Making the Majority the Majority
A Path to Power
November 30, 2016
Name-calling or Identity Politics
... Cable news in seeking ratings loved Trump; let him ramble on without context, fact check, or filter for hours. Trump spoke to this new political sentiment within the GOP Base. The establishment including political leaders, news professionals, and corporate elites backed away. They allowed Trump to be unfettered. His success caused the Republican Party to kowtow to his appeal not wanting to risk losing their base. Why offend one tribe or your base, when it is easy to stereotype and demean another? Groups targeted by Trump and his base were only weak supporters of the Republican Party. It became good business for many to allow the cancer to grow; it then became inoperable without great risk to their own health.
Cable News let Trump just ramble on hour after hour.
If the power brokers rolled over for Trump, shouldn’t we object, point out an affront? There is a time and place; there is a level of offense. Sometimes you must let it pass, and move on. The resistance movement is an effective approach raising objection directly to those in power. Trump’s supporters are not Mr. Trump; they will say the things they have been told by Rush, read on the Internet, or watched on the non-reality bubble of Fox News. They cannot be fact checked, they are immune to your fact checking. You must be respectful and demand the same from them. All the endless tirades over how to conduct a Thanksgiving dinner with Trumpers and SHillaries (move past it, I will come back to the unfair derision of Hillary Clinton at another time) were absent of one simple truth, all humans are deserving of respect. Not a respect for their deeds or words, but a respect for their existence. We need to accept that everyone has a history, a struggle, an aspiration, and a passion. It may not be ours. Their desires may even be evil. Still, everyone exists not in a vacuum but in context with the present. When I use the term Hillbilly is it an insult, simple name-calling, or is it an identity within our current society? Does the group I am identifying exist and affect our current politics? I believe the answer is yes it is an identity. If I were to have used the term Hillbilly against another child in school, it would have been taken as an insult. The people who were among the newer more Southern arrivals in our farming community would have especially taken offense. These people were sensitive to slight, felt looked down upon. They held resentment against the more established Midwestern community. Southerners generally in my experience feel their accents are used against them as a sign of lower intellectual achievements. I understand this situation. I have often been held back not by the quality of my thoughts, but by the pronunciation and accent of my words. I should add my grammar, punctuation, and style of writing also opens me to derision by the more honed of our culture. I have always trod on a road with respect on one hand and sneery-judgment on the other. I am heir to privilege, yet easily labeled a struggling Hillbilly to most of our nation. I believe I can explain this new outrage class, the Trumpers. Of, course calling them Trumpers is name-calling. No group has more earned name-calling than their movement. Name calling is the dynamic force that united it.
Racism -- false historical narratives all the devils of our tortured past expressed in a Confederate Flag.
I titled this series the Hillbilly Secession, because in a very real sense the election of Trump is a modern event akin to the secessions of 1860. It also carries with it some of the same parallels of history. This Hillbilly Secession will be defeated only if we the majority unite in a patriotic call to restore our Union. The modern Republican Party has declared a war on voters, using false claims of voter fraud to make voting harder. If news people point out in person voter fraud is almost non-existent; GOP partisans simply dismiss them as being enemies of the GOP/Trump/Conservatives. The outrage of the electorate expressed in this election has turned loose the lowest of policy proposals. ...
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