This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1344626
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1344626
Kudos – but more important, thanks – to the author.
I guess it wasn’t a funeral for me because the America my white friends thought died never existed. That America has never existed for Blacks, yet white liberals insisted on this fiction which they now have to bury.
This fiction is never buried.
It’s always vibrant – a kind of solution in itself.
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“But I worry that the DNC will try to find the middle ground and lose everything. Again.”
This!
The MSM and Dems. are only ever interested in what the aggrieved racists feel and why they are compelled to be aggrieved racists because of economic circumstances. The MSM and Dems. keep seeking to be bipartisan and come together with unrepentent racists who simply hate minorities who they believe are not entitled to the full measure of the American dream. (Pres. Obama is a huge purveyor of bipartisanship B.S., probably because he thinks it suits his image, idk.) It is the Dem. propensity to reach out to, and make excuses for, those who hate us that continually saps the energy from the Dem. base, depresses Dem. voters, and causes Dem. losses after every victory.
Dems. need to learn to take care of our own base, first. Fight for Dem. policies! This will energize our people, bring real hope for change, and make our people happy to come to the polls in the off-year elections, which is what we need. And once the young people see that those who do not hate are being rewarded, they will join the non-haters so they can be rewarded, too, and the racist old haters will eventually die off (maybe faster with help from the Trumpvirus) or sink into permanent minority status.
The path forward is clearl the DNC just has to commit to it and ignore the MSM’s constant yowlings for bipartisanship.
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This is such a nice article. Is there a polite word for bullshit because I’d like to employ it here. Obviously this asshole doesn’t get out much. Hate aint no American thing. I’ve spent near 30 years OUT of the USA and seen it everywhere I’ve been. When I grew up in the Netherlands it was the Moroccans ( dark skinned ) and the Ambonese ( Dark skinned ) that got the shitty end of the stick. In Germany it was the Turks. In Peru it was people of native ancestry vs those of European ancestry or Andean vs Limeno. In France it was the Germans and the North Africans. In Japan it was Blacks and Chinese. They hated and they killed. They held down, denied and outcasted. Just like here.
But do fuck off with that hackneyed crap about the Democrats not caring about Blacks. I admit that Black Americans are still not getting treatment anywhere near like they should but what help they are getting is coming from progressive / liberal minds.
Also, is there a polite fuck you?
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One of the things about this 4-year bender is that it’s (I think) eroded a lot of liberals’ opposition to hate – the targets are different from the rightwing evil nutbars, but some of the emotions have become similar. Not a lot of empathy or tolerance any more for the people who keep trying to kill us all.
Don’t know whether that’s bad or good.
Definitely good.
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Is it “hate”? Being racist does not necessarily entail hating those one sees as being of another race. For instance, Japanese see all other races as inferior, but still in many ways they love Americans and American culture – somewhat as white suburban kids love Blacks and Black culture, yet still in large numbers subscribe to a myth of white racial superiority. “Hate” just doesn’t name the thing.
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Unfortunately there will never be a chance for idealism in American Government. It’s too diverse a joint to settle on that. So what you do it what you can get done. You are not, at this time, going to get a progressive agenda past Mitch. You can “dream” it and “hope” for it but reality bites and that’s the deal. I’m not sure yakking at Democrats for not passing a Bernie like agenda is helpful giving that it is impossible to do so and you paint them failures for not doing so.
If the Democrats ( or folks with progressive ideals ) are to prevail they’ll do it inch by inch. Right now they’re buried in GOP’er bullshit ( much their own fault ). NO Democrat ran on a “defund the police agenda” or a “socialism” agenda…not a one…but a lot of GOP’ers won elections defending America from those nonexistent agendas. My advice to Democrats and their critics is stop using 4 letter words. Like hope, base and polls. None have served the political position well. Stick to an agenda pointed at the middle of the socioeconomic ladder and hang there. Don’t expect too much too quickly.
. Hate aint no American thing.
An academic and lifelong friend of mine came to this conclusion decades ago. He would interview people all over Europe over a period of years. It was more of a hobby than science, but he felt he had created a decent focus group.
Ethnocentrism may be hard wired. If it is, then that just makes socialization more difficult. Interactions in work and school helps reduce bigotry, but does not cure it. All we can do is to mitigate the worst effects of it. . Hate aint no American thing.
Yes, I think the author is both naive and muddled.
Good, careful reasoned argument that considers the other side’s position . . .
Just kidding.
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I’m not talking about a Bernie-like agenda. I’m talking about an agenda that focuses on the Democratic base. A Democratic president can do a lot without the Senate, just like Trump did a lot without the House. If there is a will. Dems. should just move military money around just like Trump did - move it to research and development, to forgiving portions of student loans, move it to increasing pay to teachers and first responders, all in the name of “building that wall.” Move the damn money just like the Republicons do. All Biden needs to say is that increased R&D, better paid teachers and first responders, and a more highly-educated work force all increase our military preparedness and, voila! we can move that wall money to pay for things the Dem. base prioritizes. How hard is that?
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You seem to have forgotten the 1930’s and WWII and how much the Japanese have stuck by their horrendous behavior toward the Chinese and Koreans, for example, during the period. And you seem readily willing to take seemingly “rational” explanations for bigotry, calmly delivered, at face value. Why is that?
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Obama’s election tested our democracy, and old ignored problems burst out. In some ways, Obama’s election was a triumph - a black man was actually elected president. That’s a significant watershed, a psychological hurdle that we - as a nation - passed. The Republican response showed us that we have a very long way to go still. We have a faction in our country that will never accept black people, full stop.
In order to make progress, we need to start distinguishing between those people - the white nationalists/confederates - and others on the right. And between those (white) people and the many other whites who voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Yes, white people on average vote heavily Republican… but that is an average that masks large regional differences. Once you take out the severely Republican white South, whites split pretty evenly (with some much less significant regional variation).
Consider that shortly after black shifted from the Republican to the Democratic party, the white South shifted to the Republican party. That is America’s festering sore, that spreads its poison of hate to the rest of the body politic. (Yes, not all Southern whites are like that, but the voting record is what it is. And obvs. many racist white people live outside the South too.)
We need to recognize that there won’t be any middle ground to be found with those folks, not today, not until Confederate ideology disappears. What we can do is work on those people in the R coalition who are reachable. Not all of them are children of the Confederacy.
For those who argue, above, that hate isn’t unique to America… true, except that we have a special and virulent case of it, nourished by our history of slavery. That makes it different, in kind and strength from the garden-variety ethnocentric hate.
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Shall we include American’s increasingly hostile and, yes, chauvinist, attitudes toward China and Cinese, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, in this “addiction” to hate?
I believe even our mainstream media has been affected by Russia’s intense focus on “American carnage,” on Neo-Nazis et al. They must see themselves in competition with Russia Today.
Tiresome. Author grossly stereotypes an entire group of people because, well, that’s what wokesplaining everything requires as a first step in the “analysis”.
I’ve certainly lived under no delusion that this country had somehow magically gotten past racism. Frankly, I don’t know how you arrive at the assumption that people would arrive at such a ridiculous misconception of what we lived through for 8 years in terms of reactionary bullshit towards Obama. If you think white people crying about Trump being elected was about losing an imaginary America that never existed and are experiencing some form of schadenfreude over their pain, I’d have to suggest maybe it’s the author who is having a problem, not the people who were disappointed that shit had been predictably derailed on pretty much every level.
Smirk away, Woke Jedi…clearly you’re the only one who understands anything, especially what white liberal people think and feel, because lord knows white liberals are all just clueless ninnies who need everyone who’s not a white liberal person to tell them what it is they’re thinking and feeling and how to correct it, what reality is and such.
BTW, let us know when you have an actual solution to suggest, instead of just rotten fruit to throw at everyone who would be and thought of themselves as your allies…until you opened your mouth and released your scorn for them.
Excellent article. I’ll just say that I was strangely depressed the day the election was called for Biden, and I was almost angry at the people who were out in the streets celebrating. I think this must be how an abused person feels after the police finally arrive and take their abuser away. There’s a certain relief, but the emotional scars remain, and the gnawing sense that the abuser could always return lurks forever in their psyche.
My friends, family and I certainly don’t feel the elation like we like we did in 2008. We all have a sense that in 4 years, we could be right back in an even worse place than 2016.
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America Has Yet To Shake Its Addiction To Hate
Agree, but there are constitutional issues with shutting down FoxNews and Talk Radio and even more in closing Southern Baptists and other Taliban churches.
I would say it’s also a bit of a version of whataboutism to attack the author on that point. In my reading, the author remained agnostic on hate in the rest of the world, and it’s certainly valid to discuss America’s hate problem regardless of its perniciousness in the rest of the world. I would agree with him that there was a very real fantasy in “enlightened” white liberal circles that racism and hate was in the past in America (I certainly wasn’t immune) and we were heading toward a new Manifest Destiny of diversity and cultural acceptance. One which Trump and his cohort quickly trampled over forthwith.
Obviously, that argument is itself oversimplifying issues and stereotyping people, but there was a lot of disbelief of the “it can’t happen here” variety when history is clearly showing us that not only can it happen, it’s been happening consistently for generations with fits and spurts of “good trouble” in between pulling us the other way.
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I hate to say this, but I didn’t vote for Biden because Trump was a racist, anti-immigrant, woman hater. I voter against Trump because he was a draft dodging coward and an asshole. The reasons are immaterial, only the result matters.
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