Thursday, February 23, 2017

Blog assignment 3

On February 23, Nicholas Kristof, the columnist of New York Times, wrote an editorial titled "Trump Voters Are Not the Enemy."  The intended audience is those who do not support Trump or those who overly criticize Trump supporters. Kristof tweeted a warning to Democrats because they "sound patronizing when they speak of Trump voters" and got several responses from people. He quotes some responses and gives three reasons of why he think it is shortsighted to be furious at the entire Trump voters. First is that stereotyping Trump supporters as misogynist bigots is unfair because many of them are Black, Latino or Muslim. Second is demeaning Trump "feeds the dysfunction of our political system." Lastly, he says "it's hard to win over voters whom you're insulting." Until I read these reasons, I quite agreed with his idea because being separated in two by political reason intensifies the hatred among people and it is unnecessary to continue meaningless fight between supporters. Reasons people supports certain candidates vary. It could be because of the favor of certain economic policies of one candidate, hatred of other candidates, etc. Nevertheless, his reasonings are weak.Where is the statistical proof? I looked up and found that there is a clear statistical evidence showing racial divisions between supporters of each candidate. Also, second and third of his reasons are two ambiguous and too opinionated without any clear explanation. While I understand why Kristof had to write this editorial, to warn the ironic situation of people who are otherizing, his reasonings were too weak to support his claim.

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