Opinion | How Racist Is Trump's Republican Party? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Is the modern Republican Party built on race prejudice, otherwise known as racism?
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Has it become, as Stuart Stevens — a media consultant with an exceptionally high win-loss record who was a lead strategist for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 — puts it,
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Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.
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What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”
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There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
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“I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”
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“As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system — a ‘black swan,’” Stevens writes, “I can’t do it”:
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My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means. In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.
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Race, Stevens writes,has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.
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With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.
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Ordinary citizens, without being racists themselves, may do and say things that are consistent with a racist ideology. It does not make the outcomes any less egregious or harmful.
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even though individual and group motives may not be racist, the outcomes achieved can be identical to the ones that racists would seek:
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Chloe Thurston, in turn, cited as specific examplesPresident Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.
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While both Trump and King, an anti-immigrant congressman from Iowa, “balk at the label ‘racist,’ she continued, “it is descriptively accurate and necessary from the standpoint of keeping track of the role and uses of racism in American society and politics.”
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People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs.
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People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying
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Jardina joined others in calling for caution in the use of the word racist because itoften has a backlash effect. One reason is that people disagree on what is racist, another is that people are offended when they are called racist because they do not believe their acts or behaviors or racist (even if they are).
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These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.
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As a social scientist, I would entertain the possibility that people’s actions are guided by a variety of motivations, potentially including racial considerations but also values (i.e., a commitment to a free market; egalitarianism; moral conservatism); economic considerations; self-interest (concerns about my child’s ability to get into a high school or my child’s commute to a faraway school), or even factual beliefs.
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Because of the wide variety of possible motivations, Kam wrote in her email, she “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’ — unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”
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Kam notes that she worries “about excessive use of these labels” because describing someone or some action as racist “can easily escalate conflict beyond the point of return.”
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Eric Kaufmann voiced similar caution, noting that racism and racist are highly charged words, the deployment of which can in some cases prove damaging to liberals and the left. He cited the “unwillingness to talk about immigration for fear of being labeled racist,” giving free rein to populists who do address immigration “and thus get elected. Trump’s election is exhibit A.”
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In addition, according to Kaufmann, thefear of being labeled racist may be pushing left parties toward immigration policies, or policies on affirmative action, reparations, etc., that make them unelectable.
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None of the examples I cited, in Kaufmann’s view, “are racist” unless it could be explicitly demonstrated “in a survey that those espousing the policies were mainly motivated by racism.” If not, he said, the “principle of charity should apply.”
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In addition, she continued,many whites see accusations of racism as disingenuous. They believe that Democrats in particular “play the race card” by calling people or beliefs racist as a political strategy, rather than as a sincere effort to combat racism.
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The powerful tendency of Democrats to perceive racism has a significant, if unintended, adverse effect on minority candidates seeking to be nominated in Democratic primaries
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The result? Believing themselves to be realists, Democrats actually foreclose some outcomes they would favor:Democrats who perceive high levels of explicit prejudice toward a group also believe presidential candidates from that group would be less electable.
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Clearly, there is a large divide not only over the definition of racism, but also over the level of racism in the nation.
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one of the most relevant questions before the electorate is whether voters agree with Stuart Stevens on whether Donald Trump is a racist.
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The answer to that question, according to a July 2019 Quinnipiac University national poll, is that 51 percent say Trump is a racist; 45 percent say he is not.
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There are huge racial, partisan, gender and religious differences: whites say Trump is not racist 50-46; blacks say he is racist 80-11; Democrats 86-9 say yes, Republicans 91-8 say no; men 55-41 say no, women 59-36 say yes; white evangelicals say no 76-21, Catholics 50-48 say no; the unaffiliated say yes, 63-30.
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What this boils down to is that racism is detected, determined and observed through partisan and ideological lenses.
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what is still quite striking is how much the perception of the importance of racism has changed in recent years. How else is it that the United States, a nation that declared 244 years ago that “all men are created equal,” has a president seen as a racist by a majority of the electorate?