This sounds like my experience, actually. But, if you ask them in so many words, it’s abortion 75% of the time, and “I want lower taxes” the rest. Even in hillbilly junction, most won’t cop to being racist, at least not in front of me.
4 Likes
abortion = racism because it was all about making it so black people can’t get access to population control and that’s a big thing that holds people in poverty
6 Likes
Yes, I know very few conservatives. They few I know through family relations diverge from many of the stereotypes. Especially around race. They have helped several local Hispanic families in their area for the last 20 plus years. Including helping the kids go to college. One of the daughters just finished her PH.d in women’s studies. The parents are not legal as far as I know. They would and have done just about anything to help these families. And yet they then watch FOX and still fly into a panic about the “Bad Mexican’s” coming here with drugs (ignoring the fact that there own son has been a full time raging meth addict for 10 plus years). And when we said before the election Trump is going to lump all Hispanic people together including these families they insisted he would would only get the bad ones. I just don’t get it. They love these people without reservation and yet do the mental gymnastics that all the racist shit Trump says doesn’t apply to their friends.
11 Likes
I agree, I meant once the authoritarian power truly sets in I’m gone. I’m not going to be a citizen of Gilead once “Islamic Extremists” machine-gun the congress. I’m throwing my support where I can now, and I carry a positive outlook that requires work and not relying on the decency of Americans.
[quote=“CleverEmi, post:346, topic:499”]
Even in hillbilly junction, most won’t cop to being racist, at least not in front of me.
[/quote]I have had a depressing number of people confess their racism since the election results, though at this point they claimed it never happened in a strange gaslighting attempt to the public announcements expecting “silent majority” support.
6 Likes
The conservatives I know fall into two camps as far as cultures go: the backward, and the priveleged.
Some extended family members have lived their whole lives in tiny, rural, 99% white towns and are afraid of everything unfamiliar, whether it’s brown people or LGBT (turning a blind eye to some of their own family members) or the internet. Some are entirely steeped in redneck culture for whatever reason, and all the self-defeating politics that goes with it. Some… just seem like they should know better, but have calcified into little balls of xenophobia and are willing to believe every stupid, negative thing said about others.
And some are relatively wealthy, and will vote for anything that lets them hold on to as much of their hoard as possible. Oh, there are white American kids who can’t afford to eat? Here’s five bucks, but keep your taxes outta here. This orange guy is an utter fucking moron, but he wants to lower my taxes. And so on.
8 Likes
I suddenly realised. I have been trying to find historical parallels to Trump and I’ve been looking on the wrong continent.
Loudmouthed buffoon of extreme views who can’t help saying things he’s supposed to keep quiet? People he should listen to are ignored and leave? Complete futtwicks are accepted into his inner circle and make policy?
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Did not end well. Expect the Schlieffen plan to invade Canada quickly and knock it out of the war before invading Mexico.
Worst of all I start to wonder if this is just a fantasy I’ve cooked up, or a sudden burst of percipience. Watch for the Secret Service being issued with pointy helmets.
6 Likes
That and the whole hand size issue.
4 Likes
As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the basic problem with Trump supporters is zero-sum thinking. Life is a big game of king of the hill, and they find it absurd that they should be expected to “break the rules” and cede ground because some other group isn’t playing well enough.
You can even frame social issues like abortion in this way. We all know that it’s not really about life, or else pro-life churches would be busy raising money to support poor children. Really, it’s that they disagree with the basic proposition that we’re all better off if we respect one another’s right to live as we choose. For them, every person who marries their own gender or believes in evolution is an active threat to their way of life, and so they think they need to enforce their beliefs in order to preserve them.
The problem with mass demonstrations is that they don’t actually change anyone’s attitudes. In fact, you could make an argument that relentless campaigning on both the left and the right has only contributed to a hyper-partisan climate where people’s opinions are so entrenched that it’s no longer possible to have conversations across the political divide.
I think there’s a higher return on investment in:
- Local politics, initiatives - It’s hard to climb a tower, but easy to plant a seed.
- Culture - People have to be able to imagine a different world before they’re prepared to vote for it.
- Technology - Technology changes the playing field — look at solar energy.
Loud, confrontational approaches provoke resistance and are best answered by subtle jujitsu. If you’re too focused on Trump, you’re not seeing the undercurrents that make much of his efforts ultimately futile.
7 Likes
I ain’t talking about US-style brief symbolic demonstrations; I’m talking about real protest, Argentina style.
Get in the street, block traffic, make noise, refuse police orders to move, and stay there until the job is done. It isn’t intended to change attitudes; it’s intended to make it impossible for business as usual to continue until the issue is resolved.
Less street theatre, more General Strike.
I think those are important and worthwhile things, and I hope that you have an opportunity to return to them once your country is no longer is the grip of anti-democratic fascists.
But gentle persuasion and incremental improvements are not adequate for the current situation.
The TrumpGOP are not going to allow themselves to be removed from power by an election when they control the administration of it. The US military in the hands of aggressive white supremacists represents an unacceptable and immediate threat to all people everywhere.
We’re headed for war. Bigly, as they say.
2 Likes
abortion is always a bullshit excuse. If anyone really wanted to lower abortion, then they would invest in a full range in human health care and health education. And also general education at least K - 12, preferably K - 16. But noooooooo we can’t do any of that because creeping socialism or some such bullshit
7 Likes
But we both know that things will have to get a lot worse before anything on that scale is likely to happen.
That may be so, but let’s recognize that the voters aren’t the only—or necessarily the most important—check on their power. The oligarchy isn’t unified behind Trump and the GOP, nor by any means is the national security apparatus. Even the Republican Party suffers from sharp internal divisions. If money and power can steal an election, money and power can un-steal an election. And, it can do far worse.
That may, indeed, mean that someone in a tower or a bunker decides that a general strike is going to succeed.
Meanwhile, I find it significant that we may only be alive today because Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August, and John F. Kennedy read it just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The “gentle and incremental” approach is so subtle that you rarely notice the difference it makes.
4 Likes
I’d pointed this out to others, but it never occurred to me to point it out here. Good ol’ Kaiser Wilhelm II!
Have you read “The Zimmerman Telegram” by Barbara W. Tuchman? Seems they wanted to get Mexico and Japan in on invading the US through Texas before we could get into the WWI. And used the US telegram “roundabout” to do it, too! Canada, however, is not mentioned.
When Woodrow Wilson found out - through the Brits, who’d discovered the whole thing - it was that, and not the sinking of the Luistania that made him declare war. Or so the book says.
6 Likes
Sent a copy to Khruschev, too.
4 Likes
There is an interesting Russian back story to the Cuban crisis.
At the time the US had solid fueled ICBMs, I believe, whereas the Russians still had liquid fueled. Basically, if you fueled up a Russian ICBM you either launched it or scrapped it. So the crews knew that if they were ordered to fuel the missiles, everybody was going to die. One of the commanders describes driving through a town on his way to the site and realising that if the order to fuel was given, all these people and himself would soon be dead.
In the event the order was never given. But it’s interesting that the Russians had this bigger psychological block against using their missiles. In fact, because of this issue, they designed them so they could be remotely detonated in flight. As far as we know, once Minuteman is launched it cannot be stopped.*
I am sure that part of the reason there has not been a major exchange so far is that the rest of the world perceives the US as being trigger happy and impulsive. But it goes a long way now to explaining why the RF is so worried about NATO’s expansion into the Baltic, and why the Kremlin is prepared to put so much effort into trying to get a President who seems to have a strongly developed sense of self preservation, versus Clinton who they perceive as someone who might actually pull the trigger. I am sure if Saunders had been the Dem candidate, they would have breathed a huge sigh of relief and lost interest.
*My sources for the Russian information include people who have good reason to know, but as I’ve signed the UK Official Secrets Act I cannot comment on anything I might know about NATO assets.
7 Likes
The history of Russia isn’t something I’ve delved into, but from what I’ve gathered, those who’ve governed it have this weird sort of inferiority complex about their country.
6 Likes
From Peter the Great on, you seem to be right. Russia has, since Velikii Pyotr, had a very well educated intelligentsia who have been all too well aware of the quite brutish tendency of the rulers and the degraded nature of the peasants. Mind you, Germany was similar until it was all washed away in 1945 and East Prussia and its Junkers were eradicated by the Red Army.
But then how do East Coast intellectuals feel about rural Midwestern communities?
2 Likes
On the whole, probably the same way they did seventy-or-so years ago, and the feelings are probably returned. It’s hard for me to say personally, being a descendant of rural Midwesterners. I think my a lot of my ancestors were anomalies. The urban poor probably feel close to the same thing. And let’s not even get into the rural West!
It’s hard for me to say with any degree of accuracy, though. I come from rural Midwestern stock. But somehow, culture seeped in - literature, art, music; and all the people who could tell me about it are DEAD.
6 Likes
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/20/16002764/trump-health-costs
That should read “year”, not month. Doesn’t anybody proof shit any more?
6 Likes
I hate to say this but I have held off on posting this here because it’s just too depressing:
I mean, I get that I’m supposed to be a good liberal here and “meet them on the issues” but, as with Brexit, how do you even begin to address this kind of wilfull ignorance?
On one side, you have a whole bunch of people saying “HOLY FUCKING SHIT, ARE YOU ALL ACTUALLY INSANE?” and on the other side you have a bunch “low-information voters” saying “yeh but what if this totally farcical bullshit that a bunch of right-wing billionaires have been spoon-feeding me in their own self interest had any kind of bearing in reality?? What if, huh?? I can’t be bothered to look this up for myself, so fuck you, book-reader!”
What am I supposed to do with that? Where’s the middle ground when it’s a choice between “actual reality” and “whatever Randian psychopathic bullshit you have chosen to believe in order to justify basically hating anyone who isn’t a WASP and pretending your own shit doesn’t stink”?
Fuck them all. Brexit will fuck everyone in Britain who voted for it in exactly the same way as trump will fuck over everyone who voted for him. Let them own their bad fucking decisions, just for once. Maybe when all the dust has settled, we can have some semblance of sanity…
7 Likes