Trump Digression Index: The Trump Corollary to Godwin’s Law
White House Briefing by President Trump and Coronavirus Task Force. White House Photo [public domain]
Many years ago, Mike Godwin coined one of the famous rules of the internet: Godwin’s Law.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
Godwin’s Law is so well-established that, after years of debate about its meaning and when Nazi comparisons are and are not appropriate, its invocation has almost become hackneyed. I’m not going to dive into that particular rhetorical mosh pit at the moment because I’m more interested in the purest form of the law: that whether or not the comparison is apt, it is inevitable that you will get to the Nazis at some point.
There are various corollaries to Godwin’s Law, of course. And I’ve increasing begun to apply one of my own. I call it the Trump Corollary, and it states that “As any online or offline discussion grows longer, the probability of Trump being mentioned approaches 1. If it goes long enough past that point, Godwin’s Law soon follows.”
To be clear: I’m not saying “TRUMP SI HITLER!!11!!”. What I am saying is that Trump — like fascism, communism, or the status of the 90s Braves’ rotation as the greatest of all time — has become a rhetorical dead end. Either as, “you’re just a mindless MAGA” or “you just have Trump derangement syndrome”, he has become a place where good arguments go to die.
This corollary really struck me during a video game Discord last week. We were discussing some unruly and uncooperative players and someone joked, “Oh, they must be Trump supporters.” And I realized that I was completely unsurprised that a seemingly unrelated discussion of X-wings ended on Trump. That I’d begun to anticipate that almost every conversation would end there.
One of the more irritating things about Trump’s presidency is the intrusion of it into every aspect of life. Comedies seemingly can’t function unless they make an oblique slam on Trump. SNL can’t go a week without a Trump sketch. CNN has become all-Trump-all-the-time. Awards shows…well…they were always like that. This was true before the Coronavirus but has now been kicked into overdrive. And the President, of course, loves every second of it.
In fact, the diversion of seemingly every discussion, movie, TV show, recipe, internet forum and 3000-year old lead tablet curse toward Trump is something that can now be measured. Call it the Trump Digression Index. For TV shows, it’s how many lines deep you can get into a show before Trump is mentioned. For internet forums, it’s how many comments deep you have to go on a website before the discussion of something — anything — veers off to the president or his supporters and/or critics.
A few measures of TDI, estimated by the extremely rigorous and mathematically sounds method of finding numbers that effectively poke fun.
TV comedies: 30
Discord chat: 20
IMDB post: 10
Reddit forum: 5
SNL Sketch: 3
Washington Post comment section: 1
CNN article: An indefinite number because you can’t divide by zero.
I’m sure some bright person can write an algorithm to calculate this more precisely. But now, whenever a discussion veers toward Trump, we can rate it on this scale. Examples might include:
“Wow, that was the smallest Trump Digression Index I’ve ever seen in a Care Bears episode.”
“I didn’t think it was possible for Hannity’s Trump Digression Index to get any lower and yet, here we are.”
“Since this COVID thing began, that site’s Trump Digression Index has fallen to about 2.”
“Eugene Gu has a negative Trump Digression Index.”
Feel free to nominate any Trump obsessives I’ve missed.
“TV comedies: 30
Discord chat: 20
IMDB post: 10
Reddit forum: 5
SNL Sketch: 3
Washington Post comment section: 1”
99% probability that the vase majority of people that make, write, product, watch, read these shows, etc are liberals. What would you expect? I read Slate periodically….i expect the comments to be full TDS 24/7 and it is.
Just like when Obama was Pres and all the right was “it’s the end of the world”…they just had less press…cause the media was in bed with O.Report
This isn’t new; mass culture casually shit-talking the President has been a thing since George Washington was in the office.
If anything, 2008-2016 was the anomaly. Kinda surprising that nobody just casually shit-talked Barack Obama. One of those unsolvable mysteries, clearly nobody can explain why that didn’t happen.Report
I disagree. We didn’t constantly talk about Reagan or Bush or Carter or even Clinton. Not this way. Not every day. Not every forum. Not every discussion. And while Fox News talked about Obama nonstop, we’re now in a case where both sides constantly talk about Trump, one insisting he’s the devil, the other insisting he’s the greatest ever.Report
…I guess you’re right, we did not have quite as many discussions about Reagan or Carter in online fora. And hardly anyone Tweeted about Clinton.Report
Nightline talked about the hostage crisis everyday. Nightline was a big deal back then and focusing on it everyday was also a big deal. I guess Ted Koppel’s hair was the rough equivalent of twitter nowadays.Report
Ted Koppel spent months waiting for Jimmy Carter to make an appearance outside the White House, perhaps briefly stepping into the rose garden or perhaps the back patio. If he saw his shadow the hostages would be stuck in Tehran for another 100 days.
But really, a person had to stay up late to catch Nightline. It wasn’t in your face 24/7, and even when you saw it, there wasn’t much to say about Carter because Carter never said very much, and when he did people just commented on his sweater or fell asleep.Report
Jimmy Carter had to stage a hostage rescue in Iran just to try to get a newspaper to run his name in print. At one point he was so desperate for press that he claimed a crazed rabbit attacked his fishing boat in the middle of a lake, forcing him to beat it away with a paddle. His press hasn’t really dropped since he left office all those years ago, he just never got much to start with. And that was with the Soviet Union stirring up trouble, inflation, high unemployment, and a massive energy crisis.Report
OMG, can you imagine if a swimming rabbit attacked the president’s boat in today’s media environment?Report
“one insisting he’s the devil, the other insisting he’s the greatest ever.”
I’m guessing that you don’t actually watch or listen to Fox, do you? I don’t much either (I mostly rely on RealClear to aggregate what’s worth reading on a given day rather than follow particular outlets), but I did find it interesting when the Harvard research on media bias came out a while back and showed that Trump coverage was something like ~90%+ negative at MSM outlets…and roughly 50/50 pos/neg at Fox. People who make a point of not watching Fox are often oddly certain that they know exactly what is said there…and just as often wrong. “You must have heard that on Fox” is effectively it’s own lesser version of Trump Digression with the unique twist that the person insistently making the claim is usually proudly ignorant of whether the claim in question ever actually aired on Fox, much less was the majority position there.Report
Totally disagree. You cannot blame the Obama era media that was friendly to that president for the current volume on Trump. There is more media than every, both pro and con, and add in social media the president is indeed omnipresent.Report
I blame The Daily Show.
Report
It’s will rogers fault. He mocked Hoover. No, it was Mark Twain’s fault, he mocked all sorts of powerful people. No it was Swift’s fault for satirizing the powerful.Report
Greg, the problem is *NOT* that we have a comedian class that mocks all sorts of powerful people.
Would that we did.Report
Huh. We do have that. We are up to are butts in criticism of the powerful. We have had that since the internet existed and before. Comedians dont’ actually change anything though. Not that there is anything wrong with just being entertaining.Report
This is what I mean by the world is changed.
Back in the Before Times, lets say the mid 70s, Garry Trudeau could gently mock liberals and conservatives, because the really weren’t all that different and held a shared understanding of what America was and should be.
Trudeau’s viewpoint was in line with both of them, to some degree; He was expressing the common shared understanding.
But now that is gone. Republicans have a radically different view of what America should be.
It simply isn’t possible to have an understanding of America that would be intelligible to both liberals and conservatives.
There isn’t any way to make a joke that both sides would “get”.Report
I think on this from time to time… as someone out of step with Stewart, I could watch and appreciate his jokes, and sometimes he would even pirouette to skewer his own team on a principle commonly violated.
When I think about Colbert (post his funny show), Samantha Bee, and John Oliver… those folks strike me as missing the Stewart nuance and honestly not quite getting what I took to be Stewart’s principled critiques (not that I agreed with him, but I could appreciate him).
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he rather than his heirs had worked the Trump phenomenon.Report
The problem was that his principled critique of Bush became a “well, there’s no way to skewer Obama and be funny” in January 2009.
Which made it much, much easier to reinterpret his principled critiques of Bush as insightful-but-partisan (or partisan-but-insightful) and that changed everything.
The “et al” folks seemed to have the same interpretation with a “but that’s good!” tacked on.Report
Again more huh??? Did anybody think he was doing the above it all routine. He always had his beliefs and did comedy. Insightful but partisan is solid useful work. Insight is good. It is just being partisan that is useless.Report
Fair enough… if that’s why he stopped when he did. I expect he’d have had more material than he may have anticipated… and who knows, maybe Obama would have benefited from his humor.
But agreed on his heirs, they are almost entirely without self-reflection; I suppose Colbert is the biggest disappointment (IMO).Report
The problem was that his principled critique of Bush became a “well, there’s no way to skewer Obama and be funny” in January 2009.
Not sure that’s the case. Skewering Bush was easy: extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, My Pet Goat, “yellow cake!”, he didn’t get peppered he shot that dude!, Mission Accomplished, “known unknowns”, “i don’t really think about Bin Laden to be honest”, etc etc.
What did Obama do that deserved skewering? Tan suit, no jacket in Oval Office, the Red Line, Fast and Furious, drone strikes, not defending DOMA in court….
Seems to me one admin was objectively more target rich than the other.
Oh, and Dijon mustard. How could I have left that one out?Report
It seems like the angle being presented is “how can we take skewering rendition or iraq war unless the comedian is completely non partisan and above it all.” Not saying that is good take.Report
I did a little thought experiment on how Stewart would’ve handled Reagan and I think ultimately it would have been a lot like he handled Obama (except for the Iran-Contra scandal) because Reagan projected an image of competence, and to an extent *did* run a pretty competent administration, which precluded taking the easy potshots. The Bush II and Trump admins are so obviously and idiotically incompetent that the wonder is why conservative comedians aren’t/didn’t relentlessly mock them both.Report
Maybe. There was a lot of comedy directed at Reagan and staff. Much of it pointed. But they did seem at least competent and professional.
Remembering the Ramones, Bonzo goes to Bitburg.Report
Here are a handful of things that I think would have been possible veins to mine:
Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. (A personal story. Minutes after it was announced that he won the Peace Prize, I went over to my dyed-in-the-wool Liberal Democrat co-worker and said “Did you hear that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize?” and he turned to me and sighed heavily and said “What’s the punch line?”)
The Obamacare roll-out.
The various bombs that were dropped following the Nobel Peace Prize. (And the enthusiasm with which the term “Kinetic Action” was embraced.)
Were there any major culture war events between 2008-2015 that Obama was on the wrong side of at one point? Maybe those as well.
I mean, *I* remember stuff like this (and the Village Voice making fun of it).
And there’s also the case that Jon Stewart got invited, multiple times, to the White House during Obama’s tenure (he gets defensive when asked about it) which indicates a different dynamic.
But that’s just off the top of my head.Report
“You cannot blame the Obama era media that was friendly to that president for the current volume on Trump.”
? I’m not saying we’re in a backlash, I’m saying that we’re at normal volume.Report
“There is more media than every, both pro and con”
No, there isn’t. That’s actually a big part of the problem. Local and regional news organizations have been collapsing since the rise of social media and even the big national orgs have had to drastically cut staff. That’s not even all that new, Ben Rhodes made the point under the Obama admin that the agencies used to have competent foreign desks, but since they lost those it was just ignorant, inexperienced new guys left that had to take his word for what was happening overseas (and allowed him to form an “echo chamber” to promote policies like the Iran nuclear deal). We used to have real news, now we just mostly have cut-rate minimum wage journalism majors farming out clickbait or playing at being political activists.Report
Mike Godwin stated that you can refer to Trump as a Nazi after Trump was elected.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/godwins-law-mike-godwin-internet-hitler-charlottesville-virginia-donald-trump-a7892171.htmlReport
I think it’s important to not call Trump a Nazi, because he isn’t. Instead, he’s a wannabe fascist.
Trumpism is a form of fascism. It’s what fascism looks like in America — with baseball caps! It’s how authoritarian goons sell their bullshit here, just as Mussolini sold his bullshit in an Italian way.
But it’s not Naziism. Nazis, after all, had an ethos.Report
I agree that fascism is a very mutable ideology and Trump isn’t a Nazi. That being said, most people are kind of blunt and will go for the easiest and strongest insult they can think of. That is Nazi in this case. The problem is that many Trump supporters don’t see Nazi as an insult. The younger very online ones really would like to be Nazis.Report
I can’t figure out how Fascist is an insult. The American left loved Mussolini. FDR liked Mussolini, and Mussolini explained that Fascism was like FDR’s New Deal. And of course Mussolini almost went to war against Nazi Germany over Austria, which was a potential flash point and Versailles violation long before Czechoslovakia. And of course the Fascists kicked out Mussolini, forcing him to found his own short-lived little country, the Italian Socialist Republic.Report
We know, George. We know.Report
It’s downright funny that you look at the administration that has done the most to REDUCE regulation and seat judges who push AGAINST Presidential and administrative overreach and has repeatedly told Congress “Do your job and I’ll sign what you give me”…and THAT is your example of “authoritarian” even as the party in opposition is seriously proposing taking over 1/6 of the entire economy (healthcare, via M4A), drastically restructuring our entire economic framework (even the author of the “Green New Deal” publicly admitted it’s just a socialist wish list that originally had nothing to do with climate change), and pushing for the federal government to preempt the State’s own authorities (multiple bills that deny States the right to manage their own elections as they see fit). Suuuure, but it’s the Republicans who are the authoritarians.
Trumpism isn’t fascism, claiming such merely proves that you are woefully ignorant of at least one of those things, if not both.Report
Err.. point of order:
The candidate pushing M4A lost the Democratic Primary, massively, to the candidate who was opposed to that policy.
The Green New Dream.. err Deal… was not approved or even brought up for a vote by the Democratic Congress, it was proposed by a very small contingent of the Democratic Party, that you right wingers like to over-inflate, and then it went nowhere. So to characterize the Democratic Party as seriously proposing either of those policies is.. uh… very divorced from reality.
But I am delighted to see you’ve climbed down and accepted the reality that the Dems don’t embrace or support the imbeciles of Antifa. Good on you.Report
“So to characterize the Democratic Party as seriously proposing either of those policies is.. uh… very divorced from reality.”
They were proposed. That’s a fact. They were serious. That’s also a fact. We’re not talking about a 3am tweet, we’re talking about full policy positions with cosponsors on legislation and campaign promises from people who had a legit chance of winning and supporters right here on OT. So it’s undeniable that they were “seriously proposed” and that the people doing so were exclusively democrats. We can disagree on WHY they got nipped, but I’m going to give Republicans at least part of the credit for making a point of pushing back on those so hard. I’m rather dubious that the Dem moderates could have killed those on their own. You can call it “over-inflating” but I prefer to think of it as more of a prophesy paradox: it only doesn’t come true specifically because we made such a point of assuming that it would and responding accordingly.
“But I am delighted to see you’ve climbed down and accepted the reality that the Dems don’t embrace or support the imbeciles of Antifa. Good on you.”
Shrug, many still do, particularly regarding the Dem “as a party” in the sense of stated (and unstated) positions by the more visible mouthpieces of the party. OTOH, I do make a distinction between that highly visible minority and the Democrat base as a whole (heck, something like 1/3 of the Dem base self-identify as “conservative” when polled, you guys DO have a majority even within the party who have more sense than this BS, it’s just always a question of if they’ll actually pay attention and stand up to the radicals who keep driving the agenda leftward off a cliff). If that wasn’t already clear, I’ll try harder in the future to distinguish in my comments between the regular voters and actual party officials/public persons.Report
So the Democratic Party leadership and the party rank and file rejecting those very policies is either incidental or a credit to Republicans but if a minority of the fringe of the party propose those policies in the first place then those policies can be said to be serious proposals of the Democratic Party as a whole? I mean it just doesn’t seem, I’m not gonna say fair- politics ain’t beanbag, but coherent springs more to mind.Report
Urusigh, like I mentioned yesterday, I think you’re projecting your own conservative/libertarian values onto Trump. Only a couple months into his Presidency Trump fired Comey to “lift the cloud” of an ongoing investigation into his campaign’s relationship with foreign actors. Regardless of whether you believe the investigation was legitimate or not, firing the head of an agency which was investigating him and his campaign in order to *end that investigation* is the action of an authoritarian. That was two months into his term. It’s been downhill from there.Report
We’re not going to agree if you think firing a partisan who flatly failed to uphold the standards of his job is authoritarian. I call it “Rule of Law”. Comey repeatedly violated agency policy, leaked, and flat out lied to the President. Professional misconduct is ALWAYS a valid cause for termination. Trump isn’t above the law, but neither are the people investigating him. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
I get tired of this hypocritical debate. It was the same thing in reverse when it was Hillary Clinton under investigation for her emails and the Democrats calling for Comey to be fired for violating agency guidelines then. Trump’s only mistake in that regard was not firing him on day 1. Dems kept telling me “you can’t investigate and charge a political opponent, that’s what authoritarian Banana Republics do!” and I was the one pointing out that “giving politicians on your own side a pass on violating the laws is what authoritarian Banana Republics do!” Moral of the story: Your political opposition will always call you authoritarian REGARDLESS of how you handle these situations (or how they themselves previously did).Report
We’re not going to agree if you think firing a partisan who flatly failed to uphold the standards of his job is authoritarian.
Trump didn’t fire him because he was partisan. He fired him to “lift the cloud” by ending the investigation. Which is authoritarianism 101.Report
“Trump didn’t fire him because he was partisan. He fired him to “lift the cloud” by ending the investigation.”
Your claim is contradicted by facts, not the least of which is that the investigation did not end. It should have, it was already established to be baseless back in January, but firing one person in an instigation being worked by a large team does not stop an investigation. Comey did however refuse to say publicly the very same things he told the President himself. Again, it is well established that Comey was a liar actively mishandling the investigation. Your attempt at mind reading does you no credit. Firing your own employee for misconduct, particularly an employee violating the law and policies in Law Enforcement itself, is Rule of Law 101. Again, Dems wanted Comey fired months before that for his lies and mishandling of Clinton’s email investigation. Comey wasn’t a credible leader or investigator. You can impugn bad faith all you want, but that’s just sour grapes. All I see is you trying to give violation of the Rule of Law a pass because you dislike the victim. Trying to misuse law enforcement to suppress your political foes, THAT is authoritarianism 101.Report
Your political opposition will always call you authoritarian REGARDLESS of how you handle these situations (or how they themselves previously did).
What partisans call their political opponents isn’t relevant here, though. That’s the point.Report
Trump is a sociopathic narcissist and his chief skill is pushing his way to the headlines every day. Like an angry child he will throw a tantrum or break something if only to bask in the attention.
That he somehow became President shouldn’t surprise us. He was elected by people whose overriding policy goal is to inflict pain and suffering on those they despise.Report
Which I find genuinely fascinating as the simple thing to do is ignore and not report… or worse, report in calm understated tones the bare minimum.
“Trump plays ‘hunch’ with bet on Malaria drug” The end.
Put the talking heads talking over the Trump portion of the Presser, then cut-away to Fauci for focus.
You’d think our best and brightest would be able to out think and manage a fool like Trump.Report
You’d think our best and brightest would be able to out think and manage a fool like Trump.
Exactly this. Trump uses the media to his advantage to be sure, but he also proves by demonstration that some of the harshest criticisms of the media, which emanate from the right, are largely correct. He effectively tells them he’s going to play a game with them to serve his own interests, and they go right ahead and let him play a game with them. (So it’s win-win for Trump!)Report
Yes, and plenty of leftists are calling for the media to refuse to play the game and simply ignore his deranged propaganda sessions.
There is an asymmetry at work here. SOme media outlets like Fox, Sinclair, One America see their mission as propagandists, to deliver the proper talking points in service to the ideology.
Other media outlets like the NYT or WaPo see themselves as detached objective truth-tellers, but in reality they are courtside play by play commentators. “Opinions on the shape of the earth vary”, that sort of thing.
This makes it hard for them to tell the truth, since it would require them to identify one team as the telling the truth and one as the liars.
In turn, this would require them to admit that the world has changed, that we don’t have to parties with a shared understanding of the American republic anymore, and that one party has a radical and revolutionary outlook.Report
There is an asymmetry at work here.
“If conservatives just played by the same rules liberals do Democrats would have a better chance of winning elections.”Report
I don’t think this touches at all on the dynamic; instead I’d refer you to one R. Tod Kelly. There’s no pining for a lost age, just mad dashes for relevancy… dashes that take them deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of relevancy as a metric. They can’t *not* comment on something because they’re afraid of not being relevant to that moment, that thing. There’s no “truth” or journalistic standard. They are the game and the game is they.Report
Which media are you talking about?
Because I don’t think they can be lumped together anymore. There is a profound difference between how Fox sees themselves, and how CNN sees themselves.
Comparing them is like comparing Pravda to the NYT circa 1960; The NYT could be faulted on a dozen different counts, but putting them in the same basket and calling the “the media” would be a profound error.Report
I don’t think there’s as big a distinction as you seem to be suggesting… but I’d be fine throwing a net out there and including the “Media” that have official Press Corps delegations to the White House… if we have to start somewhere.
The media runs from Print to Radio to Cable… sure they all have their flavors, but I have no idea why I’d be obliged to compare anyone to Pravda in 1960 at all.Report
That’s the real absurd part. The press, even with all its self important ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ stuff is clueless.Report
Yeah, I can’t put my finger on it exactly… somewhere there are some seriously misaligned incentives that seem structural at this point.Report
Let’s just say that after watching ‘The Caine Mutiny,’ I’d recommend next watching ‘Network’.Report
This assumes that media luminaries actually are ‘our best & brightest’.Report
Heh, well we can at least commit to: all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.Report
Prepare for the George word salad fascist defense to be spewed at you. Paragraphs upon paragraphs of meaningless shit.Report
Unhelpful and also letting him live in your head Saul.Report
“That he somehow became President shouldn’t surprise us. He was elected by people whose overriding policy goal is to inflict pain and suffering on those they despise.”
I’m disappointed, Chip. That was a gratuitous slander and I doubt that even you actually believe that is an accurate description of ~45% of the American public. You’re usually better than that.Report
I’m thinking of how many times I’ve heard variations of “Own the libs”, or “Annoy The Media- Vote Republican” or a more recent variant “Make Liberals Cry- Re Elect Trump”.
So no, I think it is completely fair and accurate to say that the overriding motivation of Trump voters is to hurt liberals.Report
I call BS Chip. You know that Twitter isn’t America. By that standard your own side would be defined by the anarchy of Antifa and your many politicians, pundits, and comedians who have made a point of gleefully fantasizing about assaulting/killing Trump, his family, and his supporters in general. Would it then be fair for me to say that the overriding motivation of Democrat voters is a desire to not merely taunt or upset their political foes, but to PHYSICALLY HARM them? You’re literally comparing “Make the snowflakes melt” with “I want to punch him in the face” as if the former is worse than the latter. That’s a fishing strawman and you know it.Report
Conservatives get very indignant when we call them fascists and say they are a radical force that disregards the norms of liberal democracy.
But look at it from our perspective;
The conservative world, starting somewhere in the Clinton presidency, became rife with dark talk of the need for militias, leading to actual armed groups training in the woods for an expected revolution.
At the moment Obama was elected they took to the streets in Revolutionary garb, brandishing guns and forming groups like the Oathkeepers promising to take up arms against the liberal government.
Much of the rightwing punditocracy openly supported the Bundy clan as they staged an armed takeover of federal property and aimed their guns at BLLM agents.
Rightwing commenters like Kevin Williamson talk about hanging women who get abortions; Bill O’Reilly kept ranting about “Dr. Tiller The Baby Killer” right up until the time when someone did in fact murder the doctor; Popular rightwing commenter Ann Coulter openly questioned whether women should be allowed to vote; Newt Gingrich suggested repeal of child labor laws.
Not to mention the fact that the rightwing tolerates and winks at the actual, amrband-wearing Nazis and white supremacists, either the softer spoken types like Charles Murray, or the tiki-torch carrying guys in Charlottesville. And how many rightwing preachers have loudly demanded that God’s Law should override the laws of man?
Do I need to go on?
Look, if you want to rub shoulders with these guys and remain silent while they talk about White Genocide and chuckle at memes of Pepe pushing (((George Soros))) into an oven, well, then don’t get all huffy when we make the connections.
So far, no Republican politician has had a Sista Soulja moment, where they draw a line and declare a boundary to conservative thought. At this moment, anyone up to and including actual Nazis, are welcome to join and be a Republican in good standing.
This is a You Problem, something you guys need to clean up. Until you do, we will keep pointing out the truth.Report
“So far, no Republican politician has had a Sista Soulja moment, where they draw a line and declare a boundary to conservative thought. ”
Yeah, we have, repeatedly, loudly, and with full emphasis, up to and including Donald Trump himself. Nazis and white supremacists are not in fact “Welcome to join in good standing”, they are denounced, debated against, and dis-invited when they do attempt to show up. It’s your side that has a problem publicly setting a line, not ours. It’s called the “Alt-Right” specifically because even they admit they aren’t part of or welcome in the “Right”. That’s not “our” radical wing, that’s a separate group entirely. For comparison, I’ll accuse Dems of “socialism” all day long, but I’m still not lumping in the actual Communist Party with you.
“Look, if you want to rub shoulders with these guys and remain silent while they talk about White Genocide and chuckle at memes of Pepe pushing (((George Soros))) into an oven,”
The only times I have ever encountered “those guys” is online, where I have invariably gotten into immediate argument against them, and those places were never in the usual conservative echo chambers, from which they are banned on sight.
Incidentally, Charles Murray is a classical liberal, not even a conservative, much less any kind of ethno-nationalist. Go actually read The Bell Curve before you slander a good man in your ignorance.
“The conservative world, starting somewhere in the Clinton presidency, became rife with dark talk of the need for militias, leading to actual armed groups training in the woods for an expected revolution.”
Do you consider the Founding Fathers to be fascists? This country was built on revolution against a government that overtaxed it’ citizens, suppressed religious believers, and then used armed force to deny people their rights. Take a hard look at your own party and tell me it isn’t running precisely on those policies. Likewise, compare to the BLM riots and Antifa and try to make the case that our militias are more unlawful or prone to violence than your own.
“At the moment Obama was elected they took to the streets in Revolutionary garb, brandishing guns and forming groups like the Oathkeepers promising to take up arms against the liberal government.”
#The Resistance, Antifa. Again, your crazies have been both more outspoken and done more damage than ours. The Obama admin weaponized federal agencies to illegally harass American citizens and your current Pres Nominee has made a self-avowed gun-grabber his man in charge of spearheading gun control, sorry but our backwoods preppers have a fair point.
“Much of the rightwing punditocracy openly supported the Bundy clan as they staged an armed takeover of federal property and aimed their guns at BLLM agents.”
In a standoff where they didn’t actually fire, they went to particular effort to avoid actually harming anyone at an unoccupied location in the middle of nowhere (hell, the locals were having picnics and lemonade out there with them, they weren’t a threat to anyone), over a case that actually had decent legal grounding, at which an FBI agent shot a man to death without justification and then committed lied about it? THAT’s the example you want to use for claiming militias are uncalled for? Quick, call BLM and tell them a Democrat thinks shooting a fleeing man involved in a peaceful protest occupation is justified! /sarcasm The law enforcement consensus following that debacle is generally solid that the agents badly mishandled the incident and escalated unnecessarily against a peaceful occupation (much the same as your own side tends to do inside city limits, except yours actually impairs the operation of government and effect innocent bystanders).
“Rightwing commenters like Kevin Williamson talk about hanging women who get abortions; Bill O’Reilly kept ranting about “Dr. Tiller The Baby Killer” right up until the time when someone did in fact murder the doctor; Popular rightwing commenter Ann Coulter openly questioned whether women should be allowed to vote; Newt Gingrich suggested repeal of child labor laws.”
Full reference please. You’ve misrepresented statements from republicans too many times for me to accept anything less than original source and full context.
“right up until the time when someone did in fact murder the doctor;”
Huh, a mass murderer finally got what he deserved, I regret only that it wasn’t done lawfully. Of course, you’re not exactly on the moral high ground given that it was a BernieBro who attempted the mass shooting of Congressional Republicans at the baseball field and the list of prominent Democrats who have suggested the assault or assassination of President Trump is rather long (along with the rape and murder of his wife and child). I’m honestly curious what on our side of the aisle you think compares to Kathy Griffin holding up our President’s severed head on national television and calling it “comedy” in the full expectation that her democrat viewers would indeed laugh along.
“And how many rightwing preachers have loudly demanded that God’s Law should override the laws of man?”
Fewer than Democrat activists loudly demanding “civil disobedience” to Trump and federal agencies. It’s not my side calling to #AbolishICE, shooting cops, or doing tens of thousands of dollars in damage rioting in the streets. Before you compare on the question of “obeying the laws of man”, you might want to note whose voters are more typically law-abiding.
“This is a You Problem, something you guys need to clean up.”
Been there, did that, do it again as needed, so when do you plan on actually pointing out some truth? Or better, yet, doing some housecleaning on your own side? I’m curious, can you even articulate what the leftmost line of the Dem party is?Report
As I’ve mentioned at this site many times, Hillary Clinton had the highest disapprovals in presidential election history when she won the nomination (until Trump won the nom only a few short weeks later). Beyond a handful of Party Loayalist types, most people – the vast majority – of folks held their noses when they pulled the lever on election day.Report
This is something that needs to be taken into account with Biden (and I don’t think that Republicans have fully grasped this yet): Biden is not Teflon but he’s certainly not Velcro like Hillary was.
If they’re expecting to throw stuff at Biden and have it stick like similar stuff stuck to Clinton, they’re going to be disappointed and they’re going to interpret Biden’s not-being-Velcro as Biden-is-Teflon… and they’ll be wrong to do it.Report
Biden is like a wrestler whose move is the no-sell. That makes you look pretty tough until you’re up against someone who’s better at working the crowd, and then it just makes you look dumb. Biden has, thus far, not really gone up against anyone who was even good at working the crowd.Report
Trump’s lost a step or two lately, seems to me. He wasn’t in top form (for Trump) in 2015-16. Even then there were signs of mental decline. But even moreso, I think it’s an open question whether Trump’s shtick works as well in the general this cycle since people have seen it on display every day for five years now. His base will love it, of course, but his base isn’t enough to get him elected.Report
There are so many things that are different about this time than last time.
Biden is not Clinton.
Trump 2016 is not Trump 2020.
Trump’s Tweets vs. Trump’s Record used to be a good go-to argument, but now the COVID has significantly changed that dynamic.
The COVID. If we’re all back to work by, oh, June 15, we can go back to playing “Yay! Global Economy!” with some factories coming home and Trump can brag about bringing back manufacturing from China.
If we’re not back to work by October 15, Biden can run on “vote for me to make things back to normal!”
The libertarians got 3% last time. They’re only going to get 1% in November. Where will that 2% go?
Who will Biden pick as VP?
Trump ain’t no spring chicken. Will he have a medical event between now and November?
Biden ain’t no spring chicken. Will he have a medical event between now and November?
Vox had an article yesterday that talked about Biden “keeping a low profile”. There are a handful of reasons that Biden keeping a low profile is good for the Democrats in the short term but there aren’t that many of these reasons that are good for the Democrats in the medium term and the election is smack dab in the middle of the medium term.
THERE IS SO MUCH STUFF UP IN THE AIR.Report
Actually Jaybird, there really isn’t that much up in the air this election.
When Trump opens up the economy, if he sticks the landing he wins. Full. Stop. The only move the Dems have is to stop that, while not looking like they are trying to stop it.
Everything else at this point is ephemeral garbage that only serves to keep the chattering class occupied.Report
Agreed, Republicans should just relax about November and focus on how delighted they’ll be when Trump wins in a landslide.Report
The idea of Trump “sticking the landing” on, well, anything really, seems comical.Report
Come on Chip. Look how well he did when he ran a business where the house always wins.Report
He single-handedly destroyed an entire professional football league.Report
Oh like pro football is popular in the US.Report
More like “if he really sticks it to the libs” amirite?Report
This all depends on if we (meaning humanity) can get Covid-19 under control. Can we? If Trump “opens the economy,” and literally everyone has someone close to them sicken and die — well can Trump really “open the economy” in those conditions?
As of today, most Americans have not been exposed to the virus. (At least, we believe that. We don’t actually know, but it seems likely.) If we try to fully open the economy, then presumably most of us will.
I don’t know what would happen, but I suspect it would be really bad.
Here is what will actually happen — my prediction: this year will be an absolute disaster for everyone involved. Trump’s policies will be small-minded, anti-scientific, and idiotic. He and his supporters will have a terrible record of botching everything. However, he will also deflect blame in every possible way.
Some people will fall for his deflections. Some won’t. I don’t know what the proportions will be.Report
My problem is that the only way to reliably get it under control involves a vaccine.
Re-opening the economy strikes me as a great idea but it will cause spikes all over the country again. On top of that, those who maintain self-quarantine (with occasional lapses into masked/gloved trips to run errands followed by showers) will do better off than those who cannot re-engage with a re-opened economy and follow those same practices so we’re going to see that those spikes are not evenly distributed.
But keeping the economy shut-down is less and less of a realistic option with every passing day given the very nature of our Just-In-Time lifestyles.
And I don’t know how you can get a vaccine for this in less than a year.Report
Agreed. It’s a nightmare.
One of the Trump’s biggest flaws here is his stark inability to be presidential, to be a leader. He’s a spoiled child who cannot handle the slightest adversity. In other words, he’s a total narcissist.
We knew this when we (the collective) elected him. It was a terrible error.
Consider how history regards Churchill’s leadership during WWII. Churchill has may flaws — from a leftist perspective he was a monster. But consider how he provided leadership to the British people. Imagine how Obama would handle this. I’m morally certain his policies would be better. More importantly, I’m 100% certain he would communicate effectively, just as Churchill could communicate during a time a great hardship.
Honestly, I think even GWB would handle this miles better than Trump. He wasn’t necessarily great, and (for example) he botched the Katrina response. But on the whole, he would handle Covid-19 far better than Trump. Almost anyone could. Trump is the absolute worst person to lead a nation through a crisis.
Will we reelect him? We might — I certainly hope not — but that tells you what you need to know about America.Report
Marco Rubio, of all people, gave an interesting take. I thought it was honest and thoughtful.
I read the responses to it and I pretty much figure that there’s nothing to be done.
Sorry, we don’t have a high-trust society… which means that high-collaboration ain’t on the table.Report
My problem is that the only way to reliably get it under control involves a vaccine.
Or a drug that mitigates the worst symptoms. The one drug I keep mentioning – Remdisivir – was developed (I believe) in response to H1N1 and is designed to work on coronavirus strains. Trump *could* fast-track it through FDA approval like he did with HCQ.Report
“Trump *could* fast-track it through FDA approval like he did with HCQ.”
Why would he need to? Off-label use, like with HCQ, requires no FDA approval. The drug is already approved by the FDA.
Getting it formally approved as a treatment for COVID-19, making it “on label” as it were? Sure, you need to submit some stuff to the FDA and do some studies.
But it’s not all that difficult, because if the drug is already approved for something else, you already know all the “big” health and safety stuff. What conditions go poorly with the drug, what medications interact, etc.
Doctors can give it to coronavirus patients right now, if they want. I believe quite a few are trying it.
Trump’s little bugaboo of HQC was already getting widely prescribed by ICU doctors because, well, desperation. That’s why it rather quickly disappeared from actual doctors as a “treatment” — because they could see, with their own eyes, that if it did anything it wasn’t much.
They were reduced to hoping maybe it helped a little, sometimes, and they’d take “a little, sometimes” as a win because they needed even tiny wins.
Of course the latest study out shows….it doesn’t do much for coronavirus patients but tend to cause heart problems.Report
What we need are the study results on Remd and any other drugs/cocktails out there. We got the off label use already. We need to know what works. Already docs on fine tuning their treatments.Report
The more stuff that helps, the better. If we can just turn it into a very, very bad 2-3 weeks, that’ll get us to herd immunity faster and that will be better.
(But the drug treatment will have to be free or nigh-free.)Report
Remdesivir is a solution in search of a problem. It’s been around for a decade and disrupts some RNA viruses’ replication (the original hope that it would be effective against Ebola and Marburg didn’t pan out). It’s never gone beyond animal testing. There are no “on label” uses, it’s never been approved for anything by any authority in the world. The FDA has now given permission to allow human trials of an “investigational new drug” because of special circumstances. That’s the same status it has in China.Report
Sure, Trump was largely an unknown quantity on election day because he hadn’t held office previously. That his support has since firmed up and enthusiasm has increased among the base shows that he’s overwhelmingly won over the reps who were reluctant in 2016. He may be unprecedentedly unpopular with Dems and still 50/50ish with independents, but Trump’s popularity within the party has hit highs previously only seen in fairly unique situations like Bush post-9/11. The vast majority of Reps heading to the ballot box in November won’t be holding their noses, they’ll be proudly wearing their MAGA hats.Report
{{The Republican Party since Trump keeps getting smaller and smaller…}}Report
Eh, that is a knife that cuts both ways. Trump was also able to appeal to working class populists by promising, for instance, that he’d give them something cheaper and better than the ACA, then he turned around and tried to simply repeal it without any replacement. I have no doubt that Trump’s allowing the GOP to simply continue on as normal giving comfort to their plutocrat leadership group has endeared him to GOP regulars but it’s certainly alienated him from GOP irregulars. And he’s repeated this pattern a lot- promising he wouldn’t cut entitlements and then trying to cut entitlements in his budget for example.
Is this going to help him hold the three states he managed to eke out a win in by a whisker? Personally I doubt it. Sure he’s captured more of his party, but that is a shrinking population.Report
Can’t actually blame Trump for that. It wasn’t “His” budget. His budget proposals have been dead on arrival at Congress his entire term and it’s not like he ever personally writes legislation and then hands it to Congress. He’s not personally at fault for the usual RINO BS that gets shoved though regardless of who we have at the top of the ticket. Trump hasn’t actually had much of choice about letting the GOP continue as normal, like any other President he has limited capital even with his own party and has to choose his battles. Republicans are still about even with Dems in favorability metrics (and actually surpassed them once or twice), so I really don’t get where you get the idea that we’re shrinking anymore than Dems are. Both parties are bleeding toward “unaffiliated”, but that’s a long-term trend that pre-dates Trump on both sides of the aisle).Report
I can’t blame Trump for the budget proposal his administration handed down to congress because Congress ignored it? Oddly I do think I can blame Trump for things his administration attempts even though congress blocks them. But it’s not me ya have to convince: it’s those middle of the road voters Trump managed to lure in 2016. He promised he’d replace the ACA with something cheaper and better for them and instead all he did was try to repeal it with no replacement in place. He promised he was going to protect Medicaid and Medicare and then Mnuchin, on behalf of Trump, handed down a budget proposal to Congress that proposed large cuts to both those programs.
I agree Trump has been a largely ineffectual and incoherent President who’s only accomplished the same kind of stuff that any generic Republican President could be expected to pass. My point, though, was that in 2016 Trump campaigned quite far to the left on economic matters. He was an unknown quantity in 2016, as you said, and now he’s been defined as a standard Republican who blows up deficits to pass tax cuts that’re overwhelmingly slanted to the wealthy while trying to cut entitlements to regular Americans. I was never going to vote for him, of course, and yes perhaps some GOP die hards are going to go in for him now but I don’t see how he’s going to go after those voters he lured in 2016 by promising more left wing economics now that he’s defined as a bog standard republican.
As to party identification, the Dems have had somewhere in the high single digits advantage in party identification for ages. Where do you go to for your numbers? I stick with 538 personally.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-generic-ballot-polls/?ex_cid=rrpromoReport
Where do I go for my numbers? A variety of sources, including 538, but in this case I’m primarily referencing Gallup. i.e. https://news.gallup.com/poll/287633/approval-congressional-republicans-tops-democrats.aspx
Favorability for the parties themselves show Reps topping Dems in 2015 and again in 2018. On some fairly important specific topics, we still hold the edge: The GOP has a six-percentage-point advantage over the Democratic Party on protecting the country from international terrorism and military threats, 50% to 44%, and a four-point edge on ensuring prosperity, 49% to 45%. Both of these advantages are about equal to one year ago. Reps also have a voter registration advantage going into some key areas for this next election: https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-voter-registration-governor-president-2020-republicans-democrats.html So the ground truth doesn’t seem to show Trump losing the voters he gained us in 2016. Most of our voter bleed seems to come more from suburban women, but that demographic has been sliding left since before Trump entered the scene.Report
Similarly the ODR (Obama Deflection Ration): How often any criticism of Trump is followed by an assertion that Obama was worse. You would expect this to be between 0 and 1, but the reality-warping field of right-wing punditry (and some blog commenters) has resulted in readings as high as 3.14159.Report
Honestly? In the age of Trump I’m more surprised by the continued references to Hilary rather than Obama. HDR would have a higher coefficent than ODR in my observation.Report
Shrug, can’t avoid it when Dems use such a double standard. I’m still having to point out to outraged people that the “kids in cages” pictures were taken in 2015. Besides, it cuts both ways, no criticism of Obama (Biden now) can be accepted by the Dems without immediately being followed with “BUT TRUMP IS WORSE!”. It’s practically a verbal tic now every time some concerned Dem points out the party’s problems in a “we need to fix this or Trump might win again!” article. That’s just the state of politics and has been for decades: it’s always the negative partisanship of “who’s the lesser evil?”, not “who is better of two good options?”Report
Thanks for the illustration.Report
You’re welcome??? Your comment wasn’t a criticism of Trump and mine didn’t criticize Obama, we both just took shots at the whataboutism of pundits and blog commenters, so in what way did I just illustrate your point?Report
I think you’re on to something here. Over the last 10-15 years or so every aspect of our choices, beliefs, verbal expressions, unstated thoughts, privately held dreams, ambitions, hopes and fears, have been analyzed and researched, all leading to the conclusion that everything we do, are, did, hope to become, is imbued with massive levels of *very important* and often *dangerous* moral and political content, whether we are aware of it or not. We’re all bad people, you see. A big part of the allure of Trump is that, being a crass and shameless amoral degenerate – IOW, a bad person – he possesses an entirely unearned self-confidence unconstrained by normal human self-reflection while simultaneously possessing a deep awareness of current dynamics which drive the culture war. And, importantly, he’s successful. He’s an awful person who doesn’t tell people that they’re good, he shows them that being awful is OK. That being an awful person doesn’t disqualify you from success. That even though you’re awful, *you too* could become President some day. And a lot of people don’t like that message. By his own choices, he *is* the new culture war.Report
I think there’s a nugget here… I might not go so far as to over-determine this as a vindication of Trump, but rather suggest a slightly more oblique take that it is mass defection from the gatekeepers – which results in Trump.Report
Not that I agree with you about Trump, but I do think you’re on to something here. Modern society embraced a post-modern moral relativism, which made it impossible for society to elect a moral exemplar because it could not agree on the standard by which such an exemplar should be judged. This left us with the Post-Clinton (Bill) era in which a major party won the argument by insisting that the personal moral failings of a President were not disqualifying if he nonetheless delivered their preferred policies. Trump is just what you get when the Republicans who lived through Bill’s attempted impeachment shrug and say “Ok Dems, if that’s how you want it, we’ll try it your way. Don’t say we didn’t warn you that was a bad idea…”
Likewise, it was the Dems who tore down the barriers between public and private life by insisting that the personal IS political…which inevitably made the political also personal. Trump is inescapable precisely because Dems refused to leave any area of life beyond the reach of politics.Report
Ugh. How about this? Clinton is what you get when a party doesn’t prosecutor Nixon letting him retire quietly then gives judgeship’s to Bork who was fine with firing a special prosecutor. If American standards have slipped the “it was all your…ALL YOUR…fault” thing is very much a part of that.Report
I think your examples actually contradict your claim: of all Presidents to face impeachment, only Nixon actually left office as a result, whereas Bill Clinton did not step down. Bork faced an unfounded slander campaign so unprecedented that using personal attacks against professionally qualified judicial nominees is literally now known as “Borking” them and it’s almost exclusively used by Democrats. All you just did was reinforce my point that it’s Democrats who broke the prior norms each time.Report
I’m inclined to agree, especially with your second paragraph.Report
What examples do you have for your second para? I can think of a lot of examples that fly in the face of your assertion and i’m not really buying it, but maybe there is something i’m missing.Report
Chip gave a good example of it the other day: that a kid who takes a lift-operator job which pays less money than packing lemons so that he can ski all winter entrenches a system of cultural status markers that negatively effect low-skilled agricultural laborers.Report
Oops misthreaded my confused response to that convo. I remember it. Not sure what it means.Report
That it was Dems who insisted that the Personal is Political? Sure, it’s actually pretty interesting reading. Start with the student movements and 2nd wave feminism of the 1960’s https://www.britannica.com/topic/the-personal-is-political, then trace it from there into intersectionality theory (it became particularly strongly associated with Black Feminism and fed into such omnipresent conversational dead ends as “check your privilege” being used to assert that political positions were causally inseparable from personal qualities such as race and gender) and finally activism on such intensely personal matters as sexual orientation, gender identity, and trans advocacy (and the corresponding polarization between parties where Democrats stopped respecting rights of conscience for businesses and professionals to opt out of doing things contrary to their deeply held personal beliefs and instead started calling longstanding beliefs formerly held by the majority of the country “bigotry” and “hate”). It was quite a shocking flip when the discourse from the left changed from “Why do you care what two consenting people do in the privacy of their own bedroom, it doesn’t affect you!” before Obergefell v. Hodges to “If you don’t participate in Pride we’re going to put you out of business” afterwards. Not coincidentally, much of the current Democrat leadership actually grew up in that 1960’s atmosphere and either participated in or were taught by those former student radicals. As an easy test, look at which side’s writers tend to start their articles and comments with some version of “speaking as an x, …” where x is a theoretically immutable inborn trait, and you’ve found an adherent of “The Personal is Political”. It’s the philosophical foundation of Identity Politics (as practiced with immutable traits as the base rather than voluntary group memberships like religion, place of residence, or military service).
Some modern examples of Dems conflating the personal and the political include things like the boycotts against Chik’fil’a, which has no policy discriminating against LGBT employees and never has, over the personal beliefs of the owners who simply expressed an adherence to traditional doctrine on the matter. An entire company was punished over the personal beliefs of two people. #MeToo resulted in a lot of similar boundary-breaking when the standard fell from “actually committed a crime or at least violated company policies” down to the low bar of “was an inconsiderate date” and yet still resulted in attempts to get people fired or otherwise damaged professionally (Aziz Ansari seems to be the best known case) and the converse where even people merely continuing their jobs like usual get attacked personnally. There’s a hell of a lot more examples where Christian business owners were targeted simply for being Christian (they usually win these cases each time, but the cases tend to continue simply as a form of harassment and fiscal damage purely from the strain of repeatedly paying for legal defense), but frankly I don’t expect anyone who’s actually disputing this point to care about people attacking Christians, it’s pretty much tied with “white” and “male” as the last “respectable” demographic to be openly prejudiced against.Report
You honestly do seem to believe that this vocal online minority of arch liberals are representative of Democratic Party as a whole and it’s really interesting. Each example you’re bringing up here is just behavior by (mostly online) woke liberals. And you then paint the entire Democratic Party with this brush even as it’s actual policies, planks and real life behavior by and large runs contrary to your assertion.Report
Welp
here you are
and “well hey that’s just a couple assholes online, it’s not what real people are really like” has been used to excuse Republican behavior for the past twelve years, eh?Report
Not the paraphrasing I’d use personally. I would never say that illiberal lefty radicals taking over isn’t a running concern for any centrist Democrat but saying, as Urusigh does, that such a thing has not only already happened but has been ongoing for quite some time is simply not in keeping with reality.Report
There is a lot here and most of doesn’t seem to be conected to your assertion. The D’s have never fully or even partially in some cases all the social movements you somehow think they do.
Boycotts are old and have been used by all sorts for decades. Staring only at a handful of boycotts by groups that typically vote D is weak sauce at best and disingenuousat most. So is the “targeted solely for being christian” That is fully disingenuous and not even trying to understand what the protesters were actually protesting.
As white male it is ridiculous to try to sell this carp about being prejudiced against us. I know that plays in conservo world but that is it.Report
I’m rather curious, which movement do you consider unsupported by Dems?
Feminism?
“I may be a little grayer than I was eight years ago, but this is what a feminist looks like,” President Obama said to cheers Tuesday afternoon. About 5,000 women descended upon the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., for the event (United State of Women Summit, June 2016), which featured speeches by Vice President Joe Biden, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and First Lady Michelle Obama.
The 1960s student movements? The primary example is the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), had its origins in the student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, a social democratic educational organization. Remind me, which major party’s most popular serving politician is a social democrat? Notable tactics included marches on Washington and the occupation of university administration buildings…hrmmm, which party does that sound like?
Black Feminism? Black women are the demographic that vote for democrats at the highest rate (90%+)
Intersectionality theory. “The doctrine of intersectionality posits that people belong to certain identity groups experiencing varying levels of oppression at the hands of the white supremacist power structure. These groups include racial and religious minorities as well as members of the LGBTQ+ community. The more groups an individual belongs to, the more oppression they experience. The left has used this intersectional hierarchy to put forth the idea that the views of people who fall into one or more of these categories should be given more weight due to their experience living in the oppressive western world.” So, how about an example: Democratic National Committee Deputy Chairman Keith Ellison, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, implored progressives gathered at Netroots Nation on Friday (2018) to embrace the philosophy of intersectionality. “All of us in this room have got to defend intersectionality as a concept,” he said from the stage, drawing cheers from the crowd. “That applause ain’t quite loud enough!” Ellison went on, riling up the crowd.
sexual orientation, gender identity, and trans advocacy. Are you seriously going to try arguing those aren’t Democrat party policy? Joe’s official campaign website literally has “The Biden Plan for LGBTQ+ Equality” and part of his campaign pitch is what Obama’s admin did in those areas.
“Boycotts are old and have been used by all sorts for decades.”
Rather ignoring the salient point, aren’t you? Boycotts traditionally didn’t cross the public/private divide (i.e. Boycotting Nike over manufacturing shoes with child workers in China is a business response to a business decision, not an attempt to target specific members of the company for non-business related positions). And it’s not a “handful”, it’s hundreds. We’re talking truly ridiculous BS like boycotting a music festival in Alabama because the state legislature passed pro-life legislation. Punishing companies commercially for what they do commercially is old, punishing companies simply for being in the wrong state at the wrong time or having owners/employees who you disagree with politically, that’s new.
“That is fully disingenuous and not even trying to understand what the protesters were actually protesting.”
You are welcome to present your argument if you think you know the cases better than I do.
“As white male it is ridiculous to try to sell this carp about being prejudiced against us.”
Do you even notice the irony that you just used the exact “as a x” preface my comment called out as the mark of intersectionality theory. You just fishing proved my point. But let’s go ahead and move past the online double standards where #WhiteGenocide and #CancelWhiteness are considered acceptable and funny, where “White Privilege/Guilt/Frailty” are considered inarguable truths, and “masculinity” is virtually never mentioned without the preface “toxic”, we’ll even go offline outside “conservo world” to a source that’s a female leftist leading multiple studies at 3x universities then published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neazxq/the-disturbing-thing-i-learned-studying-white-privilege-and-liberals I’d particularly like to point out the graphs, I think it’s worth noting that not only did discussing “white privilege” drastically reduce liberals empathy for poor whites, but that in BOTH the discussion case and in the control case without it the poor white version of Kevin received less sympathy than the Black version across the board. This is kind of a big deal when you look at the 2012 census data and note things like there being 31.7 million whites in poverty, more than twice as many as non-whites in poverty.
Oh and on a personal note, I’ve actually lost count how many times I’ve been blown off in comment sections with some version of “You’re just a cis/white/hetero/male bigot, you don’t understand anything and need to just shut up.” by someone who doesn’t even bother to address my facts or arguments.Report
Feminism?
As for the public/private boycott thing, that kind of went out the window with Citizens United, don’t you think?Report
DID SOMEBODY SAY CITIZENS UNITED?Report
Terms like feminism have a very wide definition. One persons feminist is another persons trad. Plenty of very conservative women would and did sign onto feminism from the 60 and 70’s. That Obama called himself a feminist does not imply that most or many D’s agree with radical feminism. It’s a wide and sometimes vague term.
You seem to take an example of one thing and suggest it proves a giant thing. SDS is old and gone and not mainstream at the time. It does have anything to do with now.
Boycotts have always been about private and public things. Boycotting places or companies for things you dislike is free speech. Lots of free speech is stupid or pointless but there is it. Boycotts from all sides about all sorts of things.
Geezuz Keerist…you are using shitty on line arugment to prove how bad D’s are. Have you met the consertive twittter sphere??? Much online dialogue is shite. That includes every idea, niche and hobby out there. Crimany people have practically come to drawing blood in on line forums about fantasy books or video games.Report
“That Obama called himself a feminist does not imply that most or many D’s agree with radical feminism.”
Remind me, which party is associated with pussy hats? Which radical feminists spoke up and said, “No Obama, you don’t speak for us”? AFAICT every single radfem who’s declared who they’re voting for picked a (D). Dude, you’re not off the hook that easy. They aren’t the entire party, not even a majority in numbers, but they’ve set the terms of debate, the underlying assumptions, and the very terminology your party uses when thinking or talking about any of these issues.
“Boycotting places or companies for things you dislike is free speech.”
You’re still (unsuccessfully) dodging the point. It matters what “things” are being protested via commercial damages. What private people did in their private lives didn’t used to be one of them. Are you seriously trying to claim that boycotting a music festival that was already scheduled, because it happens to be in a state that just passed pro-life legislation, despite there being no association between the music festival and the state government, is somehow “business as normal” in terms of boycotts? BS
“Have you met the consertive twittter sphere???”
No, I don’t use twitter. If you haven’t noticed, my comments are anything but < 240char. Anything less than longform articles doesn't provide enough wordcount for meaningful discussions. If I mention a tweet it is only because it made it into a larger article I read.Report
Heh. Electing a man so breathtakingly incompetent to the most powerful office in the world to own the libs. Bill Clinton, love him or hate him, at least knew what he was doing.Report
Donald Trump isn’t incompetent. Frankly, Democrats would prefer that he was, for he’d be delivering on far fewer Republican priorities. I don’t much like the game of “Vote for the policies, not the person”, but the facts don’t support accusing Trump of failing on policy. He did take China to task on trade, he did get NAFTA renegotiated and get several other trade deals besides, he did cut regulation, raise the GDP, and lower unemployment, brought illegal immigration down substantially, backed down both Iran and North Korea without getting into another foreign war, he’s been literally unprecedented in depth of support for Freedom of Religion and Pro-Life initiatives, and he’s been remarkably steadfast in backing our preferred judicial nominees. He’s delivered more Republican priorities in 3yr than we usually get in a full 8. You might not like the direction Trump has steered the ship of State, but it’s laughable to look at his long list of successes and call him “incompetent”.Report
NK is still developing all the same weapons and has not backed off anything.
Iran went from the start of a rapprochement to the brink of war and a harsh clampdown which is killing civilians.
NAFTA, only minor changes.
GDP and unemp continued the trends of the O admin so evidence of effect.
China?? huh. His family did business with them and got some good deals for themselves. China won massively when the TPP was ditched. Everything after that has been trying to play catch up on our own. We’ve suffered as much as they have with the tariff fight.Report
NK drastically stepped down the missile tests and sabre rattling. I used to be stationed in SK, the difference in behavior is striking. Rapprochement? Huh, that’s not the word I would use for “increased spending to proxy forces conducting terrorist attacks”.
“GDP and unemp continued the trends of the O admin so evidence of effect.”
BS. The trend lines are drastically different. Maybe you don’t remember Obama mocking Trump by saying he’d need a magic wand to hit 3% GDP and his admin economists predicting that stagflation was the new normal and the stock market would crash and never recover after Trump took office. Obama rode the slowest, weakest recovery in US history with nowhere to go but up. Trump took office with an economy that most economists were saying had already peaked, completely reversed many key Obama economic policies, then the job numbers and stock market both hit unprecedentedly great records. Under Obama the small business formation rate was lower than the small business closure rate (a historic first, but not a good one), under Trump small businesses rebounded and he got the highest small business confidence on record. It takes a certain kind of ideological blindness to credit Obama for his economic policies, then watch those policies get reversed and all those numbers immediately get far better, and somehow avoid the conclusion that the recovery was IN SPITE OF Obama’s terrible policies, (i.e. without the fracking boom, there wouldn’t have been a recovery and yet Obama’s policies were anti-fracking) not because of them. Calling that “Continued the trend” is like saying that walking and running are the same because both are just moving forward.
“China won massively when the TPP was ditched. Everything after that has been trying to play catch up on our own. We’ve suffered as much as they have with the tariff fight.”
BS. Even Hillary flipped on supporting the TTP. Not a good deal for us. We’ve suffered far less proportionately and absolutely than China on the trade fight, the numbers and the concessions we’re getting reflect that.Report
Urr..ummm….yeah i remember that convo.Report