The Gravitational Center of the Republican Party is White Nationalism

Nationalism: patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts.

It's dog-whistle for the Left, and, apparently Avik Roy.

No doubt there are some of the folks you describe supporting Trump, but to paint all white, working class, males who consider themselves patriotic with the brush you've used is a bit much.

I am a White, working-class male who considers myself patriotic.... so that isn't it.

The word "Nationalist" has a different meaning to me than "Patriotic". For example the people who are enraged by having to press "1" to speak English are Nationalist. Whereas, many patriotic Americans are happy to live in a place that speaks Spanish.

I think that the majority of people who are supporting Trump are both nationalist and racist. I suppose that there are people who are supporting Trump because they put their party over their country. They shouldn't be included in this number.

What is this "dog whistle" I keep coming across? What turn of phrase has it replaced?

-EDIT
Never mind, Google hooked me up

Enraged is an overstatement.

I'm a white, professional class male who considers myself patriotic and a nationalist. Neither explain why it does annoy me when I have to press "1" to speak English.

It's idiotic. We live in America where the vast majority of us, irrespective of our ethnicity, speak English. Unless I am phoning a Help Desk in Peru I don't expect the default to be Spanish. That isn't mean-spirited, it's common sense.

I'm a grandson of immigrants and happy that our country welcomes immigrants from all over the world, providing that they follow the legal process. Any who arrive here without the ability to speak English should be encouraged, for their own good, to learn the language.

Much was made of the negativity of the GOP convention, but if the position that the majority of people who are supporting the Republican candidate are racists isn't negative, I don't know what is.

Consider yourself fortunate, I suppose, that you are one of the few enlightened white working class males in this country who consider themselves patriotic. It must have taken a lot to break out of the mold.

You are wrong Finn. Nationalism is mean-spirited. It is prejudice. It is not common sense.

Nationalism is about hate and fear. It is about building walls to keep out "Mexican rapists". It is about excluding Muslim refugees. It is about opposing mosques. It is fear of Black men to avoid dealing with unjust law enforcement. It is about putting more people in jail. It is about making the Christian religion supreme and shutting out other religion. It is about intolerance with any sympathy for people outside of the White middle class. It celebrates conformity and punishes diversity.

Patriotism is about love of country. It is about tearing down walls. It about acceptance of all ethnic groups and pride of how we work together. It is about coming together to solve problems. It is about working to raise up the weakest of us and protecting the vulnerable.

Love is not the same as hate.

Those automated phone systems are called IVR's. I work on designing one as my daily job at a major financial institution.

As such, I pay special attention to many of these systems nation and industry wide as part of my job. I'm paid to do this.

The vast majority of these systems do not have customers press 1 for English. What they do have is an option "for Spanish, press 2". If the customer presses nothing (or presses anything else) the IVR continues in English. It does create a ~5 second pause in the system though to allow the prompt to be played and the response to be registered.

Our company keeps track of customer complaints on everything we do, including the IVR. This "I don't want to press 1 for English" thing comes up every day (my IVR takes almost 300,000 calls per day)....even though not one of our customers ever has to press anything for English.

My point is, sometimes your/our perceptions of an issue don't match reality. Choosing to get annoyed by something SO trivial is unhealthy and I can guarentee you, it will NEVER change anything as far as how these systems work (10% of my callers choose Spanish, that's 30,000 people compared to the ~5/day who complain).

It annoys you to press one for English.

Adding that little step allows many of your fellow Americans who don't speak English as a first language to have a dramatically better experience, maybe to get the help they need quickly and with ease. You would rather they have a worse experience, maybe a frustrating experience, maybe an unsuccessful experience because it is your privileged right to not have to press one or wait for five seconds. That you feel annoyed doing the slightest little task to make life better for Americans that are not like you kind of summarizes it for me.

I'm sure Roy shares some of your definition of "nationalism" which is why I called his "white nationalists" a dog whistle.

There's no need to get into an argument on the meaning of nationalism because it has both positive and negative connotations. You've chosen to employ the negative in keeping with your very negative assessment of the majority of Trump supporters. It doesn't make you right about them.

Quite a few people in this forum (including Berners) have acknowledged that Clinton has numerous faults with lying and corruption being among the worse, and yet indicate they will vote for her because she is favorable over Trump. Does this mean they are all corrupt liars or can be categorized as tolerant of those vices?

We have two unworthy candidates for president. I won't be voting for either, but I understand why essentially decent people on the Left and on the Right feel they have to choose a devil with which to dance. You obviously can't and insist upon imputing terrible intent to millions of Americans.

You are demonstrating the worst of tribal partisans (Republican and Democrat): The notion that one's tribe is full of virtue with occasional demonstrations of isolated vice and the other is a cesspool of vice with occasional bright lights of virtue (most often defined by agreement with one's tribal ideology).

Most of us are to one extent or another,tribal (it's in our DNA) and I don't at all exclude myself, but if we don't move away from those instincts that our political leaders, on both sides, have been cultivating for decades, our internal division will grow wider and deeper until it reaches a point where it can't possibly be bridged.

Love is, of course, not the same as hate; which you should appreciate more than many since you apparently hate millions of your fellow Americans.

Yes it does. It doesn't enrage me, it annoys me and I don't feel the slightest bit bad about myself for having that temporary minor reaction.

My fellow Americans who don't speak English, but only speak Spanish would be and are served just as well by a recording that says in Spanish "Press 1 for Spanish" I'm sure they understand what that means.

I didn't say all these systems use "Press 1 for English" I said the ones that do annoy me.

Annoyance is reserved pretty much for a trivial nuisance. Someone who experiences annoyance over this isn't headed for a heart attack or stroke.

If only 5 out of 300,000 people actually file a complaint each day, you've made the case that to suggest there are millions of Americans who become enraged about it is absurd.

I would never file a complaint about an annoyance, and neither do most people.

I would love to live a life free of annoyance, but despite by best efforts to become perfectly centered, morons keeps conspiring to irritate me.

I do not consider Trump to be just another "unworthy candidate". He is something far worse than that. He is directly appealing to the most dangerous, hateful, angry parts of us.

Trump, and the White Nationalism he is appealing to, represent an ugly part of us.

This isn't partisanship... I never said anything of the sort about McCain, or Romney or George W. Bush. None of these other candidates represent the values of racism and nationalism that Trump represents. Not surprising neither Romney nor George W. Bush will endorse Trump, and McCain makes only the weakest partisan appeal (as he fights for his own political life) and won't be seen with Trump.

There is an undercurrent of White Nationalism in America that stems from our troubled racial history. It comes out from time to time in politics, but basically we have over the years slowly progressed beyond this ugly past.

Trump is dredging this back out for political gain... it is the country that will feel the pain.

As someone who has proudly declared that any Democrat is better than any Republican, it's amusing that you should deny being a partisan.

You believe what you believe. I'm, obviously, not going to change your opinions.

I am pointing out, though, that you have a very ugly view of millions of your fellow Americans.

You've been pretty faithful in denying that there is any credence to negative stereotypes of different groups of people who don't happen to be "white" (e.g. illegal immigrants, inner-city young black males, and middle-eastern and American Muslims) or generalizations about how they think and act and whether they have love or hate in their hearts.

But you don't seem to be able to avoid stereotyping and generalizing about a specific group of white people: white, working class men who would describe themselves as nationalists.

This is not to argue that the negative stereotypes and generalizations about the aforementioned non-white groups are true and accurate, because they are not, but one of two things must be going on here:

Either you are doing what you argue others should not or those that do, have the same legitimacy as you do, to do it.

Now I know your argument is going to be something to the affect of "I'm only referring to white nationalist racists...who happen to constitute the majority of Trump's support and are now the "gravitational center" of the GOP"

Maybe you can point me to one of your posts where you accepted such a narrowing of negative stereotypes and generalizations as true?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/opinion/republicans-and-voter-suppression.html?_r=0

We know non-Americans we we see them. They are white supremacist, bigots, and have no regard for our Constitution.

Is that your mutant power?

If you believe our Constitution is "mutant power," you haven't learned anything about our country.

Finn,

I see what you are doing there.

1) I am grouping people by their behavior, words and actions. This is not the same as grouping people by race or ethnicity. Trump voters aren't racist because they are white. They are racist because they have hateful, ugly attitudes about Mexicans, Muslims, and African-Americans.

There are plenty of White middle-class people who don't talk about keeping out Muslims or rant about how Mexicans are rapists. I know this because I am a middle-class White man.

Trump is appealing to ugly racist rhetoric.

2) You missed my point about partisanship. I have said (and I will repeat) that any Democrat is better than any Republican. Of course, I am being a little funny when I say this... but I haven't seen any reason to break this rule since I started voting.

The point is that Trump is not just another Republican. He rhetoric is far uglier his ideas are dangerous is a way that far exceeds any other politician of either party in my lifetime (that includes Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes, Romney and McCain).

My opposition to Trump goes far beyond partisanship... and yes, I would oppose someone like Trump even if they were a Democrat.

I'm referring to your ability to identify un-Americans when you see them.

You're not related to Joseph McCarthy in any way, are you?

I know you want to distinguish yourself from my argument and I don't blame you, but I'm not going to beat a dead horse.

I'll be sure though to keep this exchange in mind if you go off on me or anyone else for stereotyping and generalizing. Perhaps we will deserve it, but perhaps we will be entitled to apply the Max Exception.

Finn, You're on IGNORE.

I suppose if you choose not to respond to what I am actually saying, there is nothing that I can do about it.

I hope you at least noticed that I am making the point that Republican does not equal racist. I thought at least you could agree with me on that point.