How do we fix the wounds in America?

[octopus]

@Trinopus

When there actually is a collective – like “Nazis” – then, yeah.

If you define your sets in so fuzzy a fashion that they do not have boundaries, you aren’t really practicing set theory any longer.

Yes, the boundaries are slightly fuzzy. There may actually be a handful of “good Nazis,” but I don’t think those exceptions are so important as to justify not condemning Nazism.

I was responding to a post that said the Republicans were the party of hate. My post wasn’t about Nazis or communists or cannibals or The Islamic State. It was about painting all Republicans as evil!! and the party of hate.

And unless we are actually in a state of a shooting and droning war with a group we need to be treating individuals as such regardless of what piece of cloth they like to wear or what piece of stone they like to look at.

[k9bfriender]

@Trinopus

When there actually is a collective – like “Nazis” – then, yeah.

If you define your sets in so fuzzy a fashion that they do not have boundaries, you aren’t really practicing set theory any longer.

Yes, the boundaries are slightly fuzzy. There may actually be a handful of “good Nazis,” but I don’t think those exceptions are so important as to justify not condemning Nazism.

Just out of curiosity, what “good nazis” are you thinking of?

The only way I can see it is if someone has severe learning disabilities, and is just going along with their nazi friends without an actual understanding of what they are doing.

[Urbanredneck]

I think part of the problem is how both sides paint the other side. We have no medium ground. That’s because to get people to vote, you literally have to light a fire under them.

The media plays into this also because now anyone with a cell phone can record something bad that happens and even if its just an isolated incident, it goes viral and millions see and react to it.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@octopus

I was responding to a post that said the Republicans were the party of hate. My post wasn’t about Nazis or communists or cannibals or The Islamic State. It was about painting all Republicans as evil!! and the party of hate.

C’mon, man. The right wing worked so hard for so long to get to this point. Don’t try to take it away from them. They’ve earned it.

[tnetennba]

If you think racial conflict goes back to the 1970s you need a history lesson.

[LSLGuy]

@asahi

One problem is, white supremacist leanings are not always easy to quantify. I would submit, though, that there’s a very serious problem when hundreds of young white men who are seemingly part of mainstream middle class society, presumably with personal and professional reputations, are comfortable enough to march around unmasked in public participating in a rally in which Nazi and Confederate symbols are displayed with chants of “Jews will not replace us.” I am in my 40s now and as long as I’ve been alive, there have always been extremist movements, extremist groups, confederate marches and so on - probably always will be. But I haven’t always seen college Republicans at these types of rallies - that’s different. Not that I’ve ever been comfortable with these parades of bigotry, but in the few events that I’ve seen on TV (and one or two I happened to observe in person rather by accident), the people rallying always struck me as just down-and-out types from rural America who were having a mid-life crisis of some type. But there’s something terribly wrong when presumably middle class or even upper middle class people aren’t afraid of being identified and associated in public with this sort of ideology. It suggests a degree of normalization has taken shape. And this is something that all stable democracies would do well to stamp out as quickly as possible. Because if it’s not, then today it’s college republicans who are comfortable joining this movement. Tomorrow it might be city councilmen and mayors. It might be police officers and sheriffs after that. Pretty soon you have a movement beyond just chanting and slogans, but one with real power. And that’s very, very dangerous.
…

Exactly. Here’s a post of mine from this morning in a thread about Bannon. The “they” I’m referring to is white supremecist activists.

@LSLGuy

Within the part of the country where they’re at least a non-trivial minority they’ll certainly be able to frame at least part of the agenda for state level legislation and for local-level enforcement. That is very powerful. All the more so if they can keep it up for 2, 4, or 10 years.

As well, IMO the US contains a lot of people who are closet fellow travelers. In the privacy of their own mind they’re thinking along the lines of “Those ultra-racists are crudely overdoing it, but thank goodness somebody is finally standing up for us fundies / whiteys.”

To the degree the fellow travelers can be coaxed into making even vaguely approving noises in public, suddenly the tide of white supremacy could blossom from WAG 2% rabid adherents to – big WAG – 30% rabid + semi-adherents.

There are lots of ways the “unthinkable” is actually the “unsayable-in-public”. Once those things do become sayable in public the zeitgeist can shift a very long way in a very short time.
IMO the big news with this will be the vastly lopsided geographical distribution. This will throw into very stark focus the reality that we have 2 USAs with very different ideas of how to run the country: the non-deep South urban/suburban, and the rural and/or Deep South.

The fact the former demographic is a hefty majority of the people but the latter is a hefty majority of the land area and statehouses and federal legislators will lead to lots of controversy about voting arrangements, just as it did in 2016.

[asahi]

@LSLGuy

Exactly. Here’s a post of mine from this morning in a thread about Bannon. The “they” I’m referring to is white supremecist activists.

I agree with everything except to point out I don’t see this as being confined to any particular region (the South, for example). I think it’s largely rural & suburban white America against urban / cosmopolitan America. California actually has more hate groups than any state in the United States. You can chalk it up to its population, but even so, it flies in the face of California being this integrated multicultural Utopia of tolerance.

[marshmallow]

America needs a new labor movement, solidarity, and plenty of outreach and community organizing to reshape society into something better. There’s a lot of obstacles to that, though. Beyond entrenched interests who fight it tooth and nail, there’s also the problem that people have to spend their energy to survive and come home drained. When they have time off it’s easier to escape through TV, video games, drugs, whatever. The revival of the racist right is just another symptom of America’s sickness.

[madmonk28]

@Reddy_Mercury

…How do we get out of this pit before it gets any deeper?

I think it comes down to personal action. To calling out racism and hypocrisy when we see it. For you, I think that personal action would be for you to stop posting trolling threads like this: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=833985

I think you need to stop acting like white male is default American and everyone else is just being politically correct when they try to set the record straight on the man on top of the pedestal in the middle of town.

It’s not going to get better until white men in America don’t see every attempt to disassemble a century and a half’s worth of revisionist history as a direct threat to their virility. Like I said, I think it comes down to personal action and for you and a lot of people, maybe that first step should be to talk (and post) less and listen more.

[Spice_Weasel]

Agreed. That thread was the opposite of what this OP claims to want to accomplish. The simple answer to your question is empathy. Try to understand that a large contingent of Americans have different experiences than you do, and that what you view as meaningless PC nonsense, they believe is necessary for their own sense of safety and integrity. Maybe subscribe to some blogs for people of color or take in some African American art. Shift your lens. Try to understand.

[Bone]

@madmonk28

For you, I think that personal action would be for you to stop posting trolling threads like this: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=833985

Given a warning was previously issued and the thread closed, please do not prod other posters like this outside the Pit.

[/moderating]

[octopus]

@marshmallow

America needs a new labor movement, solidarity, and plenty of outreach and community organizing to reshape society into something better. There’s a lot of obstacles to that, though. Beyond entrenched interests who fight it tooth and nail, there’s also the problem that people have to spend their energy to survive and come home drained. When they have time off it’s easier to escape through TV, video games, drugs, whatever. The revival of the racist right is just another symptom of America’s sickness.

Labor movement? How does that work without tariffs and strong border security in a global economy and rapidly advancing automation?

[madmonk28]

@Bone

Given a warning was previously issued and the thread closed, please do not prod other posters like this outside the Pit.

[/moderating]

Sorry, I sincerely thought it was germane.

[Anglachel]

nvm

[Hari_Seldon]

I don’t know any answer to the OP, but as long as the government is run by the moneyed classes, they will see it in their interest to divide the lower classes. If racism is what it takes so be it. Congress always answers to its constituents, who are those who pay for their election campaigns.

[k9bfriender]

@octopus

Labor movement? How does that work without tariffs and strong border security in a global economy and rapidly advancing automation?

Labor is more than just digging ditches. Programming a computer is also labor. Maintaining automated machinery is also labor. Writing books and novels professionally is also labor. Performing in a symphony, guess what, that’s labor too.

You don’t need tariffs to protect the laborers, in fact, tariffs decrease the efficiency of the market overall, decreasing the potential quality of life, or increasing the cost of living to the laborers in the long run.

Receiving money for past investments is not labor.

We still have the same struggle of the owner class vs the worker class. Just because the workers are no longer performing unskilled manual labor does not change that at all. It just creates another divide that can be exploited to keep the different avenues of labor from joining and organizing against the owners.

[Miller]

@octopus

I was responding to a post that said the Republicans were the party of hate.

Get back to me when the Republican party platform stops explicitly calling for discrimination against gays, then maybe you’ll have a point worth listening to.

[Silver_lining]

@Reddy_Mercury

This is a conversation I think we need to have.

It’s become increasingly clear in the last few years, and in the last few months especially, that America is a very unhappy place. There is a great deal of anger and division. Hatreds which had been simmering under the surface since the early 1970s now have come back to life in recent months. We have to ask ourselves how we got here, and what we can do to get out of it.

When a segment of the country’s white youth has come to believe that Nazism is the answer to their woes, it shows me there is a great deal of hopelessness, fear, and despair across the country - for me, that’s what drives a person to Nazism. That sense of hopeless despair is what drove the German people into Hitler’s arms. On the flip side, when a segment of our black youth has come to believe that the more radical messages of Malcolm X - those dealing with hatred of whites, and with the idea of voluntary racial separatism - are the answer - it shows great fear and hopelessness on their parts too.

The question is, how do we fix these wounds? How do we teach our young people - white and black - that hating each other isn’t the answer? How do we teach our young white men that their lack of a job isn’t a black man’s fault? How do we teach our young black men that white supremacists don’t constitute the majority of white people? How do we teach a generation that the Confederacy’s cause was an evil one, and that Nazism was even worse than the Socialism many of those on the far right so hate? How do we teach our people that hate is not the answer?

How do we get out of this pit before it gets any deeper?

The first change must be from the media, both sides display the extreme, then act as if it applies to everybody who voted for candidate A or B.

[K364]

Take the money influence out of elections and lawmaking.

[Urbanredneck]

Does it really help when our colleges have so many “black only” events and areas?

I mean imagine, 2 friends, one black one white. They come to a place and a sign says “Blacks Only”. Should they refuse to go in or should they go separate ways?

Or imagine they were at that Greenwood college where they had that day where they told all the whites to leave?