I’m talking about moderate to liberal commentators, who would never dream of voting for Trump themselves and generally consider him loathsome. In fact, a companion argument is that we should blame Trump, not his supporters, for this horrendously hateful campaign. If anything, I would say it’s almost exactly the opposite.
I’m just not having it. If you have an IQ over 80, and you still support Trump after all the widely publicized things he has said, you don’t have the right to be considered a good person. You just don’t. You may have some good qualities, you may treat your friends and family well. But you have enough information, and enough intelligence, to know better. If you stick by him regardless, then into the basket of deplorables you go!
They are right wingers, and we are supposed to pretend that right wingers are good people no matter how horribly they act or how open they are in their malice.
Of course if someone is a left winger or moderate it’s perfectly alright to call them a monster. It’s only the Right that’s sacrosanct.
I don’t know that this even really captures it. There are very conservative people (Ted Cruz, most everyone at the National Review) who feel that one of Trump’s major flaws is that he’s not really a conservative.
But what he clearly is, along with being a buffoon, is a racist, misogynist, sexual assaulting con man engaging in a “spicy dash of treason” (as Chris Kluwe memorably put it).
There is almost nothing - nothing - in this world worse than an arrogant, self-invested, chest beating, judgemental liberal cockhead.
Go ahead feller, support the status quo; actively vote and thereby encourage the holy alliance of the political class, wall street and the 1%, bend over and lube yourself for 4 more years of having the tax system legally raped, stick your head up your own arse at your excessive working hours, minimal employee benefits, the robber baron class.
Lets all stand back in awe and welcome the new Victorian age of super rich benevolence, lets continue to focus on efficiently taxing low income rather than huge wealth on one can conceivably need in a hundred years.
Again I say: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free (Goethe)
Personal anecdotal experience vs. generalization of people one hasn’t met;
What exactly one considers a “good” person to be.
I do know a Trump-supporting couple, for instance - been friends with them for around 7 years (and yet, I didn’t know, until recently, that they were Trump supporters, and it surprised me.) Out of the many people I’ve met in my life, I’d rank them among the very top in terms of hospitality, friendliness, generosity, etc. They lent me their car when I needed transportation, they didn’t mind when I, as an inexperienced-driver college student, once accidentally hit their van at around 7 mph on an icy day, while my car skidded on the slick road. They supplied gasoline when my car was dangerously low on fuel one night (sense a theme here? I’m pretty scatterbrained when it comes to car stuff ) They let me take showers at their house recently when I was staying nearby on a visit (since the house I was staying at had a really unsanitary bathroom.) The husband drove me 50+ miles to the airport without remuneration when I needed a ride to the airport. Their demeanor is just about always friendly, nice and compassionate.
Again, I was surprised to find that they were Trump supporters. I knew they were conservatives, but thought they were in the “Never Trump” crowd.
So, are they good people or not?
You seem to be confusing presidents with clergymen.
We don’t elect presidents to be moral role models. We elect them to run the country. As such, Trump’s personal character is utterly irrelevant.
By the way – I’m guessing that you think that Martin Luther King is worthy of being memorialized, despite the fact that he was a religious hypocrite and an adulterer.
Clearly not. I’m sure similar stories could be told about genteel Southern antebellum plantation owners. For that matter, I have extended family members who seem very nice, until you dig into certain subjects.
People who want to stereotype, or paint with a broad brush, will get upset when someone tries to thwart the stereotyping or broad-brushing. Their typical response, at first, is to double down even more on the stereotyping.
Not attacking you, SlackerInc, just saying.
This is not about stereotyping, and it’s not about partisanship. This is a special situation. Even before Trump descended to the level he has gotten to in the past few weeks, even before the awful Republican convention and the attacks on the Khan family, the previous Republican nominee, who is retired from public life, had this to say:
All true (and so much more), and all readily apparent to anyone with a modicum of intelligence who is paying the slightest bit of attention. If you see all that and decide to vote for him anyway, you are engaged in serious wrongdoing and I’m calling you on it.
It’s not just Trump voters who will stupidly believe he can remedy the problems you describe, but these days Republican voters in general.
At this point, your best hope for some concrete steps is to vote for Clinton and Democrats for the house and senate, and then write to Clinton to encourage her to appoint Elizabeth Warren to Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This can only happen if plucking Warren from the Senate won’t give control (or at least filibuster capability) to Republicans.
On the contrary, Trump’s “personal character” guarantees that he would be incompetent, selfish and malignant.
It’s not about being a role model, it’s about not being an incompetent, predatory con-artist & lunatic.
If they support Trump then they are not good people. They are attempting to harm a great many innocent people.
The sadistic, bigoted, irrational and predatory conservatives are far, far worse. Electing bigots, torturers and murderers because you think liberals are “arrogant” is both morally bankrupt and demonstrates that those liberals were right all along to consider themselves morally superior.
Calling Trump supporters crazy xenophobic misogynistic racists may be true to varying degrees, it’s just not at all helpful. Why is his candidacy possible now? How can we change that?
Answering those questions is far likelier to change the situation than ‘why are 40% of Americans so stupid?’
I welcome you to take your self-righteous schtick, pack it in a canoe, and proceed towards shit creek on a paddle made of your shriveled testicles. Hey asshole, ever thought for a moment about what the hard part is in “Burn down the system and build something better”? It ain’t the part where you burn it down. Any idiot with a book of matches can do that. No, the hard part is the part where you build something better afterwards. How’s Trump looking on that front? Well, his plans are largely nonsensical, and generally fall into at least one of three categories:
Mathematically impossible
Really fucking bad ideas
Ideas that entrench exactly the system you’re complaining about
Remember, Trump is running on the Republican ticket. You know, the “Right To Work” guys who have systematically dismantled unions as much as they’ve been able to, who have fought tooth and nail against the social safety net, and who have pushed massive tax cut after massive tax cut for the super-rich, including Trump’s own tax plan, which would increase the deficit by 5 trillion over 10 years in order to finance, what else, tax cuts for the super-rich. What is your major malfunction, exactly? How fucking stupid do you have to be to honestly believe that Trump would do a better job of fixing those parts of the system than Clinton, or indeed any democrat would?
And even if Trump was running basically on Bernie Sanders’ campaign promises (spoiler: he isn’t), anyone who would trust the destruction and reconstruction of the system to him deserves to be sectioned before they end up casting their vote for The Joker in the next election. The Jesse Eisenberg version! Posts like this leave me quite well-assured that any arrogance on our part is entirely justified, because holy shit you people are fucking idiots.
Did you just compare Martin Luther King, a man who stood as a figurehead against racial discrimination and bigotry, and who, for a great many people, changed the world for the better in a huge way… To Donald Trump? You owe Mr. King an apology, and then you owe me an apology for making me read something so fucking stupid.
Not only does character matter in the sense of what we teach our children as “acceptable behavior” and the face we show our allies and our enemies, but in Trump’s case, the specific character flaws he has would effectively demolish his ability to run the country in an effective, sensible, reality-based way. He’s clearly unwilling to learn even the basics of policy, incapable of handling critique, and unwilling to deal with science-based reality.
The next problem becomes: how do you take racism seriously? And does racism make someone a bad person?
The left says it does. The left sees racism as a deep moral failing, a character flaw, and also, as an intellectual mistake. That is a large part of the distaste for Trump and his voters.
Trumps voters themselves see racism not as a moral failing, but as a very deep moral obligation. An obligation to protect their own in-group from hostile “others”. They think it is both irresponsible and naive to say or do otherwise. And they get angry at the disdain they feel from the left for this stance.
The problem I see with this stance, is that the goalposts of who is the hostile other are emotional, and rooted in fear, not in fact. in the 80’ and 90’s, The “other” used to be an agressive urban black man you didn’t know personally if you lived in a rural place. Mid nineties it shifted to a Muslim terrorist, coming to the US under false pretenses. And since last month, it’s clown killers.
The task ahead, IMHO, is to adress the fear of others and expanding the in-group. again IMHO, that can’t be done by screaming that message over media Trump voters don’t listen to anyway. It has to be done by taking away the economical advantages and incentives for fearmongering by media. Any media, be it by local talk radio, regular media, or social media.
How that should be done is anyone’s guess. Suggestions are welcome.
We’ve been polite and delicate and tactful for decades now, out of fear of being called “shrill elitists”. All it’s done is allow the stupid people to gain a public platform and lose any shame about airing their stupidity for everyone to see.
That’s why we’re in this mess: because the stupid people have their own television network.
We already know the answer to that. Donald Trump is the Stupid People’s Choice because the Republican Party has spent the last thirty years feeding the stupid people bullshit and lies in exchange for the Stupid People Vote. This year, the Stupid People, recognizing in Donald the culmination of all their stupid hopes and dreams, ditched the old Republican elite (because stupid people always hate “the elite”) and answered Donald’s mating call.
The solution is to punish the Republicans, by working to kick them out of office, and shaming the stupid people by treating their stupid ideas as exactly dumb and destructive as they are.
You can’t do anything to prevent stupid people. Stupid people will always exist. Some given percentage of the population will always be stupid people. You can’t even convince the stupid people that they are, in fact, stupid. They think smart people are just putting on airs to make the stupid people feel bad.
Well you know what? Stupid people should feel bad. They should feel so bad that they should be ashamed to open their ignorant yaps in public. They can go and scribble on the bathroom walls to each other if they want, but any stupid person promoting stupid ideas about climate change, Mexicans, jobs, Obama, or taxes, to name just a few, should be thoroughly shamed until they sulk away and hide.
Stupid people and their stupid ideas should be treated like a dog that poops on the rug.
The first step to discouraging the Stupids from dumping on the rug is to loudly express disapproval anytime they start to squat in public.
) They let me take showers at their house recently when I was staying nearby on a visit (since the house I was staying at had a really unsanitary bathroom.) The husband drove me 50+ miles to the airport without remuneration when I needed a ride to the airport. Their demeanor is just about always friendly, nice and compassionate.