Hillary Clinton Showing Her True Colors?

[_canpakes]

I have never heard the dog whistle crowd complain that women, blacks, or legal immigrants were wrongfully taking jobs...

You seem to be getting a little mixed up. Her quote mentions, "You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights. You don’t like women, you know, getting jobs. You don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are."

i have heard complaints about illegal immigrants....

Specifics?

yet this still seems to be a far cry from the blanket accusations being thrown by Hillary Clinton....she seems to be successfully perpetuating your posts at the very least.

You just need to pay closer attention, or stretch your reading horizons a bit more.

Certainly, you can easily locate all sorts of diatribes from MAGA-types all day long off of the web. But, avoiding those, you can also access gentler analyses that speak to the issue:

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit (“the line-waiters form a new line”) or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, “I live your analogy.” Another said, “You read my mind.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... upporters/

Given that it's Mother Jones, I'm sure that you'll attempt to invalidate the content by attacking the messenger. But, like I said, you can always take a look at what the MAGA crowd is saying directly.

[_Jersey Girl]

I'm not sure how the Democrats are going to win the Presidency in 2020 if we keep going back to identity politics in this country. I liked that she initially focused on the producing sector of our country, and I'm especially receptive to the idea of a dynamic country, but she seems hellbent on keeping us at each others' throats. I sure hope the next Democratic nominee learns from her missteps and opts for a message of energy and legitimate progress.

- Doc

On Tues/Fri I watch a particular youtuber. This morning I happened to check into a video from today's The View. Whatshername Megan McCain made a comment that I thought was particularly relevant to your above about the same Hillary Clinton statements. I'll paraphrase...she said that the Clinton's are a virus in the Democrat party right now and that the messaging needs to change because this kind of messaging is what lost the election.

I cannot help but agree with that. Hillary Clinton and WJC need to fade into the background and let the Democrat party move forward without this constant reaching back and back biting, and let them create an identity and message that can produce a better candidate and a more vibrant and successful party.

[_EAllusion]

There's some decent evidence that white, male identity politics helped Clinton lose the election. I guess her shoulders weren't broad enough to bear it. We do know that people who harbor a great deal of prejudice towards the classes Clinton referred to self-sorted into Trump support to a greater degree than we've seen in recent history and this almost certainly picked off some of her support.

How do you confront that? One way, which some people actually advocate for, is to just adopt some more soft bigotry within the Democratic party to keep them appeased. But that's morally awful and hopefully a nonstarter for people. There are other approaches, but I can't think of one that doesn't start with first acknowledging that this is a phenomenon to understand and confront. I mean, the biggest election of 2017, Virginia's statewide races, involved the Republican party running heavily on trying to tie violent latino gangs around Democrats' necks in one of the most overt racist campaigns since the last one. I don't know how you don't call that out for what it is, and it really didn't hurt the Democrats in that case to do so.

I'm personally annoyed with the "Clinton needs to shut the hell up" narratives that you never, ever see with this kind of fire for other failed presidential candidates. Not Dole, not Gore, not Kerry, not McCain, not Romney. This is especially true if they are coming from people who support candidates that are highly similar to her.

[_Kishkumen]

One thing that would be refreshing is to see more interest in salutary political action and less handwringing over moral purity. It is interesting how the issue of morality is so central to the discussion. What should we allow morally? Can people be Democrats and bigots? Should we chase out bigots with pitchforks? I do hope we can, since we find them utterly unacceptable.

Yeah, check. Got it.

We are surrounded by bigots. In our own way, we are bigots. It is often just the flavor of bigotry that a group finds acceptable gets a pass. That is the invisible bigotry. Bigotry against knuckle dragging Christians who belong to the NRA is cool. Or, rather, it is not bigotry. To call it bigotry is to be a bigot, because it shows sympathy for the bigots, something only a bigot would do.

My bigotry against beer-chugging idiots who watch football, shoot guns, and vote Trump is something I am very comfortable with. Fortunately I run with fellow bigots who share the same prejudices. We call it “right thinking.”

[_EAllusion]

I think you can make uncomfortable alliances with bigots for a broad-based coalition. This shouldn't stop you from trying to correct the bigotry or is noxious effects. This isn't harmless, apolitical stuff. It's why criminal justice reform, for example, is so bloody hard to make happen. What you really shouldn't do is appease their prejudices by acting as though it's valid.

Check out Markk in the "Russia" thread. He's exactly the sort of MAGA voter that Democrats used to do better with. I think the idea that it's because Democrats focus too much on identity politics gets it exactly backwards in this case though. You have to understand and get past the identity politics he's into as this almost certainly helps tether his political leanings. You don't need to tell him he's got a valid point to try to appeal to him on other grounds.

[_Kishkumen]

I think you can make uncomfortable alliances with bigots for a broad-based coalition. This shouldn't stop you from trying to correct the bigotry or is noxious effects. This isn't harmless, apolitical stuff. It's why criminal justice reform, for example, is so bloody hard to make happen. What you really shouldn't do is appease their prejudices by acting as though it's valid.

Check out Markk in the "Russia" thread. He's exactly the sort of MAGA voter that Democrats used to do better with. I think the idea that it's because Democrats focus too much on identity politics gets it exactly backwards in this case though. You have to understand and get past the identity politics he's into as this almost certainly helps tether his political leanings. You don't need to tell him he's got a valid point to try to appeal to him on other grounds.

I didn’t say it was harmless. What I am saying is that both sides play identity politics, and you’re right about it not being harmless. The same idiotic comments conservatives use to stigmatize inner city blacks are routinely and thoughtlessly applied to rural whites.

It makes total sense, really. Once upon a time Democrats used racism to ally poor whites to their cause. They broke the contract by becoming the party boosting minorities. Now the poor whites resent the Democrats for abandoning them. The Democratic Party is a hard sell for rural whites when Democrats reflexively stigmatize rural whites and have effectively abandoned any real commitment to labor.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I didn’t say it was harmless. What I am saying is that both sides play identity politics, and you’re right about it not being harmless. The same idiotic comments conservatives use to stigmatize inner city blacks are routinely and thoughtlessly applied to rural whites.

I would say it's applied to anyone who doesn't double-think speak right. To say that someone, if they vote Republican, doesn't want Black people getting rights (whatever that means within the Leftist narrative these days), doesn't want a woman getting a job (I'm fairly certain if a woman is willing to swing a hammer there are plenty of jobs they can do), or an Indian-American being more successful than them.

This is exactly playing the identity politics game. To say these manufactured outrages are actually rebutting Conservative identity politics is just demonstrating a huge blind spot. I mean for “F” 's sake the Trumptard just appointed a woman as the head of the CIA, there's a woman as the head of the Dept of Education, and he has a woman as his White House spokesperson.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

This is exactly playing the identity politics game. To say these manufactured outrages are actually rebutting Conservative identity politics is just demonstrating a huge blind spot. I mean for “F” 's sake the Trumptard just appointed a woman as the head of the CIA, there's a woman as the head of the Dept of Education, and he has a woman as his White House spokesperson.

- Doc

Women are way underrepresented in the Trump admin relative to both to their numbers in the workforce and previous administrations:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/1 ... epartments

Part of this is that women make up a smaller number of Republican voters, but that gap is much smaller than the appointment gap. In order for your comment not to be tokenism, you'd want it to be a demonstration that there isn't a bias in female representation in the Trump admin, but the numbers don't really show that at all. The result is that you're just saying, "Look, they got a woman!"

The GOP recently got into a tiff because it bragged about how many women are "appointed" in the Trump admin and listed a few examples of this including: Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Karen Pence. This was hilarioulsy awful, but even if it just was citing Elaine Chao and Besty DeVos, that wouldn't have demonstrated that the Trump admin is a place where women are getting an equal bite at the apple.

You can't understand why Clinton lost without understanding how the Trump campaign deliberately appealed to racist, sexist, and xenophobic sentiments in a bid for white, male identity politics. To the issue of gender, that's why Mike Pence kept praising Trump's broad shoulders or why there was so much focus on his "stamina." If Clinton is talking about why she lost, that's a perfectly valid thing to bring up and it's almost irresponsible not to address it.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

You're right, of course. My apologies.

- Dr. CamNC4Me

[_Kishkumen]

If Clinton is talking about why she lost, that's a perfectly valid thing to bring up and it's almost irresponsible not to address it.

As long as she is willing to acknowledge that her own words and choices contributed to the problem, that's cool with me. Because the problem is not just the acknowledged gender bias and many other evils of the Trump administration. Yes, one can't simply point to the evils of Trump and then line that up with the bad ideas and feelings of his voters and call it a day.

The failure to attract voters despite their bad ideas and feelings is a failure. Her failure. The Democratic Party's failure. It is fine to say that Democrats had to go for big money and essentially drop labor to a low priority in order to remain competitive in the short term. Now the chickens have come home to roost. They have lost the working person to conspiracy theory and racism. The dark refuges of the hopeless. The Clintons were big players in the Democratic Party's shift to the right, especially economically. They own NAFTA.

Whether that is right or wrong, it just is. You can acknowledge that NAFTA is not popular, and that your name is associated with it, and that poor whites believed they were screwed by it, or you can just blame them for being racist. Hillary tends to go for option B.

What the Democratic Party generally offers is socially conscious Republicanism. The Republicans realized this and shifted even farther to the right, capturing the West Virginia voter who not only reads the headlines of the tabloids in the line for the cash register but also buys the paper, reads it, and believes it. Now we're in Trumpland. The Clintons are just as responsible as anyone for getting us there. Whatever their intentions were. They can blame the manifesting symptoms of their choices because that's easy. What they are leaving out is that globalization, support it or not, was inevitably going to be a painful transition for the American worker. Perhaps the government could have done something to alleviate that. Instead both parties chose not to.