pacobird wrote:RE: white nationalism and xenophobia
Something like 40% of Labour voters went Leave.
And something like 100% of UKIP. Not all pro-Leave voters were white nationalist xenophobes, but all white nationalist xenophobes voters were pro-Leave.
pacobird wrote:There are real, substantive criticisms of the EU to be made from the Left, and Varoufakis was the only Remainer publicly grappling with them; everyone else was like "what could you possibly dislike about the EU other than migrants?" while conveniently forgetting Greece*.
That's a fair point in broad strokes. I don't think it's entirely true; I heard rather a lot of "Yes, there are problems, but we're better off trying to reform them than leaving." But people like a convenient narrative, and it's perfectly accurate to say this was organized by a bunch of racists -- but that's not likely to win over anybody who's for it and
isn't a racist.
If the goal is to win over people who
aren't racists, yeah, calling them racists is not a very good strategy for doing that. But at the same time, I feel that it's negligent
not to point out racism where you see it. When you point out that politicians are using
Nazi visuals and
slogans, that's not so much Godwin's Law as The Emperor's New Clothes.
pacobird wrote:I guess what I'm saying is people who are like PRESIDENT TRUMP?!?! should get a grip
I think the parallels are really quite clear, and "a lot of middle-class voters who aren't racist but have serious issues with what globalization has done to their economic status voted for it" could apply just as easily to Trump.
Or he could end up losing by twenty points. Obviously I'd prefer for that to happen. But I'd be less surprised by a four-point Trump victory than I would by a twenty-point Trump defeat.
I'd put the likeliest outcome as Clinton winning by somewhere between five and eight points of the popular vote. But I
do think Trump's popularity is one datapoint in a disquieting multinational trend, that he
does have a shot and winning, at that there's a possibility if he won it wouldn't even be the most alarming nationalist victory this year.