The Left: Robespierre did nothing wrong

So does Wayne

 

I'd probably even put Monroe County above Macomb.

 

The unfortunate problem is that many of us have family members that voted for Trump. I don't think I can cut my parents out of our lives and I very much doubt I could convince them that the Democratic party has their best interests more in mind than the GOP. They are on Medicare now though so maybe having that cut will start to wake them up.

 

I'm from Ohio, you'll never get disagreement from me that most places in Michigan suck.

 

FTFY

 

I will agree that Macomb County generally represents a demographic that Democratic Party policies should benefit.

 

You're their son... If they won't listen to you they won't listen to anyone. They voted for white supremacy.... I simply can't forgive anyone who would do such a thing in 2017.

 

I'm not trying to convice you otherwise, just that I wish it were easy to just remove every Trump voter from my life.

 

I made the Macomb County reference as a nod to the classic Stanley Greenberg study.

 

Gotcha, it's just very hard for me to sympathize with people that honestly see other Americans their enemy. Anytime I vote I'm interested in the candidate that is going to make this country good for all Americans. Not just those that share my skin color. It's to the point where due to them seeing me as the enemy I now in turn feel the same way about them. They are no longer Americans in my eyes, and I certainly don't trust them.

 

Obviously I know what you're talking about, but you should explain so the other readers don't have to look it up.

 

This unfortunately is exactly who my parents are (more so my Dad), at least in the Presidential Election.

 

what was your username before

 

They are probably having a good laugh at you right now. "I bet he is bitching to his internet friends" God forbid people with an actual bidness do what they think is right. Back to the basement you go.

 

Lol, what? Of all people you can't sympathize with people who see the other candidate as the enemy?

 

We have a large group of people who will vote R no matter what. We also have a car too large part of the country who are so uninformed that they didn't know ACA=Obama care or other important policy issues. Then maybe a subset of first subset that gets all of their "news" from a 30 year old propaganda institution.
So looks like 2 of 3 vote party over country

 

lazytweaker

 

It's terrifying people vote that way, which is why people need to have the negative side effects actually hit them.

 

Greenberg wrote a NYT op-ed after the 2008 election stating he was done using Macomb as a political barometer.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/opinion/11greenberg.html

I thought it was premature then, and definitely believe that now.

For those who don't know, Greenberg is a former Bill Clinton pollster who made a career studying white, uneducated voters in the Rust Belt. He had a life-long infatuation with Macomb County.

 

Article does a pretty good job of summarizing why Macomb County sucks, though.

 

Coal power plants are going away bigly

 

Glad I read. I had assumed he was writing it off because they were unreachable. Not what he was saying at all. Not sure how it applies to she's a birch emails Bengali vote for his orangeness. I'm tired and old tho

 

I see where you're coming from, but you sound like Austin Powers's dad when he said his enemies were people intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

"It's very hard for me to sympathize with people that honestly see other Americans as their enemy... It's to the point where I see these people not as my countrymen, but as my enemy."

Huh?

 

They think I'm not the enemy so I feel the same way about them.... Didn't mean to be confusing. I'll go back and reword it.

 

In the 2008 op-ed, he believed Macomb was a demographic which increasingly did not reflect the swing vote in America in the way it did in the 1980's, contrasting it with more affluent and educated Oakland County.

2016 saw that Macomb demographic tip the election.

There are a huge block of 40-70 year old working class white voters in the Rust Belt who have swung back and forth their entire lives.

The South isn't going blue and the coasts aren't going red any time soon, so this is where at least the next two presidential cycles will be fought.

The lower Mountain West swings as well, NM, CO, and NV, but those states are much smaller than the electoral votes in PA, OH, MI, and WI.

 

Who else bout dem tax cuts?!?!? :jew:

 

What was your total tax liability for 2016?

 

Sorry. That's a private matter that I don't discuss with anybody but my accountant.

 

I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours

 

Only if you show me yours...And I ain't talking about your 1040

 

EZ D

 

You could say the exact same thing about Clinton.

 

a long essay.
Walking in black folks' shoes

Spoiler

By Denise Oliver Velez
Sunday Mar 19, 2017 · 8:00 AM CST







Jim Crow: Rex Theatre for colored people, Leland, Mississippi Delta


How often have your heard someone say, “If only you could walk in my shoes, you’d understand what I am faced with”? How about, “Try walking a mile in my shoes.” All of the recent outrage expressed by those decrying the racism of Donald Trump, his minions, and various and sundry loudly bigoted Republicans like Iowa Rep. Steve King is nothing new to anyone who has survived being black in America for the last few generations.

I lived through Jim Crow. I went to movie theaters for “coloreds” or had to sit in the balcony of those that catered to both white and black people. These were the shoes I walked in—but not by choice. Being black robbed me of options.

There were some white individuals who made a decision to take a walk in my shoes, if only briefly. Sure, they could take them off again, and continue along a white road. But they did not stand idly by and accept Jim Crow, as so many others did. They tried to make a difference. They tried to see and experience the world though the lens of the black American experience, and then share that point of view with other white people, hoping to awaken empathy and inspire action to change the stagnant status quo. One of those white people was Ray Sprigle, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

When John Howard Griffin took his famous journey in 1959 as a temporary Black man, recorded in Black Like Me, he did not seem to be aware, nor is it widely acknowledged, that another white Northerner had already blazed the trail. Others to make the trip since have been Grace Halsell in 1969 and Joshua Solomon, a University of Maryland student, in 1994. But it seems that the first white to pass as Black for journalistic purposes was Ray Sprigle, a 61-year-old writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in 1947.

In 1938, Sprigle made a name for himself by winning a Pulitzer for a series he wrote exposing Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black's membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Nine years later, he once again took up the issue of white racism with an idea from the popular novel and film, "Gentleman's Agreement," in which a reporter poses as a Jew in order to uncover the subtle dynamics of anti-Semitism. In this case, however, the ruse was adapted to discover first-hand the forces of racism experienced by the"Negro" in the South. The results were published first as a twenty-one part series in the Gazette and thirteen other newspapers and then as a pamphlet sensationally titled "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days."



After receiving a Headline Club Award and several offers from publishers, a version of the series was published as In the Land of Jim Crow (1949). The serial boosted circulation for the Gazette and was widely read on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. It even prompted a counter-series in defense of the South. Today such an experiment in "blacking up" may seem suspicious as yet another white appropriation of Black experience. But Ray Sprigle deserves credit for aiding in the post-World War-Two struggle against segregation because his daring stunt helped bring greater awareness to an issue that would soon become the focus of national attention.




Jim Crow: water for "colored" citizens
I write frequently about the history of slavery, abolition, reconstruction, lynchings, and systemic racism. One of the difficulties I’ve encountered is that some readers have a hard time placing themselves into “the problem” when the time periods under discussion are the 17-, 18-, and early 1900s. Perhaps revisiting Jim Crow will be more successful. I’m not talking about the dramatic photos of civil rights protestors being assaulted by police with dogs and firehoses, or foaming-at-the-mouth white mobs spitting at black school children attempting to integrate all-white schools. I’m talking about living in a world where you can never forget the “not normative” color of your skin.

I would like readers to consider the day-in, day-out lives of black American citizens of this nation who were reminded all the time about our “place” in this country as “un-equals.” This isn’t long ago and oh so far away. I’m 70 this year, and have vividly clear memories of the insults to my humanity during those times (which, of course, continue). I remember the first time I saw water fountains labeled “white” and “colored.”


Drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina
I immediately ran to the colored one expecting rainbow-colored water. Disappointed, I tried the white one—but the water did not look like milk. Both tasted the same, and my mother had a very hard time explaining to a child why there were two, both with false labels. She had an even more difficult time explaining away why white people were supporting this. Yes, Rosa Parks sat down. She was black. I wondered: where were the hordes of white folks refusing to sit in white sections, or refusing the white water?

By the time I was a teenager I was excited to read Black Like Me, and elated to see young white students heading off to participate as Freedom Riders and in Freedom Summer with black civil rights workers. Though some of today’s young academics may look back on John Howard Griffin with harsh critiques of his brief passing journey, I remember how reading about it made me feel at the time. Someone outside the loving circle of my family—which included a white grandmother, and my parents’ white communist friends—gave a damn. I hoped his action would influence the views of other whites, those who were not reading Du Bois or Baldwin.

I had not heard of or read about Ray Sprigle at that time. He took his trip to the South the year after I was born. His book, and the republishing of his series, didn’t hit my radar until recently.

30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South by Bill Steigerwald tells Sprigle’s story.


In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.

Escorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.

Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.

Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle’s groundbreaking exposé to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.

Smithsonian magazine had this feature which covered Sprigle’s journey and his critics, titled “The Complicated Racial Politics of Going ‘Undercover’ to Report on the Jim Crow South.”



The act of “passing” was something Sprigle touched upon early in his series—though he described its prevalence in the African-American community. “The fact remains that there are many thousands of Negroes in the South who could ‘pass’ any day they wish,” Sprigle wrote. “I talked to scores of them. Nearly every one had a sister or brother or some other relative who was living as a white man or woman in the North.” Among the more famous examples of passing among the African-American community are Ellen Craft, who used her fair skin to escape slavery with her husband disguised as her servant in 1848, and Walter White, whose blond hair and blue eyes helped him travel through the Jim Crow South to report on lynchings for the NAACP. Far rarer were instances of white people passing as black, because such a transition meant giving up the benefits of their race. And Sprigle’s act wasn’t universally praised or accepted by other writers of the era.

“Mr. Sprigle is guilty of the common blunder of a great number of other northern whites. A white man who is sincerely interested in promoting the advancement of the Negro in the South need not make any apology for being white," a reviewer in the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s still-extant black newspaper, wrote. "And never once have we heard of them changing racial identity in order to accomplish their desired ends.” The sentiment was echoed in a review of Sprigle’s book, In the Land of Jim Crow. It was “somewhat doubtful whether a white, pretending to be a Negro” could really understand the experience of that group, the reviewer wrote.

“It’s really easy to think, [Sprigle] is problematic, let’s dismiss everything,” says Alisha Gaines, professor at Florida State University whose forthcoming book Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy deals with Sprigle and other cases of white-to-black passing. “I don’t advocate for everyone to go paint themselves and shave their heads, but there’s something about their intentionality that I want to hold on to. About wanting to understand, about caring enough and being compassionate.” But, Gaines adds, it seemed like Sprigle reported the story in disguise in an (unsuccessful) attempt at another Pulitzer rather than for reasons of social justice.

“In 4,000 miles of travel by Jim Crow train and bus and street car and by motor, I encountered not one unpleasant incident,” Sprigle concluded at the end of his series. “I took no chances. I was more than careful to be a ‘good [n****r.]’” What Sprigle clearly missed, however, was that behavior and caution had little to do with how blacks were treated in the South. Griffin, once he began publishing his expose in an African-American owned magazine, was forced to take his family and flee the country after receiving death threats and having an effigy of him hung in Dallas.


In 2011, black playwright and poet Robert Earl Price premiered a new play, All Blues, based on Sprigle’s story.

All Blues — named for the 1959 Miles Davis classic from Kind of Blue, one of the most influential record albums of the 20th century — is being co-produced by the Washington College Department of Drama and the Atlanta, Ga., theater company 7 Stages, where the play will open with the same cast on Sept. 22.Del Hamilton, co-founder and artistic director of 7 Stages, will play the role of Ray Sprigle, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter who traveled through the South for 30 days in 1948 as a light-skinned black man named James R. Crawford. Sprigle’s guide was John Wesley Dobbs, an important political leader in Atlanta’s black community and an NAACP activist. Dobbs will be played by Chestertown musician Bob Ortiz.

Sprigle had already won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was famous both for his hard-hitting stories and for his penchant for going undercover to get them.

All Blues is a compelling meditation on the moral complexities of Sprigle’s venture across the country’s racial and geographic divide, which the reporter learned in his travels to call not the Mason Dixon, but the Smith and Wesson line. Sprigle’s journey took place more than a decade before the publication of Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s bestselling account of his own travels through the South as a white man passing himself off as black.

The lyrics and music of All Blues form a subtext to the play, which weaves light, movement, and a cast of characters that include the light and dark sides of Sprigle’s own soul into a moody meditation on race.

I feel more than kind of blue when I take out my Jim Crow memories and dust them off for re-examination. Many people are aware of the problems black folks have doing something simple like hailing a cab. But how many remember cabs like these, for whites only?


Taxi cabs with sign "White only, Becks cabs" on side, Albany, Georgia


Contemporary political discourse has swirled around legislation affecting transgender folks and bathroom discrimination. It often hurls me back to thinking about a time when there were no bathrooms we could use at all in certain areas.


Street scene near bus station in Durham, North Carolina. Bathroom sign reads “White Ladies Only”
Driving across the country with my parents, we always had a “porta-potty” in the car. But when you were out shopping and on foot, bringing one along wasn’t possible. My mom used to ignore the signs when we lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and use whatever bathroom was available, which could have gotten her in a lot of trouble. Thankfully, we moved back north after a year in Jim Crow land.

The movie version of Black Like Me had a scene involving bathrooms at a bus rest stop. Though I prefer the book (and thought the makeup on James Whitmore, who plays John Howard Griffin was ludicrous), the rest stop scene is a page from real-life as experienced by black folks.





I have many more of these memories, too many to recount here today. I’ve also seen Jim Crow signs banning Native Americans and Mexicans, and was refused service in a restaurant in Rapid City, South Dakota, when I was with a group of Indians from the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1980s.

“Race changing” has a long tradition in our culture. When done by whites, much of it has been negative for black Americans, who have been relentlessly mocked, parodied, stereotyped, sexualized, infantilized, and vilified via the mediums of minstrelry (blackface) and film (Birth of a Nation). There is heated debate and discussion of cultural appropriation as well. These subjects are brilliantly explored by Susan Gubar in her text Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, in which she makes distinctions between and among the different forms.


In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar, who fundamentally changed the way we think about women's literature as co-author of the acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic, turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Through a far-reaching exploration of the long overlooked legacy of minstrelsy--cross-racial impersonations or "racechanges"--throughout modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, and journalism, she documents the indebtedness of "mainstream" artists to African-American culture, and explores the deeply conflicted psychology of white guilt. The fascinating "racechanges" Gubar discusses include whites posing as blacks and blacks "passing" for white; blackface on white actors in The Jazz Singer, Birth of a Nation, and other movies, as well as on the faces of black stage entertainers; African-American deployment of racechange imagery during the Harlem Renaissance, including the poetry of Anne Spencer, the black-and-white prints of Richard Bruce Nugent, and the early work of Zora Neale Hurston; white poets and novelists from Vachel Lindsay and Gertrude Stein to John Berryman and William Faulkner writing as if they were black; white artists and writers fascinated by hypersexualized stereotypes of black men; and nightmares and visions of the racechanged baby. Gubar shows that unlike African-Americans, who often are forced to adopt white masks to gain their rights, white people have chosen racial masquerades, which range from mockery and mimicry to an evolving emphasis on inter-racial mutuality and mutability.

Her lecture on the book is available online.

Last Tuesday, I wrote this in reference to bigoted, racist remarks made by Iowa Rep. Steve King:

King’s comment, “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that's just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same,” comes out of a history—founded on racism—which dragged black people here to labor in chains and after finally freed to be kept separate and othered via the institution of Jim Crow laws after Reconstruction was defeated.

While folks point fingers at King for being the bigot he is, from my pov it is more important to point fingers at the people who have been electing him to Congress since 1997.

The vileness has become normal for Republicans. Racism has always been normal in the United States. Dear friends and allies: Do not stand by silently, as so many did during those long, long years of Jim Crow.

You may not be able to walk in my shoes. But you can walk the road by my side.

 

Why Steve Bannon Wants You to Believe in the Deep State

What better way to decimate the bureaucracy than to convince Americans it’s treacherous?

By Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon

March 21, 2017

Like a George Lucas Death Star or one of those planet-eating monsters in Star Trek, the Deep State has crashed into the national consciousness. Suddenly, it’s not just an obsession of those who inhabit the fevered, conspiracy-laced dream world of Alex Jones or Breitbart, but also the subject of countless news stories and headlines of all stripes across the media spectrum—bigger than anything imaginable, undermining the elected president of the United States, threatening the fundaments of our democracy.

Like the Death Star, the American Deep State does not, of course, exist.

Spoiler

An appropriation from countries such as Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Algeria, where real networks of intelligence, defense and interior ministry officials exercise real power to drive policy, sideline elected officials and eliminate opponents, the American Deep State is nothing more than an invention of President Donald Trump and his allies—the convenient enemy from within that they blame for their frustrations. The leaks that undid former national security adviser Michael Flynn? That was the Deep State. Reports of extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and all manner of other smears? The Deep State. The president is said to be irate about this rearguard action led by, in the words of White House press secretary Sean Spicer, Obama administration holdovers who have “burrowed in” and “continue to espouse the agenda of the previous administration.” Trump’s unshakable certainty that his Trump Tower phone has been tapped seems to be rooted—disingenuously or not—in this belief.

Many, including Loren DeJonge Schulman, Max Fisher and David Remnick, have written insightfully on the fatuousness of these charges, and there is plenty more to say: For example, that there may be only one Obama appointee left in the two premier Deep State institutions, the FBI and CIA. That’s FBI Director James Comey, whose unprecedented intervention in the presidential election would give Hillary Clinton a much a better basis for complaining about the political manipulations of unelected officials than Trump. At the CIA, all four Obama appointees have left, and it is unlikely any Obama people remain at the National Security Agency and the passel of other intelligence agencies, where there were never more than a handful. The problems that plague Trump have nothing to do with former President Barack Obama, or some covert “opposition.” Like it or not, leaks abound when career people feel their agencies are being unfairly attacked, as they did after Trump accused the intelligence community of politicization and fabrication, or when they fear that an administration is dangerously undermining U.S. interests, a worry engendered by Trump’s denigration of traditional U.S. allies and lionization of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

What has been lost in the discussion of the Deep State, however, is that even if it is fiction, it is a profoundly useful one for the White House. As Trump takes a wrecking ball to the federal bureaucracy—what Steve Bannon has called “the administrative state”—an illusory enemy like the Deep State is exactly what is needed to justify the destruction. Repetitive allusions to sinister officials and administrators will expand and energize the constituency for a radical downsizing and weakening of government agencies, especially among Republicans, who appear to believe Trump’s utterances no matter how much the media debunks them. However thoughtful the New York Times or the New Yorker criticisms of the Deep State rhetoric may be, the White House seems to have plenty of reasons to stick with its new myth.

Indeed, the Trump administration seems to be enjoying the brush fire building in the right-wing press. It’s probably not a coincidence that Breitbart, Bannon’s former domain, has put out a string of tales about Deep State infestation, including at the Commerce Department and Environmental Protection Agency. This is the sort of allegation that would brings tears of laughter to a true Deep Stater—say a Pakistani ISI officer—who would never imagine that an agency dedicated to the environment would be worth penetrating. But it makes sense when you recall that the EPA has been identified as a key target of the administration. The “skinny budget” just released by the White House shows EPA targeted for the biggest budget cuts of any agency, 31 percent in all.

The Deep State fiction also fits well with the White House’s apparently deliberate strategy to leave such traditional behemoths as the State Department almost without any leadership. On Mahogany Row, the department’s seventh floor power corridor, 7 of 9 of the top positions are empty—only Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Undersecretary for Political Affairs Tom Shannon, a career Foreign Service member, are in office. There are no assistant secretaries for the different regional bureaus, or for such functional powerhouses as the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, which spends billions a year on what one would have thought was a top Trump issue. More astonishing, there are no nominations for any of these posts.

In that light—and given the whopping 29 percent budget cut for State, second only to EPA—it is a good bet that the White House’s top priority for the State Department is not any particular policy goal. Instead, it is to make good on Spicer’s riposte to the thousand or so Foreign Service Officers and civil servants who signed the famous Dissent Channel cable objecting to the first abortive executive order on immigrations and refugees: “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it?” he said during his daily news briefing. “I think they should either get with the program or they can go.”

State’s not the only agency with empty offices. Nearly two months into the new administration, the lack of interest in filling some 4,000 open jobs across the government with political appointees is stunning. Even if one factors in Trump’s extreme reluctance to hire anyone who ever criticized him—which takes plenty out of the running—this can no longer be attributed to growing pains or incompetence. It’s intentional: The administration aims to cripple many agencies and eliminate them as independent power centers, thus giving more power to the president.

It’s a fact of life within the executive branch that agencies wield considerable power and pursue their own bureaucratic interests. That’s why ordinarily we have political appointees to ensure that the bureaucracy for the most part follows the policy leadership of the White House. Still, doing battle with the bureaucracy has driven presidents to distraction. It has also at times provided a brake on rash actions coming from the White House.

This administration has taken a different tack, effectively ensuring that the departments have next-to-no leadership of any kind; the gears that usually mesh so agencies work together have been sawn off, and there is just a lot of spinning going on. The exception, of course, is the Department of Defense, whose ability to work Capitol Hill and the massive industries that depend on it, is being enhanced.

The Trump team appears intent on changing the nature of American government so that power can more comprehensively be centralized in the White House. With State cut down to size, for example, there will be fewer pesky demands that we adhere to international law in counterterrorism, uphold our treaty responsibility to accept refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention or even pay attention to Arab objections to moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. This is a big problem. Those kinds of initiatives are frustrating to plenty of citizens who’d like to see more decisive action, but they are also the heart of the brand of deliberative policymaking that has usually kept our government on track. Slow and steady government works. And yet that is exactly what Trump and his minions seek to demolish.

How far will this incautious power grab go? It’s impossible to say, but there is a campaign in the making. Trump adviser Newt Gingrich has said he has spoken with Bannon about the issue and made clear he is on board, declaring, “Of course, the Deep State exists. There’s a permanent state of massive bureaucracies that do whatever they want and set up deliberate leaks to attack the president. … This is what the Deep State does: They create a lie, spread a lie, fail to check the lie and then deny that they were behind the lie.” Sean Hannity has called for firing “deep state, Obama holdover” officials, adding, with characteristic delicacy, “It’s time for the Trump administration to begin to purge these saboteurs before it’s too late.” A variety of House Republicans, including Duncan Hunter of California, Steve King of Iowa and Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania have echoed these charges: Kelly went to so far as to charge that Obama had stayed in Washington to “run a shadow government,” a remark he later retracted.

These are the sounds of a myth taking to flight. It would be a mistake to underestimate its durability or its potential power.

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Ambassador Daniel Benjamin is director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and served as coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department 2009-2012.

Steven Simon, who was National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa from 2011 to 2012, is the John J. McCloy ’16 visiting professor at Amherst College.

 

Writing them all off is some Chuck Schumer style bullshit. The DNC establishment wants you to believe all the Trump voters are irredeemable racists because that covers their ass for running an incompetent campaign and ignoring the lower classes. Increased engagement in those communities should be Tom Perez's top priority right now, not surrendering them to the GOP.

 

I mean, they're not going anywhere. I know a lot of people would like to trade them for Syrian refugees or whatever but these people are gonna live in this country long after Trump. If there is no effort on our part to try and find ways to relate and educate, and we all just say fuck um, they are gonna continue to vote miserably. The democrats shoulder a fair amount of blame for this debacle by being a very lackluster party for a long time. And sure, there is a ton of shitty people who voted Trump but acting like they are all shitty people while simultaneously wishing them misery is a bit hypocritical

 

I pity those who truly voted for him out of desperation. Sadly I think a disturbing number of his voters will never change unless stricken by personal tragedy and still may remain irredeemable. Those are the middle-upper class whites living comfortably that should've known better and are the most frustrating bunch. Then there are those that are quite simply pure evil a la Jeff Sessions.

 

There's been a fuckton of FAE in this thread since the election. The idea that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist is absurd. Its also dumb because it ignores that these people may have very real reasons why they felt the need to vote for trump.

 

"the idea that EVERYONE Who voted for Trump is racist is absurd".

The idea EVERY crayon is red is equally absurd too.

"But They voted for Obama!" is Shusian "but it's Ok because I have a black friend!"

"Real reasons" that were easily manipulated by racist, nationalist fake populism. Hmm...

Outright racism and/or Implicit racial bias were a factor. But it's impossible to measure.