The thing is, people really weren't crying wolf all that much when you take a look at things--and then look at how we got to where we are. Some of the people may not have been openly racist or wearing white hoods and burning crosses, but their policies sure had racial overtones. Their rhetoric sure had racial overtones.
The thing is, people really weren't crying wolf all that much when you take a look at things--and then look at how we got to where we are. Some of the people may not have been openly racist or wearing white hoods and burning crosses, but their policies sure had racial overtones. Their rhetoric sure had racial overtones.
You can pretend that they were crying wolf to salve your conscience about supporting those politicians or being part of the movement--but it was always there... just not out in the open.
Like Aziz Ansari said it in this monologue; it's not all of them, just a slice of them, but more than we realized and "Please go back to pretending not to be racist; I'm so sorry we didn't thank you for your service." https://youtu.be/Whde50AacZs
This is such a weird article. The first half decries the wolf-criers as hysterical, and the second half admits that they were right all along. The wolf-criers saw that the right had no shortage of racists and knew that it was only a matter of time before someone like Trump came along, and that when they did they would easily capture majority support in the party. Many others told themselves that the racists were a small minority that would never gain control of the GOP. One guess which side was right. If you're surrounded by wolves, you should be crying wolf constantly.
Charlie just can’t help himself from reflexively blaming the left for the right’s complete and utter moral rot. Every column repeats the format:
Republicans are shameless, vicious, mean-spirited and intellectually bankrupt- which is the left’s fault because they made us do it.
But the right does bear some blame, because the left’s criticisms were completely valid both then and now.
How do we save America and democracy? I don’t know, but Democrats should really stop catering to their crazy far-left base, because everyone hates them. No, I have no examples of times that happened, or the policies Americans hate- just trust me.
If only the left hadn’t made the right so crazy, Republicans would vote for someone like Mitt Romney or Jeff Flake.
I don't know man, I think all those Obama with fried chicken and watermelon memes that started coming out in 2008 from "respectable" Republicans kind shows that Democrats weren't too wrong to use the word racist.
Charlie’s memory is selective; Republicans NEVER encouraged racism in their ranks until 2015, apparently.
Yeah Charlie, we all LOVE the story about Buckley kicking out the Birchers. But guess who never told the Birchers (or any of their ideological successors) they weren’t welcome?
The NRCC. The RNC. The Republican Party.
Wink at racists and fascists for 50 years, don’t try to blame the people calling it out when they take over your Party.
To say nothing of the dodging of the issue employed by Congressional R leadership. When asked if Obama was a Muslim (because, that would be wrong apparently?), you would never get a straight-forward response from Boehner, McConnell, Ryan, McCarthy, et al. that no he wasn't, and/or that it was irrelevant, but instead an artful "I have no reason to believe he is" or "I take him at his word that he is a Christian". In other words, NEVER deny or refute it--and thus incur the wrath of the base--but instead give a weaselly answer that does not stake you to the position, but leaves open the *possibility* it is true.
In short, it was a perfect dry-run for the evasion they would employ with Trump's tweets
Thanks for naming names. Looking at the sources, back then, I would not have recognized the names named as important parts of the GOP coalition. That stuff seemed fringe to a lot of us then, leftovers of Buchananism 1.0 instead of harbingers of Buchananism 2.0. Mocking Buchananism as the senile grandpa who couldn't remember to pull his pants up from his ankles after excusing himself was even a pastime among more cosmopolitan members of the GOP. Oh, our hubris back then!
In particular, the California GOP was a state party losing power, and growing more fringe in the process. A GOP optimist at the time would have said California was evidence Buchananism was no longer going to work. Plus, "Hey, it's California. It's not like the rest of the US. People are crazy there," was a common right-wing trope at the time. In retrospect, this trope seems strategic, doesn't it?
I was just finishing college when Obama ran for president. I don't know if it was my younger age, or a sheltered upbringing, but attempts to demean Obama with delicious summertime foods struck me as so incandescently dumb that I couldn't take them seriously as racism. It seemed obvious to me that anyone who tried this would make far more of a fool of himself than he could of Obama.
What I haven't seen mentioned yet (though it might be by the time I get a chance to post my comment) is that how much wrong you're willing to tolerate in a coalition can depend on your judgment on whether that wrong is increasing or decreasing in the coalition. It's easier to have patience with X amount of racism if you sincerely believe it's X and decreasing than if you believe it's X and increasing. If it's decreasing, there'll soon be less than X, and if it's increasing, there'll soon be more.
Back then, the conservatives and Republicans I witnessed seemed to be getting less racist over time. The GOP seemed to me to be recovering from the Southern Strategy, attracting wonks irrespective of race. I had only gotten to know Evangelicals in college, who were multi-ethnic and politically moderate on issues besides abortion. Some were far left, and while others found this a bit weird, lefty Evangelicals weren't shunned as unamerican or ungodly, at least not in front of me: it just seemed obvious that what you thought godly politics were would depend on prudential judgments about governance. I honestly thought it was no longer possible to appeal to white identity politics, either inside or outside of church, successfully.
"Haha, Obama is half-black, let's embarrass him with perfectly blameless foodstuffs!" seemed like an "extinction burst", a tantrum happening among the GOP's outdated, crustier elements *because* reward for a bad behavior was being withdrawn.
I was in a bubble. I know that now. That behavior wasn't an "extinction burst" but a harbinger. We can't not be in a bubble, though. We can make efforts to expand our bubble or move it around, but we're always limited by the experiences we have, and those experiences inevitably affect how we interpret events.
That last is something everyone should consider when thinking about how they see and interpret events and behaviors, especially large-scale behaviors. The reconciliation of 'objective truth' and the now-fashionable 'personal truth' into something resembling a 'truth' most people can agree on much depends on this.
No fun. But necessary. Props for putting it out there.
"Man is the measure of things... of things that are, as to how they are and of things that are not, as to how they are not."
Protagoras (not Pythagoras, totally different guy).
One of the distinctions that people fail to make is the role and scope of subjectivity WRT truth. People confuse subjective truth and objective truth.
When you say something like, it's really hot in here, that is a subjective truth--you are talking about the truth of your experience. To you, it is hot. Someone from the tropics may find it cool and they would also be correct.
The description and meaning is purely subjective in anything other than edge cases (every human is going to think a 210 F room temperature is hot--that is an extreme edge case).
This is what Protagoras refers to.
If you say that it's 76 F in the room, that is an objective truth. It does not depend upon your experience and is not defined by it.
Much of political discourse is concerned with and/or framed in terms of the abstract--of things that exist only within human comprehension and narrative.
Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors) explained this very well in a book called Hogfather.. to paraphrase:
If you ground up the universe to the finest possible powder and sieved it through the finest possible sieve you would not find one atom of mercy or justice or love or hate... these are human things, things of our imagination.
And also:
Only beings who were incredibly self centered could think that a place (the universe) where the overwhelmingly vast majority of it would instantly kill them could think it was created for them.
The combination of these two things--abstraction and extreme self-centeredness leads to a lot of problems with truth.
We can say objective things about a lot of human activity.. because we CAN observe and measure the effects. When we make value judgements on those effects is where we run into problems, because value is subjective.
I don't believe/think/feel that X is Y is a subjective truth ONLY in that it truthfully describes (if you are being truthful) what YOU believe/think/feel....
In many cases (not all) there ARE criteria to determine whether X is Y. It is something that CAN be established. It IS an objective truth.
And, if you want to be bayesian about it--some things definitely are more probable than others.
Well, no. an unfortunate by-product of the very weak critical-thinking curriculum in schools is the pervasive idea idea that all opinions are roughly equal. An opinion backed by no facts in context, evidence and logic,k is of no value. Well-formulated, well-defended opinions are of great value. The key is to have strong opinions, weakly held, not weak opinions, strongly held.
Subjectivity is bound up in personal experience and viewpoint. The feelings, experiences, and judgments are important--because, in reality, that is all we REALLY have and this is what our decisions are based upon.
The danger is when we think these things are truths for anyone other than ourselves and are true in a context outside of personal experience.
There ARE objective truths--but that truth is outweighed by how people FEEL about them. We will overthrow that truth (if we can) in favor of something that makes us feel better. It doesn't make the truth any less true... or the lies we choose in their stead any less false.
We get away with it because, in the majority of cases, our truth falls into the realm of the merely human, the narrative, the experiential, the illusionary and subjective good and bad.
Whereas believing that gravity holds no sway over you and you can fly will probably kill you.
"Say it loud, say it proud, we're all Bayesians now."
Math aside, if you're trying to get productive work done, a bubble insulating from outside distractions has advantages. My young bubble included "bleeding heart libertarians":
To those already confident that free markets are inevitably captured by the oppressors, the "bleeding-heart libertarian" motto, "Free Markets & Social Justice", sounds like the worst possible joke. In my bubble, though, it was producing results.
Soon after college, I met some lawyers working for the Institute for Justice's Chicago small-business clinic. Of course, IJ is backed by wealthy donors who consider deregulation in their own financial interest, and who want to make deregulation look better by publicizing the cases where deregulation increases equity. Thing is, there *are* tons of regulations favoring the more privileged at the expense of the less, and when you strike those down, even if only to make deregulation in general look better, you, well, strike them down.
Most IJ staff are probably right-wing ideologues. Some, though, are political progressives who see the particular work they do at IJ as anti-racist, and are more than happy to siphon of a bit of the Kochtopus's funding for what they sincerely believe are anti-racist ends.
A little bubble like that can be productive for specific policy changes that (hopefully!) improve people's lives, precisely because it shuts out the sentiments driving electoral politics more broadly. But in a representative government, that's also its weakness, if you're trying to figure out what electoral coalitions are really about.
I recall crude racist stereotypes being deployed by Democrats against black Republicans, and the vicious contempt that Democrats have displayed toward black people who don't line up with what Dems think they should all believe.
Also, pretty much any criticism of Obama, on the same policy grounds for which white Democrats are also criticized, was said to boil down to "They just don't like having a black man in the White House." (Never mind that Obama's mother was white.)
Republicans opposed the ACA when it was primarily white people who were pushing it through Congress -- and Dems said the opposition was all down to Obama's race.
It really is true that the cry of "racism" became a lazy way to beat down any opposition to Dems, even if the issue wasn't about race at all. And it's true that reflexive charges of racism are bound to make some white people more hostile to those calling them racist no matter what.
Then there's the noxious idea that white people are all intrinsically disposed to be racist while non-white people cannot possibly be racist. It's a flagrantly racist notion itself, and it's false. And there are the double standards and set-asides that have objectively disadvantaged white people in some situations.
It's true that some people really are racist -- but they're not all white. It's also true that the "everything is racist" insanity has been very damaging to race relations, and so has the insistence that racism is the entire guiding philosophy of the GOP (so any non-white Republicans or conservatives must be race-traitors or dupes).
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you need to examine a number of your assumptions.
Your first paragraph demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the historical debate that has been ongoing in the African American community for the last 200 years. So yes, intramural debates among the black community can get quite viscous and don't improve when white liberals start ignorantly parroting them.
Your comment on Obama's mother was just weird, now if you were European I could understand but anybody who grew up in this country understands how race works in this culture.
You may have had a good argument but to be honest I tuned it out at the "Mother" comment.
Everyone is "racist" to a greater or lesser degree, white, black, brown, yellow, purple... whatever. Same thing with sexism/genderism.
The question is to what degree and how is it expressed.
Accusations of racism are prevalent because, well, racism seems to be pretty prevalent. Same with sexism.
And the illusion of a raceless society or a sexless society is exactly that, an illusion. It runs into the obstacle of human nature and habit.
Democratic use of racism is similar to GoP use of socialism--except the Democrats actually have a sounder basis (because apparently the GoP doesn't actually know what socialism is).
The use of racial slurs against black GoP simply highlights how ingrained particular perceptions of race and how we interact with it are.
Human nature and habit seems to dictate that we are “identitarians”; we seem to have a human need to identify with our group, and “group” gets defined ever finer, especially if there isn’t an obvious handy out-group. Russians and Ukrainians have so much in common culturally and historically, but now they are busy killing each other and calling each other Nazis. The massacre in Rwanda occurred between two groups with differences that are invisible to outsiders. Same with the two factions of Islam. It’s seems insurmountable, but I guess we have to try, if we value civilization.
One of the more interesting stories in this regard that I have seen (that highlights the inanity of it) was in an Episode of Babylon 5 (a 90's science fiction TV show, one of the better ones).
Every so many years, one of the alien races (the Drazi) has this thing that happens--and it was causing a LOT of problems (mostly violence) on the Babylon 5 station. When the station personnel investigated they found that it was a fight between two political factions: purple and green (harkening back to the byzantine chariot race team riots).
How were the factions chosen? It wasn't a question of ideology or policy. They lined up and grabbed a scarf out of a bin of mixed scarves--if you pulled green you were green, purple you were purple. Two scarves were special.. whoever pulled the special scarves were the leaders of the faction.
It was both hilarious and yet a telling indictment of how we differentiate ourselves often on the least pretext.
I would have said Money trumps Race but it may amount to the same thing. Thinking of Katrina. It wasn't racism that killed; it was poverty, not having the resources to save themselves (or be saved).
I would argue that ambition and greed are independent of class, though usually aimed at "improving" one's socio-economic class--the problem in a lot of cases is that even if you get rich or influential, in the end you are still one of those "other people" to the group you are trying to become a part of.
They weren't... but Charlie would like to pretend that they were in order to, as I say, salve his conscience.
The reality is that if you use such language (even if it is true) it always loses potency over time--precisely because the targets convince themselves they aren't that. Most of them still don't believe that they are racist or sexist. How can the words have any effect if you don't think they apply to you?
They sure still seem to get their knickers in a knot a lot of times when you call them those things (with justification), judging from how triggered they get.
Carlson is just a shameless ambitious piece of shit, so no reason it would bother him.
I think you are right, that certain language can lose its potency over time. I’m having an internal debate about what the more effective alternative might be, that avoids such a phenomenon. I heard another (!) interview with Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow over the weekend, and she made a plausible point that Democrats waited too long to call out the Q adjacent nonsense accusations being aimed at Democrats. I think both perspectives are valid . . . but where’s the sweet spot?
I honestly feel the phenomenon of Trump was that they no longer needed to hide... embrace the sexism, the cruelty and the racism... fly your bigot flag high and be proud about it. 1890s-1920s MAGA values.
The problem is that "racist" and "racism" have become over used words that have lost their power (or so many wish to argue)--while, at the same time, people take umbrage when the word is applied to them--which is strange if you think about it. If the word is actually powerless/meaningless, why the outrage?
The words haven't REALLY lost power or meaning (because you can trigger someone with them in a heartbeat)--but they HAVE lost the power to move people. The reaction to the word is purely defensive rather than reflective.
The same thing has happened in reverse with socialism (reverse as in who the target is). This is a word that has power and meaning on the right--but far less so (or not negatively) on the left.
The words and their function mirror each other. These are more signs of identity (both self and applied) than they are words with actual substantive meaning (at least in political discourse).
I am not sure where the sweet spot is. I am not sure there necessarily is a sweet spot, given the hardening of identity in political discourse. Maybe just more directly and specifically calling out bad behavior without actually using the word.
I agree with McMallow that the Dems need to be calling BS on things more quickly forcefully and directly. Not sure how much it will accomplish in the overall picture though.
The thing is, people really weren't crying wolf all that much when you take a look at things--and then look at how we got to where we are. Some of the people may not have been openly racist or wearing white hoods and burning crosses, but their policies sure had racial overtones. Their rhetoric sure had racial overtones.
You can pretend that they were crying wolf to salve your conscience about supporting those politicians or being part of the movement--but it was always there... just not out in the open.
Guess what, now it is out in the open.
Like Aziz Ansari said it in this monologue; it's not all of them, just a slice of them, but more than we realized and "Please go back to pretending not to be racist; I'm so sorry we didn't thank you for your service." https://youtu.be/Whde50AacZs
This is such a weird article. The first half decries the wolf-criers as hysterical, and the second half admits that they were right all along. The wolf-criers saw that the right had no shortage of racists and knew that it was only a matter of time before someone like Trump came along, and that when they did they would easily capture majority support in the party. Many others told themselves that the racists were a small minority that would never gain control of the GOP. One guess which side was right. If you're surrounded by wolves, you should be crying wolf constantly.
Charlie just can’t help himself from reflexively blaming the left for the right’s complete and utter moral rot. Every column repeats the format:
Republicans are shameless, vicious, mean-spirited and intellectually bankrupt- which is the left’s fault because they made us do it.
But the right does bear some blame, because the left’s criticisms were completely valid both then and now.
How do we save America and democracy? I don’t know, but Democrats should really stop catering to their crazy far-left base, because everyone hates them. No, I have no examples of times that happened, or the policies Americans hate- just trust me.
If only the left hadn’t made the right so crazy, Republicans would vote for someone like Mitt Romney or Jeff Flake.
I got the same vibe.
I don't know man, I think all those Obama with fried chicken and watermelon memes that started coming out in 2008 from "respectable" Republicans kind shows that Democrats weren't too wrong to use the word racist.
Which respectable Republicans? Names pls
Charlie’s memory is selective; Republicans NEVER encouraged racism in their ranks until 2015, apparently.
Yeah Charlie, we all LOVE the story about Buckley kicking out the Birchers. But guess who never told the Birchers (or any of their ideological successors) they weren’t welcome?
The NRCC. The RNC. The Republican Party.
Wink at racists and fascists for 50 years, don’t try to blame the people calling it out when they take over your Party.
Chaffey Community Republican Women
Diane Fedele
https://www.npr.org/sections/newsandviews/2008/10/gop_mailing_is_mouth_watering.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20081018102749/http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_S_buck16.3d67d4a.html
TownHall.com & Steve King
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/steve-king-racist-obama-cartoon-crusades
https://townhall.com/political-cartoons/glennmccoy/2015/02/05/127536
Bobby May, John McCain's Buchanan County (VA) campaign chairman saying Obama would change the National Anthem to the Black National Anthem
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27378706
To say nothing of the dodging of the issue employed by Congressional R leadership. When asked if Obama was a Muslim (because, that would be wrong apparently?), you would never get a straight-forward response from Boehner, McConnell, Ryan, McCarthy, et al. that no he wasn't, and/or that it was irrelevant, but instead an artful "I have no reason to believe he is" or "I take him at his word that he is a Christian". In other words, NEVER deny or refute it--and thus incur the wrath of the base--but instead give a weaselly answer that does not stake you to the position, but leaves open the *possibility* it is true.
In short, it was a perfect dry-run for the evasion they would employ with Trump's tweets
Thanks for naming names. Looking at the sources, back then, I would not have recognized the names named as important parts of the GOP coalition. That stuff seemed fringe to a lot of us then, leftovers of Buchananism 1.0 instead of harbingers of Buchananism 2.0. Mocking Buchananism as the senile grandpa who couldn't remember to pull his pants up from his ankles after excusing himself was even a pastime among more cosmopolitan members of the GOP. Oh, our hubris back then!
In particular, the California GOP was a state party losing power, and growing more fringe in the process. A GOP optimist at the time would have said California was evidence Buchananism was no longer going to work. Plus, "Hey, it's California. It's not like the rest of the US. People are crazy there," was a common right-wing trope at the time. In retrospect, this trope seems strategic, doesn't it?
I was just finishing college when Obama ran for president. I don't know if it was my younger age, or a sheltered upbringing, but attempts to demean Obama with delicious summertime foods struck me as so incandescently dumb that I couldn't take them seriously as racism. It seemed obvious to me that anyone who tried this would make far more of a fool of himself than he could of Obama.
What I haven't seen mentioned yet (though it might be by the time I get a chance to post my comment) is that how much wrong you're willing to tolerate in a coalition can depend on your judgment on whether that wrong is increasing or decreasing in the coalition. It's easier to have patience with X amount of racism if you sincerely believe it's X and decreasing than if you believe it's X and increasing. If it's decreasing, there'll soon be less than X, and if it's increasing, there'll soon be more.
Back then, the conservatives and Republicans I witnessed seemed to be getting less racist over time. The GOP seemed to me to be recovering from the Southern Strategy, attracting wonks irrespective of race. I had only gotten to know Evangelicals in college, who were multi-ethnic and politically moderate on issues besides abortion. Some were far left, and while others found this a bit weird, lefty Evangelicals weren't shunned as unamerican or ungodly, at least not in front of me: it just seemed obvious that what you thought godly politics were would depend on prudential judgments about governance. I honestly thought it was no longer possible to appeal to white identity politics, either inside or outside of church, successfully.
"Haha, Obama is half-black, let's embarrass him with perfectly blameless foodstuffs!" seemed like an "extinction burst", a tantrum happening among the GOP's outdated, crustier elements *because* reward for a bad behavior was being withdrawn.
I was in a bubble. I know that now. That behavior wasn't an "extinction burst" but a harbinger. We can't not be in a bubble, though. We can make efforts to expand our bubble or move it around, but we're always limited by the experiences we have, and those experiences inevitably affect how we interpret events.
Today's most Solomonic comment in my book.
That last is something everyone should consider when thinking about how they see and interpret events and behaviors, especially large-scale behaviors. The reconciliation of 'objective truth' and the now-fashionable 'personal truth' into something resembling a 'truth' most people can agree on much depends on this.
No fun. But necessary. Props for putting it out there.
"Man is the measure of things... of things that are, as to how they are and of things that are not, as to how they are not."
Protagoras (not Pythagoras, totally different guy).
One of the distinctions that people fail to make is the role and scope of subjectivity WRT truth. People confuse subjective truth and objective truth.
When you say something like, it's really hot in here, that is a subjective truth--you are talking about the truth of your experience. To you, it is hot. Someone from the tropics may find it cool and they would also be correct.
The description and meaning is purely subjective in anything other than edge cases (every human is going to think a 210 F room temperature is hot--that is an extreme edge case).
This is what Protagoras refers to.
If you say that it's 76 F in the room, that is an objective truth. It does not depend upon your experience and is not defined by it.
Much of political discourse is concerned with and/or framed in terms of the abstract--of things that exist only within human comprehension and narrative.
Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors) explained this very well in a book called Hogfather.. to paraphrase:
If you ground up the universe to the finest possible powder and sieved it through the finest possible sieve you would not find one atom of mercy or justice or love or hate... these are human things, things of our imagination.
And also:
Only beings who were incredibly self centered could think that a place (the universe) where the overwhelmingly vast majority of it would instantly kill them could think it was created for them.
The combination of these two things--abstraction and extreme self-centeredness leads to a lot of problems with truth.
We can say objective things about a lot of human activity.. because we CAN observe and measure the effects. When we make value judgements on those effects is where we run into problems, because value is subjective.
One additional thing:
I don't believe/think/feel that X is Y is a subjective truth ONLY in that it truthfully describes (if you are being truthful) what YOU believe/think/feel....
In many cases (not all) there ARE criteria to determine whether X is Y. It is something that CAN be established. It IS an objective truth.
And, if you want to be bayesian about it--some things definitely are more probable than others.
Yep.. and they all have the same value--which is basically none. :)
Well, I mean, it's valuable for our alimentary canal to have both an in end and an out end, especially since we've got taste buds.
Well, no. an unfortunate by-product of the very weak critical-thinking curriculum in schools is the pervasive idea idea that all opinions are roughly equal. An opinion backed by no facts in context, evidence and logic,k is of no value. Well-formulated, well-defended opinions are of great value. The key is to have strong opinions, weakly held, not weak opinions, strongly held.
True.
Subjectivity is bound up in personal experience and viewpoint. The feelings, experiences, and judgments are important--because, in reality, that is all we REALLY have and this is what our decisions are based upon.
The danger is when we think these things are truths for anyone other than ourselves and are true in a context outside of personal experience.
There ARE objective truths--but that truth is outweighed by how people FEEL about them. We will overthrow that truth (if we can) in favor of something that makes us feel better. It doesn't make the truth any less true... or the lies we choose in their stead any less false.
We get away with it because, in the majority of cases, our truth falls into the realm of the merely human, the narrative, the experiential, the illusionary and subjective good and bad.
Whereas believing that gravity holds no sway over you and you can fly will probably kill you.
I've never jumped off a cliff I hadn't seen a buncha frat boys jump off first and swim away unharmed.
That's why I said probably ;)
"Say it loud, say it proud, we're all Bayesians now."
Math aside, if you're trying to get productive work done, a bubble insulating from outside distractions has advantages. My young bubble included "bleeding heart libertarians":
https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/
To those already confident that free markets are inevitably captured by the oppressors, the "bleeding-heart libertarian" motto, "Free Markets & Social Justice", sounds like the worst possible joke. In my bubble, though, it was producing results.
Soon after college, I met some lawyers working for the Institute for Justice's Chicago small-business clinic. Of course, IJ is backed by wealthy donors who consider deregulation in their own financial interest, and who want to make deregulation look better by publicizing the cases where deregulation increases equity. Thing is, there *are* tons of regulations favoring the more privileged at the expense of the less, and when you strike those down, even if only to make deregulation in general look better, you, well, strike them down.
Most IJ staff are probably right-wing ideologues. Some, though, are political progressives who see the particular work they do at IJ as anti-racist, and are more than happy to siphon of a bit of the Kochtopus's funding for what they sincerely believe are anti-racist ends.
A little bubble like that can be productive for specific policy changes that (hopefully!) improve people's lives, precisely because it shuts out the sentiments driving electoral politics more broadly. But in a representative government, that's also its weakness, if you're trying to figure out what electoral coalitions are really about.
I recall crude racist stereotypes being deployed by Democrats against black Republicans, and the vicious contempt that Democrats have displayed toward black people who don't line up with what Dems think they should all believe.
Also, pretty much any criticism of Obama, on the same policy grounds for which white Democrats are also criticized, was said to boil down to "They just don't like having a black man in the White House." (Never mind that Obama's mother was white.)
Republicans opposed the ACA when it was primarily white people who were pushing it through Congress -- and Dems said the opposition was all down to Obama's race.
It really is true that the cry of "racism" became a lazy way to beat down any opposition to Dems, even if the issue wasn't about race at all. And it's true that reflexive charges of racism are bound to make some white people more hostile to those calling them racist no matter what.
Then there's the noxious idea that white people are all intrinsically disposed to be racist while non-white people cannot possibly be racist. It's a flagrantly racist notion itself, and it's false. And there are the double standards and set-asides that have objectively disadvantaged white people in some situations.
It's true that some people really are racist -- but they're not all white. It's also true that the "everything is racist" insanity has been very damaging to race relations, and so has the insistence that racism is the entire guiding philosophy of the GOP (so any non-white Republicans or conservatives must be race-traitors or dupes).
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you need to examine a number of your assumptions.
Your first paragraph demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the historical debate that has been ongoing in the African American community for the last 200 years. So yes, intramural debates among the black community can get quite viscous and don't improve when white liberals start ignorantly parroting them.
Your comment on Obama's mother was just weird, now if you were European I could understand but anybody who grew up in this country understands how race works in this culture.
You may have had a good argument but to be honest I tuned it out at the "Mother" comment.
Everyone is "racist" to a greater or lesser degree, white, black, brown, yellow, purple... whatever. Same thing with sexism/genderism.
The question is to what degree and how is it expressed.
Accusations of racism are prevalent because, well, racism seems to be pretty prevalent. Same with sexism.
And the illusion of a raceless society or a sexless society is exactly that, an illusion. It runs into the obstacle of human nature and habit.
Democratic use of racism is similar to GoP use of socialism--except the Democrats actually have a sounder basis (because apparently the GoP doesn't actually know what socialism is).
The use of racial slurs against black GoP simply highlights how ingrained particular perceptions of race and how we interact with it are.
Human nature and habit seems to dictate that we are “identitarians”; we seem to have a human need to identify with our group, and “group” gets defined ever finer, especially if there isn’t an obvious handy out-group. Russians and Ukrainians have so much in common culturally and historically, but now they are busy killing each other and calling each other Nazis. The massacre in Rwanda occurred between two groups with differences that are invisible to outsiders. Same with the two factions of Islam. It’s seems insurmountable, but I guess we have to try, if we value civilization.
Class trumps race.
Any difference trumps cohesion.
If there isn't difference we will create it.
I believe this is an unfortunate truth. I have seen it happen in very small groups and it is simply shocking.
One of the more interesting stories in this regard that I have seen (that highlights the inanity of it) was in an Episode of Babylon 5 (a 90's science fiction TV show, one of the better ones).
Every so many years, one of the alien races (the Drazi) has this thing that happens--and it was causing a LOT of problems (mostly violence) on the Babylon 5 station. When the station personnel investigated they found that it was a fight between two political factions: purple and green (harkening back to the byzantine chariot race team riots).
How were the factions chosen? It wasn't a question of ideology or policy. They lined up and grabbed a scarf out of a bin of mixed scarves--if you pulled green you were green, purple you were purple. Two scarves were special.. whoever pulled the special scarves were the leaders of the faction.
It was both hilarious and yet a telling indictment of how we differentiate ourselves often on the least pretext.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=Awr9zQ2TOnBio1QCG.v7w8QF;_ylu=c2VjA3NyBHNsawN2aWQEdnRpZAMEZ3BvcwMx?p=babylon+5+purple+and+green&vid=49cf810a8d323c8702115fe66eab691a&turl=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOVP.Sw7xacUJ1ot2L1NS0aKiegHgFo%26pid%3DApi%26h%3D360%26w%3D480%26c%3D7%26rs%3D1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DAcBTOU7RvbU&tit=%26quot%3B%3Cb%3EGreen%3C%2Fb%3E.+%3Cb%3EPurple%3C%2Fb%3E.%26quot%3B+-+Susan+Ivanova+%3Cb%3Eand%3C%2Fb%3E+Drazi&c=0&h=360&w=480&l=131&sigr=xX6XS4idrXmm&sigt=l0lCzVYhMEsz&sigi=uIjywEyobYqq&age=1335047871&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&fr=mcafee&type=E210US885G91648&tt=b
I would have said Money trumps Race but it may amount to the same thing. Thinking of Katrina. It wasn't racism that killed; it was poverty, not having the resources to save themselves (or be saved).
Yeah, and it was racism that prevented people from getting out -over that bridge. Racism that spread the "FEMA Camp" conspiracy.
Ambition and greed trumps race.
That's what I said! ;D
I would argue that ambition and greed are independent of class, though usually aimed at "improving" one's socio-economic class--the problem in a lot of cases is that even if you get rich or influential, in the end you are still one of those "other people" to the group you are trying to become a part of.
No, he means social-economic status.
Yes, what Terry said. Thanks Terry.
They weren't... but Charlie would like to pretend that they were in order to, as I say, salve his conscience.
The reality is that if you use such language (even if it is true) it always loses potency over time--precisely because the targets convince themselves they aren't that. Most of them still don't believe that they are racist or sexist. How can the words have any effect if you don't think they apply to you?
They sure still seem to get their knickers in a knot a lot of times when you call them those things (with justification), judging from how triggered they get.
Carlson is just a shameless ambitious piece of shit, so no reason it would bother him.
I think you are right, that certain language can lose its potency over time. I’m having an internal debate about what the more effective alternative might be, that avoids such a phenomenon. I heard another (!) interview with Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow over the weekend, and she made a plausible point that Democrats waited too long to call out the Q adjacent nonsense accusations being aimed at Democrats. I think both perspectives are valid . . . but where’s the sweet spot?
All you have really said is that Republicans refuse to be the conscience of the country. News flash, I know. /s
Should they not, at least, HAVE a conscience of their own? Or a sense of shame? Or perhaps some reflection on why people see them a certain way?
I honestly feel the phenomenon of Trump was that they no longer needed to hide... embrace the sexism, the cruelty and the racism... fly your bigot flag high and be proud about it. 1890s-1920s MAGA values.
The problem is that "racist" and "racism" have become over used words that have lost their power (or so many wish to argue)--while, at the same time, people take umbrage when the word is applied to them--which is strange if you think about it. If the word is actually powerless/meaningless, why the outrage?
The words haven't REALLY lost power or meaning (because you can trigger someone with them in a heartbeat)--but they HAVE lost the power to move people. The reaction to the word is purely defensive rather than reflective.
The same thing has happened in reverse with socialism (reverse as in who the target is). This is a word that has power and meaning on the right--but far less so (or not negatively) on the left.
The words and their function mirror each other. These are more signs of identity (both self and applied) than they are words with actual substantive meaning (at least in political discourse).
I am not sure where the sweet spot is. I am not sure there necessarily is a sweet spot, given the hardening of identity in political discourse. Maybe just more directly and specifically calling out bad behavior without actually using the word.
I agree with McMallow that the Dems need to be calling BS on things more quickly forcefully and directly. Not sure how much it will accomplish in the overall picture though.