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

[JCanete]

15. no of course it isn't...starting the conversation by calling people, who yes, do behave in racist

Last edited Tue Aug 15, 2017, 01:50 AM - Edit history (3)

ways, "racists"--as an opener-- is not how you undo the scapegoating that they are buying into that is fucking them over even as they fuck over minorities and women and people of other religions than christian. You are giving them a reason to tune out before you've even presented the argument. Sanders is trying to get them to tune in. I don't see a problem with that, since he isn't abandoning issues of civil rights. He isn't pandering by pretending these people have the right of it when it comes to any social issue. He's saying they've got it wrong, in fact.

He is doing the EXACT work that addresses the problem that you are presenting, by getting people to let their guard down so that they can see what they are actually doing to even themselves. That has nothing to do with coddling or not coddling. That has to do with understanding that once you go to name calling and assuming people's worst intentions you have lost them before you even began.

Yes, racism is a huge part of this picture, but racism is not something that is in itself a fundamental element. It is fed by fears over safety and instability, at least in times of economic uncertainty when that well is particularly drawn from for the sake of misdirection. There are reasons why people distrust and hate. Stripping away their logic for doing so and showing them they are being played seems like a better approach than trying to rub their nose in it.

I can't speak to Maher...I don't think he fully gets the problem and for that reason sometimes his analysis hits and sometimes it is skewed. I wouldn't disagree though, if his point were that that's all we seemed to run on...our diversity and inclusiveness(excepting the deplorables of course), because even in a changing nation, that is branding stupidity(unless you really want to avoid the third rail of class warfare, and in that case it's what you have to work with). Its stupidity because it isn't dismantling the things that these white people are afraid of, it is seemingly reinforcing the propaganda that has been fed to them...that they are losing their country to brown people and people who are "erosive" to their values and foreign to their understanding. We decided to let that narrative stand, rather than to say we're all actually in it together and that the threat is not what they've been told by the people dividing us and letting us kick our own asses over and over. We thought it better to say, "Damn straight, its us versus you," than to do what Sanders is doing, which is talking to them about the things actually killing them and the things that could make their lives better.

That isn't to say that the system isn't rigged against Democrats, and that voter role purges and corporate propaganda, etc. etc. aren't making our elections illegitimate. By all rights Clinton should definitely have won the presidency, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest it didn't go that way because of the purges. But if we aren't going to energize people to fight against oligarchy, then the oligarchy will steal it from us again and again, over and over while we piss and moan about the small percentage of hold-outs and all the Trump voters who we basically told were what was wrong with the country.