Donald Trump, White Supremacy, and the Discourse of Panic

[DonViejo]

By Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait

September 24, 2017
8:30 pm

Last weekend, a man boarded a bus in Seattle brandishing a Nazi armband. A Twitter user photographed him and sent out the photo with the hashtag “AntiFascistAlert.” Shortly after, somebody found the man and knocked him out with a punch, the video of which went viral.

It was not the first time a video of a physical attack on a white supremacist thrilled progressives. Self-styled “anti-fascist” demonstrators have inserted themselves into a number of political dramas over the past year, often winning plaudits far beyond their narrow movement. When one demonstrator punched Richard Spencer, the far-right activist, on Inauguration Day, it provoked a spirited intramural debate within the left about the morality of unprovoked physical attacks on … Nazis? Fascists? White supremacists? Racists? Who, exactly, can be assaulted on the basis of political viewpoint?

It may seem pedantic, in the face of a threat as radical as the Trump presidency, to quibble over terminological distinctions between different varieties of odious people. But the language we use organizes our political thinking. And one of the terrible things Trump has done to this country has been to warp the terms and categories — and, hence, the character — of the political opposition through the exertion of sheer terror. Seemingly harmless changes have crept into our political lexicon, which may have dangerous consequences.

Consider the question of whether it is accurate to describe Trump as a “white supremacist.” Ta-Nehisi Coates adopted this description in a sharp and deservedly praised Atlantic essay. Sports talk-show host Jemele Hill repeated the term. (“Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists.”) The Trump administration (displaying its characteristic lack of respect either for freedom of speech or intellectual consistency) demanded her firing. This caused numerous commenters on the left to defend not only Hill’s right to say it — a very sound position — but the substance of what she said. Hill “has a measure of truth on her side,” writes the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan. New York Times columnist Charles Blow concurs.

Until very recently, “white supremacist” had a fixed meaning, and it described something different than the political style represented by Donald Trump. Before the 1960s, many American politicians openly advocated white supremacy. After that, political appeals to racism had to use some level of symbolic remove. Conservative politicians have employed crime, welfare, or affirmative action as triggers. Conservative politicians often denied or downplayed the persistence of racism in American society. Racism has been absolutely central to the political appeal of conservative politics since the 1960s, and many politicians have harbored private racist beliefs, but racism has worked almost exclusively as subtext, not text.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/donald-trump-white-supremacy-and-the-discourse-of-panic.html

[Volaris]

1. Pfew...

The Authoritarian Left (those who would beat up self-professed Nazis) are not better Constitutionally than the Nazis themselves.

Real American Liberalism allows for the possibility that our Village Idiots are going to find ways to make themselves seen, and that in the long run, the more we let them do this within the bounds of Law, the easier it is to convince others of how truly, truly untenable their position is. The self-professed liberals who disagree with this position are no friends of mine, for 2 reasons:
First, they are REacting, instead of being Proactive.
Second they fail to understand the nuance of SLOW action, they want the RESULT of their effort RIGHT FUCKING NOW, DAMMIT, and that's simply not how politics in our system works.

Liberalism IS the beating heart of our Democratic Party.
But slow and steady Progress, MUST be its mechanism of delivery, otherwise we will ALL fail each other.

And if we let that happen, the Nazis and the status-quo power structure that enable and support them, will win by default.

[Abu Pepe]

2. I don't think the antifa movement is helpful

But Chait's argument that conflating Trump with the Nazis who love him is the same as labeling MLK a communist is unconvincing at best.