> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points... Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos. These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
Shor makes basically the same error as the authors of the New York Times piece above: assuming that opposing immigration and supporting law-and-order are inherently “racist” views.
Progressives need to ask themselves: is opposition to abolishing ICE (to use one of Schor’s examples) actually “racist?” Because if they just run with the assumption that it’s racist, they’ll force themselves into taking an incredibly unpopular position. As Shor himself points out, the people running the campaigns are ideologically progressive. Even if polling shows that abolishing ICE is incredibly unpopular, so long as they accept the premise that it’s the anti-racist thing to do, they will support it (or the far left will make them support it). This was basically the story of the 2019 Democratic primaries, where nearly every candidate embraced incredibly unpopular issues out of fear of being “called out.”
And “demographic destiny” won’t eventually vindicate progressives’ all-consuming view of racism. As the New York Times article above explains, a message focused around racial identity and the idea of pervasive “white supremacy” (like Elizabeth Warren ran in the 2019 Democratic Primary) actually polls poorly among Latinos (who are now the largest non-white group in the electorate). Meanwhile, Trump’s polling is up 100% among Black people and 60% among Hispanic people under 45 compared to 2016: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-.... If Republicans can convert that into votes, states like Texas and Georgia will stay solidly red. Shor is ultimately right. Democrats need to get back white voters in a country that will be 50%+ white for the foreseeable future. Because in the long run non-white voters aren’t as much of a lock as they assume. But they really need to introspect about why they would ever have thought otherwise to begin with.
Shor is a self-described progressive who wants to help elect Democrats.
He’s mostly useful as a critic of the left from the centre.
His “facts don’t care about your feelings” rebuttals of leftist fantasies are incredibly useful to both the centre and the left.
(This also got him fired on the first day of Floyd protests when he posted research showing that the riots will backfire in the long run, politically!)
he didn't even post the research - he re-tweeted the research of a black academic that showed that violent protests are less successful that non-violent ones. His firing was a travesty.
Which group(s) do you assert he is racist towards?
As a White formerly-enthusiastic-supporter, I would now consider Trump the most openly racist anti-White president in US history. His promises of securing the border have been entirely unfulfilled (he even promised more immigration than ever in the face of a rapidly declining and disenfranchised White population); his contributions to Israel from the predominantly-White taxpayer have been the most 'generous' in spite of the nation state's relative prosperity and security compared to that enjoyed by most Americans, even while jewish organisations such as the ADL routinely malign White Americans for displaying any ethnic identity or pride; thousands of black, jewish, and wild White insurgents have been free to loot, vandalise, riot and terrify American cities and suburbs (and he even promised $500bn to black Americans as a direct result) while little old White women are prohibited from attending church; open anti-White racism has been allowed to proliferate under his watch, including popularisation of "Karen" racist dialogue, criminalising Whites who defend themselves against aforementioned violence, etc; and his continuous references to the increase in non-White employment and socioeconomic outcomes have become a meme in the pro-White community (including in his recent 60 Minutes interview where he basically listed the benefits of his presidency to every group except Whites), a total betrayal of his voter base and his country's narrow minority.
But somehow a woke activist can misconstrue the occasional Tweet into a thickly-veiled dog whistle and claim that he's a White supremacist? He's doing a very good impression of the polar opposite.
1) Stop capitalising "white".
2) "little old White women are prohibited from attending church" - [citation needed]
3) "popularisation of "Karen" racist dialogue" - how is this racist?
Many people and even some mainstream outlets capitalise "Black" but deliberately avoid doing so for "white", including in a HN post within the last 24h. If they insist on making this petty distinction, I'll happily play along.
I wouldn't personally call it racist or sexist (as I've seen the term used for both men and women and of different races). However the logic works like this:
Tyrone is a internet stereotype of a thuggish blackman. The stereotype of Tyrone is considered by some to be racist (probably quite rightly). Karen is a stereotypical entitled white woman. So if calling someone a Tyrone is racist, therefore calling a woman a Karen is also racist.
Not saying I agree with any of it. But that is my understanding of how the logic works.
It depends how you define racism! According to "Defining Racism" by Beverly Daniel Tatum, it isn't. But in other interpretations of the word, it would be. I don't think it's far fetched to assume it might rightfully feel like a racist slur to the grand-parent.
Whether racism or not, it's probably an -ism of some sort. Despite disagreeing with the GP, at least their painting of "Karen" as an -ism gave me pause and made me consider that usage again. In truth, it's probably not a great and useful practice in discourse. e.g; do you believe calling someone a Karen will increase your chances of reconciling with them or coming to a favorable outcome with that person?
No, I'm personally not a fan of the term because I generally don't like reducing people to caricatures - but IMO equating it to a slur is just... wrong. It's ignorant of what actually has been happening to the oppressed people in this country since... forever? And is trying to equate someone, who is generally in a position of power (a middle class white woman) to minority groups who have experienced racism since this country's founding.
Food for thought: In the (rough) words of John Mulaney, if you equate something to another word, but you won't even say the other word, then one is clearly worse than the other.
> Curious that you're downvoted without comment [...] As an outsider to the US bunfight, your statement seems, based on what we see, pretty self-evident.
I didn't cast any vote in the thread, but here's an explanation. If I did decide to vote, I would definitely downvote it, since it only repeats a cliche that has been said over a thousand times, even though I, too, consider it as "fact". The problem is, saying "Trump is racist and divisive" does not add any new insight to the discussion, and the only outcome is attracting angry yelling from the most politically biased people, hence triggering an unproductive flamewar (I think you've just experienced exactly what I described. When you said "what in the god damn was that", I think you could see my points already). When I see something like this, I usually downvotes all related comments and their replies regardless of which side they're arguing for (thus, all angry pro-Trump and anti-Trump comments would be downvoted - only downvoting the original thread is unfair), as nothing good can come out of it.
I believe this strategy can promote what the Hacker News Guidelines is trying to achieve.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Saying either "$controversial_politician is good" or "$controversial _politician is bad" violates all of those Guidelines above.
For controversial political discussions, I found the worst thing you can do is posting a general criticism, such as "$something is bad". Instead of doing that, a better strategy is talking about a specific issue, for example, instead of saying "$politician is bad", it's better to pick and criticize one of his policies, and to analyse its perceived harmful effects due to the policy. The more specific the criticism, the better. While it's still saying "$politican is bad", but it contains new insights and information that prevent the discussion from being dragged into a name-calling flamewar (it may still be a flamewar, but with fewer name-calling posts and more discussions). I found it dramatically improves the quality of discussions.
I am also an outsider and it isn't obvious to me how he is both. Divisive sure (most politicians of note are), racist though? I personally don't see it.
It suits some people to conflate immigration policy and racism. It then allows them to then label anyone opposed to immigration as racist. It is further confounded by the fact that those people that are deeply racist are almost always opposed to immigration. They do it all the time in the UK and I see no reason why it would be different in the US.
For "evidence" of Trump's racism, most will bring up his clumsy statement when he first announced he was running for president. To me he was clearly referring to hardened criminals and gangs, others say he is referring to every illegal immigrant. Again if you take it in the worse possible intent yes then you could say it is racist. However that is the worst possible interpretation and it shouldn't be your default. From my observations Trump was speaking off the cuff and I can forgive a poorly worded statement.
I am not particularly partisan (I am a centre -> centre-right libertarian when taking political compass tests). However after spending a lot of time paying attention to what is going on both sides will try to spin any issue in their favour.
I've been duped a few times by both sides of the political spectrum when it comes to contentious statements. Sp when a media outlet claims someone has made such a statement, I find the original clip of what was said and listen to it in context before I form an opinion.
Seen this before. When you actually look closely into it is always far more complicated than it is presented and they always omit important information. In many of these examples is someone quoted something he said over 30-40 years ago and they happen to remember everything perfectly. I can't remember what I said a month ago on any particular subject. I find a lot of these stories hard to believe.
It is always the same pattern, whenever you point pop your head over the parapit and say "Look I think you are being a bit ridiculous about <controversial character>, I think it is a bit overblown". You always have people googling every hit piece that ever been written about them (usually by a partisan news outlet) and then you are expected to rebut every claim. I can't possibly do that.
I will stick to what I said before. I don't believe anything any of these media outlets print. This btw goes for both left wing, right wing it doesn't matter they all outright lie whether that is by omission or overtly.
You people can play team sports if you want. I am not doing it.
> Has any other President actively tried to harm states he didn't like? Trump has.
I doubt this is the case. Most examples I've seenwhere he and one of the Governers were engaging in some Realpolitik.
I don't believe he is a racist. He has strong opinions and no fear of hiding them. That is actually a huge draw for people voting for him.
Accusations of racism are mostly political play.
I don't really see how it is self-evident though. What do you think makes him racist? The Obama stuff could be seen as that but I am unsure if it is racism or craziness, but I would tend to think the latter to be more correct.
The whitewashing of this guy is the big issue. He can do no wrong, that supporters don't contort the evidence (and their own good sense) to struggle to reinterpret him as 'ok'.
You want to understand, read outside your bubble. Not extremist view, just speeches and responses to direct questions and whatnot.
Some reports may seem extremist because of the shocking response they have to our potus. It's a normal reaction to a fundamentally troubling character that's somehow in power. Somehow its not honest for them to speak out like that, while the candidate gets every benefit of the doubt?
I suggest using those contortionist skills, to understand outrage and shock at the spectacle of an incoherent, largely immoral money-grabber in the White House.
I think Trumps has many flaws and it is true that there is some white washing. I do think his strong opinions can be a source of much bigotry.
But he is judgmental about everyone and I don't think it is connected to race.
His voters specifically let him say controversial stuff. They like it if it hits sensibilities of his political enemies since it signals his voters that the others just think themselves to be exalted above the allegedly less sophisticated members of society.
"He has strong opinions and no fear of hiding them. "
He has utterly moronic and harmful opinions that he irresponsibly broadcasts. His irrational opposition to masks has killed a lot of people.
"Accusations of racism are mostly political play."
It is the opposite, there is ample evidence of Trump's racism but his supporters like to make implausible denials of it. You may as well claim that Hitler wasn't anti-semitic.
I mean... I thought so in 2016, but four years later, I simply do not believe this. There is no evidence to support this. He has constantly condemned white supremacy. He obviously is a nationalist, but for America, being a multi-racial nation, saying one is a nationalist does not mean you are a racist.
Trump has delivered insane results for minority groups, and has done things even supposed 'progressive' candidates wouldn't do. All this has convinced me that the man is clearly not a racist, despite constant claims otherwise.
Also, I suppose I am somewhat immune to the racism claims against trump. My parents are immigrants, as is my entire family. My parents were the first ones on the Trump bandwagon in 2016, followed by the rest of my family. I thought they had gone off their rocker and thought the man was nuts, despite being a Republican leaning voter. I voted against him in 2016. I thought he was clearly a racist and would hurt immigrants, like my uncle. However, Trump became president, and my uncle's case suddenly went faster. All this talk about how he was delaying immigration simply didn't pan out for anyone in my family. My uncle became a citizen a few years ago, and now the entire family is voting Trump. My sister-in-law (who is Hispanic) is also voting Trump, along with a bunch of her family. They didn't 4 years ago.
Funnily, enough, most of my friends growing up (who are mostly non-white) are either Trump voters or are okay with Trump (like they do not believe people who vote for him are racist). I do have friends who believe that all Trump voters are nuts, and they are mostly the white friends I made in my super-elite college. I do have non-white friends from college who are also against Trump, but given how few non-whites there are in elite colleges to begin with, that's the minority for me.. Even more amazingly, despite my own immigrant family and my sister-in-law's supporting Trump, the only family I have that is rabidly anti-Trump are my white relatives (who are more highly educated than anyone in my non-white family, I suppose).
The fact is Hacker News and most of these elite media outlets cater to an audience of mostly white, educated, coastal liberals. Their experiences do not match the reality of every day Americans, including black and brown and immigrant ones. I would not be surprised to see massive black and brown turnout for Trump. Perhaps not majorities, but enough to give the democrats real cause for concern.
What do you mean by demographic destiny? I assume that means something like, over time the demographic makeup of society will come to look more and more like "college-educated coastal progressives"? Do people really believe that? If so, that is hard to believe. "College-educated coastal progressives" tend to have few or no children compared to the "majority of the country". It would seem the demographic makeup will go in the opposite direction.
“It happened four years ago when Donald Trump scored an Electoral College victory with his turn-back-the-clock campaign to Make America Great Again. He'll have trouble pulling it off again. That's partly because the pace of demographic change keeps shrinking the America Trump evokes in the rear-view mirror.”
I love how acceptable it is to brag about how eventually white people in the US will be outpopulated by non-white people who we assume will all vote Democrat. How would the reaction be if the mainstream media was bragging about white people outbirthing Mexicans in Mexico and soon taking over their politics?
Note: I'm not white btw so don't @ me, just making an observation
There's an entire genre of white supremacist media that goes on about this "replacement" endlessly, and has politics to match such as the "quiverful" movement encouraging white women to have lots of children.
I don't think people on the other side are bragging.
I think this sort of response to the interview misses the forest for the trees.
This is the best article on elections I have ever read. When I first read it I felt for the first time I understood how the game is scored. These two quotes stand out and are what matter:
> Persuadable voters trust the parties on different issues. And there’s a pretty basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.
> So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.
That's the game for both sides: Talk about issues non-partisan voters trust and/or agree with your side on, and avoid the opposite.
I agree the advice is astute. But you don’t necessarily get to pick what to talk about. Luckily, this election became a referendum on COVID—where the general empathetic association of Democrats plays strongly. But say COVID hadn’t happened. Instead, the last major pre-election issue was what happened this summer and law-and-order issues? (As Schor notes, this issue favors Republicans.) A whole lot of progressive Democrats turned a blind eye to police stations being burned down, etc. They had to: they had backed themselves into an ideological corner where they accepted the premise that any focus on the breakdown of law and order was “racist.” This was an incredibly unpopular position not only among white voters, but Hispanic voters of all ages and many older Black voters. Luckily, Biden was positioned to be able to say he understood the need for reform while having no soft spot for rioting. But Trump would have steamrolled over any of the other Democratic candidates by throwing their 2019 primary rhetoric back at them. And just not talking about the issue would have been a total non-starter—that’s what would have been on voters’ mind.
Democrats need positions in immigration and policing that aren’t the ones we saw from progressives over the past year and a half. Biden’s are fine. But within progressives’ current orthodoxy, Biden’s views would be deemed extremely “problematic” if Trump wasn’t there to be the bad guy.
I’ll give you another concrete example. Elizabeth Warren consistently used the term “LatinX.” This term actually polls terribly among Latinos. 70% have never heard of it. Of the 30% that have, the majority think it shouldn’t be used as a label to identify Latinos. Just 2% identified with the term themselves. Why use it? Because the people who work for Elizabeth Warren think the term “Latinos” isn’t gender inclusive. Schor would say not to use this term because of a high risk of alienating voters you need. But as Schor recognizes, the ideology of the campaign staffers has a powerful effect on the campaign’s messaging.
Possibly, but you could project the same argument backwards: "why is this King guy talking about race when it's incredibly unpopular with white voters?"
Yes, but the major difference between her and Sanders was that she’d thread race through every issue. As an academic matter this works just fine—failing municipal water systems are disproportionately ones that affect people of color. As a matter of political rhetoric (I watched her in person at several events in Iowa last year) it’s actually quite off-putting. Also, her tripping over the phrase “LatinX” (which just 2% of Latinos identify with, and 70% have never even heard of.)
1. higher racial resentment correlated with higher votes for trump
2. most positive views of rising diversity correlated with switching from voting for romney to voting for not-trump ; least positive views of rising diversity correlated with switching from voting for obama to voting for trump
3. correlation of support for trump and more negative views of rising diversity
the analysis for 2 & 3 "[...] controls for education, gender, age, income, ideology, party, views on immigration, racial resentment and personal finances"
> "This is all pretty pretty clear, I don't know what else you could want."
I do wish he would have talked more about what "racially charged internet searches" meant. As Paula Wright pointed out, I'd like to know what those "racially charged internet searches" which you have described as "racist" were. Immigration is surely not a race issue in the US, an ethnically diverse culture. Wouldn't illegal immigration be just as big a concern for black wkibg [sic]* class citizens?* and There was rhetorical slippage here from "racially charged" to "racist".
Still, if it's possible, could you walk through the thinking, step by step, when you get a chance? Links to relevant results are fine, no need to write an essay.
Hi there, and welcome to HN. Have you done any analysis (or know of studies) that bear on the wonky technological (or tech adjacent) issues that tend to consume this forum? Examples would be copyright and patent issues, broadband availability, antitrust, net neutrality, technological unemployment [0], free trade / tariffs / trade war, H1B visas, gig work (eg. Uber), R&D spending, space exploration, AI/algorithmic biases/ethics, open source, capital gains taxes, etc.
Conversely, how do you view the structure and detail of party and candidate platforms (eg. Warren's "I've got a plan for that" vs., well, anybody else)? Is more detail better or worse in terms of election results?
What does “rising diversity” mean in this context? Folks in Texas are angry about folks from California moving in and changing the culture. Is this racist? Equating anxiety about cultural change with racism is putting on ideological blinders.
As if the Republican side didn't have enough bombings, drone strikes and so on. Yes, Obama disappointed on quite a few fronts. But choosing Trump of Clinton was just plain stupid, face it.
> As if the Republican side didn't have enough bombings, drone strikes and so on.
I have a few friends at work that are from Pakistan. They prefer Trump over Obama because he isn't droning their homeland.
So they think Trump is an improvement.
> But choosing Trump of Clinton was just plain stupid, face it.
This is why everything is becoming polarised. This assumption that the other side is stupid or evil or both.
A lot of voters were turned off by Clinton calling Trump supporters deplorable. Others were worried after Clinton said she wanted to put a no-fly zone over Syria which would have meant a direct conflict with Russia.
I still remember Christopher Hitchen's scathing criticism of the Clitons.
It boggles my mind that there is still no sensible “establishment” understanding of why Trump was elected.
There was no honest post-mortem after 2016, only blaming sexism, racism or Russian interference. No lessons learnt.
This column by Russ Douthat from a couple of days back summarizes the failure:
Any explanation approaching accuracy undercuts the establishment and can not be acknowledged. It's not the kind of tactical mistake they can own up to, but one that cuts uncomfortably close to admitting they're doing the country a deliberate disservice.
The explanation is there if anyone wants to see it. The Rolling Stone's political editor was calling it 6 months before Trump was even elected.
>It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. [...] [Trump] likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business. That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience.
Lots of little things that suggest Shor is so deep into politics he can't remember what a regular person is like. For example:
The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different
from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions,
health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options...
He completely misses the fact that the liberal-conservative spectrum we see in American politics is pretty arbitrary and has more to do with tribalism then ideological coherence. For example, it would be "ideologically coherent" to be both pro-life and pro-gun-control. Or concerned about climate change and pro-nuclear-power. Or anti-racism and anti-immigration. So his conclusion is wrong. Highly educated people who follow politics are not more ideologically coherent, they're more ideologically conformist.
Another example:
At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just
an important fact of the world ...
Who's he talking about? Obama-Trump voters. He's looking at this sophisticated polling where they ask questions designed to probe for "racial resentment" and seeing no other way to interpret them. Ok... so why did they vote for Obama? Were they motivated by racism then? Did their motivation change between elections? These aren't rhetorical questions; I have no idea why Obama-Trump voters made those choices. But Shor is so deep in the numbers he can't see that his conclusion is nonsense.
Thanks for elaborating. Your points are both good - the first one in particular jumped out to me as well as I was reading the article. I do think clueless is overstating it a bit, but admittedly you prefixed it with "brilliant and" ;)
From the article: But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.
This seems like a pretty important insight and I really wish the interview could have unpacked this a lot better. It seems to be an operating assumption of the Democratic campaign, and I imagine if one is locked into this view (by implacable statistical analysis), then it would be really difficult to hear any other concern as anything but dog-whistling racism. While Shor did somewhat outline his thinking, it would be nice to be able to follow this trail to see why, exactly
From the article: There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.
The words a paper in that quote links not to the paper itself, but to a Vox interview, from which all links are to a draft paper that 404. I would like to read this paper for myself, but apparently it has been withdrawn
I wonder if David Shor is quick to cite papers that support his preconceptions, rather than let the quality of the papers lead him to conclusions? This is why I would like to actually see the results of these polls and such for his first assertion.
Took a while to find, but "How Ideological Moderation Conceals Support for Immoderate Policies: A New Perspective on the “Disconnect” in American Politics"
I'd like to see that paper too if you find it. Over in the UK, Cummings credits his win of the Brexit campaign to a similar insight about "moderates". (Oh and there's a PG blog on the topic too).
I think it is dead wrong on almost all accounts. I don't think people are widely racists and the accusation wasn't even underhanded, it was very well perceived. That did cost a lot of votes. Especially since the democrats even wanted to penalize people for allegedly being racist. Like a monarch that went crazy. This is really bad overall advice in my opinion.
> that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.
Anyone advocating ideologically consistent views should be eyed with suspicion.
Perhaps people are interested in how their situation can be improved instead of how their alleged opinions can be bettered. Some of those people hoped for a little less hubris, which was in vain if you read stuff like this.
Sorry, but it is really that bad and I wonder how these people became sociologists in the first place.
To suggest that you can only win an election while appealing to racist white people is so far removed from reality...
His argument doesn’t even make sense within his own theory. Obama-Trump votes correlated strongly with Google searches indicating “racial resentment.” Okay, but why did those people vote for Obama in the first place? Sure, someone could be a racist and vote for Obama, but what changed? Schor says the salience of different issues changes in different elections. That makes sense. But surely race was a highly salient issue during the election of the first Black President. Yet Iowa voted for Obama by almost a 10-point margin in 2008 and for Trump by almost the same 10-point margin in 2016. Wisconsin voted for Obama by a 14 point margin and Michigan by a 17 point margin.
David Shor is a pollster and cannot admit that fact that polls do not tell the whole story, especially with a unpopular candidate like Hillary. Hillary, in America, is loathed by many as a pretentious Marie Antoinette who rode her husband's coat tails and looked down upon the working class. I personally know several folks who voted Democrat their whole life and voted for Trump in 2016. i.e. her infamous deplorables speech. https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorabl...
Working class voters saw their manufacturing jobs shipped overseas. They were told to "retrain" to get high tech jobs. They took on a mountain of student loan debt and still could not find jobs that were as good as their manufacturing jobs. Even white collar workers are angry with what they see as corporate malfeasance. e.g. H-1B programs that make it legal to replace American citizens with low paid foreign workers. Under Title 8, of the US Code, you can be imprisoned for six months for hiring an unauthorized alien but with H1-B, the corporations can get away with it. What David Shor and other Democratic Party Elitists describe as "racist white people" are the working class who feel abandoned by the Democrats. I think the working class mostly voted out of frustration in 2016. What worries me is that the Democratic Party Elite still don't get it and will continue to foist tone-deaf candidates on us, who only know to toe the corporate line and ignore the working class who are becoming more and more desperate.
This article gives a perfect, if unintentional synopsis of why Trump is in power. The left has embraced hook-line-and-sinker Critical Theory and Identity Politics. All power and victimhood is seen through the lens of identities, causing the left had to abandon class because it is not an immutable category. The working class abandoned the Democratic party because the party abandoned the working class and then poured salt onto their abandonment by shaming them as racist/sexist/homophobe, etc.
Same as the Labour party in the UK, and the Labor party in Australia. While the politicians might be socialist, the parties are definitely centre-left neo-liberal.
I think you are on spot with that assessment and it might even happen again since the strategy is mostly unchanged.
A bit sad to see what the author believes about his countrymen and he doesn't seem to have noticed that many of those already picked up on them while even having fewer prejudices.
> All power and victimhood is seen through the lens of identities, causing the left [...] to abandon class because it is not an immutable category.
I don't think that really captures the motivation or pressure to stop talking about class.
Rather, class in the US is really really messy (compared to, say, Britain, where despite the additional complications of social vs. economic class, you can describe yourself as 'lower upper middle class', and be understood), and the fact that speaking about class at all got you branded as communist (in the past), or socialist (currently), or elitist (always). America is largely branded as a classless society rather than trying to get to grips with class. Confusing the issue even more is the denigration on the right of "coastal elites" that are largely middle class.
As far as US political rhetoric is concerned, socialism seems to be the new communism.
Meanwhile, though speaking using the lens of racism isn't exactly easy (eg. "That's racist!" "No, you're the racist!"), it is at least somewhat possible.
Is it any wonder that politicians on the (US) left don't talk about class? Confusing your audience isn't exactly going to win elections. They can talk about creating jobs and inequality, but that's about it.
This is interesting from the perspective of showing a particular ideological blindness very, very clearly. He claims that Obama to Trump voters are motivated by racism and cannot see any problem with the idea that a racist would vote for a black man to have the most powerful job in the world.
If that is something a racist can do in your categorization of the world, than juuuuust maybe your categories are broken.
Otherwise we're in a world where racists would happily pick Barack Hussein Obama over Mitt freaking Romney, but couldn't bring themselves to pick Hillary over Trump.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadHmm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points... Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos. These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
Shor makes basically the same error as the authors of the New York Times piece above: assuming that opposing immigration and supporting law-and-order are inherently “racist” views.
Progressives need to ask themselves: is opposition to abolishing ICE (to use one of Schor’s examples) actually “racist?” Because if they just run with the assumption that it’s racist, they’ll force themselves into taking an incredibly unpopular position. As Shor himself points out, the people running the campaigns are ideologically progressive. Even if polling shows that abolishing ICE is incredibly unpopular, so long as they accept the premise that it’s the anti-racist thing to do, they will support it (or the far left will make them support it). This was basically the story of the 2019 Democratic primaries, where nearly every candidate embraced incredibly unpopular issues out of fear of being “called out.”
And “demographic destiny” won’t eventually vindicate progressives’ all-consuming view of racism. As the New York Times article above explains, a message focused around racial identity and the idea of pervasive “white supremacy” (like Elizabeth Warren ran in the 2019 Democratic Primary) actually polls poorly among Latinos (who are now the largest non-white group in the electorate). Meanwhile, Trump’s polling is up 100% among Black people and 60% among Hispanic people under 45 compared to 2016: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-.... If Republicans can convert that into votes, states like Texas and Georgia will stay solidly red. Shor is ultimately right. Democrats need to get back white voters in a country that will be 50%+ white for the foreseeable future. Because in the long run non-white voters aren’t as much of a lock as they assume. But they really need to introspect about why they would ever have thought otherwise to begin with.
Shor is a self-described progressive who wants to help elect Democrats.
He’s mostly useful as a critic of the left from the centre. His “facts don’t care about your feelings” rebuttals of leftist fantasies are incredibly useful to both the centre and the left.
(This also got him fired on the first day of Floyd protests when he posted research showing that the riots will backfire in the long run, politically!)
As a White formerly-enthusiastic-supporter, I would now consider Trump the most openly racist anti-White president in US history. His promises of securing the border have been entirely unfulfilled (he even promised more immigration than ever in the face of a rapidly declining and disenfranchised White population); his contributions to Israel from the predominantly-White taxpayer have been the most 'generous' in spite of the nation state's relative prosperity and security compared to that enjoyed by most Americans, even while jewish organisations such as the ADL routinely malign White Americans for displaying any ethnic identity or pride; thousands of black, jewish, and wild White insurgents have been free to loot, vandalise, riot and terrify American cities and suburbs (and he even promised $500bn to black Americans as a direct result) while little old White women are prohibited from attending church; open anti-White racism has been allowed to proliferate under his watch, including popularisation of "Karen" racist dialogue, criminalising Whites who defend themselves against aforementioned violence, etc; and his continuous references to the increase in non-White employment and socioeconomic outcomes have become a meme in the pro-White community (including in his recent 60 Minutes interview where he basically listed the benefits of his presidency to every group except Whites), a total betrayal of his voter base and his country's narrow minority.
But somehow a woke activist can misconstrue the occasional Tweet into a thickly-veiled dog whistle and claim that he's a White supremacist? He's doing a very good impression of the polar opposite.
1) Stop capitalising "white". 2) "little old White women are prohibited from attending church" - [citation needed] 3) "popularisation of "Karen" racist dialogue" - how is this racist?
Tyrone is a internet stereotype of a thuggish blackman. The stereotype of Tyrone is considered by some to be racist (probably quite rightly). Karen is a stereotypical entitled white woman. So if calling someone a Tyrone is racist, therefore calling a woman a Karen is also racist.
Not saying I agree with any of it. But that is my understanding of how the logic works.
Whether racism or not, it's probably an -ism of some sort. Despite disagreeing with the GP, at least their painting of "Karen" as an -ism gave me pause and made me consider that usage again. In truth, it's probably not a great and useful practice in discourse. e.g; do you believe calling someone a Karen will increase your chances of reconciling with them or coming to a favorable outcome with that person?
Food for thought: In the (rough) words of John Mulaney, if you equate something to another word, but you won't even say the other word, then one is clearly worse than the other.
As an outsider to the US bunfight, your statement seems, based on what we see, pretty self-evident.
I didn't cast any vote in the thread, but here's an explanation. If I did decide to vote, I would definitely downvote it, since it only repeats a cliche that has been said over a thousand times, even though I, too, consider it as "fact". The problem is, saying "Trump is racist and divisive" does not add any new insight to the discussion, and the only outcome is attracting angry yelling from the most politically biased people, hence triggering an unproductive flamewar (I think you've just experienced exactly what I described. When you said "what in the god damn was that", I think you could see my points already). When I see something like this, I usually downvotes all related comments and their replies regardless of which side they're arguing for (thus, all angry pro-Trump and anti-Trump comments would be downvoted - only downvoting the original thread is unfair), as nothing good can come out of it.
I believe this strategy can promote what the Hacker News Guidelines is trying to achieve.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Saying either "$controversial_politician is good" or "$controversial _politician is bad" violates all of those Guidelines above.
For controversial political discussions, I found the worst thing you can do is posting a general criticism, such as "$something is bad". Instead of doing that, a better strategy is talking about a specific issue, for example, instead of saying "$politician is bad", it's better to pick and criticize one of his policies, and to analyse its perceived harmful effects due to the policy. The more specific the criticism, the better. While it's still saying "$politican is bad", but it contains new insights and information that prevent the discussion from being dragged into a name-calling flamewar (it may still be a flamewar, but with fewer name-calling posts and more discussions). I found it dramatically improves the quality of discussions.
It suits some people to conflate immigration policy and racism. It then allows them to then label anyone opposed to immigration as racist. It is further confounded by the fact that those people that are deeply racist are almost always opposed to immigration. They do it all the time in the UK and I see no reason why it would be different in the US.
For "evidence" of Trump's racism, most will bring up his clumsy statement when he first announced he was running for president. To me he was clearly referring to hardened criminals and gangs, others say he is referring to every illegal immigrant. Again if you take it in the worse possible intent yes then you could say it is racist. However that is the worst possible interpretation and it shouldn't be your default. From my observations Trump was speaking off the cuff and I can forgive a poorly worded statement.
I am not particularly partisan (I am a centre -> centre-right libertarian when taking political compass tests). However after spending a lot of time paying attention to what is going on both sides will try to spin any issue in their favour.
I've been duped a few times by both sides of the political spectrum when it comes to contentious statements. Sp when a media outlet claims someone has made such a statement, I find the original clip of what was said and listen to it in context before I form an opinion.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-r...
"Divisive sure (most politicians of note are),"
Has any other President actively tried to harm states he didn't like? Trump has.
> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-r...
Seen this before. When you actually look closely into it is always far more complicated than it is presented and they always omit important information. In many of these examples is someone quoted something he said over 30-40 years ago and they happen to remember everything perfectly. I can't remember what I said a month ago on any particular subject. I find a lot of these stories hard to believe.
It is always the same pattern, whenever you point pop your head over the parapit and say "Look I think you are being a bit ridiculous about <controversial character>, I think it is a bit overblown". You always have people googling every hit piece that ever been written about them (usually by a partisan news outlet) and then you are expected to rebut every claim. I can't possibly do that.
I will stick to what I said before. I don't believe anything any of these media outlets print. This btw goes for both left wing, right wing it doesn't matter they all outright lie whether that is by omission or overtly.
You people can play team sports if you want. I am not doing it.
> Has any other President actively tried to harm states he didn't like? Trump has.
I doubt this is the case. Most examples I've seenwhere he and one of the Governers were engaging in some Realpolitik.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/456523-donald-trumps...
I don't believe he is a racist. He has strong opinions and no fear of hiding them. That is actually a huge draw for people voting for him.
Accusations of racism are mostly political play.
I don't really see how it is self-evident though. What do you think makes him racist? The Obama stuff could be seen as that but I am unsure if it is racism or craziness, but I would tend to think the latter to be more correct.
You want to understand, read outside your bubble. Not extremist view, just speeches and responses to direct questions and whatnot.
Some reports may seem extremist because of the shocking response they have to our potus. It's a normal reaction to a fundamentally troubling character that's somehow in power. Somehow its not honest for them to speak out like that, while the candidate gets every benefit of the doubt?
I suggest using those contortionist skills, to understand outrage and shock at the spectacle of an incoherent, largely immoral money-grabber in the White House.
But he is judgmental about everyone and I don't think it is connected to race.
His voters specifically let him say controversial stuff. They like it if it hits sensibilities of his political enemies since it signals his voters that the others just think themselves to be exalted above the allegedly less sophisticated members of society.
Which is funny because his "strong opinions" usually contain much bigotry.
Then you are being willfully ignorant.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-r...
"He has strong opinions and no fear of hiding them. "
He has utterly moronic and harmful opinions that he irresponsibly broadcasts. His irrational opposition to masks has killed a lot of people.
"Accusations of racism are mostly political play."
It is the opposite, there is ample evidence of Trump's racism but his supporters like to make implausible denials of it. You may as well claim that Hitler wasn't anti-semitic.
Trump supporters are in a very deep denial about just how terrible and harmful he is.
Trump has delivered insane results for minority groups, and has done things even supposed 'progressive' candidates wouldn't do. All this has convinced me that the man is clearly not a racist, despite constant claims otherwise.
Also, I suppose I am somewhat immune to the racism claims against trump. My parents are immigrants, as is my entire family. My parents were the first ones on the Trump bandwagon in 2016, followed by the rest of my family. I thought they had gone off their rocker and thought the man was nuts, despite being a Republican leaning voter. I voted against him in 2016. I thought he was clearly a racist and would hurt immigrants, like my uncle. However, Trump became president, and my uncle's case suddenly went faster. All this talk about how he was delaying immigration simply didn't pan out for anyone in my family. My uncle became a citizen a few years ago, and now the entire family is voting Trump. My sister-in-law (who is Hispanic) is also voting Trump, along with a bunch of her family. They didn't 4 years ago.
Funnily, enough, most of my friends growing up (who are mostly non-white) are either Trump voters or are okay with Trump (like they do not believe people who vote for him are racist). I do have friends who believe that all Trump voters are nuts, and they are mostly the white friends I made in my super-elite college. I do have non-white friends from college who are also against Trump, but given how few non-whites there are in elite colleges to begin with, that's the minority for me.. Even more amazingly, despite my own immigrant family and my sister-in-law's supporting Trump, the only family I have that is rabidly anti-Trump are my white relatives (who are more highly educated than anyone in my non-white family, I suppose).
The fact is Hacker News and most of these elite media outlets cater to an audience of mostly white, educated, coastal liberals. Their experiences do not match the reality of every day Americans, including black and brown and immigrant ones. I would not be surprised to see massive black and brown turnout for Trump. Perhaps not majorities, but enough to give the democrats real cause for concern.
There is tons of evidence to support this.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-r...
"He has constantly condemned white supremacy. "
He has spent his entire Presidency dog whistling to white supremacist groups.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-history-of-support-fr...
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonar...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-09-30/la-na-pol-...
Presumably he means the same thing CNN means by it. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/01/politics/election-2020-trump-... (emphasis mine):
“It happened four years ago when Donald Trump scored an Electoral College victory with his turn-back-the-clock campaign to Make America Great Again. He'll have trouble pulling it off again. That's partly because the pace of demographic change keeps shrinking the America Trump evokes in the rear-view mirror.”
Note: I'm not white btw so don't @ me, just making an observation
I don't think people on the other side are bragging.
This is the best article on elections I have ever read. When I first read it I felt for the first time I understood how the game is scored. These two quotes stand out and are what matter:
> Persuadable voters trust the parties on different issues. And there’s a pretty basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.
> So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.
That's the game for both sides: Talk about issues non-partisan voters trust and/or agree with your side on, and avoid the opposite.
Simple in theory. Impossibly hard in practice.
Democrats need positions in immigration and policing that aren’t the ones we saw from progressives over the past year and a half. Biden’s are fine. But within progressives’ current orthodoxy, Biden’s views would be deemed extremely “problematic” if Trump wasn’t there to be the bad guy.
I’ll give you another concrete example. Elizabeth Warren consistently used the term “LatinX.” This term actually polls terribly among Latinos. 70% have never heard of it. Of the 30% that have, the majority think it shouldn’t be used as a label to identify Latinos. Just 2% identified with the term themselves. Why use it? Because the people who work for Elizabeth Warren think the term “Latinos” isn’t gender inclusive. Schor would say not to use this term because of a high risk of alienating voters you need. But as Schor recognizes, the ideology of the campaign staffers has a powerful effect on the campaign’s messaging.
Activism is politics. I think the distinction is between activism and running for office.
1. higher racial resentment correlated with higher votes for trump 2. most positive views of rising diversity correlated with switching from voting for romney to voting for not-trump ; least positive views of rising diversity correlated with switching from voting for obama to voting for trump 3. correlation of support for trump and more negative views of rising diversity
the analysis for 2 & 3 "[...] controls for education, gender, age, income, ideology, party, views on immigration, racial resentment and personal finances"
https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1304772188030066689
I do wish he would have talked more about what "racially charged internet searches" meant. As Paula Wright pointed out, I'd like to know what those "racially charged internet searches" which you have described as "racist" were. Immigration is surely not a race issue in the US, an ethnically diverse culture. Wouldn't illegal immigration be just as big a concern for black wkibg [sic]* class citizens?* and There was rhetorical slippage here from "racially charged" to "racist".
Conversely, how do you view the structure and detail of party and candidate platforms (eg. Warren's "I've got a plan for that" vs., well, anybody else)? Is more detail better or worse in terms of election results?
[0] I've always had a soft spot for this episode of The West Wing: http://westwingwiki.com/2014/04/season-5-episode-19-talking-...
Maybe it had to do with all the war, bombing, and drone campaigns?
As if the Republican side didn't have enough bombings, drone strikes and so on. Yes, Obama disappointed on quite a few fronts. But choosing Trump of Clinton was just plain stupid, face it.
What is that supposed to mean?
> As if the Republican side didn't have enough bombings, drone strikes and so on.
I have a few friends at work that are from Pakistan. They prefer Trump over Obama because he isn't droning their homeland.
So they think Trump is an improvement.
> But choosing Trump of Clinton was just plain stupid, face it.
This is why everything is becoming polarised. This assumption that the other side is stupid or evil or both.
A lot of voters were turned off by Clinton calling Trump supporters deplorable. Others were worried after Clinton said she wanted to put a no-fly zone over Syria which would have meant a direct conflict with Russia.
I still remember Christopher Hitchen's scathing criticism of the Clitons.
https://christopherhitchens.net/hillary-clinton
He wrote a whole book about them IIRC.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of both Trump and Clinton however calling people stupid isn't going to convince anyone of your position.
This column by Russ Douthat from a couple of days back summarizes the failure:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/opinion/trump-republican-...
The explanation is there if anyone wants to see it. The Rolling Stone's political editor was calling it 6 months before Trump was even elected.
>It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. [...] [Trump] likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business. That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience.
... is a very common saying in actually racist groups that think themselves above others.
Alternatively it can also be the language you speak... that gives you away.
Another example:
Who's he talking about? Obama-Trump voters. He's looking at this sophisticated polling where they ask questions designed to probe for "racial resentment" and seeing no other way to interpret them. Ok... so why did they vote for Obama? Were they motivated by racism then? Did their motivation change between elections? These aren't rhetorical questions; I have no idea why Obama-Trump voters made those choices. But Shor is so deep in the numbers he can't see that his conclusion is nonsense.This seems like a pretty important insight and I really wish the interview could have unpacked this a lot better. It seems to be an operating assumption of the Democratic campaign, and I imagine if one is locked into this view (by implacable statistical analysis), then it would be really difficult to hear any other concern as anything but dog-whistling racism. While Shor did somewhat outline his thinking, it would be nice to be able to follow this trail to see why, exactly
From the article: There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.
The words a paper in that quote links not to the paper itself, but to a Vox interview, from which all links are to a draft paper that 404. I would like to read this paper for myself, but apparently it has been withdrawn
I wonder if David Shor is quick to cite papers that support his preconceptions, rather than let the quality of the papers lead him to conclusions? This is why I would like to actually see the results of these polls and such for his first assertion.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.688...
> that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.
Anyone advocating ideologically consistent views should be eyed with suspicion.
Perhaps people are interested in how their situation can be improved instead of how their alleged opinions can be bettered. Some of those people hoped for a little less hubris, which was in vain if you read stuff like this.
Sorry, but it is really that bad and I wonder how these people became sociologists in the first place.
To suggest that you can only win an election while appealing to racist white people is so far removed from reality...
I suspect it is too, but I would at least like to see the reasoning behind it if any
Working class voters saw their manufacturing jobs shipped overseas. They were told to "retrain" to get high tech jobs. They took on a mountain of student loan debt and still could not find jobs that were as good as their manufacturing jobs. Even white collar workers are angry with what they see as corporate malfeasance. e.g. H-1B programs that make it legal to replace American citizens with low paid foreign workers. Under Title 8, of the US Code, you can be imprisoned for six months for hiring an unauthorized alien but with H1-B, the corporations can get away with it. What David Shor and other Democratic Party Elitists describe as "racist white people" are the working class who feel abandoned by the Democrats. I think the working class mostly voted out of frustration in 2016. What worries me is that the Democratic Party Elite still don't get it and will continue to foist tone-deaf candidates on us, who only know to toe the corporate line and ignore the working class who are becoming more and more desperate.
My impression of them is that they were arguably mildly SocDem in the past, and then turned into (neo)liberals in the 90's. Liberals are not leftists.
A bit sad to see what the author believes about his countrymen and he doesn't seem to have noticed that many of those already picked up on them while even having fewer prejudices.
I don't think that really captures the motivation or pressure to stop talking about class.
Rather, class in the US is really really messy (compared to, say, Britain, where despite the additional complications of social vs. economic class, you can describe yourself as 'lower upper middle class', and be understood), and the fact that speaking about class at all got you branded as communist (in the past), or socialist (currently), or elitist (always). America is largely branded as a classless society rather than trying to get to grips with class. Confusing the issue even more is the denigration on the right of "coastal elites" that are largely middle class.
As far as US political rhetoric is concerned, socialism seems to be the new communism.
Meanwhile, though speaking using the lens of racism isn't exactly easy (eg. "That's racist!" "No, you're the racist!"), it is at least somewhat possible.
Is it any wonder that politicians on the (US) left don't talk about class? Confusing your audience isn't exactly going to win elections. They can talk about creating jobs and inequality, but that's about it.
If that is something a racist can do in your categorization of the world, than juuuuust maybe your categories are broken.
Otherwise we're in a world where racists would happily pick Barack Hussein Obama over Mitt freaking Romney, but couldn't bring themselves to pick Hillary over Trump.