Another Bear said:
Quote:
A few provisos:
1. The Trumpian GOP is full of Irish (e..g, Hannity), Italian (Giuliani), Jewish (Miller), etc.,, Nazis
2. 52% of white women and even 25% of Hispanic women voted for Trump
3. African-Americans ALSO have currently strong conservative cultural tendencies (for really good reasons: (a) for the family, because of the out-and-out destruction of the African-American family by slavery and the most serious economic and political oppression in the 100 years that followed before the civil rights movement finally began to be effective in pushing back (also thereby creating the largest backlash with the ugliest political consequences one can imagine); and
(b) for the church, the one cultural institution allowed the community throughout, and which, in African-Amerian communities, often is the center of the local community
4. In a certain way, women have the natural conservative inclination that comes with the strong natural inclination to bear children and the consequent need for stability in order to raise children, which stability tends to be threatened by social and cultural changes.
5. I'm almost inclined to believe that the American social system is one giant Stockholm Syndrome in which the trajectory of the oppressed groups is to come to identify with the oppressors.
6. Racial and Supremacist politics are totally based on lies - the biggest one of course being the actual scientific existence of what is called race, that word being nothing more to begin with than a handy way to describe (and therefore justify) discrimination and oppression (starting with slavery).
1. Latinos, Asians, African Americans and Mixed-race people will replace the Irish, Italians and Jews. They already started if you look at California and NY politicians and media. The difference is they can't pass for white and simply can't drop their background because it's tied to the visuals of skin tone. I see integration but I don't see leaving behind the color line.
2. 52% will be difficult to retain as the demographics shift. The Latino vote is very fickle but 25% doesn't seem crazy if the other side of that is 75% not voting for Trump.
3. Agree the the central institaution in the AfAm community seems to be church/religion. And yes I see some of those conservative Christian values...but the vote was totally mobilized by Obama, while generally NOT voting GOP. I think if the right candidate shows up, the vote is there. It was for Clinton and Obama. I think it will be there for anyone who connects. Elizabeth Warren just stated that the criminal justice system in the U.S. is racist. (like duh...but you still have to say it)
4. I believe the new generation of women voters will support choice, and as long as the GOP is anti-choice, they won't get the vote. I believe the 52% was driven in part by Russkie smears. In an un-hacked elections, HRC should do better...but yes, she messed up bigly in the rust belt.
5. Can't argue against that.
6. While race is an artificial construct scientifically...race is still very much a real thing in modern America. The civil war (and Southern longing for the past), immigration and a few others things will continue to make "race" as we know it, an issue in America because the deportable won't be dead completely and white privledge isn't going away.
OK
1. I can definitely see leaving behind the color line, because I have and continue to personally experienced it - first from a high school teacher (an older lady from New England, somehow transplanted into a majority Jewish public school in L.A.) who astounded the class by asserting that she couldn't tell the difference (certainly a bald-faced lie, told for effect, but it worked, and no one could either get her to admit it or come to fully believe that she didn't actually believe it) - but more just from having spent half my life as a jazz musician largely socializing with people on the other side of that line. I mean, it doesn't take much, once one begins actually to engage with people on the "other side of that line", to get to the point where not seeing people instead of members of a stereotyped group becomes certifiably insane.
2. Bearister recently posted an excellent article about the foundations of the Koch Brothers et al. essential plan to suppress the majority vote, by political and cultural means, which has been percolating since the late 1960s and which has flowered in effectiveness majorly in recent years - most especially in the 2016 Presidential Election, but in previous congressional, state and local elections for a lot of years now. Such suppression appears to be a lot easier to achieve than one might imagine.
3. and 5. If you agree with 5, you can't be so certain about 3.
4. A recent poll suggests greater support for Roe v. Wade; but, although the actual, historical basis for opposing abortion has been shown to be racist (since, as abortion was becoming widely accepted by middle and upper class women as one of the things that was helping them overcome their own oppressive conditions, the purveyors of those oppressive conditions began to fear a greater consequent birth rate among "the lower orders"), the cultural justification for abortion is still a very hard argument to make, because it is undeniably killing of human life, and the cosmically meaningful moral reasons for it require a lot of serious soul searching, and real, moral balancing, which are hard for humans to begin with, and maybe almost impossible to cram into a political slogan.
6. The Marxist analysis that got lost here, both in the overwhelming thicket of race, and in his own gross inability to (a) understand the truly organic nature of capitalism and therefore (b) even barely imagine a political system that had any real viability, was that of social class. So, what you miss here is that the privilege is not so much White (of which aspect there is still some appendage, with no real benefit to white people other than the lack of casual, daily oppression to African-Americans and other dis-favored minorities of the day - which is not so much a benefit to white people as it is a blindness of theirs), but, in terms of real power, a privilege of moneyed class, which class by now is absolutely riddled with not only people of all "colors" and other groups but, in truth, non-Americans of all kinds (keeping in mind that 38% of American stocks are owned by foreigners).
