The “racial reckoning” of 2020 set off an entirely new kind of backlash

How is it any different from the grievance over Obama's election? Feels like it's been the same crap for 15 years.

 

How is it any different from the grievance over Clinton's election? Feels like it's been the same crap for 30 years.

 

or the grievance over Reagan's election and GB #1. I still have an "Impeach Bush" sticker on my Yugo

 

Word on The Street is that Bill Clinton was the first black President. Given that, you can see why the SCWs blew their gaskets over Slick Willy.

 

Ehh, I'd say something happened with Obama's election. After he won, you had the Tea Party wave. Immigration policy became the big deal. Anecdotally, I'd say the accusation of RINO became more common and mainstream. And of course Trump became the next president. Maybe it wasn't seeing a black man in the white house that broke their brains, but something happened circa 2008.

Not to say BLM wasn't a watershed event. I think it was. Just not sure it's responsible for white grievance. They (we?) were already aggrieved.

 

It was 100% the election of Barack Obama that made the American right lose its mind. At that moment there was talk of a "permanent" Democratic majority; demographics were "destiny" and the party had a 60-seat presence in the Senate. Obama brought in big cohorts of new voters to the Democratic party and the GOP was coming off of two major self-owns that ate away at the American middle- and lower classes: the Iraq war and the 2008 financial collapse. People were angry that their wealth had been wiped out and that their friends and family were dying in a war based on Republican lies.

GOP leadership knew that this was a potential watershed moment and they acted accordingly. Mitch McConnell broke with all precedent and decided to gum up the executive nomination process so badly that Harry Reid went "nuclear" and removed the filibuster for all presidential appointments short of the Supreme Court; McConnell weaponized hitherto unknown things like the debt ceiling to fight Obama. It's been reported that McConnell wanted to break the system so that Obama's majority lost faith in government and, by extension, him.

If the GOP could grind governing to a halt they knew that most voters would blame Obama - since most people aren't dorks who pay attention to Senate rules - and not the Republicans. After all, the GOP's core message of tax cuts for the wealthy and less oversight over business had just wrecked the economy. Its post-9/11 bloodlust was killing thousands of people in service of a lie. Doubling down on that would be a hard sell in the immediate future. But, undermining Obama when the American public had its first real taste for "big government" since Carter could do more to elevate the GOP's standing than any Reagan-era messaging could. Obama's job was to pull the car out of the ditch and the GOP's plan was to drive it down more ditch-filled highways once it was on the road again. A core thing to remember about Republicans is they have no desire to solve problems even if they're the creators of them; modern conservatism does not allow for self-reflection and course correction.

Obama's existence was fodder for the fringe. Trump got his political start by being a racist and questioning where Obama was born just like some posters here who always referred to him as "Barack Hussein Obama" and acted coy when called out on it. Republican politicians soon learned there wasn't really a price to be paid for being openly racist and doubled down on that. We don't need to go down that road because we've been living it for 16 years. But, suffice to say, conservatives learned there was no price to pay for questioning Obama's birthplace, saying his middle name like a slur, etc. because that mindset helped Donald Trump win in 2016. Where things really went off the rails is that the GOP's "let's push the car back into the ditch and hope nobody notices" economic policy was no longer appealing to the base and that's how we got to where we are now: a major political party governed exclusively by its populist id in the service of one narcissist's ugly ego.

 

As a white male....... white folks are some of the biggest, entitled snowflakes on the planet. Having family in East Texas and Louisiana.. you just realize that white folks (particularly white males) grow up learning that the country belongs to them and develop this entitlement ideology that just leads to grievances when they actually head out into the real world.

 

Agree, but I think it started with Bush Jr. The nation was on the right path after Clinton, but Bush messed up nearly everything. Then a black man was chosen as the solution, which brought the extremists out in force. Of course, Obama had no solution, and hope vanished. Biden did five times better, but we are at a point where facts mean nothing anymore, and people are truly unable to distinguish alternative facts from real facts. They think they are smart when they are actually very ignorant.

But the future is still bright, as long as we still have some form of democracy.

 

Yeah the reputation rehab W has received is only possible because of Trump. His economic policies were a huge contributor to 2008 (Clinton deserves a lot of fault, too, for bowing to Phil Gramm and repealing Glass-Steagall) and he led the nation into an insanely expensive and bloody war in Iraq for no reason. Obama couldn't quell the post-2008 populist anger and Trump exploited it.

 

Obama was too nice.
He was reaching accross the Aisle to people who wanted to literally murder him
He allowed so much to pass . . he was given a mandate and did nothing with it
he actually beleived the bullsh*t
He actually beleived in this country
which is a problem alot of the poor and immigrants have

Believing the PR and not realizing it is all smoke and mirrors
marketing and advertising

Rocket River

 

Trump courted the infamous Deplorables who mostly stayed away from either party. Not all Cons are deplorables, nor are all deplorables Cons, but they'll vote MAGA/Trump as long as they feel like they're spoken to.

Without that Deplorable vote, Donny wouldn't have as much clout to shape the GOP as he's had in the last 4 years.

 

I think you're right. Trump managed to vehiculate a class of formerly non-voters using white grievance. That was in 2016. I think we have yet to understand what the 2020 BLM protests will do to us politically.

 

And in 2024.... he's real courting the male grievance vote.

 

Obama shoud have taken Luther with him everywhere

 

You can blame the "backlash" on the blacks and social justice movements for conservative whites being more openly racist and embracing white supremacy but - I blame the conservative whites like @basso @tinman etc who are more openly racist and embracing white supremacy.

 

Think about a pathological liar naming his political website Truth Social, and all those naive, brainwashed, and ignorant fools believing his truth. It's no wonder there are so many MAGA die hards completely unable to distinguish fact from fiction when they only believe their cult leader. They are incapable of using any critical thinking skills to question Trump's altered version of every situation he rants on about. They don't even realize that they are being fed a pack of lies over and over and over again.

 

@tinman passing for white these days?

 

Ever since he married Ginnie and got the $ millions in undeclared gifts that guy's been whiter than a childless 50 year old incel.