DENVER POST: Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark goes way too far.
Before elite donors at a glitzy fundraiser on Friday, Hillary Clinton managed to insult millions of Americans by arguing that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are deplorable individuals animated by racist, sexist, homophobic and other warped ways of thinking. Though she’s backed away from applying that characterization so broadly, she deserves the backlash she’s getting over the remarks. . . .
We condemned Mitt Romney in 2012 for making his 47 percent comments to well-heeled donors. Romney said that nearly half the nation was comprised of freeloaders who “pay no income tax” and who are in the tank for Democrats because of the party’s identification with government assistance.
And we remember that in 2008, the last time Clinton ran for president, she happily joined criticism of then-candidate Barack Obama for telling donors that struggling Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them.”
Related: Not Deplorable, Not Horrible, Not Irredeemable:
When Hillary Clinton denounced half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” last Friday, it seemed less an unscripted gaffe and more part of a targeted messaging strategy. Earlier last week, in an interview with an Israeli television network, she also trotted out the “basket of deplorables” line. Perhaps this “deplorables” attack will help rally the Left’s base. Maybe this was intended as a strategy to distract from Secretary Clinton’s myriad scandals and try to make the election a referendum on Donald Trump. However, the partisan optics of her attack might be less revealing than its deeper assumptions. Whether or not this proves an effective partisan gambit, the “deplorables” attack reveals some of the assumptions that have rendered public debates more fractious. . . .
Making politics simply the conflict between right-thinking people and “deplorables” (or sheep misled by such “deplorables”) undermines the foundation of serious political discussion, which demands a good-faith effort at communication and a recognition that those who differ from us might have legitimate alternative viewpoints. Without that mode of discussion, politics degenerates into simply screaming slogans at the opposing side. It’s a commonplace to lament political “gridlock,” but the impulse to deplorablize one’s opponents very much gets in the way of finding prudential compromise. The politics of demonization decreases civil trust and threatens to increase the fractures of an already divided body politic.
It makes perfect sense, though, if you divide voters into those who can be useful and those who might stand in your way.
UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru: Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ wasn’t just impolitic, it was wrong.