Bigot.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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564 Responses

  1. Road Scholar says:

    Very well said, Will. The thing about Trump’s tweets that’s almost refreshing in a way is the manner in which he lets his id out to play on the regular. It’s not a matter of conjecture based on policy proposals, actions, or inactions that we can argue about either way; he just comes right out and says it sometimes in a very clear and unambiguous fashion.Report

  2. Mike Dwyer says:

    I actually find the discussion of Trump’s racism the least interesting because it’s just about him and I just don’t find those kind of conversations all that productive.

    What was weird about the tweets was that it was so obvious what he was trying to do i.e. increase the rift between Pelosi and the Progressive Four, but he went on the ‘go back to your countries’ thing and here we are. It’s actually kind of illustrative watching him use social media because one can imagine how, if he had the same nefarious intent but employed someone to help him write these, it could be really effective beyond his core supporters. It really is an amazing bully pulpit.

    From a purely partisan standpoint I’m also bummed he got involved because it’s been entertaining and ultimately necessary for the Left to have their little identity politics squabbles as of late. It works better playing out without outside interference.Report

    • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

      They’re often not the most interesting thing to talk about, but at some point it’s ignoring the elephant in the room. Context that is often actually important for any ancillary discussion. When it comes to his immigration policy, for example, excluding the intent of the architects of the policy makes the discussion in herently incomplete.

      Now, we can discuss immigration policy – what is ideal, what is politically possible, and so on – without making it all about Trump. But Trump is an important part of Trump’s policy, and this is an important aspect of Trump. Trump chooses this to be in evidence when he says things like this.Report

      • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

        We’ve had the discussion in this site many, many times about discussing policy vs. motivations/intent. I’ve been told that, for example, we don’t discuss the intent/motivations of an author when reviewing their post…we talk about the post itself. It’s probably a smart approach, even if sometimes frustrating.

        I tend to look at commenting here (and previously when I was a writer) as pretending that we have a direct impact on policy makers. Otherwise, it feels like shouting into the wind. So let’s say we can do that. We can actually influence policy makers and we all agree Trump is somewhere on Silver Wolf’s racism spectrum…now what? I personally don’t need to know what his motivations are in order to evaluate his policies. I cannot imagine there is a single policy someone could propose that i would support, but after finding out they actually had racist motivations, change my mind.

        As I pointed out though, there are several ancillary conversations related to the tweets that are extremely interesting.Report

        • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

          There is a pretty significant difference between participants of this site and office-holders. Participants here are evaluating (politicians, policies, whatever) and we can afford a great deal more charity. As an office-holder (the highest, even) we can’t afford that with Trump. He and the things he do are what we are evaluating. Revealed intention are a part of that.Report

          • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

            I would actually contend the opposite. A politician has to grant more charity to the opposition or nothing ever gets done. We live in a country of over 300 million. We can find someone who will be harmed by any policy proposal. If I always identify that harm and assume it was intentional, how could I ever vote Yes for anything?Report

            • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

              Some charity is good, but lack of charity is also important. We could use a lot less charity when it comes to congress granting power to the Executive Branch, for example.

              As a general matter, just because you’re skeptical of someone’s motivations doesn’t mean you never go along. If Trump came forward with a single payer plan, that would be worth any risk associated with it for supporters of single payer. On the other hand, if it involved something that would give him more power that he could use against groups he has already expressed disdain for… you have to keep in mind the liabilities, to say the least.

              Think about it in terms of gun registries. Lack of charity drives the opposition. And the more politicians talk about banning guns as a desire, the more justified that opposition is to people who favor private gun ownership.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

                But if Trump’s single payer proposal gave him more power, and I saw that as problematic, would it be about his motivations or simply a preference for a less powerful executive branch?

                You do make a good point though about the executive branch and Congress ceding power. The term ‘bully pulpit’ was coined by Teddy Roosevelt, who remains my favorite president, but believed very strongly that the president should drive the moral direction of the country. That does speak to motivations. So perhaps Congress taking back some of that responsibility would take out some of the moral aspects, dispersing them among the hundreds of people who make up the Legislative branch.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                It is giving him power, and that’s an argument against it. However that argument is superceded by the potential good it could do (if you support single payer), and that Trump won’t be president forever.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

                It would be an interesting exercise to ask a liberal, would you give Trump a guaranteed second term and more power if you could get single-payer? Faust would be enjoy that.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Giving Trump an entire second term would significantly alter the cost/benefit analysis compared to simply giving him more power for the remainder of his existing term (and a second, if so elected).Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

                You’re welcome to tweak the question to a single term with a lot more power (although this late in his term the question loses a bit of it’s punch). We could compromise and say that Trump has vowed to resign after two more years.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                No, I wouldn’t give him an additional term or more power for single payer. That’s a fools trade under any circumstances. Economics will force us to single payer at some point if nothing else.Report

      • Pat in reply to Will Truman says:

        @mike:

        “I cannot imagine there is a single policy someone could propose that i would support, but after finding out they actually had racist motivations, change my mind.”

        What about racial gerrymandering? If we suppose that parties will occasionally put a thumb on the scale to benefit their party, and that we’ll allow some tolerance level of this* provided it’s not outside the bounds of what we consider okay**, if someone proposes a map that produces some result that favors a party the default would be to accept it on the merits of those two propositions.

        If you find out that the party in question explicitly designed it as a racial gerrymander, would that modify your acceptance, supposing you accept * and **.Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to Pat says:

          Personally, I am okay with gerrymandering in any form, but if I opposed it I am also positive it would not be on a sliding scale.

          We’re talking about motivations here. If you are okay with a little gerrymandering but not the racist stuff, would you assess the latter based on what was in someone’s heart or what you saw on paper i.e. someone just drew a line through a ghetto? Because if you can see it on paper then motivations are irrelevant. Just evaluate the policy based on facts, not telling yourself that you can see into someone’s heart.Report

  3. JS says:

    “I actually find the discussion of Trump’s racism the least interesting because it’s just about him and I just don’t find those kind of conversations all that productive.”

    “Okay, maybe it’s racist but let’s change the subject to something completely unrelated” is one the OP missed, but is a standard response to overt racism.

    I’m not talking solely about someone “protecting the team”, but as a response to a deeply uncomfortable subject.

    Of course, avoiding the topic is something you can do when it’s your 80 year old uncle at Sunday dinner. It’s less effective against the President of the United States.

    Still, I suppose it’s progress from increasingly strained versions of “He’s not racist, that’s just liberal nonsense’ to ‘Well, I find talk of racism boring, let’s talk about this instead’. It’s slow moving past denial!Report

    • Mike Dwyer in reply to JS says:

      We avoid the racism discussion because it’s basically armchair psychology and entirely immune to policy. Just a few days before, AOC was accusing Pelosi of racism herself. I’m just not sure what utility there is in tut-tutting over the racism of old people. Can you create a policy that somehow prevents them from being racist? No. But you could create policies around how public officials use social media…right?Report

      • Philip H in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

        Everyone below the President has policies for how we use social media. And what he does would get all of us escorted out of the building pronto.

        But that’s not the point. He is a racist – he supports and promulgates racist policies, and he expects those working for him to carry them out, no matter what other policies or laws they violate because he’s in charge. That’s not how any of this has worked up til now, nor what the oft ballyhooed Framers of the Constitution had in mind.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

        Can you create a policy that somehow prevents them from being racist?

        If it were just “old people” it would be one thing, but when it’s old people who are in positions of power (as either Speaker of the House or President) then it rapidly does become a matter of policy, and political actors are able to act, and should be willing to do so if necessary.

        That includes voting against the people in question where relevant.Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

          Let’s say that one of her Democratic congresspeople regularly dropped N bombs in meetings and was discovered to be KKK-sympathetic. Other than a censure, removing them from committees or supporting a primary opponent, what tools would Nancy Pelosi have to actually deal with them?Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            Better question: What tools should Pelosi have to deal with them?Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              I had to look it up but there is some more authority (if necessary)

              “Even though citizens cannot recall a member of Congress, the individual chambers can remove members of the House of Representatives or Senate by way of expulsion. There have been only 20 cases of expulsion in the history of the United States.

              The House or Senate can expel a member if there is the support to do so by at least two-thirds of the members. There doesn’t have to be a specific reason, but in the past expulsion has been used to punish House and Senate members who have committed a serious crime, abused their power, or been “disloyal” to the United States.”

              So that is probably appropriate but I suspect Congretional tradition is almost always to allow their voters to have the final say. That’s especially convenient with the House since it’s only a 2-year term. Better to allow that than to make enemies.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                There have been only 20 cases of expulsion in the history of the United States.

                15 from the Senate, 5 from the House.

                1 for treason (trying to get the British to conquer Florida).
                17 for taking up arms against the US by joining the Confederacy.

                Two recently, 1980 and 2002, both for bribery.

                The problem is when you look at the misdeeds (even the expanded misdeeds), they’re things like taking up arms against the USA, bribery, serious sex crimes, misuse of office, and various other things that you can get arrested for. Overturning an election is a big deal.

                Racism is… what? A thought crime? Are we sure we want to give Nancy (and Trump for that matter) the ability to punish people for thought crimes?

                This sounds like one of those tools that only works if it’s used by people on our side against our enemies.

                It also sounds like something which could/would be weaponized by partisan forces easily and instantly.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Yeah, that was kind of my point. It’s easy to get all bent out of shape about racism because you don’t actually have to do anything concrete to address it. You just complain. Meanwhile, ignoring the racist intent of bad policies and actually addressing the policy on its own merits is a lot harder. hence, the Left chooses complaining about the thought crime.Report

          • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            Congress can expel members from office, too.

            But the tools you listed sound adequate. They would severely limit that member’s power and re-election chances.Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

              But as Dark Matter points out, that’s not how things actually happen. People are amazingly tolerant of bad behavior and nearly every politician removed from office usually goes voluntarily (see Al Franken).Report

  4. Silver Wolf says:

    I would actually like to see your racism scale. My thinking on racism, sexism and a range of other -isms has evolved in this direction over time. I use the analogy of an on/off versus a dimmer switch. Perhaps you could do a post on it.

    If we as a society moved towards this view, as opposed to simply calling someone or something racist, I feel that it would help improve the situation over time. I think people would be (marginally) less defensive if they saw it as “room for improvement” as opposed to “good/evil”.Report

    • Mr.Joe in reply to Silver Wolf says:

      Ditto. I struggle a lot on degrees of racism and how to properly calibrate responses.

      Everybody is at least a little bit racist. It is too deeply built into our nature.

      It would be great to have some sort of scale or nomenclature to use. Right now, any discussion involving race is going to be at least a bit racist, but not necessarily cross-burning, midnight-lynching racist. Such a thing is probably not the greatest thing to be known for, but it is definitely not the worst.Report

  5. Chip Daniels says:

    The elephant in the room is that even today, after all we have seen of this man, about 40% of American voters approve of him.

    It doesn’t matter if they “hold their nose” or are reluctant, or are ironic, they are supporting him, and will vote to continue this because bigotry and open racism don’t bother them.

    Can we at least drop the yelps about incivility and call them deplorable?Report

    • Can we at least drop the yelps about incivility and call them deplorable?

      For the most part, nobody is stopping you from calling them deplorable. People are disagreeing with you, which is not the same thing.

      For my part, I don’t have any issue with saying that voting for Trump is a deplorable act. Giving people that label runs into my resistance against binaries, so I reserve it for the more unambiguous cases.

      Generally speaking, though, people are never going to like it when you say mama is a bad person. But it’s a free country.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Will Truman says:

        I attack Trump’s supporters because injustice never likes to operate out in the open.

        All unjust regimes surround themselves with a thick protective cover of apologists who aid in dismissing, denying, and distracting.

        Sometimes they are deliberate, sometimes they are useful idiots, but they are critical to sowing confusion and reasonable doubt, to cause the opponents of the regime to hold their fire and be silent.

        Notice how even such obvious outrages as the treatment of children in the camps is met with a blizzard of legalistic parsing, challenges to the veracity of the accusers, distractions and whataboutisms.

        The first step in attacking injustice is to refuse to accept the lies and evasions and distractions, and to call it by its true name.Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          Serious question – what is your conversion rate for Trump supporters? Or do you feel like you are motivating non-Trump supporters to also be more outspoken? Write their congresspeople? March in the streets?

          Or is the goal really just to state your own convictions?Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            I’m not here to convert anyone.

            I’m not trying to be the pickup artist of politics, to slyly get Trumpists to vote Democrat even if they hate themselves in the morning.

            The most persuasive argument is always to just speak the truth. If people reject that, they were never “gettable” to begin with.Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

              So if you aren’t here to convert, you aren’t here to motivate your like-minded brethren, then who is benefitting from speaking your truth?Report

              • dragonfrog in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                “Now we art all here,” said Hastur meaningfully, “we must recount the Deeds of the Day.”

                “Yeah. Deeds,” said Crowley, with the slightly guilty look of one who is attending church for the first time in years and has forgotten which bits you stand up for.

                Hastur cleared his throat.

                “I have tempted a priest,” he said. “As he walked down the street and saw the pretty girls in the sun, I put Doubt into his mind. He would have been a saint, but within a decade we shall have him.”

                “Nice one,” said Crowley, helpfully.

                “I have corrupted a politician,” said Ligur. “I let him think a tiny bribe would not hurt. Within a year we shall have him.”

                They both looked expectantly at Crowley, who gave them a big smile.

                “You’ll like this,” he said.

                His smile became even wider and more conspiratorial.

                “I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime,” he said.

                There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars.

                “Yes?” said Hastur. “And then what?”

                “Look, it wasn’t easy,” said Crowley.

                “That’s all?” said Ligur.

                “Look, people-”

                “And exactly what has that done to secure souls for our master?” said Hastur.

                Crowley pulled himself together.

                What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

                But you couldn’t tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn’t pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn’t understand. They’d never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.

                He’d been particularly pleased with Manchester.

                – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good OmensReport

              • Murali in reply to dragonfrog says:

                I’ve been to manchester. I’ve been to london. Manchester has its share of confusing roads and traffic jams etc, but it has nothing on london. Dear god, the mere thought of driving through central london gets my blood pressure shooting through the roof.Report

              • dragonfrog in reply to Murali says:

                The M25 orbital motorway also comes in for a good skewering in that book. It’s a fun read and a good show too.

                I was in Manchester once, too young to really notice much about driving it. Other than that my impression of it is based on entirely second hand stores of the “madchester” rave scene, and that my cousin still throws house music parties there.Report

              • Murali in reply to dragonfrog says:

                The m25 is the least bad of the city of london’s roadsReport

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                As long as the truth is met with hot debate, it needs to be spoken.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Is there any difference between a social truth and a religion?Report

              • veronica d in reply to JoeSal says:

                Oh great. We’ve reached the place where we have a tedious conversation about the meaning of “religion.”

                This is the sort of thing where even real-life Socrates might say, “Dude, that’s a waste of time. Let’s talk about fucking instead.”Report

              • JoeSal in reply to veronica d says:

                Hey, if we are talking about the truth let’s talk about the truth, but to talk about social truth as if it is a said and done is like saying “of course blue is a good color and not a bad color, what are you racist!!!”Report

              • JoeSal in reply to JoeSal says:

                Probably wouldn’t even take a philosopher to say, hey, if your good with really late term abortion, why don’t you take those crying children in cages, and extract them with really sharp medical instruments, and sell the body parts on the open market?Report

              • veronica d in reply to JoeSal says:

                Huh?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to veronica d says:

                As someone who does not believe in a deity and, thus, does not believe that S/He guided the hand of those who worshipped, I find the evolution of religion to be something very fascinating indeed.

                And we’re going to have to come up with a term for whatever the hell this post-Protestantism is evolving into.Report

              • veronica d in reply to Jaybird says:

                Well yeah. There are many interesting conversations one could have about religion, including the boundaries of that category.

                That isn’t what is happening here.

                Here is a wild concept: the surface appearance of a discourse is not always what is actually being said.Report

    • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      I can tell you I know at least two people who voted for him and will vote for him again strictly because they want SCOTUS stacked with conservative justices because of abortion. They don’t care about anything else. So you can call them deplorable but from their perspective a stacked SCOTUS might save millions of unborn lives. They see Trump as choosing bad for the greater good. And plenty of his other supporters make the same decisions.

      I wasn’t horrified by any of HRC’s policy proposals but I could never have voted for her because of her role as an accomplice to her husband’s behavior for decades and what she did to Lewinsky. Sometimes a single issue is enough, one way or the other. Until you can understand that kind of moral calculus, you’ll only be able to see things in black & white.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

        I do understand it.

        Preventing women from having access to abortion justifies ripping infants from their mothers arms. Justifies empowering a national culture that views anyone nonwhite as inferior, lesser being undeserving of respect or dignity. Justifies an authoritarian government without any checks on its power.

        I get it, I really do, we all get the calculus. Saul has been talking about strategic voting since day one.

        Do you understand it,though?
        Do you have any idea how far these people are willing to go to accomplish their goal?Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          I’m pro-life and i don’t want to do any of those things. Is it possible other pro-life people feel the same way?Report

        • Pat in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          @ mike

          I guess the problem some of us have, here, is that we see folks saying, “If it were only not for abortion, I’d vote for somebody other than Trump”, but absent some goalposts I have no reason to believe that any one of them is authentic.

          Because I really don’t see them on the front lines fighting against any of the things they say they don’t like about Trump. They’re remarkably quiet about all of these other things that they find terrible about him. Maybe in private, but not from the pulpit or from their twitter feed or in their op-eds.

          Or, in some cases, they’ll dedicate a post now and again about how this other thing is bad, but it’s buried under a million gallons of digital ink about how the Democrats are worse on Blah, or something else.Report

          • Mike Dwyer in reply to Pat says:

            I think the majority of his supporters endorse him across the board. I was simply pointing out to Chip that there are single-issue voters who believe Trump is an ally in preventing genocide (and that isn’t the kind of language I use about my pro-life position but it’s very much the way some view the issue).Report

            • J_A in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

              I was simply pointing out to Chip that there are single-issue voters who believe Trump is an ally in preventing genocide (and that isn’t the kind of language I use about my pro-life position but it’s very much the way some view the issue).

              When you (general you, not @Mike Dwyer you)) say “there is nothing I won’t be willing to do to stop abortion” it means there truly IS nothing. Children in cages, war with Iran, the unraveling of the decades long alliance with Europe, the destruction of civilized politics, all those things are a price you are willing to pay to stop abortion.How many dead US soldiers and Iranian civilians are you comfortable with? The answer is “there’s no upper bound, no matter how many die fighting in Iran, because we need to stop abortion”

              And yet, after the price is paid (mostly by others, of course), probably abortion will still be with us. So the price we paid will be for nothing.

              It doesn’t matter, you will still be willing to accept anything else to stop abortion.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to J_A says:

                The “I believe it is genocide” doesn’t cut it.

                There are an infinite number of people who would say the same about factory farming, global warming, or the capital gains tax, but when people lose their ability to abide by the norms of a liberal democracy, they need to be defeated for that fact alone.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to J_A says:

                I think they usually justify it around innocent lives vs adults with agency. As I said, I don’t agree their mental math. As much as I oppose abortion, it’s not the supreme issue for me.Report

              • J_A in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I think they usually justify it around innocent lives vs adults with agency.

                I agree that US soldiers and Iranian civilians have some sort of agency on dying in the next war, but sole issue voters also have agency. They could add one more issue to their list.

                But of course, that’s so much harder than deciding to die or not in a bombing. So my heart is with themReport

              • Saul Degraw in reply to J_A says:

                Also single-issue voting is kind of silly. Voting doesn’t exist in a vacuum and there are not any situations where elections hinge on any issue. There are always compromises to make. Sometimes deep moral compromises. Coalition politics is like this.

                There are things I wish the Democratic Party does that they do not. There are things I wish they did not do but they do. All in all, I consider them heads and tails above the Republicans and vote for them accordingly.

                The idea of single-issue voting or refusing to hold your nose a bit is a sign of privilege. You know that the bad stuff won’t hurt you or your loved ones.

                Unit it does.Report

              • Philip H` in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                This. Totally This. I have a half African American niece who voted for Trump based only on his willingness to stack the SCOTUS as Mike suggests. She remains convinced that racism and anti-environmental policies that come with that stacking will never come to hurt her, mostly because she was raised by her white grandparents and doesn’t really consider herself black, and hence believes she has privilege that, frankly as a woman and an African American woman she probably lacks.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip H` says:

                “…believes she has privilege that, frankly as a woman and an African American woman she probably lacks.”

                And I hope Uncle Phillip is allowing her to keep thinking that rather than telling her anything to the contrary. It’s amazing what you can accomplish in life when no one tells you that you are the underdog.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Philip H` says:

                You know, I’d argue that a large component of privilege is believing you have it and being willing to leverage it whenever possible.

                Sure, it could ultimately fail when it hits Orwell’s boot, but then, all privilege, real or assumed, fails at Orwell’s boot, if the boot is of a mind to refuse it.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I work very hard to encourage and support her. I’m also not shy about the obstacles she faces when she chooses to discuss them. I’ll always have her back, just as I will her two mixed race younger siblings (who, interestingly enough, identify as black and proud).Report

              • veronica d in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Believing you have privilege won’t help you when you really don’t have it. For example, a young black man being pulled over by the cops — he can just act like he has the same privilege as a white person, but he doesn’t, and if he fucks it up, he might end up getting a solid beatdown (or worse).

                Did you know a lot of cops are racist bullies?

                This reminds me of the “fake confidence” thing, the “fake it till you make it.” That’s fine, up to a point. Past a certain point, I think it turns into a kind of narcissism, which can blow up in your face hard.

                I know I’m not cis. It’s important that I know it. In some sense, I’d like to forget that fact. From time to time, I’ll be in a social environment where I can forget that fact. It’s really nice. But day to day — no, I never forget that I’m trans. I can’t afford to. If I do, someone with power might notice and make an effort to remind me. This can be various levels of horrible.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to veronica d says:

                Did you know a lot of cops are racist bullies?

                That would be the boot.Report

              • Philip H in reply to veronica d says:

                Agreed. My African American nephew is going to be one of the young black men of whom you speak, in as much as he has some diagnosed emotional control issues. As long as he takes his meds he’s generally fine, but one day he won’t take his meds, and I’ll be the articulate uncle on TV calling for justice from a police encounter gone horribly wrong.

                That aside – @Mike Dwyer’s ballyhooed Social Justice Warriors really do want to make things better for you and for my nephew, and it still grates me to no end that such an outcome is not universally shared here and elsewhere.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip H says:

                “Social Justice Warriors really do want to make things better for you and for my nephew, and it still grates me to no end that such an outcome is not universally shared here and elsewhere.”

                The problem Phillip is that you all keep making promises to new groups you discover but you still haven’t delivered on your promises to the first group. And before you blame that on the obstructionism of the Right, you all have controlled many of our cities for GENERATIONS and the people you want to help the most are still suffering. How much longer should they wait?Report

      • Slade the Leveller in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

        You don’t think single issue voters are the black and whitest voters there are?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      Have Trump’s tweets changed how you view the “if you don’t like it, move to Somalia” argument?Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

        Perhaps relevant:

        Report

      • Catchling in reply to Jaybird says:

        “Move to Somalia” is an unfair instruction to make, but “I think Somalia is the logical endpoint of your views” is less so. The rhetoric is parallel to conservatives/libertarians telling American leftists, in the Cold War days, to move to the USSR (except I don’t personally think Somalia’s the best exemplar of, whatever it’s supposed to represent, anarcho-libertarianism or something).

        That’s very obviously not the spirit with which Trump was speaking. It’s not “Here’s a country that you should travel to because it matches your stated values (and further demonstrates, in my view, why those don’t make for a livable government)”. He’s saying “Here are various countries to which you actually belong by default; you live in the USA as a guest. You should go to these other countries, which by the way are crime-infested, not because they exemplify a form of government inferior to capitalist representative democracy with three balanced branches, but because of the sort of people who live there, namely people physically like yourselves.”

        A lot of people have pointed out Trump’s hypocrisy in running an entire presidential campaign basically premised on “This country is a hellhole and needs to be made great again”. But in the view of him and his ilk, telling him to “go back where you came from” doesn’t compute because they’re not guests like those… other… people, they actually live here.Report

  6. There’s no reason to pretend that Trump isn’t what he plainly is, and there’s no reason to pretend that his supporters do not absolutely agree with him. They are both motivated by the same sort of animus. After all, one of conservatism’s most fundamental planks is believing whole-heartedly that they are the true Americans, and that everybody else is insufficiently American if they are even American at all. That Trump is simply saying so out loud, as opposed to movement’s audible dog-whistling.Report

  7. Oscar Gordon says:

    Yeah, there is no un-ringing that bell, especially after the double down.

    Of course, I was done with Trump after the whole ‘locker room talk’ bit.Report

  8. JoeSal says:

    “Trump……that’s just a straight-shooter with “upper management” written all over him.”Report

  9. Doctor Jay says:

    I really like the idea of a 10 point racism scale, actually. On an amusing note, I think white people reserve the word “racist” for someone who is a 9 or 10, but black people start pulling it out for fives or sixes.

    And in point of fact, I don’t use the word all that often myself. I sometimes find it hard to tell, but I think I’m a bit to the left of you, Will.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      the problem with a 10-point racist scale is that people aren’t willing to interpret that as anything but:
      0: not racist
      1: racist
      2: racist
      3: racist
      4: racist
      5: racist
      (etc.)Report

      • Some people do. With others it’s:

        1. not racist
        2. not racist
        3. not racist
        4. not racist
        5. not racist

        9. not necessarily racist
        10. okay racist

        That’s one of the thinks that leads to so many arguments. For some it takes practically nothing at all. For others it’s nothing for less than assault or a burning cross.Report

        • Marchmaine in reply to Will Truman says:

          Serious question, what are the words we *should* be using for 2-9?

          Is there a scenario where being, say, a level 4 racist is kinda ok? We don’t want a binary, but the partial stink is pretty stinky as far as I can tell.Report

          • Will Truman in reply to Marchmaine says:

            1-10 are all racist. It’s a question of kind and degree.

            I honestly don’t know how usable it is in the discourse. I use it as an internal metric for creating fictional characters.

            I will probably need to do a post on it. I will say this, though: Being a 1 is actually pretty unhealthy (self-loathing, basically). I doubt everyone would even agree on where the sweet spot is.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

              You spend a childhood memorizing verses like Romans 3:23.

              You spend your 20s regretting all of the time you wasted memorizing silly Bible verses.

              Then you are in your 40’s and they’re back, baby.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Will Truman says:

              1-10 are all racist. It’s a question of kind and degree.

              The problem comes when you want to pair that with “racism is the ultimate evil and MUST be opposed”

              Being a 1 is actually pretty unhealthy (self-loathing, basically).

              Ignoring that “self-loathing” isn’t a problem with Trump and that he’s more than a 1…

              …what are you considering “a 1”?

              My general impression is all of society is at least at that.Report

              • The problem comes when you want to pair that with “racism is the ultimate evil and MUST be opposed”

                Right. If you can’t wrap your head around the idea that everybody is some kind and degree of racist and so it’s more about minimizing and managing that impulse rather than eradicating it, this system will be of no value to you.

                Ignoring that “self-loathing” isn’t a problem with Trump and that he’s more than a 1…

                Trump is definitely not a 1. His political persona, at least, is probably a 7 or an 8.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will Truman says:

                What is sort of interesting and revealing is that it is conservatives who keep insisting liberals feel racism in the ultimate evil but i never see actual liberal saying that. I’m an official liberal and i’d list a good few things worse than racism. Is anybody saying racism is worse then murder, rape, child abuse, various crimes, etc. No racism isn’t the worst thing ever and it’s also a pretty common thing that we all will struggle with in some way.

                Yeah a 7 or 8 at least, but it’s effortless and authentic.Report

              • veronica d in reply to greginak says:

                Well, I think there are (for lack of a better term) different modes by which a thing can be bad. Standing alone, an individual racist act seems fairly minor. However, unlike (for example) murder, the evil of racism emerges from it’s commonality. These days, murder is relatively uncommon. Most people realize that murder is very wrong. By contrast, many people feel that racism is “kinda okay,” or even desirable.

                So what happens in a nation of 300 million? Does the weight of one exceed the weight of the other? Is it even a sensible comparison?

                I’m not talking about the weight of individual acts. Surely killing someone is far worse than calling them the n-word. However, multiply that by {society}. Spread it across generations. It’s complicated.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to veronica d says:

                greginak: What is sort of interesting and revealing is that it is conservatives who keep insisting liberals feel racism in the ultimate evil but i never see actual liberal saying that.
                veronica d: Most people realize that murder is very wrong. By contrast, many people feel that racism is “kinda okay,” or even desirable.

                welpReport

              • pillsy in reply to Will Truman says:

                Yeah I think my issue is so often rhetoric that treats it as something that is to by minimized and managed [1] but then there’s no actual interest in going the next step towards minimizing and managing it.

                In particular, if you have a common impulse that you want to minimize and manage, that’s (especially according to conservatives!) a strong argument for disapproving of it socially. And it’s a very strong argument against giving people who engage in it openly positions of great power and influence.

                And yet….

                [1] Especially, to be blunt, Rightward rhetoric.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to pillsy says:

                Well, I’m not trying to make a political point or advocate something by saying that. I consider it to be a truth whether we say so (apply rhetoric) or not. Whether it’s useful or not. There are upsides and downsides to actively approaching it this way. Complacency (it is what it is and there’s nothing we can do about it so oh well) is a real concern with any admission of limitations. And for some people, knowing that you’re going to be racist no matter what just removes any incentive. So I can be convinced that the binary approach is more effective in terms of motivation and behavior modification. But that doesn’t make it more accurate.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Will Truman says:

                Yeah that’s fair.

                FWIW I don’t think racism is an inevitability but I also don’t think it’s just a binary thing. I think racism is a specific and insidious expression of more general impulses that do have to be managed and minimized.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                This is probably the point where I should make my traditional plea to always consider cultural prejudices rather than racism as the actual problem at hand. In my experience that is almost ALWAYS the actual issue.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                That may be true in general, but there is a lot of evidence that Trump infers that people have cultural values he’s prejudiced against based on their race, and that is, uh, well, racist.

                It was racist when he did it to Obama (which is exactly where the sting of Birtherism lies) and it’s racist now.

                And I don’t really think all the burden on not hindering conversation should fall on the people who do believe he is a racist and his comments are racist.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                I’m talking about discussions of racism in general. Most policies aimed at helping minorities, for example, would better be geared towards poor people (and receive more broad support). For example, since Senator Harris brought it up, race-based busing has already been struck down by SCOTUS as unconstitutional. Here in Louisville, one of the two school systems sued in the case, they switched to a ‘socio-economic’ approach which makes income more of a priority. (Biden should really mention that at the next debate.)

                I used to hear a lot of white people say, “I hate n-ggers but I also hate white trash too.” Obviously that is a really bad choice of words, but what they were clumsily trying to convey was that it wasn’t about race for them, it was about class. Chris Rock also had a similar joke in one of his comedy specialis that was oft-quoted around then. I think the same thing is still true, but people have gotten smarter about not announcing it. There are still a lot of middle class white people that might be prejudiced against a certain class of black people, while having very close black friends in their own class, and at the same time also really disliking poor whites too. And in my experience, middle class blacks also have complicated feelings towards poor blacks. Again, all of this speaks more to culture than race even if we still haven’t figure out the right words to use when explaining it.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to pillsy says:

                there’s no actual interest in going the next step towards minimizing and managing it.

                “The next step”? We have checks and balances, Trump is minimized and managed.

                The number of ignored court orders is zero. The number of arrested political opponents is zero. The people trying to defund the refugees were the gang of four.

                Picture Trump without the court overruling him and it’s grim. Instead we have flame wars on Twitter. Granted, we also have a mess on the southern border… but then we get back to his critics using facts and photos from the Obama era to criticize him.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dark Matter says:

                The next step is not just minimizing and managing Trump, it’s minimizing and managing racist attitudes.

                And frankly that’s absolutely impossible when you have a President who’s as openly racist as Trump is, because members of that President’s party will overwhelmingly defend the racist things he says, and adopt those views or at least accept them as respectable.

                And to be blunt, if you really do mean that Trump should be managed and minimized, that’s incompatible with supporting his re-election.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                “…it’s minimizing and managing racist attitudes.”

                If you have some tips on how to do that on any level for anyone, please share with the group.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I mean not voting for open racists to hold high electoral office seems like an easy layup to me. Likewise not fundraising for them, endorsing them, and the like.

                It’s incredibly straightforward, in fact.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                I mean, I guess that would clean up the overt racism. But how to you minimize and manage the secret racist attitudes of everyone else? The ones that drive policy but they never talk about them out loud?Report

              • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Just because there are hard problems doesn’t mean we shouldn’t solve the easy problems. Especially when they’re just hanging out there in broad daylight.

                Or the Oval Office.

                As for those secret racist attitudes, that’s already a step in the right direction, because it makes it more difficult for those people to advance their policies or build coalitions around them.

                It’s not be a sufficient condition, but it is probably a necessary one.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                So an overt racist runs for office – how do you convince people not to vote for them? In the privacy of the voting booth people make some weird choices.

                I know I’m being pedantic here but I’m sure you see my point. It’s incredibly hard (impossible?) to actually reduce or eliminate racism. But you can absolutely address the policies it creates on their actual merits.Report

              • Aaron David in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                One of the biggest problems, on a meta-level, is getting everyone to agree on what is or isn’t racism. And that is before you get into second-order effects such as freedom of speech and so on. Or if something is racist, should that matter more than [other issue]. There are what, 20-30 commenters on this thread? Each and every one of them has a different interpretation of what constitutes racism, how important it is, what should be done, etc. Pillsey and I come from a very similar background (Jewish, children of academics) and yet we have rather intensely different ideas on all of this.

                And that? That is politics in a nutshell.Report

              • This touches on another one, which is to consider that maybe your definition of racism is too narrow (or too broad, though that’s less likely to be a problem among whites except as a political cudgel).Report

              • Aaron David in reply to Will Truman says:

                Well, political cudgel covers a lot of ground…

                But it does get down to what is the essential point of all this; who decides what is and what isn’t racist. Looking around the right side currently, they don’t consider this racist. Like At All. And they don’t think Trump is of the racist persuasion. Why? They don’t share the priors that help make that determination. And, they also feel that the left is given a pass on its racist actions. Whether or not you agree with them is immaterial at this point. The left, if it believes in this, which I think it does, has no power at this point to make a convincing argument in that direction.

                As you well know, we have politics for a reason, and that reason is to make these kinds of decisions. And when the country is as split as ours is right now, there likely is no answer at this time.Report

              • Political cudgel does indeed cover a lot of ground. It’s also the case that politics can turn people’s heads around. I would like to think that’s what’s going on here. They are so reluctant not to back their guy that they will more or less try to justify anything*.

                The alternative is that they genuinely view “Go back to where you came from” as being not racist. Which, everyone has a right to their opinion. But if that’s their opinion that I do not believe that they are interested in managing or minimizing racism.

                * – Fortunately, I have actually seen some criticism from the right, including people who often/usually defend Trump. And even from the rest I am seeing a lot more in the lines of evasion than defense. So all is not lost.Report

              • Well, poll numbers could be worse.

                We’ll see if it holds or if more people can talk themselves into “Actually not racist”…

                “Send Her Back” probably isn’t helping.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Will Truman says:

                68% believe Trump’s tweets were offensive
                59% believe Trump’s tweets are “un-American”
                65% believe what Trump said is racist, including a plurality of Republicans (45-34%)

                The barking dog that’s not there is “does this make you less likely to vote for him”.

                The media just kind of assumes that being a racist is an automagic disqualifier. I would prefer the President not be a racist in a binary, abstract sense.

                However in order for racism to be important enough to drive my vote he’d need to be doing a lot more than just spinning people up on twitter. Before anyone asks, we’d need to see things for which we wouldn’t give a pass to Obama.Report

              • Hopefully Team Trump at least will see this as something that doesn’t actively help them and that maybe there are limits to how much they want to push the envelope. Hopefully the Democrats nominate someone and run a campaign that people are not as eager to vote against so such things come in to play.

                I don’t expect either of these things, really. I said earlier on that I don’t expect this to move the needle. That isn’t the only metric by which something might matter.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Aaron David says:

                SSC has an essay about “lie inflation” that makes this argument about “abusers”.

                1. We don’t tolerate abusers around here, right? Right!
                2. John’s actions technically qualify as abuse by this incredibly broad standard that includes basically everyone.
                3. Therefore we shouldn’t tolerate John.

                Seems to me that this argument works for “racist” too.

                And while I have no problem with determining that Trump’s tweets were beyond the pale and that he ought to be impeached, etc…

                It feels like there’s something else going on and portmanteau words are being used deliberately and tactically.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

                What you are referring to is a thing. A definite thing. A thing that I have seen on this site.

                It does not flow logically that it is a thing that is applicable here. What stands out at me about Trump’s comment is that it is does not merely “technically qualify”… it’s something that if it were said by anyone anywhere I would think less of them (without a pretty convincing apology, anyway).

                This one doesn’t need technicalities or the context of Trump.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Will Truman says:

                She: “You are not treating me with respect.”

                He: “Well actually, you are saying this only because of your emotional feelings which are invalid based on some nebulous and poorly defined idea of “respect” and here let me show you this chart of statistics demonstrating the frequency of endearments, and a regression analysis of lovemaking, all of which proves you are either lying, or stupid.”Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Serious question: I read a while back that it is racist for a white person to tell a black woman they like her hair. Is that actually racist and if so, who decides?

                Corollary: If a black person says, ‘No it isn’t racist,” but a white person says, “No, it totally is racist,” is the black person automatically correct by default? And what if the disagreement is actually between two black people? Do we call it a draw?Report

              • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Serious question: I read a while back that it is racist for a white person to tell a black woman they like her hair. Is that actually racist and if so, who decides?

                Maybe.[1] What’s at stake if we decide one way or another?

                As far as I can tell, it would just be a shift in some attitudes about what is, and is not, polite.

                But the thing is, I don’t see how the answer influences the answer to the question of whether what Trump said is racist in the slightest.

                [1] Did you read it as a bald assertion, or was it backed up with an argument? Was the argument any good?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

                Sure. Impeach the guy.

                “Love it or leave it” is an ugly sentiment when it’s yelled from a car at a guy holding a sign.

                It’s an absolutely vile sentiment to come from a politician.

                And “go back where you came from”, implying that “you didn’t come from here” is racist as heck.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Will Truman says:

                It does not flow logically that it is a thing that is applicable here.

                From the link:

                Third, the biggest beneficiaries are actual liars. Suppose some singularitarian claims [X]. And suppose that’s totally false… Usually I would accuse them of lying, and this accusation would be enough to alert people that, hey, something has gone terribly wrong here. But if both sides are constantly accusing each other of lying just for having normal human failings, then “you are a liar” no longer carries much weight. I have to come up with some complex circumlocution in order to let people know that someone told a mistruth.

                Trump is a racist.

                However if you opposed school busing you’re a racist, there’s no other explanation. Ditto if you opposed various social welfare programs. Ditto if you oppose anything Obama wanted to do.

                So when I moved into the best school district I could afford, the only possible explanation could be racism.

                So now we’re in a world where the Right is convinced (perhaps correctly) that the Left will pull out the racism charge regardless of what has happened.

                Being told that you really REALLY mean it this time, that this time is different and special, and it doesn’t matter that it’s politically advantageous, was expected, and has already been dismissed.Report

              • My point was not that the dynamic has not been in play with Trump and racism*, but that this is not an instance of “John’s actions technically qualify as abuse by this incredibly broad standard that includes basically everyone.”

                This is an example where technical and broad definitions aren’t needed. This isn’t like busing and other ambiguous cases. This one is pretty straightforward, as far as I am concerned. You don’t even need the context of “It’s Donald Trump saying it.”

                * – And, of course, just as I have learned whose charges of racism not to take seriously, I have also learned whose this-is-not-racism arguments to similarly disregard.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                So an overt racist runs for office – how do you convince people not to vote for them?

                Do they have a (D) next to their name or an (R)?

                THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION.

                If they have a (D), you have to understand that people make mistakes and this bloodthirst is more indicative of a “BSDI” kind of attitude than one that is actually interested in addressing the racism that is important.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I was thinking mostly in terms of our own behavior. If everybody is racist, then we all have room for improvement.

                In terms of what we might be able to do to influence others – apart from perhaps setting the best example we can – the most immediate thing that comes to mind is to not run interference for racism, when someone shares their stories don’t automatically dismiss the racism or insist that we exhaust every other possibility before we accept racism as an explanation.

                On the flipside, I would say that there is also trying to being cognizant of which things might backfire or have backfired and avoid doing those things even and especially if doing so makes us feel good.

                Empathy matters quite a bit, for all involved.

                I don’t know what can be done on a policy level, other than trying to root out government-institutional forms racism, providing legal protections on the basis of race when appropriate, and so on.

                Racist attitudes have changed quite a bit over the years – usually for the better but with some bumps along the way – so obviously it is possible to move the needle. It may always be with us, but the degree is not a constant (nor is how it is expressed).Report

              • pillsy in reply to Will Truman says:

                In terms of what we might be able to do to influence others – apart from perhaps setting the best example we can – the most immediate thing that comes to mind is to not run interference for racism, when someone shares their stories don’t automatically dismiss the racism or insist that we exhaust every other possibility before we accept racism as an explanation.

                This is why it’s incredibly important to, you know, not have the major parties support open racists. It creates a permission structure for (at least) that racist’s co-partisans to be openly racist themselves if they’re so inclined…

                …and if they’re not so inclined, it gives them a strong incentive to dismiss and deflect justified charges of racism.

                I’d like to think that at least some of the people I see that I used to respect who are defending this latest outburst from Trump as “not racist” wouldn’t have done so five years ago, but if I do believe it it makes it all the more important that racists be kept away from positions of partisan influence.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to pillsy says:

                It’s better when the quiet parts are quiet.

                Generally.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to pillsy says:

                it’s minimizing and managing racist attitudes.

                After we get rid of these attitudes we’re still going to be an extremely diverse population, and the various “inequality” problems we have will still be serious problems, and without racism to blame them on we won’t know what to do.

                That might even be where we are after our elders die off.

                …if you really do mean that Trump should be managed and minimized, that’s incompatible with supporting his re-election.

                At the moment, I don’t support it, I simply expect it. It’s difficult to unseat a sitting President; Add to that the economy is doing very well, he’s managed to not bumble his way into any wars, and he’s largely kept his campaign promises. Amazingly, he’s going to run as the safe candidate with a glowing record of success.

                Now if you nominate Sanders or Warren, then I’ll have to switch to actively supporting Trump as the lesser (and known) evil.

                I consider the socialists to be WAY more dangerous than the racists, their track record is much worse in terms of economic destruction and in plumbing the depths of how bad things can get. Worse, they’ve done with and managed to keep a vast following of popularity and respectability.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                That omelette of economic growth sure needs a lot of eggs.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dark Matter says:

                After we get rid of these attitudes we’re still going to be an extremely diverse population, and the various “inequality” problems we have will still be serious problems, and without racism to blame them on we won’t know what to do.

                Well then we’ll be in a much better position to figure out what to do. And if you can’t see how managing the challenges of having an incredibly diverse population in a way that members of that population find mostly tolerable is made a lot harder by overt racism, I’m not really sure what to say.

                I consider the socialists to be WAY more dangerous than the racists, their track record is much worse in terms of economic destruction and in plumbing the depths of how bad things can get.

                This is one of those somewhat plausible arguments [1] that really doesn’t hold up as a rationale for this course of action:

                Now if you nominate Sanders or Warren, then I’ll have to switch to actively supporting Trump as the lesser (and known) evil.

                Like the kind of socialism that Sanders advocates and Warren allegedly advocates… has been tried and those aren’t the results.

                I’m not saying raising taxes to support more social spending in a rich developed nation is necessarily going to have incredibly great outcomes–it’s a mixed bag.

                But it’s a mixed bag, it’s not the Great Leap Forward.

                And if you’re citing the fact that the Constitution has placed some constraints on Trump’s racist impulses as an argument in mitigation, our Constitutional order is much, much better at checking socialist impulses than racist ones.

                [1] I think you are may just be underestimating the role racism played in some of the worst atrocities of the 19th and 20th century, and the role destruction wrought by racist ideologues paved the way for Communist domination of much of Eastern Europe and Asia.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to pillsy says:

                Well then we’ll be in a much better position to figure out what to do. And if you can’t see how managing the challenges of having an incredibly diverse population in a way that members of that population find mostly tolerable is made a lot harder by overt racism, I’m not really sure what to say.

                My point without racism to take the blame it’s too uncomfortable to talk about why inequality is still a thing, too hard to point to culture.

                Like the kind of socialism that Sanders advocates and Warren allegedly advocates… has been tried and those aren’t the results.

                By all means, please explain how any of their proposals decrease the role of gov and increase economic freedom. The Northern European states endorse high levels of economic freedom, higher than what we have now, the Warren/Sanders proposed type is just the opposite.

                You can look up exactly what the Democratic Socialists of America want from their website, and yes, it’s straight out of central planning. It’s the “True Socialism has never been tried” insane burn-the-economy down type as usual.

                our Constitutional order is much, much better at checking socialist impulses than racist ones.

                Unless you’re lowering the definition of racism down enough that we’re into thought crimes and disagreements on culture, i.e. where everyone qualifies, I claim the opposite. We control racism via criminal law, i.e. murder and terrorism are illegal. Add to that discrimination based on skin color and we’re there.

                I’m less worried about socialists creating mass murder than I am them running out of other people’s money and leaving a huge mess. If the economy breaks and/or the federal gov needs to go bankrupt, running out of other people’s money to spend on our socialist programs will be the cause.

                Warren or Sanders creating a half dozen new entitlements when we already don’t know how to pay for our current ones would be a huge step in that direction. It’s unlikely they have the votes to outlaw private ownership of capital (the wealth tax is a thinly disguised attempt at that) but even trying to do that would be destructive.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dark Matter says:

                My point without racism to take the blame it’s too uncomfortable to talk about why inequality is still a thing, too hard to point to culture.

                Let’s say you’re right. I mean I don’t really think you are, but I can accept it arguendo and I have been wrong once or twice in the past.

                Overt racism, as long as it’s hanging out there, and is a politically viable and even powerful force, will preclude having the hard conversation you believe is necessary.

                Unless you’re lowering the definition of racism down enough that we’re into thought crimes and disagreements on culture, i.e. where everyone qualifies, I claim the opposite.

                We had the current constitutional order in place for several generations alongside Jim Crow and segregation. It took concerted efforts on the part of the legislature, the executive, and the courts, to change that. It went away in large part because people were increasingly repelled by racism, which is why it’s bad to make racism more popular.

                And I believe it’s gotten more popular in the last ten or so years, and Trump is making it more popular still.

                As for economic freedoms, well, I could point to some stuff Warren is arguing for (like zoning reform) does that, but yeah most is entitlement focused.

                Then again, most of it also depends on significant tax increases.

                But the tax increases are… constitutionally problematic and unlikely to pass. And the President can’t unilaterally raise taxes.

                And our system is veto-point rich.

                And, you know, there’s the Court thing again. We don’t have to return to the Lochner era or really anything like it for it to place a significant obstacle in the way of a genuinely socialist (or even somewhat ambitious center-left) agenda.

                Also, like, historically the US has had many more problems caused by racism than by socialism-induced debt crises. And it’s not because socialism was uniformly unpopular during that time. It ebbs and flows.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to pillsy says:

                Overt racism, as long as it’s hanging out there, and is a politically viable and even powerful force, will preclude having the hard conversation you believe is necessary…

                First, I’m in favor of getting rid of “overt racism”, but not to the point of thought crimes and tearing up the first AM. 2nd, if we didn’t have that conversation under 8 years of Obama in charge of the gov, then my expectation is we’re not going to have it for at least one generation no matter what happens. Inequality is going to be viewed as proof of racism for a long time because the alternatives aren’t thinkable.

                3rd, from your description I’d expect someone is making serious and active attempts to bring back Jim Crow and/or Segregation. So… Are we passing anti-black laws? Bringing back Jim Crow? Something else? Are we equivalating those to one politician saying mean things about another politician?

                We had the current constitutional order in place for several generations alongside Jim Crow and segregation.

                If you need to reach back 60 years for examples on what is possible then you’re making my point for me. The ability of the police to beat up innocent people (or protesters) goes away with the ability of cameras to capture them doing so. Currently, the number of judges who would approve of re-Segregation is roughly zero, and the number of politicians who would back it is roughly zero. That’s not “can’t get 60 votes in the Senate in the foreseeable future”, that’s “zero”, as in, “anyone even suggesting it would have their career end”.

                You’re trying to draw a line from one Troll on Twitter playing the race card against his political opponents to Segregation.

                In contrast I’d say the odds of us having a serious fiscal mess, including breaking various promises (which for others would be called bankruptcy), is 100% and the question is how to stop it from getting worse.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dark Matter says:

                My point without racism to take the blame it’s too uncomfortable to talk about why inequality is still a thing, too hard to point to culture.

                Quantuum mechanics is uncomfortable to talk about. It throws causality out the window. That doesn’t make it not true.

                In a weird way you’re conceding that the SJ activists are right about all this stuff by admitting it’s a difficult issue to talk about.

                If it weren’t true why would it be difficult?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Stillwater says:

                In a weird way you’re conceding that the SJ activists are right about all this stuff by conceding it’s a difficult issue to talk about. If it weren’t true why would it be difficult?

                For the same reason why it’s hard (for anyone, but worse for politicians) in coal states to tell coal miners that they should have started learning to code a decade or two ago.

                Saying a lot of the current situation has to do with things like unwed parenthood and various other cultural factors sounds like victim blaming. Black politicians don’t get elected by pointing to their own people as the source of their problems. Trying to tell people that they have more influence over their children than whatever happened to their great-grandparents isn’t going to go well.

                It’s much politically safer to claim it’s someone else’s fault. It’s aggravated of course because within living memory the dominant reason for black inequality was white racism.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Black politicians don’t get elected by pointing to their own people as the source of their problems.

                So, there’s no racism in America then?

                When did it mysteriously, inexplicably, disappear?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Stillwater says:

                So, there’s no racism in America then?

                That’s what is called a strawman. Of course there’s racism.

                My argument is we’re past the point where racism is the biggest problem faced by the black community in terms of economic advancement (or it’s lack).

                Assume I have a magic wand and can restructure reality but only have a limited number of wishes with limited power.

                Should I be making sure Jim Crow doesn’t come back by kicking Trump off of Twitter, or should I be making unwed parenting rates the same?

                Make a list of problems, then sort them by their impact. Is racism still #1? #10? If it’s still this massive force, then what needs to happen for it to be only the equal of the war on drugs?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dark Matter says:

                My argument is we’re past the point where racism is the biggest problem faced by the black community in terms of economic advancement (or it’s lack).

                Dark, you should forward this to the NAACP STAT.This insight will radically change how black people view politics and culture in the US. It’s priority one!

                Dude, you’re a genius!!!!

                Add: It’s amazing to me that all it takes to solve black people’s problems in America is a little White Guy thinking. I’m sure they’ll be as appreciative as I am!Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Stillwater says:

                So, you don’t have a response to my argument other than to point to my skin color? What’s the word for that kind of thing again?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                I’ll just say that a white guy telling us that racism is a minor problem in America is…not a persuasive argument.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                One could argue that a white guy telling us that racism is a huge problem in America is also not very convincing.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I was thinking about this a bit more this morning…It struck me that maybe we are all talking past each other because so much of what the Left calls racism today is actually the legacy/effects of past racism. They aren’t wrong that real, conscious racism drove those policies 25, 50, 100 years ago but I think it’s being conflated with believing that a lot of people are racist today. And maybe the reason for that is because they can’t imagine how those things could exist unless modern racists are actively ensuring that legacy continues. From the Right we believe that much of that legacy still exists because the policies Democrats created to try and address those ills just haven’t been very good and with the Democratic stranglehold on those cities where inequality seems most prevalent, no one on the Right has really gotten a chance to demonstrate a better way.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                …much of what the Left calls racism today is actually the legacy/effects of past racism.

                Yes.

                And maybe the reason for that is because they can’t imagine how those things could exist unless modern racists are actively ensuring that legacy continues.

                Less “can’t imagine” and more “don’t want to understand”. Opposing racism is easy, you get to wear a white hat, you get to virtue signal, everyone congratulates you. There’s no risk, you can bask in the knowledge that it’s risky and dangerous without it actually being risky or dangerous (when was the last time the Klan lynched an activist?)

                Pointing to cultural problems is painful, hard, and unpopular. The solutions are probably painful hard and unpopular.

                Much easier to pretend that liberal plantations are hotbeds of unopposed racism and call it a day and/or that what happened to someone’s great-grandparents decides your destiny way more than what you do with your kids.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                One could argue that a white guy telling us that racism is a huge problem in America is also not very convincing.

                What white guy are you referring to? Certainly not me. I never said racism was a huge problem. I did say that it’s a “real* problem, which conservatives consistently deny or reject. As evidenced by this thread. 🙂Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I’ll just say that a white guy telling us that racism is a minor problem in America is…not a persuasive argument.

                When science has a paradigm changing Theory, we argue about it for a generation and wait for everyone who grew up with the old theory to die. In this case the old theory was correct for generations so the clock may not have even started ticking yet.

                But no one is even attempting to make fact based arguments that I’m wrong, nor disagreeing with the underlying observations which drive this. The closest we have to a counter argument is I’m not allowed to make these arguments because of my skin color, because clearly math and logic depend on that.

                And if we can’t chase this line of reasoning here on this board then there’s no way in hell it can be done in the real world. It’s THAT painful.Report

    • JoeSal in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      How are you using white people here? Because when I asked veronica and drilled down what it meant, we were at neo-nazis. When I asked North, we drilled down and we were at MRA.

      OT is a really weird place when it comes to talking about white people with folks who have pretty pale skin on average.Report

      • veronica d in reply to JoeSal says:

        Huh?Report

      • Doctor Jay in reply to JoeSal says:

        Well, I include myself in the category “white people”. Does that clarify things? I am somewhat less judgmental of white people for growing up white than some, because I did that, too. My neural nets got trained a certain way just by growing up white, and so did a lot of other people’s.

        AND, I think that engaging with these ideas, trying to find the attitudes that I was raised with that cause problems for people of color, is a very worthwhile endeavor. Once I got over the shame, it enriched my life. I recommend this path for every white person.

        One really important difference between me and veronica is that I am not threatened directly by Trump and Trumpism. He’s not trying to keep old white males out of the military. He’s not trying to stop them from pursuing happiness. He’s not using them as a political punching bag. With veronica, it’s otherwise.

        So, temperance is just a lot easier for me. I think that I can use my situation to discuss certain things with people that she (or my daughter, who is also trans) would find pretty threatening.Report

      • North in reply to JoeSal says:

        Hmm? I don’t recall that conversation but I’d be fascinated to re-read it if it happened, I am a white person myself after all.Report

        • JoeSal in reply to North says:

          I will see if I can find it, combing the comments under this new system isn’t what it used to be.Report

          • JoeSal in reply to JoeSal says:

            https://ordinary-times.com/2019/02/22/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-muthana/

            The ‘white’ part was in reference to ‘white guys’ so I guess I was a bit off.Report

            • North in reply to JoeSal says:

              Gotcha, if I’m reading correctly we were discussing if the right wing guys who purport to not care about womens desires were very numerous. I came down on the position that they were numerous numerically on the internet but not demographically or sociologically. I certainly wouldn’t define all white people as MRA type; I’m a white person myself after all and I like to think I’m not a red-pill kind of fellow.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to North says:

                v’s last sentence about white guys was:

                “For us right now, it’s young, restless white guys who can’t figure out women or their careers”

                I considered that a generic white guys, not right or left, but will agree it could have implied ‘right wing white guys’. That still looks like it drilled down to neo-nazis and MRA.Report

              • veronica d in reply to JoeSal says:

                I identified a particular social cohort that is driving much of Trumpism and adjacent dipshittery. To be clear, I don’t think they are the only such cohort. Others surely exist. But they are the one I am most familiar with. (I don’t know any West Virginia coal miners. I know a lot of gamergate types.)

                Do I think all of these guys are Nazis in the full measure?

                Of course not. That would be silly.

                Do I think that the hard right wing finds these guys to be fertile recruiting ground?

                Indeed, undeniably. Brietbart jumped onto the gamergate thing for a reason.Report

            • veronica d in reply to JoeSal says:

              I don’t see where I said that literally all white men are neo-nazis. Am I misunderstanding your point?

              I made a couple comments that mention particular men. Here is one:

              It’s not the truly poor who rise up. It’s the “downwardly mobile” middle-class. For us right now, it’s young, restless white guys who can’t figure out women or their careers.

              Here we see a common grammatical structure: the restrictive clause. When I say “restless white guys who …”, the material after the who denotes which men I am talking about. This clearly is not all men, just some of them.

              Note if I included a comma, like this: “…restless white guys, who …”, then that would be a non-restrictive modifier, and in this case could be read to refer to all restless white guys. However, that is not what I wrote.

              Later I said this:

              I’m pretty sure we’re talking about different groups of men. I’m talking about the dudes who end up neo-nazis and similar.

              Clearly I’m talking about a specific subset of men.

              I don’t understand your criticism. I suspect you are deliberately misreading me. You shouldn’t do that.Report

  10. DensityDuck says:

    Are we allowed to make a distinction between “doesn’t agree with Democrat priorities and policy proposals” and “fucking asshole racist Trumpy”? Or are we in a place where if you aren’t on Team Blue you’re on Team Red?Report

    • Doctor Jay in reply to DensityDuck says:

      Well, the way elections work in this country, there are only two ways to vote. Though there’s the “stay-home/third party” variation.

      But when we are talking, there’s more variation available.

      I have a friend who has said to me, privately, that they like Trump’s policies, but wish he’d keep his mouth shut. I have another who disavows Trump as a conservative, but shrugs him off as “ok”.Report

      • dragonfrog in reply to Doctor Jay says:

        There are two or fewer ways to vote.

        If you are one of the 2/3 or so of Americans who don’t live in a swing state, all you options are equivalent to staying home.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to DensityDuck says:

      When an injustice is happening, there are only two courses available.

      Opposing it, or not.

      There are an unlimited ways to oppose Trumps bigotry without being a Democrat.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

        “There are an unlimited ways to oppose Trumps bigotry without being a Democrat.”

        I’m surprised you believe that. How do you reconcile it with your earlier comment:

        “about 40% of American voters approve of him…they are supporting him, and will vote to continue this because bigotry and open racism don’t bother them”

        I guess there’s no out-and-out contradiction, but even so, the comments feel like they were written by two different people.Report

        • Will Truman in reply to Pinky says:

          I think it exists in the gap of “You don’t have to vote for the Democrat but you can’t vote Trump” (and still oppose bigotry etc)Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Pinky says:

          Those 97% of Republicans who support Trump could, if they were not racist, draft a Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, or Justin Amash.

          But then again, they could have easily supported Jeb Bush in 2016 and gotten a tax cut and a Justice Kavanaugh all the same.

          They support Trump because of, not in spite of, his racism. This is a conscious choice they have made, even though others were available to them.Report

          • DensityDuck in reply to Chip Daniels says:

            Jeb Bush? The guy who’s a big fan of Charles Murray? The one who “doesn’t know” if the Emanuel AME church shooting was racist?

            I mean, you can point to other things, and I doubt that he’s genuinely racist the way these stories make him seem, but A) it’s not me you have to convince about this stuff, it’s you, and B) see above re: “one-to-ten scale of racism”.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to DensityDuck says:

              You asked if we were “allowed to make a distinction between “doesn’t agree with Democrat priorities and policy proposals” and “fucking asshole racist Trumpy”.

              And when I suggest Jeb Bush, you tell us that he is in fact a racist.

              I’m not sure what you are trying to prove here, but you seem to be going in the wrong direction.Report

  11. Jaybird says:

    To be honest, I stopped being able to predict the responses to out-and-out racism at some point in the last 4 years or so.

    Will we have forgotten this by Wednesday?Report

    • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

      I do not expect it to have impact beyond a cycle or two. We’re not learning anything we didn’t already know.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

        Do you want to know the last time that Trump did something that I was certain would result in him getting thrown out on his ass?

        It was the “Horseface” tweet.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

          I was pretty sure that we’d seen the last of him after “blood coming out of her, wherever”

          And then they…kept asking him about it? And he didn’t go away?

          And that was where I thought “uh oh. He’s not apologizing. They really don’t have a plan for that.”Report

  12. Saul Degraw says:

    I partially agree with Trump this time. The country three of these four congresswomen are from is being ruled by a corrupt and cruel administration. Oh wait, Trump wasn’t referring to himself.

    More seriously, Chip is correct about this one. I would go further. Trump is the logical conclusion (hopefully) of Nixon’s Southern Strategy to various race-baiting campaigns that Republicans used through out the 70s until now. There was the hands ad from Jesse Helms when it appeared he was going to lose. There was Willie Horton. There was Fox News and Nancy Grace, etc. GOP politicians whether racist themselves or not were perfectly willing to use race-baiting techniques to achieve electoral victory.

    Trump himself rung this bell for decades. His first public appearance was defending his father’s properties from charges that Trump the Pater refused to rent to black people. He called for a public lynching of the wrongfully accused and convicted Central Park Five in the 1980s. As Chips says, lots of people were and are willing to ignore this. Or they like it, Trump says the quiet parts very loud and they like it. Bigots and haters will always be among us so I guess they like hearing it openly. The big problem is the people who tried to (and continue to downplay) Trump’s racism because they hate that the opposition are Democrats and/or liberals. As former OTer Jason Kuznicki says there is a good chunk of people who “hate liberals more than they love liberty.
    There was a comment here many months ago that more or less said “I don’t like Trump but Democrats are the crap team and why won’t they become Republicans without Trump.” Or you have people that like Trump’s goals over all but just wish Trump himself was not so coarse and vulgar.

    I gotta say that my patience for the later groups is not existent and my sympathy for their predicament is not that good. Are there some whackjobs running for the Democratic nomination? Yes. Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang are whackjobs. But they are polling very low and continue to do so. SF gets a rap for being wild and liberal but our mayor is the very sensible London Breed and our representative is Nancy Pelosi who is currently a source of major frustration for the progressives that want to impeach now.

    But the desire to both sides is super-strong in many people so they need to equate a small percentage of antifa activists with the Democratic Party. Or you have pundits who just can’t admit that a good chunk of Americans like a racist bigot because it is bad for their wallets so they keep on trying to say “Today is the day that Donald Trump will become Presidential and unite all Americans” or “Donald Trump is better than this.”

    Donald Trump will never be Presidential and he is not better than unhinged racist attacks on Twitter. Sunday’s racist rant was the second story about Donald Trump being unhinged on Twitter this week.

    https://www.vox.com/2019/7/11/20690150/trump-tweets-off-the-rails-july-11-2019

    The President is an authoritarian, blowhard, racist bigot and he probably is suffering from some kind of dementia or serious neurological decline. Yet liberals must be owned and good forbid the Democrats put someone who will be marginally tougher to Corporate America on the Supreme Court so…..Report

  13. Aaron David says:

    Did this change anyone’s view of Trump? Is it going to cost him votes? Does it change the narrative of what is going on at the border, with INS? Has shouting Racist! at everything that moves completely nullified this? Does everyone think it is racist to say these things?

    Like Jaybird says, our predictions about racism or sexism or… have been failing for so long that our predictive powers are close to zero. And as Density Duck alludes to above, we might have been a little too quick to shout racism in the past and now that might come back and bite us in the ass.

    In the end, much like the comments about grabbing them by the p****, it is an aesthetic argument, not policy argument. If you think he is an a**hole, and let’s face it, most people do, but he is putting the country on the right track, then this holds no water. If, on the other hand, that this speaks to the core of the American experience, then you are horrified by this. But those votes already were.Report

    • Mike Dwyer in reply to Aaron David says:

      “Did this change anyone’s view of Trump? Is it going to cost him votes? Does it change the narrative of what is going on at the border, with INS? Has shouting Racist! at everything that moves completely nullified this? Does everyone think it is racist to say these things?”

      This. Look at Sam’s comment above. It’s not really about Trump here, it’s about characterizing his supporters. They are Bad People. In the woke religion, it’s important to clarify who is among the chosen and who is going to hell. I’m just fascinated by the religious fervor that believes pointing this out will somehow lead to their ascension someday.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

        This. Look at Sam’s comment above. It’s not really about Trump here, it’s about characterizing his supporters. They are Bad People.

        This is true for some people and not for others. Just as Sam’s comment accurately describes some conservatives and not others.Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

          Sure, but if we’re going through the Woke Religion checklist Sam checks pretty much every box. So if this is religious for him, not secular, we should also question the motivations of his analysis of Trump supporters? I mean, would you rather your actions were evaluated by an atheist or the Spanish Inquisition?Report

          • Marchmaine in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            “or the Spanish Inquisition”

            Finally, the OT Moderation Hat is within my grasp… or is that a rhetorical question?Report

          • Jesse in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            I see Mike got the new ‘I’m supposedly a centrist but the left is so crazy’ talking point that wokeness is just like religion.Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jesse says:

              Dude, I’ve been there for at least a year. It’s actually something I sort of knew in my subconscious but couldn’t really articulate until I started seeing other people talk about it. Now it makes perfect sense.

              And to be clear, it’s not ‘the Left’. It’s the Far Left/SJ Left that has gone the religious route.Report

              • It is worth noting here that the “wokeness” Mike is criticizing here is the belief that police officers should stop killing innocent people, and that when they do kill innocent people, there should be consequences for doing so. This, in Mike’s mind, is a conclusion that requires a religious-like devotion to arrive at.

                Meanwhile, what DOESN’T require a religious-like devotion to arrive at is the belief that police officers are always right, and that any evidence otherwise is to be simply explained away with increasingly ludicrous explanations designed only to justify any particular officer’s behavior.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                Mike backed his position with numbers. Numbers that revealed that errors in killing were rather small in proportion to the number of encounters.

                That somewhat separated his position from a religious one.

                A religious position would probably be ok with police being armed and expect zero killings for all encounters. That would require a hell of a lot of faith.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                Sam,

                Your obsession with police shootings is just your issue of choice. It’s similar to how Christians have various axes to grind. Your wokeness is not really about that one issue, it’s about your need to put everyone in the Good or Bad category and how you approach your Rightness with such a religious fervor. Replace police shootings with any other issue and I suspect you would be just as righteous and cast the other side in exactly the same manner. It’s just what you do.Report

              • JoeSal,

                Nobody anywhere has expected “zero killings for all encounters” nor argued for such.

                Faith is not required to believe that there should be consequences for behavior. Faith is required to believe that police officers are perfect and should be treated accordingly.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                Sam Wilkinson:
                “The obvious answer is that the goal should be 0 killings of unarmed people, per year, and that anything more than 0 should be rightly regarded as, at the minimum, a systematic failure by police to do the job that they are tasked with doing. ”

                I suppose you could dodge that by saying failures and killings are separate issues.

                And let’s say I shuffle it around. Would you be just as uncomfortable and looking to punish over one failure as many, even in the realm of large numbers?

                Mike mentions ‘continuous improvement’ and ‘systemic failures’, so I don’t think there is a concept of perfection on his part about the individual officer, or the system.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to JoeSal says:

                And I want to add that I am not picking on you in a ad hominem way.

                It is just that your position appeared at zero failure rates to have weight of social truth to it, and it may still, but how that meshes with the reality of large numbers of humans doing tasks, doesn’t mesh with the concept of objective reality.

                Because the truth component of reality would expect that large numbers of people doing something would have human errors in it.

                That’s where I start seeing it as a religion. The expectation of large quantities of humans doing something perfect to achieve ‘perfect justice’.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to JoeSal says:

                At the end of the day, an ideal goal of zero killings by police is nice, if not practical.

                If I’m being more practical, I’d want zero killings that were not clearly cases of legitimate self defense (dead person had a gun, in their hand, and was sending lead downrange towards the officer).

                However, I think a very realistic goal is that officers are held to the same standard as civilians with regard to the lawful use of deadly force.Report

              • Mike,

                We all have our topics that we write about. If that is your standard for obsession, so be it. But recognize that what you are doing is projecting outward.

                As for the idea that everybody is in a good or bad category, I would welcome very much a citation for me having made that claim.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                I wasn’t going to bother digging out a citation but you were kind enough to provide one here:

                ‘At the end of the day, if they’re voting for him, they support him. They’re not casting half votes. They’re not casting quarter votes. They’re making their declaration clear: they’re with him, racism, bigotry, animus and all.”

                and

                “Electoral support is absolute support, surely. …if they vote for him, they’re with him, and we should quite rightfully doubt the claims they make about their alleged disapproval of him.”

                So let’s assume that you cast your vote for HRC in 2016. I am 100% convinced she is an accomplice to rape by covering up for her husband for decade and what she did to Monica Lewinsky was criminal. I could also say that because she is pro-choice then she endorses the murder of thousands of unborn children every year, which would make you also an endorser of those murders by voting for her. But that seems extreme, not to mention that it would implicate my wife, whose heart I know to be good, and so I choose to see nuance. You do not. You only see Good and Bad. Justice Billings Hand said this, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.”

                So I agree with both have our topics we write about (yours with arguably a more singular focus than mine) but I am going to be arrogant enough to say that I try a lot harder to leave room for me being wrong.You seem to write from a place of zealous belief in your Rightness and your normal MO is to dare anyone to to disagree so that you can prove them to be Bad.

                Justice Billings Hand said, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” You might consider that approach Sam, though it’s pretty clear you have no idea of your own zealotry, so I suspect you will so see no need for a change.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                It really is funny to see how you’ve internalized the ‘Hillary Clinton did something to Monica Lewinsky’, and keep bringing it up even after it’s pointed out that is utter nonsense.

                Monica Lewinsky is not a victim of Hillary Clinton, in any sense. In fact, Lewinsky has repeatedly apologized _to_ Hillary for her affair with Bill: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/13/monica-lewinsky-sorry-hillary-clinton-987030

                The person who victimized Monica Lewinsky, as she has repeatedly made clear, was Ken Starr, by forcing her to testify to a private relationship under the threat of imprisonment, making her a huge public figure known for giving blowjobs, and ruining her life. She’s said the release of the Starr report was literally the worst day of her life.

                Please stop attempting to _make up_ how Monica Lewinsky feels about Hillary Clinton. She has been very very clear on that. She bears Hillary Clinton no malice whatsoever.

                But…you’ll just keep doing repeating it.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to DavidTC says:

                Wow, that was a lot of writing there… Do you work for them or something? Anyway, I’m not interested in re-litigating those two. Thankfully their days in the sun are just about over. If someone less over-the-moon for HRC wants to read more the NYT did a pretty good job.

                https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/us/politics/hillary-bill-clinton-women.html

                Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                As for ‘an accomplice to rape by covering up for her husband for decade’, you’re going to have be more specific there.

                There are two people who have alleged non-consensual sexual conduct on the part of Bill, and both of them have really weird claims about Hillary.

                Juanita Broaddrick has a story about a…handshake, which she’s not very sure of and, honestly, even if Hillary was attempting to communicate something, it’s hard to figure out exactly what was being implied there. And, uh, Broaddrick has been rather inconsistent in her feelings about this handshake over the years and whether Hillary was actually trying to say someone, or if she just _thought_ that at the time but was probably mistaken. And even if Broaddrick is completely correct, and we take the implication at 100% face value, it could have been Hillary saying ‘I know you and my husband have had sex, and we appreciate you remaining quiet’, without realizing it was rape.

                The other story, by Kathleen Willey, is even dumber. She says that Bill groped her while she volunteered at the White House, which…sounds completely plausible. She _then_ asserts she was terrorized by Hillary Clinton intimidating her with a dead cat on her porch, a man hiding under her deck, and a man asking ominous questions in her neighborhood. This is…less plausible. As far as I can tell, not only did these things not really happened, but it’s _completely_ unclear how Willey
                would know Hillary Clinton was behind them.

                Both these claims require…really weird behavior on the part of Hillary, and _even if the described events are 100% true_, don’t actually implicate Hillary in anything at all….the first could be ‘Don’t come forward about your affair with my husband’ and the second could have been from…anyone. (Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be even a hint why this would have been Hillary doing this stuff! Like, Hillary was randomly selected via dart board.)Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to DavidTC says:

                Well I’m back on the bigger picture of how Hillary becomes the Democratic party in toto.

                I mean I can grasp the logic of someone not liking her even unto seeing Trump as less evil.

                But what about the downballot candidates, the state legs, city council,governor, Congresspeople?

                Are these AnyonebutHillary folks voting D for all races except the Presidency?

                Or is there something uniquely evil about all those other candidates that makes the Republican the lesser evil in every case?

                I can’t remember a time when so many members of a party went to such incredible lengths to denounce it while at the same time voting for it straight ticket.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Mike,

                You are doing very impressive mental backflips to justify not voting Democratic in 2020. I’m Jewish and not always pleased with what AOC and Omar say about Israel but their statements are far less bad than the actions of the GOP under Trump overall.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Luckily Omar and AOC aren’t running so there is still hope…though of the 5 top contenders right now, only two of them are someone I could probably vote for at this time.

                But it is kind of funny how often Democrats here on the site complain to me that I am looking for a justification to not vote Democratic. It’s really a simple formula – run someone that I think isn’t a shill for Progressives or a capital S socialist and I’ll probably vote for them. Otherwise I will just find a 3rd party candidate as usual.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Every choice is a statement of priorities.

                Voting 3rd party means “The incumbent doesn’t bother me enough to evict him”.

                It doesn’t mean you love the incumbent, it just means whatever he’s doing isn’t of sufficient harm to you that ousting him becomes a top priority.

                Now it’s entirely possible that enough Americans feel this way to let Trump win re-election, I just don’t know.

                I just don’t think anyone should be bamboozled by the argument that had the Dems done something else, it would change things.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Or, the alternate candidate is, in a person’s opinion, the option capable of greater harm to that person.

                Trump is bad, but the democrats could always put forth someone worse (it’s early in the season!)Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                That too, is a choice of priorities.

                Imagine the worst that Warren could do, and compare that to the worst that the Trump can do.

                Any answer you give reveals a moral choice, a statement of what is important or not.

                None of us are innocent bystanders, impassive observers. We’re all players in this, and we all have some ownership in how things turn out.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Given that we’ve already hammered out that a vote for a person is an absolute statement of endorsement for everything they do, 3rd Party is obviously the only moral route.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                “I endorse the articles in Playboy, not the nekkid pictures!”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Is this one of those things where a vote for Trump is a vote for everything Trump does, a vote for a 3rd Party is a vote for everything Trump does, and the only thing that a vote for a Democrat indicates is non-racism without any other policy preference?Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Imagine the worst that Warren could do…

                The question I ask myself is, “If the Dems win all of the House, Senate, and White House, how much can they do?” The White House, by rule-making and/or decree, can’t go much farther left than where things stood at the end of Obama’s time. Legislation will be moderated by Pelosi and Schumer. Schumer is unlikely to find the votes to kill the legislative filibuster. If Pelosi or Schumer are replaced, it will be by someone in their 50s or 60s. None of the Squad are going to end up as Speaker or leading major committees. I don’t believe that John Roberts is going to roll over and allow wholesale reversal of Court decisions made over the last 20 years. I feel quite confident that voting for Warren (and for my current Dem Representative, and to replace my current Republican Senator) isn’t going to result in single-payer or free college (or court-packing or any of the more extreme positions common in the LGM commentariate).Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Michael Cain says:

                The issue for a lot of us Dems is that we view Trump and the GOP as an existential threat to liberal democracy itself.

                It isn’t policy x or y, its literally the ability of our nation to function as a democracy the way we’ve known it.

                I know that sounds overly melodramatic to some, but I would point to how common illiberal democracy is around the world currently, everywhere from Putin’s Russia to Xi’s China, to the various types of somewhat illiberal democracies in Europe like Hungary and Poland.

                The idea that America could become a lesser-than-free democracy is very real in my mind. Not a nightmare like Nazi Germany, but just one of those dreary little petty 3rd World kleptocracies where things sort of run along with the appearance of normalcy, but the government is hopelessly inept except with regard to graft and the occasional brutality done in the shadows.

                So I don’t know, when people sort of do this chin stroking thing of discussing Trump like he’s a normal politician proposing normal policy stuff it leaves me dumbfounded.

                It reminds me of that friend I had who was a missionary in Argentina in the 70s during the Dirty War. When I asked him if he didn’t find it scary, he laughed and said he had no idea it was going on.

                Because petty tyrannies are like that, where there is this large group of people who live completely untroubled lives, never experiencing the brutal fist of the government.

                Us folks here at OT are those sorts of people.

                With maybe one or two exceptions, no one here is going to ever experience a rough ride in a police van, or have our children ripped away from us, or watch a loved one be shot by the cops with impunity.

                For me, that’s how I make sense of the apparent blithe indifference of the 3rd party stuff. Where a potential tax hike become the deciding variable, because everything else is just a statistic, an abstraction.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Imagine the worst that Warren could do…

                Wealth tax. Setting things up so the next Microsoft or Amazon will be set up in another country.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                “At a Border Patrol holding facility in El Paso, Texas, an agent told a Honduran family that one parent would be sent to Mexico while the other parent and their three children could stay in the United States, according to the family. The agent turned to the couple’s youngest daughter — 3-year-old Sofia, whom they call Sofi — and asked her to make a choice.

                “The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,” her mother, Tania, told NPR through an interpreter. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take [my husband] away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, ‘You said [you want to go] with mom.’ “

                But yeah.
                Taxes, man.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                “The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,”

                First problem is Obama went to court for the right to do that sort of thing, so your carefully cherry picked story might be from his term.

                Bigger problem is if you cherry pick one person who had a bad result on a really bad day, then you can paint any story you want. Eric Garner died on Obama’s watch.

                When we start trying to put numbers to “what is good”, it gets real hard to look away from economic growth. It’s why we have a household income north of 50k rather than the 30k we had within living memory.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                If I called this behavior evil and unjust though,though, you wouldn’t argue the point?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                If I called this behavior evil and unjust though,though, you wouldn’t argue the point?

                That’s right. I wouldn’t argue the point. It’s evil and unjust.

                It’s also hardly the only evil thing going on if we’re going to look at the entire country. There are people who are food insecure, who lack housing, who lack opportunity, etc. If crying eyes motivate you then we can dig up a picture of a dying 3 year old with his parents begging for money.

                Treat all of that collectively as a whole and ask how to minimize it, or how to max human good, and we’re back to talking about growth.

                That kid being on the news doesn’t make everyone who isn’t on the news less real.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Wealth tax.

                Not a chance in hell. Warren can’t do it unilaterally, and Schumer — or any other Dem who could win the majority leader spot — won’t have the votes in the Senate to pass it.

                I’d be willing to bet my standard bet that Schumer won’t have the votes to simply repeal all of the McConnell tax cuts, let alone pass new taxes. The American system is set up so that the members of the legislature at all levels are on average older, richer, and more conservative than the people they represent. The Senate is the extreme case of that.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Michael Cain says:

                …won’t have the votes in the Senate to pass it.

                This is one of her main proposals which is supposedly proving she’s a serious player… and I don’t hear any pushback on it.

                If she gets the nod then team Blue is in the mood to eat the rich, no matter what the long term consequences will be. Figuring out what form the “compromise” over the meal takes would be interesting, but I’d prefer to deal with Trump’s various vilenesses.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Dark Matter says:

                This is one of her main proposals which is supposedly proving she’s a serious player… and I don’t hear any pushback on it.

                “Repeal Obamacare” was a main proposal by every Republican everywhere, it seemed. But when it actually mattered McConnell couldn’t deliver 50 votes.

                The Dems need to flip three seats (plus the White House) to control the Senate. Four if you assume Doug Jones loses in Alabama. There aren’t four states with Republican Senators to be flipped where a federal wealth tax supporter can win.

                To be honest, I’m not sure a federal wealth tax can get by the current Supreme Court.Report

              • 5. Manchin’s running for governor and good luck getting that seat back blue this cycle.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Michael Cain says:

                The Dems need to flip three seats (plus the White House) to control the Senate.

                Three problems. First, you’re thinking two years out, if Warren wins you should assume she’ll be in there for 8.

                2nd, Fleeing the country takes years to set up and implement if done right. A wealth tax is a retroactive tax, and hers comes with serious punishment for trying to escape it by shifting your assets overseas. Anyone who would be hurt by this needs to flee the country years before she fully gets her act together.

                A serious player even talking about this is destructive. Imagine Trump starting to talk about death camps in a “how” kind of way and there’s no push back in the GOP. That he doesn’t have 60 votes wouldn’t be all that reassuring.

                3rd. Yes, agreed that the stars aligning for a wealth tax is unlikely, but it’s a good measuring stick for where her head is at and giving her the nod is a good measuring stick for where the Dems are at. If it takes 20 years for this to be make it into the law books, the economic power houses will have seen it coming for at least 5.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                The problem that liberals never seem to understand is that because you all believe that government can cure all ills and you like Big Huge Programs to do it, there is also great capacity for harm. No need to cite all of the many examples of that very thing here, but the last 50 years is littered with them. So yeah, while I think Trump does harm in the ethical and basic human decency sense, I also think other presidents have done real harm in that capacity and we have recovered much faster from that than we do from bad policy. Bad policies last for generations.

                Since I mentioned busing earlier, I can give you lots of examples of specific harm done by busing to minorities every day in my city. My wife spends a good part of her workdays trying to mitigate it. Those kids and their families are not harmed by racist tweets but they are harmed daily by bad liberal policy. So yeah, those are the kinds of things I think about in the voting booth.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                There are a many articles and tweet streams on the webs in the last couple days from immigrants or POC’s saying that the racist tweets is a big issue for them. They have been told the leave the country or some such bilge for years and having the prez say that will just ramp that up and is deeply insulting on it’s own. It’s not a nothingburger that doesn’t effect them.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                Okay – so someone that is politically engaged enough to even know what he said, understand the context and then tweets about it…they are upset. Gotcha.

                Meanwhile the single POC mother who has never been able to attend a PTA meeting because her kids are bused across town and she doesn’t own a car, just found out her 6 year-old got suspended from the bus because he couldn’t keep it together for the hour-long ride (because he is friggin’ 6 years-old) and now he has to be driven to school every day. And if she can’t make that happen, he will eventually be reported to a social worker (my wife) who will unfortunately have to send his mom scary-sounding letters, visit their home and if things don’t improve, refer them to child protective services. And all of that is because some well-meaning liberals decided that the best thing for this child wasn’t to go to school down the block, but to spend the day in a classroom with middle class white kids, hoping their magic white people success will rub off on him through osmosis or something.

                So yeah, i will reiterate what I just said…bad policy hurts that family far more than a racist tweet.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Yeah bad policy hurts. I’m all about talkign policy. Guy who tweets racist things does racist policy things is a pretty straihgforward path along with the harm the tweets do.

                Bad policy and bad tweets can both be bad. In fact they are. We can dislike more than one thing. One bad thing doesn’t erase the other bad thing.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                What I discovered when I became a liberal is that when you start to speak about doing things on behalf of the oppressed rather than yourself, people notice when your claims of harm are different than what the oppressed themselves say.

                That is, your claims of the harm done to minority communities, and the proposed solutions, sound very different than what those people themselves say.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Chip – see my reply to Greg about busing. I see the effects every single day. My wife deals with it as a social worker with the school system. I deal with it as a manager with minority employees. I keep up with the numbers for inner city gun crime. I see the extra money leaving my employees paychecks every month because the Obama administration messed with healthcare spending accounts. I know you have this idea that minorities really appreciate the efforts of white liberals…and maybe some of them do…but a lot of them probably just wish everyone would get out of their way.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Sorry mike, you may not like D policies and in some cases i would even agree with you. But the “white liberals” stuff is crap. POC have been a major part of the D establishment for decades now. Maybe they have had bad ideas but D policies have not been white people doing things to POC. Even something like the drug war had support from POC in gov.

                It’s a weird twist to speak up for the needs of POC but then erase the actual voice they have had on policy. You certainly did not invent it, but it still is weak and not good history.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                So, white liberals are immune to the blame for bad policy because they invited POC to the table when they were crafting those policies? Really? It almost makes me wonder if a token POC is invited to every liberal policy meeting just so the whites have deniability.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Cthulhu on a crutch Mike. You are letting the heat of this debate get to you. Blame liberals all you want. My direct point was that POC have had a significant in crafting the policies of the D’s for a quite a while now. That is a generalization, but it’s true. Don’t like how the polices of D’s affected POC’s. Well there is a solid chance POC’s may have voted for those polices. Not as tokens but because they believed it.

                More busing ain’t going to happen. But if you want to engage the discussion there are POC’s who see it as a solution. They maybe wrong in a dozen ways but they aren’t tokens and they are seriously looking at their communities.

                It’s an artifact of the places we talk on the webtoobz that people think all liberals are white and , of course, that all POC are liberals. There are plenty of very liberal POC and conservative POC. It isn’t all whites.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                Yeah, I get that sometimes liberals let POC have a voice, but keep in mind that busing was not crafted by meeting with poor minorities in their communities. Busing was crafted in Ivy towers, maybe with a few PhD-holding POCs there…maybe.

                But we’re off-topic here. my point was that liberal policies hurt POC every single day. Those same people, if they are even paying attention to what the president says, are not directly impacted by his words beyond the emotional level. That single mother I was talking about might even follow politics as a hobby and be outraged by his tweets…but it’s the liberal policy that actually affects her and her kids. And that’s what i have been trying to say. When i’m considering who to vote for, i’m often more wary of the well-intentioned liberal that is going to affect millions with bad policy, moreso than the nefarious who never seems to actually pass much in the way of policy.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                But than that leads to the obvious point regarding who POC tend to vote for over the last few decades. For better or worse most groups of POC vote somewhere between solidly for to overwhelmingly for D’s.

                It would be better if R’s were more competition for, lets say, African American votes. It really would bevbetter to push D’s more and to offer them more options. But it isn’t the D’s fault for what the R’s do.

                I’m guessing the recent tweets will not inspire POC or any group with recent or current immigration to vote for trump or R’s. The tweets will actually matter when the votes are cast.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                I think POC primarily support Dems because we have a binary system. The GOP has certainly not done a good job of attracting them and unfortunately in our system there isn’t a third option. It seems fairly obvious to me how to craft a message that blacks could get behind, but thus far tradition is still the thing helping Dems the most.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                The binary choice is an issue. But that cuts all ways. I think it would be great in some ways to have a parliamentary system with a real libertarian and social D party. I doubt they would ever be big but having those voices be more prominent and be able to swing votes would be healthy. Alas we got what we got and who POC tend to vote for is pretty obvious.

                It’s also not hard to follow D politics and see that African American women, as mayor pete said, are a strong driving force in the party.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Mike,

                Just admit that you never want to vote for a Democrat. Life will be easier for everyone involved. Just admit that you are still squished out by homosexuality instead of doing a dance while also calling drag queen story time “overt.” Just admit that you might not want to see children in concentration camps but still allowing more immigration is not great either.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Saul,

                When you get a little older, perhaps nuance will make more sense to you. I vote for lots of Democrats, just not for president so far. I’ve voted for my liberal Democratic congressman at least 4 times now. Also our liberal mayor. I will be voting for the Democratic nominee for governor in KY this fall. It’s a big world bro and the WH is just one little part of it.

                (BTW, when you say ‘everyone involved’ who is in that group? Need to know for when I send out my holiday cards.)Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Mike, you’re looking at this the wrong way.

                Read what Saul is saying as if “Just As I Am” were playing on the organ.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jaybird says:

                I’m sort of staggered by how aggravated people are by this. It’s probably a good indication of how much they are going to lose their shit if/when Trump gets re-elected.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Then you should have no problem voting for any Democratic nominee, because whatever they need to pass will need the votes of Senators either as or more conservative than any current Kentucky congresspeople or the Democratic nominee for Kentucky Governor.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jesse says:

                I have read your comment at least 5 times and I do not understand it. Before you clarify, can I reiterate that Trump is probably going to carry KY by several thousand votes?Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I think you need to remember where I live. Kentucky is bright red. Anything is possible, but I expect Trump to be well ahead on the polls come election day. That gives me the luxury of voting my conscience for a 3rd party candidate if the Dems nominate a turd.

                With that said, I voted 3rd party in 2016 for the same reasons and I’ve still been taking to the woodshed here many, many times because I don’t preface every utterance of his name with Racist Shitbag Trump. It’s just sort of assumed by most liberals that if you lean rightward you secretly like him or at least look the other way on his behavior. So honestly, it would serve me better just to lie and say I voted for Harris or whomever…but that’s not how I roll.Report

              • cjcolucci in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Down to two already? How did this comment end up down here instead o?f where it belongsReport

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to cjcolucci says:

                Yeah – it’s amazing how fast you all wrecked the field. I had hopes there would be some good ones hanging around longer.Report

              • cjcolucci in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                So when I said “name three” and you named five or six, and I suggested that you were fooling either yourself or us, and Jaybird got all bent out of shape, the issue was one of timing?Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to cjcolucci says:

                CJ – you have to work on that reading every word thing – pretend it’s billing for a wealthy client and you want to get all that sweet divorce money …. I said out of the five front runners. Not my fault the Left seems to be boarding the Titanic so quickly.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Oh, for the record, I’m most probably not voting Democratic in 2020 either.

                While it’s true that I won’t be voting for Trump, the Democratic nominee not being Trump is not sufficient to win my vote.

                I submit to you: if you think it ought to be, you are going to be as surprised in November 2020 as you were in 2016.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                You are doing very impressive mental backflips to justify not voting Democratic in 2020.

                You’re assuming “racism” is THE priority, when for most people it’s probably not even “a” priority.

                I put a value of “zero” on Twitter in general and Trump’s feed specifically. My priority is economic growth. Trump’s performance has been far from perfect from that point of view so there’s vast room for improvement… but that assumes the Dems care.

                Underneath the xenophobia, the racism, the trade wars, the narcissism, and the ego, Trump seems to care about economic growth (I assume in service to his greed but whatever). However him trying to do good things is a bit like putting a bull in a china shop and expecting him to craft vases, so I’d really like him out of there.

                Right now, two of the four Dem front runners have economic proposals so nasty that, imho, they make Trump look good.Report

              • So the fact that the economy is being propped up by absolutely unprecedented deficits doesn’t bother you?Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                Actually Rushbo was all over this today. Nobody really cares about the deficit, it was always a fraud and not a worry. Rush is Right.

                Limbaugh: “Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus”Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                So the fact that the economy is being propped up by absolutely unprecedented deficits doesn’t bother you?

                It bothers me a great deal. To fix it we need serious entitlement reform. We’re not in enough pain to do that.

                We’ll fix this issue at the last minute with great pain inflicted on lots of people… or… we’ll get enough economic growth that we’ll be able to pay for our promises. Or some combo of those.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Mommy said they had to take our food stamps because concentration camp contractors needed new yachts.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                If that were the choice then it’d be easy. Unfortunately that’s not the choice and the reality is pretty ugly.Report

              • Exploding the deficits in unprecedented ways is what Republican presidents do. First Reagan with tax cuts + military buildup, then W with tax cuts plus starting two wars without even budgeting for them, now Trump with tax cuts plus military buildup plus subsidies for farmers hurt by his tariffs. Unified Republican government, as in 2017-2019 is worst of all.

                Of course, of a Democrat is elected, they’ll go back to being deficit hawks. Their hypocrisy and irresponsibility is staggering,.Report

      • Which part of my comment above are you actually objecting to?Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

          “…and there’s no reason to pretend that his supporters do not absolutely agree with him. They are both motivated by the same sort of animus.”

          You might believe every word of that, and you are entitled to that belief, but let’s not pretend it’s anything other than your opinion. And please, for the love of god, before you do the Sam thing where you tell us there is no way we could see X without reaching conclusion Y…we’ve seen that from you a thousand times already and much better commenters than me have already discredited your methodology. It would be way more interesting if you tried a different approach.Report

          • Mike,

            My apologies regarding your confusion: which part of my comment are you actually objecting to? You’ve not answered that.Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

              I quoted it directly above Sam. Whatever game you are playing, why don’t you just skip to the punchline now?Report

              • What’s the objection exactly? Are you claiming that Trump’s supporters aren’t motivated by their shared animus toward targeted groups?Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                The OP you were referring to specifically talked about racism/bigotry. Is that the flavor of animus you are talking about?Report

              • I think the question is exceedingly clear: what are you objecting to? You’ve quoted one-and-a-half sentences in your original comment.Report

              • North in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                I think he’s saying that asserting that Trumps supporters all agree with him completely and absolutely, as you assert, is quite a leap. It’s pretty obvious that Trumps supporters run the gamut from absolute unquestioning supporters to reluctant supporters who mewl that the Democrats are worse.

                And he’s right Sam. Trumps supporters are humans; not bees. Humans don’t absolutely support anything in large groups. Personally I think that fact is more damning on conservatives than what you allege.Report

              • Sam Wilkinson in reply to North says:

                At the end of the day, if they’re voting for him, they support him. They’re not casting half votes. They’re not casting quarter votes. They’re making their declaration clear: they’re with him, racism, bigotry, animus and all.

                If that’s a failing of democracy, so be it, but we are not obliged to try to excuse away what it means to support Trump.Report

              • North in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                Support him, electorally, sure, but you didn’t say that. You said they absolutely agree with him and we both know it’s not the case.Report

              • Sam Wilkinson in reply to North says:

                Electoral support is absolute support, surely. How else can they support him (or not support him) in a meaningful way? They can tut-tut him, the things he has said, and the things he has done, but if they vote for him, they’re with him, and we should quite rightfully doubt the claims they make about their alleged disapproval of him.Report

              • North in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                Seems like a big distance from knowing absolutely that Trumps supporters agree with him on all matters Sam me lad. Why don’t we just walk it back to saying their electoral support is unwavering and stronger than their past support for their previous supposed principled conservative leaders and leave it at that. It’s a much bigger insult to conservatives than what you said.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

                I assume you voted for Obama, so you absolutely supported his decision to authorize the killing of US citizens without due process?Report

              • Philip h in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                That was one of the reasons I voted third party against him the second time around, and why I voted against HRC, in as much as she seemed perfectly fine with keeping those policies in place (along with her atrocious neoliberal economic plans).

                @Sam Wilkerson is both correct and not in as much as those who supported Trump did so willingly, and were and are prepared to embrace him because he ticks a box for them (and its many different boxes) that no other politicians ticks. Where Sam’s analysis fails (and Mike hints at this but isn’t bold enough to embrace it yet) is that Democrats COULD do something about those boxes if they took a different path. Voter I talk to in the South, and DC and elsewhere want clear choices. They want someone to be fighting for them economically. They want to know they matter, and in our current age of the oligarchs they don’t feel like they do. Voters want to be in control of their own destiny, and they know they are not, so they lashed out in fear. Republican politicians have become adept for the last 40 years at exploiting that fear, and DJT is just the latest to do so. Democrats could address that fear as well, but going further Right won’t cut it. Remember, the reason DJT is in the WH is not that he won an overwhelming majority, its that 45% of voters stayed home. Get those folks in voting booths and voting against him, and him having 27% of the country tolerating (if not agreeing with ) his racism is irrelevant.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Philip h says:

                AgreedReport

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip h says:

                And of course you realize that from a rightward perspective we see the last 40 years of Democratic policies as mostly stoking fears within certain communities, thus increasing reliance on the government. it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations that find the Left telling these people they can only succeed through the help of white saviors. Personally I find it more insidious because it creates so much apathy in those communities. At least Trump’s overt bigotry creates action in those communities.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                What creates apathy in those communities is lack of transportation, lack of real economic opportunity and lack of real educational opportunity. No liberal has lower expectations of someone because of their race or economic situation – but we recognize in a why conservatives will not that market economics has not solved many big societal problems and never will, and so we pursue ideas that seek to ameliorate those issues through government – because that’s the only avenue left to do things that big.

                Take as an example Kentucky coal miners. Markets for their coal have declined steadily for more then a decade. They can’t rebrand or retool or innovate their way out of that, and the Trump rhetoric not withstanding, government can’t create an artificial market for their product for very long (which iMHO means government is choosing winners and losers which is the antithesis of a free market). Many of those miners were well paid, and drove local economic prosperity.

                Now those regions are in economic decline, and like it or not, government intervention will be required if those folks are going to stay where they are and live lives of dignity and productivity. Looking at that, modern Republican politicians decided to try and prop up coal exports which only delays the pain and – if reported mining bankruptcies are be believed – doesn’t delay it for long. As they intervene in those markets, they have also slashed budgets for job retraining programs (A liberal policy) which are likely the route to the most economic success for the most people int he region. Liberals would also agitate – and many already have – for relocation assistance to get retrained people to jobs, and for expanded public education for the children of those who remain, again with an eye to making the folks still in the coal fields productive citizens. Conservatives block those moves at every turn because they require tax funds and expand government, even though it their lack of support for those programs has a direct impact on their own constituents.

                So yeah, its all liberals fault for wanting to help people. I suppose when the last mine closes we should just let them all starve since it will motivate them to move elsewhere to seek opportunity with their skill sets.Report

              • Em Carpenter in reply to Philip H says:

                I’m on my second read-through of Isenberg’s “White Trash”, and that was exactly the line of thought for why most of the settlers England shipped off to Jamestown were the poor, the “vagrant”, and the criminal; they thought they would either thrive and create a productive colony, or die- win/win.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Em Carpenter says:

                Those sent to Australia were surly expected to die . . . and seem to have gotten a lot of things right anyway.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip H says:

                Let me counter with another example from Kentucky: During the Clinton years it became clear that tobacco was on the way out as Kentucky’s main cash crop. So our farmers began to diversify and were doing all kinds of cool stuff. Freshwater prawns, grapes, sheep & goats, etc. The kinds of things you can do on rolling hills. The Ag department was opening co-ops and it was an exciting time. Then the government started subsidizing the hell out of corn and soybeans for biofuel. All that innovation and diversification stopped. Everyone just started growing those two crops. They are making money now but as soon as that goes away, they are hosed again. That is the pain that gets created by big government programs.

                Ironically though, McConnell did us a big favor with legalizing hemp again so there is hope, but even that is just one crop, although KY is uniquely suited to take advantage of it.

                At the end of the day I just think that the good intentions of liberals often do an extreme amount of harm and it takes a really long time for us to realize it and an even longer time for us to reverse course. I simply don’t trust those policies most of the time.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Weren’t many of those ethanol subsidies passed under Republicans in the Bush administration?Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip H says:

                Do you consider Bush to be a small government conservative?Report

              • North in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                You sure as hell don’t get to call him a liberal and foist him off on us! He’s not one of ours; nice try though.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to North says:

                Biofuel subsidies are Big Government. He didn’t have to be a liberal to do liberal things…right? My point is, these are the reasons I am always leery about liberal policies because they have so many unintended side effects.

                Side note: I was told that American biofuel subsidies have also affected the salinity of bodies of water in Canada.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                i find it tough to call anyone a small government conservative when they balloon the deficit and debt.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip H says:

                My point exactly. So we agree he really governed like a traditional liberal, at least on the domestic side. Big government programs with a multitude of negative side-effects.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                By that logic Eisenhower was the last conservative President.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip H says:

                True story: Both Eisenhower and Nixon referred to themselves as Progressives.Report

              • Philip h in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Also true story – Nixon signed all the environmental laws Republicans have been trying to roll back since Reagan.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Philip h says:

                Agreed, which also makes my point because I think you know how much I dislike the way the Left uses the EPA. Nixon did liberal things, so did Bush. Those things have had some pretty negative side-effects, so that’s something to consider when a Warren or Harris get nominated (especially Warren, god help us). I just continue to believe that Warren would do far more abject harm than Trump, even if I have no doubt I would enjoy hanging out with her and the Secret Service would probably have to get involved if i spent more than 5 minutes with Trump. It’s not about intent, it’s about results.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Philip h says:

                Nixon gets too much credit for this. Years later, when we got to see his papers, his reason for creating the EPA by executive order was that he didn’t like or trust the environmentalists in various federal agencies and wanted them all in one place where they could be more easily controlled. He vetoed the Clean Water Act. Like all of the major environmental bills of that time, it had passed by a veto-proof majority and the veto was overridden. He impounded half the funds appropriated to enforce the CWA, eventually losing in the Supreme Court and leading to passage of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

                Much of Nixon’s support of environmental protection was under the umbrella of his New Federalism plans: he wanted most of the control (and funding) to be the responsibility of the individual states, with some federal oversight. Congress declined to do it that way.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Philip H says:

                “By that logic Eisenhower was the last conservative President.”

                you present this like it’s a Mega Own but not a few conservatives would agree with you hereReport

              • Philip H in reply to DensityDuck says:

                One of my great quibbles about Republican politicians who call themselves fiscal conservatives is they are anything (at least in my life time). They just focus on defense spending and tax cuts as opposed to wanting to raise revenues to provide social and economic services they think need to be provided. Its a seething hypocrisy I wish they’d just ditch because – like their refusal to take the victory lap when a democrat passed the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare reform package – it prevents us from having an actual national discussion of policy alternatives.Report

              • Slade the Leveller in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                No one is ever forced to take subsidies. If you’re making it on your own, with your new, economically sustainable crop, then taking the subsidy is just another form of welfare.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

                I agree with you, but when you dangle that money in front of someone it’s pretty hard to resist. Even programs I support, like the CRP program out west or some of the other things our Ag department does here in KY, all come at a price. I don’t hate all subsidies as a blanket policy, but they have so much potential for negative waterfall effects. That’s why i get so nervous about them.Report

    • I don’t expect this to have a long-term effect on Trump’s re-election prospects. And at this point neither do I expect overly-expansive definitions of racism on the part of the left to move the needle. It’s all built in.

      Sometimes observations are worthwhile even when they don’t move to the political needle. It’s one of the reasons a lot of people who support him argue that the president is not a racist. It matters to them. (In fact, I wrote this in part thinking of all of the times defenders have tried to insist that he is not racist. I can guarantee you someone will make that argument again here soon.)Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

        When the democrats were infighting last week, it was a great opportunity for Trump to shut the heck up and let them claw at each other.

        He failed to take that opportunity.

        This has given the democrats a great opportunity.Report

      • Aaron David in reply to Will Truman says:

        I agree with this wholeheartedly.

        I do, however, feel that we have been shouting Racist! at anything that we don’t like for so long that the idea of it, what is and is not racist, has lost almost all meaning. And that is really destructive to trying to end racism and to truly become a more inclusive society.Report

        • The fact that it is abused by some does not mean that the concept no longer exists, or shouldn’t be or can’t be identified. Or that it should be reserved only for violence and burning crosses (and even then, denied sometimes).

          I don’t have a long history of throwing the R word around right and left. If that’s someone’s objection, it shouldn’t apply here.

          But I knew without a doubt it would be and so devoted a couple paragraphs to that argument.Report

        • Philip h in reply to Aaron David says:

          I agree with Will that abuse doesn’t make it wrong to point out, nor should the Left pull back simply because the Commander in Chief is a well known racist.
          I grew up in a southern state that had to reelect a governor known to be under FBI investigation (for which he later served time in the federal pen) in order to keep a Grand Wizard of the KKK out of the state house. Said Grand Wizard openly supports the president. So for some of us, shouting racism is a daily need in as much as we are daily surrounded by racism in ways that can’t be easily ignored. Its tiring for us, but still must be done.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Will Truman says:

        (In fact, I wrote this in part thinking of all of the times defenders have tried to insist that he is not racist. I can guarantee you someone will make that argument again here soon.)

        “Here” here or ‘on the internet’ here? Because for the latter, several posters at Instapundit, as well as Ann Althouse, have made that argument in this micro-cycle.Report

        • Kolohe in reply to Kolohe says:

          TvD is also out their on twitter defending the comments and retweeting ‘Trump’s not a racist’ sophists with hairsplitting parsing of Trump’s series of tweetsReport

    • greginak in reply to Aaron David says:

      Good post Will. Whether or not this will be remembered is irrelevant. It will be by some, though mostly his opponents. If it’s wrong it’s wrong. His sympathizers are going to try to forget it, at least in public, as fast as possible. This is very much not about aesthetics. It is only that if racism doesn’t actually effect you. If you feel the brunt of racism in some way then this just another little notch up on the spigot of racist crap that spews on you.

      Statements like this are not policy, of course, the sympathizers plead. But motivation matters. Motivation animates policy and how it is applied. Statements like this give more license to ordinary citizens to shout this at fellow citizens on the street or in the market. Statements like this certainly empower people who may have kept those feelings private to let them loose if they are in positions of power.

      If the word racism is used to often, which it is, that doesn’t diminish the need to call it out when you see it. To many people say they don’t like racism but when presented with it, really just hate liberals or Dem’s more, so speaking out against presidential racism is to much for them.

      And just to repeat something i’ve said before. There has been far to much toxic hyperbolic name calling in this country for as long as i can remember. Calling liberals traitor or designating certain parts of the country as less American is old hat at this point. No “team” hasn’t gone to the shit cannon with name calling. If you don’t like it, then good. But if all you do is whine about one side and don’t see the other, then you probably are actually practitioner of that art and certainly blind to it.Report

  14. George Turner says:

    There was a poll out yesterday that said swing voters are overwhelmingly familiar with AOC and think of her as representing the Democrat party. She also is wildly unpopular, but not quite as much as Ilhan Omar, of whom only 9% have a positive impression. Nine percent.

    What Trump is doing is making sure that the national conversation stays squarely focused on the freshman Democrats who constantly scream that America is an evil racist country controlled by Jews, and who are now pointing out that Democrats are the same backwards white racists who ran the Jim Crow South.

    Trump’s political genius in 2016 was in openly saying what everyone was thinking, but what everyone was afraid to say publicly because they weren’t hearing anyone else say it, except perhaps in their small circle of trusted friends. When the Democrat party embraces members who repeatedly espouse more hatred of America and Americans than we usually hear from Iran or North Korea, a whole lot of voters think “Those hateful, ungrateful wretches should crawl back to whatever broken-down country they came from.” That they came from such a country isn’t fact, it’s an impression that they represent a set of beliefs, values, and emotions that are wildly foreign to our body politic. Trump is both lancing the boil and providing cathartic release, while keeping the focus squarely on the festering issue that the Democrats can’t resolve.

    He is that horrible uncle that your huge family has to eat Thanksgiving dinner with. Most of the family does not, not, not want to talk about certain sensitive subjects, and the rest of the family knows not to talk about them. Trump is boorish loudmouth from New Jersey who is going to bring those up, squarely and insultingly.

    “Tommy, I see you’ve flunked out of college again. So, Fred, have you finally quit schlepping your secretary? Amber, it’s nice that you got into Yale, but if you hate America that much why don’t you move to Tehran? And sometime I’ll tell you why your mom gave you a stripper name.”

    He’s long-ago understood the family and read the room and he’s eating Turkey and stuffing and swinging an ax. A third of the family is horrified and outraged and scream at him to stop, a third are chiming in on his barbs, and a third are staring at their plates and trying hard to suppress the giggles.Report

    • Pat in reply to George Turner says:

      ” the freshman Democrats who constantly scream that America is an evil racist country controlled by Jews”

      Hi.

      This has never been uttered by any of the “Squad”. I disagree with most of their policy proposals but this is just fucking garbage version of “dialogue” that seriously doesn’t belong here.

      George, you are a stain on the Internet, you are the sole reason I don’t comment here much anymore, and if I had my druthers you’d be banned to the cesspool that is your own mind, permanently.Report

      • North in reply to Pat says:

        I’m very sorry you don’t comment here because of George, Pat, because you’re a great person to have around and in the community. George drives me up the wall too but I feel we shouldn’t be trying to chase him away and certainly not ban him. Yeah, a lot of the things he says seem to come out of a right wing imaginary land but a significant portion of conservatives have succumbed to that form of mind set and they are the dominant force in the Republican Party. George and his odd exaggerations and enraging mis-characterizations is probably more representative of that part of the polity and of current main stream conservatism than anyone else on the site. Since he stays civil and doesn’t break the rules he shouldn’t be banned and since he embodies republican thought such as it is I think he should be engaged as much as one can stomach and ignored if you can’t stand engaging him.

        All that said, I am very sorry he aggravates you so much and I do suffer your absence.Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to North says:

          This raises a question though. Is spewing patently paranoid and false stuff civil if said in sufficiently polite and/or neutral language? I don’t think it is and I think it is a detriment to the site that we let George do it because he is polite.

          I get that the Powers that Be want OT to be cross-ideological but doesn’t it raise serious issues if we need to bend over backwards for George’s false rantings to get a right-wing voice here.

          And I realize that a lot of OTers probably see me as a partisan hack for the Democrats.Report

          • DensityDuck in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            “I think it is a detriment to the site that we let George do it because he is polite.”

            So, what, you think you can’t talk his position down because he’s too nice about it?Report

          • North in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            If you think it’s patently paranoid and false then you’re free to civilly question it. I grant that George is far more energetic about his assertions than I personally am about pushing back on them. But I put in a row at the oar from time to time.

            But drive him out because we don’t agree with him and can’t be bothered to push back argument wise? If we wanted to hang out at Red State or NRO or Jacobin those sites are already in existence.

            And, frankly, George embodies conservatism in its modern form; you never know if he’s trolling to own the libs, actually believes it or is a closet liberal pretending to be a conservative. Wouldn’t driving him away be sanitizing conservatism here on the site? What has conservatism done for me that I’d want to do that kind of service for conservatism?Report

            • North in reply to North says:

              Before I forget, I must hasten to add that sometimes George posts clever things, or funny things and they’re great. So it’s not like he’s a Russian bot or something.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to North says:

                Since we’re talking about George like he can’t read the comments…

                If he wasn’t here I’d have to assume you all made up half the stuff you say Republicans say.

                Slightly more seriously, George says his bit, but he rarely lights after someone and attacks. I remember far more angry and zealous leftists and libertarians that would savage new and old commenters for crossing them.

                To not comment because George might lay one of his bricks on or near your comment? That seems odd. He doesn’t pick fights and (after Maribou trained him in) he minds the rules.

                Sometimes I think maybe George could use a hobby and maybe distill his thought for the day into fewer and shorter posts… but then that’s probably better advice for me.

                Someday I want the full ballad of BP related to me in verse over cognac. Start from the beginning.Report

              • It pushed for the overthrow of the Iranian government , back when it was still called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.Report

            • Saul Degraw in reply to North says:

              I disagree with your add on and I also disagree with what you think happens when we let George post here. You seem to think we are exposing modern day Republicanism in an unvarnished form. Maybe you are right but I also think plenty of people can read is ravings and decide they want nothing to do with us and forgo posting.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                “but I also think plenty of people can read is ravings and decide they want nothing to do with us and forgo posting.”

                Well, we let you post here and hadn’t asked for your banishment yet.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to JoeSal says:

                I want to live in a world in which Saul is the voice of the radical extremists.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                He falls on the extreme side of the two freedoms problem, so that makes him a extremist in my book.

                As awnry as we can be over here we don’t often run off folks from our side, and don’t often request banishment from that side.

                I think yall suffer dearly from friendly fire.

                I’ve become somewhat convinced that if two or more rightward folks left this place it would become just another leftist church.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I never know how to react when people call me a left-wing extremist especially because there are people on LGM who curse at me for being a pro-capitalist, yuppie, gentrifier, Rockefeller Republican and a prig.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I want to live in a world in which Saul is the voice of the radical extremists.

                Isn’t that 1970?Report

              • North in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                It’s happened occasionally. Not as often as I’d like; the charm to loony ratio isn’t favorable but it does exist and bears being acknowledged.

                There’s always the risk that some people won’t take the plunge into the community based on what any given poster says. It sounds harsh but I would think such people probably wouldn’t be a good fit in the rough and tumble of the commentariate here and are probably better off not doing so.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to North says:

                FWIW, I enjoy coming here because there are conservatives about.

                I lurk in Balloon Juice and snark on LGM, but its nice to actually have opposing viewpoints to tilt against.

                And given the absolute sewer that most open comment boards devolve into this place is like a Casablanca where we fight by singing the Marseillaise just a bit louder.Report

              • greginak in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Agreed. It has always been the appeal of this place to have a variety of viewpoints. It’s sad that we are model of f*cking civility compared to most of discussion boards out there. Though your metaphor could lead to a new tagline for the site.

                OT: No, Rick is not going to save you here.Report

          • Mike Dwyer in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” – Socrates

            That’s generally the way I feel about people wanting to cleanse a space of opinions they don’t like. The other side wins by default.Report

      • Mike Dwyer in reply to Pat says:

        Pat,

        Let’s break George’s comment down:

        ‘America is evil’ – AOC says we are running concentration camps on the Southern border. She deliberately chose that term. Isn’t that meant to reference some sort of evil?

        https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/aoc-isnt-interested-american-exceptionalism/592213/

        ‘America is racist’ – All of the Progressive Four have either implied this or said it explicitly

        ‘America is controlled by Jews’ – AOC has played cozy with the anti-Israel lobby and we know that Omar has stated numerous times that America is beholden to the Israel lobby.

        So because they didn’t actually string those things together into the sentence George wrote, are we still going to pretend they don’t believe all of those things?Report

        • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

          Omar has flirted with the line and rightfully been called out on it, but criticizing anti-Israel lobby is not “controlled by Jews” territory (the biggest problem with Omar’s comment being that she was unclear as to whether she meant the Israel lobby in particular or Jews more generally).Report

          • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

            Let’s change ‘controlled by Jews’ into ‘foreign policy is steered by the pro-Israel lobby’. Does that sound better?Report

            • Will Truman in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

              That makes it a substantively different statement, IMO.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

                I mean, I guess it does if someone separates Jews from The People of Israel. I’m not well-versed on the cultural opinions of the people that live there. Maybe that’s something Lee or Saul could help with.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                FWIW Mike, George’s comments are the generic misdirections used to avoid discussion. Plenty of conservatives say american is evil or badly wrong at times. It happened plenty when that other guy was Prez.

                I agree we are running concentration camps and i had distant relatives who died in the OG concentration camps during WW2. Fussing over whether the particular noun is the most accurate as opposed to whether what we are doing is Right is pedantic misdirection.

                The “pro-isreal” lobby has far to much sway in our gov. I now only think that but my FIL was heavily in involved in the state level AIPAC for years but left due to feeling their politics going to much towards RW Israeli politics. It’s a pretty common feeling among American jews that RW Israeli politics is wrong headed but powerful in DC.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                Well unfortunately that word choice skewed the debate for a couple of weeks…but hyperbole will do that. AOC certainly intended to outrage and damn if it didn’t work. The entire Democratic presidential field declared their support for Open Border less than a week later. Seriously, that gal is brilliant.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                No open borders have not been supported. And why the obsession with AOC? There are far more powerful members of congress. She is used as a foil for Trump to form some sort of equivalence. If you don’t like her there are a few dozen prez candidates to talk about including a handful with a chance of being prez.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                Greg,

                I think you and I have different interpretations of how they answered that debate question. And I think their answers were absolutely influenced by the dialogue AOC started. In that respect she has a lot of power. Social media is the great megaphone of our time.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                There isn’t really anything AOC has said that others haven’t been saying. What the contenders are saying about immigration has been influenced by the recent actions by the Trump admin and very much by the sinking of the bi partisan immigration compromise in 2013 by the R hard liners.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                I get the impulse to minimize the importance of AOC considering how problematic many of her proposals are for mainstream Democrats, but I also think that the media has embraced her and she IS influencing the conversation. Things only ramped up as much as they did that particular week because of her comments and her deliberate choice of specific terminology guaranteed to inflame debate. I would not be shocked if you say one of the Progressive Four pull another stunt before the next debate.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to greginak says:

                I’m with Mike on this one. She came in with talk of a Green New Deal and got a vote and almost all of the presidential candidates voted in favor of it sight unseen. And right now the Democratic House’s website is taking time out of their day to attack her cohort.

                She’s just some freshman congressman the same way Ted Cruz was just some freshman senator. Except she’s better at it.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

                She’s pretty obviously tapping into something the same way that Trump tapped into something.

                While it’s true that AOC benefits from her youth and aesthetics, it’s her moral clarity that the Republicans will find doesn’t go away even if she gets primaried and finds herself with a sweet lobbying gig in a couple of years.

                Trumpism will survive Trump.
                AOCism will survive AOC.

                I suppose it’s best for both of them that their opponents are each other rather than, say, someone actually good at it.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jaybird says:

                I don’t think AOCism / SJ wokeness has quite the same potential as the Tea Party due to lack of focus and the lack of homogenous followers of the ideology, but it IS interesting to watch. Did anyone read Russell’s latest piece? I didn’t even know Mayor Pete was getting lit up by his own side but apparently he isn’t gay enough.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                ” lack of focus and the lack of homogenous followers of the ideology”

                Reminds me of Catholic complaints about the Reformation.

                You see it as a bug. I see it as a feature.

                (Though, I *DO* wish that they had a required reading list.)Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jaybird says:

                That’s a good analogy in the sense that all of those Protestants had (and still do) their individual axes to grind, but doesn’t that just point to the likelihood of fracturing on the Left? I mean, Protestantism spread, but the only thing linking many of the denominations was a general dislike of Catholicism (hmmm…your analogy certainly has legs).

                I just don’t see the general selfishness of identity politics as capable of building a coalition that actually wins national elections, but we have a heck of a test of that theory happening right now.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                The Mayor Pete thing is a good example of how things are distorted. There was a terrible piece about him that was, as near as i can tell, universally panned. Does that mean he is getting torn up by his own side. No. It was one piece that the editor repudiated after the universally negative reaction.

                There is an example of every on the web. Twitter will usually provide 2 examples today of everything you want, and don’t want, to see. That doesn’t mean it is a thing though. Lots of things are said by one or by few, those things are best ignored and don’t mean much. When you hate something it is easy to find and easy example of that on the intertoobz but that is quite often nutpicking. It only proves you searched for validating evidence, not that you have solid evidence for your thesis.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                Russell is pretty level-headed but he was bothered enough to write about it. One wonders if the same sort of aspirational support that came with the first black nominee in 2008 and the first female nominee in 2016 might also not find it’s way behind the first gay nominee in 2020. Or at least make enough people mad at the way he gets treated to storm off in a huff (see Sanders voters 2016). I’m just saying that intersectionality creates a lot of potential friction.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I read the original piece and my gob was smacked. I read Russel’s piece which was, as always, good. The original piece was bothersome and deserved all the smackdown it got.

                My point is that one piece, as bad as it was, doesn’t prove much. Even a handful of tweets doesn’t prove much. If you don’t like SJW/wokenss than it’s easy to find things that support your beliefs. That is the problem. The toobz provide easy evidence for everything without knowledge of how big or significant something is.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                There have been several articles prior to this one asking if his white maleness trumped his sexuality from an intersectional standpoint. I think that does expose cracks in the SJ Left. How big they are remains to be seen.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will Truman says:

                Yeah she got a vote on the GND which has gone not very well. I don’t’ have a problem with some on left side of the D”s pushing. The D ‘s could use that. But it’s also clear there has been a lot of push back and the major prez candidates all have there own proposals which are far more likely to get a push if elected.

                She knows how to use social media which gets attention in the press and among us EO’s so she has outsized influence. But like you said the power in D congress has been pushing back. So that shows the limits of where she is at.

                A big part of the distortion of social media is to only look at SM influence adn followers and every tweet as if that equals results. The press gravitates towards attention getters and it’s a cycle that focuses solely on what gets clicks. While i don’t’ think Biden is going to get the nom, nor do i want him to. And i wish the D’s would go leftward, there is a reason Biden is leading and that is because there are plenty of D’s who far from AOC leftyness. Focusing on AOC is a way of framing everything as just two poles which has never been accurate.Report

              • dragonfrog in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                “Well unfortunately that word choice skewed the debate for a couple of weeks”

                Isn’t it nice that we’ve hashed this out now. Will you commit to not letting it skew your commentary here in future?Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to dragonfrog says:

                Several of the commenters here are still using that language…people make little choices every day.Report

        • Pat in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

          I don’t need you to cape for George, Mike.

          I also am tired of trying to litigate this stuff.

          I give everybody on this site all kinds of latitude, I have a pretty big charity bucket. Hell, I think Duck wastes a ton of time by just reflexively doing his inverted Socratic dialogue thing but as annoying as it is to me personally I don’t think it’s not sometimes valuable.

          George dumped out his charity bucket forever ago and literally every time I visit this site it takes me less than a half hour to come across some of his bullshit. George has not once on this site indicated that he’s capable of giving anybody he disagrees with any level of charity and he deserves none.

          He’s basically a bad version of Ben Shapiro and that’s saying something.Report

          • Mike Dwyer in reply to Pat says:

            Fair enough. Obviously my charity bucket tips in a different direction than yours. I’ve spent plenty of time away from the site in the last few years due to other commenters so I feel your pain, even if I disagree with you on who is most problematic.Report

    • There was a poll out yesterday, although I notice you’ve managed to leave out who exactly was being polled.Report

    • JS in reply to George Turner says:

      “There was a poll out yesterday that said swing voters are overwhelmingly familiar with AOC and think of her as representing the Democrat party. She also is wildly unpopular, but not quite as much as Ilhan Omar, of whom only 9% have a positive impression. Nine percent.”

      I know that poll! It polled “white, non-college voters” which is a fun definition of “swing voters” insofar as they went for Trump what, 2-1?

      What a very odd, very specific group to poll.Report

  15. Saul Degraw says:

    Another depressing thought. What if Trump decides or decided that white nationalism is how he gets reelected in 2020? If this is Donald Trump now imagine what he will be like in a year.Report

    • JoeSal in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Geez that could be terrible, he might get obnoxious or something! Maybe tweet distasteful tweets.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to JoeSal says:

        You are bloody oblivious because you are not on the receiving end. You are completely unable to comprehend the damage and evil that Trump is doing. For all your vaunting on the evils of social constructs and government, you are blithely fine with an authoritarian racist government committing actual atrocities.Report

        • JoeSal in reply to LeeEsq says:

          I have been warning against authoritarian governments for decades.

          The oblivious among you only learn from that most brutal of teachers.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to JoeSal says:

        Evil has to start somewhere. You don’t just jump into full blown human rights atrocities. It starts with small things like saying something distasteful, dishonest, and obnoxious. You cultivate these small things because most people are just going to turn their noses away and snub you at best. You grow your small following and get more and more people to agree with you. Then you go on to small acts of vandalism and violence against the out groups. You build and build and build until you get a genocide.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

          Don’t forget The Best Of Intentions!Report

        • Brandon Berg in reply to LeeEsq says:

          Does this work in a leftward direction, too? Are Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez starting something that’s going to end with gulags and a cultural revolution?Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to LeeEsq says:

          There’s creeping evil on both sides. On the Right we have the most radical extremists that feel like they have a greenlight to do violence based on their hate. A step below them is the average Trump supporter that just feels embolden to say gross things online and elsewhere.

          On the Left we have Antifa which is a problem that should be taken more seriously. A step below them is the average SJ warrior that feels embolden to say gross things online and elsewhere.Report

          • Tod Kelly in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            The important thing, then, is to focus on just one of those groups and generally give the other a pass.Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to Tod Kelly says:

              Who is giving them a pass? I’ve said a dozen times that the GOP is lost for a generation. I haven’t for a Republican candidate for president in years. So no one is giving them a pass. It’s just not a productive conversation at this point. I guess I’m hoping there is still an opportunity to stop the Left from going down the same path.Report

              • Tod Kelly in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Mike, the second comment in this whole thread is you saying that your problem with the Presidents tweets was they weren’t damaging enough to the libs.

                As to the Left following gin the footsteps of the Right, I’m not sure I see a way to avoid that path right now. To my eye, every step they are taking mirrors almost exactly what the Right was doing 10-15 years ago. (Well, minus the cartoon-y level of Barack The Magic Nego-esque bigotry for the yucks.)Report

              • Tod Kelly in reply to Tod Kelly says:

                Back in 2017, Jason said something to the effect of “you know, after you tear down all of the institutions our civilization rets upon, you might discover you might find you actually needed them.” I think about that quote a lot these days.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Tod Kelly says:

                That’s a really uncharitable reading of my comment. My first point was suggesting that he failed at his objective but also noting what a powerful tool Twitter is for a president. My second point was that I wish he had stayed out of the squabble because I want to see the infighting on the Left play out without outside interference.

                Neither one of those was me bemoaning that he hadn’t done a better job of beating up the Squad. As someone who is on record saying that I am embarrassed by the president’s use of social media, I think your interpretation of what I said may be more a reflection of your own biases than anything else.Report

  16. You know, I’m tired of conservatives calling everyone dislike communists. I mean, libertarians calling everyone they dislike statists. I mean, liberals calling everyone who supports Trump complicit in his racism.Report

  17. Brandon Berg says:

    There are a lot of women in congress and he only criticized a few of them so it’s obviously not about race.

    Ted Bundy knew a lot of women and most of them lived long lives and died of natural causes.

    I think this misses an important nuance. It’s not a coincidence that Trump singled out the very same people who were very publicly flinging their own feces at Nancy Pelosi for not taking their inane far-left ideology seriously enough. Trump used their race in his attack on them, and like much of what he does, that was bad, and he shouldn’t have done that. But it almost certainly wasn’t the motivation for the attack.

    I don’t have an explicit 10-point scale for racism, but if I did, this would be an important criterion. There’s a level of racism where you don’t dislike someone just because he belongs to some other race, but if you have a beef with a person who happens to belong to another race, you’re going to drag his race into your trash talk. It’s like how woke-offs start throwing around “white male” like a slur whenever some white man disagrees with them.

    What the actual motivation was, I’m not sure. I’ve seen speculation that he wanted to stop the mainstream Democrats from distancing themselves from the Pinko Posse, as they were in the process of doing. That seem somewhat plausible. To win next year, Trump needs to keep the far-left wing of the Democratic Party front and center in the public mind, and forcing the mainstream to defend them helps to do that.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      Personally, I call it racist if you casually drag race into the trash talking, because that makes it obvious that their race is part of what you see objectionable about them.

      But then, I consider woke people who sling ‘cishetwhitemale’ around like a slur to be just as racist.Report

      • But white people do suck.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        I mean the snag here is that the “woke people” doing that are quite likely to be white themselves. Not saying that this is an ironclad defense against the usage being racist, but it does complicate the issue somewhat.Report

        • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

          Is the conversation now about whether someone can be racist about their own race?Report

          • pillsy in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

            Somebody certainly can be racist against their own race, but it’s usually not going to be most people’s first guess, and it usually isn’t mine.Report

            • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

              I can absolutely guarantee that I am never going to charge anyone with racism against their own race. As someone that thinks the charge is vastly overused already, that kind of meta conversation seems ludicrous.

              With that said…what we see from the SJ Left is not really racism against their own race, it’s white guilt. That’s a particularly noxious trait of that crowd and because most of them believe they have already expressed adequate shame for themselves, they mostly direct it outwards towards their fellow whites. Pretty maddening from my perspective, but it the reality of the day.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to pillsy says:

          There is no rule preventing a person from being racist against their own race, although I would suspect that such ‘racism’ is more about classist and elitist attitudes than it is actually about race.

          Not that that makes it any better…Report

  18. Slade the Leveller says:

    All you needed was the picture.Report

  19. greginak says:

    In other news Kellyann Conway asked the ethnicity of a reporter who questioned her about Trumps tweets. I’m sure the answer is spectacular but not at all subtly infused with r****t undertones though it is the fault of liberals.Report

  20. Jaybird says:

    Chad Pergram covers the House for Fox News.

    Fair enough.

    Anyway, he is livetweeting over the last 8 hours talking about the House Resolution to condemn Trump.

    I know that it’s Fox and you have to have X amounts of bias, privilege, and power to get a job there in the first place and so his take on what happened in the House today isn’t necessarily a 100% accurate reading of what’s going on and what happened.

    But if he’s even in the ballpark?

    Trump’s statements have created chaos. And not among the Republicans.Report

    • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

      You’re twelve hours late, Jaybird.

      A resolution to condemn Trump just passed w/ Republican votes and Pelosi just hugged Omar.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

        Oooh, that hadn’t happened yet when I wrote that.

        Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

          And heeeeeeere we go:

          Report

          • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

            He’ll win in 2020.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

              Yeah, that’s my general impression too. Mediaite is running a story where AOC is blaming Pelosi for the death threats “the squad” is getting.

              But, hey, it’s also running a story where there is footage of Trump grabbing a woman’s butt at an Epstein party in 1992.

              There are still oh-so-very-many things that can happen in the next year.

              Remember how long October was in 2016?

              But, yeah, it seems to me that the Democrats are in a huge purity spiral and don’t know how to get out and, meanwhile, Trump is enjoying the benefits of explaining how the Democrats are lying about him (without even *CONSIDERING* apologizing). Remember the Democratic nomination process? Who’s the frontrunner? Is there a single one who will be able to dominate the news cycle like Trump? Like, even in the same ballpark?

              (Well, other than Marianne Williamson…)Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

                I’ve said something like this elsewhere, but it seems to me that one of the more insidious ways that Boomers have damaged the world is by hanging on to their places for so long that all the potential middle-managers and junior executives died on the vine waiting for their turn. When your entire management org chart is filled up with the same people who’ve been there since 1992 then you don’t have a chance to mentor anyone, so when people finally age out and retire you end up with half of the bunch being old people waiting for their turn to be over and young people who can’t tell their ass from a you-know-what.

                I mean, I kinda think this is what the unpaid-staffer-internship was supposed to be addressing; a way for potential candidates to see how the job was supposed to be done. But if it isn’t your job then it doesn’t land the same way, even if it’s a job that you’re intending to get for yourself…Report

              • This is a really interesting thought.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Agree with every word of this. As an organization, my company is doing a pretty good job lately of pushing the old-timers out. They are offering them pretty generous severance packages and it’s sort-of voluntary, but most of them are taking it. The sad thing is, most of the people they are having to push out are very well-off because they all got tons of stock during our IPO in the 90s. They aren’t staying for the money but either because of their egos or because they don’t have a plan for a second act so they are terrified of having all of that time on their hands.

                The problem we have is the Gen Xers are pretty well-trained for taking over these spots but the people behind them are woefully unprepared because no one has time to mentor and Millennials need a little bit more of that than most. We’re failing them and many are leaving the company so the Gen Xers find themselves stuck because they just lost their replacement. As a company we are also horrible at retention for a bunch of cultural reasons. We just got a new president of my division that came from a younger, hipper company so i am hoping he makes smart changes fast.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Which makes an interesting comment about how we as a people view work.

                We hear often that if we offer people free money they will stop working and loaf all day, but here, you not only are offering people money but actually have to use subtle coercion to force them to stop working.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I don’t know if it’s a good indicator. These are people that are at the top of their profession with a very recognizable company. They are all alphas. It’s similar to watching a once-top athlete being unable to walk away from the game because they are addicted to the success. I also think a lot of them just didn’t make plans. I don’t plan to make that mistake.

                On the flip side, for example, my stepdaughter would absolutely spend the whole day laying in bed watching Netflix if someone sent her a check. She has no drive at all. So there are all types I suppose.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                There are an awful lot of not-alphas who hold on just because they are afraid to not have that job. That’s one of the things the Boomers did to themselves, having so much of their identity tied up in their work at a specific place that leaving that job at that company is psychologically painful or terrifying for them.

                GenX and later have, IMHO, become so disillusioned with the idea of corporate loyalty that who they work for is not terribly important.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                My wife, being a manager at her company, has gone through a number of lay off cycles, and everytime, a big component of the cycle is to offer generous voluntary layoffs to people at or very near retirement age. Not only does it get them to leave, but it also reduces the number of ‘announced’ layoffs that get reported to the media.

                And yet, every cycle she has older workers whining to anyone who will listen about how the company doesn’t value them and wants to turn them penniless out into the street.

                Dude, you’ve been working for 26 years, you got a full pension and 6 months of severance, plus you’ve known this was coming for almost a year and have no excuse for not having made plans for what to do after.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                My director confided in me a few years ago that he has over $1 million in stocks, plus I know he gets a sweet pension, even better than mine (which is pretty good). He recently told my manager that he was ‘going out swinging’ which means that instead of mentoring from the rear, which should be his primary focus, he’s out on the front lines picking fights. I’ve called him on it twice now but I think the real problem is that mentoring is an art and some people just don’t have a talent for it. He only knows how to charge ahead so unfortunately he will be remembered for being an asshole the last few years of his career rather than the wise old man that we all remember fondly.Report

              • …or because they don’t have a plan for a second act so they are terrified of having all of that time on their hands.

                This, at least among my former colleagues. When they start muttering about retirement, I ask them, “What’s your plan to fill up all those hours? How’s it hold up if you (or your spouse) develop physical limitations?” I started planning for my retirement — and not just in the sense of money — years before I actually retired.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Same here – luckily I stumbled into Quality and my company has paid for me to get a lot of good training. I can easily become a consultant and/or an AS 9120 auditor after I retire at 55. That will (hopefully) give me the flexibility to go back to college and get my masters and PhD. I’m hoping Second Act Mike is going to have a lot on his plate.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to DensityDuck says:

                I realize that this is basically just “term limits” restated, but I think it comes at that from a different angle than the usual “if they’ve only got 2 terms then there’s less incentive to corrupt them” thing.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

                So there are going to be a lot of people re-learning old lessons.

                Well, perhaps one or two of those old lessons will have turned out to have been not worth learning.

                If we’re lucky.Report

  21. Chip Daniels says:

    From over at Balloon Juice, they reference a series of comments from Josh Marshall describing how Trumps reelection strategy is to use racism as a tool to keep his base whipped up in a fever, splitting the country and hoping to get the bigger half.

    This is supported by the new poll showing that support for Trump among Republicans actually rose as a result of his racist tweets.

    Which brings me back to my point that there is no centrist lane for candidates to pull from. The 2020 election will be one of those single issue elections where you are either in the White Supremacy Party or you are not.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      “And that’s why you have to vote for Biden and Buttigeig.”Report

      • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

        Lots of non-Trump options…

        “We are a party that seeks the common good, on common ground, through common sense. We believe in the sanctity of human life, the necessity of social justice, our responsibility to care for the environment, and promotion of a more peaceful world. We cherish the individual rights and separation of government powers protected by the U.S. Constitution, and recognize the need for social supports and community cohesion. We seek to bridge the bitter partisan divide with principled and respectful policies and dialog.”

        I hope Chip joins me in finding a better way out of the Democratic party duopoly.Report

    • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      Dude, you’re not even factoring in the big wedge issue for next year. Just wait until Red America watches transgender athletes beat our girls in various Olympic sports. I’m telling you right now, we’re all going to be talking about it next summer.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      The 2020 election will be one of those single issue elections where you are either in the White Supremacy Party or you are not.

      There you go. Anyone who makes fighting White Supremacy their top priority is with Team Blue. Anyone who thinks the current body count of zero doesn’t justify calling it a serious problem isn’t.

      So we end up with “vote for the Dem or you’re a Nazi”… which probably isn’t enough. Trump can’t win a reasonable evaluation so he’s making sure he’s being compared to Hitler.Report

  22. Jaybird says:

    One thing I was thinking about today was the whole “pro-Trump” vs. “anti-Trump” vs. “anti-anti-Trump” dynamic.

    And while I am not pro-Trump, I could certainly understand why someone would call me “anti-anti-Trump”.

    One thing I noticed about the racist tweets was that they weren’t particularly fun to argue about. Extrapolating out from me, this tells me that attacking Trump on this particular attack surface is likely to work fairly well… but 16 months is a long time.Report

    • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

      Well hopefully we won’t be going on about this for 16 months because he some be tweeting like this for 16 months.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

        No pun intended, surely.

        If he starts being fun to defend again, I’ll start wondering if he’s going to get re-elected (including popular vote) again.

        I mean, today, he tweeted that The Squad was the reason shampoo bottles have instructions on them. That would be *FUN* to defend against.

        If the racism stuff wasn’t there.Report

        • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

          Always good when a troll admits he’s a troll.Report

        • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

          Boys boys boys. Lets not get lost in the weeds over who obviously spends most of their time trolling but dresses it up in fancy talk and who doesn’t. What’s important is having fun. And it’s just so sad that all the racism stuff, like tonight’s rally where Trump had the crowd chanting “send her back” gets in the way of fun. Juvenile insults from the prez are fun stuff…..come on… right? Lets get back to the fun and ignore all that ugly stuff.Report

          • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

            What I keep wondering is, let’s suppose there were four new Congresswomen whose parents came from Sweden, France, Germany and Austria and they formed a squad. Trump gets mad at them and told them to go back to their countries (Rep. Heidi Klinkerschmitt was the only one actually born overseas but she came here when she was 12.)

            Do we call his tweets racist or something else?Report

            • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

              If he told anybody to go back where they came from he is mega wrong and he is an *******.
              Racist? Well i guess it would depend on their race. Theoretically four people could come from those countries but be muslim and/or POC. But what he he called a Omar a filthy jew. The second part sounds anti Semitic but we would be scratching our heads saying “but shes muslim, WTF?” It wouldn’t make any sense. So if he told white people of traditional euro decent then he likely isn’t being racist but he is wrong and depending on their religion there could be bigotry there ( if they were jewish or muslim).

              He could still be displaying bigotry which i see as the overarching term that describes the whole basket of evil isms ( racism, anti semitism, all the ethnic hatreds, etc) But he is aiming this at 4 women of color and seems to be now focusing mostly on the one who is muslim. I’m more then willing to discuss this and though we disagree i think you are a person of good will. But all this behavior by him is, to be polite, fucking disgusting, getting worse and too many people are micro analyzing every part of how to define this or that for something that is glaringly obvious.Report

              • pillsy in reply to greginak says:

                But all this behavior by him is, to be polite, fucking disgusting, getting worse and too many people are micro analyzing every part of how to define this or that for something that is glaringly obvious.

                It’s not only that; I think there tends to be a sort of ahistorical and unrealistic insistence that racism is a much more refined and coherent ideology than it is or ever has been.

                For example, the argument that having contempt for people based on their culture rather than their race simply isn’t racist is… well, I think it’s just incorrect once that culture starts being correlated with race. Indeed, supposed problems with the culture of African Americans were often used as justifications for de jure white supremacy.

                A lot of people seem to hold to the idea that it’s only “racism” if you adhere to the idea that “race” is an inherent biological category and that races have differing degrees of value or capability.

                But, like, why?

                Also, while you can argue that calling someone who is “merely” a xenophobic religious bigot a “racist” is a misdiagnosis, that doesn’t mean you’re doing such a person an injustice by calling them that.

                And in this case, Trump and many of his followers have clearly tied this to the idea that people who have ancestries tied to some countries are here on sufferance, while whose ancestries tie them to other countries aren’t.

                I just don’t see how that’s not racist no matter what the precise mechanism they posit for the discriminatory attitude is.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                Pillsy,

                Obviously I disagree about as strongly as I can with all of this. I’m going to cite my two BAs as a strong bias towards culture. We could go through all of the historical examples of races eventually becoming ethinicities and eventually cultures and then just sort of generic.

                Let’s be honest here, we’re only really talking about blacks in this discussion. Most people that discuss this kind of stuff are savvy enough to know there is a huge difference between Japanese and Chinese peoples culturally. We also know that there are a lot of differences between peoples in Massachusetts vs peoples in Alabama. We understand that two white people raised in very different parts of the country are going to have a lot of different cultural habits. I can also tell you, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time on American Indian reservations (my stepdaughter is 1/4 Navajo) you will see some significant differences between different tribes.

                So then why do we treat blacks as a monolithic group from coast to coast? Are we suggesting that black culture is more homogeneous than white culture? I’m sure some people will contend that whites have had the luxury of transcending their race while blacks have been forced to remain more insular due to oppression, but that is a perspective I would actually call racist.

                You seem to be arguing that culture is tied to skin color here. Is that accurate? If you want to move beyond biology you are really getting into slippery territory.

                I chafe at the racism thing so much because I studied culture for 10 years in an academic setting and it just became more and more apparent to me that race was a construct and culture was, well, everything. Calling racism when culture is the actual factor seems so intellectually lazy to me. And honestly, unproductive.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I’ve heard the “culture” thing to. But when i’ve asked what that meant culture ended up being rap, sagging pants and do rags.All things strongly associated with African Americans. The cultural notes they said were strong proxies for race. In fact everything was about a stereotypical African American. Then if there was a bit more digging, there was a disrespectful attitude or their community leaders were shady which could be anyone from Sharpton to MLK. Then even deeper when “those” people are around there is more crime.

                Saying it is just culture seems like just trying to relabel things that are all about one race and sometimes stereotypical identifiers for it. Just underneath the shallow identifiers were a bundle of derogatory stereotypes.

                It would be like saying i don’t think Inuit were bad people i just think their dances, kuspuks and language was bad. And when Inuit are around crime gets worse. But i’m not racist against Inuit. I just happen to think it’s bad to have them around and all the markers of their culture are bad.

                Or to phrase my point differently. If someone says they are fine with African Americans as long as they act the way whites do, believe the way whites do and stay in line, is not clean of racism. In fact it’s far on the road to it. Like i’m not anti-semitic. As long as jews convert to Christianity i’m cool with them.Report

              • Philip H in reply to greginak says:

                Well done.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                Here’s why I know it’s culture and not race: The things I heard people complain about regarding blacks in the 90s are things white kids are doing now. Almost every racial prejudice has a cultural reason behind it. And culture can be addressed by policy. I just firmly believe that the focus on race over culture is a losing strategy and it kind of seems like the last 50 years have proven me correct.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to greginak says:

                But when i’ve asked what that meant culture ended up being rap, sagging pants and do rags.

                Nonsense. I have no option on women’s fashion, that includes hairstyles. My #2 daughter listens to black music and I’ve never quibbled about it.

                Culture is what happens in the family and how does the family interact with their surroundings.

                What’s important in the family? What value does the family puts on education? On math? My #4 daughter dropped the ball in math in April, we’re spending the summer forcing her to relearn everything she didn’t. Is there an extended family to cover, i.e. is there more than one adult around? Are the parents married? Do they support each other? Do they try to enrich the children mentally and socially?

                What is the family’s relationship with money? With drugs? With Gamboling? With crime? With Religion? How about what they see outside the family?

                What is the perceived family status with the world? How does the family deal with that?

                How does the family deal with authority? Inside and outside the family?

                Does the family think they’re in control over their destiny?

                Or to phrase my point differently. If someone says they are fine with African Americans as long as they act the way whites do, believe the way whites do and stay in line, is not clean of racism.

                My wife was physically attacked by one of her 4th-5th grade students when she was substituting. The school has a number of kids like that. She’s also worked in a different high school system where only the exceptional students value math/science, and the number of disruptive students is so high that she pities the students who are trying to learn. Obviously we refuse to send our kids into either system.

                So far I’m not a racist because everyone I’ve mentioned is white. Problem is this also describes some of the black schools. But that’s fine, we’ll just pretend there’s no problem, no effects, and look the other way because it’d be racist to say I think it causes problems.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to greginak says:

            Greg, one of the things I suspect about the coming election is that the Woke Left will see things that are true as opportunities to position themselves in a Holier Than Thou position and score points rather than take the true things as information that they need to incorporate.

            This is one of the reasons that I think the odds are pretty good that Trump is going to be re-elected.

            The fact that the Woke Left will make Anti-Anti-Trump a much more attractive position to be in than mere Anti-Trump.Report

            • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

              Well we’ve had lots and lots of holier than thou groups in the past. The woke left don’t seem much different than the others except for the specific beliefs of course. Of course every bit of racist shite that comes out of trumps, or one of his followers mouths, will be defended and the woke left and the targeted POC’s will be blamed. There will be no actual racism or if there is it doesn’t matter because…blah blah blah…the woke left. “Why did you make us say that!!!” the conservatives already plead.

              I’m far more personally concerned with standing up for what is right and staying true to my values. Trump is degrading the US just like people said he would. Maybe you need to ponder the difference between the woke left and seeing Trumps loud and proud racism. Because there is wide chasm there. And there are swayable people who can see just how ugly all this is and its going to get worse. If you want to tell me how many people the woke left will push away, then also open your eyes to the conservative people horrified by trump. Noting just one is weak sauce.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                This is a chicken and egg scenario: Which came first, the Woke crowd telling their fellow whites they are racist or the non-woke crowd declaring they weren’t?

                With all of that said, I was listening to a podcast with Marianne Williamson today and she had a vastly different take on the sort of pervasive racism that the Woke crowd believes exists today. Her opinion was that most people aren’t actually racist, but because the US as a people haven’t atoned for its past, that prevents us from moving forward. I actually liked this idea a lot better because talking about collective responsibility vs. individual guilt is a lot more productive and would actually turn off a lot less people. For example, I don’t really like being called a racist but I’m pretty okay saying, ‘The United States has a racist past that we haven’t completely dealt with.” Maybe that’s me deflecting, but human nature is what is is.Report

              • greginak in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I completely agree about our history and the failure to grapple with it. People will say with a straight, and ignorant face, that slavery ended with the CW so that dealt with racism. Even trying to discuss what led to the civil rights era or the things that persisted afterwards is to much for some people.

                Of course that leads to why we haven’t grappled with our history of racism. One obvious answer is that racists or their defenders or people who hold a lot of racist attitudes have resisted that. I still see people , in the year of our lack of god 2019, say that slavery wasn’t all that bad.

                A second thing is that if you don’t like the woke left why pay much attention to them. It seems like people are attracted to the harsh ends of the spectrum. I’ve said multiple times, and i’ll say it again, people throw out the charge of racism far to often and have for years. That doesn’t mean racism isn’t a real and serious thing. And also that people have thrown out the traitor or hates america slur for decades also. There are plenty of liberal types who haven’t gone full woke, in the negative sense, but exist here and in the world. It’s not just trump or woke. I haven’t committed treason or hated america just because I’ve been called that for ever. I also avoid talking to most of those conservative types since they are generally worthless to interact with.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to greginak says:

                “A second thing is that if you don’t like the woke left why pay much attention to them.”

                For the same reasons are so worried about the Far Right. The Woke Left has already started engaging in violence. All it would take is a permissive president from that side of the aisle and we could have the exact same concerns people hold today about the president’s relationship with extremists.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                For the same reasons are so worried about the Far Right.

                A far right guy sleeps in the white house. He won the last election. He ran a campaign based on being far right.Report

            • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

              Like I said earlier, they’ll be more interested in victories than in winning.

              also: “At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid,” said Nietzsche.Report

            • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

              Greg, one of the things I suspect about the coming election is that the Woke Left will see things that are true as opportunities to position themselves in a Holier Than Thou position and score points rather than take the true things as information that they need to incorporate.

              Isn’t this one of those things that are true people who are not part of the Woke Left should incorporate and act on in an attempt to undo the damage of people acting in off-putting ways in the name of a good cause?

              I mean surely people falling into the Anti-Anti-Trump camp because they find the Woke Left insufferable is every bit as much an error as the Woke Left being insufferable, if not more so.

              And more to the point, people who have zero credibility with, and ability to influence, the behavior of the Woke Left for all the basic-ass human reasons that make politics (and often times life in general) an obnoxious chore (or worse) may have credibility with the people being repelled by the Woke Left for, well, those same basic-ass human reasons.

              So you know, many things are true. Including uncomfortable ones like, “People who really annoy you can be right about very important things.”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                I guess it comes down to which of the Joes I see as more personally offensive and more likely to do more damage.

                McCarthy or Stalin?
                Stalin or McCarthy?Report

              • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

                Racists or anti racists?
                Nazi’s or the ADL?
                Prez focusing race hatred or the sociology prof no one has ever heard of?
                Homophobes or people wanting equal treament for LBGTQ.

                Now i’m not “saying” any of these things of course. I’m just trying them out to see if got the concept down. I think i got it though.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to greginak says:

                You sound like you’d have been a big fan of McCarthy!Report

              • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

                You’ve got the trump style down pat. Use a tactic, a like a binary choice, than chide others for using it. And always attack and attack. I imagine this is fun for you, right?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to greginak says:

                Guilt by association? Yeah, that’s an echo too.

                (Yeah, it’s more fun than the racism thing, I tell you what.)Report

              • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

                Two posts from now your going to saying how you tried to prevent all the things you do and how much you hate them. “Why you make me mention mccarthy!” “i never did that”.

                Guilty be association!? Please i have clearly said many times that you are obviously above all us in LEO.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to greginak says:

                Greg, if you cannot wrap your head around why someone would see McCarthy as a bigger threat than Stalin, you probably won’t understand the differences between being pro-Trump and being anti-anti-Trump.

                And arguing against me as if I’m pro-Trump won’t work, because I’m not.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Greg, if you cannot wrap your head around why someone would see McCarthy as a bigger threat than Stalin, you probably won’t understand the differences between being pro-Trump and being anti-anti-Trump.

                So, you think worries about the rise of McCarthyism are why people support (anti-anti) Trump?

                I hope not. This literally makes no sense, conceptually or empirically.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                You’ve grasped much of the analogy, but not all of it.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

                McCarthyism scares the heck out of me. Democrats see Russians under every rock and bush. I’m afraid to use Russian dressing on my salad. I quit eating beef Stroganoff because Jerry Nadler might use it to link me to Russia. They’re flinging subpoenas left and right to find any document that links anyone to Russia, no matter how indirectly, and then they send out teams of FBI agents to arrest them in the middle of the night to make them testify before their committees in their show trials.

                Frankly, all of them doing the screaming and investigating are probably Russian agents that Putin is using to undermine the United States and sow as much divisiveness, paranoia, and destruction as possible.

                This is of course in start contrast to Stalin and Kruschev, who are still lauded. Just today the New York Times was pointing out that the Soviets launched women and Asians into space long before the US because NASA was a racist and sexist organization. (Apparently the Times hasn’t realized which continent Baikonur is on.)

                In any event, let the game of intersectional Bingo continue!Report

              • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

                If you cannot grasp why people don’t see the so obvious clarity of your arguments and that is seems like you just oppose with crappy arguments for fun then you haven’t been paying attention. Like if you just attack and attack and dodge questions but don’t see any parallels. Of course you aren’t pro trump, but that doesn’t mean you may not use some his style.

                I mean like who is the bigger threat
                The prez spouting racist sleaze and a 20 year old post modernist loving sociology student at Ivy U, then who can blame the Joes.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                No, it comes down to which of the Joes you think is more likely to do damage.

                The one you find most personally offensive seems like it should be obviously secondary, and indeed based on heuristics you’ve proposed in the past you should maybe even consider that personal offensiveness has led you to underestimate the damage that the one you find less offensive might do.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                I’m not sure.

                If it was “more likely to do damage”, then everybody would have agreed with McCarthy back in the 1950’s.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                Really? I mean Stalin was clearly much more likely to do damage if you were in 1920s Russia, but it’s way less clear in 1950s US.

                And of course Stalin wasn’t actually on the ballot.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                If it was “more likely to do damage”, then everybody would have agreed with McCarthy back in the 1950’s.

                Seems like in the 50s people would be able to recall the second world war, which was fought against fascism.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                but it’s way less clear in 1950s US.

                So you could see why someone would see McCarthy as a bigger problem than Stalin, in 1950?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                I don’t support Stalin, and I need to stress this clearly.
                But the dissidents, in particular Solzhenitzen, are a bunch of illiberal prigs.

                Stalin is presiding over the biggest economic expansion in our lifetimes, and frankly, the damage that the dissidents could cause would be more of a threat than anything Stalin could do.

                But please, if you keep hysterically hyperventilating about the starvation and gulags like I am some moral monster, that will just make me reluctantly support Stalin.

                Which I don’t, let me stress that again. But I am anti-anti Stalin, and by that I mean Stalin is the least bad alternative.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Then you’ll be pleased to know that I don’t support Trump.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                Are you actually committing to the argument that the Woke Left is a bigger threat than Trump, on the basis of the fact that they’re making true statements about the state of the country in an annoying way?

                And if not, what are you actually stating?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                Eh, I see us accelerating towards divorce or war.

                Now, the long answer would probably involve a long essay and we’d have to cover the whole “America is an Idea” instead of it being a country thing.

                Now change is inevitable and so no matter which direction we take, we’ll continue going for a while so there is never going to be a permanent (whatever) majority and whichever path we go down will evolve and change.

                So the question I’m dealing with is whether I replace Trump with… what? What will replace Trump?

                Pelosism? Schumerism? AOCism? Yangism? Williamsonism? Bidenism?

                I don’t support Trump.
                But that doesn’t mean that I have to vote for Joe Biden. There’s always the ability to say “no, I don’t support your alternative”.

                No matter how bad Stalin might be (and we agree that he’s bad!), that doesn’t mean that we have to embrace McCarthyism.

                We can say “no” to both.

                And the idea that if I don’t support McCarthy that I’m objectively a supporter of Stalin is an idea that I’m sure you already know is a bad one.

                I’m not saying that I prefer Trump’s idea of America. I don’t.

                But that doesn’t mean that I have to sign on with the Democrats.

                There are third ways. And the appeals of the left to their own moral superiority sounds to me to be awfully similar to the appeals of the right to their own.

                I can disagree with the idea that both the Trumpists and the Woke Left have for what they want America to look like.

                Anyway, my answer would be something like that.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

                Oh, and the “if you’re not with us, you’re with the other side” well has already been pre-poisoned.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Oh, and the “if you’re not with us, you’re with the other side” well has already been pre-poisoned.

                In part because people like you insist on viewing things in binary partisan terms. The political universe is bigger than that. As an example, all those Democrat-hating Never Trumpers committed to voting D in 2020 to prevent the Trumpian slide into totalitarian lawlessness.

                Pick your poison. Just like everyone else.*

                *One of the consistently amazing things about Never Trumpers is their sense of *entitlement* to a party which reflects the totality of their views. That they were so deluded as to think the GOP ever did so is a testament to the idea that a sucker is born every minute.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                You don’t have to sign on with Stalin to oppose McCarthy, but to effectively oppose McCarthy you would have to align with his opponents within the actual political system we have.

                And the Left may sound like the Right in its appeals to its own moral superiority to you. The two behaviors may even be the same.

                But that doesn’t mean the threat posed by the two behaviors are the same, and the fact is if you can’t even articulate what the threat is, well, you should expect people to be very skeptical of it.

                Like if it were somehow, I dunno, a Vassar freshman running against Trump that would be one thing, but none of the actually candidates you mentioned represent the “Woke Left”.

                Not Biden. Not Bernie. Not Yang or Buttigieg or Harris or even Williamson.

                Nor of course do Pelosi or Schumer.

                So we’re left with AOC, maybe? Who’s clashing with her own party leadership, namely Pelosi, and isn’t even running for President since (among many other things) she isn’t old enough?

                Like, there are situations where it makes sense not to pick either side.

                You’ve just never presented an argument, or anything even vaguely resembling an argument, that this is one of them.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                Pillsy, I’m not trying to get you to change your mind. I’m no longer embracing an ideology that requires me to try to get other people to be more (whatever).

                It’s because I see The Culture as the primary driver of the things that I tend to support and neither Trump nor The Democrats support the parts of the Culture that I see as worth keeping.

                And if both wish to toss the good parts aside… well, if we, as a society, decide that that’s what we want, then full speed ahead!

                But Trumpism will more or less die with Trump and whether that happens in 2020 or 2024 matters little in the big picture. The fight is, currently, between Trump and The Squad and given that I already know Trumpism has an end date, the question is whether I support The Squad being the ones who supplant him or Door #3.

                I’ll take Door #3.

                (Hey, in the short term, the Democrats could nominate Yang and I would *TOTALLY* canvas for him!)Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                No, the thing is that the current conflict isn’t Trump against The Squad.

                It’s not because he doesn’t want it to be.

                And because he’s President now, he actually has a lot of power to expand his targets beyond The Squad, and by couching his attacks on them in racist terms, rather than in terms of the ideas you found disagreeable, he did just that.

                And whoever the Dems run in 2020 and goes against Trump, it’s not, like I said, going to be a member of The Squad. Indeed, you yourself know this or else you wouldn’t be complaining about being uncertain about what the Democrats represent.

                You may not be trying to convince me of anything.

                But you are presenting arguments.

                And the arguments you are presenting are not good.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                So the fight isn’t between Trump and The Squad but Trump and The Democrats. Fine.

                To the extent that The Democrats agree with the Squad on the direction (but just not the speed), I disagree with what The Democrats want.

                There are a handful of Democrats that I would support wholeheartedly. Yang is one.

                But I won’t support someone with a (D) next to their name just because they are not Trump.

                Trump is already defeated. It’s just a question of who will do it.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                But I won’t support someone with a (D) next to their name just because they are not Trump.

                Ahhh. So you view (eg) a tax increase on the wealthy as a BIGGER worry than (eg) Bill Barr corrupting the DOJ to protect Trump and further the goal of unitary executive immune to oversight by Congress or the courts..

                Good on ya mate!

                Add: I’m reminded of Dark Matter’s view of this stuff where he has basically said that he opposes any policies which would hurt the economy (on his definition of “hurt”) and that’s why he’s going to vote for Trump. It’s clean. Admirable in simplicity.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Stillwater says:

                I have some distant family that I see as infrequently as possible for whom “No matter what the Republicans do to me, the Democrats would have done worse” is an article of faith. No specific policies or outcomes needed.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I already said that I don’t support Trump, Stillwater.

                Do you want me to say that again?

                “You can’t not support Trump *AND* not support the Democrats!”

                Watch me.Report

              • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

                I actually follow some peeps on the twitterz that are not Dem’s and don’t support Trump. They are scathing in their descriptions of Trump and seems avoid the BSDI over all stuff. Heck one those trump hating, non D’s said something like
                “This is chilling shit. The idiot is going to get people killed.” yet he still isn’t a D.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Exactly! You did.

                But you don’t oppose him enough to vote for a tax increaser….Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                It’s like Bush never even happened.

                It’s downright uncanny.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Dodge.

                Look, you play a high principled type on the internet but obvs your principles conflict when it comes to voting for a D candidate to oppose Trump.

                That means you don’t think Trump is *any worse* than a generic Democrat. Which is pretty damn astounding.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                It’s not a dodge.

                Remember when Bush said “”Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”?

                Was he right?

                If he wasn’t, and I’m going to guess that you are willing to accept that it is possible to believe that he was wrong with what he said without being on the side of the terrorists, then I’d ask you to try to wrap your head around it being possible to neither support Trump nor the Democrats.

                (And I would not only vote for Yang, I’d campaign for him. I guess I could vote for Tulsi. I might vote for Williamson as a lark.)Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Bush also said Americans are working hard to put food on their family.

                But to take things back to the issue: you don’t think Trump is worse than a generic D.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Don’t see it as me not seeing Trump as worse than a Generic D.

                See it as me not seeing Generic D as automatically having earned my vote.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                “earned”

                Heh. Now you’re talking Jerry Springer’s language.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                It’s possible.

                But it being possible doesn’t make it justified. And given the nature of our political system and the way conflicts are carried out within its confines, it’s much less likely to be justified than it would be in the GWoT context.

                In part because “picking a side” means something vastly different.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                There is, of course, nothing wrong with disagreeing with what the Democrats want, but I think you are very mistaken if you believe that they as a whole want what The Squad wants but slower, or even have a cogent enough set of goals to be said to want any particular thing.[1]

                And hell if you think that actually not supporting the Dems is the best way to accomplish your political goals I guess that is what it is.

                But the fact that they want bad things isn’t a great argument, and the idea that Trump is already defeated is non-obvious in the extreme, especially given the significant powers of the Office of the Presidency, and the ability to shape the political views of the Republican Party that he has as its de facto leader.

                [1] One of the most infuriating yet reassuring thing about the Democratic Party is that it has a much harder time actually committing to a course of action than the GOP.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                I don’t think that my political goals are particularly achievable. Neither are my secondary ones. Nor my tertiary ones.

                The ones that are more likely to lead to divorce than war? Yeah, maybe those are achievable. I dunno.

                I’m not going to support Trump.

                But I don’t have to support the Democrats.

                And I am not saying that they want “bad” things. I think that the things they want will have unintended consequences and the unintended consequences are things that I don’t particularly want.

                Are they bad? Insofar as they are not final, they are not bad. I think that we’ll wander through bad places because of them.

                And if we’re going to do that then they can do that without my help.

                Same for Trump.

                (But I see Trump as, effectively, neutered. Even if you don’t.)Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                but I think you are very mistaken if you believe that they as a whole want what The Squad wants but slower, or even have a cogent enough set of goals to be said to want any particular thing

                Damn dude. Here I was making a case for voting generic D and you just blew that argument outa the water. 🙂

                More seriously, tho., I think another term of Trumpism will turn US government into something alien to us, something we equate with failed states. And that’s enough reason to vote D in 2020 for me.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                No really if you’re worried about some creeping cultural shift that electing Dems will abet, I think it’s important to consider whether electing Dems will do any such thing.

                There are many downsides to trying to herd cats, but at least it’s pretty hard to lead them all over a cliff.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                Ahh, yes. Got it. Unless, of course, Dems hold the House, the POTUS and 60 votes in the Senate, and then they’re likely to pass conservative policies like the ACA anyway. 🙂Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                The culture will shift no matter what.

                The question is “which direction will it go in?”

                I figure that I will provide whatever nudge I can by voting 3rd Party. That will communicate my desires To Power a lot more clearly than a vote for, say, Kamala Harris would.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jaybird says:

                I think this is a good point. Voting isn’t just about winning elections, it’s also about communicating priorities. Jaybird and I see voting 3rd party as us exercising our right to vote for a candidate that might have no chance of winning but more closely aligns to our values. That someone on the Left would see it as basically an endorsement of Trump tells me a lot about them.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                If there was an election between an actual Stalin-style Communist and an inoffensive center-right politician, where they were going to get the vast majority of the vote, I wouldn’t vote for the third party liberal candidate. I’d vote for the center-right candidate, then double down on opposing his policies once they got in office.

                A vote for a third party instead of Trump is simply saying, “I want Trump to have an easier path to victory – I just don’t want to be directly responsible for it, so I have plausible deniability.”Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Jesse says:

                Meh. If you’re not in a competitive state you have latitude.

                If you are in a competitive state, it’s basically saying that between Trump and the Democrat (or Stalin 2.0 and the Republican) doesn’t matter to you. Indifference.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Will Truman says:

                Indifference is really the key word here for most of this conversation.

                When people say they see no difference between Warren and Trump, or state that racism isn’t really the existential threat that Democrats make it out to be, it appears to me as a shoulder shrugging indifference to the lived experiences of others.

                That our perspective- as white educated comfortably employed people- is the correct and accurate view of things, while the experiences of women, people of color, are somehow skewed and out of step with objective reality.Report

              • To be fair, a number of the people I know who will vote or won’t vote based on who the Democrats put up are non-white (including a contributor to this site!). Some are women (and, of course, roughly 4 out of 10 women will probably actually vote for him).

                So it’s not strictly a Lived Experience thing, at the least.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Will Truman says:

                My oldest daughter was voting in her second presidential election in 2016, but it was the first one she was passionate about. She really like Sanders, like so many other Millennials, and didn’t care for the way he was treated by the DNC. She still would have probably voted for HRC until Hillary told the women of the left that they were bad feminists if they didn’t vote for her. So my daughter voted for Jill Stein.

                The only thing I can say with any certainty today is that if Trump wins reelection the Left is going to load up the blame canon and no one will be safe.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Ah, I see you’re one of those men who didn’t let his daughter or wife vote for Hillary! *angry face*Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                That our perspective- as white educated comfortably employed people- is the correct and accurate view of things, while the experiences of women, people of color, are somehow skewed and out of step with objective reality.

                The “experiences” of everyone are skewed and out of step with objective reality, which is why we need to follow numbers. “Anecdotal data” isn’t data. People believe what they want to believe, much of science is an effort to try to get away from that.

                Single parent headed uneducated households is strongly associated with a large number of negative outcomes when whites do it. This type of household is vastly more prominent among blacks. Are we really supposed to think that there’s no problem there? Ditto with half a dozen other issues.

                Subtract the destructive outcome you’d expect on whites from what we see with blacks. What’s left is racism… but there’s not a lot left after you do that.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Anecdotal data, supported by physical evidence is what we call history.

                A conclusion demands both types of evidence since by themselves each is incomplete and untrustworthy.

                How do you know that you have gathered all the data?
                How do you know the collection methodology wasn’t tainted? Or the process used to analyze it wasn’t itself flawed?
                And so on.

                What we are talking about here is sociology, a field where objective data is very hard to come by and even harder to analyze.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                “When people…state that racism isn’t really the existential threat that Democrats make it out to be, it appears to me as a shoulder shrugging indifference to the lived experiences of others.”

                Let’s imagine an alternate reality where instead of screaming RACISM for the last 10 years Democrats just hyper-focused on addressing the actual ills in black communities. They never called anyone names but they aggressively pursued policies that would mitigate or eliminate those problems. And because they didn’t call anyone names, they started building all of this support in conservative churches and among the moderate Right and eventually that started to bleed farther and farther rightward until lots of people were committed to the cause. 10 years later things weren’t perfect but they were a hell of a lot better.

                Would you say they succeeded because they reduced racism or because they actually addressed the problems themselves and built support for their mission?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Policies like…health care reform?
                Like, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau?
                Like, appointing diverse federal judges who themselves came from communities of color?

                See, you’re imagining a world which actually happened, but somehow was vociferously opposed by Republicans.

                Even today, the chief goal of Republicans is to destroy anything done by Obama, just for spite.

                I’m baffled why you think that just making white Republicans feel good about themselves would have changed their opposition to anything Obama.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                “Policies like…health care reform?
                Like, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau?
                Like, appointing diverse federal judges who themselves came from communities of color?”

                Those are, respectfully, terrible examples. If that’s your idea of policies designed to help black communities it’s no wonder they have been stuck in stasis for the last 50 years…

                I’m talking about things like freeing non-violent offenders from prisons and having well-funded and robust re-entry programs. I’m talking about using the full power of the federal government to eliminate gun trafficking into inner cities. i’m talking about billions invested in subsidized housing that is integrated into middle class areas. I’m talking about pushing for equal funding for every school in a district by using federal education dollars as a cudgel, and then ending all busing so black kids can go to school in their neighborhoods. I’m talking about billions invested in renewing the arts, home ec, shop class and a bunch of other programs that would see kids graduate from high school with more skills than they do now. Etc, etc.

                Or yeah, health care reform *yawn*.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                So your theory is that had Obama done all those wonderful things, he would have won support from Republicans?

                I want to live in such a beautiful world.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                No Chip, go back and read my other comment. You have to build support for policy, not enact it and hope that people support it after-the-fact. I’m suggesting that if Democrats stopped accusing the country of racism and actually start attacking the legacy effects of historic racism, they could build support. Say what you will about the GOP but most conservatives that I know are actually pretty sober and realistic problem-solvers. A lot of them actually have a pretty good understanding and interest in solving the problems facing black communities but when they are constantly told they are racists they sort of lose interest.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jesse says:

                Is this the part where I explain the Electoral College to you?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Going with the lesser evil is not an “endorsement” of that evil.Report

              • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

                About McCarthyism. There is a rather notable loud Repub politician who screams about people being un american and hating the country and all that. He even suggest kicking them out. It’s been in all the papers. The current guy seems to be echoing McCarthy if you sort of look at with eyes open.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to greginak says:

                There is a rather notable loud Repub politician who screams about people being un american and hating the country and all that. He even suggest kicking them out. It’s been in all the papers. The current guy seems to be echoing McCarthy if you sort of look at with eyes open.

                So we’re going to be hauling the gang of four up in front of the UnAmerican committee and breaking their careers?

                Funny, I’d thought their careers had benefited by the current guy. I’d even thought that’s why he did it.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to greginak says:

                Well yeah.
                If someone wants to make a case that Liz Warren is somehow the McCarthy to Trump’s Stalin, that’s going to be a hilarious effort.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Just for clarity, I’d go with Stalin because by the time it was becoming apparent that McCarthy might be a real problem, Stalin was a corpse or about to become a corpse.

                However, the Kennedy’s felt quite differently and wouldn’t say a bad word about McCarthy. They even tried to get him to marry their sister.Report

              • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

                Would that be the same guy who’s been falsely accused of being a Russian spy for two years?Report

              • greginak in reply to George Turner says:

                It’s the guy who the intell community and the Mueller report said the russians wanted to win, the russians helped to win and his campaign was heavily in contact with. There is even an entire book detailing all his attempts at obstruction of justice and everything.Report

              • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

                Obviously you didn’t read the Mueller report, which noted that the Russians didn’t even know how to contact Trump’s people, and ended up madly scrambling after having completely dropped the ball.

                But yeah, if it helps you get through the day, there are Russians under every rock. They’ve infiltrated all levels of government, and can read the American public better than Democrat politicians and pollsters because at least 50% of the country is Russian sleeper agents.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

                The Woke Left is roughly on par with the Far Right. They have a growing violent wing (Antifa) and in general they trade in extremism and hateful rhetoric. All it would take is a liberal president just as willing to look the other way and you would see them become just as much of a problem as the Far Right is under the current administration.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                All it would take is a liberal president just as willing to look the other way and you would see them become just as much of a problem as the Far Right is under the current administration.

                Which would be a really good reason not to vote for such a person president and attempt to fight their reelection.

                It’s not a good reason to not vote for any of the frontrunner Democrats, as none of them are like that.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to DavidTC says:

                Do you feel certain about that? November 2020 is a long way off.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Hey Mike,

                https://twitter.com/Joshua4Congress/status/1152166472493387776

                People killed in the last 10 years –

                Antifa: 0

                Right wing terrorists: 313

                ICE: 81

                CBP: 98

                If you don’t live in Portland and/or are a right winger who’s obsessed with Antifa because you watch Fox News, they literally don’t matter.

                On the other hand, the Far Right holds actual power in broad swathes of the country and is actually doing terrible things.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jesse says:

                Well then I guess we shouldn’t worry about them. Thanks for the sanity check.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                The antifa can’t even do better in violence than the extreme right in the only place where they have a vague smattering of support – Portland – as while Andy Ngo got beat up, a racist stabbed a guy who was standing up for them.

                So yes, until antifa are the most dangerous things in their own core, we should worry about the far right that has actual political power.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to Jesse says:

                So you’re literally saying that we should ignore them until they are actually dangerous enough to be a problem? You know the government already has them listed as a domestic terrorist organization…right?

                Just look at the quotes from both sides and observers after Charlottesville. The Left side may not be as good at violence, but they were certainly a part of it. THIS is what happens when you ignore violence on either side. Your literally taking a position no different than the president but suggesting somehow yours is different because of less deaths or them not being as good at it.

                https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-charlottesville-witnesses-20170815-story.htmlReport

              • North in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Uhh… Mike.. you don’t have to go far to find leftists denouncing Antifa. I mean the whole of the moderate left and liberals all think they’re idiots or worse and say so often. They’re far from being ignored.Report

              • Mike Dwyer in reply to North says:

                Sure – you can find people in this very thread that are on the Left and have already or would in the future continue to denounce Far Left extremists. Stillwater and Jesse are not those people though.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                I think the people who beat up Andy Ngo should go to jail for assault and battery.

                OTOH, no I don’t think they’re .1% as dangerous as your average Republican congressperson.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

                Stillwater and Jesse are not those people though.

                Joe Sal taught me a valuable lesson yesterday, Mike: If you’re not prepared to kill to achieve your goals then you’re just a keyboard commando signaling an empty and hypocritical virtue.

                Kill em all, I say. And rent seek. Of course I would tho. I’m a lefty.

                What say you? Are you prepared to kill to achieve your goals?Report

              • aaron david in reply to Jesse says:

                That is one hell of a disingenuous tweet. You have to dial down, but we have no idea of the circumstances of the BP and ICE deaths (did someone die after trying to cross the desert with no water after the BP tried to rescue them?) the 313 is worldwide (why not count North Korean deaths at that point?) and includes many questionable deaths, while only counting FA murders that were completed, not Bombing attempts on ICE facilities and police stations or sniper attacks on R softball games. And, yes, there have been way too many deaths (any is too many) by the right, cheap shots like this take away from any lesson due to obvious attempts to play partizan footsie.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to aaron david says:

                Not sure why you think it’s disingenuous.

                Antifa: 0
                Alt-righters: 313

                The disingenuous part is thinking that antifa violence is equal to or (gasp) potentially *even worse than* alt right violence.

                The idea that potential lefty violence constitutes a biggoer worry than actual righty violence is a staple of conservative thought, tho.

                I’ll leave it to the reader to discern why that might be.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Stillwater says:

                Well, his list (even specifically the 313 number) probably stems from either Wiki or a source listed by wiki in their entry on right wing terrorism.

                Some of those are highly questionable inclusions. For several the police don’t even know of a motive, and for many the cause was mental illness, not ideology.

                What’s interesting about right-wing terrorism (contrasting the entry with the one on left-wing terrorism) is that it encompasses all things that aren’t specifically Islamic terrorism or an attempted communist revolution. Even if the perpetrator is a hard core socialist or fully agrees with “The Squad”, if the attack was not aimed at overthrowing the government and replacing it with a communist regime, and if they didn’t shout “Allahu Akbar!”, the attack apparently gets listed as right-wing terrorism.

                A more accurate list is obviously needed.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to George Turner says:

                A more accurate list is obviously needed.

                One that switches the tallies.

                I feel ya.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to George Turner says:

                “For several the police don’t even know of a motive, and for many the cause was mental illness, not ideology.”

                It’s worth noting how the Gilroy shooting got memory-holed when it turned out that the shooter was an Iranian teenager who bought his gun legally and was quoting a New Zealand labor organizer’s rant written 150 years ago.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Nope.
                He was an American.Report

  23. pillsy says:

    @Mike,

    I’m, uh, pretty puzzled by this reply. I mean I definitely disagree with it in parts, but much less strongly than you seem to think, and a lot of it strikes me as very correct. And a lot of the stuff that I agree with is also commonly accepted by what we tend to call the Woke Left.

    Obviously I disagree about as strongly as I can with all of this. I’m going to cite my two BAs as a strong bias towards culture. We could go through all of the historical examples of races eventually becoming ethinicities and eventually cultures and then just sort of generic.

    Obviously yes. So obviously yes that I’m surprised you think I disagree, and I’m sincerely asking you why you think I don’t.

    Let’s be honest here, we’re only really talking about blacks in this discussion.

    OK, being honest, that’s… not what we’re really only talking about here. Only two of the women Trump attacked are black, and one of them was born in Somalia, and raised in a Somali immigrant community.

    So then why do we treat blacks as a monolithic group from coast to coast?

    For a bunch of reasons and for certain values of “we”. And quite a few people actually do end up treating white people as a monolithic group on all sides of the debate, so I’m not sure the difference is that stark.

    I’m sure some people will contend that whites have had the luxury of transcending their race while blacks have been forced to remain more insular due to oppression, but that is a perspective I would actually call racist.

    That sounds kind of racist to me too…?

    You seem to be arguing that culture is tied to skin color here. Is that accurate?

    No. I’m saying that racism often uses cultural disapproval (often of imaginary or greatly exaggerated cultural faults) as a justification for racial prejudice and discrimination.

    I chafe at the racism thing so much because I studied culture for 10 years in an academic setting and it just became more and more apparent to me that race was a construct and culture was, well, everything. Calling racism when culture is the actual factor seems so intellectually lazy to me. And honestly, unproductive.

    But racism is, itself, a feature of American culture [1] and many other cultures.

    [1] Attenuated of course from when it was the dominant view in the 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th centuries, but I’d argue worse than it was 10 or 20 years ago.Report

    • JoeSal in reply to pillsy says:

      I don’t really see what the left is doing with racism. How would you see a race war developing? For all the yammering it only looks from the outside as a strategy to attempt to amass power by stoking something that is near a impossibility in this country.

      Now the whole punch a nazi, punch a commie thing, that looks doable.Report

      • Stillwater in reply to JoeSal says:

        I don’t really see what the left is doing with racism.+

        They’re trying to get people to understand that it’s REAL on the supposition that people decent people would change their behavior if they knew. Your comment constitutes a counterargument to that view.Report

        • JoeSal in reply to Stillwater says:

          Do you think tribalism is real? And if not tribalism, then in group out groupism? Do you think it will ever go away?

          If we as a society make racism A BIG DEAL, how will it ever not be a big deal?

          And again this doesn’t answer the question of how this evolves into a bonified race war, instead of a bunch of busy bodies trying to shame people who don’t care if people call them nazis or WS for the thousandth time.

          Parsing decent and non-decent people lost its value a long time ago, mostly due to the people using that behavior.

          I would really challenge someone to show their work on a possible race war or even genocide as Lee mentions above, or this looks like nothing more than political posture.Report

          • Stillwater in reply to JoeSal says:

            If we as a society make racism A BIG DEAL, how will it ever not be a big deal?

            Depends on you idea of what identifying racism means. Some people – white people – think minorities want to highlight racist actions and policies in order to flip the script on whites and oppress them. Other people – usually minorities and most white people – think that highlighting racism is useful to create a more egalitarian society devoid of privilege and discriminatory punishment.

            The only race-based tribalism* I see in the US is white people keeping their boots on minorities necks.

            *gender based tribalism is men (usually white men) keeping their boots on womens’ necks.Report

            • JoeSal in reply to Stillwater says:

              Are you willing to kill a lot to make your ideas of a ‘egalitarian society’ a reality?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to JoeSal says:

                Sure. I’ll kill anyone and anything. Like all my lefty friends, I love to kill.

                Is that the answer you wanted to hear?

                Or is it that merely *advocating for* real racial equality will piss off white people so much that blood will spill and that burden falls not on the white people committing those crimes but activists who compelled them to engage in such acts of violence?Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Stillwater says:

                Just seeing if this egalitarian society stuff was anything more than keyboard commando-ism rent seeking priviledge through political posturing.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to JoeSal says:

                No, it’s more than that, Joe. It involves a lot of killing, just like you thought. And rent seeking.Report

              • greginak in reply to JoeSal says:

                The problem is that by suggesting we are killers and this isn’t the first time i’ve been told liberals are murderers and genociders you have made us go kill people. That’s how it works. Conservatives were called racists, sometimes unfarily, so they were made to embrace and defend racism. Welp i gotta go kill someone. Most likely a baby since i’m pro choice which means i’m a baby killer. brb.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to greginak says:

                greg, I totally understand. That’s the way it works anymore. I’d just suggest that you do a little rent seeking while your at it to make it worth your while.

                Good luck!Report

              • JoeSal in reply to greginak says:

                Greg, you kinda just prove my point, there isn’t a there, there.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to JoeSal says:

                Seems to me you had a standard of “willing to kill people” to determine how seriously people are taking the issue. If people are willing to kill, then they’re serious. IOf not, then they’re not.

                The weird thing is that this is just a recipe for violence – and oppression, and so on – which runs antithetical to a liberation-based view of egalitarianism.

                I think you’re fucked up, Joe.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’m the fucked up one? You believe that the nation is tribal and yet think the nation can be non-tribal with a strategy of what? Best wishes?Report

              • greginak in reply to JoeSal says:

                Hmmm i was just doing some social rent seeking, so i guess guilty as charged. On the bright side my privilege gets me to the head of killing line, so got the murdering done real quick. I used the self check out line of course to support the firing of good hard working white working class people. It’s been a full day, i need an artisanally bottled water with straw.Report

              • greginak in reply to JoeSal says:

                Me too!!! Kill, kill , kill. I just try not to get blood on my keyboard. Though i am willing to use my keyboard to kill if ordered by group commander, Oprah.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to JoeSal says:

                Guys, we’ve had a remarkably good comment section considering the subject. Let’s try to keep it that way.Report

              • JoeSal in reply to Will Truman says:

                10-4, I’m out of this one.Report

      • pillsy in reply to JoeSal says:

        How would you see a race war developing?

        What are you talking about, dude?

        Like how do you even get from “racism exists and is bad” to “race war”?Report

    • Mike Dwyer in reply to pillsy says:

      “I’m saying that racism often uses cultural disapproval (often of imaginary or greatly exaggerated cultural faults) as a justification for racial prejudice and discrimination.”

      And I would say the exact same thing from the other direction. Cultural prejudices are often labeled as racism as a justification to avoid conversations about cultural problems. I’ll give you a couple of examples:

      1) Blacks as a group are generally not very good at generating wealth. Black women are far more likely to own a luxury vehicle despite making less money as a group than white women. Blacks are less likely to own a home even when they make comparable incomes. Etc, etc.

      2) The high rate of gun deaths in the black community.

      We can both agree that both of those realities have roots in racist policies, the first being tied to lending practices and historic income inequality and the latter being a feature of the drug war, failed cities, etc. But at what point has the root cause been addressed and we can look to internalized dysfunction on the part of these communities?

      I’ve mentioned before that when I was working in a warehouse environment I had a team of about a dozen employees. Half were white, half were black. The whites were all married and home owners. None of the black employees were married or owned a home. All of them had similar levels of education, made the same amount per hour, etc. Was it racism that was responsible for that disparity or culture? And I think that is the core thesis regarding our differences.Report

  24. DavidTC says:

    I feel I should mention, as someone who is currently doing research into McCarthyism for a completely unrelated thing, that the comparison between the ‘Woke Left’ and McCarthyism is…really dumb. If the Woke Left is McCarthyism, they are _really really_ bad at it. McCarthyism managed to get thousands of people fired from just the government alone. The Woke Left has managed to…what, exactly? Get like ten people fired?

    But let’s assume this is literally a direct analogy, and this is just the start of the Woke Left. Like, it’s late 1945 in McCarthyism. (This would be very difficult because the Supreme Court eventually soured on the thing and _that_ is basically what shut most ‘loyalty’ checks down, and the Woke Left would have an even more difficult time because most of the justification there was ‘National security of an outside threat trumps free speech in government jobs’, which is…a good deal less of a reasonable argument when the problem is ‘This person is not woke enough’.) But let’s assume the same thing could still legally happen, that there could be some sort of ‘wokeness’ checks required for government employees or whatever.

    There’s a rather large problem with all this: The loyalty checks in the US really started in 1947 with Executive Order 9835 under President Truman, who basically got forced into it by Republican politicians. He tried to keep it away from the Hoover FBI (and failed) and then he tried to limit it, but failed and eventually the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act passed over his veto, and then the next election Eisenhower was elected and fully embraced the madness.

    Who is _elected_ means nothing in this situation. If the population wants it, it will happen. If they do not want it, it will not.

    The question is, ‘Who decides what the population wants?’ And while it’s easy to say ‘Trump proves the President actually is important there’, but in reality, no. Trump just ended up in power because enough of the population had been fed nonsense for a really long time by various right-wing media outfits.

    The only way witchhunts like that happen is if the general population wants them to happen! And the only way they really ever want them to happen is if someone keeps standing there telling them they need them for years. Like, oh, the right-wing has been telling them about immigrants and Muslims and people on welfare and basically everyone for years.(Everyone on the right who is about to mention the ‘Russian Investigation’…if that’s an example you want to include in that list in your head, I’m not stopping you.)

    The Woke Left, OTOH, have a _laughable_ small amount of the population on their side. Tumblr and Left Twitter are not the United States of America. A thousand people dogpiling onto someone for not being woke enough is…nothing. Nothing at all in the grand scheme of things. And they honestly are so confused that 90% of their attacks are on their own allies. They can’t just _magically_ have the political capital they need to pull any sort of witchhunt off, even if a few of them somehow get into power.

    There’s some hypothetical universe where they continue to grow in power and scope, and could eventually have a McCarthyism-like thing going on, but…who is elected at that point won’t actually be able to restrain an actual broad-spectrum political movement like anti-Communism was in the early 1950s or this hypothetical Woke-Left-ism is in 2025 or whatever.

    tl;dr – Witchhunts are social problems, not political problems. They happen because people ingest propaganda. The only way to stop them is to figure out how to counter propaganda.Report

    • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

      So who keeps issuing all the subpoenas to try and prove Trump and all his staffers are secret Russian agents? Which media outlets kept telling us that any day now Trump would be charged with treason and for working for a hostile foreign power? Who keeps telling us that the Russians decided our election?Report

      • Stillwater in reply to George Turner says:

        So who keeps issuing all the subpoenas to try and prove Trump and all his staffers are secret Russian agents?

        A subdivision of Woke Left Central controls those efforts with the approval of Woke Left International HQed in the basement of the UN building.Report

        • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

          Damn it, Stillwater. You’re uninvited from the annual Destruction of America party we on the woke left have for revealing our HQ locations.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Jesse says:

            There are those invited to the party;

            Those not invited to the party;

            and those who thought the party was in the basement of Comet PingPong.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Stillwater says:

          Uh, it’s not called Woke Left Central anymore, the term ‘central’ is too postitional-normative, implying that people not exactly in the center are wrongly positioned.

          The preferred term is now ‘the Woke Left Group’.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

        I…honestly am completely baffled as to how you think this is arguing with me.

        If you think the investigation is unfounded (1), then the fact that a Republican administration, or rather a Republican Attorney General(2) and a Republican Congress can be forced into a witchhunt _against a Republican_ rather proves my entire point that witchhunts have absolutely nothing to do with who is in office!

        Witchhunt are, again, the result of concertrated effort to turn the population against _something_, for years. They are not people leaping into power and starting a witchhunt against everyone’s wishes. In fact, politicians often are forced into witchhunts (Like Truman) against their own wishes!

        Saying ‘electing someone is going to cause a witchunt’ is the equivalent of saying: You shouldn’t use the lightswitches in your house, because if your house is full of gas it can set an explosion off. So you should always use a flashlight instead.

        The lightswitch isn’t actually the problem there, and if your house is full of gas, not using a lightswitch is a veeeeeery short term solution. Your house, will, eventually, explode, unless you stop the gas leak.

        If someone wants to stop the upcoming Woke Left witchhunt, they need to…somehow shutdown the Woke Left’s TV and radio shows, remove the billboards, stop having the Woke Left on Sunday morning TV shows, stop making all newly elected Democrats sign a Woke Left pledge, get rid of their massive PR efforts, etc, etc.

        Of course, witchhunts aren’t the only thing that works that way. People can be influenced into pressuring politicians into doing all sorts of things. That’s basically how politics works.

        1) Which, it wasn’t. And, no, the founding has very little to do with the Steele dossier, nor was it to prove Trump and his staffers are secret Russia agents. It was to investigate the ties between _the campaign_ and Russia.

        2) The investigation had trouble getting off the ground because Trump doesn’t give a damn about the actual procedure, but to further my point, this investigation under any other Republican president would have been cooperated with much more, because of political pressure. (And probably end up wrapping up soon, because Trump continued to interfere with it.)Report

        • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

          Witchhunt are, again, the result of concertrated effort to turn the population against _something_, for years.

          Which is what the Democrat party and the media have been doing ever since Trump’s victory. Hillary retained Fusion GPS, which paid for the dossier that said Trump was getting golden showers in Moscow. That was probably in response to Trump quipping that maybe the Russians had all her e-mails, so she screamed “He’s colluding with the Russians!”

          Comey, Strzok, Page, and others used that as a pretext to spy on his campaign, and then try to destroy his administration or remove him from office with the help of other top Obama officials. That failed, so they’ve spent two years alleging that Trump is a Russian stooge, despite not having a shred of evidence, and despite the charge making no sense whatsoever.

          In terms of political ties and influence in US campaigns, and in foreign government lobbying, Russia is almost insignificant. In 2017 their government spent $193,000 over here lobbying for things, whereas the government of Ireland spent $18 million, the government of the Marshall Islands spent $16 million, and the government of Liberia spent $10 million. The government of Korea spent $52 million. How much influence can you buy when you’re only throwing an eightieth as much as the Marshall Islands? Even the government of Bermuda wildly outspends the Russians on DC lobbying.

          Secondly, Trump didn’t need any money. He’s the least likely candidate in history to need cash. He also doesn’t listen to outside advice, so how the heck could anyone influence him, much less a two-bit foreign operation that didn’t even know how to contact his campaign officials?

          That’s why a huge swath of the public looks at these investigations and sees a paranoid and deranged witch hunt, and an attempt to subvert and undermine the government of the United States, and the people’s faith in the government of the United States. If anyone is doing Putin’s bidding, it’s the Democrats.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to George Turner says:

            “One signed receipt for the Swedish Penis Pump Enlarger 3000…”Report

          • Stillwater in reply to George Turner says:

            Secondly, Trump didn’t need any money.

            Hells naw. Between Trump U, Trump Steaks, Trump Casino and all the in-demand properties that aren’t losing any money AT ALL he’s raking in the cabbage. No way this dude could be bribed.Report

            • George Turner in reply to Stillwater says:

              And he can’t. Bloomberg estimates his net worth at $2.8 billion. Forbes estimates it at $3.5 billion, down from $4.5 billion in 2015. And there’s those crafty Russians with maybe $180,000 to throw around. It would be like trying to corrupt a New York cop, and having him put his career at risk, by offering him three dollars.

              It’s both ludicrous and stupid.

              In contrast, many pundits noted that Hillary has a pathological need for money. Some think it’s because she grew up relatively poor, and as first lady of Arkansas was often the poorest person in the room, as they entertained both old money and new billionaires from families like the Waltons (Walmart) and Tyson Foods. Thus a pattern of siphoning up every dollar even when she doesn’t objectively need to. For example, she made her own campaign pay her a salary for being her campaign’s candidate. Nobody could recall any candidate ever doing that before, and she certainly didn’t need to. Yet she did it anyway, because she has to be getting over on someone.

              Here’s a telling look from August, 2016, in two parts

              Donald Trump’s campaign doubled its spending in July, even though the Republican nominee still only employed about 80 people, aired no television ads and maintained ties with his fired campaign manager and the writer who plagiarized part of his wife’s convention speech.

              80 people and low low spending, compared to:

              Clinton, in contrast, reported 703 staffers, $2m on travel and signs of new offices. In July, her campaign spent a total of $38m, filings show, mostly on advertising. Last week, Trump spent $4.8m on his first general election ads, which aired in four swing states.

              If also noted that Mook refused to say the Clinton Foundation wouldn’t keep accepting foreign contributions during the campaign.Report

      • pillsy in reply to George Turner says:

        As I read through @DavidTC’s comment, I envisioned many potential avenues of counterargument, but none of them were nearly this dumb.Report

        • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

          The allure of the alt-right is that an explanation’s preposterousness is directly correlated with it’s allure.

          It’s like WWE without any recognition of the distinction between real and fake. It’s all just entertainment value.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

      If the Woke Left is McCarthyism, they are _really really_ bad at it. McCarthyism managed to get thousands of people fired from just the government alone. The Woke Left has managed to…what, exactly? Get like ten people fired?

      Careful there. If we start measuring effects created by the Left then we’ll start doing the same for effects created by the Right.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

        Ummm…okay? Do you think I was arguing there were current witchhunts started by the right? Because there aren’t. There are not, at this moment, any actual ‘witchhunts’ going on in American society, nor much of a taste for them.

        I’m finding myself wondering if people know what the heck McCarthyism even was. Or maybe _I’m_ using it wrong and it’s become divorced from the original meaning.

        McCarthyism, or a witchhunt, or…whatever the term people want to use, is something that happens when _a sizable percentage of the population_ believe that there are _secret_ things about other people. Hidden, dangerous things. And they, the general public, then demand investigations. These investigations then have a political motive to find those ‘secret people’, regardless of reality.

        We are not, in any manner, close to this point. For any political orientation.

        I think people have confused witchhunts with demagoguery. Demagogues can cause witchhunts, and often take advantages of them happening in front of them, and perhaps the term ‘McCarthyism’ is the problem here, because McCarthy was a demagogue. But McCarthy didn’t start McCarthyism. He didn’t join in until it was three years in, and he was not, in any manner, the driving force of any of it. That’s why historians tend to call it the Second Red Scare.

        This was, again, started by President Truman because, well, Republicans had started denouncing various things as ‘communist’, and the Hoover really really wanted to have reasons to attack anyone he wanted, especially civil rights supporters and union organizers.

        Honestly, without the push of Hoover behind the thing, we wouldn’t even have had the Second Red Scare or the Lavendar Scare at all. (And the First Red Scare was just…stupid nonsense that didn’t last long at all.)Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

      In your research, did you find whether people who opposed McCarthyism were necessarily supporters of Stalin?Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

        *sigh*

        What on earth does that have to do with anything?

        I rather suspect President Truman, who didn’t like McCarthyism , was not a support of Stalin. The Department of Labor also was not particularly a fan of the concept. Most people inside the government understood it as Hoover throwing his weight around. But very few people ‘opposed’ it, it was more they didn’t like the _amount_ of it or how it was being done.

        However, the fact its false dichotomy doesn’t change the fact that one of the choices, literally, is not one of the current choices. It is not _possible_ to choose McCarthyism in today’s politics.

        You can’t say ‘I choose neither Trump or McCarthyism’. It’s like refusing to build your house on the ocean _or_ build it hovering six thousand feet in the air, and pointing out that you’ve been offered a false choice and there are other places to build houses. Well, yes, that is technically true, but I’m fairly sure you weren’t actually offered that second choice. You’ve misunderstood something somewhere.

        And honestly, there’s one political entity that is operating via demagogueic populism, which, while not the same as McCarthyism, is one of those things that slowly sway the population to the point they’d be willing to do it. Luckily, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies tend to be directed outward, and he has no focus.

        Luckily, we still have a lot of checks in place, both from Hoover’s general abuse of the FBI _and_ from court decisions about this specific thing, and society has changed a lot, to the point that attempting to track people down for the _beliefs_ seems rather unlikely.

        About the only sort of McCarthyism I could ever see us doing at this point would be for pedophilia or something like that.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

          What on earth does that have to do with anything?

          I think that it’s related to the intentions of the person who brought up McCarthyism in the first place. I think he was making a point about how it’s possible to be an anti-anti-Communist without being a Communist.

          I think.Report

      • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

        I’m guessing I’m the only person here who supports McCarthyism. Well, someone’s got to do it.

        There are communists in government who work to undermine our country and they needed to be rooted out. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, was somehow was put in charge of the CIA despite voting for the Communist Party’s candidate, which he admitted in his CIA interview. I’m pretty sure that in WW-II the OSS wouldn’t retain agents who said they supported the Nazi party, they’d start a big file on them and have the FBI tap their telephone.

        The left freaks out when they some some cop with a Nordic pagan tattoo that can be indirectly linked to some Scandinavian motorcycle club that has some members who support something that can be construed as Nazi-adjacent, mainly because the Nazi’s co-opted Scandinavian and Teutonic imagery to build their bizarre cultural superman mythos. But they can run avowed communists for office and support Democratic Socialists who praise the old Soviet Union as the ideal. Yet based on oppression and genocide, the communists are objectively worse than the Nazis, plus historically, they didn’t dress nearly as well.

        1996 WaPo story on the Venona transcripts

        The recent publication of a batch of Venona transcripts gives evidence that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were rife with communist spies and political operatives who reported, directly or indirectly, to the Soviet government, much as their anti-communist opponents charged. The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught.

        The sum and substance of this growing body of material is that: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June 1953 for atomic espionage, were guilty; Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons such as Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon and Harry Gold, whose innocence of the accusations made against them had been a tenet of leftist faith for decades, were traitors or, at the least, the ideological vassals of a foreign power.

        I recommend reading the whole thing (If you can dodge the paywall), because it also discusses all the sweeping cultural and political shifts that occurred as a result of botching the classified NSA identification of Soviet agents in the US, which of course couldn’t be revealed at the time.

        Maybe they shouldn’t have shouldered a paranoid alcoholic with the role of being the heavy hand of government.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

          There are communists in government who work to undermine our country and they needed to be rooted out.

          It’s no longer constitutional to remove people from the government based on their political views. That’s how McCarthyism ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper of declining public support sending it to backrooms, and then court cases seriously limiting it.

          Well, in the public realm. In the private blacklist realm, private individuals started suing the people providing private blacklists and were easily winning the case. Turns out if you call someone a communist and put them on a list to tell people not to hire them, you actually need some proof or it’s libel and there are some pretty serious damages for deliberately destroying someone’s career.

          John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, was somehow was put in charge of the CIA despite voting for the Communist Party’s candidate, which he admitted in his CIA interview.

          It’s not constitutional to not hire or fire someone from the government because of how they voted, period. It’s not even constitutional if they were literally a member of the Communist Party.

          I’m pretty sure that in WW-II the OSS wouldn’t retain agents who said they supported the Nazi party, they’d start a big file on them and have the FBI tap their telephone.

          The US was at war with Nazi Germany. The US was not at war with the Soviet Union.

          It’s legal to remove government employees for working with a foreign power, and/or to plot the overthrow of the US government, but it’s not legal for the government to fire, or even refuse to hire, someone because they are a communist, or vote for communists, or hold communist views, or anything of the sort.

          Which I’d think conservatives would know, considering how often they attempt to cry about discrimination for their political beliefs in public education.

          Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning that, _even in times of war with Germany_, people who had previously spoken up in favor of the actual literal Nazi regime that we’d entered a war with were not subject to any sort fo witchhunt or even systematic removal from government employment.

          Whereas people who were communists in the political sense but nothing to do with Soviet Russia _were_. Just someone who liked Marx totally divorced from any national thing.

          Why? Because Hoover and various right-wing government people had been spewing anti-communism for years, as a way to fight civil rights and unions.

          I recommend reading the whole thing (If you can dodge the paywall), because it also discusses all the sweeping cultural and political shifts that occurred as a result of botching the classified NSA identification of Soviet agents in the US, which of course couldn’t be revealed at the time.

          That article is…confused in places. The NSA did not have ‘a top-secret program called Venona’ in the 1940s, as the NSA literally did not exist in the 1940s. Signal intelligence in the 1940s would have been from the SIS and…*goes to check Wikipedia*…yup, they were who was running Venona. (It is at this point I admit I have been writing MCU fanfic set in the early days of SHIELD, which is why half of all this, and McCarthyism, and all sorts of random 1950 political strife, is all in my head already.)

          And….does anyone really think the conclusion we should take from Verona is that McCarthyism is good? McCarthyism was _really stupid_. It completely failed to find the Soviet spies that actually did exist!

          This is because the entire thing was a moronic witchhunt basically promoted by Hoover. Huge amount of people lost their jobs for random political beliefs, and let’s not forget sexual orientation, and meanwhile the damn Soviets ran rings around the government.

          The amount of people actually arrested by the FBI during all that was less than 400, and it appears that most of the charges were for lying to the FBI. Basically, the FBI would find some connection to communism, and if the person lied, they were arrested, and if they admitted it, they were pressured into resigning, and if they didn’t resign, pressure was put on the agency to let them go. (Some of those agencies said ‘No, this is stupid’ and refused.) Records are a bit sketchy, but it seems clear that the FBI crowed about Soviet spies, so if they’d caught any more, we know about it. No, they were just catching people with ‘vaguely possibly communist political beliefs’, and often not even that.

          Meanwhile, all the actual working-for-the-Soviets presumably weren’t, uh, openly members of the communist party whatever.

          McCarthyism is almost a textbook example of how a witchhunt not only is harmful, but it literally doesn’t accomplish its goals, because the actual point of a whichhunt is to for the people conducting it to justify their own existence and gain power, not ‘find the thing they are looking for’.

          Saying ‘McCarthyism isn’t bad, because there were really Soviet spies’ is like saying ‘We need the Fire Department…yes, they decided to flood the mall for no reason and caused millions in property damage and risked countless lives, but look at all the buildings that burned down across town while they were doing that!’

          Maybe they shouldn’t have shouldered a paranoid alcoholic with the role of being the heavy hand of government.

          American history would be a lot less stupid without J. Edgar Hoover and his little fiefdom, and no one will ever convince me there weren’t huge amount of blackmail keeping presidents from removing him.Report

          • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

            Well, we did manage to execute quite a few Soviet spies, but not soon enough to stop them from stealing our atomic secrets and building a vast nuclear arsenal that let them keep all of Eastern Europe subjugated, along with spreading all over the place and dumping tens of millions of people into mass graves, which is how communists roll.

            The reason to toss communists out of government (as the US Army recently did with a newly minted officer) is that they have to lie when they swear an oath to defend the Constitution because their allegiance is to a dictatorship of the proletariat, one where people don’t have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or really any rights at all. The idea of limited government is completely alien to Marxism and to its offspring, Fascism and Nazism.

            So we outlawed communism, without a single vote of Democrat opposition in either house, and over the opposition of J Edgar Hoover. Contrary to what you may have been told, it is still US law, starting at 50 U.S.C. § 841 to § 844, under chapter 23, Internal Security, part IV, Communist Control.

            The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

            California finally rolled back their ban on communists in state employment or in public education in 2017, which, along with their poverty, is one clear sign that they’re becoming a communist state, which is something that everybody has known for a long time.

            The Supreme Court didn’t strike down bans on communist party membership as unconstitutional, they merely said the laws were too broadly defined and that a person had to share the illegal intent of the communist party before they could be tossed out of their jobs.

            It’s a tricky issue, similar to banning membership in terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda, which have broadly similar aims of government overthrow, subjugation, and mass murder, but in the name of Allah instead of the proletariat.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

              So we outlawed communism, without a single vote of Democrat opposition in either house, and over the opposition of J Edgar Hoover.

              I love how you say ‘without a single vote of Democrat opposition in either house’, which again is literally my original point: witchhunts do not happen because of who is elected. Moronic anti-communist things were being done by both parties.

              Also: That didn’t outlaw communism.

              Now, there _was_ a law that arguably outlawed communism at one time, or at least people were prosecuted under it. The Smith Act. The Courts made it much narrower in 1957 and voided a bunch of convictions.

              Contrary to what you may have been told, it is still US law, starting at 50 U.S.C. §841 to §844, under chapter 23, Internal Security, part IV, Communist Control.

              Ah, yes. The Communism Control Act, 50 U.S.C. §841 to §844, which ‘outlaws communism’. It didn’t anyway (It just required them to register), but…but it’s also not in effect anymore. Despite what Wikipedia tries to imply.

              §843 might still technically be on the books, but all that does is just add to a list defined in 50 U.S.C. §781. Hey, look, that law doesn’t exist anymore! Because that law was the McCarran Internal Security Act I mentioned above, and the part it amended was, indeed, found unconstitutional and repealed. Thus rendering both §843 and §844 (Which carefully explains how to determine if someone is a member of the communist party as defined by §843) utterly pointless.

              The only reason that’s §843 and §844 are still US law is someone forgot to repeal them when they repealed the law they modified. They do literally nothing.

              But, wait, there is also §842. The…uh…law no one understands. The law that denies the Communist Party of the United States ‘the rights, privileges, and immunities of a legal body’, which no one has any idea what it means. That entity still _appears_ to exist as a legal body, it has membership and voting and leadership. Some states tried to keep it off the ballot, and that worked…once. And not again. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled it could participate in an unemployment insurance system, which is…really weird for a non-existent entity to be able to do. The reason _that_ part of the law hasn’t been struck down is because it appeared to do nothing whatsoever. Like, no one knows what’s supposed to be doing.

              So…yeah, the Commmunist Control Act _functionally_ is not in effect anymore. Part of it amends a part of a law that was struck down by the courts and repealed (Even if it itself has stupidly never been repealed.), and part of it is…too weird to understand so it’s literally never done anything.

              Oh, wait. There’s the first part, where they call the communist party a bunch of names, I guess that’s…still in ‘effect’?

              The Supreme Court didn’t strike down bans on communist party membership as unconstitutional, they merely said the laws were too broadly defined and that a person had to share the illegal intent of the communist party before they could be tossed out of their jobs.

              Yes. Exactly what I said.

              The US government cannot fire members of the communist party simply because they are members of the communist party. It can fire them if it proves they share the illegal intent of the communist party, specifically, the intent to overthrow of the United States government.

              It still can’t arrest them for that, though. Wanting to overthrow the government, and even advocating for that, is protected by the first amendment. The Courts have just said that ‘People who actively wish to overthrow the government should not be allowed to work for it’ meets whatever constitutional threshold is required to slightly restrict those rights.Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                See 18 U.S. Code § 2385.

                Advocating for the overthrow of the US government, or even knowingly affiliating with those who do, is punishable by 20 years in federal prison.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to George Turner says:

                Unconstitutionally vague? What about advocating for an exit-clause amendment? Or for a constitutional convention?Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                I think the law is pretty clearly doesn’t apply to constitutional conventions, or voting people out of office, or other mechanisms that are built in to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

                In full, it says:

                Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

                Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

                Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

                Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

                If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

                As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons.

                Congress is considering outlawing Antifa on similar grounds, declaring it a terrorist organization.

                The left often regards such people on their side as kind of cute, perhaps “passionate idealists”, while at the same time losing their minds over a half dozen skin-head high-school drop-outs on the right.

                However, the scary ones are those with serious military training and hardware, often former veterans who come home and set up shop as tactical shooting instructors and such, because that’s what they know.

                Timothy McVeigh taught the government to take such people very seriously, and the “revolutionary” ones are usually quite distinguishable from the militia (Bundy Ranch) types who are armed to the teeth but just want the government to leave them alone.

                One of my friends, who spent time in Iraq as a contractor for Blackwater Security, got a little too chummy in some vets he met in some activist online Facebook and gun forums. One day he got a call from a pal he knew in the FBI, who warned him that he was associating with people who were being watched very closely, and that he might want to cut ties. He did.

                One vet and former law man who ran a popular Youtube channel, along with teaching tactical courses in Tennessee, got all irked one day about Biden saying Obama would use executive orders to institute gun control. So the Youtuber posted an angry video saying “I’m telling you, if that happens, it’s going to spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot” along with a few other even juicier bits.

                The government immediately intervened, and his next Youtube video was with his attorney, where he said “In another video I said some pretty volatile stuff, which I apologize for. I do not – in any way – advocate overthrowing the United States government. Nor do I condone violent actions toward any elected officials.”

                The threat of twenty years in prison can help a person gain clarity.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to George Turner says:

                Which is why when I go to an Antifa rally, my sign says “We Came Unarmed- THIS TIME”

                Gotta thank the lawyers for the disclaimer.Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                Be careful!

                The UK Guardian reported that the LAPD planted wired informants into anti-Trump activist groups.

                The LA case is one of several across the country of law enforcement aggressively targeting anti-Trump and anti-fascist groups with monitoring and criminal trials.

                In Sacramento, police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue cases against leftwing activists, including seeking charges against anti-fascist protesters who were stabbed at a white supremacist rally. In Berkeley, police collaborated with a violent pro-Trump demonstrator to prosecute a leftwing group last year, and there have been similar controversies in Washington DC, Oregon and other states.

                So now they’re going to be even more paranoid.

                You’ll show up for a pre-protest meeting and have an encounter with Paisley, who downed eight Starbuck’s Bold Signature Espressos that morning. He’ll slam you up against a wall and start screaming “Are you a cop, man?!!! Are you with the pigs?! Raegan, McKinli, check him for wires!”

                While you’re screaming sincere denials, Aiden and Chase chime in with “The fascist cops are bugging informants!” and “They’re planting cameras in people’s bums, man!”

                Maisie screeches “The only way to check is with an organic artisanal shade-grown latte enema!” and Chet says “With Texas Pete hot sauce!”

                Brooklyn cries “Texas Pete is cultural appropriation! It’s totally racist you inauthentic pretender!” and Maelynn says “It’s got to be Sriracha!”

                You’re only chance of escape will be to rely on your intimate knowledge of hot sauces to foil them at every turn.

                “Listen to me, please. Sriracha is run by a bunch of South Vietnamese capitalists who blighted their local community, which took them to court!”

                Claire retorts with “El Tapatio then!” and you coolly reply “El Tapatio is made in Vernon California, near downtown LA, and its exported to Mexico.”

                Brooklyn says “Do I look like I care?” and you icily stare at her and say “It’s packed with xantham gum and sodium benzoate. Do you even read labels?”

                Tristen says “Cholulua, then!” and you see your chance.

                “Cholula is owned by Jose Cuervo, which is a corporate giant with 35% global market share. They’re owned both by the ultra-wealthy Beckmann family (with two n’s), and the giant global corporations that are the merged spawn of Guinness, Gilbey’s (the UK’s largest producer), and other world-wide entities. Are you people anti-fascists or corporate sales reps for mass market distilling giants?!”

                At that point you should have them back on their heels, and that’s when you need to go on the offensive and crush the pampered little snowflakes.

                So, be prepared for anything.Report