posted by geeblock
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/16/why-republicans-cant-break-free-white-nationalism/?utm_term=.2d1bc9aedc8f#click=https://t.co/bmGkg2RyjM
no lies told in this article. Including *gasp* gerrymandering
Eh, he plays fast an loose with the ultimate motive for the "autopsy after the 2012 election. Race was part of that, but it was neither the only part nor even a majority of why that was done. They were still talking about where the party would stand on same-sex marriage back then. Maybe it's not an out-and-out lie to say it was about race, but it's certainly not completely honest, either, as the full truth wouldn't quite fit the narrative of the piece.
The piece is equally coy with the statement that what 2016 Republican primary voters "wanted" was a "xenophobic bigot who wasn’t shy about making explicit appeals to white nationalism." The racial undertones of some of his statements (which weren't as blatant as they are today, as Kelly Ann Conway's husband wrote about a day or two ago) were one of the biggest criticisms against him among Republicans during the primaries. It was his "outsider" and "maverick" personality that had people willing to vote for him thinking he'd be the best net positive.
Make no mistake, the Republican Party HAS laid groundwork for criticism over racial issues before Trump. The unsustainable multiple wars against Middle Eastern countries who had not acted as aggressors will not be viewed well looking back in history. The ridiculous fearmongering about "Sharia Law in the US" is something they should hope gets forgotten as well. But the kind Trump had occasionally alluded to was against more than just 'brown people from the desert'. I don't think anyone would have imagined it would be as overt as it has become.
All that to say that the writer is, at best, being disingenuous with his phrasing.
His little jab about "the help of the Kremlin" and "the backstop of the electoral college" is silly, as well. I've no doubt that Trump would skirt the law and rules to get what he wanted. I think he's corrupt on a level that I've certainly never seen in the Oval Office in my lifetime, but there remains no case that passes muster with regard to him colluding with Russia. Sure, it seems like Russia was active in attempting to influence the US election, but that's something that most world powers, the US probably the BIGGEST offender of which, do all the time. And the electoral college didn't play some special rule for Trump. It's been the agreed-upon rule for a couple centuries now. The reason for its existence has been laid out exhaustively, and its presence and role were no surprise to anyone.
"His voters don’t just tolerate Trump’s racism, they cheer it." Coupled with his previous sentence, he commits the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent.
P1: If RNC voters cheered his racism, then he would receive the nomination.
P2: He received the nomination.
Q1: Thus, his voters cheered his racism.
The author does effectively nothing to argue against the case that many either denied it, dismissed it, or tolerated it, all as opposed to endorsing or cheering it.
Also, as has been stated previously on here, gerrymandering has nothing to do with presidential elections, so his efforts to bring that up in a conversation about the state of the Republican Party in light of the current president is, at best, context-less.
The fact that he decries the Senate system, which give all states the same number of votes, while ignoring the very thing put into place to counterbalance that (the House), is ignorant at best. Deceptive at worst.
Worth noting as well, essentially every structural piece that he treats like a strategic support for the Republican Party predate the Republican Party, which makes his indictment against these structures laughable.
Finally, the author hilariously attempts to paint the entirety of the Republican political sphere with the same brush by saying they "have a hard time seeing past the next election." It's basically an ad hoc statement. It serves the author's purpose to say it, even though it's absurdly unlikely to be true, and even if it were true, he'd have no way of knowing it.
It's an opinion piece, but it's mostly a short-form manifesto from a man who appears to think he knows more than he can know and seems to paint the missing pieces however best suits his sense of superiority.
Some of it he got right, mind you. His teasing out of the missed opportunity on Rubio was pretty accurate, for example, and while gerrymandering doesn't have anything to do with the Executive branch, it is indeed something that happens and is a problematic means for ensuring the maximum retention of seats in the House. But he took too many assumptive liberties for you to be able to say there was "no lies told." If none of the false or deceptive statements were lies, the only alternative would be that he's an idiot or a blindly partisan hack.