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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37152 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Did anyone make much of it when 'white girls for Kamala' showed up on the scene a few days ago? I certainly didn't.

And I certainly didn't see the logical next step: 'white dudes for Kamala'

https://www.foxnews.com/media/white-dudes-for-harris-hold-call-after-160000-white-women-join-karens-for-kamala-zoom

This is the first time in my lifetime (not that old, but...) that any group of white guys publicly organized themselves politically around their shared identity.

Could be nothing - could be a watershed moment. I have been wrong about many things but was at least right about the bud light thing.

Anyway, more interested in hearing your thoughts

The implication of having to identify a group for X is that said group typically doesn't support X but this particular groups does and that hey, maybe you fellow member of that group should also support X. There's literally dozens thousands of us!

Will this actually gain support for Kamala Harris among white dudes? Well, the likely answer is that it probably will get a few, but not enough to shift the needle for this demographic in any particular manner.

If you're a white guy, what policies/cultural stances does Kamala have that would want to make you vote for her? I know it hasn't been long since the Democratic Party decided she should be their candidate, but I have heard very little about her actual stances and policies that wasn't something I had to look up my self.

So far, I haven't seen anything that would shift someone that wasn't already planning to vote for her (likely due to her being the democratic candidate, than anything else) to vote for her.

If you're a white guy, what policies/cultural stances does Kamala have that would want to make you vote for her?

Getting laid with whatever female demographic are rabbid Kamalah supporters is the reason.

Thank god for the secret ballot, then.

It’s not meant to shift support, it’s a fundraising/organizing gimmick.

40% of white men voted for Biden. Even if you drop that 10% for Harris, that's still tens of millions of people.

If she losses an incremental 4% of white men, she is DOA.

And if she loses them 80-20 (and loses every state but CA and NY) that will still be millions of white men voting for her. More than enough to fill a fakakta digital event.

Oh I agree. Her getting 10k white men on a call is meaningless

Not quite meaningless- it shows that she has the institutional capacity to get 10k white men on a call. That's an absolutely doable challenge for a major campaign, but otherwise quite difficult.

I suggest that her real concern here is to show democrat insiders that she has the backing of the Biden campaign infrastructure.

I was being a little cheeky there with the number quoted in the article, which was "Over 10,000 white men from all across the country are expected to join the effort this week and will be on hand to welcome Vice President Harris to the presidential race and pledge to help get her elected".

but I have heard very little about her actual stances and policies that wasn't something I had to look up my self.

And you won't. The path to Democratic victory is selling Kamala as a generic Democrat, not her actual policy stances which weren't popular with Democrats last time and will be even less palatable to Republicans and squishy centrists. Just because GovTrack deleted their page naming her the most liberal senator of 2019 doesn't mean it wasn't true.

She is both a far left extremist who supported BLM and in height of violence saw the protests as necessary to continue to get more change, favored police decriminalization, open borders, DEI, Green New Deal and a mainstream Democrat. This republican anti Kamala video includes most of them except her BLM 2020 protests comments https://youtube.com/watch?v=bHlb0z1vZm8

How much backlash did Kamala face then or now for any of this? And how alone has she been?

This is what the Democrats are now. Maybe she is somewhat even more left wing than any random Democrat, but they are a far left party and the difference between Harris and other Democrats will not be significant as the default of liberal democrat politics has shifted to a more radical direction. It represents the 21st century type of far left which is of course different than early 20th century far left of orthodox marxism. Nor is this a constantly anti-establishment far left but a pro being the establishment far left.

As for the voters, I do think that there will be an attempt to fool the electorate by promoting her as a more moderate politician than she is. But the issue isn't X or Y random politician but a broader trend of a shift of the mainstream, and of the Democrats in general towards the far left.

There is an obvious bias by many against describing the Democrats as far leftists, under the fear of being perceived too partisan, or right wing. Suppose someone writes an article analyzing the election and the candidates, it would actually be their duty to properly inform people about where the parties and candidates stand and to talk about how far left the Democrats actually are.

To say she supported BLM is a bit of an understatement. There's a decent amount of evidence, her last presidential campaign was supposed to have followed Jussie Smollett's attack (lynching) and her Federal anti-lynching bill but the whole thing fell completely apart as more of the story of the attack came out.

I will preface by stating an agreement in principle with the strong judgment expressed by the video, but the hyperbolic rush of right wingers to class everything as BLM open borders defund the police has unfortunately clouded the waters. Harris is a climber bending her opinions to the whims of idiots, not an originator of bad ideas (my bogeyman for that is Pramilla Jayapal).

Harris is a modal minority democrat who post 2020 has to position herself as against the modal white democrat because she is pretty poor quality as a white democrat. Barack played the white (Centrist Democrats) game well, and Cory Booker is a black democrat who plays the Centrist game pretty well too. By contrast Bernie doesn't play the white democrat game well, and neither does Warren. I hope this elucidates my general observation of white vs minority democrat styles, in crude classification.

Harris is a climber sanewashed into centrism by association with Biden, and her progressive points post 2020 are likely a positioning game to be a champion of an otherwise disrespected democrat political caucus. Her actual voting history is unsympathetic to black and brown issues, and the current brattification/wokeification of Harris is just throwing anything at a wall to stick.

How much backlash did Kamala face then or now for any of this?

Her abysmal primary performance was enough. But all that's being erased now. The Democrats will promote her as a generic Democrat; all for women and minorities, for taking from "the rich" and giving out goodies to the good people. No need to go into specifics.

Suppose someone writes an article analyzing the election and the candidates, it would actually be their duty to properly inform people about where the parties and candidates stand and to talk about how far left the Democrats actually are.

But if that someone is writing for the mainstream media, they are a booster for the Democrats, so they will not. If they aren't writing for the mainstream media, they are preaching to the choir and will make no difference. Control of all the "neutral" institutions is a ridiculously powerful tool.

Yeah, I don't think American Democrats generally realise that their party is substantially further to the left than e.g. the UK or Australian Labo(u)r parties.

It... depends what you mean by "left". Economically the US Democrats don't seem to be more socialist. Socially, yes, they're more progressive.

Is GovTrack an actual reliable source? I saw an article about how six democrats voted with the GOP to condemn Kamala Harris as the Border Czar so I looked up these six democrats (and to no surprise ideologically they're in the middle). So I just clicked around, and their political stance becomes obvious with a page like this:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/ted_cruz/412573

The "Elections must be decided by counting votes" specifically, that's apparent if you select the page for numerous Republican senators. Factor in the fact that they removed the scorecard page labeling her as the most liberal senator and their bias is clear, but I did find utility in their Ideology–Leadership Chart as well-being able to view their voting records and bills.

One of those memetic ironies: it's become de rigeur among the anti racist set to constantly identify oneself as white in a mildly ironic self effacing way. White boy summer, white girl wasted, I'm just an old white dude, they never should have let a white boy like me (x), white son in law energy. The identification is primarily negative, but mildly so.

Where when SA originally wrote his piece identifying as White was a red tribe affectation, today it might almost be more a blue tribe affectation to constantly go on about one's whiteness.

This does not, of course, preclude the affectation developing from irony to importance. Nor does it mean the event was real, it could quite easily be faked and reflect the tastes of just a handful of campaign staff.

Eh, Whitest Kids U Know was incredibly quotable to a certain age group, too.

Did social media let this sort of humor get a little closer to the people in power? Probably. Does it reflect an actual acceptance of identitarianism? Not so much.

Does it reflect an actual acceptance of identitarianism? Not so much.

There are very few groups more accepting of identitarianism than white progressives, and all the others are shunned from nearly all mainstream spaces (the remainder, like Banania, should be but are not, because the universe is fickle). They primarily approve of it for others, but they definitely approve of it.

The first two times I saw this was in the context of basketball: the title of the film “White Men Can’t Jump,” and Larry Bird in Space Jam being “clear” as a reference to WMCJ. (My mom still laughs every time.)

Where when SA originally wrote his piece identifying as White was a red tribe affectation, today it might almost be more a blue tribe affectation to constantly go on about one's whiteness.

Eh, identifying oneself as White is kinda blue, but 'is he White or Mexican/black/whatever' is a red tribe thing, and the expected answer if talking about a liberal White would be 'hipster' or something of that sort.

White boy summer, white girl wasted

These seem more apolitical. I suppose they’re vaguely left if only because zoomers are more left than the average of the rest of the population, but it’s not a huge tell politically.

The self deprecating nature of those statements is apolitical in the sense of it doesn't take a position on immigration reform or tax policy. But the self effacement excludes white identitarian politics. Which makes sense given Chet Hanks' well known love of miscegenation.

The campaign has a short amount of time to present Harris as a popular competitive candidate, so they are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. This is about contacting and rallying supporters. As well as trying to get some headlines.

They didn't actually organize themselves politically as white guys. The campaign was putting together calls with large groups and noticed it had a bunch of white guys who weren't part of any other call, so they threw them in a white guy call.

So I think it's basically nothing. The only thing that might be big is that a lot of the organizers may have realized for the first time that splitting people by race and sex creates a white male group.

It’s about persuasion because

White women supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, 47% to 45%, Pew Research shows. In the 2020 election, an even higher number of white women, 53%, supported Trump.

You want the headline, “white women broke zoom supporting Kamala”, even if a chunk of those zoom accounts are fake (no one will ever check). This is probably why the “white dudes” group is organized.

Let’s say 60% of white women vote for Trump. That still leaves around 35-40m potential white women voters for Harris. If 0.1% join a zoom call you probably break zoom (I don’t actually know). That is, breaking a zoom call doesn’t mean anything.

But what about ‘white dudes for trump’

It needs to cross the isle. White dudes for Biden would be weird too, so it must be black blokes for Trump.

Or even better, Black b*tches for Trump

It needs to cross the isle.

The sceptered isle seems to lag the States by at least a few years as far as these Culture War shibboleths go (the odd Summer of Floyd notwithstanding). But don’t worry, old Blighty will have “lager and Paki-Tory skewers down’t pub” before you know it.

It's OK as long as they humble themselves by calling themselves "girls" and "dudes." Lowercase white. Not like the Black women and Black men who can wear their identity with pride.

I don't wish to be this cynical, but I have a feeling white guys would only be able to publicly organize towards a left-wing candidate in these times. Doing so for a right-wing candidate would likely be pointed to as evidence of white supremacy in action.

Conservative Whites do not refer to themselves as 'White', by and large. 'Rednecks for Trump' is totally a thing that could happen.

It’s even more cynicism-inducing that you felt the need to pre-emptively hedge for such “cynicism.”

There’s a meme so old that it might had been a Forward from Grandma (or Klanma, as Reddit-types would claim):

"I'm a proud black man", said the black man.

"I'm a proud Mexican woman", said the Mexican woman.

"I'm a proud Asian man", said the Asian man.

"I'm a proud gay man", said the gay man.

"I'm a proud transgender", said the transgender.

"I'm a proud Native American", said the Native American.

"I'm a proud white man", said the racist.

Nowadays even the proud Asian man would come off as sus due to lack of ipdol social credit, unless he’s a west/southwestern Asian in Europe.

There's also the akward fact that identity politics is strongly "left/democrat coded" in US politics in much the same way that overt religiosity is strongly right/republican coded.

Its not for nothing that both the abolitionist and the civil rights movements often found themselves being led or represented by men of God.

I honestly don't know how seriously to take this; I saw the Reuters article about the "White women for Kamala" call linked on /r/stupidpol and it included the following paragraph:

Hours after the announcement, more than 40,000 people joined a Zoom call for Black women supporters. One for Black men on Monday drew over 50,000 people and there have been separate calls for South Asian women, LGBTQ allies, and white men.

Are we really at the point as a society where we actually prefer having race- and gender-segregated meetings for a topic that's supposed to have broad-spectrum appeal? Or is this something everyone involved will look back on in embarrassment a year later?

My question is, where the hell are people getting these Zoom links? I haven't seen any advertising or public posting for any zoom calls, and if I did, I would probably immediately consider is a scam.

Organized by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group with about 10 million members, the video call included activists, podcasters, the singer Pink and regular voters, several who said they regretted not doing enough before the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. [...] On Thursday's call for white women, participants discussed strategies, including reaching out to friend groups, fundraising and countering misinformation.

Are you a member in good standing of any well-connected Democrat activist groups? These calls are for loyal foot soldiers, not the general public.

Does it lead to and create societal problems that cannot be ignored by the general public, or does this kind of idpol stay "mostly harmless" until everyone pretends it never happened? My hope is that it's the latter. Society allows these kinds of people to eventually say, "oh, silly us" and we all talk about how dumb the 2010's and 2020's were. My fear is the former, which carries a risk in ending in actual ethnic conflict, racial spoils, and bloodshed.

If comfortable white people can somehow forever profit from these kinds of signals, enact laws and policies at the expense of lesser whites without paying a cost themselves, then, sure maybe this is how it all goes down. Quietly. A white nationalist's worst nightmare. If comfortable white people no longer engage in a charming guilt ritual and instead find themselves disenfranchised and destitute alongside the bad whites, they will no longer be afforded to see charm in guilt rituals.

The reason why I find that a more likely end point if we continue down the 2020 framing of race relations is that, somewhere down that road, America empowers real, Black Panther racial supremacists. If the nation empowers true believers of racial supremacy, then I'd expect eventually we see them act as racial supremacists. Along with the fact that, in my estimation, it would coincide with the empowerment of ideologically bankrupt thugs. "Well, those are the good whites, we take care of them" only goes as far as you don't actually empower people that believe whites have a debt in blood to pay, deserve all the pain they receive, are inferior beings, and so on.

I'd like to think that we did reach IdPol zenith in 2020, and stuff like this is fallout. That Kamala Harris' campaign immediately launches identity based zoom calls is gross and disheartening, but she's also a product of her time. We all are. It's a major part of how she got her job, after all. If you're worried about race relations as a risk stuff like this could be a real reason to vote against Kamala. Doubling back to reinvest in 2020'isms carries the risk it all gets worse-- more pervasive, more legal -- that seems like a sharper turn towards Race War, Now! Rd. to me.

I still expect we "get over it", or a large part of it, in the ~20 years range. Maybe we never completely dismantle all the scaffolding, because stuff like socioeconomic outcomes are hard problems to solve, but somes ways of thinking and memes may change. We might be able to start cloning Kmele Foster.

Anyway, another L for liberals like myself. FeelsBadMan.jpg.

Or is this something everyone involved will look back on in embarrassment a year later?

That's the 64,000$ question isnt it? To me this just reads as yet another example of how out of touch the Democratic Party's messaging has become. Who exactly is this sort of rhetoric supposed to attract? The hardcore idpol crowd, man-hating feminists, and the bulk of the LGBTQ comunity were going to vote Democrat anyway. The only "swing" voters i can see this swaying are accelerationists and queer-adjacent alt-righters which seems like a very fringe demographic to be courting when contrasted with the proportional risk of alienating the general population.

I don't think the average poster here really grasps just how unpopular overt identity politics is in the US outside of academia and twitter.

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