The “racist Democrats” that previously supported Obama? That doesn’t make much sense.
No, racism doesn’t make much sense and never did, and it’s replete with hypocrisy and contradictions. Is that a new revelation to you?
Yeah because racists never have black friends and everything about race relations in America is as simple as Rachel Maddow and other progressives from Lilly white America would have us believe.
I strongly doubt that vignette actually took place.
That was provided mainly for entertainment purposes here, true or not. But if you don’t think the author did due diligence in his reporting, take it up with him.
Racism is only one motivating factor in how a racist person acts, isn’t it? And it’s never hard to find contradictions that result from it. The thought was expressed here that an action ostensibly contrary to racism doesn’t make sense, so it couldn’t have happened and therefore racism wasn’t present. Well, it doesn’t really work that way.
I find it instructive to take those examples and drill down into a bit more detail. Let’s just take the conflicts you’ve highlighted in parentheses – jobs vs environment, and public safety vs racial concerns, and see how the prioritization stacks up.
To see how Republicans prioritize jobs vs environment, one has only to look at the current head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt. Like the president who appointed him, he’s an outright climate change denier. He basically believes the EPA should not exist and spent his previous career conducting a record number of lawsuits against them. Trump has rolled back something like 64 important environmental regulations. He’s trying to revive the coal industry, because “jobs”. I once looked at the health statistics in the part of West Virginia where many of those “jobs” are, and where also a couple of major coal-fired power plants are located. Besides having some of the worst, most dangerous jobs in the world, those poor folks and their families have among the highest rates of cardiopulmonary disease in the entire nation. Every climate change denier in Congress – and there are quite a few – is a Republican. The Koch brothers, who are among the most staunch and activist Republican supporters, run Koch Industries, among the most recklessly polluting industrial concerns in America and the most heavily fined for persistent environmental violations.
The point I’m getting at is that if one wants to talk about a prioritized balance between jobs and the environment, you can’t look to Republicans any more because there’s no balance there at all. Richard Nixon may have created the EPA, but the kind of Republicans that Trump’s base clamors for just want to destroy it. They know nothing about science or the long-term implications to their lives of climate change and environmental pollution. Jobs don’t mean a hell of a lot if our quality of life plummets and life itself is at risk. That’s not a considered, analytical approach to setting priorities – it’s just recklessly ignoring reality, like pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. I’d like to know just one thing – just one – that Trump has done or that Trump’s base would approve of that constitutes an actual balance between jobs and environmental protection.
It’s much the same with “public safety vs racial concerns”. The Republican line is that Democrats are just pandering to blacks, at the risk of public safety. No, Democrats are analytically looking at the long term and trying to balance criminal justice with the goal of a just society with equal opportunity and a minimum of racial strife. Republicans are responsible for the US having by far the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world, supposedly in the name of “public safety” yet it’s concurrent with some of the highest crime rates in the first world. And that incarceration is heavily over-represented by blacks, often serving long sentences for relatively minor offenses. Again, the lack of an objective analytical approach has created counterproductive results, in this case, a permanent criminal underclass predominantly comprised of young black men.
What constitutes “relatively minor offenses”, possession of a small amount of drugs?
I could define this in my own terms… But I fear the many superlatives, followed by expletives, interspersed with evocations of the “The Holocaust” / “Final Solution”, which would all invariably goosestep behind my mode of diction, could lead to the post’s moderation / deletion – rendering the time spent compiling such a rant, pointless.
As such, I think this↓ best defines who and what “Trump’s™” base is:
Source:
Huffington Post
tl;dr –
I see dumb people… :eek:
I wish people would stop assuming that Donald Trump is smarter and more deliberate than he is. If he understands voters or viewers, it’s only to the extent that he thinks like they do. He’s not some Machiavellian Wizard of Oz standing behind a curtain. He spends hours a day glued to Fox News and ranting at CNN. He’s not well-versed in politics (I’d bet money he doesn’t know who Machiavelli was.), history, sociology, psychology, or the Constitution. He’s like a reality TV star in that he’s found success not through talent so much as in playing a version of himself.
His wives spent thousands on his handbags.
Yup.
Which means he knows what they want to hear, and how they want to hear it, and this is the day and age when that works.
He’s no Moriartian mastermind but he is experienced in selling snake oil and running hustles leaving someone else holding the bag.
I have to be skewing that average. I have not watched TV since 2002, have never seen a reality show, but would vote for Trump if the election was held today. I voted for Gary Johnson.
Considering Trump is forcing the administration to slash regulations, you might consider that non-pothead Libertarians prefer Trump over the Socialists.
DesertDog, at least one does.
I have never smoked marijuana in my life, have always voted Libertarian and prefer Trump over the Socialists (Clinton, Sanders, etc.)
“One Libertarian” != “Libertarians as a whole.”
You are one of the reasons, then, why liberals assume libertarians are only Republican-lite Randroids. Frankly, I don’t think I’d like much the direction Clinton or Sanders would take the country, but I absolutely loathe what the current administration is doing, destroying generations-long alliances and cozying up to authoritarian oligarchies for no gain to my country while getting plenty of gain in their pockets. And lying the entire time they’re doing it.
I wonder how the average Wrestlemania fan compares to the average Trump voter. Age, race, gender, socio-economic status, place of residence etc. I’m not implying that all Trumpists are WWE fans. I’m sure some of the wealthiest supporters of Trump never watch it. Bit if you look at the audience at the next big “match” I think you will also be looking squarely the “base”. Just my opinion.