Subject: Re: Philip Roth on Trump

It's his legacy, your legacy, and sadly a legacy the rest of the world will attribute to the USA for a long long time.

Aye, and that's the rub. That's why I use the two quotes to illustrate the USA's racism. They had a profound effect on my understanding of our racism. I wonder what the quotes will be used to illustrate the dangerous mix of isolationism, authoritarianism, etc., we're going through now.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” Lee Atwater 1981

So, as an exercise, what would a modern one look like?

You start out by firing up the base during the GFC making immigrants into the whipping boy during that crisis. And that never stops, it gets worse. The Iran hostage crisis breeds Islamaphobia, and that never stops, and it gets much worse after 9-11. Trump picks up on the border phobia and uses a wall that becomes a symbol, and building the wall becomes important.

Tired, someone else can finish. :)