President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

FYI, Marc Rich never returned to the US, has been dead for several years and his pardon 16 years ago at the conclusion of Clinton's term in no way carried any of the racist dog whistle characteristics that Joe Arpaio's does (at a moment of high racial tension in our country). Rich, who was highly involved in and bankrolled covert ops for Mossad, had extremely influential Israelis lobbying Clinton's folks for his pardon and he was a virtual unknown publicly. So this little tangent seems to be a poorly conceived false equivalence. YF is probably upset because Rich got away after his boy Rudy indicted him for a laundry list of white-collar crimes.

 

I'll sum all this up: Get the fuck out of here with your "Unless you condemn this you're ok with that" bullshit.

 

Wow. I can only answer a couple of those.

Everywhere. Swinging its big dick around.

 

Goddamm, that's a great post.
Fuck the Party of Mean People.

 

'yab is the board racist. Good call.

 

Which "rights" do white middle class Americans that other groups don't? And which groups don't have them?

I'm not saying I disagree. I'm just curious, at this point, which rights these are.

 

I don't think it will, per se, although I've never thought Nafta was a good deal for America.

 

Fuck you, turd.
His post was fine.

 

I hope you're not a gambler.

 

2022?

Cleveland State will finally be off probation.

 

So far, 2022 is shaping up about the way I'd imagined.

 

This subject makes me think of many things, especially corporate roundtables and panels discussing diversity in this industry or that, and they're almost always composed entirely of white men, or white men and maybe one white woman. Maybe one person of minority classification. Usually, someone palatable to white, corporate America. I was going to post something along the lines of dixiehack's remarks, but the more I thought about it, the more I held off. My guess is that most of the people posting on this thread are white males, which pretty much dooms the conversation to understandable yet severely limiting blind spots. It feels like a fool's errand to even try to go down this road, which is probably why it rarely happens in white circles. But then I saw his post, and I decided to try to share some thoughts, imperfectly worded as they will be.

I agree in spirit with what dixiehack said, although my word choice probably would have been different. Going back to a college class many years ago, I've had a roller-coaster ride of a relationship with the word "rights," and I realize that the definition of a "right" can vary wildly among people in a conversation about them. So I would likely have chosen wording that incorporated an even more problematic term in the white, male world: privilege (and what comes with it that, to others, probably feels like and may well be, essentially, rights). It's a word I've seen mocked and dismissed by intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful people, and guess what? All of them were white, and most of them were men. So do I expect a discussion on this topic to bear much fruit here? I do not. That's not a shot at anybody. Just a conclusion based on our demographics and years of understanding that despite even the best of intentions, those demographics are limiting.

People who say identity politics killed the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white. People who say the party has been too caught up in identity politics are overwhelmingly white. Not just white, but white males. Then there's this:

"A lot of it is fueled by the Internet. It has inflated problems that are singular and best resolved locally into nationwide justice matters."

For all of its flaws, the internet is where I've learned many things that have opened my eyes in the past five to 10 years. Twitter, despite its many problems, has in many ways been more instructive than a lot of interaction in the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood world. For one thing, people of color, women of color, people with disabilities, transgender people, etc., who might not feel safe being honest about their experiences IRL, using their names, in front of people they know, find social media a safe place to vent anonymously about these issues. They've created their own communities, and like with any, yeah, they have flaws, but there is real teaching going on for anyone willing and able to pay attention with an open mind. But it can be uncomfortable.

I grew up in the Deep South in a family that would, even today, scoff at the notion of white privilege. We didn't have much money. My mother's summer vacations in childhood were spent picking cotton in blistering hot, humid weather. The day I finished my first day of classes my senior year of high school, I had received a better education than my parents did, and for longer than my father went to school. My parents figured out a way to pay private-school tuition for each of four children for eight years, plus four more for me — in a one-income household. But it's undeniable.that their being white gave them opportunities that weren't open to others who were not white. I had to work hard to get to where I am in terms of understanding why so many people put so much emphasis on identity politics, but first I had to want to get there, and almost none of it has been comfortable for me. That discomfort, more than anything else, explains to me why we went from a post-election theme in 2012 of "the GOP may well be dead" to the post-election morass we have now, one in which one of the central themes is "the Democratic Party is broken."

I have never heard anyone who wasn't white say the kinds of things about identity politics mentioned or quoted above. Usually, it comes from people who have the luxury of feeling no sense of urgency to have the attendant issues of race and identity resolved in a fair and just way. Usually, it comes from people who have never faced injustice on a local level. Usually, it comes from people the system tends to protect, not disenfranchise — in fact, is designed to protect. "Work within the system for change" sounds great when the system was built and is run by people like you who have lived a life similar to yours. Resolving problems locally sounds great when you can call the police and have it never cross your mind that you might got shot or arrested once they get to your house. So people look for some kind of relief on a national level, or at least for a sense of community in such places as Twitter, and elsewhere on the internet. And many of them have poignant stories to tell that, even when you have to wade through a ton of misinformation and just awful citizen journalism, are eye-opening about things we use the shorthand of "rights" and "privilege" to discuss — or avoid discussing honestly. None of this, either, is a shot at anyone who has said those things. It's just my observation of what reality looks like for so many people fighting this struggle every day.

George Will has an intellect that would crush mine in an Intellect Olympics (heck, almost everyone here is smarter than I am), but I have seen him put his blind spots painfully on display in columns regarding higher education and the purity of thought he longs to see again at its institutions. Ironically, at its core, his most vehement rejection of what he sees as alarming trends on campuses across America, including what in layman's terms might be described as safe spaces, intellectual censorship and other "millennials, kids today, blah blah blah, are killing x, y and z" talk, chokes off much of the conversation rather than broadening it. It simply protects the status quo, one in which a bunch of white men in ivory towers stroke their beards and smoke their pipes and look very thoughtful, yes, very thoughtful indeed, hmm, about the problems facing minorities today. And they talk, and they write, and they opine, and they do precious little listening. And they live very comfortable white lives.

I say all this as someone who, most days, is still upset at people who helped elect Trump by seeing Hillary Clinton as not being this enough, or that enough, not saying this enough, or that enough. But as someone who has enjoyed white male privilege for much of nearly six decades without fully realizing the extent and intricacies of it, I know that I am not coming from the same life experience as them. I know that "work within the system," resolve things on a local level, to them sounds a lot like "guess what? real change is not going to happen in your lifetime." So I have an appreciation for why it's more important to them than it is to most of the people saying it has destroyed the Democratic Party.

And I'm not sure what advice I'd give them (not that they're asking), because I know that white America, for all of its economic anxiety and its desire to "drain the swamp," is not inclined to easily let go of the status quo with respect to identity and racial politics. Something about prying it from cold, dead hands comes to mind. Bannon is probably right about what he says. ("The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I’ve got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.") And it's a tricky thing for the party more inclined to do something about an unjust system to figure out a way to win elections so it can do just that, but dropping important social issues just to win is a good way to lose a big part of your soul.

And ultimately, it puts us right back to the spirit of what dixiehack said, because white America likes being comfortable and quickly runs out of the courage to be uncomfortable enough to work on real change for all, for those who don't look or talk like they do.

tl; dr: what dixiehack said.