Politics over Religion at MD&D

[_Kishkumen]

There’s a great Vox article about the underlying reasons for Trump’s popularity that were discovered through careful surveys. Many of us will not be surprised to learn that support for Trump is highly correlated with xenophobia and sexism. When my parents gushed about those good old days, I always imagined malt shops and poodle skirts. The reality is that the unchallenged dominance of white men is usually the unspoken key to their nostalgia. What was so great about 1960?

Hmmm... gee, could it be segregation?

Nowadays people are a lot more honest about that being the case. How disappointed I was to find pretty frank white nationalism among my relatives. This is the key to Trump’s support. Richard Spencer once said he had no problem with socialism so long as it was benefiting the right people.

The smartest and most diabolically insidious thing the GOP ever did was to connect the idea of government support for anything to brown people. Before long government support started to become too expensive. If they have to let brown people in public universities, they make it difficult for the brown people to afford it. It is the wedge the Right uses to sucker poor white people into resenting their own benefits and voting against them.

Make America Great Again is really code for Make America White Again.

I am not saying that every Trump supporter consciously thinks this way, although quite a few of them clearly do. I am saying that they want the White World of the past back. This is what they feel a great America is, even if they don’t consciously put those things together.

[_RockSlider]

What was so great about 1960's?

Hippies and woodstock silly

[_Kishkumen]

What was so great about 1960's?

Hippies and woodstock silly

You jest but I think the date of 1960 is a very revealing choice.

Woodstock was in 1969.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

John F. Kennedy’s presidency commenced in January of 1961.

Conservative mythology is highly intolerant of the 1960s. It begins, in a sense, with the Kennedy presidency. Kennedy gives us Johnson, who fulfills the promise of civil rights for African Americans, with the pressure of MLK pushing it forward. Woodstock is the frightening cultural chaos that erupted when spoiled young white kids mixed freely with people of different races with abundant drugs and sex all around.

I was taught either implicitly or explicitly to be fearful or suspicious of all of that. Hippies were losers in my world. The ‘60s were a bad time and hippies were one of the reasons. MLK was seen as immoral and a Communist. All of this comes out of a predominantly white supremacist Mormon worldview (speaking of my personal experience).

Why would so many Mormons vote for Trump? They eat that MAGA crap three times a day or more in multiple courses. It is a white, white vision of things in Mormonism.

[_Johannes]

Why would so many Mormons vote for Trump? They eat that Make America Great Again ____ three times a day or more in multiple courses. It is a white, white vision of things in Mormonism.

I'm sure you're right, and likewise the Brexit vote in my country was inextricably tied up with nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment (in Britain, the racial politics are a bit different - we don't like white and delightsome immigrants either). But I think you're missing something, and that something is gender. The figures that I have seen show a significant gap in support for Trump between men and women.

Other things happened in the 1960s than civil rights reforms, and, more importantly, in the 1970s. Across the western world, women began to enter the workplace in large numbers. Legal changes made it easier to leave dysfunctional marriages and claim financial support from ex-husbands. In America, the ERA was defeated and rightwing Protestants suddenly started passionately believing in Roman Catholic ideas about abortion.

Sexual resentment is part of this too, not just racial resentment. Part of me thinks that Bernie could have won.

[_Choyo Chagas]

(... - we don't like white and delightsome immigrants either).

pardon, sir ...
all - near all - immigrants to united states are the ancestors of today's united states' leaders...

i am sorry to say this; but this is a fact

ok, negroes (niggahs...) excluded
obama? you may protest. it is a past, written.

[_Johannes]

I think we're at cross purposes. I was just noting in passing that bigotry in Britain is slightly different because, alongside "traditional" racism against people of colour, there is severe resentment directed at white immigrants from European countries (even, one regrets to say, Hungary). That anti-European prejudice was instrumental in swinging the Brexit vote.

[_Chap]

(... - we don't like white and delightsome immigrants either).

pardon, sir ...
all - near all - immigrants to united states are the ancestors of today's united states' leaders...

i am sorry to say this; but this is a fact

ok, negroes (niggahs...) excluded
obama? you may protest. it is a past, written.

I think you may have missed the point Johannes was trying to make. He is, it appears, British, perhaps even English. What he says refers to the sad fact that in some parts of the UK, the 2016 vote to leave the European Union was in part motivated by a dislike of the presence of white European workers, such as Poles, whose high qualifications and willingness to work were seen as displacing or reducing the wages of less qualified long-term UK residents.

Much to my surprise, and also I suspect to the surprise of Johannes, language was used about such people that had previously only been applied to black or brown immigrant workers, and was hence normally referred to as 'racism'.

[I see that Johannes has just explained himself in similar terms.]

[_Johannes]

I think you may have missed the point Johannes was trying to make. He is, it appears, British, perhaps even English. What he says refers to the sad fact that in some parts of the UK, the 2016 vote to leave the European Union was in part motivated by a dislike of the presence of white European workers, such as Poles, whose high qualifications and willingness to work were seen as displacing or reducing the wages of less qualified long-term UK residents.

Indeed. It's very revealing, really. For years, anti-immigration rhetoric denounced people who wear burqas, don't learn English, don't integrate with mainstream society, and so on. But Polish immigrants are white Christians who tend to speak good English and often have quite conservative views. As for the economic issue, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't work, they're welfare scroungers, and if they do, they're stealing our jobs - the Daily Mail will go after them either way.

[_Kishkumen]

I'm sure you're right, and likewise the Brexit vote in my country was inextricably tied up with nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment (in Britain, the racial politics are a bit different - we don't like white and delightsome immigrants either). But I think you're missing something, and that something is gender. The figures that I have seen show a significant gap in support for Trump between men and women.

Other things happened in the 1960s than civil rights reforms, and, more importantly, in the 1970s. Across the western world, women began to enter the workplace in large numbers. Legal changes made it easier to leave dysfunctional marriages and claim financial support from ex-husbands. In America, the ERA was defeated and rightwing Protestants suddenly started passionately believing in Roman Catholic ideas about abortion.

Sexual resentment is part of this too, not just racial resentment. Part of me thinks that Bernie could have won.

I agree, and that is why I emphasized white men. But you are right to note that I gave that less time than it warrants. Thank you for correcting the imbalance. I recall my mother telling me about bra-burners when I was a child, in hushed tones of course.

[_Meadowchik]

I'm sure you're right, and likewise the Brexit vote in my country was inextricably tied up with nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment (in Britain, the racial politics are a bit different - we don't like white and delightsome immigrants either). But I think you're missing something, and that something is gender. The figures that I have seen show a significant gap in support for Trump between men and women.

Other things happened in the 1960s than civil rights reforms, and, more importantly, in the 1970s. Across the western world, women began to enter the workplace in large numbers. Legal changes made it easier to leave dysfunctional marriages and claim financial support from ex-husbands. In America, the ERA was defeated and rightwing Protestants suddenly started passionately believing in Roman Catholic ideas about abortion.

Sexual resentment is part of this too, not just racial resentment. Part of me thinks that Bernie could have won.

I agree, and that is why I emphasized white men. But you are right to note that I gave that less time than it warrants. Thank you for correcting the imbalance. I recall my mother telling me about bra-burners when I was a child, in hushed tones of course.

Johannes and Kish, what a lead-in that is for the positive ramifications of more equal treatment of genders: when both partners are more self-reliant they can make the relationship less transactional and more holistically responsive, more fulfilling for both and by extension, healthier for any children in the mix.