I'm intentionally putting your Atlantic article first in this response to make it easier to reply:
RangerDave wrote:
Celebrating his big win in Indiana—and his elevation to presumptive nominee of the Republican Party—Tuesday night, Donald Trump spoke at Trump Tower in New York City, where he delivered a promise to heal the deep fractures in his party.
“We want to bring unity to the Republican Party,” he said. “We have to bring unity. It's so much easier if we have it....We're going to bring back our jobs, and we're going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again, and this country, which is very, very divided in so many different ways, is going to become one beautiful loving country, and we're going to love each other, we're going to cherish each other and take care of each other, and we're going to have great economic development and we're not going to let other countries take it away from us, because that's what's been happening for far too many years and we're not going to do it anymore,” he said.
One reason for [Trump's] atrocious ratings [with minorities] is the way Trump speaks to and about minorities, which was on display during his victory speech Tuesday.
“We're going to have great relationships with the Hispanics,” he said. “The Hispanics have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what's going on, they want jobs.”
Part of Trump’s rhetorical power is his supercharged used of “we,” a method that persuades people across the country that they are part of a larger movement, and somehow share with Trump his aura of wealth and luxury. (It’s the same technique he’s used to sell real estate for years.) In the midst of his spiel about all the ways “we” would make America great again, Trump tossed in this passage about minorities. His phrasing is telling. First, it suggests that for Trump, blacks and Hispanics aren’t part of “we”—“they” constitute separate groups.
is not a bad publication on many issues, but on anything regarding the sacred cows of race and gender, they are firmly in the tank for preserving these issues and re-assuring liberals of the sort that read publications like
The Atlantic that they are intellectually both correct and superior to those knuckle-dragging racist misogynists.
This passage is telling both for its nitpicking of Trump's unpolished delivery style, and its acknowledgement that it's part of his sales technique - it has nothing to do with Trump excluding Hispanics and everything to do with a perception of exclusion based on his crappy phrasing. While this might be a legitimate point, the fact of the matter is that publications like this have been perfectly ok with years and years of Sharpton, Jackson, and plenty of similar agitators talking about "White America" and how it supposedly views blacks, then pillorying whites when they object to being told what they think by black leaders that then brand them racists for thinking it. Other, similar strawmanning and exclusion of whites goes similarly unchallenged, but when Trump uses sales phrasing that has unfortunate connotations only to people going out of their way to detect it, all of a sudden its worthy of comment.
Quote:
I think there's definitely a not-insignificant portion of his base that are, in fact, drawn to him for racist and misogynist reasons, but I think there's a broader appeal that, although not exactly racist or misogynist, is still related to race and gender/sex. Like I said to Xeq upthread, he's basically playing identity politics, but the identity he's appealing to is white, male, blue collar, native-born American. That's a demographic that has been consistently on the losing side of all the cultural and economic changes of the last 20-30 years - and has been consistently told they have a moral duty to embrace that loss without objection - and he's tapping into the resulting frustration and sense of displacement there. Whether one thinks that frustration is legitimate or not, it is undoubtedly linked to a sense of tribal identity that distinguishes between "us" and "them", and Trump is clearly playing to it. I read an article the other day that pretty neatly captures the dynamic of who Trump sees as his constituency and who he sees as "the other", so to speak:
There are certainly some racists and misogynists supporting Trump, but fewer than you'd think. Most of what's referred to today as "racism" is better termed "prejudice" or merely "stereotyping" and has only become "racism" as the term has expanded in meaning to satisfy the endless appetite of the left for battling the racist menace.
That said, the unbelievably condescending and smug tone of your reply - despite incorporating certain elements of truth - reflects precisely the source of frustration that drives this "identity politics".
Your assessment is based on a huge number of fantasies liberals rely on the media to perpetuate, and the cravenness of conservative politicians and intellectual self-absorbtion of more conservative media in failing to denounce them:
- Evangelicals, not white male blue collar people, have lost the culture wars, and not entirely wrongly. These groups are identified together only because black evangelicals have successfully skimmed under the radar by keeping their anti-gay attitudes on the down-low and preaching against the White Menace in their churches which makes Jesus suddenly A-OK with the large portion of the liberal crowd that otherwise has the vapors over anything they deem excessively Jesus (usually any Jesus at all). White male blue-collars have been losing the economic contest, not the cultural debate.
- White, Blue-collar, Native-born, and most of all male are not a united group being opposed by anyone that is not a member of all four groups. For the last 50 years the left has been tying women's issues to those of blacks and more recently gays and other minorities despite those agendas often being in conflict or unrelated. In particular, women have gained wildly, often gaining clear advantages that would be considered institutional sexism if men held them. Blacks have not, and the left is despearte to conceal the fact that black males are being victimized far more for being poor males that can't afford lawyers than for being black.
- Whites have been amalgamated into a single group by the left that, if not already liberal, it has conveniently assigned the status of George Wallace voters. The white racism of the 1960s south has been extended to include any and all rural whites that don't toe the appropriate line, so that now some white guy from rural Wisconsin is obviously just as suspect as the guy with the Alabama drawl and the rebel flag sticker on his bunker (who is assumed to be an unrepentent racist on that basis alone himself). The ethnic and regional divides that used to - and to a large degree still do - mean white people are not a community or group in the way there's a "black community" but the left insists on portraying it that way.
Essentially, the white, male, blue-collar person got drafted into being the opposition in the cultural divide the left needed in order to maintain the press for equality that was no longer necessary as of 25 years ago or so - existing laws and institutions were adequately addressing such issues, and remaining apparent "disporportionalities" were a result of differences in group behavior far mroe than differences in their treatment (which is exactly where "mass incarceration" comes from). While segregation may still be "in living memory", it is solely within the living memory of people eligible for social security.
Having been drafted into being a windmill for the left to tilt at, these people have been sold an endless crock of **** about how one one side about how growth will give them new opportunities (despite that growth being tailored to avoid paying the wages they need) and on the other that they're "privileged", and when they object to measures to address their conditions being aimed at people based on skin color or the presence of a vagina that they just resent losing their "privilege" and they're <insert hate-assignment slur here>. When they object to endless attempts to boost "women and/or minorities" because "hey, I'm over here making 11 dollars an hour, what about me?" they're told they only care about god, guns, and gays and to STFU, racist (even if they ARE female or a minority).
The reason Trump arose, aside from his very astute selection of 2016 to run in, was that this finally just got to be too much. White poor people are dying, males are losing badly in educational opportunities and the left can't conceal that.
Worse, the more out-of-control elements of the left finally slipped their leash. The left's establishment fabricated a pay gap that's been exaggerated to around 3 times its real size - and the reason for which is really an unknown, not a lack of "equal pay", and that emboldened the loons:
- Despite ISIS burning people in cages, beheading people, and blowing up hundreds of Europeans, and despite "refugees" terrorizing German women in a frenzy of sexual assault, we still ehar about "Islamophobia"
- A "campus rape crisis" was invented wholesale, despite warning signs years ago (Duke lacrosse case), and the fabricators were caught red-handed in 2 cases (UVA and Lena Dunham) and a total lack of reputable statistics to support it
- Repeated defense of violent black thugs as victims of "police violence" right alongside the ones that obviously are. Disgracefully so, in fact. A black man is brutally murdered by being shot in the back by a cop in SC, but that gets LESS attention than a thuggish punk violently assaulting a police officer and getting killed in the process. Probably because the cop was instantly fired and arrested, and that just doesn't fit the "racist justice system" narrative.
- White people blatantly posing as blacks to whore on the victim status
- Campuses nationwide beset by protests making lunatic demands, administrations folding in appalling displays of total cowardice, and students being terrorized in libraries. The idea of students getting expensive degrees on American campuses being beset by overt racism is put forth as if it were seriously believable, while competing viewpoints are run off campus in a fashion so unsubtle as to be comical. Mizzou let this get so out of control its financial situation is in jeopardy
- BLM interrupts a clearly sympathetic presidential candidate, takes over his rally, and then goes on a news network and the same person doing it tells the interviewer "[white people] have ta sacrifice y'all selves". Not "we want this"; it's "we want to tear you down, or better yet, abase yourself before black people"
- Protestors show up at Trump rallies, create a ruckes, and Trump (his occasionally questionable suggestions notwithstanding) is blamed - despite a total lack of similar protestors at Clinton or Sanders rallies.
I could go on and on.
Suffice to say, the bottom line is that white, male, blue-collar workers have simply had the goalposts moved over and over - no matter what they do, they are always racists unless they are disregarding their own interests in favor of someone elses, and even when those interests actually align it is not ok for them to want to benefit alongside everyone else. It has simply gone past the point where it the disguise of "equality" and "fairness" would hold up, and it's blatantly now every other group simply sticking up for their own interest and calling it "social justice".
Whites have learned that no matter what they do, they will always be racists to everyone else, and condescended to by white liberals. With a lack of any reasonable alternative, they've flocked to a demagogue or the one guy that REALLY DOES seem to care about actual equality for everyone and is losing to the vagina card, mainly because his ideas are economically laughable. When they started running out of racism to fight, the leftists had to generate more of it, and they succeeded by playing blatant identity/victim politics. They just didn't realize that they were on the verge of their own fringe elements going off the deep end and giving the game away right when a loud-mouth billionaire decided to run for President.
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