Some posters here seem to think if you just drive out to the rural areas and talk to these people this would be solved.
I think it is a perfect example of why that kumbaya thinking won’t work.
No, I think that if you talk to these people, some might be willing to at least feel like they’re not being ignored. I fully acknowledge that rural white America has problems and that they are foolish for believing that a demagogue like Trump or someone else has the easy answers to their problems. I am as alarmed as anyone at the increasing disparity between the world they apparently live in and the reality the rest of us are living in.
But I also think that some of their irrational fears and behavior are rooted in concerns that are very rational. To be perfectly clear: rural white counties will probably continue to vote for white conservatives a majority of the time; I’m talking about how can progressives at least find the ability to reach some of these people so that a few might be persuaded to change votes, and more than that will be persuaded to at least listen and hear someone out.
It’s not like the media hasn’t done ten million “Let’s talk to the Trump voter” stories. These people DO get courted. I’m not saying their concerns don’t matter because of course they do; Joe Biden has a moral duty to be their President. But they get listened to.
I see no evidence, no reason to believe, that urban voters are being listened to all that much.
Really excellent article:
But contemporary authoritarianism works not by explicitly oppressing the people, but by accelerating the moral rot of already weakened institutions. Everything is riding on how those arms of the state and society – from the Senate and the supreme court to the press and the most insignificant of local public office – behave in the coming few days and weeks. And Trump has been manipulating these institutions for four years: see the way he used his term to pack the courts with rightwing judges at dizzying speed. Even the openly Biden-supporting media is hesitating to call a spade a spade, because they believe the institutions will prevail. Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup. If it were happening in Turkey the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.
coups don’t always begin with a dramatic Reichstag fire, but through obscure and elusive machinations. Since the Americans might not know about our countries as much as we do about theirs, we can tell them that it has happened just like this here too – we trusted the institutions and were certain the leader wouldn’t dare.
Today’s authoritarian societies are not fully formed dictatorships, single-party states – they don’t need to be. They manufacture crises and prolong political instability, keeping the masses on their toes, but ensuring leaders can act with impunity. American democrats shouldn’t expect a clear-cut power-grab from Trump, but rather a maddeningly obscure process that keeps everything up in the air until the masses are exhausted and lose interest. Even if he accepts reality and his electoral loss, Trump’s “movement” will see its task as running a parallel political reality for the next four years that will constantly threaten Biden’s legitimacy. Most importantly, through his recent appointments in the state apparatus and consolidation of anti-democratic loyalists, Trump is already engineering his own shadow state.
If after four years of Trump they only dove deeper into the insanity then they are unreachable. Given how many voted for Trump that is exactly what they did. There was no shortage of how insane Trump is stories out there. Not even opinion…Trump himself speaking. And they went in for more.
Liberals were reaching really hard the last four years. We all saw stories of republicans switching sides. Whether liberals reached them or they just discerned for themselves how insane Trump was there were converts.
But even more converted to Trumpism.
Again, these people are not being reached by any means whatsoever.
And…looking at the stats…it really seems it is conservatives (read white people) being made afraid of anyone who is not white.
Even if they think Trump is insane they think he will protect white people.
Racism really is at the root of it.
I tend to agree with you that I think racism is far more prevalent in general identity and policy than most people, even progressive ones, are willing to admit.
I’m reading Lilliana Mason’s Uncivil Agreement right now, which is about how identity politics in the US is getting extreme. It’s a couple of years old now, but really interesting. Here’s a transcript of a podcast she did if anyone is interested: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2018/08/04/transcript-uncivil-agreement/ She doesn’t have a lot in the way of solutions other than “people on different sides need to hang out with one another to learn that they have common goals,” but I’m not sure how possible that is for communities that are geographically separated from others.
I have a problem with my family, that they are getting their information from totally different sources from me, so it feels like we’re talking from different realities. We both think the other person sounds totally insane. It makes it hard to even want to talk to them about politics at all; But it’s almost impossible to NOT talk about politics these days.
This is something big cities have that rural areas don’t. People from many different races and creeds and walks-of-life are put together and work together and so on.
I am not saying big cities don’t have their racial tensions (they most certainly do). But people also learn to get along at least on some level. Something rural communities never get.
Who wants to be friends with Nazis?
No one (except other Nazis presumably).
I think the notion is most of them are not Nazis. In 1933 when the Nazi Party seized power they had something like 20,000 people out of 65 million.
The problem was the other 64.98 million people did nothing to stop it.
There’s ~72M of those in America now. Though I’m sure some of them are good people.
Fortunately there are ~78M pulling in the other direction.
Still scary though fer sure.
I’m not sure if this has been posted elsewhere on this board, but it shows just how far into denial some Trump supporters are.
This story is an interview of a nurse who works in a South Dakota hospital treating COVID-19 patients. It turns out some of them are so far into denial that even when they reach a point that they are almost in respiratory failure they still insist that COVID-19 is a hoax. Some of them were demanding to know why they weren’t being treated for lung cancer, because of course what else could they have that is causing their symptoms? If these people are so far gone that they are denying the actual virus right up to the point that they are dying, how can we expect them to be convinced by some election officials telling them that Biden was the actual winner of the election?
The CT on this is that Pence is about to be arrested, that he was not Trump’s real choice, and that this is being done to install JFK jr (yeah - he’s still alive and well) as the next VP.
So all those street battles were just one faction of Nazi fighting another? No.
Then there was the establishment view that Hitler was an idiot who would fade if given a little power – a man more easily stopped by being allowed to fail than if on the outside pissing in. Just because this backfired doesn’t change that there was a serious effort to stop Hitler.
What exactly do you think we should be doing to stop Trump? Put up more BLM lawn signs? Sit down on the nearest interstate to block traffic? I don’t totally condemn those actions (OK, I do want to be able to drive over to help my 94 year old mother, so I’d rather folks go light on the traffic-blocking), but I doubt protests will be particularly effective if the next U.S. presidential wannabe dictator is younger and more vigorous than this one was.
(Psst…look at the date. Also, working for the Nazi Party and being a member of the Nazi Party are not the same thing just like not every person in the US military is a Republican.)
Well, you don’t have to be a card carrying member of a political party to support the party. Millions votes Nazi (and the party had hundreds of thousands of members by 1933, and enjoyed membership of ten percent of the population by the start of the war.)
This.
It’s why a majority of Democrats supported Biden in the primaries as the safest choice to beat Trump. Because he is a white male with a long history of centrism, we knew he would scare away fewer racists and misogynists than the other possible candidates.
While it’s impossible to know for sure (i.e., we’ll never be 100% certain what a Warren or Buttegieg etc. candidacy would have led to)*, it’s pretty clear we were right. Enough racists and misogynists voted for Biden in WI, MI, and PA to put him over the top.
*Progressives and Blacks DID come out for Biden in numbers they failed to for Clinton, so that bolsters the obvious that anyone but Biden would have done worse, losing to Trump. Latinos not so much, that’s true…