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osxmatt

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    White threat in a browning America: How demographic change is fracturing our politics.

    in The Political Re-Education Camp

    Posted

    Quote

    In 2016, Donald Trump wielded that same sense of change as a threat; he was the revanchist voice of those who yearned to make America the way it was before, to make it great again. That was the impulse that connected the wall to keep Mexicans out, the ban to keep Muslims away, the birtherism meant to prove Obama couldn’t possibly be a legitimate president. An America that would elect Donald Trump president was an America in which a future was being written that could read thrillingly similar to our past.

     

    This is the core cleavage of our politics, and it reflects the fundamental reality of our era: America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first yearthat a majority of US infants under the age of 1 were nonwhite. The announcement, made during the second term of the nation’s first African-American president, was not a surprise. Demographers had been predicting such a tipping point for years, and they foresaw more to come.

     

    Another way to say that is it’s often our perception of race and power that matters. In that case, though, most Americans feel the browning of America is happening even faster than the demographers report. Back in 2013, the Center for American Progress, PolicyLink, and the Rockefeller Foundation surveyed Americans and found that the median participant believed the country was 49 percent nonwhite; the correct answer was 37 percent.

     

    You might assume, seeing all this, that the reason for the racialization of American politics under Obama’s presidency was that Obama, being African American, discussed racial issues and put forward race-conscious policies more often than past president. You’d be wrong. “According to content analyses conducted by political and communication scientists, Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,” writes Tesler.

     

    Obama’s presidency didn’t force race to the forefront of American politics through rhetoric or action but through symbolism: Obama himself was a symbol of a changing America, of white America’s loss of power, of the fact that the country was changing and new groups were gaining power. That perception wasn’t incorrect: In his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote — a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. That is to say, a few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t drive American politics; by 2012, it could.

     

     

     

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/30/17505406/trump-obama-race-politics-immigration

    ~*The Official Thread of One Term/Twice Impeached/Worst of Them All Presidential Tantrums, Candy Throwing, and Pants Shitting*~

    in The Political Re-Education Camp

    Posted

    Just now, Greatoneshere said:

     

    Robert Mueller looks like an adult at the airport, Don Jr. looks like a big child whose family is so rich he never grew up - OH SHIT WAIT THAT EXPLAINS SO MUCH. 

     

    He's reading a paper. Not even the digital version of a paper on an iPad, an actual paper.

     

    He's everything I want to be when I get older, along with his hairline.

    Spotting CNN on a TV Aboard Air Force One, Trump Rages Against Reality

    in The Political Re-Education Camp

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Dodger said:

    I never said anything about how happy they are. It's you guys who make remarks that his marriage must be in shambles, because you really hope that to be true. I don't buy for one second you guys are objective about it either. I read this board every day, you guys aren't objective about anything Trump does. So don't tell me you suddenly are when examining his marriage.

     

    You were the first person in this thread that explicitly mentioned their unhappiness with each other. Hell, you even used the word hate multiple times.

     

    No one else is speaking like that, at least not until you lowered the discourse. You’re literally shouting at a mirror. 

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