And again they give a false implication that legal immigration would be at stake here. I don't mind if people support Trump or Hillary or whoever, but this intellectual dishonesty about newsreporting should cease.
if you think that trump has been talking about illegal immigration only, I would like to point you to the term "dog whistle politics". Do you think that the white supremacists that have come out in support of him are only referring to illegal immigrants when they talk about the threat posed to "our" culture?
Lee Atwater once explained in a speech that because of changes in social moirés you couldn't call black people "n*" anymore. Instead you could refer to racial issues in terms of tax cuts and school busing. Tax cuts keep your hard earned money from benefiting "those"" people and school busing...they were going to make your kids schools worse by bringing "them" in.
Are there issues with the US immigration system. Yes. Has that been at issue in this election? Not really. That's just not what's going on here. The issue of immigration is a surrogate for a perceived loss of power by one population relative to another.
The subtitle to the motherjones article is literally: "How Donald Trump took a narrative of unfairness and twisted it to his advantage."
In practice, I've heard the line "I know trump's awful but ..." coming from quite a few surprising places. I can't say "this reality doesn't exist because I choose not to believe in it".
If I want to honestly understand the world, I need to be open to ideas I currently do not understand.
Because both parties have abandoned them, and class politics, in favor of identity politics.
Why do so many politicians, activists, journalists, and other leaders ignore (or demonize) their cause?
Of course, the class based view of this is that the capital owning class have disenfranchised the rest of the country. It's impossible to talk about class in America without including race. The poor and working poor whites have had more in common with their black neighbors than they have had with the capital owning class since the end of the civil war. That doesn't change the structure of the issue. So, no, I was not saying that it is as simple as race.
Ex-Democrat, I can see, but ex-liberal...what, is this person now a mercantilist monarchist or something? I'm assuming that they still support the ideal of democracy and some kind of quasi-market capitalist society?
There are some on the "far left" that take the view that Trump is exactly what this country deserves and that if we went "full retard" that it might mean real reform sooner rather than later because of the damage he would do. I don't agree. The American president is clothed in tremendous power and is capable of terrible things.
I don't think that the avid environmentalist is actually an avid environmentalist if they think that Trump would be good for the environment after attacking the EPA and the limited good that they do now as choking the lifeblood out of business.
EDIT: What I'm trying to say here is that in the American class system the middle class whites who struck a deal with elites for privilege over the poor and people of color are afraid that the deal has changed. They are right. There's no economic advantage to the capital owning class to respect prior social compacts and they have removed all the levers of power that the middle and lower classes had to stop them. They were allowed to remove those levers in the name of maintaining racial privilege for a large group.
my point is that something can be happening in the macro even while there is anecdotal evidence to the contrary in the micro.
i mean, you know that, at this point, things like the southern strategy have been well documented including very literal explanations by the people that came up with it, right? ron reagan announcing his campaign in a town were civil rights workers were murdered?
was it just the thing about the environmentalist? and thats going to kill my whole point for you? fine. you met a unicorn. unicorns are real. that doesnt change the meat of my argument.
EDIT: yes, i was being snarky about the ex-liberal andbthe environmentalist. i thought the bit about an ex-liberal being a monarchist was funny. classical liberalism joke. sue me.
Those people are far dead and there were many Republican primary contenders who tried these antique tactics and fell flat in the 90s onward. Coopting some dusty historical strategy as starting to work again doesn't sound like a plausible story.
Many feel that the modern political machinery had left them behind. You could say he "dog whistles" to saying he cares about poor whites and those who don't have a college degree, but he actively talks about them and how he'd like to secure opportunities for them to succeed. It's safety net and opportunity politics.
The republicans played to a sense of white aggrievement over the 40 years since the 70's while using the political power given to them in the name of that aggrievement to disempower the people that gave it to them.
I agree that he does speak to how middle and lower class whites still feel aggrieved but he does it in a way is still consistent with white privilege. You mentioned Arlie Hochshchild in another comment. Did you catch her comment about how Trump is playing the white knight role and that he shames everyone but white men? What about her "deep story" explanation? She's said that in two different interviews that I've heard her in. The one thing that she doesn't include, because its outside the scope of what she's doing, is the extent to which these people are complicit in the construction of their own circumstances. If you only look at this as an economic class struggle it's impossible to explain the reason that people supported parties that were explicitly opposed to their self interest. The class based explanation of the exploitation of poor people without including race is incomplete at best and disingenuous at worst.
It's "safety net" in that he's going to get some "safety net" for "you" and not "them". You have to be willingly ignoring that to not see it.
EDIT: Saying that the southern strategy was only for pro segregationists in the 60's and early 70's is so demonstrably false that it makes me think you are purposefully being misleading. It BECAME the Republican mainstream. It didn't go away. It won.
This is the case right now. Ramping up deportation as Trump has suggested would obviously not yield better results. The immigration courts right now have a backlog of more than half a million cases [5]. I've not even touched stop-and-frisk, religious profiling, etc.
Now, and this part is speculation, this part of history comes to mind: [6]. If it's TLDR, then search for "repatriation".
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/office-of-the-chief-immigration...
[2]: http://naij-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-01-14-Re...
[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-a-crowded-immigra...
[4]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportation...
[5]: http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.160915.html
[6]: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-h...
Edit: Bonus: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trumps-p...
Lots of people openly say that we should tolerate illegal immigration either for economic or humanitarian reasons, and I've never seen such an argument applied to them.
var iceberg = { tip : "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" }
If you want a historical analogy that helps you to better connect with the situation under question then I would recommend to think about immigration of Germans into South America after WWII.
This is what at least comes into my mind. I do not know if this analogy would be fair to either parties.
Also it does not follow that I would recommend you to support one of the candidates based on this. If you happen to be an American.