It’s pretty common in certain circles. Look up, for example, the use of the term “wipepo.”
Twitter examples --which wouldn’t exist if they said flat-out that ‘straight white Christian males are evil’–such would be taken down. But less overt expressions remain:
A vigorous Russian Propaganda effort helped.
So did the funding in the name of naked greed, by the 1%.
Meybe you ought to. The only place I’ve ever seen it used made a point of saying that it doesn’t apply to all white people.
And it’s certainly not standard behavior by “the left”.
Cause and effect is not irony.
The charts people have given are examples of the reality that until the Nixon Era both the Democratic and Republican parties had right, center, and left wings. In the early 20th century, many Republicans bonded with Teddy Roosevelt to boost the “progressive” agenda, but most did not. That was a major reason why Roosevelt ran on a third party ticket in 1912. Franklin Roosevelt had several Republicans in his cabinets, because as progressives they were more liberal than many Democrats. Conservativism had multiple branches, but the most heinous were Southern racist Democrats.
Conservatism surged after WWII, partly because of anti-Communist fervor, partly because of anti-civil rights fury. Liberal Republicans, concentrated in the Northeast, lost favor to a more libertarian wing represented by westerner Barry Goldwater.
Then Nixon happened. Even for a war criminal his Southern Strategy was breathtakingly horrific. The idea was that the Republicans would accept the Democrats who detested civil rights and incorporate them into the party without any other obligation than their vote. This wasn’t a necessity. The Republicans could have just simply refused to accept them on moral grounds. Nixon had no morals, of course, so that apparently never occurred to him.
This act destroyed any vestige of a liberal wing in the party. Reagan built on this momentum to push out the moderates, who kept losing to the no-compromise right wingers. Again, the decision to concentrate the party leadership ever farther to the right was a deliberate one.
The Democrats did not do this, deliberately or otherwise. Clinton famously “triangulated,” declaring welfare over and appealing to the remaining moderates in both parties. It worked nationally, until he brought himself down. Newt Gingrich saw the strategic value of appealing to the far-right wing in his party, more numerous than the moderates, who felt themselves not being represented, until he also brought himself down. Look at that Washington Post visualizations cited by Crafter_Man and you’ll see that the split occurred during Clinton’s administration.
The Democrats had internal wars between the centrists, liberals, and progressives, but the Republicans kept moving their center farther and farther right. Trump promoted himself as the champion of the farthest right and was surprised at how successful that pose made him. He tested the edges again and again and found no resistance. Scores of acolytes realized that jumping in front of an enraged mob and proclaiming themselves as the leader won political office.
By doing so, however, they had to follow Trump’s example, which was one of shouting “NO” the loudest. This precluded any possibility of positive policies, as well as compromise, agreement, or future planning. Any and all reactions had to be visceral and immediate clickbait, inherently antithetical to rational thought, social amity, or international relations. What choice does anyone outside the bubble have except to reflexively oppose such negativity and nullification? Nothing is ever being offered that is sharable, and that too is deliberate. Any statement that would be acceptable by a Democrat is red meat to a base that refuses to accept the legitimacy of the party.
It’s nonsense to accuse recalcitrant progressives of refusing to compromise. The few progressives in office have never had power. The only resistance is exerted by rogue conservative Democrats like Manchin and Sinema. They can’t articulate their opposition as actual coherent policy, nor do they have a following or seem to represent a wing of the party. They refuse quixotically.
What’s politically interesting is that if the Republicans were to offer positive policies they might gain the advantage they seek among middle-value voters. But there seems to be nothing that would be simultaneously be acceptable to the antis that are taking over the party. Can the party survive their head swallowing their own tail? Can the Democrats ever learn to act as a party rather than multiple strands of spaghetti spilled from a package? Tune in tomorrow for the terrifying answers! Or maybe next year, or next decade.
Now where have I heard that before?
I think the clearest explanation is shot to the amigdula positive feed back loop of right wing media, starting with talk radio, expanding with fox news and then kicking into overdrive with social media.
Basically strong emotions sells. Tell the narrative that their audience are heroes defending all that is good about America from the forces of evil. Add in a bit of cultish information control wherein they represent the sole source of information and all other sources are lies and you are on your way. But the audience gets desensitized over time. Just saying that Democrats will tax your hard earned wages isn’t enough anymore, so we say that they will turn your son gay, when that stops being outrageous enough, we say that they are going to implement Sharia law and outlaw Christianity, until eventually the only way we can push the envelope is to say that they are literally drinking the blood of children.
Previously there would have been no way that that would have been accepted, now it is just one step up from what they already believe so its just taken in stride.
As if I had ever claimed that it was.
(If you believe I did make such a claim, then by all means provide a link.)
As with the “defund the police” phenomenon, those who attempt to create camaraderie and political capital around the concept that straight-white-Christian-males are inherently vicious and anti-democratic are a distinct minority within the Democratic big tent.
But of course all such extremist views–rare though they may be–are catnip to those who find it congenial (and convenient!) to claim that extremism is rife within the D party.
Reads that way to me:
You didn’t say ‘rare extremists among the left’; you just said “the left”.
Maybe what you meant was “a few extremists among the left”. It’s not unusual for people to type something that reads to at least some others as if they’d said something other than what they meant. I’ve done it myself occasionally.
But if what you’re trying to say is that such views are not “rife within the D party”, then we’re in agreement.
It’s wypipo.
The spanner in the works here is that actual minority members tend to be less progressive, including on racial issues, than white progressives. So the most extreme polarization is not between white people and other ethnicities, but between white conservatives and white liberals.
This is some kind of logical fallacy at work here, but I need a minute to come up with which one, precisely. Probably it’s the part about “the most extreme fallacy,” which I don’t think is particularly relevant to the argument that we’re polarized along with racial, religious, sexual orientation, ethnic, etc lines, which doesn’t need to specify which one is the most extreme.
Hillary didn’t ignore the midwest.
The former secretary of state wrote that in Pennsylvania, her team had 120 more staffers on the ground than President Barack Obama did four years earlier and spent 211% more on TV ads. She noted that she held more than 25 campaign events in the Keystone State while having major surrogates like Obama and Vice President Joe Biden make appearances as well.
She also noted that in Michigan, she had about 140 more staffers on the ground than Obama in 2012, spent 166% more on TV ads, and made seven visits during the general election campaign.
“We lost both states, but no one can say we weren’t doing everything possible to compete and win,” she wrote.
On Wisconsin, Clinton said it was the “one place where we were caught by surprise.”
I don’t think it’s “all” about one thing. I think it’s a number of factors. If you examine what I believe to be the typical conservative view of an idealized American culture, it seems to consist of the following:
You know, all that typical Norman Rockwell shit.
And I think if you look at the past 50-60 years or so, there is a perception by conservatives that these things are being threatened. This is due to larger macroeconomic trends such as globalization, technology and automation, climate change, and general shifts in cultural norms.
So what the typical conservative sees is a world where “real” jobs in farming and manufacturing are no longer economically viable. Meanwhile, they see our cities, with their large populations of minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, liberals, and other “others” where people seem to make obscene amounts of money working on stupid stuff they can’t comprehend. Or worse, they see crime and drugs and other issues they had associated with the cities encroaching on where they live. And it just sort of makes their brains explode. That our country us becoming more diverse is just the most visible indicator that they can comprehend.
And it doesn’t help that you have these partisan 24 hour media channels, constantly feeding into each sides fears and generalizations, causing each side to double down on their positions.
Yep.
“Wipepo” gets over 7000 hits (Google search) today, so it is in use–but you’re right that “wypipo” is far more common. (It’s not a term that I use, so…)
I’ve heard this argument but there are several counterarguments that need to be addressed because there are serious concerns about this theory.
Why are only whites moving so far to the right? To my knowledge blacks, latinos, asians, indians, etc are not moving further and further to the right. Black women are probably the most working class group in the united states, and almost none of them vote republican (just a small %). There may be some movement among latinos though.
When 538 controlled for income, they found the education gap among whites remained. Whites aren’t voting GOP because they are working class, its because of their education level. College educated whites are 20-40 points to the left of high school educated whites in households with 100k+ in income and in households with 30k in income.
The education gap itself isn’t about education, its about attitudes about race and immigration. When you control for racial resentment, the partisan gap among whites based on education disappears.
From what I can tell, its really not about economics. Its about racial resentment among whites, and whites who go to college are somewhat less likely to find racial resentment appealing. most of the studies I’ve seen point to this hypothesis being more likely.
As a society we don’t really want to admit this to ourselves or each other, so we just pretend its not happening because we’d have to confront that society isn’t as advanced as we want to believe it is.
I agree that the working class has been forgotten, but I don’t understand what the GOP offers them economically.
Hispanics are definitely moving right. Not sure about any of the other minority groups.
I’m a Hispanic from South Texas. I know the phenomenon personally. The reason for that is that the younger generation of high school only educated Hispanics, who are by now 4th generation and don’t speak Spanish or have any personal ties to their great grandparents country of origin, now see themselves as white. And what has happened to high school only educated white people? They’ve moved to the right.
I think of two ‘demographic’ issues that I’ve distilled down to nothingness:
We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.
–Lindsey Graham
And there are still a shockingly large number of them.
I lived half of my life in San Diego. In Mission Valley there were two big shopping malls, Mission Valley Center and Fashion Valley Mall. They were pretty close to existing in the same parking lot.
For years, they competed for the same customer.
At some point – wisely – they self-selected: Mission Valley went ‘down market,’ appealing to a middle-income shopper, while Fashion Valley went ‘upscale’ with luxury retailers proliferating in its effulgent storefronts.
I’ve mentioned innumerable times on this MB that – IMHO – the two major parties simply do the same thing: figure out who their customer is, give them what they want, and then do anything humanly possible to get them ‘into the doors of their store.’
The Internet has made micro-targeting infinitely easier. They can economically bombard even single, relatively obscure issue voters with fairly cheap ads.
The thing about Mission Valley and Fashion Valley is – AFAIK – they didn’t have to go all Third Wave Experiment or Stanford Prison Experiment in order to grow their customer base and maximize profits.
IMO, the Republican Party, in particular, is very mindful of Senator Graham’s statement above. And while they struggle to figure out which alternative demographic they can most readily tap into, they will double down and double down and double down on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in order to wring every conceivable last vote while their base draws breath.
Also … I don’t remember Mission Valley or Fashion Valley gerrymandering their parking lots or using mall security to proactively prevent minorities from shopping there.
So, there’s that.
#Murica !
Possibly working class people are less receptive to an unrelenting focus on how privileged they are.
Then they should stop listening to right wing news sources that keep telling them that.