Moral Equivalents?

Have to respectfully disagree with your use of the word ‘fact’ here.

No, not really. Did you read it?

Read it. Not granular enough to allow solid conclusions. For example, did those counties flip because voters did, or because Obama voters stayed home?

Why couldn’t it be a function of racism?

Why would they have to sit out 2008 and 2012? Why could it not be the case that extra-heavy turnout among POC were enough to put Obama over the top?

Thats ok, Because the massive swaths of red and that broken “blue wall” do agree with my use of it.

No. Couldn’t really get past the selected paragraphs. No great number of words or even a phenomenal level of eloquence is going to repair the faulty premise that everything which followed was based on.

It’s not like a TL;DR, but more like- Quit insulting the injured. Calling a bunch of people that abandoned a party that had previously garnered generational support names is one of the fundamental flaws of the neo-liberal strategy.

Heh. Seriously?

So, like Coates, you want to start with a presumption of racism in voting priority for white people?

So, let’s get this theory crystal clear - the roving hordes of white racists were finally defeated at the polls by a surge of black voters for Obama. But the PoC decided to sit 2016 out when in full view of the next George Wallace, giving the racist hordes back their power?

Your statement amounts to: “Why can’t the behaviour fit my worldview? Prove that it doesn’t.”

Are 34 Republican governors, the House & Senate, state legislatures a function of racism? Or is it that Democrats’ message is failing to resonate across the electorate for this cycle?

The view of some dems on this loss is interesting to me. It boils down to: my opponent is immoral and/or the electorate is immoral. They are taking no responsibility and doing nothing to change.

Which is fine by me. After all they’re competing with hapless republicans who can’t govern their way out of a paper bag.

This is it. The Gentry Liberal wing of the Democrats - currently the wing in charge - never, ever misgovern. It’s never a flawed candidate, ideas in need of updating, corrupting influences taking them off the public interest - it is always Them.

They can’t admit Obama was not quite the performer he was hyped to be, that they became beholden to special interest groups, that they demanded litmus tests that were both impractical and self-devouring - nope, it was Them. Always Them.

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Two things need to be pointed out in response:
-The notion that working class white folk (as opposed to black folk) are “the injured” is an incredibly ahistorical perspective.
-Coates specifically dismisses singling out the white working-class as the cause of Trump’s victory.

Coates makes a compelling and historical case for what might more accurately (and less emotionally charged) be called ‘soft bigotry’ among white voters. It’s a thesis worth considering, rather than dismissing out-of-hand. (And respectfully, the compulsion to dismiss it should engender at least a little self-reflection among those who want to honestly confront these very difficult, emotionally fraught issues.)

“The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks.”
[…]
“The number of black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016, representing a sharp reversal from 2012. With Barack Obama on the ballot that year, the black voter turnout rate surpassed that of whites for the first time. Among whites, the 65.3% turnout rate in 2016 represented a slight increase from 64.1% in 2012.”

If we were talking about something that happened in 1830 or so I would totally agree. Alas, we are not. This is an election that occurred last year with one of the ugliest showings of character by journalists nationwide, and an escalation from rhetoric to violence by the left.

Good! Because it wasn’t just middle class white men that rejected the neo-lib platform. It was many people from all walks of life that disobeyed the press.

Interesting that nowhere in my response did I mention race or class- But that is directly where you took it.

Again, and respectfully, this is a completely ahistorical view. While things are no doubt better for them today than they were in 1830, on balance there is no group in America today that are ‘the injured’ more so than black folk.

These are right-wing talking points not supported by data.

I’m not sure what to do with this. Even assuming the press was in the bag against Trump, does that mean he should be elected? Is he doing well in your opinion? Is he making good decisions? Is he representing the country in a way that makes you proud?

Being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian is not a good reason to elect a president.

Race and class are the subject of the thread (of late). Given this, is it really that interesting?

Not really. @thunderbolt23 asserted, flatly and without supporting data, that “it isn’t a function of racism.” I simply questioned this assertion.

Wholly? No. But to some extent, were these gains a manifestation of racial/ethnic anxiety? I would venture yes.

If this is being attributed to me, it is incorrect. By and large, white privilege is not a function of conscious moral action on the part of whites, and thus is not a manifestation of immorality.

Now that is an ironic statement, given that the go-to play of the GOP for the past 50 years has been to blame The Other. The Other has been (in no particular order) Hippies, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexuals, TG individuals, Antifa, climate scientists/tree-huggers, etc. But the basic gambit–‘those people over there are the cause of all your problems, and you have to elect us to keep them at bay’–has remained the same.

You must understand the myopia you’re displaying pretending all politicians don’t demagogue the ‘other’. But as a counter and for levity sake:

It isn’t ironic, because I’m not a Republican, and I didn’t say anything contrary to what you’ve asserted. Far from it, the GOP has been captured by the Angry Right mad at everyone and ginned up all kinds of grievances, all while their corporate overmasters laugh all the way to the bank. That doesn’t mean the Gentry Liberal set isn’t guilty of the same sin - it just means a pox on both houses.

Precisely the opposite - Coates’ take is, at its core, emotional. He assumes everyone is a racist - hard or soft - until they prove they aren’t. There is no empirical basis to start there.

I don’t dispute black turnout was lower, that’s a fact - but in Coates’ world, everyone’s vote is either to vindicate racism or defeat racists, and with George Wallace 2.0 on the ballot runinf to negate Obama’s presidency…PoC didn’t turn out like they did in the past. That makes no sense. Meaning, Coates’ basic premise doesn’t add up.

And that’s the problem with Coates - he starts with unjustified assumptions.

You have this exactly backwards - the data and historical voting trends (and common sense) show 2016 voting tallies (and 2012 and 2008) weren’t driven by racism. There’s simply no basis for concluding so.

And Coates didn’t demonstrate anything that refutes that. He showed that white people generally voted Republican across a number of income levels and locations. Well, ahem, no duh. What he leaves out is credible evidence the engine of all the voting in that direction is a function of racist beliefs. With all credit to South Park, he posits the Underpants Gnomes approach to conclusions:

  1. White people voted Republican in 2016 (as they have for a while)
  2. ???
  3. They voted to keep black people down!

Forget causation - there isn’t even correlation, because there is no evidence that these people are even actually racists.

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The problem you keep running into is that you constantly define everything in race in America as a zero-sum game, when it’s not. White working class folk have been hurt. Blacks have been hurt. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. To say white working class folk have been hurt isn’t by extension saying black people haven’t been hurt.

This is precisely the too-simple approach I keep noting.

There’s nothing at all ahistorical about recognizing that white working class have been hurt unless you think that races are in competition with one another for the rewards of a zero-sum game.

And this is myopic identity politics at its worst. The old Democratic Party knew you could be for the put-upon whites and blacks at the same time, and there was never any lack of congruence. Now, the Gentry Liberal philosophy says, nope, you have to pick the racial tribe and stick with it against the other.

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Yes. A little tidbit from IRL-

In hitting bottom as a drunk and drug addict it was important for me to learn that taking a toxic idea that was obviously failing me and doing it harder was not going to work.

I had to let go of that idea all together and replace it with better ones that actually worked.

That would be my advice for Dems that continue to play identity politics. Let it go. Bottom is where you decide that it is.

I’d say comparing GOP complaints about, eg, TGs to Coates’ complaints about racism is a rather robust false equivalence. So no, not a pox on both houses.

Again, this scans as if you haven’t read the article. He is at pains to provide evidence to support his contentions. You may not agree with them, but dismissing them as ‘emotional’ is simply incorrect.

Time out. You argued above that Trump wasn’t all that racist, and race wasn’t a primary mover for him. Now you’re arguing the opposite. Which is it?

It doesn’t make sense that POC–who have had longstanding difficulty voting, made all the more so by recent legislative shenanigans by GOP-controlled statehouses–were more motivated to do so for a candidate who was potentially the first POC POTUS than for white HRC? While I wish POC had turned out for her like they did for Obama, the fact that they didn’t is certainly not inexplicable.

I’m at a loss as to how you feel you can make such a claim. Further, just how far back are you willing to take it? How about 1988, aka the Willie Horton election? How about 1888? In your opinion, has there ever been a POTUS election in which racism played a role?

I don’t know if you are being willfully truculent here, but demonstrating that white people in general voted for Trump was one of his two central theses.

And again, you are ignoring what ‘voting Republican’ means when someone like Trump is the Republican nominee. White people didn’t just vote Republican, they voted for Trump.

Given Trump’s public pronouncements on the subject during the campaign, I think Coates has all the “credible evidence” he needs to argue that race played a significant role in the election.

And to suggest he believes “all the voting in that direction is a function of racist beliefs” is to strawman him. You’re better than that.

Except for the fact they voted for Trump, that is. (And no, that is not a blanket assertion that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, or was motivated by racial animus.)

To the contrary–you’re the one who keeps trying to paint Coates (and me) as contending that everything is a function solely of race. Again, it is a strawman argument.

Show me a way in which working-class whites have been hurt that was not also experienced–earlier, and much more severely–by POC, and I’ll take your point.

Again, you are creating a strawman.

No, it isn’t - it comparable because both sides are refusing honest introspection about their own flaws and are busy falsely scapegoating others for their own mistakes. Apples to apples. So, a (justifisble) pox on both.

No, I read the article - in fact, I read it before you posted it here. And emotion drives his worldview - he doesn’t see people as they actually are, he reduced them into a stereotype based on fear - he sees a racist under every mushroom, when there is no rational reason to start with such a presumption.

No, as in, that’s how PoC see him, and how Coates sees him. If they saw him as George Wallace 2.0, why sit home?

Yeah, it kinda is - George Wallace 2.0 is on the ballot to erase the gains made by the first black president that they turned out to put into office, and PoC stay at home? Again, it doesn’t make sense.

What does make sense is the simple explanation - PoC didn’t necessarily like Trump, but they didn’t think he was the evil racist monster to the degree Coates thinks they thought in their 2016 voting calculus, and disappointed with two lame candidates, they stayed at home (like lots of other white people also did, because, as it turns out, people of different colors actually ain’t so different. Who knew?).

Yes, 1860 and 1864.

That’s not a thesis, that’s a commonly known, garden variety fact. Coates unjustifiable extrapolated that line fact into racism in action.

That’s the point - you’re not justified in equating a bunch of white people all doing one thing to an act of (passive or active) racism. Coates does. He assumes white don’t even order a meal without a racially motivated calculus. You do too. It’s poppycock. There’s no empirical basis to do so.

I meant the overwhelming driving factor, sorry for any confusion, to which Coates does think so.

No, it isn’t - that Coates’ whole approach. Its right there on the page. And that’s the point of his article - he wants to say, look, the perfectly sensible consensus on why Trump won, backed up with data, should be tossed out and we should focus entirely on race, because that’s what drive white people to vote for Trump.

He doesn’t have another angle.

No, the point is taken whether you want to or not - you keep insisting (by your line above) that this is a zero sum game. It’s not. It isn’t a competition. Until you learn that it isn’t a zero sum game, well, bluntly you’re never going to get it right.

No one is arguing that blacks haven’t been hurt. What people are saying is that working class whites have, and because one-man-one-vote exists and the white working class exercises said vote, that’s how we got Trump. Those votes - ones that primarily belonged to Obama - determined the outcome On the Electoral College.

It’s ideology plus math. It’s dirt simple.

Nope, what I wrote is precisely what you’ve been preaching - zero sum politics and economics, it’s either sympathy and advocacy for the White working class - OR, not AND - sympathy and advocacy for PoC, and it can’t be both.

That’s where your IP has led to, and it’s a political, and more importantly moral, dead end.

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It’s “apples to apples” only if the complaints themselves are equivalent. I hope you will agree they are not.

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times–don’t exaggerate to make a point.

Au contraire Pierre. There are plenty of rational reasons to believe that systemic race-related factors continue to exert significant influence in American society. You may not agree, but the idea is not indefensible.

It’s also important to recognize that you may not be in the best of positions to assess the degree to which such factors remain in play.

I don’t recall Coates saying that POC saw Trump that way. Feel free to correct me if he did.

See above.

So, 1864 was the last election in which racism played a role? Seriously?

In the 90s (the 1990s, not the 1890s), David Duke secured the GOP nomination for governor in Louisiana. He ran against another white guy. As both major-party candidates were white, would you contend that racial attitudes did not influence the candidate for which individuals voted? Would you really look at Duke’s impressive vote total, shrug your shoulders and say ‘What can I tell you? White people tend to vote Republican. Move along–no evidence of racism to see here’?

“All”? You’re straw-manning again. Time to stop.

Coates highlights the role of race in his work. That’s his area of interest. Having race as one’s particular area of interest is not the same thing as contending race is the sole factor in play.

OTOH, if you can produce a quote by Coates (from the present or any other work of his) in which he makes such a claim about race, I will happily concede the point.

Actually, it is you who seems to be staking out the ‘zero sum’ position, with your recommendation that the Dems relegate the issues important to POC to the back of the bus (so to speak) in order to appeal to whites.

That is precisely the common wisdom that Coates disputes.

See above.

You are arguing that greater attention needs to be given to the concerns of the white working class. How is that anything but IP?

No, not for the point I’m making, which is the sin of failing to introspect and take responsibility for outcomes under your control. You want to give liberals a pass on this because you happen to agree with them on the “rightness” of their ideas - but the standard applies to both camps, no exceptions.

I’m drawing on an ancient and largely forgotten tactic made taboo by the IP crowd called humor. If we’re going to have to adhere to tedious literalism and pedantics, it will be dry reading indeed.

Well, if we’re at a place where you’re having to make your point that what Coates is saying is “not indefensible”, then we can both agree it’s on a shaky foundation, even being charitable. But that aside, we are talking about voting decisions, not something more broad, and for this subset of social actions, we have data and information that (simply and effectively) explains what really happened with those votes, and so the frolic into speculation into other, less supported explanations better have an early whiff of credibility to seriously challenge the current view. Coates provided no such credibility, for the reasons I’ve gone into.

IP in its full glory - because I don’t share the identity, I’m fully (or at least partially) disqualified from challenging a different identity’s conclusions. No thanks, I’m more of a rational, Enlightenment-type.

Huh? Coates sees Trump as a racist demon driven with a mission to negate Obama’s presidency out of hatred for his blackness…but you don’t think Coates sees Trump as George Wallace 2.0?

No, not the only one.

I thought he ran as an Independent?

Sure, it did - and? The gubernatorial primary for Louisiana back in 1991 allows someone to extrapolate the voting conscience of white voters writ large in the year 2016 after 8 years of a black man in the White House? Relevance?

How about “‘all’ in the sense that it is largely driven by considerable, even overwhelming, amounts, so much so that other reasons are being excluded by rationale of being irrelevant, but in no way ‘all’ in the sense that it is the lone reason or exclusive reason for the voting, on the basis that it could never be all, because at least one voter likely has a different reason” - does that qualifier satisfy the pedantics needed?

Nice try, but incorrect. That’s not what zero means, and far from moving those issues to the “back of the bus,” it’s about recognizing and addressing those large issues that affect both working class whites and PoC, because on some very large topics, they have shared interests, despite their difference in skin color.

You’re busy playing zero sum politics - no, can’t help working class whites, must instead help PoC. I’m playing a different game - I’m saying WCW and PoC have many, many common interests, and let’s make each camp aware of that rather than needlessly dividing all the time and unite in global solutions that…help all of them at the same time.

Yes, poorlyn, and doesn’t make a compelling case.

See above.

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So, to be clear: You’re saying that POC single-mindedly focused on an agenda of, say, addressing the wealth-inequity legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are on the same moral plane as a conservative who is single-mindedly focused on an agenda of, say, keeping TGs in the BR of their birth gender?

Yeah, I was too.

You misunderstand me. That’s not the point we’re at. I was referring to the minimum level of credence that could be afforded Coates’ ideas–not the level I afford them.

You are out over your skis, my friend. The data we have may explain what happened, but it in no way explains why. (Unless you’re withholding such data, in which case I urge you to put it on the table.) In short, nothing presented to this point has provided empirical insight into why people pulled the lever they did.

Is the proposition that maybe–just maybe–you don’t have a full grasp of what it means to be a POC really so absurd? Are you so certain of your ability to empathize that you can dismiss this possibility out of hand?

And note that, in your eagerness claim status as a casualty of IP-think, you have overstated the situation yet again. I did not say you were “disqualified from challenging a different identity’s conclusions”; I merely suggested that “you may not be in the best of positions to assess the degree to which such factors remain in play.” So maybe you should leave the Cloak of Victimhood on its hanger for now.

Look at my statement again. It referred not to Coates’ opinion re Trump; rather, it referred to your claim about what Coates said vis a vis the opinions of POC writ large re Trump.

I’m embarrassed to say (because I’m a Loozyanian, and thus should know better) that you’re correct.

The relevance is that, in a previous post, you seemed to suggest that race cannot be a factor in an election if the nominees are both white. I presented the LA governor’s race as a counterfactual to that suggestion.

You mean, all as in most?

Again: Coates focuses on race–an important causal factor in the sociopolitical process. Another writer might focus on gender; another on class; another on religion. Why Coates’ pursuit of this particular topic is such a bee in your bonnet, I have no idea. And again: If you can find an example of Coates dismissing non-racial factors as inconsequential, you will be onto something in this regard. If you can’t, the obsessive in this relationship is you, not him.

Why can’t the Dem party address both legitimate concerns of POC and these global concerns you allude to? You seem to imply a choice must be made–that it’s one or the other. Once again, the zero-sum thinking seems to be yours, not mine.

Uh, no, asked and answered above, the first time.

With due respect, you’re in a vortex of your own confirmation bias. Trump flipped voters that once held the so-called Blue Wall. Meaning, he flipped a bunch of Obama voters. Meaning, these same voters - racists, according to Coates’ theory - voted for a black man in a previous election. Since it is unhinged from reality to assume these racists took a leave of senses during the Obama years only to rediscover their inner racist and vote for Trump, the data give us plenty of reason into why, even if by process of elimination alone.

No, what’s happening here isn’t some new theory based on new data (Coates’ only data is that white people vote for Republicans). What’s happening is that the gentry liberal set is in a complete state of denial over what Obama and the Democrats didn’t accomplish in 8 years and they are responsible, in part, for the economic anxieties that caused reliable Democratic voters to abandon their post on the Blue Wall and give someone like Trump a shot.

Coates’ navel-gazing theory is (yet another) copout - another attempt to say, hey, we didn’t do anything wrong, we’re awesome, it’s those darn benighted evil people surrounding us causing all the problems.

Sure thing.

I see, more pedantics. Sorry, friend, not interested in this part.

I never said it can’t be - I’m trying to understand whether it was in the 2016 presidential election. And no one has presented anything other than conjecture in the face of other, better explanations supported by data and logic.

They focus all they want, bully for them - I’m only interested in on question: are they right?

Bee in my bonnet? Obsessive? Merely disagreeing with a thesis amounts to an obsession?

I get that Coates is the essayist du jour among the chardonnay set and that it’s considered heretical to be critical of such a hip darling - but that’s not how I operate. In the world of ideas, disagreement isn’t a bad thing, and I prize independent thinking above all.

Coates writes alot, and I read a lot of it. I think he’s all wet on a lot of stuff, despite being a good writer and very bright. I can back up why I think he’s wrong. That shouldn’t trouble anyone. But most importantlyn, disagreement isn’t obsession. Good Lord.

I think you’d do well to brush up on the meaning of what zero sum is - as what I’m suggesting is not zero sum. I’m not putting races against each other in a game where gains for one automatically translates into losses for another (as you clearly do).

And as I said, what I suggest is addressing issues important to PoC - but focusing on the ones that concern WCW as well, because there are problems that transcend race (and there are), and affect lots more people, they deserve to be prioritized in the public policy world.

OK then, either we agree, or I still don’t understand your point (or perhaps its relevance).

As pointed out above, while Trump flipped a number of key districts, it’s not clear how many of those were due to flipped Obama voters. Estimates are he flipped between 6-9M Obama voters nationwide. If those were concentrated in the Blue Wall states, their flippage was key to the outcome. OTOH, if the flipped voters were spread out across the country, or were predominantly in Democratic strongholds (CA; NY), their flippage was not all that important. As I said upthread, a more granular analysis is needed to settle this issue.

Forgive me, but–sigh. Coates’ thesis, which you insist on misstating over and over again, is that the post-election conventional wisdom–to wit, that working-class white voters were the nexus of Trump’s triumph–is incorrect.

The ‘responsible parties’ are Obama, the Dems, and the entire GOP establishment. Globalization is not a uniquely Democratic idea. Trump represents the dubious and quixotic belief that we can somehow roll back our economy to its 1950s instantiation. It ain’t gonna happen.

I don’t think that’s fair at all. Yet again, Coates has his perspective and interests, and has had them for a long time. He’s not a Johnny-come-lately to the notion that race plays a central role in American politics; he did not trot out these ideas in the wake of HRC’s defeat. You cannot (fairly) accuse him of such.

The difference between a discussion concerning Coates’ personal opinions, vs a discussion concerning Coates’ assertions about the beliefs of POC writ large, is far from an exercise in pedantics. I imagine that if I were to misrepresent your personal opinions as a statement on your part concerning what all white Americans believe, you would be quick to correct me on that score–you wouldn’t let it go as mere ‘pedantics.’

Yes, they are right. Like race, gender, class and religion all play a role in American politics.

You don’t “merely” disagree with him; you adamantly and categorically reject his theses. This is puzzling, to say the least.

I’m sensing a little reverse elitism here. How’s the artisanal, GMO-free cheese plate? I hear the brie is to die for.

That is not what you said previously, but I am glad to hear you say it now.

I really think Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office is pretty straight forward. In my opinion, he persuaded our blue collar/working class that he could return them to the middle class through the reestablishment of the manufacturing sector.

I honestly don’t think there’s a whole lot more to it than that for the vast majority of white voters.

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