“You can’t vote for a guy who’s racist and not be racist.”
Ok…
When you say “can’t” I assume that you really mean that, genuinely, and you are counter signalling some on the left who continually bleat that NOT ALL Trump voters are racist, in an attempt to maintain intellectual honesty when it comes to the prominent leftist talking point about NOT ALL muslims being radical. In other words, you are drawing a line in the sand. If a politician is a racist, and you vote for that person you are a racist. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Let me give you a hypothetical scenario.
It is a US presidential election. The democratic candidate is a black democratic socialist, who’s main policy platforms are single payer healthcare, police reform, more open borders, less foreign intervention, and a minimum wage increase. He is funded entirely by small money donations from his supporters, as big money donors hate his guts and give large sums of money to his republican opponent, with negative ads against him being constantly run on most major networks. He also happens to believe that certain negative traits sometime associated with white people are genetically determined, but he has made it very clear he does not hate white people, and believes that his policies will help everyone in the country, regardless of skin colour.
His opponent is a wealthy senator, and a white man, who believes in waging a dozen wars globally at the same time, that the poor are entirely responsible for their own lot in life and deserve no support, and that restrictions on big business should be cut and that government money should be saved by cutting social welfare programs entirely.
According to your diagnosis that anyone who votes for a racist candidate is racist, it would be entirely legitimate and justified, hell, even morally obligatory, to call all the supporters for candidate one racists. This is why people from across the political spectrum made the case that you can’t accuse someone of racism just because they voted for Trump. Voting is a judgement call that involves weighing up all the pros and cons. Some people who were genuinely against racism and believed that Trump was a racist would voted for him anyway for any number of reasons. blanket statements like you made are absolutely unacceptable.
