A majority of Americans say President Trump is a “dangerous dictator” who poses a threat to democracy and believe he’s overstepped his authority by actions such as the mass firing of federal employees, a new survey says.
The wide-ranging poll released Tuesday, on Trump’s 100th day in office, is the latest sign of him losing support for his immigration and economic policies — the two issues that largely fueled his election.
Yeah. I’m in Merced, CA, which was one of the initial collection points for detained Japanese Americans before they were put in the internment camps. We have a little memorial at the fair grounds, which is where they were collected up at. I’ve always believed that people 50, 100, 200, and 2000 years ago really aren’t fundamentally different than people today, and anyone today who professes to be disgusted by Jim Crow but still embraces modern forms of oppression would have embraced Jim Crow back then. We’re seeing that now. These folks, without even a second thought, will eagerly embrace Hispanic internment camps while denouncing the Japanese internment camps as something that never should have happened, and dismiss any semblance with a thought terminating “but this is different.”
This is really well said. Throughout history, you can reliably find people on both sides of moral and humanitarian issues like this. There were Roman elite who spoke out against slavery in antiquity, there were Brits who mocked the American Colonies for owning slaves while founding a country based on freedom, there have always been men who believed in equal treatment and rights for women. Right and wrong is usually pretty clear, and in general regular people throughout the ages have been able to recognize which is which. Our values haven’t changed much, but our systems of power and accountability have.
That said, I also believe a good amount of the right wing backlash against the internment camps was performative. Because up until relatively recently, many racists themselves understood that their beliefs were terrible, so they at least tried to hide their true feelings and spoke out against obvious atrocities like this in public. But that was only so they could be accepted by the wider culture, and so they could continue to participate in left-coded spaces. They don’t need to hide how awful they are anymore because the president is leading by example.