What I Heard from Trump Supporters

>he coalition on the right is full of cracks that could be exploited to split them up. Trump actually exploited one of those cracks to get himself the Republican nomination. When the left comes in to pour moral superiority all over people, it fills those cracks in like glue. People who would have otherwise split from Trump are sticking to him because the left is chopping at everything.

Your assumption is that Donald Trump forged some kind of political coalition. He didn't. The Republican Party votes in lockstep, by and large. What happened was that Hillary Clinton utterly failed to get people in key areas to the voting booth to get the numbers she needed.

The Donald fans can glue themselves together all they want, but it wasn't them who won anything. It was Democratic infighting that ceded it over to them. It's not the Republicans that need to get cracked, it's the Republicans who are pouring glue into the cracked up Democratic coalition.

The easiest answer I know is that it's a problem with selective (and unproductive) enforcement.

Lots of people immigrate illegally, and many of them stay at length, work hard, and build lives. The government pretty explicitly turns a blind eye to their presence. Then we change leaders, and suddenly responsible residents of 30 years are kicked out to a country they haven't lived in since childhood. Meanwhile, a great many other people in the same situation aren't.

It's a bit like my reaction to marijuana laws. I think the law isn't very good, but that's just grounds for reform. What I think is immoral is seriously punishing 1% of people violating an unimportant law instead of lightly punishing lots of them. It's about limited or variable enforcement of the law, which encourages people to play a lottery where a handful of players get their lives ruined.

That used to be my main beef with Milo. Now that he's come out as effectively pro-NAMBLA, I'm seriously wondering how tasteless he's going to get before we stop giving him the attention he craves.

(And, yes, I realize that his stance regarding pedophilia is most likely a consequence of his own childhood sexual abuse, but even that still doesn't excuse the shitty things he's advocating, or saying about specific people. Attacking a specific person the way he has is necessarily an act of violence, and no matter how prettily you dress it up, or how loudly you hide behind "freedom of speech", violence is never speech.)

> They are so fucking tired of identity politics. Oversensitivity, calling everything "-ist" to win an argument, trying to tie racism into everything.

I've thought of this and wondered is it actually possible that racism and sexism is rampant?

In Eastern Europe, racism is utterly rampant (dismissal of achievements of people based on their ethnicity, wide spread belief that people of a certain ethnic type are 'bad for the country', casual disdain to out-group members). However racism is also utterly accepted, and thus invisible to the casual eye because in practice many people constantly make exceptions to their world view. They're racist in general and chant slurs when drunk, but polite to their neighbors from Nigeria because "those are the good ones".

Perhaps the same is true in the US. Just look at companies like Uber, and how institutions can be warped to protect sexual harassers. Those individuals aren't some great 'other'. Those are our friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, and yes sometimes they are even 'us'. Yet outside of smoking gun situations, we don't see them as even potentially 'sexist'.

So sexism could be rampant. Racism could be rampant.

However, calling people out on said fact, is not useful for anything except for fostering feelings of self-righteousness. What is most effective, as we can see from the US Civil Rights movement of the 60s, is focusing on common ground, and using that as a motivator toward egalitarianism. In my very own state, the KKK was utterly destroyed by the fact that they wanted to beat up elementary-school children, and whilst some people might have been casually racists they drew the line against beating up 7 year olds and thus could be motivated to repudiate even less extreme positions simply because the KKK was also for them. What brought us all together was the feeling that 'we are all human beings who value our families, and love our children'.

What I see with current day liberals (and conservatives actually too) is that the platform lacks unity.

Thus rather than being able to build bridges, bridges are often burned pre-emptively by more 'extreme' segments of the group.