By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, July 21, 2019
‘Send her back!”
they chanted, meaning Representative Ilhan Omar, the Somalia-born Jew-hating
weirdo elected to Congress by the ghastly fruitcakes who run things in
Minneapolis. President Donald J. Trump, elected president by the ghastly nut
cutlets who run things in much of the rest of the country, basked in the chant,
glowing like a gopher sauntering forth from Chernobyl — he was, in effect,
hearing his own daft words shouted back at him ecstatically, and he has a real
weakness for that sort of thing.
Much has been made about whether the episode and Trump’s
words inspiring it were racist; my own view is that Donald Trump is incapable
of being a racist in the traditional sense of that word, because racism is
derived from a perverted and misapplied sense of loyalty, a sentiment
from which President Trump is manifestly immune. What is more interesting — and
more troubling — is what the exchange says about our eroding sense of citizenship.
Citizenship is a precious thing. To be a citizen is more
dignified and more honorable than to be a subject. When the Romans lost their
republic and slid into empire, it was not democracy they were losing — they
never suffered from that particular superstition — but their status as
citizens. There were things the Roman state could not do to a Roman citizen —
crucifixion, for example. The state had to respect the citizen because the
citizen was the building block out of which the republic was built. The
conversion of the Roman republic into an empire under god-emperors was a
catastrophe for the Roman citizen — not only politically but also culturally
and spiritually and, eventually, economically. God-emperors are not
traditionally real big on property rights and due process.
The idea that Ilhan Omar could — even as a matter of
mass-dunderhead rhetoric — be treated as a non-citizen because the president
and his admirers do not like her politics (which are quite unlikeable) does
violence to the idea of citizenship per se. In that much, it is fundamentally
and literally un-American.
It is not the worst act of violence committed against the
concept of citizenship in recent years: That particular distinction belongs to
Barack Obama, who unilaterally arrogated to himself (and his successors!) the
power to order the extrajudicial killing of American citizens in conditions that,
once the legalistic mumbo-jumbo is penetrated, amount to “whenever and wherever
the president damned well feels like it.” In principle and as a matter of
citizenship, there is no meaningful difference between Barack Obama’s ordering
the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki — “the Osama bin Laden of Facebook,” they
called him — and Donald Trump’s (hypothetically) ordering the assassination of
a political critic in Reno. The pretext of “national security” will cover a
multitude of sins.
Ilhan Omar became a U.S. citizen when she was a teenager.
(As Jake Tapper wryly points out, she has been a citizen longer than the
president’s wife has.) Maybe it was a mistake to let her into the club — I am
open to the argument that we should be far choosier about whom we offer the
honor and dignity of American citizenship. I might even ask some pointed
political questions: Are you a Communist? Are you a Jew-hating weirdo?
But we didn’t do that. Ilhan Omar is a citizen and must be dealt with as one.
“Oh, they’re just being puckish!” comes the inevitable
response. “It’s a high-spirited response to how genuinely awful Ilhan Omar is!
They’re just trolling the Democrats and the media!” That may be the fact, in
which case — grow the hell up. Ideas have consequences, even half-formed and
half-understood ones.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be
enemies.” So said Abraham Lincoln in much more difficult times than these. We
should resist the urge to treat our presidents as god-emperors, but Lincoln
testifies to the fact that presidential words matter.
Alas, so does Donald Trump.
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