[thread] One progressive tic that I'd like to see go away is "X constituency won the election." We’ve seen this in a lot of elections, most memorably (for me) the Jones special election in Alabama.
If the point is to give a gold star to people who voted for your candidate, then the gold stars go to… everybody who voted for your candidate. You don’t deserve less credit for voting Democratic simply because fewer members of your demographic also voted Democratic.
One of the problems with this habit is that it reduces people to their race, or sometimes race+gender. Most voters are cross-pressured by multiple factors: education, religion, geography, etc. Seeing voters as undifferentiated ethnic blocs is terrible politics.
I’m not making a principled case for race-neutrality everywhere. There are issues where it makes sense to discuss people as broad identity categories. I just don’t think it makes sense to transpose this habit onto voting.
To cite a specific instance here, trying to shame white women who voted for Biden because *other* white women voted for Trump is nuts, both morally and politically. When you see people saying this, it's indicative of a deeper race/gender essentialism run totally amok.
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A note on my coverage. My goal in writing about Trump has been to write about him like he was any other president. That standard is practically impossible to keep, because his offenses are at a scale and frequency so far beyond the historic norm.
The standard of "Would this story merit dropping everything and writing about immediately?" is one normal presidents meet every few weeks, or less. For Trump it's several times a day.
Yesterday @gregpmiller reported Trump making one of the most anti-Semitic comments any modern president has uttered. A normal pol would be facing calls to resign over this: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
The freest of freebies would be for Biden or (better still!) Harris to denounce Robin DiAngelo. That would get media attention. nytimes.com/2020/09/12/us/…
@EoinHiggins_ The entire point of my article is that the problem with the GOP is sysmetatically ideological and NOT an aberration! nymag.com/intelligencer/…
@EoinHiggins_ Writers do a bad job of understanding words all the time, but it's rare to see yourself represented as making the exact 100% opposite of your actual point.
Karen Bass is highly-regarded by members of both parties, but her long history in the Venceremos Brigade would become a huge issue if she is nominated theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
I'm seeing her being described as a quiet, do-no-harm pick:
Criticism of the letter seems to be split evenly between "they're rich/privileged/enjoy large platforms" and "they're has-beens embittered about being ignored."
People who want to dismiss the letter because their platforms are too small could argue with people who dismiss the letter because their platforms are too big, but I don't think they actually care what reason you glom onto
When I reported on David Shor's firing, some leftists pushed back and said he was fired for reasons other than tweeting about a paper: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Obviously it would be a wild coincidence if Shor was suspending for a tweet, forced to apologize, and then immediately fired for unrelated reasons.