reply to post by buddhasystem
I'm quite sure you're right in principle that there is a definite effort on the part of politicians generally to seek to simplify issues in the
interests of popular persuasion. I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with attempting to help people relate to big issues, so long as you
aren't manipulating the issues to suit your purposes, as in the instances you give as examples. But even if they do manipulate, as all governments
surely do - it's quite a stretch to get from attempting to manipulate popular support to attempting to provoke racial tension. In a country with such
a huge ethnic vote, surely the latter would be politically naive, at best - political suicide at worst?
What bugs me about my own perspective of the US and its politics is that I am fed an underlying message by media in the UK - and in what popular
culture I see from the US - that republicanism is inherently the politics of the uncultured, ignorant side of America, and the democrats somehow
represent the cultured, civilised side. I see a map of the US depicted in blue and red by state and I see the America I know about from TV - New York,
Washington, California and so on (I stand to be corrected on this by the way) voting democrat - and the bits I know nothing about voting republican. I
hope I'm canny enough to acknowledge that my not knowing about a whole swathe of America does not mean that whole swathe is ignorant.
And this is a case in point. The story has been reported over here, essentially, as the struggle of republicanism against its inherently racist heart.
But it's hard to believe that can be right - and hard to be dissuaded from the view that what we have here is a simple case of racist people
automatically siding with the party that opposes the election of a black man... I do think there's merit in the argument that if both candidates were
white, the racism would be evenly spread.
I'd be interested to know if it would genuinely be more remarkable for a black man to be the republican candidate than a democrat, though???
In the UK, we divide our parties stereotypes not so much by intellectual level as social level. The tories are regarded as posh and elitist,
Oxbridge-trained, wealthy aristocrats. Labour are regarded as the opposite. Yet the man who brought Labour to power was an Oxbridge educated elitist.
So it all evens out in the end. What price a black man being the next Republican president, I wonder?
LW