POLITICS
Josiah
RE: Trump
Joseph
Josiah, Thank you for your prompt response – surely a sterling example of the competence and politeness we see every day in this Administration. Unfortunately, promptness appears not to have translated into coherence. Your first point – that Trump cannot be a racist because black people voted for him – is risible. It ignores that while Trump’s percentage of the vote did increase, the actual number of black people who voted Republican did not. In fact, what we saw in 2016 was a confluence of two factors: Republican voter suppression of African-Americans, which is a matter of public record, and the truly abysmal nature of the Clinton campaign, which was unable to create the same enthusiasm that had brought black voters to the polls for Obama (although this is perhaps understandable given that these voters wouldn’t turn out for anyone but Obama, as you can see from previous down-ballot races). Further, while Donald Trump is prejudiced against black people, as you can see in the number of lawsuits he has incurred by refusing to rent housing to them, the prejudice of his campaign was aimed squarely at Hispanics. It is a fallacy to assume that racism can only apply to black people; and the United States, in the form of white nativists like the ‘Know-Nothing’ Party, has a long and dark history of equal-opportunities bigotry. Now, I would appreciate it if you did not attempt to tie me to the dumpster fire that was the Clinton campaign. I have never, and will never, support the statement that all, or even half of Trump’s voters were ‘deplorable’. Some of them certainly were, and the fact that one of those voters is now Attorney General is alarming. But most of Trump’s voters in the rust-belt were motivated by the annihilation of their industries and a complacent Democratic establishment that took their votes for granted. The idea that economically distressed members of the working class can be manipulated by demagoguery is not, I hope, a new one for you. However, the cause of their distress is not illegal immigrants who ‘took ma jerbs’ as you quite ridiculously assert; rather it is the relentless drive for greater profits under capitalism which has seen jobs replaced by robots or shipped to East Asia. It is with sadness, if not surprise, that the hyperbole of my ‘Nazis on the internet’ comment went undetected, confirming once again that the Right has a keen sense of humour – as long as nobody uses it to criticise them. However, I will not apologise for pointing out that the element of the population most vocal in its support for Trump is now spending half its time complaining about the failure of the popular vote to elect Le Pen ‘because fewer people voted for her’, and the other, complaining Trump hasn’t personally deported every person in American with melanin in their skin. With regards to your final point – such that it is – on violent protest at Berkeley, I am impressed that in this day and age ‘tu quoque’ is still seen as an acceptable argument. A sign of the degeneration of public discourse, perhaps. The idiocy of anarchist groups like
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