It’s Obama’s fault. He’s a walking microagression.
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You know what’s fun about the modern media? Is that you can live in 2 different worlds. You watch CNN and it’s totally one world. Then watch Fox and you get a completely different world. It’s like we live on two different planets.
So, the big news… Melania’s shoes, wearing high heals, going to visit the tragedy that is Harvey in Houston and surrounding areas. Her fucking shoes! Not the thousands of people suffering. Not that the mayor of Houston didn’t order any kind of evacuation facing down a Cat 4 hurricane because it would cause too much chaos. Because having to rescue people from 12 feet of water was the better option.
/rant
Fwiw, this is the byproduct of the freemarket dictating the media.
Chalk up another win for the free market and the Kardashians. Making the average American dumber by the day.
Blame Obama?
You mean Barack HUSSEIN Obama right?! That mooslim sunuvabitch
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If he ain’t no dirrrrrty mooslim why is his middle name the same as that bearded guy we done hung in Iraq???
No, I like good discussions that don’t result in name calling.
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I am glad somebody has the stomach for the tedious debates. They need to be had. And I am sooo… tired.
"The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.
[…]
Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”
An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker." [emphasis mine]
It’s hard to know where to begin with Coates’ swing and a miss, but what he primarily misses is that election wasn’t decided by “whiteness” exercising its power - voting trends largely held, except for those important places (electorally) where people who voted for Obama flipped their vote for Trump. In other words, voters perfectly happy to pull the lever for a black man, but switching to the other party after being disappointed by the first party.
I do agree that Trump’s goal is a complete negation of Obama’s presidency, but it is out of “white” anger. Which is not to say Trump is innocent on thinking wrongly and stupidly on matters of race - it’s just that Coates exaggerates and misses the mark.
Coates is a bright guy, but despite his eloquence, has far too simple a worldview. There isn’t a racist behind every corner, nor is the world and it’s problems caused by the tribe of racists against the tribe of good guys. I say this without any sense of sarcasm or snark - he really should get out and actually meet the people of the world he’s constantly condemning as racists.
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On this negation - Trump has done nothing (and does little else, even now) than watch Fox News garbage and read crappy far-right blogs. Trump being a dullard’s dullard, he stewed in the Obama hate for 8 years and got completely infected with Obama Derangement Syndrome - he wasn’t born here, he’s a socialist, he’s a big city elitist, etc. - he swallowed it all, uncritically, and is the living, breathing personification of the comments section in right-wing media.
His motivation for wanting to negate Obama’s presidency is all that - which, true, has contained elements of racism. But the motivation is not especially or even mostly driven by racism, contra Coates.
Trump isn’t a conservative, he isn’t a populist, he isn’t a centrist - to the extent he believes in anything beyond self-promotion for material gain, he believes whatever angry garbage is presented to him in small chunks of vitriol and single syllable words. That’s it. He hates Obama because of bunch of wingnuts said “hate Obama” and he hasn’t had an original thought since Trump vodka.
I would add that there are two other things that “drive” Trump:
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He wants to be seen as the “Great Savior” that delivers the U.S. AND the World from 8 years of disastrous Policies under President Obama. (One need look no further than his rally speeches and Tweets for that).
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(And I do NOT say this facetiously)…he wants to be seen as the greatest President ever…
If the trajectory of his Presidency continues on the path it continues on; my feeling is that there is no doubt that his 4-8 years will be “remembered”…but not in the way he would like.
I would suggest the best place to begin would be with his thesis, which is that the common wisdom about Trump’s electoral success–ie, that it resulted from the mobilization of disaffected working-class white voters who felt alienated by the sneers of coastal elitists and boxed out by Democratic identity politics–is in fact a canard unsupported by the data. Given this, he looks elsewhere for an explanation consonant with the data at hand.
Such people do exist. However, it’s estimated that between 6 and 9M Obama voters pulled the lever for Trump. In my mind, that number is not large enough to invalidate Coates’ contentions.
I think he would probably say the same about you (also said without sarcasm or snark).
So he’s not racist, he’s just an overly credulous mouth-breather? I can’t help but wonder: If forced to choose between the two, which characterization would Trump acquiesce to?
Love the saltiness of the article. Few things.
- Many white people voted for Obama both times. I heard somewhere he got more white votes than McCain, but don’t recall the link, so could be wrong.
- There was no minoroty candidate in the 2016 race. Hard to argue racism. Well… maybe Rubio or Cain could.
- Trump did better with POC than Romney.
- Trump did better with white women than Hillary Clinton.
Number 3 and 4 are just beyond belief for me. Romney was peak Republican establishment. Said all the right things and was governor of a blue state. Trump of all humans beat him with POC. Hillary went with “I’m with her” so everybody could virtue signal they voted for a woman, and he beat her with white women.
This was a change election, it was the “R” turn. Populism works when it has a system people are mad at to point to. Hillary was the presumptive nominee and nobody dared challenge her. Trump beat 17 other contenders. Iron sharpens iron.
His thesis is exactly where I started - did you not read my post? Its no canard - what swung the election was the voters who were archetypal Democratic voters who, in large part, voted for Obama in 2012. These are the ones responsible for flipping states from blue to red. The other voting trends were relatively normal and predictable.
There was no “surge” of angry white voters that came out of the woodwork to vote to repudiate the presidency of the hated black man eight years running. And that bears out logically, and Coates’ theory just doesn’t add up, even aside from the obvious data - this huge surge of racist whites sat at home on election day when a black man was actually on the ballot, but decided to show up in 2016 to cast a racist vote when the two candidates were both white? Of course not. That’s silly.
Then look at the data. As you know, all that matters is the Electoral College. And the vote totals you identify are (and were) more than enough to swing the states. There are plenty of election autopsies out there that analyze the data and show Coates’ theory to be incorrect.
He might, but he’d be wrong. Coates thinks history - good and bad - is driven by racism and essentially nothing else. History and the forces that move it are more complicated than Coates’ narrative.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying he isn’t racist at all. But I don’t think racism is the lodestar that drives what he decides to do politically.
We know what makes a great president, and Trump is literally incapable of achieving anything close to it. To do anything even close to it would require a character change that is, again, literally impossible.
Per the unimpeachable Wikipedia, McCain got 55% of the white vote to Obama’s 43.
Not hard to argue racism if one candidate was dog-whistling (or at times, foghorning) racist predilections, while the other was not.
Not exactly something to crow about. Further:
"Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency with less support from black and Hispanic voters than any president in at least 40 years, a Reuters review of polling data shows, highlighting deep national divisions that have fueled incidents of racial and political confrontation.
Trump was elected with 8 percent of the black vote, 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote, according to the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll."
Also true, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the question at hand. Are white women incapable of racism?
Also a factor, no doubt.
Hmm…I just looked again, and I still don’t see anything about his central thesis in your post. What I do see is your thesis about what happened.
I don’t think this is true, but am open to seeing data supporting it.
You are misstating Coates’ thesis. His thesis concerns who, exactly, propelled Trump to victory. Conventional wisdom is that it was disaffected working-class whites. Coates argues that it was whites writ large, not just the working class. Further, he argues that the conventional wisdom is promulgated by the liberal white punditry precisely because it extirpates any complicity on their part (as white people) in Trump’s election.
Speaking of silly…If the POTUS election had been between David Duke and HRC, are you suggesting that racism could not be a motivating factor for some voters because both candidates were white?
Feel free.
That is an obviously incorrect statement to anyone who read the article.
This is not a canard. This is a fact.
Thunderbolt nailed it.
All that article amount to is another jab at people that didn’t do what faulty poll information says they should have. Same data that said Hillary would take it in a landslide.
Lefties like that writer are still lost, embittered, and hanging on to the hope that if they say something mean enough that Hillary will finally win.
It didn’t work last year at this time and it won’t this year either.
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Read the WaPo article I posted.
But did Coates show any data that suggest whites voted differently in previous elections? Because if he didn’t, that means white writ large are voting similarly across election across different candidates. Which they have been and are. And it isn’t a function of racism.
What moved the election is, again, changes in counties and states that were previously blue that went red that flipped the Electoral College votes from 2012. Well, why did they change colors? Easy - working class types who previously voted for Democrats (and Obama) changed their vote to Republican.
Don’t dodge the point - do you think all these angry whites sat out 2008 and 2012 when a black man was on the ballot, only to show up in 2016 ready to avenge white people from Obama’ reign? Coates seems to think so - do you?
I’ve read a lot of Coates. This is pretty much his theme. It’s not just this article (though this article is demonstrative of his overly simplistic view of the world).