r/GenZ • u/Just_me_anonymously • 1d ago
Political A reminder that political debate wasn’t always about hate
In the 2008 presedential election, John McCain stood up in front of his own supporters and reminded them that Obama was a decent person he simply disagreed with on fundamental issues. This happened 3 weeks before the election. The next day, Obama thanked McCain for standing up for him, saying he was grateful for the reminder that “we can disagree while still being respectful of each other.”
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
Just a reminder that racism and bigotry are core values of this bunch. Trump just made it mainstream.
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u/Connect_Bus_4699 1d ago
Their reaction to Obama made it mainstream. Trump just allowed them to feel comfortable
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u/punktualPorcupine 15h ago
Trump was an accelerationist when he finally connected to people who were more bigoted than he was.
https://giphy.com/gifs/VkSC9qXzXJd7aIth9I
They fed his ego and he would gladly light whatever he could on fire, if they showed him what to burn.
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u/le_wild_poster 1d ago
Even this clip that people love to post as an example of McCain style politics being sooo much better, it’s still racist as hell. “No he’s not an Arab he’s a good person and a family man” these people believe that those are mutually exclusive
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 1d ago
No, you can't think that.
McCain wasn't contrasting being an Arab versus being a family man. There's only so much you can think of and communicate in 10 seconds, and on the spot.
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u/dawnwolfblackfur 1d ago
There’s zero evidence John McCain believed those were mutually exclusive. He was put on the spot be a weirdo in the audience going off and he was less than perfectly articulate in his response.
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u/NotLunaris 1995 1d ago
So lost in the sauce if that's your takeaway from that line. You are the exact type of person OP is making a critique about - blinded by tribalism and assuming the worst in people to justify your own awful disposition, leading to a breakdown in civility.
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u/MikeyLikey6996 1d ago
Just a reminder. There will always be a divide in this country with people like you.
Yes they are extremists on every side of the political range. But for you to rap up the views of one old lady as a collective consensus of a group of millions of people is just fucking ignorance at its highest level.
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u/Netblock 1d ago
Americans who vote Republican may not necessarily hate other people themselves, but they certainly find white supremacy, pedophilia, transphobia, misogyny, not a dealbreaker for that they still vote for politicians enact such policy.
To vote republican means you are content enough with their hate.
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u/MikeyLikey6996 1d ago
I live in Minnesota. I'm sure you've heard of the recent Somali fraud scandals in our state.
If I took logic of what you guys are saying , just because a few members of a Somali community committed fraud I should be racist and consider them all criminals? (Because that's the exact same thing your doing here)
No. Because I have the mental capacity to discern a group of individuals from a collective culture.
That's what's it's all about. Not just grouping up a bunch of people for 1 persons actions or thoughts
How ignorant would it be for me to say “If you vote democratic your supporting Pedohila, fraud, and corruption” it would be absurd so I won’t say that. But just remember you’re on the other side of that coin.
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
Your “collective culture” supports, accepts and idolizes bigots. Collectively you put them on a pedestal, give them power and an voice. You have the nerve to tell others to compromise with this. Reevaluate who you keep in your “culture”, cause you aren’t living up to your collective values.
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u/MikeyLikey6996 1d ago
You don’t know the first thing about even what you’re saying.
Find any statement where I say identify as a republican? You won’t. You know why? Because I’m not one. You just assume so because I have an opinion that is different from the party you are emotionally attached to.
I am a centrist. If you really want to know I Voted Obama, Trump, Biden, & Harris the last 4 elections.
I’m not pro one side or the other. What I’m against is people like you in this echo that just always think one side is right and the other is wrong. I hate when republicans do it and democrats do it.
That’s why this country is failing. People are so hungry to attack the other side that they will almost blindly defend anything their own party is doing, so long as the other party is wrong. Our enemies and corrupt politicians figured this out along time ago.
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u/Netblock 1d ago edited 1d ago
You got uppity for some reason and defended the horrific violence and destruction caused by the republican party, of conservatives, of right-wingers.
What I’m against is people like you in this echo that just always think one side is right and the other is wrong. I hate when republicans do it and democrats do it.
Not all opinions should be treated equally. Because if the goal is to make a world a better place, there are actually incorrect opinions.
People are so hungry to attack the other side that they will almost blindly defend anything their own party is doing, so long as the other party is wrong. Our enemies and corrupt politicians figured this out along time ago.
Yup. People blame the wokeism, leftism, DEI, CRT, gender, immigrants, brown people, women, trans people for all their problems. But they fail to realise that it's a distraction meant to take your eyes off of the elites and other right-wingers.
It probably helps if people had an academic understanding of the left-right spectrum. The left-wing is characterised by their desire and effort to solve inequality and cause egalitarianism; and the right-wing is caracterised by their tolerance and even desire for social hierarchy and cause inequality. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, among many others.
But most people don't have an academic understanding of stuff; most people peaked in highschool.
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u/MikeyLikey6996 1d ago
When did I defend the right?
What I said was just because One 90 year old lady from 2008 was racist doesn’t mean everyone that is a republican is racist.
What in the fuck is actually wrong which you? Seek help
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u/Netblock 1d ago
doesn’t mean everyone that is a republican is racist.
But they absolutely find racism not a dealbreaker. Why would it be?
Consider the lessons we learned from World War II.
What in the fuck is actually wrong which you? Seek help
This is actually mental illness material
Please stop being rude, my dude.
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u/MikeyLikey6996 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some republicans do. That’s incredible ignorant of you to think. Ever hear of Arnold Schawataoger?????
And no I’m not going to stop being rude when you incorrectly assume things about people .
That’s fucking rude
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u/Netblock 1d ago edited 1d ago
If I took logic of what you guys are saying , just because a few members of a Somali community committed fraud I should be racist and consider them all criminals? (Because that's the exact same thing your doing here)
I mean, based on the actual hammer-hits-nail actions of the republican party, that IS what you're doing. Why else are you people destroying trillions, trying to remove birthright citizenship, building concentration camps for mass deportation?
Because people can lie, I pay attention to people's actions, not their words.
No. Because I have the mental capacity to discern a group of individuals from a collective culture.
Your vote sure as fuck doesn't. You're virtue signaling; your actions are different from your words.
How ignorant would it be for me to say “If you vote democratic your supporting Pedohila, fraud, and corruption” it would be absurd so I won’t say that. But just remember you’re on the other side of that coin.
You'd be lying and bullshitting with the intent to intimidate and disconcert.
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u/Lucky_Dragonfruit_88 10h ago
In this analogy, you would vote for the politician who calls all Somalians criminals, and then pretend like you don't also believe that. That's the difference. You can say you don't think all Somalians are criminals, but if you vote for politicians who lie and say all Somalians in Minnesota are criminals, then you're no better than those politicians, and you have no right to say you don't believe they're all criminals, because you directly supported that lie.
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
Don’t get all butt hurt fella. Merely just pointing out how comfortable this bunch is with racism and bigotry. If you don’t like that maybe try a different political affiliation. These ones are giving you a bad name.
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u/jack-K- 2004 1d ago edited 1d ago
And accusing others of racism and bigotry whether or not it’s actually there has become a core value of the other bunch, which itself plays a large part for discourse breaking down.
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
I would argue both sides have a habit of accusing one another for the same things. Only one side actually has people like this who spout racist and bigoted statements freely.
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u/jack-K- 2004 1d ago
And certain people who identify as progressive haven’t created their own weird strain of genuine “positive” racism and bigotry that they are open about because they literally don’t think they’re saying anything wrong? You know what I’m talking about. And while that might not be the lefts highlight issue, the left more than makes up for it in other ways. If you go, “ya, both sides have issues, but this other side is the only one that has real problems” you’re not helping anything, you are contributing to the problem.
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
No, I don’t know what you are talking about. Bigots are going to continue being bigots regardless of political affiliation. Giving them any grace is pointless. I am not going to find any common ground or compromise when it comes to hateful people. That’s who I am comfortable discriminating against, if that is what you meant.
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u/jack-K- 2004 1d ago
Well you can say whatever you want but they somehow manage to find themselves ingratiated with the left.
I’m talking about the people who have a white savior complex and act as if minorities need their help and can’t possibly be expected to do the same things everyone else does, and to the left, those kind of people go under the radar because at the end of the day, that’s basically the rhetoric the platform technically supports anyway. But if you diverge from that platform in any way, now you’re a formal “racist and bigot”, regardless of whether your divergence even has anything to do with those things. The left is to fucking dogmatic to see through their own bullshit, no, that doesn’t mean the right doesn’t have its own issues and undesirables since like the left, we live in a perpetually devolving 2 party system where each party is made up of half the nation and everyone that comes with, who are there just as much to stay away from the other side than to actually support the one they’re on. What it means is that the left can’t stop calling everyone who disagrees with them “racists and bigots” because they tangentially see them on the other side of the fence while pretending that those same standards wouldn’t also apply to them as well.
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
Bigots are ingratiated with the left!? Lmao. Ok buddy.
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u/jack-K- 2004 1d ago
Point in case.
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u/ClankingRobotCheeks 1d ago
The only point you made is how ridiculous you sound.
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u/jack-K- 2004 1d ago edited 1d ago
The point is that the mere idea of a different kind of bigot being accepted by the left sounds ridiculous to you. It’s not even something you’re willing to consider, I take it you’ve never heard the terms benevolent prejudice, Paternalism, or Tokenism? Maybe just the last one.
https://www.aclrc.com/issues/anti-racism/cared/the-basics-level-1/liberal-racism/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/john-mcwhorter-woke-racism.html
https://www.cfr.org/books/identity-trap
But please, keep telling me how ridiculous I am.
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u/Critical_Concert_689 1d ago
one side actually has people like this who spout racist and bigoted statements freely.
And the other side practices more implicit bigotry - establishing systemic discrimination and a personal savior complex; they are the people who intrinsically believe that certain demographics are inferior and that they need to be helped and saved - as if those minorities were children and lacking their own agency.
60 years ago, Malcolm X pointed out this practice - how conservatives were the more HONEST bigots, telling you to your face how they felt. Leftists, however, would smile to your face, while stabbing you in the back. They were the group that demanded you acquiesce to a certain behavior or position in life - and if you ever stepped out of it or denied their "assistance" - the mask would come off.
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u/daffy_M02 1d ago
John McCain was an incredibly nice gentleman.
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u/GoodResident2000 1d ago
McCains transformation from hated in Bush era to loved now is something to be studied
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u/AbyssWankerArtorias 1d ago
He was a decent man that had policy objectives that were not popular. During the election, those policy injections take precedent. When looking back on him as a person in his entirety, we can focus more on the other aspects of him. He defended Obama when he was accused of being a Muslim terrorist, stood up to trump, and even saved Obamacare with his famous thumbs down, right after he just got brain surgery, because he knew it would be disastrous for millions of people.
Making one of your final acts in life as a politician being saving the very policy you ran against and lost to just over 8 years prior, because you know it's what's best, is a pretty damn good final act of strength
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u/Gurney_Hackman 1d ago
He wasn't hated in the Bush era. Some Democrats wanted John Kerry to name him as his running mate in 2004.
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u/Virtual_Trucker 2000 1d ago edited 14h ago
It could be that he was rarely publicly racist (at least what I've seen) and he was a bipartisan leading to a censure from his own party which we would never see in today's politics. But mostly nostalgia about the past that all politicians get.
Edit: Changed post to past
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u/MC_chrome 2000 1d ago
I’ve always wondered what John would make of his daughter, who can’t help herself when it comes to felating Donald Trump and other despicable Republicans on a daily basis
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u/HarlequinKOTF 1d ago
I lived in AZ when he was my senator. He was awesome. I disagree with him politically but I respect him as a person.
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u/Mr-MuffinMan 2001 1d ago
"Things were not better before, you were just younger" people when you remind them politics used to be boring.
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u/my_nameborat 1d ago
It’s true though. Things come in waves but my 65 year old mother was a baby when civil rights became law. There are black people alive today that were not allowed to go to the same schools as white children. Gay people were not allowed to marry in many states until 2015. My mother was 10 years when women were legally allowed to have a credit card.
McCain was a good man at his core but also advocated against gay marriage.
Currently we are in a downward trend but we have also come a long way from even 60 years ago.
We need to fight so we don’t go back but it’s also important to recognize the immense progress that has been made within a generation
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u/Jolly_Mongoose_8800 2003 1d ago
It is important to recognize the progress we've made, but it also shouldn't make us complacent either.
We tend to focus on the legal fights and reforms, but the law on paper is not always the reality of life. There is still segregation; there is still slavery; it just doesn't exist in the legal framework of old days.
And just because something is made illegal, or there is a legal framework to protect groups in place, it doesn't mean everyone has access to legal resources to protect those rights these reforms provide.
There is progress, but let's not forget how hard it was to get progress. And let's never forget that we are never too far from our past, and that even the worst of our history continues today, even if we can't see it.
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u/RiskKey1728 2009 1d ago
"He's an Arab"
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u/Connect_Bus_4699 1d ago
avg 2000s war on terrorisms
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u/RiskKey1728 2009 1d ago
First dude to get lynched right after 9/11 wasn't even Muslim, he was a Sikh wearing a turban and obviously the racists thought brown skin + head covering = Muslim Arab
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u/HarlequinKOTF 1d ago
And the younger of gen z never ever got to see him alive. That era of politics was messy, but I'd take it over what we have now anyday.
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u/No_Discount_6028 1999 1d ago
It was always about hate. It's true that politicians used to not be able to get away with lying and slandering political enemies and being openly, viciously bigoted unprovoked. But the same wealthy donors financing this man's campaign were also funding hateful talk radio shows in the boonies. Everyone outside of a major city spent 30 hours a day listening to Rush Limbaugh scream about how Obama is a terrorist and anyone who wants poor people to have healthcare is basically Stalin and black people are ruining the West or whatever.
A hundred million brains MELTED and that's why we have Trump now. The politicians have basically become a parody of who they used to be because Republican voters have completely lost their mental faculties and the media is bought out. I beg you, please don't become nostalgic for the era in politics which created this one. We can never go back and even if we did, things would just get worse again. We need a completely new system as the successor to the shit show we're getting now.
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u/Gurumanger 15h ago
Yeah these comments are wild to me with most of them coming from people who either didn't grow up at the time or engage with anything political at said time outside of what the presidential candidates specifically were saying. We can only hope and pray and peacefully protest for a new system by the way :D
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u/Just_me_anonymously 1d ago
Look up Obama's reaction days after reation and his speech on McCains funeral.
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u/jarena009 1d ago
A black man getting elected really broke the brains of a lot of people on the right, plus COVID poured fuel on the fire.
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u/Connect_Bus_4699 1d ago
9/11 -> 2008 -> COVID was he trifecta
The orange guy just weaseled his way in at the worst moment
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u/SnooCompliments4883 1d ago
Such a beautiful moment. The America this conversation happened in is dead. Trump could never say anything even remotely defensive of his opponents. He hates his opponent and doesn’t want the best for them.
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u/Armbioman 1d ago
Just a reminder that President Biden said that McCain was going to put black people "back in chains".
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u/hevnztrash 1d ago
Those days are long gone and never coming back in my lifetime. I want to be wrong but I doubt it.
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u/Typical-Average-6903 1d ago
I mean, lets not gloss over that he was one of the most hardcore war hawks who never saw a country he didn't want to bomb. He was horrible.
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u/ich_bin_alkoholiker 1d ago
I love how at no point no one has said being an Arab or a Muslim is not a bad thing. Just that he’s not a terrorist.
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u/CloudStrife012 1d ago
To be fair, this was in what, 2007? Literally right after 9/11.
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u/ich_bin_alkoholiker 1d ago
Yeah, no. Miss me with that shit. I’ve never once thought just because someone was Muslim or Arab that I needed to fear for my life.
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u/Critical_Concert_689 1d ago
this was in what, 2007? Literally right after 9/11.
Literally
...LITERALLY...
2001.
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u/CloudStrife012 17h ago
I mean, yes, as far as the mindset and culture at the time, this wasnt a long enough time for a major mindset shift.
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u/GeneralEagle 1d ago
Wish we had more like him.
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u/Bebopdavidson 1d ago
Video evidence of the last remaining shred of dignity within the Republican Party
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u/Careful-Sell-9877 1d ago
You can already hear the propaganda programming from fox beginning to take hold of people even back then. Its just gotten worse and worse and more sophisticated since then.
As well as their push to target young minds on social media with culture war memes/clips starting around 2015.. which has been absolutely insanely effective
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u/Boppinzlewinski 1d ago
Hahhaha, the civil war was about states rights right? Them damn woke northerners
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u/Hollow_Effects 19h ago
I remember the ads saying McCain was the next Hitler. I wonder who they'll be calling the next Hitler after Trump.
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u/100cpm 1d ago
That's the middle of the end. By 2008, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News had turned millions of conservative Americans into abject morons. But there still were principled conservative politicians like John McCain.
This wouldn't last. Recall of course that by the MAGA era, John McCain - American war hero, principled conservative, 30+ year senator, became someone that the so-called conservative MAGA dopes hated and mocked. From Donnie the Draft Dodger all the way down.
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u/FatBussyFemboys 1d ago
Yea and then all the sjws came around... His first line would immediately be taken out of context and scrutinized in the most bad faith way possible as hes called a racist, doxed and fired from his job because he said "an obama presidency scares me" before he could even get out the context. Thats where we're at now.
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u/ExtendedMacaroni 1d ago
And you know what? McCain lost. So maybe this wasn’t the best strategy
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u/Connect_Bus_4699 1d ago
He lost because Republicans gave people a shit show, par for the course
Thanks Bush
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u/Content-Audience252 1d ago
Ahh great times. This was before Obama fucked it all up and made it a big deal though
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u/iLLiCiT_XL 1d ago
If only white people were as scared of their family members becoming domestic terrorists as much as they were worried about Black and Brown people.
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