Both candidates, whoever wins, are likely to say “I’m going to unite a divided nation,” but how is this going to actually be tried?
Even for the crazies Trump has, like KKK types, white nationalists, he’s not the only one with crazies in the corner. The Democratic Party, and by extension their nominee Hillary, have New Black Panther types, extreme elements of the BLM movement, BDS & blame-Israel-first types, anti-capitalists and borderline communists, etc. as their crazies too. Trump has Duke, Hillary has Michael Moore. Whether you think these people are truly comparable, fact is that they are not the mainstream of the American electorate, nor should they color one’s impression of a majority of one major party nominee’s voters. The average Trump voter is not the first group, and the average Hillary voter isn’t the second group.
At the end of the day, we’re all Americans.
How might Hillary Clinton try to unite America if she wins? How might Donald Trump try to do the same?
I’ll be very disappointed in President Hillary Clinton does anything to try to appease the white supremacist, women-hating, “build a wall to keep the Mexicans out” part of Trump’s supporters.
What she will do, if Congress doesn’t spend all its time trying to stop her from doing anything at all, will be to get some big dollars put into projects to revive our infrastructure; this will create a fairly large number of good-paying jobs that can be filled by people who lost their good-paying factory jobs. She’ll establish programs to train people for these and other jobs. She’ll put in programs to make college more affordable (and if I get my wish, other types of post-secondary training). She’ll put in programs to make childcare more affordable for struggling families. She’ll improve the ACA (ideally IMO by making it a single-payer system, but I’m afraid no one could get that to pass Congress). All of these programs will help that majority of Trump supporters that aren’t bat-shit crazy.
OK, maybe I’m so anti-Trump I can’t see any real good in him, but I don’t think he’ll do anything to help most of us. He’ll put more dollars in the pockets of the rich by lowering their taxes and claim that this will make everyone better off, but all we’ll end up with is an even higher national debt than Hillary will leave us with. Health care will go back to being the clusterfuck it used to be. He won’t push his childcare tax deduction thing (which wouldn’t help low-income families as much as HRC’s plan, anyway). He’ll screw up our relations with other nations which will put us all at greater risk.
…Did you just compare a documentary filmmaker with at worst a sketchy relationship with the truth to an unrepentant Grand Wizard of the KKK?
This thread should go real well.
The correct right-wing analogy to Michael Moore is not David Duke. It’s a lot closer to Chris Wallace. The fact is that it’s not as simple as “both sides have their crazies”. The right wing has been constantly feeding and formalizing their crazies, to the point where they are running the party. The democrats… Haven’t. A clear endorsement of the outward message of Black Lives Matter while condemning the more radical elements therein is by no means comparable to constantly throwing a bone to the “second amendment solution” folks.
Trump and Putin agree to resolve all future disputes between the two nations by bare-chested mud-wrestling (result binding). I think the entire world could get behind that. I know Putin is pretty fit and strong, but Trump has a huuuge weight advantage and would fight dirty, so I think he’d have a chance if he could kick Putin in the balls and sit on his head.
Michael Moore is a documentary filmmaker who produces lefty films every few years. David Duke is the unrepentant former head of the KKK. These are not comparable at all.
No. The fact that David Duke endorsed Trump does, in fact, color my impression of Trump’s supporters. Duke is literally a white supremacist. The relevant issue here is not that Duke and Moore are out of the mainstream, but that Moore takes positions that it’s possible for a reasonable, moral person to take. Duke is, again, literally a white supremacist. This is a terrible attempt at drawing a false equivalence.
Yeah, really – some of the “both sides the same” fallacy at work here. Emphasis on the fallacious part.
Putin’s a trained and ranked judoka so yeah Donald probably would have to fight dirty to land a big hit. But OTOH I would not put it past Vlad to pull a Feyd and have a spike with a polonium or ricin pellet concealed on his person.
There is a difference between realizing that Israel is not automatically right about everything and “blaming Israel first”. The New Black Panthers are about as influential as the East Orange Chess Club and may have fewer members. Some may define “extreme elements of BLM” as anyone who objects to people getting killed by police. There’s a difference between not being Big Business’ bitch and being anti-capitalist. There’s a difference between being a communist and not agreeing with everything on the WSJ editorial page. Michael Moore is an articulate activist filmmaker. Duke is a member of a terrorist organization. Not too similar.
The only way I can see Trump bringing the country together is by giving us a common enemy to fight. He has already pissed off most of Washington and the Media. If he gets the presidency, he will likely get worse. I continue to hold a positive outlook and believe that the David Duke segment of Trump’s supporters are small and abhorrent and will give the Democrats and Republicans with common sense something to unite and fight against.
I do wish these Definitely Not Misogynists would stick to a coherent line.
Clinton can be a neoliberal in the pocket of the big corporations or she can be a communist and anti-capitalist. She can’t be both. Especially not at the same time.
Really, though, I should be happy when Right Populists and Left Populists meet each other head-on like this. The discordant noises are like a Merzbow concert being invaded by a feline swingers club.
You and I likely agree that booting 12 million people who are already here, who merely took the loaf of bread to feed starving families, by crossing the border between countries with a massage wealth gap, would be not only morally wrong, but the cost to do so, monetarily, would be greater than the money that would be theoretically saved from illegal immigration.
That being said, not everyone who wants to stop illegal immigration (read carefully: NOT legal immigration) hates Mexicans on account of their ethnicity and/or skin color. There is a case to be made that it DOES lower wages in some (but not all) sectors and areas of the economy to be worthy of being dealt with. After all, Bernie Sanders himself said that there were bills he voted on because illegal immigration drove down wages. Studies have found that while its net effect may be positive or zero on the economy overall, they don’t say its gross effect is zero. As in there are people who are hurt by it.
If Hillary reforms immigration to provide a path to legalization/citizenship to those here without a criminal record, but also finish the border fence she did vote for in the 2000s, that could go a big way to unifying America.
The Republicans are already openly talking about impeaching Clinton and continuing to obstruct any effort to implement her agenda. Why on earth is it Clinton’s responsibility to “unite” with these dead-enders?
The clock is running out on Republican gerrymandering and obstructionism. Hillary should leave them twisting at the end of their own damn ropes.
About 30-40% of America is captive to a false information stream – Breitbart, Hannity, Infowars, etc. America can’t be united as long as that’s true. There’s pretty much nothing Hillary or any Democrat/liberal can do to change that (though they could make it worse with political mistakes) except at the margins. There might be fringe equivalents on the left, but they are tiny – so small that none come to mind off the top of my head.
Only “reasonable” conservatives might be able to change that, and it won’t happen quick. At the very least, it means that Romney, McCain, Graham, Rubio, etc., must stop asking people like Trump for their endorsement – must stop going on Limbaugh and Hannity’s shows – and must unreservedly denounce all such misinformation.
By the way, the source of this misinformation stream is far more about making money than about ideology. There are billions of dollars to be made on hating Obama and hating Hillary (there were millions to be made on hating Bush and other conservatives, but much, much less money – perhaps why the extreme right has dominated talk radio for so long). String a few feebly linked facts with a bunch of innuendo about Hillary Clinton, put it on a blog, and you’re guaranteed thousands of clicks or more. Do it weekly or daily, and you’ve got yourself an income stream.
You pretty much nailed it here. This is a deeply divided nation as a result of intentional misinformation and manipulation by the right, going back at least as far as the lead up to the Great Depression. From the moment FDR took the steps he and congress took to remedy some of the causes of income inequality and try and provide some stability to the financial system as well as institute a safety net for the less fortunate among us, the right has fought tooth and nail to eliminate those advancements. This isn’t to imply that there’s some secret cabal of assholes, just a bunch of well off individuals who have a “I’ve got mine, fuck all the rest of you” attitude. Birds of a feather flock together.
This is (again) a deeply divided nation, and for that matter, planet. United we stand, divided we fall. The seas are dying, the planet is hurting, and a bunch of people who will be dead in not that many years simply see any acknowledgement of that (or any other problem with the status quo) as an impediment to their profit. We will fall, all of us, individually and collectively. This situation cannot stand:(
I can see a President Trump uniting a divisive electorate with the establishment of “Apprentice”-style colleges, small (no - cozy) enough to be strip-mall friendly, all throughout the US, bringing together aspiring young professionals who eventually go out there to not get fired.
I hope Eric commandeers this area, and continue looking like he hopes to be in the FBI one day.
Cites?
hmm I was thinking more Hananatarash crashed by Jehovah’s Witness pamphleteers but we’ll let that go.
Bolding mine - that sounds too wide sweeping for me - I wish Adam Davidson would have been much more specific by coming up with at least a couple names behind that statistic.
In the second NYT cite, the third paragraph twice mentions “research suggests”, which dilutes the claims’ veracity for me.