Stereotypes, not policies, secured those election wins

I finished the book The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley. It’s a sequel to The Guncle. I read it back in 2022. A guncle is a gay uncle. In that earlier book gay Patrick took in his niece Maisie and nephew Grant while their father Greg went into rehab after the death of their mother Sara. Patrick did a decent job of parenting over that summer and afterward adjusted his acting career to be closer to Greg and the kids. Now five years later when Grant is 11 and Maisie is 14 Greg is about to marry again. Bride Livia is from one of the important families of Italy, yes the family is rich. So the wedding is to be held at an expensive hotel on Lake Como. Patrick volunteers to take Grant and Maisie for a few weeks before the wedding so that Greg and Livia can finalize the details. Patrick and the kids use that time to tour Europe. That’s when Patrick learns that Maisie is very much against the wedding and Grant isn’t happy about it either. Maisie wants her uncle to make sure it doesn’t happen. So while traveling Patrick talks to the kids about love languages, ways people demonstrate their love. He hopes Maisie will see that Livia does love her. Once at the Lake Como hotel Patrick meets Livia’s lesbian sister Palmira. Patrick is jealous that she will crowd out his role as guncle by becoming the kid’s launt. The family is rich enough that the bachelorette party – Livia, Palmira, Greg’s sister Clara, Maisie, and somehow Patrick is held at the Prada flagship store in Milan in an after-hour’s private session. The event does begin to show that Livia really is paying attention to Maisie. I enjoyed the book. Like the earlier book it is a good story, quite fun, and also has good things to say about love and family. And like the earlier book there are a lot of cultural references. The acknowledgments in the back say that a movie version of The Guncle is in the works. I’m pleased to hear that. Alas, all I can find online is the movie is in development and has been since 2021. Ian Reifowitz, formerly of the Daily Kos staff and now part of its community, announced he has published a book. It sounds intriguing, but not enough for me to buy it. The book is Riling Up the Base: Examining Trump’s Use of Stereotypes Through an Interdisciplinary Lens by Reifowitz and Anastacia Kurylo. The description:

Riling up the Base argues that stereotypes (especially those relating to immigration, race/ethnicity, and gender), not policies, secured Trump’s election win and the ongoing support he enjoys. From his 2015 campaign announcement through his presidential term and in his time out of office, Donald Trump has used stereotypes as a routine feature in his rhetoric. This book defines them as a crucially important strategy for attracting, retaining, and energizing voters. Covering topics like persuasion, agenda setting, critical race theory, and semiotics, the authors use a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to unpack how Trump motivates his base. This book provides a full aggregate explanation of the seemingly mesmerizing attachment and adoration his core supporters feel by explaining the way seemingly disparate theories work both alone and together to expose the mechanisms at play. Various theories help reveal the reality that, regardless of who his competitors were, his uncanny ability to wield stereotypes enabled him to secure a strong base and win the presidency, twice.

A week ago Scott Simon of NPR talked to Garrett Graff about his book The Devil Reached Toward The Sky: An Oral History Of The Making And Unleashing Of The Atomic Bomb. The discussion marked 80 years since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is another book that sounds intriguing but I won’t read. Some of what was discussed: The “oral history” part means we follow the development of the bomb and get to know the players before they know whether the bomb will work and whether they will be able to use it before Germany does. Though we associate the bomb with Japan the project to develop it was because of scientists who fled Europe and knew the colleagues they left behind were working towards a bomb. Los Alamos, New Mexico, Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee were large cities that few knew about and weren’t on any maps. Hanford and Oak Ridge were both 100,000 people and the Oak Ridge bus system was one of the ten largest transit systems in the US at the time. The uranium refining machines were run by high school girls – who else was there to hire at that time? They did a better job than the PhD scientists. But they didn’t hear the world uranium or know what they were making until President Harry Truman’s announcement that the bomb had been dropped. The last part of the book is a contrast between the Americans celebrating a successful mission and the Japanese dealing with the devastation of the bombs. Even after the second bomb imperialists wanted to keep fighting and Emperor Hirohito survived a coup attempt the night before his surrender. Nuclear bombs have been considered too terrible to use and haven’t been used since. But we are closer to their use than any time in those 80 years. Conflict between India and Pakistan. Israel and the US bombed the Iran nuclear program. Weapons might proliferate in Europe and Asia. And various countries are upgrading their arsenals. In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times discussing the “republics” of America:

Americans pride ourselves...on our undivided history under one Constitution — a single, ongoing experiment in self-government. But look closely at American history and you’ll see that this is an illusion of continuity that belies a reality of change, and sometimes radical transformation, over time. There are several American republics and at least two Constitutions, a first and a second founding. Our first republic began with ratification in 1788 and collapsed at Fort Sumter in 1861. Our second emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and was dismantled, as the University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha argues, by Jim Crow at home and imperial ambition abroad. If the third American republic took shape under the unusual circumstances of the middle decades of the 20th century — what the Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie calls “the great exception” of depression, war and a political system indelibly shaped by immigration restriction and the near-total exclusion of millions of American citizens from the political system — then the fourth began with the achievements of the civil rights movement, which included a newly open door to the world. This was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of society. Of a Black president and a future “majority-minority” nation. There was an ugly side — it’s no coincidence that state retrenchment from public goods and services followed the crumbling of racial barriers. But for all its harsh notes and discord, this was the closest the country ever came to the “composite nation” of Frederick Douglass’s aspirations: a United States that served as home to all who might seek the shelter of the Declaration of Independence and its “principles of justice, liberty and perfect humanity equality.” It’s this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.

In the comments Bonky tweeted an image of a child with a bald head wearing a hospital gown with a hand around a mobile IV bag looking at a glowing ballroom golden with well dressed people dining. Bonky wrote, “If you think a golden ballroom is more important than childhood cancer research… I have nothing left to say to you. Please unfollow me.” In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Phillips O’Brien of Phillips’s Newsletter discussing the dangers of praising the nasty guy. O’Brien concludes that doing so would be “counterproductive tactically and morally questionable.” Along the way he said this:

Note, he is not paying for [the Patriot batteries], the Germans are, so he is not giving Ukraine anything. He is allowing the US to benefit to protect Ukrainians.

In today’s roundup Dworkin quoted Stephen Robinson of Public Notice discussing the Confederate statues that had been taken down during the Biden years (in response to George Floyd’s murder) which the nasty guy is working to put back up.

There is a critical difference between acknowledging the nation’s history and celebrating its worst moments. In Germany, they don’t erase their shameful Nazi past, but that doesn’t mean they’re erecting hagiographic statues commemorating Nazi war criminals.

While that statement makes an important point there is a problem with it. Many in the South consider their role as shameful only in that they lost the Civil War. Erecting those statues was a way of defying the winners and reminding black people that they better watch what they do.