing with fire since the advent of civil rights, and Trump is fanning that fire and adding fuel to it.
Here is a post at Jack Balkin's blog by Gerard N. Magliocca
ReplyDeleteArchie Bunker is Alive and Welll
I don't think that posts like this are simply anti-Trump by Trump haters.
@Malmo,
ReplyDeleteCorrect. But I wrote Malmo, I didn’t read the bit Tom clipped as necessarily a hit piece.
Mark Dankof wrote:
ReplyDeleteDankof: Joseph Sobran noted in 1996 that Bill Kristol used his college roommate at Harvard, Alan Keyes, to cost Pat Buchanan the 1996 GOP Iowa Caucus by diverting votes from Buchanan to Keyes, which insured the victory of Bob Dole.
Sobran was clear that this was designed by Kristol to insure that Buchanan’s anti-Zionist, anti-NAFTA views gained no further momentum in the GOP presidential primaries after Buchanan’s initial victories in Louisiana, Alaska, and New Hampshire.
Superb post, Tom, and very revealing even if Trump might not be a racist. I see Trump as an hedonistic illiberal, what I mean by that is that he doesn't have a lot of traditional conservative values, but when it comes to business he's ruthlessly right wing. Rather like a porn or drug baron may have a lax morality, but is not a liberal because they couldn't care less about the environment, workers rights, the Green movement, global warming, animal rights, better wages and conditions for ordinary people.
ReplyDeleteMany conservatives, especially religious ones, conflate the two together, and think that people with a lax morality are liberals. Some are, but most are not. Most have no political views, and are certainly not political liberals.
Chris Hedges comes to mind, who is very liberal, but with a very high morality, he's even a vegan, like me.
It brings to mind an article I intend to write about genes. It turns out that genes don't account for much of our personalities. The geneticists have gone quite, have you noticed. In the great genome project they thought they were going to find genes for personality traits, like intelligence, shyness, criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc, but they found none, or even a collection of genes that can lead to personalty traits. Zero, zilch.
ReplyDeleteThe lefties seem ignorant of system interfaces (nationalism) and then they conflate nationalism with racism or cry "xenophobia!" when competent people advocate for regulating system interfaces (legal immigration)...
ReplyDelete"he's even a vegan, like me"
ReplyDeleteCain was the first vegan of mankind (produced feedstocks)....
His brother Abel was a meat-eater (produced livestocks)....
The vegan Cain eventually became the first man-killer (killed his little brother Abel the meat-eater) ...
Cain was the first vegan of mankind (produced feedstocks)....
ReplyDeleteOr so the myth goes. Since the Bible supposedly only goes back 6,000 years, the first of anything is suspect.
Economic historian Michael Hudson is part of a group of scholar/experts who convene at Harvard to study ancient history. They published the fifth book in their series Labor in the Ancient World last year. It goes back to 10,000 BC. He said that there have “been so many revolutions in the last 10 years” in archeology, anthropology, Assyriology, and Egyptology that it took the group 10 years to come out with the current book. It’s about building public works. They found the actual invoices. Biggest expenditure was for beer and meat.
Interesting interview with Hudson here: http://www.earthsharing.org.au/2015/04/michael-hudson-labor-in-the-ancient-world/
Translation here, with audio as well:
http://michael-hudson.com/2015/04/sovereignty-in-the-ancient-near-east/
BTW, Re: debt cancellation:
"The third volume was on Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, about how debt cancellations restored the land to its citizen-cultivators to provide a means of self-support for the free citizenry." And, "However, in Babylonia we have more or less regular debt cancellations whenever a new ruler would take the throne."
Interesting commwnt by Hudson:
"So what we found as a by-product of the labour volume is that the origins of land rights were defined by the tax payments – the corvee labor obligation.
To get the right to a given land of a given size, you had to promise on such-and-such dates to provide this much labour for the corvee project. It’s a French word, because a corvee tax in the form of labour instead of money payments lasted all the way down through the 18th Century in France. It was typical in mediaeval Europe before you had a money economy. Everybody who had their own subsistence land or their own land holdings of one form or another, or their grazing lands, would have to supply X number of labourers to the big building project."
In 2010, former president Bill Clinton, who used to be known as America's first Black president, told Senator Ted Kennedy... "A few years ago, this guy (President Obama) would have been getting us coffee,"
ReplyDeleteBill Clinton is a vegan, but then Hitler was a vegetarian.
Delete"Chris Hedges comes to mind, who is very liberal, but with a very high morality, he's even a vegan, like me."
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify my thinking, does being a vegan somehow equate with having "a very high morality"?
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteOf course not, but its still an ethical choice.
Delete@The Rombach Report,
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify my thinking, does being a vegan somehow equate with having "a very high morality"?
No, but their shit doesn’t stink.
@The Rombach Report,
ReplyDeleteIt must have been reported in 2010, because kennedy died in 2009.
"It must have been reported in 2010, because kennedy died in 2009."
ReplyDeleteMRW - Apologies. My bad. It was during the 2008 presidential campaign that Clinton made that remark to Kennedy. It came out in a book published in 2010.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/bill-clinton-told-ted-kennedy-obama-coffee-years-game-change-article-1.197492
Rombach, no biggie.
ReplyDeleteMost on theft are anti-war and view war as the business of states historically. The EU is designed to minimize the power of the nation state for this reason. Europe has been the scene of wars between state for millennia. There is a lot of truth the the notion that the modern nation state is prone to war because the organizational model is hierarchical and derived from the military.
ReplyDeleteLeft anarchists are opposed to the state as a matter of limiting freedom owing to hierarchical structure that enables to--down control.
Trump's purported trade policy is enough to make the Republican establishment livid.
ReplyDeleteSince the Bible supposedly only goes back 6,000 years, ... mrw
ReplyDeleteIt goes back to the Big Bang - about 14 billion years ago.
I have to groan when purportedly Christian ministers attack the Big Bang since it's a HUGE setback for non-theists.
Btw, SETI was a HUGE setback too so I guess that's why its funding was cancelled - the silence was too embarrassing.
I think it's great that there are so many exoplanets and yet no aliens have ever been detected - AWKWARD!
God should have put a chapter in the bible with an introduction to quantum physics, and space, time, and relativity. That would have fucked up us atheist liberals.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletewith an introduction to quantum physics, and space, time, and relativity. Kaivey
ReplyDelete"In the beginning ..." Genesis 1:1
Until the 1950's, scientists generally believed the Universe had no beginning nor end (Steady State theory). The Bible teaches both.
But in any case, it's God who's running the test; it's not so much what we think of Him but what He thinks of us.
Kindness and truth are what He desires in people. Stick to those and you should survive.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteHere's a very good piece from VDH at Trump hating National Review on Trump and the electorate that could push him to victory. If Trump plays his cards right Hillary will be fortunate to win even one state in November.
It deserves a posting here as much as the overwhelming anti Trump pieces I'm seeing of late.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436015/trump-anti-establishment-vote
"It deserves a posting here as much as the overwhelming anti Trump pieces I'm seeing of late."
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because of "fairness"? I thought fairness was too PC
Any piece which suggests Hillary won't win one state under any conditions is ridiculous. She may lose but a 50-0 wipeout? Aint gonna happen.
Tom has no reason to balance out his anti Trump pieces, there are plenty of places you can go to find the "balance" you seek.
FD, I do not fear a Trump presidency. I dont prefer it but I think it would be much worse for the GOP than anyone else. Anything which hurts the GOP is good for the country. They are a bunch of sadistic, short sighted, closed minded dinosaurs.