{"id":36369,"date":"2016-11-18T03:00:14","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T08:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36369"},"modified":"2016-11-17T12:55:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-17T17:55:43","slug":"scott-alexander-you-are-still-crying-wolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/18\/scott-alexander-you-are-still-crying-wolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Alexander &#8211; &#8220;You are still crying wolf&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Trump is President-elect, but he didn&#8217;t get there by pandering to white supremacist and racist voters, but you&#8217;d never know that by how his campaign was reported in the media. <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2016\/11\/16\/you-are-still-crying-wolf\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scott Alexander<\/a> says that the media still hasn&#8217;t learned its lesson and is still crying wolf:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Back in October 2015, <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2015\/10\/23\/a-whiter-shade-of-candidate\/\" target=\"_blank\">I wrote<\/a> that the media narrative of Trump as \u201cthe white power candidate\u201d and \u201cthe first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era\u201d were being fabricated out of thin air. I said that \u201cthe media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data\u201d, and predicted that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Well, guess what? The votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the <em>Washington Post<\/em> article, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/monkey-cage\/wp\/2016\/11\/11\/trump-got-more-votes-from-people-of-color-than-romney-did-heres-the-data\/\" target=\"_blank\">Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did<\/a>, or look at the raw data (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2016\/11\/08\/us\/politics\/election-exit-polls.html\" target=\"_blank\">source<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>We see that of every racial group, the one where Trump made the smallest gains over Romney was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump\u2019s message resonated <em>least<\/em> over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.<\/p>\n<p>Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don\u2019t see official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in lower numbers to vote in 2016 than they did in 2012, 2010, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the media quickly responded to all of this undeniable and freely available data with articles like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2016\/11\/12\/white-flight-from-reality-inside-the-racist-panic-that-fueled-donald-trumps-victory\/\" target=\"_blank\">White Flight From Reality: Inside The Racist Panic That Fueled Donald Trump\u2019s Victory<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2016\/11\/9\/13571676\/trump-win-racism-power\" target=\"_blank\">Make No Mistake: Donald Trump\u2019s Win Represents A Racist \u201cWhitelash\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he\u2019s \u201cthe candidate of the KKK\u201d and \u201cthe vanguard of a new white supremacist movement\u201d is made up. It\u2019s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of <em>other<\/em> undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But <em>you are still crying wolf<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I avoided pushing this point any more since last October because I didn\u2019t want to look like I was supporting Trump, or accidentally convince anyone else to support Trump. But since we\u2019re past the point where that matters anymore, I want to present exactly why I think this is true.<\/p>\n<p>I realize that all of this is going to make me sound like a crazy person and put me completely at odds with every respectable thinker in the media, but luckily, being a crazy person at odds with every respectable thinker in the media has been a pretty good ticket to predictive accuracy lately, so whatever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not just the media he&#8217;s talking to:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist \u2013 not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it\u2019s a slippery slope down to \u201canyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash\u201d. I\u2019m not saying you\u2019re teetering on the edge of that slope. I\u2019m saying you\u2019re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there is a next time.<\/p>\n<p>Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to <em>literally anything else<\/em>. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to \u201cI\u2019m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later\u201d, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for <em>an entire 24 hours<\/em> before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won\u2019t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn\u2019t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n<p>Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they\u2019re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Trump is President-elect, but he didn&#8217;t get there by pandering to white supremacist and racist voters, but you&#8217;d never know that by how his campaign was reported in the media. Scott Alexander says that the media still hasn&#8217;t learned its lesson and is still crying wolf: Back in October 2015, I wrote that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[1037,188,477,213,99,101],"class_list":["post-36369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","tag-donaldtrump","tag-electionwatch","tag-magazines","tag-newspapers","tag-racism","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9sB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36369"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36375,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36369\/revisions\/36375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}