09-10-2016, 08:33 PM
She may have lost no votes among people who were never, ever, ever going to vote for her.
Yes, it is easy for liberals to kick racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and religiously-bigoted people. Bigotry is practically illiberal by definition. But does one have a real excuse ion a world with so much sophistication to be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and religiously-bigoted? Anyone who has read The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird, standards of late-K-12 education, has no excuse for racial or religious bigotry.
Donald Trump has scapegoated people who have gotten ahead of people who see themselves as salt of the earth -- but generally lacking in marketable skills. So if Mexican-American kids are doing better in school than their kids and getting better lives... then something must be wrong! Told by half-witted preachers that Muslims worship the "Moon God" Allah, that "Allah akbar" means "Kill Christians!", that Osama bin Laden is the true face of Islam, and that the President that offends them by being non-white is a Muslim, they see Muslims in much the same light as Germans who saw Jews as a devious conspiracy to dominate and exploit the world based on some Jewish conception or racial superiority and thus to be driven out.
So what if Donald Trump fails this time? The nastiness of hatred will be back in right-wing American politics. What used to be the fringe associated with likes like the Birch Society, Posse Comitatus, and Patriot movements have become mainstream within the Republican Party. To be sure, our economic order, one in which the primary objective of which is to maximize easy income for economic elites by enforcing hardship and fear upon everyone else, creates a populace that feels that economic elites have cheated them but dares not blame those elites. But people full of fear of elites turns to 'safe" enemies that people can identify easily by some difference. Race. Rejection of heterosexual patriarchy. Ethnicity. Religion.
Yes, it is easy for liberals to kick racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and religiously-bigoted people. Bigotry is practically illiberal by definition. But does one have a real excuse ion a world with so much sophistication to be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and religiously-bigoted? Anyone who has read The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird, standards of late-K-12 education, has no excuse for racial or religious bigotry.
Donald Trump has scapegoated people who have gotten ahead of people who see themselves as salt of the earth -- but generally lacking in marketable skills. So if Mexican-American kids are doing better in school than their kids and getting better lives... then something must be wrong! Told by half-witted preachers that Muslims worship the "Moon God" Allah, that "Allah akbar" means "Kill Christians!", that Osama bin Laden is the true face of Islam, and that the President that offends them by being non-white is a Muslim, they see Muslims in much the same light as Germans who saw Jews as a devious conspiracy to dominate and exploit the world based on some Jewish conception or racial superiority and thus to be driven out.
So what if Donald Trump fails this time? The nastiness of hatred will be back in right-wing American politics. What used to be the fringe associated with likes like the Birch Society, Posse Comitatus, and Patriot movements have become mainstream within the Republican Party. To be sure, our economic order, one in which the primary objective of which is to maximize easy income for economic elites by enforcing hardship and fear upon everyone else, creates a populace that feels that economic elites have cheated them but dares not blame those elites. But people full of fear of elites turns to 'safe" enemies that people can identify easily by some difference. Race. Rejection of heterosexual patriarchy. Ethnicity. Religion.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.