By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Donald Trump has a frightening habit of uttering things
that many people apparently think, but would never express. And he blusters in
such an off-putting and sloppy fashion that he alienates those who otherwise
might agree with many of his critiques of political correctness.
Nonetheless, when the dust settles, we often see that
Trump’s megatonnage strikes a chord — and, with it, sometimes has effected
change. In an odd way, the more personally unpopular he becomes for raising
taboo issues, the more resonant become the more refined variants of his
proposals for addressing these festering problems.
For the last several months, anti-Trump demonstrators
have sought to disrupt his rallies; they attack his supporters and wave
offensive anti-American and often overtly racist placards, while burning
American and waving Mexican flags — often with a nonchalant police force
looking on.
Trump shouts back that their antics are only further
proof of his general point: Illegal immigration and an open border have
subverted our immigration laws and created a paradoxical movement that is as
illogical as it is ungracious. After fleeing Mexico, entering the U.S.
illegally, and being treated with respect (try doing the same in any Latin
American country), some foreign nationals have been waving the flag of the
country they do not wish to return to, while scorning the flag of the country
that they demand to stay in. But apparently they are not fond of Trump’s larger
point, disguised by his barroom rhetoric, which is that the old melting-pot
protocols of rapid assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have been
sabotaged — and now the American people can at last see the wages of that
disaster on national TV.
In response to the general public disapproval that
focused on the violent demonstrations, anti-Trump protestors recently have
announced that they will ban Mexican flags from their future rallies. They
probably will not, but why did they even play-act that they would? Are
illegal-immigration activists suddenly turned off by Mexico and appreciative of
the United States? Be that as it may, it would surely be a good thing if
immigrants to the U.S. and their supporters stopped attacking the icons of the
country that they have chosen to reside in.
For that matter, why suddenly during the past six months
did 16 Republican primary candidates begin talking about enforcing immigration
laws, avoid the very mention of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and promise
to finish the southern border fence? While they all deplored Trump’s
mean-spirited rhetoric, they all more or less channeled his themes. Until the
approach of the Trump battering ram, outrageous developments like the
neo-Confederate concept of sanctuary cities being exempt from federal law were
off limits to serious criticism — even from the Republican congressional
establishment.
Trump dismissively characterized Judge Gonzalo Curiel as
a “Mexican” (the absence of hyphenation could be charitably interpreted as
following the slang convention in which Americans are routinely called “Irish,”
“Swedish,” “Greek,” or “Portuguese,” with these words used simply as
abbreviated identifiers rather than as pejoratives). Trump’s point was that
Curiel could not grant Trump a fair trial, given Trump’s well-publicized
closed-borders advocacy.
Most of America was understandably outraged: Trump had
belittled a sitting federal judge. Trump had impugned his Mexican ancestry.
Trump had offered a dangerous vision of jurisprudence in which ethnic ancestry
necessarily manifests itself in chauvinism and prejudice against the Other.
Trump was certainly crude, but on closer analysis of his
disparagements he had blundered into at least a few legitimate issues. Was it
not the Left that had always made Trump’s point about ethnicity being
inseparable from ideology (most infamously Justice Sotomayor in her ruminations
about how a “wise Latina” would reach better conclusions than intrinsically
less capable white males, and how ethnic heritage necessarily must affect the
vantage point of jurists — racialist themes Sotomayor returned to this week in
her Utah v. Strieff dissent, which
has been characterized as a “Black Lives Matter” manifesto)? Had not Barack
Obama himself apologized (“Yeah, he’s a white guy . . . sorry.”) for nominating
a white male judge to the Supreme Court, as if Merrick Garland’s appearance
were something logically inseparable from his thought?
What exactly was the otherwise apparently sober and
judicious Judge Curiel doing in publicizing his membership in a group known as
the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association? Raza — a term that will likely soon
disappear from American parlance once belated public attention focuses on its
1960s separatist origins and its deeper racist Francoist and Mussolinian roots
— is by intent racially charged.
Certainly, an illegal-immigration advocate could not expect a fair trial from
any federal judge who belonged to a group commensurately designated “the San
Diego Race Lawyers Association.” From this tawdry incident, we will remember
Trump, the racial incendiary — but perhaps in the aftermath we will also
question why any organization with Raza in its name should earn a pass from
charges of polarizing racial chauvinism. The present tribalism is unsustainable
in a pluralistic society. I wish the antidote for “typical white person,”
“punish our enemies,” “my people,” (only) Black Lives Matter, and “la Raza”
were not Donald Trump, but let us be clear on the fact that his is a crude reaction to a smooth and unquestioned
racialism that, in bankrupt fashion, has been tolerated by the establishments
of both parties.
For seven years, Barack Obama has not deigned to explain
to the American people why he abhors terms like radical Islam, Islamic
terrorism, and Islamist, unlike European leaders and most Americans. Obama
certainly in the past has had no problem with using far more sweeping and
generic categories — for example, dressing down millions of Pennsylvanians as
know-nothing clingers, or Christians in general for their purported centuries
of “high-horse” sins. His administration has stereotyped and provoked plenty of
groups, from supposedly parasitic entrepreneurs who did not build their own
businesses to a nation of supposedly cowardly non-minorities.
In one area alone, Obama and his administration have
created a vacuous and dangerous vocabulary of euphemisms — violent extremism,
man-caused disasters, overseas contingency operations, a largely “secular”
Muslim Brotherhood, and so on. Such nomenclature only confuses Americans about
the dangers that they face from radical Islam while emboldening Islamists, who
can suspect that if we are afraid to call them what they are, then we may also
be defensive about their bogus grievances against the West. Neither ISIS and
al-Qaeda nor the relatives of Omar Mateen and Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino
killer, have shown any gratitude to the U.S. for its politically correct
tiptoeing around who is blowing up, beheading, and shooting whom — and why.
Most recently, the administration, in disturbing 1984 style, edited out the Orlando terrorist’s explicit praise of
and statement of solidarity with ISIS from the released transcript of his call
to 911 — in an apparent effort to reinvent him as a generic rather than Islamic
terrorist.
So why have polished politicians such as Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton suddenly decided that the American people needed explanations
about, or changes in, their longstanding vocabulary?
Trump in blunderbuss fashion has questioned the premises
of the seven-decade-old NATO alliance. Observers on both sides of the Atlantic
derided his simplistic critique of paltry European contributions to the defense
of the West as a sort of know-nothing nativism. It may well have been. But then
strangely, European governments — Germany’s especially — quietly began issuing
statements that, in fact, they were planning to up their defense budgets. Why
now such acknowledgments, if Trump were a mere buffoon? And how did it happen
that Europe (in aggregate perhaps the largest economy in the world) has still
relied on far greater U.S. defense expenditures 70 years after the end of World
War II?
Two examples of Trump’s most controversial and in some
sense reprehensible invective are his suggestions that we should temporarily
bar Muslim immigration into the United States, and that we should hold the
families of terrorists accountable for their silence. Critics rightly decry
both suggestions as unworkable, creepy, and contrary to the American sense of
decency, while privately perhaps acknowledging that something is wrong with
current immigration from the war-torn Middle East, a problem by now spanning
two generations.
Collate the profiles of the Boston, Fort Hood,
Chattanooga, UC Merced, San Bernardino, and Orlando attackers, and four themes
emerge: (1) the parents, spouses, girlfriends, or siblings of the killers had
plenty of occasions to discover that something was wrong with the person in
question, but chose to remain silent and not contact authorities; (2) many
second-generation Americans of Middle Eastern heritage feel no gratitude to the
U.S. for taking in their parents, much less for their own good luck of being
born in the U.S. rather than in their parents’ war-ravaged hellholes; (3) even
on the occasions when state or federal authorities did look into reports that,
for example, the Boston or Orlando killers were jihadist extremists, agents did
little proactively, perhaps out of worry that they might be pegged as
Islamophobic or as unduly profiling those of Middle Eastern descent; and (4)
the U.S., like Europe, has no mechanism for screening the hundreds of thousands
of immigrants that are flowing across its borders, and thus no way of knowing
whether terrorist cells are infiltrating the country.
The reaction to Trump’s rants was understandable. A
chorus denounced him for his racism, nativism, and xenophobia. Yet, quietly,
authorities now say that they may well bring up Omar Mateen’s wife and others
on charges of conspiracy or accessory to terrorism, in a muscular fashion that
we have not witnessed before in other terrorism cases, especially the
outrageous exemption given the conniving girlfriend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. If
there is a precedent set that remaining silent while a relative plots mass
death means a long prison sentence, then such deterrence may save lives in the
future.
Meanwhile, lots of politicians are now either calling for
a temporary cessation of immigration from the Middle East or confessing that
they have no idea who is entering the United States. They channel Trump’s
outrage that unchecked entry from countries like Iraq, Syria, or Yemen is
suicidal, but they clean up his invective by predicating possible future
limitations based on the country of origin rather than on religious
affiliation.
So what are we to make of these sometimes resonant
messages from our often reviled messenger?
Is Trump an Ajaxian tragic figure who takes it upon
himself to raise issues for the benefit of public debate — in overheated
fashion garnering public attention with the full knowledge that his advocacy
will earn him only hatred and ostracism?
Hardly.
A better metaphor is Trump as a loose nuclear weapon.
Once he is dropped onto an issue, no one quite knows exactly the parameters of
the ensuing explosion — only that it is going to blow up lots of things, and
foremost Trump himself. In the subsequent charred landscape, no one emerges
unscathed from the fallout, and many suspect that they should have adopted
proactive solutions well before they were nuked by Trump.
A final irony?
Would far more sober and judicious candidates like Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan, had they run again in 2016, have brought up these issues?
If so, could they have called commensurate public and presidential attention to
them? Is losing politely in a fairly close race always preferable to the risk
of losing loudly by a large margin?
So we always return to the central truth of 2016: Trump
is a symptom, not a catalyst. He was created by the hyperpartisan
unconstitutional overreach of Barack Obama, and by the appeasement of much of
the Republican establishment, who wished to be liked and admired for their
restraint and Beltway moderation rather than feared for their insistence on
adherence to the Constitution and the protection of the individual from an
always growing and encroaching government.
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