If there's anything more fraudulent than how righties claim that Obama was promising "Racism is over, folks!" rather than his actual message--America's made a great deal of progress on racism, and we're capable of making more--it's when they blame him for wokeness, when that message is precisely what wokeness rejected.
This speaks volumes about what motivates the right. How dare a black president say a word about race! They thought we could elect Obama and then “keep him in his place.” This just shows how ugly and petty they are.
Wow. The election of a black president, for whom they didn't vote, meant that it was no longer acceptable to point out racism? That's wild - and some serious bullshit.
Bullshit. My first reaction was that I think that Obama was disillusioned during his presidency - not that he was particularly illusioned in the first place - by the amount of racist resistance he encountered. So maybe he gave up on crossing the aisle and started focusing on people who were willing to accept the idea of a Black President. Like, at all. But even that is far too kind to Shapiro’s argument. He’s just trying to find a way to blame the Republican’s mass idiocy on Obama, and having a damned difficult time coming up with anything that sticks.
I am 100% sure that he didn’t expect to charm them, but I can agree that he expected them to be more rational than they were. It’s hard to remember that back then, it wasn’t yet obvious that they would rather destroy the US than live up to our democratic ideals.
I thought it was pretty obvious, but then I vividly remember Mitch calling Obama the "worst president in American history" pretty much the day after he was inaugurated. I also remember Rush Limbaugh saying, "I hope he fails!" and the incredulous media being like, "omg why would he ever say something so negative???"
It’s always so wierd that they’re still holding onto this one, because for the rest of us it was just kind of a “duh” moment and not all that exceptional.
It kind of reminds me of when I talk to some dyed-in-the-wool Dem who’s still got a grudge about Reagan and thinks he was the epitome of evil, or the way Boomers seem to think the JFK assassination cheated them out of their own Obama.
It’s probably one of those things where it doesn’t really have to make sense. They’re gonna stay dug in on it for the rest of our lives.
I don't think Reagan was the epitome of eveil but I do think he ran and governed as a smiling racist - against welfare queens driving Cadillacs - and the champion of incredibky brutal dictatorships in Central America, so yeah, fairly evil.
Dyed-in-the-wool D voter here, who does not *have a grudge about* Reagan, but who identifies him as an inveterate bullshitter, as a senile demented old hate-mongering bigot, as possibly the most consequentially bad President of the 20th century, in whose Administration the foundations were laid for the Second Gilded Age.
I *do* get exercised a little bit about how *Democratic* talkers talk about him as though he were some inspirational figure. Though I admit I have not heard that for a while now.
Thanks for engaging with that interview so I didn't have to! Klein has become unbearably credulous when engaging with the right, to the point that I find it hard to engage with his work at all.
I don't know that I find him credulous. I think it's been a mission of his lately to try to understand and articulate conservative arguments in the way that conservatives understand them. But he's quite willing to offer pushback.
And he was worse in not pushing back in his interview with Yoram Hazony.
I appreciate what he is trying to do, but some of this stuff requires a little less steelmanning on the guest's behalf and calling out some real intellectual problems with their positions.
Few things are worse than having to talk with someone obviously arguing in bad faith. On the brightside, these are the GOP's own words: their "best" foot forward and public justification for their authoritarian actions. If that's the best they have to offer, we can safely write off elite Republicans.
I just don't think I have to take seriously that the same people who were enraged about a lawful search warrant being served on DJT, respectfully when he was out of town, after he'd refused to comply with legal summons to return documents that didn't belong to him, were radicalized because Obama mildly criticized a police officer who arrested his friend for breaking into his own house.
They say that radicalized them, but even John McCain, who was pretty even tempered by today's standards, introduced Sarah Palin, the OG DJT, to national politics in the 2008 campaign. Hell even Hillary tried a bit of the "he's foreign" stick in the 2008 primaries.
This radical strain of politics has *always* been a part of America. Andrew Jackson represented it. John C Calhoun *also* represented it, even when he and Jackson were at odds about other stuff. In more modern times, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond ran on national tickets representing it and ate chunks out of both parties electorates. Only when Nixon's southern strategy happened did it start the great sorting that pushed most of that body politic to the Republican party. In 2012 Mitt Romney largely won the nomination because he ran against GWB's (and Rick Perry's!) openness to immigration. DJT, of course, had been on this bandwagon for a while and certainly has a unique way of simply making the subtext text without any need to obfuscate.
To say that Obama created this movement or radicalized folks is simple gaslighting. It's like when my white friends used to ask "why I brought up race." James Baldwin wrote so eloquently about how the social construct of race in this country was built in a way so that white folks *don't* have to think about race most of the time. The construct does its work with their silent complicity. It can be jarring for whites to be forced to face its realities. That shock can be used for good, as when civil rights protesters and mass media revealed its brutal realities in the Jim Crow south. Mitt Romney attempted, but DJT perfected, using that shock for bad after the election of the first black president.
In other words, I don't doubt that many folks were radicalized by Obama. But excuse me if I don't believe it was exactly in the way they proclaim.
I think Chief Justice Roberts said something like this several years ago: how can you argue that there is systemic racism in the US when we elected a black President. He doesn't say Obama himself promised this but insists that Obama's election proved this. Leading him to deny any data that proves otherwise. Similar to Justice O'Connor, when upholding the Voting Rights law, says (to paraphrase), this has to end sometime, doesn't it? Settled on 15 years, as I recall? Not based on data etc, just pick a year, which makes no sense. Unless you live in a cloistered world, like the Supreme Court. And the only black person you know professionally or socially is Clarence Thomas. Shapiro is just a nastier version of the same attitude. Obama's comments about Trayvon etc were trying to teach, to reach, such Americans about the continuing racism in the US but they take that as a betrayal. Does that make his election the ultimate racist act? Or the ultimate free pass for racism. I suspect many of us thought it was the opposite, the beginning of recognition that we all deserve to be valued for who we are, for our own merits, not the end of any such effort.
The deep disagreements that Obama used to have with Ta-Nehisi Coates and the activists who came out of Ferguson when these people were invited to the WH are conveniently excised from this argument. The deal with Obama was that his policies would be postracial not that he would never make a statement that reminded us that he was Black.
"Postracial" is the wrong word. Obama said clearly in "The Audacity of Hope" that you help Black people by helping everyone not by developing special programs for Black people.
And the beer summit was exactly the kind of thing Obama ran on. If two people have a disagreement they should sit down together and realize that everyone is human.
If we take Shapiro's argument as representative of Republicans, then they were never a serious party or people to take in good faith. As noted, the supposed "deal" existed only in their minds and they offered nothing. McConnell dedicated the GOP to make Obama a one term president, and the Democrats worked hard to make Obama care as Republican as possible (i.e. Heritage Foundation plan X Romney care). If we compare these Obama actions to those of Trump, it's a joke. Any reform and way out of this democratic backsliding needs to quarantine most Republican elites from power.
The arguments put forward by Shapiro in his books and speeches are frankly quite ridiculous, really some of the poorest I have ever heard from an alledged intellectual. If this is one of the great minds that conservatives can produce in the United States (which Shapiro is considered to be, from what I understand, and the fact he was on the show tend to suggest some people are able to listen to him without laughing or crying), it speaks volumes about the poor intellectual state of the country...
His description and understanding of history are laughable; they seem straight out of a church-sponsored late 19th-century educational manual.
And, from the start, it was completely obvious the Tea Party was nothing else than a visceral reaction to having a "black" president ("I want my country back" was the rallying cry), and that the "fiscal responsability" discourse was pure bs.
Shapiro conveniently forget BOTH white men and women did not vote for Obama in 2008, and this after 8 years of Bush, and with Sarah Palin on the ticket, ffs !!!
I had exactly the same thought listenting to this podcast... I kept thinking "this can't possibly be a good faith argument"? If such miniscule "offenses" were all it too to "radicalize" a group, they might be post-hoc rationalizing something they wanted to do anyway. But I'm not in other people's heads, I don't know.
It is worth noting that Obama himself notes in his book that the Gates incident resulted in the single biggest polling drop in white support for his presidency, more than any other event. I wouldn't cast this purely as conservative rewriting of the narrative. It really was the biggest blowback moment https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/07/30/obamas-ratings-slide-across-the-board
David Samuels of Tablet has deep Obama Derangement Syndrome as merely his interview with David Garrow will show but his point that there was more racial division according to polls when Obama left office than when he started may be mildly more sophisticated.
If there's anything more fraudulent than how righties claim that Obama was promising "Racism is over, folks!" rather than his actual message--America's made a great deal of progress on racism, and we're capable of making more--it's when they blame him for wokeness, when that message is precisely what wokeness rejected.
This speaks volumes about what motivates the right. How dare a black president say a word about race! They thought we could elect Obama and then “keep him in his place.” This just shows how ugly and petty they are.
Wow. The election of a black president, for whom they didn't vote, meant that it was no longer acceptable to point out racism? That's wild - and some serious bullshit.
Bullshit. My first reaction was that I think that Obama was disillusioned during his presidency - not that he was particularly illusioned in the first place - by the amount of racist resistance he encountered. So maybe he gave up on crossing the aisle and started focusing on people who were willing to accept the idea of a Black President. Like, at all. But even that is far too kind to Shapiro’s argument. He’s just trying to find a way to blame the Republican’s mass idiocy on Obama, and having a damned difficult time coming up with anything that sticks.
I thin Obama actually believed he could reason with Congressional Republicans. I think he believed in his charm way too much.
I am 100% sure that he didn’t expect to charm them, but I can agree that he expected them to be more rational than they were. It’s hard to remember that back then, it wasn’t yet obvious that they would rather destroy the US than live up to our democratic ideals.
I thought it was pretty obvious, but then I vividly remember Mitch calling Obama the "worst president in American history" pretty much the day after he was inaugurated. I also remember Rush Limbaugh saying, "I hope he fails!" and the incredulous media being like, "omg why would he ever say something so negative???"
Yep, and Klein is really trying to make it easier for him. Pundit solidarity.
Yeah… I feel like a review of Shapiro’s response to the Barbie movie was in order before deciding to platform him.
It’s always so wierd that they’re still holding onto this one, because for the rest of us it was just kind of a “duh” moment and not all that exceptional.
It kind of reminds me of when I talk to some dyed-in-the-wool Dem who’s still got a grudge about Reagan and thinks he was the epitome of evil, or the way Boomers seem to think the JFK assassination cheated them out of their own Obama.
It’s probably one of those things where it doesn’t really have to make sense. They’re gonna stay dug in on it for the rest of our lives.
I don't think Reagan was the epitome of eveil but I do think he ran and governed as a smiling racist - against welfare queens driving Cadillacs - and the champion of incredibky brutal dictatorships in Central America, so yeah, fairly evil.
Dyed-in-the-wool D voter here, who does not *have a grudge about* Reagan, but who identifies him as an inveterate bullshitter, as a senile demented old hate-mongering bigot, as possibly the most consequentially bad President of the 20th century, in whose Administration the foundations were laid for the Second Gilded Age.
I *do* get exercised a little bit about how *Democratic* talkers talk about him as though he were some inspirational figure. Though I admit I have not heard that for a while now.
Were you around for Reagan? He was the epitome of evil if you were paying attention.
Thanks for engaging with that interview so I didn't have to! Klein has become unbearably credulous when engaging with the right, to the point that I find it hard to engage with his work at all.
I don't know that I find him credulous. I think it's been a mission of his lately to try to understand and articulate conservative arguments in the way that conservatives understand them. But he's quite willing to offer pushback.
Not enough, I think?
Depends on the goal. If he's just trying to understand, youbdon't want to pushback a lot lest they stop talking.
Agreed.
And he was worse in not pushing back in his interview with Yoram Hazony.
I appreciate what he is trying to do, but some of this stuff requires a little less steelmanning on the guest's behalf and calling out some real intellectual problems with their positions.
Few things are worse than having to talk with someone obviously arguing in bad faith. On the brightside, these are the GOP's own words: their "best" foot forward and public justification for their authoritarian actions. If that's the best they have to offer, we can safely write off elite Republicans.
I just don't think I have to take seriously that the same people who were enraged about a lawful search warrant being served on DJT, respectfully when he was out of town, after he'd refused to comply with legal summons to return documents that didn't belong to him, were radicalized because Obama mildly criticized a police officer who arrested his friend for breaking into his own house.
They say that radicalized them, but even John McCain, who was pretty even tempered by today's standards, introduced Sarah Palin, the OG DJT, to national politics in the 2008 campaign. Hell even Hillary tried a bit of the "he's foreign" stick in the 2008 primaries.
This radical strain of politics has *always* been a part of America. Andrew Jackson represented it. John C Calhoun *also* represented it, even when he and Jackson were at odds about other stuff. In more modern times, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond ran on national tickets representing it and ate chunks out of both parties electorates. Only when Nixon's southern strategy happened did it start the great sorting that pushed most of that body politic to the Republican party. In 2012 Mitt Romney largely won the nomination because he ran against GWB's (and Rick Perry's!) openness to immigration. DJT, of course, had been on this bandwagon for a while and certainly has a unique way of simply making the subtext text without any need to obfuscate.
To say that Obama created this movement or radicalized folks is simple gaslighting. It's like when my white friends used to ask "why I brought up race." James Baldwin wrote so eloquently about how the social construct of race in this country was built in a way so that white folks *don't* have to think about race most of the time. The construct does its work with their silent complicity. It can be jarring for whites to be forced to face its realities. That shock can be used for good, as when civil rights protesters and mass media revealed its brutal realities in the Jim Crow south. Mitt Romney attempted, but DJT perfected, using that shock for bad after the election of the first black president.
In other words, I don't doubt that many folks were radicalized by Obama. But excuse me if I don't believe it was exactly in the way they proclaim.
That was actually the first time I ever heard that. And I spend a lot of time in conservative circles but not in conservative media.
It sounded totally bizarre
Thomas Chatterton Williams cites those same moments in his most recent book
I had forgotten all about that, actually. I also had no idea it looked large in anyone's mind.
I think Chief Justice Roberts said something like this several years ago: how can you argue that there is systemic racism in the US when we elected a black President. He doesn't say Obama himself promised this but insists that Obama's election proved this. Leading him to deny any data that proves otherwise. Similar to Justice O'Connor, when upholding the Voting Rights law, says (to paraphrase), this has to end sometime, doesn't it? Settled on 15 years, as I recall? Not based on data etc, just pick a year, which makes no sense. Unless you live in a cloistered world, like the Supreme Court. And the only black person you know professionally or socially is Clarence Thomas. Shapiro is just a nastier version of the same attitude. Obama's comments about Trayvon etc were trying to teach, to reach, such Americans about the continuing racism in the US but they take that as a betrayal. Does that make his election the ultimate racist act? Or the ultimate free pass for racism. I suspect many of us thought it was the opposite, the beginning of recognition that we all deserve to be valued for who we are, for our own merits, not the end of any such effort.
Yeah, it's like saying 19th century America couldn't have had systemic racism because WEB DuBois went to Harvard
The deep disagreements that Obama used to have with Ta-Nehisi Coates and the activists who came out of Ferguson when these people were invited to the WH are conveniently excised from this argument. The deal with Obama was that his policies would be postracial not that he would never make a statement that reminded us that he was Black.
"Postracial" is the wrong word. Obama said clearly in "The Audacity of Hope" that you help Black people by helping everyone not by developing special programs for Black people.
And the beer summit was exactly the kind of thing Obama ran on. If two people have a disagreement they should sit down together and realize that everyone is human.
The Black Agenda Report folks that gave white people on the left permission to dislike Obama we will not even speak of.
If we take Shapiro's argument as representative of Republicans, then they were never a serious party or people to take in good faith. As noted, the supposed "deal" existed only in their minds and they offered nothing. McConnell dedicated the GOP to make Obama a one term president, and the Democrats worked hard to make Obama care as Republican as possible (i.e. Heritage Foundation plan X Romney care). If we compare these Obama actions to those of Trump, it's a joke. Any reform and way out of this democratic backsliding needs to quarantine most Republican elites from power.
Shapiro implies that conservatives "allowed" voters to select Obama in return for memory holing racism and that is not how things work sir.
The arguments put forward by Shapiro in his books and speeches are frankly quite ridiculous, really some of the poorest I have ever heard from an alledged intellectual. If this is one of the great minds that conservatives can produce in the United States (which Shapiro is considered to be, from what I understand, and the fact he was on the show tend to suggest some people are able to listen to him without laughing or crying), it speaks volumes about the poor intellectual state of the country...
His description and understanding of history are laughable; they seem straight out of a church-sponsored late 19th-century educational manual.
And, from the start, it was completely obvious the Tea Party was nothing else than a visceral reaction to having a "black" president ("I want my country back" was the rallying cry), and that the "fiscal responsability" discourse was pure bs.
Shapiro conveniently forget BOTH white men and women did not vote for Obama in 2008, and this after 8 years of Bush, and with Sarah Palin on the ticket, ffs !!!
A black man was elected as president, and the Right went crazy.
I had exactly the same thought listenting to this podcast... I kept thinking "this can't possibly be a good faith argument"? If such miniscule "offenses" were all it too to "radicalize" a group, they might be post-hoc rationalizing something they wanted to do anyway. But I'm not in other people's heads, I don't know.
It is worth noting that Obama himself notes in his book that the Gates incident resulted in the single biggest polling drop in white support for his presidency, more than any other event. I wouldn't cast this purely as conservative rewriting of the narrative. It really was the biggest blowback moment https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/07/30/obamas-ratings-slide-across-the-board
*Democrats* only barely on net approved of Obama's handling of the incident (37-30) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/07/30/section-2-henry-louis-gates-jrs-arrest/
David Samuels of Tablet has deep Obama Derangement Syndrome as merely his interview with David Garrow will show but his point that there was more racial division according to polls when Obama left office than when he started may be mildly more sophisticated.
(He is not the only problem with Tablet's political coverage but it doesn't help)