Portside

•    The Curious Quiet of Establishment Jewry on Trump’s Anti-semitism - Ben Murane (Jewschool)
•    Donald Trump is Taking a Page from Reconstruction-era White Supremacists - Donald Nieman (The Conversation)
•    Trump’s One Public Service Was Exposing the Misogyny of the GOP - Rebecca Traister (New York Magazine)
•    The Religious Right’s Devotion to Donald Trump Will End the Movement As We Know It - Sarah Jones (New Republic)
•    How Donald Trump’s Fall Matters - Daniel W. Drezner (Washington Post)
•    Taking Trump Voters’ Concerns Seriously Means Listening to What They’re Actually Saying - Dylan Matthews (Vox)
 

The Curious Quiet of Establishment Jewry on Trump’s Anti-Semitism

By Ben Murane
October 14, 2016
Jewschool

Much like the wholesale rejection of the Movement for Black Lives by many Jewish institutions, what we’ve seen over the past year is the inadequacy of many of our current leaders to meet the challenges of our day. If America has truly come so uncomfortably close to putting a purveyor of anti-Semitic tropes into our country’s highest office, then something is deeply flawed in the way we’ve pursued tolerance education, anti-oppression, and alliances with black, Hispanic, and Americans of color.
Many of our Jewish institutions and leadership are missing — indeed already missed — the opportunity to be part of America’s civil rights and progressive movement of the Millennial era.

Donald Trump is Taking a Page from Reconstruction-Era White Supremacists

By Donald Nieman
October 11, 2016
The Conversation

How can “Trump Election Observers” distinguish between qualified and unqualified voters? Trump doesn’t say. But his reference to “certain areas” – and the entire tenor of his campaign – suggests that their color will give them away.
Trump’s invitation is eerily familiar to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the Reconstruction that followed the U.S. Civil War. Slavery was abolished, black men were voting and the Republican Party of Lincoln was sparking a civil rights revolution.
Disbelief gave way to fury as white southerners formed paramilitary organizations to keep “illegitimate” voters from casting ballots. The groups went by different names: White Brotherhood, Knights of the White Camelia, Red Shirts, Democratic Rifle Clubs and, most notoriously, the Ku Klux Klan. They employed persuasion, intimidation, disruption and murder to deter black voters from the polls. One of these organizations instructed its members to “control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine.”

Trump’s One Public Service Was Exposing the Misogyny of the GOP

By Rebecca Traister
October 10, 2016
New York Magazine

Which is worse: Threatening to grab someone by the pussy or forcing someone to carry and give birth to a baby that is the result of rape? Which is worse: Popping a Tic Tac in preparation for forced extramarital kissing with a stranger or actively discouraging women’s full participation in the workforce? The answer is: None of these is worse; they are all of a kind. The view of women as yours to control via political power, star power, or simply patriarchal power, is what Republicans — not just Trump, but lots of Republicans — have been doing for years as they work to reduce reproductive-rights access and reinstall women in early marriage and traditional hetero homes where their competitive, independent, threatening power might be better contained.
In other words, the party’s policies are built on the same frame that Trump’s words and personal actions are: a fundamental lack of recognition of women as full human beings.

The Religious Right’s Devotion to Donald Trump Will End the Movement As We Know It

By Sarah Jones
October 9, 2016
New Republic

Some evangelicals, like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore, have publicly criticized Trump’s convenient conversion. But their voices were never enough to sway the rank-and-file. The religious right was never as unique as it wanted everyone to believe, and now Trump has revealed the movement’s superiority to be the ruse it’s always been.
The religious right isn’t dead yet. But after this election becomes history, the movement will be forced to reckon with the consequences of its quest for power. Young adults, who overwhelmingly oppose Trump, are already leaving conservative churches, and the religious right’s Trump moment will surely only fuel this trend. If it had maintained a consistent public morality, maybe it could have retained some countercultural appeal. Now that its most visible leaders have sacrificed that authority, it has nothing left.

How Donald Trump’s Fall Matters

By Daniel W. Drezner
October 10, 2016
Washington Post

The question is how Trump and his base will react next month when he loses. Given Trump’s complete disregard for protocol or democratic norms, there seems little reason to doubt that he will claim that the election was rigged against him. And the big question then is how Trump’s hardcore supporters will react to that declaration.

Taking Trump Voters’ Concerns Seriously Means Listening to What They’re Actually Saying

by Dylan Matthews
October 15, 2016
Vox

The idea that voters are motivated by economic struggles and so are voting for a candidate who would make their economic situation far worse is much more insulting than accepting they are uncomfortable with racial equality. The implicit idea is that Trump’s voters aren’t motivated by genuine political disagreement about race, but are just dupes voting for the wrong candidate because they’re too dumb to Google his tax plan.
Any solution has to begin with a correct diagnosis of the problem. If Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization, then even full Bernie Sanders–style social democracy is not going to prevent a Trump recurrence. Nor are GOP-style tax cuts, and liberal pundits aggressively signaling virtue to each other by writing ad nauseam about the need to empathize with the Trump Voter aren’t doing anyone any good.
What’s needed is an honest reckoning with what it means that a large segment of the US population, large enough to capture one of the two major political parties, is motivated primarily by white nationalism and an anxiety over the fast-changing demographics of the country. Taking them seriously means, first and foremost, acknowledging that, and dealing with it honestly.