Are we pretending both teams don't do the same thing?
Society The Donald J. Trump Show - 4 more years editions
- Thread starter IschKabibble
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We? It was Trump who made the comment.
Can you think of an example of any other president in history both shit talking the previous president and also using him as a bench mark for success?
That's definitely accurate. My point is that "the table" is downstream from where politics happens. Traditionally when agitations have been made for people of color, they come from feedback loops within those communities. Laws, governance strategies, and social planning have typically issued out of the need for socially dominant groups to preserve a semblance of social cohesion. Even during slavery this was demonstrably true as there were hard limits institutionalized by the planter class that prohibited certain behaviors by drivers and overseers in compelling labor. The biggest differential was the power relationship and how limited the concessions were because of them. Gradually, as interracial coalitions for abolition grew in strength and influence, the political interests of the planter class were displaced. Except their wealth still bought them a lot of interest in various southern state politics and they used it to argue that a group of ostensible "others," in this case black people (and later, the North), were conspiring to destroy their way of life. There are parallels to this moment and today's rhetoric. In the example post above, "liberals" serves the same function as "the North" or "yankees" and an other is cast in the role of eminent danger, irresponsible, and either blindly following or guilting white men, who are of course the only ones granted the possibility of agency. This pattern has of course repeated many times through history with the Irish, Germans, Chinese, Italians, Japanese, Mexicans, etc serving as the stand-ins. Those groups always had responses and lobbying strategies of their own which worked to varying degrees at different times. In most cities, they settled for fiefdoms where the larger social enclosure was somewhat more tolerant. It's one of the reasons why I fear a national breakup rather than fascism as either a part of or the aftermath of the Trump era.
I like how the left as a whole has completely forgotten that Obama was known as the "Deporter-in-Chief".
Both agreed we can't have people staying here illegally. If you liken the situation to a leaky boat, Obama was just scooping the water up and tossing it overboard. Trump is trying to fix the hole.
Although nobody appears to be addressing the real issue, which is that our path to citizenship is an expensive clusterfuck of an ordeal. Fix the process.
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I'd have to do some googling to come up with specific examples for you. But yes, every administration in every country both talks about building on the success of their predecessor while at the same time running them down.
I look forward to reading them.
Out of curiosity, why is that you think a president is required to categorically oppose everything his predecessor did?
There is the denotation of nationalism, which is the simple definition that speaks to centering your country. There is also the connotation, which usually has come up in either authoritarian regimes or post-colonial politics. In either case, it speaks to an already settled notion of what a nation is and an agenda to center that notion in orienting toward the rest of the world. In the US, we've traditionally sidestepped that term with the term patriotism, which means a similar thing, but is more about the emotions you have for the country and wanting to do right by it. Nationalism has an explicit political connotation that is largely about defining a country's identity as distinct from others. Using that language sends a signal to more extreme elements that their voices are being heard (Steve Bannon, for example, always referred to his program as "economic nationalism") and that their own visions of the nation are now at the forefront of political discourse. Trump definitely knew what he was doing using that word (and he tipped his hand by saying "you're not supposed to say this anymore"). Normalizing these loaded words in our political discourse changes the orientation from a more passive ideal to more active political moves. I think Trump is expecting a narrow victory in the midterms and intends to use that small majority to start pushing through populist legislative packages. What their effects will be is anyone's guess at this point.
By people of color, do you mean black people?
You had me until the last little phrase there. I've only ever heard people who self identify as liberals or progressives perpetuate the idea that whites are the only people whom have agency. I'm not saying that in the pejorative, it's just an observation. If we believed people had agency we'd tell them to fix their problems themselves. If we believe people need our help it's because we don't believe they have the capacity to do it themselves.
Lobbying strategies? I assume by that you mean they took agency over the positions they found themselves in and did what they could to better this positions.
What did I say to lead you to that conclusion?
Time for @Splinty to clutch his pearls. ..
Anthony Scaramucci Tells Donald Trump: 'Dial Down The Lying' | HuffPost
Anthony Scaramucci Tells Donald Trump: 'Dial Down The Lying' | HuffPost
By people of color in that context, I mean non-white people generally. By lobbying strategies, you inferred my meaning correctly.
Regarding the question of agency, one of the biggest philosophical and political arguments is the debate between the influence of structure and agency. If you look at your sentence, you say "if we believed people had agency we'd tell them to fix their problems themselves." Who is we? What is the basis of those beliefs? What people? Tell them how? Which problems? When you try to answer those simple questions, the intersections between structure and agency become quickly apparent. In your next sentence you say "if we believe people need our help it's because we don't believe they have the capacity to do it themselves," which already assumes unlimited agency exists in the society; equal, rational actors moving through the world with no external influences or frictions and no history. This is consistent with ideas about agency where social life is just something that happens to us from time to time, interrupting our true life, which is interior, in the mind or soul, depending on whether you subscribe to religion. And religion becomes very salient here because it too rests on concepts of interiority and feeling as its justification, e.g. "God is real because I feel him in my soul" which isn't falsifiable of course. When we try to organize society, we can't rest on internal conditions because we can't reliably know them. Social organization isn't premised on things like capacity so much as looking at what has been happening to groups consistently and trying to remove state apparatuses that exacerbate problems while increasing investment in apparatuses that might ameliorate them. Where the conservative/liberal divide comes in is generally in which apparatuses do what and how. But even to get to that conversation, we have to grant that the interior condition of individuals is not really reliably accessible so policies can't be crafted around it.
So in that sense, when we look at agency, it too becomes a social construction--Something we can only see when it comes out of social relations where behavior like cooperation, support, domination and control are common. Agency interacts with structure at the points where it resists or consents, but the ways in which one can resist/consent is informed by history and shaped by the circumstances of now. So in the US, we modify the structure with the hopes of broadening the options of agency. Most of the conversation is around access and opportunity, because we're culturally disposed against more sweeping structural changes.
That it's abnormal for someone to both be critical of someone and use them as a benchmark.
Critical?
More like intentionally malicious and dishonest.
So yes, I would think it is abnormal for someone to spread malicious lies and misrepresent facts about someone and then point to them as a benchmark of success.
Is it not possible for someone you detest to still have some merits?
This is likely where we fundamentally disagree. The structure never consents to agency, it only resists it.
So are you stating that you don't believe agency exists at all, and that we're only products of our past momentum?
Agency is only broadened when sections of the structure are removed.
Yes it is, I haven't stated otherwise.
Detesting someone vs spreading intentionally damaging and malicious lies out them are not the same thing.
You said it's abnormal. The thing is, it isn't at all uncommon for people to hold similar views on some things even when one party is/was spreading intentionally damaging and malicious lies about the other.
Holding similar view to something is different from respecting it or using it as a benchmark for success.
I think my wording was clumsy. I was referring to when agents resist or consent.
To the second point, no I'm saying they're historically derived and we have to reckon with that history.
As for the relationship of structure and agency, we know from that even people in total control societies exert degrees of agency so it's not necessarily dependent on removal of structures as much as what it does within structures.