Vox: Bernie Sanders and many Democrats keep confusing identity politics with tokenism

[TomCADem]

11. Salon - Stop blaming identity politics: With white liberals like these, who needs the right wing?

Last edited Sun Aug 13, 2017, 01:40 PM - Edit history (1)

Bill Maher is another racial apologist who refuses to acknowledge that Trump is race baiting. Instead, Maher blames Democrats and minorities. How are Democrats going to win if they pretend that what happened in Virginia was not motivated by racial hatred and a white supremacist agenda?

This reminds of Republicans blaming rape victims for dressing inappropriately. Likewise, Maher and Sanders blame minorities, women and religious minorities for demanding equal rights, thus buying into Trump's idea that equality comes at the expense of white males.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson both successfully addressed this issue head on and acknowledged that racism and scapegoating were used to oppress white males. Ignoring racism is not going to make it go away.

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/07/stop-blaming-identity-politics-with-liberals-like-these-who-needs-the-right-wing/

Is there any problem in America not the fault of liberal progressives? Has anyone actually ever met a liberal? What do these people do for fun? Sneer about cultural appropriation, burn American flags, and mock old women wearing crosses?

The idea that every political, social and financial crisis in the United States has a liberal origin is not only the propaganda of right-wing tantrums, but increasingly since the surreal election of Donald Trump, an obsession of liberals themselves. Myopically fixated on their own masochism and pathetic insecurity, they have wasted precious airtime, intellectual energy and freelance budgets of popular publications in attempts to explain how exactly they are to blame for 62 million Americans driving or walking to the polls to vote for a historically illiterate fool whose character actually appears in worse shape than his acumen.

Bernie Sanders, a leftist rather than a liberal, was one of the first to incoherently assign the presidential loss to the failure of “identity politics,” failing to recognize that Donald Trump is the most powerful practitioner of identity politics in the world. Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor, acted as eloquent parrot to Sanders when he wrote that the Democrats’ fixation on diversity cost them the election. Recently, Bill Maher, whose derangement seems to advance with every television appearance, told Jack Tapper that the Democratic Party failed in 2016 because its leaders “made white people feel like a minority.”

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One has to wonder: With liberals like these, who needs reactionaries? Trump voters told pollsters that “diversity comes at the expense of whites” and that the federal government, throughout American history, has provided too much assistance to black citizens. Maher, Lilla and Sanders would not identify the problem with the white electorate as racism, but insufficient coddling and pandering from Democrats. The crucial aim of American politics, according to the increasingly widespread view of opposition to “identity politics,” is to make white cowards and bigots feel that they have no need for growth, and that they are the center of the universe.