Three former members of Congress have become leading figures in the Trump Administration, as it works against Civil Rights, Health Care, and common decency toward the poor, and one has to wonder how these three men can look in the mirror and feel they are doing what is proper in any society.
Jeff Sessions, former Alabama Senator, is doing everything he can as Attorney General to undermine the rights of all racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and transgender Americans, trying to take us back to the way things were in the era before the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950s, and trying to deny the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation in American society. Jeff Sessions has a hardened look on his face, and anyone can see what a nasty racist, nativist, and misogynist Sessions is.
Tom Price, former Georgia Congressman and a medical doctor, is Secretary of Health and Human Services, and has engaged in corrupt conflicts of interest regarding stock profits given to him by companies that the department must deal with. And now, Price is so eager to knock 24 million Americans off health care completely. What kind of doctor, and basically any human being, would be so hardhearted and cold and distant about the basic life and health of people who are elderly, disabled, poor? The man has such an evil look on his face.
And then we have former South Carolina Congressman Nick Mulvaney, who is head of the Office of Management and Budget, who is out to promote extreme tax cuts to the wealthy by cutting all programs that help the poor to survive just barely, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, as well as health care, education, food stamps, used by poor women and their children, as well as disabled and elderly. Mulvaney sees the poor as a group to exploit and make their miserable lives ever more downtrodden. Mulvaney is Robin Hood in reverse, and is a despicable, uncaring man, who has no conscience.
The thing that unites all three is that they are all “religious”, “good Christians”, in all the hypocrisy of such terminology!
If this is religiosity, to oppose the message of their savior Jesus Christ, who happened to be Jewish, then no wonder so many people are so cynical about religion!
Liberals Need to Make the Case For Government Programs That Work
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/04/17/liberals-need-to-make-the-case-for-government-programs-that-work/#.WPT-GM3JYPs.facebook
Maxine Waters is having a moment.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/18/politics/maxine-waters-democrats-millennials/index.html
Liberals/Progressives were right: Racism played a larger role in Trump’s win than income and authoritarianism.
 http://www.salon.com/2017/04/17/liberals-were-right-racism-played-a-larger-role-in-trumps-victory-than-income-inequality-and-authoritarianism/
(“The newly released American National Election Study analyzes voters and their motivations in the 2016 electionâ€)
Considering the fact that Trump’s clothing line is made in China, his “Buy American” mantra he was spewing today is rather hypocritical.
Ms. LeTourneau talks about the role racism played in the election as well.
Beyond Black and White, the Role Xenophobia Played in the Election
by Nancy LeTourneau
April 18, 2017 2:47 PM
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/04/18/beyond-black-and-white-the-role-xenophobia-played-in-the-election/#.WPZgiBwtxyU.facebook
Yesterday Martin raised some important questions about the findings outlined by Thomas Wood in an article titled, “Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism.†On the same day, Philip Klinkner wrote, “Immigration was central to the election, and hostility toward immigrants animated Trump voters.â€
It is important to note that this kind of analysis has been triggered by the release of data from the American National Election Study (ANES). That was also the basis for an article by Mehdi Hasan that I referenced previously titled, “Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues.â€
Some of the questions that arise from the reviews of this data might have to do with the need to revisit what we mean by words like “racism.†We have traditionally used that to describe some of the attitudes White Americans have about Black Americans. The questions Wood relies on to identify racism are all based on that formulation. But does “racism†also apply to attitudes about Mexican Americans? How about immigrants more generally? The survey questions from ANES on which Klinkner relies are a completely different set of inquiries.
The fact of the matter is that many Mexican Americans are not immigrants. They lived here long before European Americans came to these shores. And yet they have been subjected to much of the same kinds of racism directed towards African Americans. Is that because white people assume they are immigrants or because they are not white? Perhaps a combination of both.
Of course, we can’t talk about the role that anti-immigration played in the election without discussing Islamophobia. Based on what I have seen and read, that was a huge factor in many rural communities, especially where evangelical churches and community groups hosted presentations by the fear-mongers. That brand of discrimination is primarily based on religious beliefs. But there are also a lot of stereotypes about Muslims being “brown†and Islamophobia is often linked to fears about immigration in general.
If, rather than slicing and dicing these issues separately into different categories, we were able to subsume them under one heading titled “xenophobia†or “white nationalism,†we could actually measure the impact that fear and hatred of “the other†had on this election.
Of course, we could add to that Martin’s suggestion of the role played by sexism, and homophobia as well. That might give us a more complete picture of the politics of resentment that was exploited by Donald Trump.
The article she referred to by Martin.
The Strange Role of Racism in the 2016 Election
by Martin Longman
April 17, 2017 12:36 PM
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/04/17/the-strange-role-of-racism-in-the-2016-election/
The headline blares “Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianismâ€, but Thomas Wood’s piece at the Washington Post is a bit more nuanced than that. Before we talk about it, though, let’s look at how Wood got his data:
Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making.
The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in 2016 compared with other recent elections.
The factors he looks at are authoritarianism and racism, but also income level. Income level is self-explanatory, but the former factors require carefully crafted questions. To gauge people’s relative authoritarianism, they asked questions about child-rearing. The more people emphasize following rules and respecting elders over self-reliance and curiosity, the more authoritarian they are. To gauge people’s relative level of racism, they are asked indirect questions that really amount to giving an explanation for why blacks remain lower on the socioeconomic scale. This is called the “symbolic racism scale†or SRS.
The finding here is pretty straightforward:
Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump.
This data can be compared to previous elections going back to 1988. What’s surprising isn’t that Trump voters are more racist than Clinton voters, because the same finding is there for people who voted for Romney, McCain, Dole and the two Bushes. In fact, on three of the four questions that test racial attitudes, Trump’s voters were less racist than their Republican predecessors (the fourth question was a tie).
The big difference is among Democrats, or Hillary Clinton voters, who are far less racist in their attitudes than the Democrats who voted in any recent election, including the two for Barack Obama. The implications are bizarre, suggesting that a lot of racially bigoted people were willing to vote for Obama against an opponent who didn’t appeal too directly to their racism, but who flocked to Trump when he made “political incorrectness†central to his pitch. To be explicit here, a lot of racist Democrats voted for Obama and didn’t vote for Clinton, and they did it because of racism.
This suggests that if you want a racist’s vote, you have to make an appeal directly to their racism. Without it, he or she just might vote for a racial minority.
Maybe this data would become a little clearer with questions about gender attitudes, but there would be no historical data for purposes of comparison.
In any case, yes, racism played a bigger role than authoritarianism according to this large survey, but what really stands out is the data about income. Here we have data going back to 1948, and it was always the case that people in the top income quintile vastly preferred Republicans. That changed in 2012, and it changed dramatically in 2016. Rich people preferred Obama in his reelection and they preferred Clinton.
Looking at the lowest income quintile is interesting, too, because prior to 2016 that group had voted at at least the national average for Democrats in every election except Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 campaigns (but not his landslide 1972 election). They strongly favored Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in all of their elections, but they turned on Hillary.
It looks like Trump resembles Nixon in more ways than one. They both did better among low-income voters than a typical Republican. I guess this is the Silent Majority pitch, and the appeal of the Southern Strategy. Perhaps lower income Protestants were the most likely to abandon the FDR coalition to oppose the Catholic John F. Kennedy, just as lower income Protestants were more likely to abandon the Obama coalition and go for the guy telling them that their racist attitudes were being stifled and marginalized by the political correctness police.
I still think gender attitudes played a role here, but that’s just my own speculation. It’s important to know the complete picture because it’s hard to craft a response without it.
Overall, it confirms my observations about the county patterns of voting. The election was lost because low income/rural white voters who voted for Obama decided to vote for Trump. Ironically, racism played a big role in the flip even though almost everyone expected the opposite to happen (that without a black candidate, the Democrats would do better with the racists).
It just goes to show that you can think you’ve got everything figured out, but you never do.
In our experience, misogyny definitely factored in. Male Republicans we know didn’t like the idea of a black president followed by a woman president.
Young Democratic voters that Rational Lefty and I are friends with would have preferred some younger candidates.
Trump Drifts Away From Populism, to Supporters’ Dismay
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/populism-donald-trump-administration.html?_r=0
(Anyone who believed a word Trump said deserves everything they get. But the rest of us don’t.)
Re: Trump’s clothing being made in China.
So is Ivanka’s. He’s using the office of president to further enrich him and his family.
The Khans have endorsed Perriello.
http://bluevirginia.us/2017/04/khizr-ghazala-khan-endorse-tom-perriello-governor