Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2018 11:47 pm
Do you want a question that incites or a question that has insights?Papsmear wrote:QUOTE (Papsmear @ Nov 7 2018, 12:42 PM) Both you gentlemen have been following the mid-terms closer than I have.
I was looking for a more inciteful answer.
Perhaps the political histories of the peopel who won/lost their seats or something along this lines?
My new job is actually quite boring so I was hoping for a wall of text from P1/Ryujin/Cashto/maybe even Metz, explaining to me exactly what happened.
I have alot of time to kill on this job and knowing that you are all quite into politics, there would be a little more reading material in this thread post election.
Here's what happened: it turns out the US is still very, very racist. For quite a bit of time between the 1980s and about 2008, there was a point where the racism was at least somewhat muted. The image of things like the "welfare queen," the Rodney King incident, and the OJ Simpson things were awash with little bits of racism that you might not notice if you're not black. You might think I'm kidding but check this @#(! out:
http://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/oj-simpson/
They made his skin *darker.* That's because America associates darker skin with dangerousness and criminality. Metz will tell you "that's just statistics" because, surprising no one, Metz is a huge racist. What is it actually? Flat out racism. The color of your skin has nothing to do with whether or not you'll commit crimes, obviously.
Donald Trump's team; however, like every Republican since Nixon, knows how to turn that latent racism into votes. The end result was all this fear mongering about a couple thousand migrants who are seeking asylum from central-American failed states, generally ones that US drug policy basically created because there was a moral panic about drugs brought about by... and I @#(! you not this is the most-accepted historical understanding of what happened... racism. All these guys walking from Guatemala to the US where they intend to surrender themselves to US border agents and request asylum are apparently gang members and drug dealers despite this being easily the worst way to sneak drugs into the US. Find some dumbass white kid who's in Tijuana for spring break and ask if he or she would like to make $5,000. Even if they get in trouble, they won't *really* get in trouble.
So what happened was pretty simple: white people showed up and voted for the guys who promised to keep those dirty brown people out of the country. White people showed up and voted for the guys running against those dirty brown people who dare think they belong in the political system. On top of that, white politicians have been using their clout for decades to come up with virtually any excuse for preventing brown people from voting, because how *dare* they act like equal Americans.
You're probably sitting here thinking to yourself, "oh it can't be that bad." There was a precinct in georgia that uses electronic voting machines where all of the machines were delivered and zero power cables were delivered. Guess the ethnic majority of the precinct this goof-up occured. That's on top of the way ND decided that tribal IDs are no longer ok for voting and the way North Carolina actually told a court, "well we closed these precincts because they're predominately black and democrat." During the campaign for Florida governor, the KKK sent out two robocalls to people in florida that are basically just statements of "better not let those n-words in office." During the campaign for Texas senate, Ted Cruz reiterated his support for Steve King, a member of the House of Representatives who is an open white supremacist with close ties to neo-nazi groups and the KKK. Donald Trump would not stop talking about Maxine Waters, a member of the House of Representatives who's two distinguishing features are that she's been there forever and that she's a black woman. Between Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, CNN, and Maxine Waters, at Trump campaigns it was *always Waters* who got the biggest boos and jeers. Donald Trump called Stacey Abrams unqualified to hold the office of governor. Stacey Abrams has a law degree from Yale (where Kavanaugh went) and spent 10 years in the Georgia state legislature. What part of her makes her unqualified? Oh, yeah, her skin color and her genitalia.
I get that this @#(!'s gotta be hard to hear. It's hard for me to accept, especially since the communities I grew up in were largely ethnically diverse (though there were very few Black people, which is the result of long-term racism, we did have many hispanic people, a strong Jewish community, many people from different parts of Asia, a few Indian kids, a few middle easterners, etc.) and by some weird accident of fate many of my friends growing up were Black people and one of my dad's best friends was a Black woman who was a defense attorney. But it's the state of the United States of America, and the more I look into our history, the more I realize that it's always been this country. Malcolm X once said "the south starts at the Canadian border." He's not $#@!ing wrong.
Once upon a time, the Republican party fought against this racism. Seriously, the stories of the Reconstruction are super $#@!ing inspiring and a reminder that the American system of bringing a massively diverse group of people together and building a mutual community doesn't just work, it works really $#@!ing well. But at the heart of it there were Democrats who were seriously pissed off that they lost their $3 billion enterprise (slavery) and twisted the schoolbooks and the public perception of the period until everyone's taught that Grant was a @#(!faced moron who drunkenly murdered his way through the civil war against the Noble, Inestimably Heroic and Good, Tragic Robert E. Lee, the BRILLIANT tactician! P.S. Robert E Lee *really* liked to watch his slaves get whipped and was the architect behind Pickett's Charge where he threw away an entire division of men for no gain.
By the 1920s, pretty much everyone was on the "$#@! Black people" hype train. Charles Houston literally became a lawyer because he saw white US soldiers lynching black US soldiers during WW1. He started the chain of cases that ended with Brown v Board of Education, which stated that racial segregation is unconstitutional as it inherently denies equal protection under the law. At this point America was divided into roughly four corners: some were socially incredibly conservative and considered Black people a subservient class, some weren't, and then some were Republicans and some were Democrats. There's a professor of 20th century history at Princeton named Kevin M. Kruse who's done several exhaustively sourced twitter threads explaining the politics of the early 20th through the 1960s during the party "switch" on racism. I'll link his master thread list so you have more things to read about, but keep in mind that this guy holds a doctorate of philosophy specifically because of his scholarship on civil rights era politics in the US. I'm not linking some rando.
There were some big events that started occurring in the 1940s. First, FDR's wife Eleanor Roosevelt was a vocal proponent of civil rights. Through her influence and the lobbying of the NAACP some of the first "Equal opportunity" laws were passed in the US. If you ask the Black community they'd rightly say it was too little, and the FDR administration was very clear that they were more concerned about getting white people back to work than civil rights. Then after FDR's death, there was an incident towards the end of WW2 in which many Black soldiers were killed by white American soldiers. Truman was pissed and unilaterally ordered the desegregation of the army over the objections of the joint chiefs. The US never went back, and you can ask Sycrus how he feels about the Marines of Color he served with. I promise you Sycrus loves them as brothers.
Things started coming to a head in the 1950s over segregation. If you listen to the words of Storm Thurmond or Barry Goldwater or George Wallace and start agreeing with them, you can just go ahead and lose my number. Those men were irredeemably evil men and the world is a far better place for their passing. And the terrorism of the KKK (yes, it was flat out terrorism. There's a thread on the Kevin Kruse list about the things the KKK did during the middle of the 20th and you would be forgiven for confusing them with modern accounts of ISIS) was of course reaching its highest point ever since President Grant quite literally sent the army into the south in the 1870s to put a $#@!ing stop to the KKK.
(Seriously, the story of Grant being a @#(!ty president and a @#(!ty general is this weird revisionist history bull@#(! by a bunch of Southern white racists who are still, a hundred and fifty four years later, still sore that they lost a war in which their only goal was to continue owning Black people in chattel slavery. The "States Rights" story was invented in the early 1900s during the "redemption" period which was when America "redeemed" itself for the Reconstruction policies. The Reconstruction policies weren't "We're going to seize land," that literally only happened in a handful of cases and each time the land was taken from someone who had literally become a general in the CSA army, so meh. The Reconstruction policies were "what if Black people got to be educated and participate in the political process?")
It was in this environment that you had Dr. King, the Rosa Parks bus boycott, which is itself an astounding testament to the capacity of the Black communities in the US: Rosa Parks was actually the second person arrested, and she was chosen for this act of civil disobedience because she was an ice-cold mother$#@!er who could keep her calm in any situation. Her poise and dignity is not like "oh wow luckily this happened to someone like Rosa Parks," the Black communities wanted this to happen and wanted the face to be Rosa Parks because they knew she was unimpeachable. Then Lee Harvey Oswald shot the sitting president, John F Kennedy (who was beginning to make calls for civil rights). Lyndon Johnson takes the oath of office, and immediately sets to work bringing about a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act which have some real teeth to them. There was considerable opposition, but eventually Johnson signed both into law (and was photographed doing so with Dr. King).
This backlash, by the way, lead to George Wallace getting 46 electoral votes and overall splitting up the Democratic party. The next few decades were a furious realignment as the old guard retired and the new guard of Southern racists began flocking to the welcoming arms of the Republican party. Somewhat interestingly; however, the tactics became quieter. No longer would you warn against "negroes living in your neighborhood," but instead you would talk about "economic freedom" and people "freeloading off the government" in a manner which, when juxtaposed with cultural stereotypes, were very clear in telling the country that the country's problems were the result of those "lazy black people."
Eventually the dogwhistles got quieter and quieter, especially when America's issues with Islam started rearing its ugly head. Hell I remember doing a 6th grade paper on Islam and my mom asking me to find out why those ragheads wanted to kill us all. Like, what. Are you @#(!ting me. Spoiler alert: the answer is they don't, and that religious extremism is blah blah blah blah blah. During the 2000s, it was never about Black people, it was about those dirty Muslims (who we all imagined were middle easterners, of course!) That's when Barrack Obama happened, and oh my god that's what broke the Democratic party.
There's no reason it should have, of course. Barrack Obama was a plenty competent president who did a bunch of things that were suspicious (his bombing campaigns were particularly fierce, he never closed gitmo, he never really made strides in criminal justice, and his expansion of Presidential power was alarming), but all you really need to remember from that era were the accusations levied against him. That he was from kenya, that he didn't have a birth certificate, that he was a muslim, that he's a traitor to the US, etc. Look at how Minigun here talks about Barrack Obama. Now consider the way Minigun talks about Donald Trump, whose first term as President has seen far higher deficits, far more civil disorder, and economic policies that are actually killing off American agriculture (which is like, wow, what an impressive trick that is). The difference between the two men, apart from Obama being an infinitely better person and several orders of magnitude more intelligent, is that one of them is Black.
So now in 2016 we had this situation where we had a woman running against a guy who was not afraid to align himself with David Duke or Steve Bannon or Breitbart at large, who constantly said things that websites like the Daily Stormer praised him for (and btw, much like if you find yourself agreeing with the KKK we're going to have problems, if you start agreeing with self-described nazis we're going to have problems). America's choice was actually pretty clear: Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump did because it turns out the majority of Americans aren't @#$%@#s. But unfortunately, @#$%@#-Americans have votes which count for more because of the electoral college system and the way senate seats are apportioned. A Wyoming vote is worth about 1/300,000th of a senator. A California vote is worth about 1/20,000,000th of a senator. Their vote counts for seventy times what mine does in the Senate race and the Presidential race.
This is the part where I start talking about "bubbles" because Metz and other morons like to talk about "librul bubbles." Right now I live in Santa Barbara near the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I'm going to school. I share a room with a half-black, half-mexican woman, my apartment has two other Hispanic people in it (one of whom is a first-generation American). Next door is a household of Asian-Americans, at least one of whom is an international student. Downstairs we have an Indian dude, and in the kitty corner from my apartment lives a couple of hispanic guys and a couple of white guys. My roommate is from Pittsburg, CA which is basically like Oakland, a poor working class minority-majority city in the bay area. My housemates are also from minority-majority working class neighborhoods. Downstairs, almost everyone is from wealthy portions of San Diego or Los Angeles. My friends, the ones I talk to constantly and share ideas with? One of them is a half-Iranian whose mom is a reporter for NPR and was once the Afghanistan bureau chief. One of them is a woman from Redding, CA which is basically the poster child for "white rural middle america." One of them has a dad who's nearly always homeless. One of them comes from a well-off family, and one of them is a French immigrant. Those are just my IRL friends: online I talk to people from Chile, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK. My dad's friends include a Filipino woman who came here to study nursing, and his wife who's an ex-Chinese national. My classes aren't majority white. They're majority Asian, which was how it was when I was going to high school growing up. I've met people who could barely speak English and worked with people who are fluent in languages like Russian, Ukranian, Farsi... etc. My family is very conservative Christian and I've spent my entire life hearing their talking points, and we're talking the kind of evangelicals who think Liberty University is a pretty sweet place to go to college.
But somehow people who live in these cities that have massively diverse populations are accused of living in "bubbles." They don't know what "real america" is like, because apparently the only way to expand your horizons and engage different viewpoints is to live in a town of fifty white people who have 25 grandparents between them and all think that taco bell is exciting ethnic food. Yeah, ok.
It's actually astounding how many of these people will up and tell me that I don't know the value of hard work, or that I don't really know what life is like, as if somehow I was never in a position where I was barely scraping by working a blue collar job surrounded by people who only barely spoke the only language I knew. Metz insists that because I attend college (and learn about physics) that I don't have any survival skills and have no idea how to live in the "real world," only in my "liberal academic bubble." Look at the "planning commission" he's on and look at the pictures of everyone on it and tell me that you have ever seen a more useless concentration of white mediocrity.
So, to answer your question, what happened? A broken electoral system ran face first into centuries of ingrained white supremacy and American white supremacy's only opponents have been *terrified* of calling it out because "we have to be civil or they'll vote for Trump." Spoiler alert: they didn't vote for trump because liberals were mean. They voted for trump because they're racist @#(!bags. They continue to vote for Trump's party because they continue to be racist @#(!bags. They get pissed off when you call them racist @#(!bags because they know they are racist @#(!bags and don't want other people to find out.
If you don't like me calling people racist @#(!bags, then you should either a) convince them to stop being racist @#(!bags or b) just go ahead and stop calling me a "friend" because I have had it up to my $#@!ing eyeballs with that @#(!. And when people talk about "you can't have friends based on political positions" yeah $#@! that noise. No friend of mine thinks Brian Kemp's campaign in Georgia was "fair." No friend of mine calls Andrew Gillum a "criminal." No friend of mine votes for politicians that take away LGBT rights. No friend of mine looks at children being thrown in immigration cages and says "this is fine." No friend of mine will ever, ever, ever vote for a person who courts endorsements from David Duke or Jerry Fallwell or Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reily or Candace Owens or $#@!ing Tomi Lohren. It's at the point where these aren't political differences, these are fundamental ethical differences.
As promised, btw, here's the link to the thread links from Kevin M. Kruse:
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/ ... 6693651457