Nothing, not even catastrophe, is absolute.
Crisis is opportunity.
World War II, ghastly as it was, meant that my father, a farm boy taking education classes at Southern Oregon College of Education, was drafted into the war and sent across the country to man anti-aircraft batteries at Boston Harbor. That was before he was sent to Europe and the Battle of the Bulge. While stationed in Boston, he met a second-generation immigrant of Greek heritage living in Malden, Massachusetts. They fell in love and married. Here I am.
Wars rattle the dice of destiny and make new things possible.
I can think of two good things that emerged from American voters having chosen Donald Trump. There will be more, but these come to mind immediately.
1. No false complaints that the election was fraudulent.
Trump had prepped his campaign and election officials in strategic places to cry foul. His margin over Kamala Harris in the battleground states and his victory in the popular vote was equivalent to Biden's margin over Trump in 2020. There were problems that emerged, including bomb threats that closed polling places in heavily-Democratic precincts in Atlanta. There are always pretexts for claiming fraud.Both winner and loser accepted the election results. A norm was reaffirmed. Possibly this establishes a bad precedent: When Republicans lose, they claim the election was rigged, but when Democrats lose they accept the results. Therefore, Republicans are tough and smart and Democrats are pushovers. But I am an optimist. Maybe Trump's having accepted the election without incident defines the 2020 insurrection as a one-time-thing, an exception to the rule. Maybe what we reaffirmed is that Americans transfer power peacefully, and we started a new 250-year string. It's a start.
Yes, this is a good thing. This may change the calculation for Republicans going forward. Hispanics are not a lost cause. No need to demonize and insult "people of color" and perceive the GOP as a "White's only" fortress against demographic change. Republicans used to scoff at "diversity" and "multiculturalism," considering them Democratic "woke" ideas intended to pack the electorate. The GOP may start favoring policies on immigration, minimum wage, language, and voting rights that are kinder and gentler to Hispanic voters. It could be a return to Bush-era policies toward Hispanics within the GOP.
Democrats will be better off if the parties don't stratify by race and ethnicity. Democrats had fallen into a presumption that people mainly vote their identity, defined by race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Tuesday's results demonstrate how wrong-headed that is. People vote their own individual perspective, not a group perspective. It was high time for Democrats to remember "It's the economy, stupid" and lose the focus on ethnic politics. That may refocus Democrats back toward policies that advance economic opportunity and prosperity.
Democrats will find opportunities inside a Trump presidency if they allow themselves to see them. They should not see finding these nuggets as capitulation. They should see it as judo. The strength of the opposition provides the energy to move things in new, more advantageous directions.
14 comments:
These are good ideas, but bringing them about would require reversing the course of history. The Republican Party was once the party of Lincoln. Then, in the 1960s, they developed their Southern Strategy, turning it into the party opposed to desegregation and civil rights. Much of their hold on power is now dependent on pandering to white nationalists, which have become an influential part of their base and the key to Trump’s success. It’s hard to imagine them suddenly embracing diversity and multiculturalism.
3. The unambiguous and permanent elimination of DEI and wokeness and “race conscious” discriminatory government and corporate programs. The absolute requirement to judge everyone by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
The Democratic Party used to be the party of diversity and multiculturalism and, at the same time, America's bastion of white supremacy. Richard Russell and his ilk were vicious white supremacists to an extent hardly imaginable to those who didn't experience Jim Crow; for a sense of his power, consider that a senate office building in Washington, D.C., still bears his name. The Republican Party, in theory, can become like the Democratic Party of 1933 to 1980.
Sounds great, just as soon as we eliminate the many remaining inequities of systemic racism.
What we need to eliminate is the bogus propaganda concept of “systemic racism.”
Right. All the racial inequities are also bogus propaganda, and whites are the ones really being oppressed. Too bad the data doesn't support that, but maybe Republicans can rewrite history to suite their whims.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-RACE/USA/nmopajawjva/#0
Apparently, in this age of Trump and “alternative facts,” the gross disparities between Blacks and Whites in health, wealth, education, incarceration, etc. are either “fake news” or due to genetic differences. We don’t have systemic racism in the U.S. anymore; we have “race science.”
“All the racial inequities are also bogus propaganda, and whites are the ones really being oppressed”.
The bogus propaganda is the toxic, fatalistic assumption that in the 21st century all mathematical inequities or inequalities—including “fewer than 13% of Oscar nominations went to Blacks!”, for instance—are the zero-sum consequence of oppression.
This reductionist foolishness sweeps away individual characteristics into politicized, group-based stereotypes. Members of prefab victim groups are most harmed, short and long term.
“Racial inequities“ stem from a multiplicity of causes, many of which have nothing to do with racial discrimination. And reverse discrimination is never the answer.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. People with common sense know that. The voters know that. If the Democrats don’t catch a clue, this election will only be the first of a very long string of defeats.
Black people commit violent crime at a higher rate per capita than white people. Incarceration rates reflect that. Not every disparity is caused by racial discrimination.
But committed ideologues refused to understand this. And to the extent that the Democrats align themselves with those ideologues, the voters will refuse to support them. Experience runs a harsh school, but a fool will learn at no other.
The higher rate of incarceration among Black Americans is largely attributed to a complex set of factors including systemic racism, biased policing practices, disproportionate application of drug laws, concentrated poverty in Black communities, and historical factors like redlining, leading to unequal access to opportunities and increased likelihood of criminal justice involvement; essentially, racial disparities in the criminal justice system contribute significantly to this disparity.
And the incarceration rate is only one of many disparities between Blacks and Whites.
And crime? Violent crime? No mention of that?
There are apparently phenomena that are only visible when you look to the right. Crime’s one; an out-of-control border is another.
Those who only look to the left ignore them, and it continues to cost them elections.
Among the complex factors, many if not most of which do not spring from oppressive intent or behavior, is the modern left’s divisive, self-fulfilling prophecy: the pathological worldview that results from irresponsible and opportunistic figures in academia, politics, religion and entertainment telling especially young black men that American society is deliberately rigged against them from the outset.
No surprise that outsized, race-conscious anti-social behavior results, including not only quick-fix violence and criminality, but disdain for conventional family, work and educational ethics.
I thought you'd appreciate the above analysis since it was actually written by AI. Oh, well.
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