Compromise Has Died in the US Electorate

[tomahawk6]

Your Parliment lacks a chaplain ?

 

[PPCLI Guy]

Your Parliment lacks a chaplain ?

Not that I am aware of...and religion has no place in our politics at all.  We do not care where or even if our MPs go to church.  It is a complete non-issue......except that most know who the Sikhs are, and most know who many of the Muslims are, but that is a matter of dress as a means of self-identification, as opposed to proclamation.

 

[Remius]

Not that I am aware of...and religion has no place in our politics at all.  We do not care where or even if our MPs go to church.  It is a complete non-issue......except that most know who the Sikhs are, and most know who many of the Muslims are, but that is a matter of dress as a means of self-identification, as opposed to proclamation.

Not quite true as a prayer is part of parliamentary proceeedings. See here: http://www.ourcommons.ca/procedure-book-livre/document.aspx?sbdid=af057bd0-f018-4fb4-bd75-4a2200729f05&sbpidx=2

Also there is a chaplain assigned to the speaker in the British system.  Not sure if Canada has one or not.

 

[FJAG]

Your Parliment lacks a chaplain ?

Not that I'm aware of as the prayer in the House of Commons is given by the speaker.

There's a fundamental difference between religious freedom in our Constitution and that of the US.

Canada recognizes in it's constitution in the preamble that states "Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God." This however is an anachronism that was put into the document in order to resolve some compromise. Pierre Trudeau himself didn't want it and was quoted as saying "I don't think God gives a damn whether he's in the constitution or not." The phrase has been generally interpreted as having no legal effect and being a "dead letter". See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble_to_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms

The substantive freedom of religion clause is in Section 2 which provides that "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms a) freedom of conscience and religion ..." As such it is a permissive right given to people to use or not to use.

The US Constitution, on the other hand, provides at the 1st Amendment that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..." This is a restrictive as well as permissive law which puts a prohibition on Congress (and government in general) in this field.

I quite frankly prefer the US provision as it appears at first blush to be clearer. Unfortunately what ought to be clear provisions are ones that are inconvenient to many of those who just can't stop themselves from proselytizing.

:cheers:

 

[beirnini]

So we can see that compromise has died in the American independent and left-leaning voters, but why has never really existed in "conservatives"? Glad you asked!

Donald Trump won the GOP primary and the presidency because campaigning on whiteness-first messaging still has potency in the 21st century. Plenty of people don’t want to directly engage with this fact, but this [piece] will be getting into it in full. All too often I see the framing that “Hillary lost to the worst candidate in history.” But I think this framing has always been wrong, and it allows people to bypass a question that they don’t want to grapple with: why was Trump electorally viable to the degree that he was? Do not construe this as me arguing that Hillary’s campaign didn’t make mistakes, but I want to laser focus on why people voted for Trump, and what that says about where we are as a country.

“He promised to shake up the establishment.”

“His campaign resonated with those who have been left behind.”

“It’s just so refreshing to hear a candidate speak his mind.”

“Trump voters responded to economic anxiety.”

But these theories do not have any explanatory power regarding why the vote broke down the way it did demographically. Only one broad demographic seemed to be receptive to the kind of campaign that Trump ran on: white people.

We must be cognizant of what Trump ran on: calling Mexicans rapists, banning Muslim immigration, building a wall to keep undocumented immigrants out, national stop-and-frisk. And he has a track record of questioning the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate. We know that denial of racism, alongside hostile sexism, predicted a vote for Donald Trump significantly more than other factors like economic dissatisfaction.

This kind of correlation between racial resentment and the probability of voting for Trump has been observed in other studies.
Lack of education predicted support for Trump because of its strong relationship to ethnocentrism, not so much income and occupation. Trump voters thought that a hierarchy that prioritized white people was under attack. Trump helped cement that belief.

Separate point: perceptions of the economy don’t really determine political preference. Rather, it’s the other way around; political preferences determine economic perceptions. Bearing this in mind…

We’ve seen something analogous under President Obama; racial resentment predicted perception of the economy (note the blue curve). The more racially resentful, the poorer the perception of the economy.

So yeah. You see the theme. Of course, it’s not enough to grapple with what the appeal of Trump’s campaign was. We must also be cognizant of the fact that that appeal was propelled to the White House while Trump has demonstrated he's thoroughly unfit.

We know Trump’s temperament is horrible, he lacks the qualifications to govern effectively, he doesn’t know the ins and outs of the issues, he has no real desire to learn, he is obsessed with denigrating his opponents and not being humiliated, and he’s a lecher. We can’t just say “Donald Trump won by cultivating bigotry” though because that still leaves some things ambiguous. Donald Trump won because affirming the primacy of whiteness is still an issue of importance to too many white voters.

What white supremacy greatly fears is a genuine meritocracy, a society where anyone, regardless of race or gender, can rise according to their talents and diligence. For white supremacy to guard against a trajectory toward meritocracy, this requires everything of merit must be sacrificed, which brings us to a terrifying conclusion: the various ways Trump was unfit for the Presidency were features to his voters, not flaws. Trump won the GOP primary and was propelled to the White House because a swath of white voters wanted to send this message to people of color after 8 years of a Black President who successfully governed: “The worst of us should still be given deference over the best of you.”

Furthermore, this entitlement is so profound that many white voters have been willing to sacrifice benefits to their class in exchange for seeing institutions uphold the primacy of whiteness. In W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, he wrote about the psychological wage of whiteness; in exchange for experiencing potentially low economic wages, white people were given a psychological wage in the form of ubiquitous deference.

If you find it hard to conceive of people forgoing fiscal wages for the sake of a psychological wage, consider that similar behavior has been observed in non-racial contexts. A Harvard study asked people if they’d rather make $50,000 when everyone else around them makes $25,000 OR if they’d rather make $100,000 when everyone else around them makes $200,000. Fifty percent of respondents opted for the former.

Wild, right? People will opt for a job that pays absolutely less so long as they know they make more relative to everyone else over a job where they make absolutely more but relatively less than everyone else. Because people want to know they’re on top. But if that’s how people behave in non-racial contexts, then it’s actually not a wild leap to conceive of white people forgoing economic benefits so long as they get institutions and politicians upholding white supremacy. They want to know they’re on top.
This is actually why many fiscally left-leaning policy positions that we support run into brutal opposition; the real undercurrent is too many white people do not want to share the safety net with anyone else. Then they wouldn't be on top.

Here’s a specific example: we could have had something akin to single-payer during the Truman years. But white southerners opposed it because they feared a national health insurance program would force hospitals to integrate. Seriously.

The 60s marked a period of significant success for the Democratic Party and civil rights. It also led to a flight of white southerners from the party and the end of bipartisanship on redistributionist policies.

Reality: This country was founded upon building an economy on top of exploiting Black labor, concentrating wealth produced from that labor in the hands of white people, and deploying all kinds of terrible tactics to ensure that rigid social stratification was upheld. And when that status quo has been challenged, our country has experienced its most significant upheavals.
The U.S. fought its bloodiest and most destructive war over whether the enslavement of Black people should continue. Eras of relative stability for the United States, on the other hand, usually relied on people with power tacitly (or explicitly) upholding racial exclusion from democracy.

As minorities increasingly got to participate in democracy—both in terms of voting and participating in government—we saw a decline in bipartisanship, a trend which effectively exploded when Barack Obama was elected President. This isn't a coincidence.

The unfortunate truth is Trump is the culmination of a force that has always been here, namely the tendency to undermine and destroy institutions that do not show extraordinary deference to whiteness, and instead, propping up new and regressive systems in their place. The White House did not show extraordinary deference to whiteness for the past eight years because the President was Black, so the institution was undermined by a majority of white people who voted for a man thoroughly unfit to run the institution but promised bigotry.

I made this [piece] because I am sick of the bullshit excuses for voting for Trump as well as the attempts to obfuscate what happened in 2016. Regardless of your opinion of Hillary Clinton, this was my attempt to explain what happened in 2016. Thanks for reading. I think it's only fair for me to add that many of the observations in this thread conform to what people of color have been saying for years and years. That shouldn't go unacknowledged.

Source

 

[SeaKingTacco]

So we can see that compromise has died in the American independent and left-leaning voters, but why has never really existed in "conservatives"? Glad you asked!

Source

I missed how your Twitter sourced article proved that small c-conservatives never compromise.

Doesn't the fact there was a US civil war (partially) over the issue of slavery kind of weaken Mr Grey's thesis that the US was built on slavery?

 

[Fishbone Jones]

.... or that the democrat slave owners wouldn't comprimise with the republicans to end slavery.

Slavery was pretty much a democrat thing and they still try make political hay with the subject.

Those two statements hold as much water as anything your highly biased, left wing blogger, Ethan Grey, has to say on the subject.

His very first untruthful first sentence, "Donald Trump won the GOP primary and the presidency because campaigning on whiteness-first messaging still has potency in the 21st century" sets the tone for the rest of his drivel.

 

[Brad Sallows]

That first sentence assumes a lot that has to be proven.  Extending from the argument that cultural chauvinism and identity politics were among the reasons for Trump's victory to the argument that it was "the" reason will require more proof, as will the thesis that "whiteness" is an acceptable synonym for such a large mass of people.

There were other contributing factors, such as the fact that Democratic strategy included using Trump as a foil to muddy the primary and drag down those thought of as "serious" candidates.  The media gave him an easy ride, and he got beyond their control.  If you disagree, go back and re-read all the lamentations published after the election by people who regretted not covering the Republican primary more fairly and objectively.

A rant asserting the recent adoption of identity politics - a long-time technique of a great many groups who are decidedly opposed to Republicans and conservatives in the US - by some Trump voters does not fit the description of an excuse for why "compromise...has never really existed in "conservatives"".

 

[beirnini]

I missed how your Twitter sourced article proved that small c-conservatives never compromise.

To be more precise it's a Twitter article with many sources.

Regardless the over-arching premise of this article is that there is a deeply held belief in white entitlement (if not supremacy) that drives conservatives generally and Trump voters particularly. As the article describes in some detail historically if a policy or law were to seen as being helpful in any way to a non-white/black person - or as we've seen with Trump and his supporters more recently simply implemented by a non-white/black person - such a policy or law is not to be supported in any way, regardless how helpful it may be to white people generally.

Ergo uncompromising.

Doesn't the fact there was a US civil war (partially) over the issue of slavery kind of weaken Mr Grey's thesis that the US was built on slavery?

How so? It's a fact that a very significant part of the early-American economy was built on slavery. The civil war proves at least in part that many in America wanted to preserve slavery as a means to continue building the economy.

 

[Brad Sallows]

There is a simpler explanation that doesn't involve attributing malign motives to large swathes of people - they prefer their own culture.

"As the article describes in some detail historically if a policy or law were to seen as being helpful in any way to a non-white/black person"

Untrue.  Plenty of laws and policies in the US have been helpful to black people.

 

[beirnini]

There is a simpler explanation that doesn't involve attributing malign motives to large swathes of people - they prefer their own culture.

*Edit #2: I should think if conservatives were genuinely so concerned about maligning the motives of large swathes of people Trump's "Mexicans are rapists", etc. would be thoroughly offputting. Funny that it doesn't seem to be.

Regardless, the article does not ascribe "malign motives" it describes what are entitlement motives among white conservatives. Are officers "malign" when they act upon the wrongful denial of a salute from an NCM? It's about hierarchy and subordination and the entitlements therein.

With regard to culture you would probably have a point if it could be demonstrated conclusively that there are indeed clearly defined and differentiated cultures that are (coincidentally) identifiable by relative melanin content in superficial tissues. As far as I can see blacks and whites in America speak the same language, learn the same facts and history in school, go to many of the same church denominations and believe in the same deities, watch essentially the same tv and movies, support the same sports teams, form the same ideal family units and pledge the same allegiance to their flag.

*Edit: And even if there is a clearly defined and different culture between whites and blacks, how does culture alone explain the rejection of a desegregated healthcare system that would've significantly benefited whites?

"As the article describes in some detail historically if a policy or law were to seen as being helpful in any way to a non-white/black person"

Untrue.  Plenty of laws and policies in the US have been helpful to black people.

Plenty of laws and policies in the US have been passed by independents and non-conservatives. The point isn't whether or not blacks are ever treated fairly, it's whether or not one identifiable type of voter ever wants to treat blacks fairly. The polls and studies sourced in this article suggest fairly convincingly that they do not is a well-supported proposition.

 

[Brad Sallows]

People vote for candidates with off-putting attributes.  Examples: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump.  It doesn't mean those voters approve.  Several prominent defenders of Bill Clinton admitted defending him because he was the Democratic president - strict political partisanship - even though they found his personal conduct repulsive.  No-one gets to define the threshold of acceptability for others: each voter determines what he is willing to tolerate.  Others are free to feel as outraged as they choose.  Both sides have freedom of thought and expression.

Comparing military regulations and discipline to the free exercise of a vote is not an effective position to adopt.

Cultures: suburban white, urban black.  Do you propose to argue they are not distinct and differentiable?

>The point isn't whether or not blacks are ever treated fairly

Then you should abandon or modify this absolute statement: "As the article describes in some detail historically if a policy or law were to seen as being helpful in any way to a non-white/black person ... such a policy or law is not to be supported in any way, regardless how helpful it may be to white people generally.".  Too broad a brush.

What is being overlooked (deliberately or ignorantly, doesn't matter) is this: people who share interests might, given a choice of only two practical candidates, all vote for the same candidate.  Their calculation might give greater weight to political interests than to personal values.  It tells us nothing about their personal shortcomings, or the many shades and strengths to which they adhere to particular points and positions.  Examples: some people tired of the Democratic war against their religious liberty (the reality, however it might be debated on the head of a pin, is irrelevant compared to the perception) voted for Trump because he was the only candidate not representing a continuation of such policies; some people subject to or witnessing losses of employment voted for Trump because he was promising to change things rather than simply asserting that those jobs are gone and are never coming back.  Again, the perception is what is important.  Even a faint hope will almost always carry more weight than none at all.

 

[Pencil Tech]

I missed how your Twitter sourced article proved that small c-conservatives never compromise.

Doesn't the fact there was a US civil war (partially) over the issue of slavery kind of weaken Mr Grey's thesis that the US was built on slavery?

I disagree. There were always people who were opposed to slavery, even at the founding of the USA, but many of the founding fathers were slave owners as is well documented. By the time the of the civil war, abolitionism had become more and more widespread - slavery and the slave trade had been abolished in England without a war but the US was late in abolishing slavery and it had to come to civil war for it to happen. Then during the Reconstruction, slavery was replaced by Jim Crow and segregation. This whole trauma is woven tightly into the fabric of the USA and the repercussions continue.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

I disagree. There were always people who were opposed to slavery, even at the founding of the USA, but many of the founding fathers were slave owners as is well documented. By the time the of the civil war, abolitionism had become more and more widespread - slavery and the slave trade had been abolished in England without a war but the US was late in abolishing slavery and it had to come to civil war for it to happen. Then during the Reconstruction, slavery was replaced by Jim Crow and segregation. This whole trauma is woven tightly into the fabric of the USA and the repercussions continue.

I accept that. My point (clearly, poorly made) was that at the time of US civil war, slavery was not part of the industrial Northern States- it was a feature of the much economically weaker agrarian South. I accept also that the removal of Federal troops from the South in the 1880s allowed Jim Crow to take root. I accept that this trauma runs deep in the US. My point is in parallel to Brad's- the original article asserted but proved nothing of the sort that everyone who voted for Trump was a racist. I think even Canada, people vote for candidates for all sorts of reasons- both simple and complicated.

 

[beirnini]

People vote for candidates with off-putting attributes.  Examples: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump.  It doesn't mean those voters approve.  Several prominent defenders of Bill Clinton admitted defending him because he was the Democratic president - strict political partisanship - even though they found his personal conduct repulsive.  No-one gets to define the threshold of acceptability for others: each voter determines what he is willing to tolerate.  Others are free to feel as outraged as they choose.  Both sides have freedom of thought and expression.

There are off-putting attributes that will and will not speak to one's executive capacity (e.g. willingness to commit oval office adultery or ordering the burglary of the offices of your political opponent) and to one's suitability to be a shaper of public opinion in the media.  As you rightly point out a writer who baselessly "maligns the motives of large swathes of people" is concerning if not unacceptable.  So I have to still wonder how is that same characteristic not similarly concerning if not unacceptable in a politician and member of the executive unless, as the article goes into some detail, such a characteristic is not actually a flaw but a feature.

Comparing military regulations and discipline to the free exercise of a vote is not an effective position to adopt.

Again, as the article goes into some detail when we're talking about a social system of hierarchy and subordination and entitlements, a system that in part was fought over at the cost of millions of lives in the American Civil War.  It is a perfectly apt comparison and position.

Cultures: suburban white, urban black.  Do you propose to argue they are not distinct and differentiable?

Do you take issue with the study cited in the article that supports white entitlement was the determining factor to rejecting desegregated healthcare even though it would have helped whites equally? Because I fail to see how as you propose culture largely explains that, especially when urbanization wasn't so pronounced in the '50's and '60's.

The point isn't whether or not blacks are ever treated fairly

Then you should abandon or modify this absolute statement: "As the article describes in some detail historically if a policy or law were to seen as being helpful in any way to a non-white/black person ... such a policy or law is not to be supported in any way, regardless how helpful it may be to white people generally.".  Too broad a brush.

I don't think so.  Seeing as Trump - within his powers and far more than any President before him - has gone out of his way with almost single-minded purpose to undo everything Obama ever did either with executive orders, appointments (or lack thereof) or attempted legislation I'm not really prepared to abandon that just yet. Trump's motivation goes far beyond mere partisanship.

Beyond that as I said before laws and policies have been put into place by independents and non-conservatives, regardless the objection of conservatives. That's democracy. There are non-zealous, non-ideologically driven politicians and civil servants that occupy the vast majority of positions in government and the bureaucracy as well. Just because blacks are treated fairly by the bureaucracy now and again does not preclude a faction in the electorate that is, as the studies and polls in this article demonstrate, against the fair and equal treatment of blacks. One need only look to Kim Davis to see what a bureaucracy filled with conservative zealots opposed to enacting policy and law that run against their beliefs would look like.  We're not there yet, and I hope we never will, but considering how much support she continues to receive from her politically like-minded and fellow travelers it isn't outside the realm of possibility either.

What is being overlooked (deliberately or ignorantly, doesn't matter) is this: people who share interests might, given a choice of only two practical candidates, all vote for the same candidate.  Their calculation might give greater weight to political interests than to personal values.  It tells us nothing about their personal shortcomings, or the many shades and strengths to which they adhere to particular points and positions.  Examples: some people tired of the Democratic war against their religious liberty (the reality, however it might be debated on the head of a pin, is irrelevant compared to the perception) voted for Trump because he was the only candidate not representing a continuation of such policies; some people subject to or witnessing losses of employment voted for Trump because he was promising to change things rather than simply asserting that those jobs are gone and are never coming back.  Again, the perception is what is important.  Even a faint hope will almost always carry more weight than none at all.

The article describes in some detail that "denial of racism, alongside hostile sexism, predicted a vote for Donald Trump significantly more than other factors like economic dissatisfaction. This kind of correlation between racial resentment and the probability of voting for Trump has been observed in other studies". If you have a issues with the methodology of the studies and polls themselves, or with the conclusions drawn from them then by all means share them. But your opinion that Trump voters particularly and conservative voters generally vote on some other calculus is just that; your opinion. It isn't supported by the data.

 

[Brad Sallows]

The different identifiable segments of the whole voting population were sliced and diced after the election, and Hillary didn't hold Obama's fraction of several of the voting blocs, including blacks.  I accept it as established that Obama was at nearly all points during his administration more popular personally than the policies he favoured.  That evidence tends to deprecate racism as an explanation, and reinforce Hillary and her political positions as the source of her own demise.

You can go on cherry-picking the handful of studies that support your position.  They're a fart in a hurricane.  Your selected author isn't a righteous iconoclast disproving the conventional wisdom of political analysts on both sides of the aisle; he's angry and frustrated that his causes have at least suffered a four-year interruption of advancement and at worst an eight-year period of reversals and he situated his estimate.

Regardless, the idea that white racism propelled Trump into office could be proven or unproven and would still be irrelevant to the notions that compromise never really existed among conservatives, or that the blame for a dearth of compromise could be narrowly laid at any one pair of feet.  To reiterate a couple of examples I may have mentioned before which poisoned compromise: Reagan's compromise with Tip O'Neill over immigration; Harry Reid's iron-fisted no-compromise management of the Senate.

 

[QV]

beirnini

I wonder if you have read any of Thomas Sowell's quotes and comments regarding slavery and racism.   

 

[Blackadder1916]

Again, as the article goes into some detail when we're talking about a social system of hierarchy and subordination and entitlements, a system that in part was fought over at the cost of millions hundreds of thousands of lives in the American Civil War.

Fixed that for you.  Much like most modern political debate discourse jabbering, it is irritating when those participating either don't bother or don't care to ensure that what they say is factually correct.

 

[mariomike]

For reference to the discussion of American Civil War casualties,

New York Times
New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll
APRIL 2, 2012
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html

 

[beirnini]

Fixed that for you.  Much like most modern political debate discourse jabbering, it is irritating when those participating either don't bother or don't care to ensure that what they say is factually correct.

Thanks for the correction and apologies for the irritation.