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I agree that those are issues that should be addressed, but if you feel that Trump's rise wasn't legitimate, then I urge you to spend some time in an area of th

I agree that those are issues that should be addressed, but if you feel that Trump's rise wasn't legitimate, then I urge you to spend some time in an area of the country that voted for him. There are many, many areas of the country where people feel like their quality of life has been on the decline for decades and who have lost faith in normal politicians. The "altright rhetoric" may not be influential to you, but it is very influential to a large chunk of the population.

deleted 9y ago
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gizmo 9y ago
Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind. Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegotiating all trade agreements, a.k.a. "winning". The entire campaign was a big lie. Trump lies on a scale that is not comparable to what regular politicians do -- his salesmanship skills allow him to tune in to whatever people want to hear. When the connection between campaign promises and policy gets totally severed democracy dies. White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump. 1. Blaming outsourcing and illegal immigration is not racist. If American citizens need to compete against people who are willing to work very hard for less than minimum wage, that hurts the wages and quality of life of Americans. Our labor laws exist for a reason. 2. Many people were aware of how non-political Trump sounded during the election. People didn't vote for him because of his eloquence, but because he was the only major contender that acknowledged many issues that our country had. Like you said, rural America has every right to be angry, and Trump was the only Republican that tried to tap into that.
  - gizmo 9y ago
    1. There is no clear evidence that illegal immigration has a meaningful influence on wages. Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do. For the past 30 years wages haven't kept up with productivity growth, I'm sure you've seen the charts. Meanwhile expenses for housing, education and healthcare have exploded. Framing immigration as the primary cause of economic stagnation is wrong, because it is a minor influence at most. The way Trump talked about immigration was transparently racist, and it's the same Southern Strategy rhetoric we've seen time and time again. 2. Voters didn't choose Trump just because "he acknowledged issues". This election was a referendum on race, and that's what got Trump in office. See for instance https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-vote-trump-racism-did/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak...
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      1. I didn't say illegal immigration was a major cause of low wages, but it definitely does have an effect, especially among lower class workers. You say "Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do," but the issue is that Americans refuse to do it for minimum wage. Why would someone do backbreaking labor for near minimum wage and no benefits when they can work at a gas station making more? For Americans to do those jobs, wages would have to go up. Corporations would be forced to do so if illegal immigration didn't keep wages down. 2. That site that you linked to is ridiculous. They measure racism by peoples' beliefs in self-determination and whether or not illegal immigrants take jobs. Which they do. If there are 10 million illegal immigrants in a country of 300 million doing lower class work, and those people aren't equally distributed across the country, you can bet there will be pockets of land where lower class wages are suppressed. And you can bet that, within those areas impacted, views towards illegal immigrants will be more negative.
      - jakelazaroff 9y ago
        At the core of your argument is this premise: > Corporations would be forced to do so if illegal immigration didn't keep wages down. But no one is forcing corporations to hire undocumented immigrants over people authorized to work here; in fact, they're pressured not to. It's illegal! That's why "illegal immigration" is cast as a racist issue: it's often a hand-wavey dog whistle blaming people of color for economic issues while absolving (generally white-owned) businesses of any responsibility.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I'm not sure that predicating your campaign on lies reduces it's legitimacy if you actually hold the popular mandate even as those lies are exposed. Fortunately, that situation doesn't describe us.
KirinDave 9y ago
I'm definitely not arguing that no one voted for him. But I do think we keep seeing examples of structural manipulations of the system to alter vote outcomes. Republicans haven't been particularly subtle about this. And actually, my dude, there are a ton of people studying this and the altright is by no means Trump's largest individual support block. There's quite large and very thoughtful investigations with raw data available. Again, I repeat: if you actually crunch the numbers the altright is not only a minority of Trump's supporters, but a faction that's almost vanishingly small. This sort of shows up in practical measurements of their gatherings. Now, unopposed I think they'll grow. That's what fascism is all about at this stage and really their principle message is that they want power and they'll fix white people problems by any means necessary. But they weren't particularly effective this last election cycle compared to the more direct manipulations we see.

deleted 9y ago

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gizmo 9y ago

Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind. Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegotiating all trade agreements, a.k.a. "winning". The entire campaign was a big lie. Trump lies on a scale that is not comparable to what regular politicians do -- his salesmanship skills allow him to tune in to whatever people want to hear. When the connection between campaign promises and policy gets totally severed democracy dies. White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump. 1. Blaming outsourcing and illegal immigration is not racist. If American citizens need to compete against people who are willing to work very hard for less than minimum wage, that hurts the wages and quality of life of Americans. Our labor laws exist for a reason. 2. Many people were aware of how non-political Trump sounded during the election. People didn't vote for him because of his eloquence, but because he was the only major contender that acknowledged many issues that our country had. Like you said, rural America has every right to be angry, and Trump was the only Republican that tried to tap into that.
- gizmo 9y ago
  1. There is no clear evidence that illegal immigration has a meaningful influence on wages. Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do. For the past 30 years wages haven't kept up with productivity growth, I'm sure you've seen the charts. Meanwhile expenses for housing, education and healthcare have exploded. Framing immigration as the primary cause of economic stagnation is wrong, because it is a minor influence at most. The way Trump talked about immigration was transparently racist, and it's the same Southern Strategy rhetoric we've seen time and time again. 2. Voters didn't choose Trump just because "he acknowledged issues". This election was a referendum on race, and that's what got Trump in office. See for instance https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-vote-trump-racism-did/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak...
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    1. I didn't say illegal immigration was a major cause of low wages, but it definitely does have an effect, especially among lower class workers. You say "Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do," but the issue is that Americans refuse to do it for minimum wage. Why would someone do backbreaking labor for near minimum wage and no benefits when they can work at a gas station making more? For Americans to do those jobs, wages would have to go up. Corporations would be forced to do so if illegal immigration didn't keep wages down. 2. That site that you linked to is ridiculous. They measure racism by peoples' beliefs in self-determination and whether or not illegal immigrants take jobs. Which they do. If there are 10 million illegal immigrants in a country of 300 million doing lower class work, and those people aren't equally distributed across the country, you can bet there will be pockets of land where lower class wages are suppressed. And you can bet that, within those areas impacted, views towards illegal immigrants will be more negative.
    - jakelazaroff 9y ago
      At the core of your argument is this premise: > Corporations would be forced to do so if illegal immigration didn't keep wages down. But no one is forcing corporations to hire undocumented immigrants over people authorized to work here; in fact, they're pressured not to. It's illegal! That's why "illegal immigration" is cast as a racist issue: it's often a hand-wavey dog whistle blaming people of color for economic issues while absolving (generally white-owned) businesses of any responsibility.
KirinDave 9y ago
I'm not sure that predicating your campaign on lies reduces it's legitimacy if you actually hold the popular mandate even as those lies are exposed. Fortunately, that situation doesn't describe us.

KirinDave 9y ago

I'm definitely not arguing that no one voted for him. But I do think we keep seeing examples of structural manipulations of the system to alter vote outcomes. Republicans haven't been particularly subtle about this. And actually, my dude, there are a ton of people studying this and the altright is by no means Trump's largest individual support block. There's quite large and very thoughtful investigations with raw data available. Again, I repeat: if you actually crunch the numbers the altright is not only a minority of Trump's supporters, but a faction that's almost vanishingly small. This sort of shows up in practical measurements of their gatherings. Now, unopposed I think they'll grow. That's what fascism is all about at this stage and really their principle message is that they want power and they'll fix white people problems by any means necessary. But they weren't particularly effective this last election cycle compared to the more direct manipulations we see.