[rayiner]

The anti-progress candidate—as defined by “affluent coastal elites”: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...

E.g. they called Trump a racist for saying things that most minorities themselves agreed with.

> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.

[tptacek]

And? Minorities are racist just like everybody else. Why do we have to triangulate this stuff? Trump was obviously a pretty racist guy.

The sneaky lawyer trick in what you wrote is "they called Trump racist for saying things minorities agreed with". That's true, they did. But they also called him racist for a bunch of other reasons!

[rayiner]

> And? Minorities are racist just like everybody else.

There is a difference between minorities being racist, which of course they can be, and minorities not finding allegedly racist things to be racist. My point is that it makes no sense to define "racism" to encompass supposed "dog whistle" messages directed at minorities that those minorities themselves agree with.

It not only gets used to shut down debate, as PG observes, but it's exploitive. It gets used to argue on behalf of minorities against policies that minorities themselves support. Associations of law-and-order with racism got weaponized in the last couple of years to advance approaches to policing and criminal justice that minorities themselves rejected.

> Why do we have to triangulate this stuff?

Because white people shouldn't get to police other white people on minorities' behalf over statements that those minorities don't find offensive.

> Trump was obviously a pretty racist guy.

In the sense that pretty much every 70-year old man is racist? Sure. In the sense that any of his policies were racist? No. Strong borders, careful scrutiny of refugees from parts of the world rife with fundamentalism, quelling riots, etc., are not racist.

[tptacek]

You did it again: you framed something like "Is Trump racist? No, this set of policies everyone says is racist isn't really racist." I don't even have to disagree with your premises to continue to find Trump's policies racist, because he did more than carefully scrutinize refugees and attempt to quell riots. (I do disagree with your premises, though).

I'm not out to get you with these observations. I don't think you're racist, or running cover for racists. I like that there are vocal conservative-leaning people around here. It's weird that you'd deploy high school debate tricks to respond to me, isn't it? If it's "sneaky lawyer trick" upthread, I apologize; I was just having fun, not trying to cast aspersions.

[rayiner]

When people say that "Trump is racist," I take that to mean "Trump is personally prejudiced and that is reflected in his messaging and policies." I think whether he's racist irrespective of his messaging and policies isn't an interesting question.

[pen2l]

> I think whether he's racist irrespective of his messaging and policies isn't an interesting question.

I don't think a leader's personal conduct and presentation are completely immaterial qualities, people/children can smell this stuff, and boy did Trump smell. A good leader inspires people to be better. Even more so for the figurehead of free world, I think folks should be able to say "look, that's our leader, he's a good (wo)man" to their children. They could with Obama, they couldn't with Trump. You're a parent, does this not cross not your mind at all?

[rayiner]

I think mixing politics and morality is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst. Politics isn’t a vehicle for imposing manners or enlightened attitudes.[1] I respect George W. Bush as an extremely moral person. He was also a bad President. Same thing for Carter. Meanwhile Clinton was an immoral person, but was a good President. I think Trump was extremely immoral, but his legacy will probably be one of the most profoundly positive turns in American foreign policy in generations: dismantling the Bush/Cheney neocon apparatus.

I think Trump is a boor and I certainly wouldn’t want my kids to emulate him. At the same time, I think many of his detractors have screwed up morals as well and worry about my kids absorbing those.

[1] I think treating “racism” as a political issue rather than something to be addressed through cultural means actively hurts “Black and brown people” by pissing away political capital on abstract debates that don’t actually help anyone.

[tptacek]

Yes, we're on the same page there. (Some of) Trump's policies were racist: constructed and executed with overt racial animus, to a degree we haven't seen since the 1970s. That doesn't mean border security and cutting refugee slots is intrinsically racist; not everything Trump did was racist. I'm sure George Wallace did a bunch of stuff just to keep the lights on and the trains running, too!

[rayiner]

Like what do you think was driven by racial animus? People use the “Muslim ban” as an example, but it’s telling that other Muslim countries didn’t want refugees from those places either.