Re: POTUS Election Thread 2020
Originally Posted by Hooahguy
More on why the presidential race is static in terms of sentiment. What you have to understand is that when Trumpists say Trump is doing a good job, aside from any lies or delusions what is meant is that Trump is leading an uprising against threats to White Power (the more perverse of the alt-right have called it a Warsaw Ghetto uprising.)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...acy-study.html
The reality is, as I've sometimes pointed out over the years, that right-wing Americans have about as much regard for democracy as the most radical Salafist extremists have.One explanation for Republican indifference to such deeds is that Republicans aren’t aware of them: Fox News’s programming and Facebook’s algorithm have simply kept red America blissfully ignorant of the commander-in-chief’s most tyrannical moods. (If a president executes a political prisoner in the middle of Fifth Avenue and no right-wing pundit is inclined to report it, does his shot make a sound?)
But a new paper from Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels suggests an alternative hypothesis: Many Republican voters value “keeping America great” more than they value democracy — and, by “keeping America great,” such voters typically mean “keeping America’s power structure white.”
In a January 2020 survey fielded by YouGov, a slim majority of GOP voters agreed with the statement “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Nearly three-fourths agreed with “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.” More than 40 percent agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” More than 47 percent concurred with the premise that “strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.” And on all of these questions, most of those who did not agree were merely unsure.
This result has been discovered in I-don't-know-how-many studies over the past few years. The definitive struggle with American Darkness is that over malignant Whiteness. Without Whiteness, no army of evangelical hucksters or grasping plutocrats can maintain dominion, and they know it. I don't say this in allusion to the old trope that racism is a trick used by the elites to deceive the common folk, because the "elites" feel the same way to their bones. (The failure, then, of populism is that its inherent dichotomies between Elites and The People have always been incomplete and self-soothing.)Bartels’s study therefore aimed to discern the nature of popular indifference to liberal democracy on the American right. Which is to say: What ideological or cultural forces lead Republican voters to subordinate democracy to their desired political outcomes?
The study entertains a range of possibilities. By examining the answers that YouGov’s respondents gave to other survey questions, Bartels explored the degree of correlation between six voter dispositions and anti-democratic sentiment: partisan affect (i.e., a voter’s level of avowed love for Republicans and hostility for Democrats), enthusiasm for President Trump, cynicism about actually existing democracy, ideological commitment to economic conservatism, ideological commitment to cultural conservatism, and white “ethnic antagonism.” That last category refers to a voter’s level of concern about the political and cultural power of nonwhites in the United States. For example, if respondents agreed that “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country,” that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities,” and that speaking English is “essential for being a true American,” they would post a high score on the ethnic-antagonism scale.
Of course, many of these dispositions are heavily correlated. To gauge the independent influence of each factor, Bartels controlled for five of the dispositions (freezing them at the average value among Republican voters) and then looked at how closely a high score on the remaining one correlated with anti-democratic sentiment. Applying this method to all six variables, he found that ethnic antagonism is a better predictor of a Republican’s indifference to democratic niceties than anything else.
Notably, what Bartels calls “cultural conservatism” (essentially, attitudes on all “culture war” issues except those concerning race, such as “patriotism, traditional morality … and disdain for big cities, rich people, journalists, and college professors”) is actually negatively correlated with anti-democratic attitudes. In other words: A GOP voter who espouses average levels of ethnic antagonism, partisan affect, and support for Trump — but exceptionally high levels of cultural conservatism — is less likely to agree that defending America’s traditional way of life justifies the use of force than the average Republican is. This suggests that popular support for authoritarianism within the GOP is not animated primarily by concerns with conservative Christianity’s declining influence over public life but rather with that of the white race.
Pelosi has gained a reputation for trolling Trump in their dealings since 2017, latest example being her dismissiveness of Trump's stature vis-a-vis debates. As to how distemperate that makes Trump or what it achieves, it's probably impossible to say.
He was demonstrably angered and shaken by all the inquiries into his finances and dealings with Russia, to the point that much of his rhetoric has been geared around them. Also, many of the crimes he's committed in office. In these - especially in 2019 - there may have been too much of a reliance on the maxim of 'allowing the enemy to make mistakes,' in the absence of clear alternatives within our power. It's more that we can hold a minimal measure of relief in Trump's bungling and incompetence - it's not actually good or helpful that he feels he has and does have impunity to do whatever he whims.
It's a nice thing to have, I just don't think there's a way to configure it toward extracting material advantage. One of the things one comes to realize over time paying attention to politics is that, as a truism, media coverage of a candidate's platform, attitudes, actions, and the like is wholly determined by how media entities choose to portray them. A political actor has very little control over that. Trump doesn't get anywhere without the media giving him a leg up.As I said earlier, the media seems to have gone the way of many Americans...weary of COVID-19, and weary of the BS in Congress at not getting anything done. Burning buildings, shootings, right-wingers vs. left-wingers, all the crap that grabs ratings (not that it shouldn't get press, but press to the exclusion of a lot of other things). And right now it seems to me that Fearless Leader is dictating the pace, and the circumstances. That needs to change......
Regarding my stance wishing the Democrats would get militant and speak of the fascist threat in the tenor Republicans use for black women suggesting children eat vegetables, all I can say with confidence about its media representation to the public is that it would certainly take command of the discourse in the way you'd like. The quality of the effects themselves is more debatable.
Speaking of media narratives, to the extent this isn't being reported as "Republicans refuse to negotiate" or "Republicans have made the affirmative decision not to legislate pandemic/economic relief" it is a disservice done by the media.weary of the BS in Congress at not getting anything done.
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). As an example, NOW Biden is going to Kenosha, AFTER Trump has already been there. Now it's still possible Biden/Harris gain some gravitas if they meet personally (and sincerely) with the Blake family, and just as importantly, with leaders of the protests. But they should have already been there.
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