BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I live in San Francisco. Heard all the arguments of the left and have rejected them.

The Middlebury and UC-Berkeley protests/riots are exhibits A and B for that assertion. Change the black clothing and masks at Berkeley for brown shirts with swizstika armbands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between now and 1930's Germany.

The Middlebury and UC-Berkeley protests/riots are exhibits A and B for that assertion. Change the black clothing and masks at Berkeley for brown shirts with swizstika armbands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between now and 1930's Germany.

I disagree with the protests' violence - but the protests themselves were protected rights.

Does green beer taste better laced with hypocrisy? Does shamrock smell sweeter perfumed with historical amnesia?

We may be about to find out, for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day jamboree at the White House will be a breathtaking celebration of double standards and the willful forgetting of America’s recent past. Even by the crooked yardstick of the Trump administration, the disconnect is surreal: The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish.

In the blizzard of executive orders, it was easy to miss a proclamation President Trump issued on March 1. The president declared this Irish-American Heritage Month and called on “all Americans to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Irish-Americans to our nation with appropriate ceremonies, activities and programs.” The proclamation could hardly be more upbeat in its praise of the Irish for “overcoming poverty and discrimination and inspiring Americans from all walks of life with their indomitable and entrepreneurial spirit.” Mr. Trump embraced these poor and despised foreigners as the forebears of “the more than 35 million Americans of Irish descent who contribute every day to all facets of life in the United States.”

The Irish are at least as fond as anyone else of being told how great they are, but as an Irish person, I find this more than a little disconcerting. It is like having your chastity praised by a brothel keeper, or your temperance and thrift eulogized by a drunken sailor. The whole thing would be funny if it did not raise the most uncomfortable question: Is it right to applaud the legacy of mass immigration from Ireland because the Irish are white and Christian?

The question is especially pertinent because so many of the people who have devised, defended and attempted to carry out Mr. Trump’s policy of identifying immigrant communities with criminality and terrorism are themselves Irish-Americans. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, announcing in January that his boss would continue the tradition of accepting a bowl of shamrock from the Irish prime minister on March 17, told reporters that the St. Patrick’s Day reception is “an issue that’s near and dear to me” because of his pride in his own Irish roots. Mr. Trump’s senior strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, boasts of his “blue-collar, Irish Catholic” family background. Kellyanne Conway (née Fitzpatrick) is half-Irish. Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, who has the job of enforcing Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, “is remembered fondly” in Massachusetts, according to The Boston Globe, “as an adventurous Irish Catholic son who reached the highest echelons of military service.”

These are intelligent people, and it seems unlikely that they are so romantic as to imagine they’re descended from Irish kings and Celtic goddesses. Most probably, some of their ancestors were wretched people. The Irish Catholic immigrants who washed up in the United States after the potato famine of the 1840s were, on the whole, the most destitute national group ever to arrive on American shores.

They were nobody’s ideal of the desirable immigrant. The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources. Worse, these people were religious aliens — the papist hordes who threatened to swamp Protestant civilization and, in their ignorance and superstition, destroy enlightened democratic American values.

The people around Mr. Trump surely know this history, yet they act as if they were the descendants not of these poor immigrants but of the American nativists and Know Nothings who slandered and derided them. Mr. Trump’s assertion that millions of illegal immigrants voted to deprive him of his victory in the popular vote directly echoes one of the most common charges against the Irish in the 19th century: that, in the words of one Yankee, “Irishmen fresh from the bogs of Ireland” were led to the polling booths “like dumb brutes” to “vote down intelligent, honest native citizens.”

The relentless campaign to associate undocumented migrants with criminality reworks the charge that Irish Catholics were innately crooked and violent. And the demonization of Muslims as implicitly un-American reproduces the canard that Irish Catholics could not be trusted in high office because they would take orders from the Vatican. As late as 1960, John F. Kennedy faced exactly these slurs in a presidential election.

In the Trump era, there are only two ways to toast the achievements of the Irish in America. One of them is tacitly racist. It relies on a silent distinction, an assumption that the Irish are somehow different from, say, today’s migrants from Latin America. But what is that distinction? It is not that the Irish were wealthier or better educated by contemporary standards, or more highly skilled or harder working. It is simply that they were white and their whiteness gave them a right to be in the United States.

If we are not to collude in this obnoxious distinction, people of Irish descent must celebrate their heritage in a radically different way: as the ultimate rebuke to a paranoid frenzy about immigration. We Irish are not Know Nothings. We know something important: what it’s like to be feared, to be discriminated against, to be stereotyped. We know from our own family histories that anti-immigrant hysteria is founded on lies. And we know that, over time, those lies are exposed. Yesterday’s alien is today’s workmate; yesterday’s pariah is today’s patriot.

St. Patrick’s Day is always in danger of being drowned in beer and sentimentality, but President Trump and his inner circle of Irish-Americans have given it the possibility of renewed gravity and seriousness. They have made it what it once was when the Irish were outsiders: a day when people who are in the shadows stand up and say, “We belong here.”

The Irish belong, not because they are better or worse than any other group of migrants, now or in the past. They belong because they are exactly the same: hopeful people doing their best to build dignified lives.

My,my! You disagree! How restrained.

In a similar vein, the conservative group Turning Point USA recently published a “Professor Watchlist,” a catalogue of what it thinks are dangerous and “anti-American” professors who deserve public shaming for allegedly trying to “advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.” (Among those “radical agenda” items: advocating gun control, calling Ted Cruz’s infamous “New York values” statement anti-Semitic.) The watchlist homepage of course includes a disclaimer that Turning Point will “continue to fight for free speech and the right for professors to say whatever they wish.”

I presume you think this this opinion piece invalid, then.

There speaks someone with only a 'sound-bite' level of understanding of history.

As it happens, I am almost finished reading a current book about the rise of the Nazi party. What is truly striking are the passages from Mein Kampf (translated into English) in which Hitler wrote about propaganda and the importance of appealing to emotion, not reason, when seeking support. Keep it simple, don't worry about whether what one says is 'true'

In addition, once Hitler was Chancellor (as part of a coalition), he often made speeches in which he denounced the extraordinary violence being perpetrated by his supporters, but in the same speech gave clear signals, to those prepared to listen, that suggested that the violence was fine with him and justified.

The resemblance to Trump's tactics, including that part of the address to Congress where he pretended to deplore violence, is striking.

So I do agree with the broad theme that there are currently some truly disturbing similarities between 1930's Germany and today's USA.....just not the one the poster was suggesting. But, heck...why let facts get in the way of a nice sounding post? I mean, aren't alternative facts even better than truth amongst trump-boys?

You seem to think that publishing something adverse is in the same category as hitting a person in the head with a rock or or blunt weapon, or breaking windows and destroying property.

What it means is that there's no evidence of a level of voter fraud that would swing elections and justify extreme measures to combat it.

You must like to make yourself look stupid.

However, Bannon has pretensions to intellect. He has already quoted Lenin in one interview, and it is not a far stretch to think that he will have read similar works.

We are going to have no friends. The meeting with Merkel apparently did not go well, except of course Trump thinks, or says, it was great.

In real life, if I find myself having to deal with someone like Trump I simply accept it as an unfortunate fact and engage with him as little as possible.

With our weak dollar inhibiting Canadians from travelling to the US, add to that our political distaste for this administration and there are already signs that tourism and cross border shopping trips from even here (arguably your best friends) may well drop off the cliff.

Any hard line NAFTA renegotiation rather than tweaks to improve it will seal that deal and we don't trust your guys.

Comparing Trump to Hitler.
More twisted logic from the progressive left.
Hitler wanted to conquer Europe.
Trump doesn't want any part of Mexico.

I think the Putin model of authoritarianism is closer to what Trump uses, but even then there are comparisons to Hitler that are valid:

What about Hitler's and Trump's appeals to nationalism?
What about Hitler's and Trump's scapegoating minority groups as the source of the countries' problems?
What about Hitler's and Trump's desires to increase their military?

The Trumpettes like to bury their heads in the sand, or perhaps some believe they will become rich oligarchs like their hero.

Try expanding your horizons and look for information outside your bubble.