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American politics is undergoing a racial realignment – Democrats are rapidly losing non-white voters as the forces that ensured their support weaken
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- American politics is undergoing a racial realignment
I've heard this from my mother, who lives in the southern US, but had not given it much credence as more than anecdata.
I am too far to the left these days to be able to imagine the appeal of the Republican party to anyone. But especially, I can't understand what kind of beliefs would cause a person of color to join a party dominated by an increasingly racist ideology. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that any person can't or shouldn't vote Republican. That is their right. I'm asking if anyone has information that would provide a rational framework for this shift.
Unless the shift from identity to belief is specifically happening in non-white communities, I would expect that there are liberal Republicans who are going to start voting Democrat for similar reasons. Not that I have any love of the Democratic party machine. It seemed like there was a glimmer of hope with folks like Bernie Sanders and young progressives like AOC. But the party seems to have gotten their primaries locked down to keep things business as usual.
Frankly the most terrifying thing with the idea of a Republican shift is that a Trump win might just be the end of democracy in the US. It feels like we are teetering on the brink of the abyss, and it feels like there is very little to be done about it other than hope and get the vote out in November.
Anecdata incoming. As a Democrat-voting gun control advocate, it's very disheartening to watch the community I grew up in (Chinatown) pivot more towards gun ownership. This is a community that has been crying out about feeling unsafe due to rising crime for years now, but the city continues to do little to address crime in an effective way. Safety takes precedence over most issues when people feel threatened, so Democrats can either pull their heads out of their asses or they can lose future elections.
The Chinese/Chinese American group is also a minority group that appeals against racism fall somewhat flat with. It is the Democrats side that likes affirmative action which typically puts Chinese Americans at a disadvantage and it is progressives that use the term BIPOC, signaling that some minorities are more equal than others. Dems continue to shoot themselves in the foot.
And on the other end of your concern, the Democrats would pick up a not forgettable percentage of people from the Right if the Dems would shut up about guns. If they'd stop promising they want to ban guns, take them away, and so on.
A lot of people, who live in cities, and have never personally had a bad encounter with a cop, think cops are the answer to everything. And that anyone who'd ever want to own a gun is a nutcase who deserves to be locked up. Or at least ignored politically.
But not everyone lives in a city. Some people live way out in the sticks. Some people, gasp, have animals (actual four legged animals) that live near them, and not all those animals are nice and cuddly. Plus criminals exist everywhere, and when the county you live in takes an hour to drive across, and phone networks might go down sometimes, and the cops won't be 90 or 180 seconds away from responding to a 911 call ... banning guns sounds an awful lot like "fuck you, we don't think you count."
Further, cops aren't on our side. Uvalde should demonstrate that better than anything else. It was Texas. Home of Yeehaw! The cops not only didn't go in to deal with the situation, they actively prevented parents who arrived willing to go in and save their children from doing so. The cops were more willing to play the heavy on desperate parents outside, than going in to Protect And Serve.
Which doesn't even touch on how cops will respond to a call and shoot, kill, or assault the victim rather than pursing the suspect. How cops will enter the wrong houses, and throw their weight around, abuse people. How cops just flat out get things wrong and act like bullies as a matter of habit. And then will lie about it.
Relying on cops is folly.
Beto O'Rourke is a great example of why Dems should leave guns alone. He was gathering support, looking like he could advance ... and then he came out as stridently, virulently anti-gun. His support withdrew, and his campaign imploded. All he had to do was pick any of the other issues to highlight, but he had to rail against guns (in Texas, of all places) and then had the gall to be surprised when voters abandoned him.
So there are folks who are mostly Center-Right except for the vitriol leveled against guns by the Dems. So they vote Republican (now MAGA) simply to safeguard themselves.
No they wouldn’t. These people will never vote for the Democrats because literally no amount of softening will be taken seriously or be enough. There is nothing empirical to show that single-issue gun voters will ever vote for Democrats in large enough numbers to offset the loss in support they’d suffer from parents and families who are concerned about crime and gun violence in their communities. It’s 100% fantasy.
Maybe now, when any single issue gun voter is voting for trump, but I know plenty of grumbly ex republicans who refuse to vote for trump but would go back in a heartbeat if it was someone like McCain, mostly over the gun issue.
It's not even something the left fully agrees on. I think there should be gun control. I think 90% of the gun control proposed is outright insulting to everyone involved. Just utter ignorance and fear mongering to make it look like they're going to do something.
As someone blue in a deep red state, I agree. There are a lot of habitual Republicans around, mostly in the deepest red rural areas, who would swing if the focus were just decency, calm dialogue, bipartisan problem solving, and less identity politics and wedge issues.
The GOP is getting these new voters because of beliefs and practical issues, I think because the identity framing of "But you're X, of course you would support Y" is infantilizing and squicky, especially from the DNC in the past few decades. Gun-toting liberals are a strong base in some states, and only one among many that could be better drawn to a party/coalition with improved messaging and platform choices.
But I'd rather fix the election format and build a multi-party system to encourage coalition-building as a pragmatic necessity than fix the current problems with the Democratic Party.
This right here is the answer, but you'll never hear it proposed by the parties, and as long as the GOP presents an existential threat to US democracy, activists who might otherwise push for electoral reform are going to focus on keeping them from sinking the ship.
I truly don't know where to go from here.
Run a right-wing spoiler candidate. Give a W to the Dems with the margin of victory being than your chosen spoiler's total. It may not result in change, but it'll at least be "fun" to watch.
If only Kerry had won Ohio in '04. That would have created two elections in a row where the Electoral College disagreed with the popular vote—favoring a different party each time.
As I have said elsewhere, I am in favor of licensing, mandatory insurance, other control measures. However most gun control proposals don't convince me that the people writing them are aware of or respectful of what different groups of gun owners want or need.
It's focused on banning the scary guns instead of the guns most often used for murder. If you want to go down a banning guns by form factor rabbit hole, handguns are what you should target if you care at all about lifesaving.
There will never be someone like McCain though. The party’s pickled itself in crazy.
90% of the gun industry is based on fear mongering so that’s just the water we’re swimming in. Aside from that though, the main proposals are universal background checks, gun licensing, and a national registry/database. I fail to see what’s insulting or ignorant about that.
Almost nobody is proposing a coherent licensure system. Usually it’s AWBs, red-flag laws, and further restrictions on CC.
I’d actually rather have a national licensure system than the messy, complicated patchwork of laws and regulations we have now. But my views on what said system should include tend to not go over well with some other gun owners or with pro-gun control folks.
People propose what they think they can get passed. The intransigence of the gun lobby means all you’ll get is small potatoes, if that.
The only ignorant stuff I can think of is around misusing technical terms like assault rifle.
Usually the complaint is that “assault rifle” isn’t a technical term. It’s just one of those random “gotchas” to derail the conversation while adding nothing productive. Like “Hurr it’s magazine.” Everyone knows what’s meant by it. I’m an economist and I’m not over here being like “hurr you have understand calculus before you’re allowed to have opinions on whether you feel financially stable.”
Assault rifle is a technical term. It's a selective fire rifle (fully automatic / semiautomatic / safety on) with a removable magazine. These are already banned for civilian manufacture. There are a finite number left in circulation that you can buy, however they usually cost over $20,000 and you need a special license from the ATF to purchase. They are very selective over who gets one.
An "assault weapon" is not a technical term, and no, not everyone "knows what's meant by it." That's the problem with the term. It literally has no technical definition, it is a made up term.
The last time Congress banned "assault weapons" it was a complete disaster, because trying to ban things because they look like an assault rifle leads to absolute zero consistency. It literally comes down to the aesthetics of the gun.
I’m fine with banning certain aesthetics, because I don’t want guns in the hands of wannabe operator shitheads and the more we can do to keep them from getting into owning guns as a hobby the better.
If we could design legislation specifically to keep guns out of those people’s hands without any functional compromise I’d count that as an absolute win. Paint them all pink and give them dildo grips if that’s what it takes.
Gun control is one of the issues where primary elections undeniably damage the party as a whole. Candidates need to make all kind of noise about firearm regulation to get the nomination, then pretend they didn’t say all that when campaigning for the real election. The distorting effect of primaries is generally more obvious on the GOP side, where each decade has its insurgence in the base.
This really feels like a disingenuous argument you're here, in regards to guns. I don't know of any democratic politicians who want a blanket ban in guns (which you are very heavily implying is the case).
The primary Democraric party position on guns is very clearly to ban / greatly limit access to assault-style weapons in particular, which is not the type of weapon you'd need or use to defend yourself against animals (or humans in your own home).
On top of that, to add some basic sanity checks to gun ownership. Like background checks (e.g. somebody with a history of domestic violence probably shouldn't be able to just walk into a store and buy a gun, no questions asked).
No reasonable person wants to "ban guns", rather, just add some common sense rules to the mix.
There is no legal definition of “assault style weapons” and the last time there was anything close to one it was out and out stupid to the level of banning aesthetics.
So yes common sense rules would be great but so many advocates for them don’t really seem to be following the discussions closely because “you can have a bayonet or a grenade launcher BUT NOT BOTH” is the epitome of nonsense.
Most of the proposed bans are for things like the AR platform which has plenty of other just as capable and deadly alternatives that are not listed
Yes. Generally what passing a law would do is establish a legal definition.
And they’re also pretty clear on what they’re trying to ban, which is stuff like bump stocks, extended mags, pistol grips, etc.
Even if it is on the level of aesthetics that’s not the worst thing, a big part of the toxicity of American gun culture is the focus on appealing to mentally unwell macho dorks. So making guns less appealing to those people would actually help, in the same way banning cigarette cartons from having cartoon characters on them was part of cutting down on smoking.
They need to constrain where and how gun companies advertise too.
Yep. And every time they do it, that definition was utterly absurd.
Screwing around with a right in the constitution, even if people disagree on what level that is, just to pass legislation about aesthetics when people are getting killed, is, in my eyes, extremely disrespectful to the process and those who are getting killed. American gun culture is fucking stupid, yes, but slogging through the mud of legislation and 3rd rail issues for aesthetics that likely will have 0 impact on gun violence or mass shootings is absurd.
Maybe they do, but again I sincerely doubt any of this will have even the slightest effect on gun violence or mass shootings.
This is all before you get into the issue of current circulation. There are an estimated 20 MILLION AR15's in America. You're likely going to have to grandfather them, or turn a vast % of your law abiding population into criminals. So even if you get everything you want, the odds that the next mass shooting will have someone with an AR15 with a 20+ round mag, are likely just as high as before.
And that's just 1 brand of semi automatic rifle. You know what was still legal after the last assault weapon ban? The Ruger Mini 14. An functionally identical weapon to the AR15, but without a pistol grip and tacticool furniture.
I'm all for a registry up to a point. I understand the logic to an extent of limiting ammo supply/magazine capacity. I absolutely agree with background checks (which are much more common than people think). I will go even farther than most and say you should be able to lose access to your weapons if you're caught behaving in an unsafe manner with them repeatedly (not securing them properly, finger on the trigger, brandishing, etc) as yes the Gun Culture is fucking stupid and there's way too many people who will say they hate those people on the range, but still turn a blind eye when it comes to them getting a CCW.
And even still, none of this will come close to making a major dent in the numbers. The majority of gun violence is suicide which is clearly mental health support first (because again getting guns OUT of circulation is something that will take generations at this point), and when it's not it's still either mental health related or law enforcement related (gang violence/domestic violence). ALL of this is done with basically stock hand guns, which NONE of the legislation touches. A 10 round glock will still kill you, your family, or your supposed enemies just as effectively, and is perfectly legal under ALL legislation I've seen. So will a 6 shot revolver.
As for mass shootings, they're an extreme anomaly in gun violence (depending on which definition you use, as the term draws to mind things like Uvalde and the Vegas shooting, but includes things like gang drive bys), and low and behold seem to be the only thing that laws care about given they always focus around rifles.
Finally this is before I even get into the horrid shit Hilary did where she tried to pivot the Vegas shooting into "AND JUST IMAGINE IF HE HAD A SILENCER!" because there was a vote coming up on that. It's so dishonest and absurd it's hard to even convey.
So no, I do not think anyone has proposed anything more than noise in posturing.
No. It was a dead letter until the 60s when the gun lobby and Birchers pulled it out of their asses and seeded it into the judiciary through the Federalist Society.
I also don’t think it would have 0 impact. But it’s hard to have a fact based discussion on any of it because gun nut lobbyists have literally disallowed Congress or the CDC from even being able to collect the data or study the impacts of policies in any systematic way.
Largely irrelevant. What’s likely to end up in the black/gray market is only a subset of that and there’s an 80/20 rule in terms of who owns them. (As in a TON of the guns are owned by a very small number of people). It’s fine if you only get some of the most egregious stuff at the first pass. Legislation is iterative, you can tweak things as you go.
No, access to guns dramatically increases likelihood of successful suicide and attempts at it independent of everything else. There’s a reason Amazon puts so much energy into one-click ordering. The more steps you put between thinking about a thing and following through on it the more opportunities people have to change their minds. Suicide is usually an impulsive act.
Yeah. There’s so much routine gun violence that the mass shootings end up being a small fraction of the incidences. But this isn’t the exonerating factor you seem to think it is. The same laxity around gun ownership and indifference to irresponsible and antisocial behavior by gun owners contributes to both. The mass shootings are the canaries in the coal mine.
Good luck getting juries to convict on that stuff in the places where it's popular.
I would love for a Democratic candidate to come right out and say something along the lines of, "we don't want to ban guns, we want you to continue to enjoy hunting and continue to protect your home and family. What we want is to make sure that everyone who has a gun is taking their ownership seriously. To that end, we want to work with states and Law Enforcement Agencies to background check and license everyone who has a gun, along with insurance for gun ownership. We would also like to provide free annual continuing education on gun safety to anyone who is interested in taking it, and a requirement (free of charge) to anyone who is a gun owner in order to keep their insurance. The only guns we want to take away are ones that are large magazine or otherwise modified artillery guns/military style guns. But we would happily replace them for free with a hunting rifle or handgun."
I'm neither here nor there on guns, but I think this would go a long way to getting the people who keep villifying dems for gun control.
Those are some pretty blatant contradictions.
"No one wants to ban guns" and "ban assault style weapons," are two statements that cannot exist side by side.
Additionally, you really need to do some research into what assault style means. That term is a blatant flag that you're advocating regulation of something you don't understand.
You are not accurately quoting me.
I said nobody want a blanket ban on guns.
That is not contradictory to a ban on assault style weapons (which I also didn't say. I said ban or make much more difficult. The nuance is important). This isn't even something I'm personally arguing either, I'm literally just laying out the typical Democratic party position.
Again, this is very disingenuous arguing. You need to actually read what you're replying and not attribute false quotes if you want to actually have a constructive engagement
Okay, if you want to jump around over the use of the word "or," to say I'm being disingenuous, that's fine. I'm not going to argue semantics.
Yes, how dare he take a strong stance against guns when 22 people were killed in his hometown recently. He should've just stayed quiet about that, otherwise Republicans might've voted for him!
I'm sorry, Beto was right to be mad and he shouldn't have to keep quiet about another mass shooting to not piss people off. I respected him more after that.
Yeah, getting sarcastic with the other commenter isn't really necessary.
It cost Beto the election. That's the only point they're making, and your respect for him doesn't change the fact he gave up a position to enact change.
But presumably you would already have been someone who would have voted for him anyway if you were in his voting district anyhow. So earning the respect of people similar to how you see him does nothing for his chances of winning.
That's the reality of politics. Obama refused to support same-sex marriage publicly through most of his political career until 2012, even though there are indications he supported it before he started running. The rights of gay people in that narrow window of time (narrow compared to the overall history of the US anyhow) of his political career were less important than him winning and enacting other policies. Had he prioritized the rights of gay people first, maybe he would have earned more respect from people who would have voted for him anyhow, but would have lost support from others and not made it as far as he did.
https://apnews.com/united-states-government-general-news-63f51fcd69bb4ce18ed6b7306d1b3c89
Yeah policies on gay marriage might have a different approach than policies on guns with regards to mass shootings and the effects of those shootings, so I'm not attempting to say that you can equate Obama's carefully moderated approach to be a perfect plan for approaching guns and mass shootings. What I am saying is that shows the reality of politics, sometimes the public perception of a politicians stances comes before their beliefs, opinions or feelings on any given matter.
People don’t seem to be aware generally about the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes being committed in recent years. My husband is Asian and we live in an Asian neighborhood, so I see it - but the media and society in general is almost completely silent on it.
I don’t think that arming them is the best way to deal with it by any stretch of the imagination, but I completely understand why they would feel like they need to be. The solution isn’t more cops, either, it’s better cops who do a better job handling these situations. Or to put it better, a better organized and trained institution. Unfortunately police across the nation seem to be increasingly against the communities they serve, and that’s a real problem for very obvious reasons.
On reflection, yeah, if I want national Pan-Asian news I get it from Instagram accounts (obviously YMMV until you read the article from a reputable outlet) and from following specific local newscasters. I didn't realize it but this is probably not something a lot of people are aware of. On reflection, I think one of the accounts in particular is pretty pro-gun / anti-cop-- "cops will not protect you" vibes.
(On my own end, I'd pick well-trained cops and a fast and correct justice system if I had a choice.)
It's valuable anecdata. I didn't get into it in my post (didn't really want to start an internet fight about crime), but living in NYC and seeing what happens at a local level with regards to crime is horrendous. (For those not in NYC-- the DEI efforts are also very awkward as the Asian populace was statistically the poorest for a really long time, but the extremes on the national level create an assumption of higher overall wealth (e.g. Vietnamese vs. Hmong).)
I think about Christina Yuna Lee when I go home late at night, and Michelle Go every time I approach the edge of the subway platform. I think about all the other people (unnamed in their articles) whose lives were taken away from their friends, family, and children for no good reason, doing ordinary things like walking home with a friend. When I wonder what I would do to protect myself or someone else, I worry about ending up / creating similar situations as those of Jose Alba or Daniel Penny. It's not like I'm doomscrolling crime either, these were just big local news pieces and are all fairly recent. It does not feel empowering.
This might be a different thing to what you're thinking about, but it reminds me of the term latinx. Literally everyone I know hates it, because it misunderstands what grammatical gender is doing in a word and feels like American colonialism of our language. Yet I saw Biden use it a couple of months ago. Obviously not nearly enough to change my vote, but it shows a party not in communication with the actual communities it's representing.
Can you share the correct understanding of what grammatical gender is doing in a word? And more specifically, what does it do in a word meant to describe a person?
It's a case system. Nobody speaking Spanish actually thinks the wall is female and the stick is male. You can call the most sexist, bigoted, chauvinistic Latin guy una (female) persona (female) latina (female), and he won't even blink. Because grammatical gender isn't actually gender, it's a structure of the language, and the genders of the nouns aren't associated with anything real.
EDIT: unless you're specifically gendering someone, in which case latinx doesn't help at all, since you'd need to change the pronouns (el, ella), not the nouns.
Thanks, it was a genuine question although reading it back I'm not sure that came across.
I grew up learning Spanish in school and do know about grammatical usage somewhat. Some of the nuance I was curious around was that very case, e.g. if someone was described with "latina."
It reminds me of the English tumult of using "he" as the default genderless pronoun, where some authors switched to "she" as the default and others opted for he/she or (s)he, and now "they" becoming increasingly common.
I also wonder why the anglicized version didn't become "latina" by default. Latinx always seemed clunky.
Unfortunately, English tends to absorb and butcher source words. Living in Texas, I still can't help but shake my head at the widespread usage of "tomale" for a single tomal.
Ah, sorry, didn't mean to come across as a dick there either, its a fair question.
That is the main problem with latinx, the fact that it's not pronounceable in Spanish. That's the part that makes Latin people angry, because it feels like continued colonialism of our language. x isn't pronounced "eks" in Spanish if you're actually pronouncing the formal consonant, it's pronounced "eh-khis". It's just a hideous word, and doesn't fix anything, because what about the pronouns? Is it el latinx or la latinx? Or xl latinx, lx latinx? Esx latinx? Estx latinx? The entire structure around it has to be changed, and to what end? Because, by God, if you're absolutely intent on not using a gendered word to identify yourself (even if males use female nouns and females use male nouns), you can just say "Soy Latín". That's not usual and you'd get weird looks, but perfectly grammatically correct and neutral. Technically the word is masculine, since every noun has a gender, but if doesn't have a masculine ending, its just going by the default gender.
On your point about anglicised version, that just confuses me. Why don't English speakers just say Latin, Latin American, Hispanic, etc? Those are all the translations of the relevant terms, and all gender neutral. I honestly don't know what language is latinx is meant to address.
Don't worry, you didn't come across rude to me at all.
Just using "Latin" is probably the most clear, you're right. It might not have caught on because of the overlap with scientific naming and the dead language, or maybe because it was seen as too narrow in referring to the Americas vs Portugal/Spain.
Hispanic is also pretty neutral, but the bigoted (truncated) usage may have contributed to a fall in popularity. I'll personally probably stick with Latin when needing a global word.
Don't let me police your language either. I frankly don't care what people call me, Puerto Rican is my principal identity, and everything else is a distant second. Your community might be different.
Latin is in a bit of a weird spot. Some people do think that, but as a counterexample, I've never seen people talk about Latin music as a church orchestra, or Latin food as the ancient cuisine of the empire. Language is weird!
As an aside, I think this is more of a problem with second and third gen Americans, particularly the ones that never learn Spanish. They want ties to their ancestral culture, but don't have the context and language to fully partake it it, so you get these fusions, where latino is their principal identity (something not shared with immigrants), and of they're LBGTQ+, combining the nb desire for gender neutral pronouns into their chosen identity.
Which is fine, people should be happy. But Dems should be aware it's far from the mainstream, and pissing the mainstream off.
I'm actually on my own journey of gender, probably most aligned as nonbinary but still comfortable with he/him and they equally. I definitely understand the desire to push back against traditional assumptions of masculinity (and femininity), but prescriptive language changes without a basis in colloquial/shared usage seem like a recipe for contention.
That's fair enough, and there's definitely different perceptions than my own. Really, the worst part about the word is that it's clearly unpronounceable. There's other alternatives like latines that I've seen, although those gave problems too. Namely, -e is a masculine ending too. You can say esa latina, but if you say ese latine, you're back to using masculine.
But latinx in particularly gets people's hackles up, because it's not operating in the basics of the language.
I think there's a bit of confusion here. "una persona latina" is correct because the noun 'persona' is feminine. It would not be correct to say (about a man) "él es latina" you would say "él es latino."
Masculine nouns are the default for mixed gender groups too, so if anything 'latino' should be the default term unless all members of the group are female.
No confusion, just following the linguistic pattern adopted with English pronouns. From using "he" to "she" as an indefinite pronoun, why not go from "Latino" to "Latina" as a default universal descriptor. English has no grammatical gender rule, inventing "Latinx" is still an odd choice to me.
If the grammatical gender has no gendered masculine or feminine connotation, why wouldn't all Latin men be content with described as "Latina" in English, derived from "persona latina?"
I don't think that 'she' is used as a universal descriptor in English.
The difference is that calling a man "una persona latina" has no implication about him, but just calling him 'latina' is implying that he is feminine.
Here's a link to a discussion about what I'm referring to with using "she" as the default, universal singular, instead of "he." There was definitely a movement towards the feminine, especially in academic writing, most likely as a course-correction for the seemingly patriarchal nature of defaulting to "he."
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28508/reason-for-the-current-trend-to-use-she-as-the-gender-neutral-pronoun
Edit: and if using Latina implies he is feminine, then there is more to the grammatical gender than purely form. The response I received suggested grammatical gender was misinterpreted as gendered language, yet you're saying that it's correctly interpreted to be masculine and feminine.
Gendering someone and grammatical gender are two separate concepts. Una persona latina would be fine for men because the noun persona is feminine. Saying someone is latina is defining a gender for them, without a noun.
I'm not saying Spanish isn't gendered. I'm saying grammatical gender is a separate concept. Changing one word doesn't help, unless the person using that word only means to use in in English.
Male is default, but not because misogyny. It's default because Latin has three genders (-um for neutral, -us for masculine and -a for feminine), and the -um and -us forms slowly merged into -o. The masculine ending is both the neuter and the masculine ending, so it is default. Saying los estudiantes doesn't gender a group of students. Saying las estudiantes does.
Yes, I am not talking about changing the entire Spanish language. Just discussing the conversion into an English word, and purely as a hypothetical to challenge the "why" aspect. Would Latin men be averse to being described (in English) as Latina? If so, is the non-grammatical gender in Spanish transferred to English? Why?
Again, I was talking about the use in English.
I don't know the linguistic history of Spanish. I do think that using the masculine form of a word as the "default" reinforces patriarchal concepts. Whether that effect is larger or smaller for Spanish vs English is hard to quantify.
They would. By the same token, women would be averse to being called "Latino". Not as a plural, because the masculine plural is the default, but a latin woman would correct you if you called her a latino without modifiers. If you see a group of latin women, it is also incorrect to use "latinos", and they will correct you.
That's if you're gendering them. If you're gendering the nouns, you might not have this problem, as some nouns only have one gender, thought not all. Teacher can be either maestro or maestra, for example.
The grammatical gender problem doesn't exist in English because, in English, nouns don't have grammatical gender. Neuter words that apply to all already exist. The problem only exists if the person is code switching. That is, if the name.of their chosen identity is in Spanish, but they operate in English speaking circles. In that way, the problem is the opposite in both languages. Nouns aren't a problem in English, pronouns are. In Spanish, nouns on their own aren't a problem, but pronouns are a huge barrier. You can't piggyback of the plural, you have to create an entirely new word, and that word has to fit the noun's ending. Which means that you have to create hundreds of words, if not thousands.
The migration of non-White voters to Republicans is largely just a lot of data weirdness.
1.) You have a small n of non-White people in most surveys in general, so small shifts end up looking like big percentage changes.
2.) You have a small percentage of non-White supporters of Republicans, further magnifying it.
3.) Non-White incomes and wealth has only been growing, so it is not super surprising that as larger percentages of the groups get rich, larger percentages start to gravitate towards the party that promises to let them pull the ladder up behind them.
4.) I would argue that the real realignment is along gender, rather than racial lines. If you look at the cross-tabs what’s actually happening is men shifting more to the right. And that trend transcends race. Misogyny is the driver here, not racial dynamics. (And the misogyny travels with it’s cousin, homophobia.)
The op-ed provides more factors than I was thinking of, like small government vs. big government and homogeneous racial groups (which I'm going to take as "people who socialize outside of their race are less likely to let race be the primary factor by which they make decisions").
Part of my own family got more enamored with Trump, but I think it's because we're culturally less sensitive to bombastic personalities who don't respect the norms of D.C.. So the things that make him a boor don't bother them, I think it's seen as a strong projection of opinions. I think the authoritarian vibes are also comforting to them. (On my own end I can say I never really cared that much for his gaffes, there was enough to criticize before I got to clutch my pearls. On the authoritarian vibes... those aren't my politics, but the self-obsessed culture of "this is how you project being a polished candidate ready for The Machine" is gross to me, and I think we need more Bernies.)
That being said, I think the only thing everyone can objectively state about Republicans vs. Democrats is that Republicans are more punishment-oriented in crime and Democrats are... not that. Officially it is generational reduction of crime through policy, sometimes it's just not prosecuting repeat offenders (and I'm putting it really nicely here). That plus the specific flavor of diversity awareness they put out I think plays very weirdly to a lot of people. Taibbi had a previously free 4 part series on Loudoun / Virginia in 2021 and DEI. It's unfortunately not free now, so I can't validate my memory here, but I think this is the article set where he actually does quote liberal parents who feel exasperated and confused at being 'on the other side.'
Agree with your points and one raised early in the oped about these groups having much more conservative beliefs than their voting patterns would reflect. Having non American family members, I am often told how jealous they are of our country having a party as far to the right as the Republican party. I'm sure Christianity has a large role to play there and also the surprisingly (to me at least) xenophobic nature of many countries in the world.
Perhaps they've been voting democrat for self preservation and no longer feel the need to.
There’s a couple surprising factors in what makes a person of color support Trump.
First, many of these people of color… pause for dramatic effect… actually don’t think of themselves as people of color. They think they are white and thus, not one of the people Trump is talking about when he’s being racist. This is especially so in the Republican Latino community. They believe that Trump/Republicans consider them white and that they are accepted as part of their racist community, and that they can all be happily racist together against all the other POCs whom they think of as non white. They believe this right up to and including the point where their families are being deported en masse by the very people they voted for. Sounds absolutely wild but this is genuinely what they believe. Look at Enrique Tarrio, literally the leader of the Proud Boys. He will never understand that Republicans consider him a useful idiot that they can utilize as a tool, not as a “fellow white” as he believes he is with all his heart and soul.
Disclaimer: these aren’t my own views of what “whiteness” and “non-whiteness” is, just what I have observed of Republicans.
It’s also important to keep in mind that Latino is a broad term that includes several races. It encompasses anyone from David Ortiz to Alexis Bledel. There are Latinos who would fall under a conception of white, and many lighter skinned mestizo folks who would “pass”.
TIL. She played the entitled WASP so perfectly in Gilmore Girls. Shocking!
One point about whiteness: many Latin people are white in their own countries. Race is a social construct and England didn't invent the caste system. They're not being stupid when they say they're white; they're using their own cultural conception of race. And frankly, white Americans accept that to an extent. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are able to code switch identities with their base, depending on the context.
What I find confusing is that very few Democratic politicians actually talk like this much. There’s a big issue where stuff that random dingbats on Twitter say are signposted as “Democrats think this” and put up against stuff that Republican officials and candidates for political office say to make a “both sides” narrative. But the median Democratic official spends as much time countering the far left as the median Republican spends pandering to the far right. There isn’t even a contest there. The false equivalence people draw is insane.
I couldn't vote further left than I already do, but there is a messaging problem in my country as well. The right looks strong and as though it has something to fight for, whereas the left looks pretty weak rhetorically.
I was wondering though, if you could give an example of this alienating pop psychology-speak and left-speak you mention?
Every time a Democrat does "Latinx" outreach in the US I physically cringe (see Elizabeth Warren). Essentially no-one in the Hispanic community uses that term, and the vast majority haven't even heard the term... I'm not sure if this falls under pop-psychology though.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/
To be clear most of this is about the National scale, as when you get more local things can change a lot:
This has been a known problem for decades for a whole slew of reasons. George Bush even had some mangled quote on it.
Minority populations in the US are often very conservative, especially those that tend towards being heavily religious. The democratic stance on things like abortion or their recent push towards "woke" policies or whatever you want to call it, does not mesh well.
Minority populations are also, justifiably, not very trusting of the government, and the Dems sure do love expanding it and adding more rules. Appointing a prosecutor as VP during nation wide demonstrations and riots due to police brutality shows how much they care about that attitude.
Finally, it's not like the Dems don't know that there is no other choice. They pay lip service to minority communities and then ignore it. It's been known for decades that weed as a schedule 1 drug is a fucking joke that mostly leads to poor poor minorities being locked up in jail, but no matter how many times the dems have the presidency, the house, the senate, and the courts, nothing ever seems to get done about it. This is one of MANY issues that always gets talked about in debates and somehow never mentioned again until elections are around the corner.
So in short they know they're a mostly captured voting block, and don't try to appease them at all. There's an implied "Go ahead, vote republican if you don't like it" attitude.
Oddly, the underlying "whites only" attitude of the republicans is probably why they haven't been sweeping the elections for the past 20 years. These days it's only gotten worse, and there is no small government party, and it's not like most people aren't aware of what a fucking shitshow they've become, but it doesn't change the fact that for many minorities there is no party that comes close to representing, or caring, about them.
Eh, in the modern Democratic Party it is the leaders of the Black community that have the most conservative positions on drugs and crime. Restorative justice this and that are popular with Black activists, but not so much Black political leaders. It’s important not to confuse the two.
And a big part of this is precisely because the victims of permissive cultures around drugs and crime also fall hardest on Black communities. The church ladies don’t want to put up with it. You’re gonna have a hard time convincing them to not throw the 15 year old wannabe gangbanger who bullies their 15 year old good student in jail for a long long time. And take three guesses which 15 year old’s parent is more likely to vote. Sure they don’t like when their kids are victimized by the police, but they like it even less when they’re victimized by neighborhood delinquents, who are a more regular fixture in their neighborhoods. There tends to be a lot more nuanced understanding of policing in the Black community as a whole than just the activist community tends to suggest.
At least from my limited vantage, the activist v. political leader breakdown is generational. Perhaps less so in core membership of each group, but definitely in terms of alignments within the general Black population. The guys I know who have zero qualms about walking right up to a percent substation in an all-White neighborhood to report that some asshole just smashed his car window are all old enough to be my father.
It is definitely generational, but I’m not really sure if it’s a generational cohort thing or just a “your perspective changes as you get older” thing. Probably a bit of both but hard to say what the percentage split is.
Please don't forget "men only." It seems like Tildes skews heavily male and as such women's issues are sometimes forgotten. Republicans are a "white men" party. Hence why the slogan "make America great again" is nonsensical to many. Great again for who, exactly?
As long as Republicans continue to deny women their right to bodily autonomy, by denying abortions and birth control and even starting to attack no-fault marriage now apparently, they are losing a huge chunk of voters—women.
So not only does the Republican party need to stop being so racist, they also need to stop being so sexist.
This is a topic about the racial realignment so I didn't bother to go into that as I think it's a very different topic.
All races have women... Women make up half of the population, half of all races. This is the point of intersectional feminism. A Hispanic woman is a Hispanic woman; one cannot remove the woman from her and only focus on the Hispanic, and likewise one cannot remove the Hispanic from her and only focus on the woman. Race and sex are intertwined, people are multifaceted in their identities. I think that choosing to ignore sex when discussing race is going to cause blindspots in political analysis.
The state I commented on was:
Because I disagree with this one-sided analysis of why Republicans don't sweep elections. It's more than just racism. It's not just "whites only." The Republican party's sexism matters, because women matter. I think the Republican party's blatant sexism does increasingly impact their chances with every new generation of woman voters.
Most data I've seen clashes with what you're saying. Active female voters generally vote about 50/50 with regards to republican/democrat.
Compare this to the 10/90 of the black community or the 40/60 of the latino community.
…but in that 10 (or 40), what is the gender breakdown?
Majority male but that doesn't change the numbers. This is already in the data. 90% of the voting black community isn't women. If the republicans could grab 30% of that they'd crush the democrats.
Just for clarity of anyone reading this thread in the future, you meant "90% of voters in the Black community isn't just women", right?
Yeup.
I wonder if our immigration policies select for people with conservative ideology. In order to become a naturalized United States citizen you have to put up with years of “sponsorship”, and you have to be tested for “American-ness”. It feels kind of paternalistic to me. To my memory, all people granted citizenship outside of birthright I have ever encountered have been extremely conservative. Which, in retrospect, might also explain why conservative people seem to be so happy with our current naturalization process.
Maybe, but there's also a big friction with the left having a very loud section that wants to explain why we should all convert to communism, and there's a lot of people coming from countries that were wrecked by "communism". And saying "well not that communism" doesn't really give a lot of confidence because that's what they, their parents, and their grandparents were told as well.
And when you're coming from some of these countries, you often don't have the same "liberalness" the us has. The idea that we're going to argue about pronouns is laughable when they're escaping famine, economic collapse, mass gang violence, or many of the other issues that some of these families have dealt with.
On top of that many other countries are much less liberal than the US when it comes to rights or religion. You can tell them they're wrong, but then why shouldn't they vote for someone who doesn't?
Heck put bluntly, it's mostly the immigrants from wealthy "western" nations who align the most with the democratic party, and happen to also have a majority white population.
If you're coming from South America, Africa, The Middle East, or large parts of Asia, the dems positions are likely to be heavily against your opinions if not outright offensive to you or your beliefs. I suspect the main reason these demographics don't vote more for the Republicans is because they've always been the party of "don't let them in" and in recent years have gotten much much worse about it.
To be clear, I’m not talking about political parties here, I’m talking about ideology.
Immigrants are also not all coming from these impoverished and strife-filled nations; there are many people who come from rich countries as well.
In any case, “conservative” and “progressive” are very reductive terms to begin worth, and they really start to dissolve when you cross a national boarder.
Sure, but I already touched on that.
There's lots of people coming from rich countries. A lot of them, who will naturally line up with the Dem's liberal positions (which are probably very conservative to them), are often from liberal European countries which tend to have populations which are NOT made up of what would be considered minorities in the US.
If you're coming from China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey, I'd say there's good odds you're more conservative than the current democratic party's stance on a majority of issues (japan and south korea might hit that list too).
My uninformed vibe take is that the Republicans are more united around culture wars where as the Democrats have to be the party that represents the progressive resistance and the middle management that they are resisting. That wasn't always the case where the Republicans were classically pro business and the Democrats were pro worker and government, but words speak louder than actions post Newt Gingrich and all those people who don't like being tred on are tired curious, as long as those other guys get it worse.
I mean, trump won, in part, because he won the rust belt. Democrats used to be (or at least pretend) the party of the average worker.
After Obama bailed out the banks and Hilary snubbed them and they decided to blast only messaging in the direction of the SJ crowd...well turns out they'll vote the other side.
It has always felt somewhat dishonest to me how the dems tend to claim to want to support the poor and uneducated, but those are the people now voting heavily for the republicans because the dems run candidates who sure as shit don't seem to respect them.
God knows Trump doesn't either, but turns out a con man is great at getting the support of the poor and uneducated.
"the poor" do vote for democrats, they just live in cities.
Now maybe. They used to in the rust belt as well.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/mfKaR
Thanks, I'm appreciate folks posting interesting articles, but I skip paywalled content. I wish Tilde culture considered it as a factor when posting.
You can add
paywallto your topic tag filters if you want to avoid them.Good to know, thanks!
You can also go to archive.is and paste the paywalled link to get access for free. It makes these paywalled topics much less frustrating.
If you install the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension (for Firefox or Chromium) paywalled links like these will seldom be a problem. I don’t even realize which sites have walls because I almost never see them anymore.
Seconded. The only reason I don't use Bypass Paywalls Clean myself anymore is because I actually want to encounter paywalls so that I can properly tag topics with
paywall, and provide mirror/archive links for people who can't use BPC. :PThank you for the link, it was a huge help. For some reason I haven't been able to resolve, awhile back all the archive sites decided they hate my computer though they're work through my phone, so having another work around is much appreciated.
Archive.today and all its mirrors unfortunately don't play well with Cloudflare DNS due to a bit of a pissing match between them. So if you're using Cloudflare DNS at home, but not on mobile, that would probably explain it.
p.s. Even if you didn't explicitly set CloudFlare DNS (1.1.1.1) in any of your devices' network settings, Firefox utilizes Cloudflare DNS by default if you have DNS over HTTPS (DoH) enabled. So if that is the case, you can either disable DoH, reconfigure it to use any DNS provider other than Cloudflare, or add
archive.today,archive.is,archive.phandarchive.lito the DoH Exceptions, and it should resolve the issue.One part of Tildes culture is that creating topics is a collaborative process, sort of like a Wiki. For example, tags are often added by someone else who has permission to do that. You can add tags yourself, but you can also leave it to someone else if you’re feeling lazy.
The same is true of archive links - if you don’t see it right away, check back later, or learn to create them yourself. (It’s easy, but I went for a surprisingly long time before I started using them.)
I tend to post archive links if I used an archive site myself, and otherwise leave it for someone else to do.
Most quality journalism is paywalled though, and most paywalled content has only a soft paywall.
I think a better request would be for authors (maybe a bot if that's possible with tildes coding) to consider posting an archive link so it's easier for users to view
Yes, I know I can paste the link in myself, but honestly the story would have to be something I'm actively invested in to go through the effort. For more casual things I'm only semi-curious about, I would elect to move onto the next topic for discussion instead of trying to get the archive link working
Most of my browsing is done at work, and with our firewall the archive websites don't like to behave
A mirror bot is probably very unlikely to happen unless Canadian copyright law changes. And even users posting mirror links is not entirely without potential legal risk here in Canada either, so expecting submitters to provide mirrors for paywalled articles is problematic as well. From a previous comment of mine on the subject: