This week, I intended to write about
the appalling mass murders in San Bernardino and the anticipated reaction of
the Supreme Court to gun control. However, I have been distracted by the latest
verbal sideshow of Donald Trump. I have to accept I got him wrong. I thought he
was just a buffoon, a supernova who would implode and soon leave the political
scene. Instead, he remains the Republican front-runner in the race for the
nomination for President. He is polling far better than his seventeen rivals,
maybe because there are so many of them.
Donald is a brash New Yorker. He
knows how to put on a show. And he spouts the kind of political trash that
Republican audiences in Beaumont, Texas, and Mount Pleasant, South Carolina,
like. Never mind that few of us had even heard of these places and that his audiences
numbered little over 500. He speaks outrageously to harvest publicity. Since
subtlety is wasted on Trump, he fails to distinguish between a limited number
of jihadists whose creed is death from those who comprise mainstream Islam. His
demagoguery and messages – all Mexicans are killers and rapists, build a wall
to keep out Mexican illegals, ban all Muslims from entry to USA – seem to play
well to certain right-wing Americans. And so, Trump’s ego, already the size of
Alaska, will only get bigger as his statements get wilder.
However, Trump can point to precedent.
At least three Democratic Presidents have had their administrations behave and
legislate to support insular, discriminative and reactionary tendencies. Fear
of radical leftism, Communism and people who just look different, has in the
past promoted policies which we in Western Europe could regard as anathema.
Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, anarchist and
left-wing social agitation aggravated national, social, and political tensions
in the United States. When the Industrial
Workers of the World backed several labor strikes in 1916 and 1917, the press
portrayed the Union’s actions as "radical threats to American society
inspired by left-wing, foreign agent
provocateurs." In April, 1919, a leftist plot was discovered when
36 bombs were mailed to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment, including J. P.
Morgan and John D.
Rockefeller.
Two months later, eight bombs exploded in eight American cities. One
of the targets was the DC home of US Attorney General Palmer who, at the behest
of President Woodrow Wilson, ordered the Justice Department to raid numerous
homes and offices. Before the bombings, Wilson had pressurized Congress to pass
the anti-immigrant, anti-anarchist Sedition
Act, 1918, purportedly to protect the populace by deporting putatively
undesirable political people.
At the end of WWII, the US was enmeshed
in the Cold War and feared the spread of Communism. Congressional committees focused
on both national and foreign communists who were thought to be influencing
society and infiltrating the federal government. The House
Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, was prominent in the fight. Richard
Nixon started to build his national political reputation as a member of HUAC, having
Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker
Chambers, both NKD spies, testifying that Soviet spies and communist
sympathizers had penetrated the U.S. government before, during and after the
war. Other U.S. citizens confessed, some with pride, to their acts of espionage
in situations where the statute of limitations on prosecuting them had run out.
In March 1947, President Harry Truman signed
Executive Order
9835, creating the
"Federal Employees Loyalty Program." Political-loyalty review boards
determined the "Americanism" of Federal Government employees, and
recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the Soviet
Union, as well as some suspected of being "Un-American.” With such a
mandate, witch hunts were inevitable.
The anti-communist process launched the
successful political careers of Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph McCarthy. There was a minor
level of Soviet infiltration of the United States government at low levels.
However, HUAC damaged many careers of Hollywood writers and actors for nothing.
More seriously, it wrecked the careers of numerous academics who had communist
sympathies in the 1920s and 1930s but whose activities since then had been
patriotic. As for McCarthy, he became discredited and died in disgrace in 1957.
McCarthy made no significant inroads against communists. Like Trump, he was a
blow-hard.
If Trump seeks another precedent for
his pronunciations, he need look no further than President Franklin Roosevelt. Within
days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration
interned all Japanese-Americans who lived on the west coast, mainly in the San
Francisco area. Families were separated and shipped to states like Montana and
Wisconsin to see out the war. The fact that these people were American citizens
who lost their properties, businesses and freedom, and had done nothing to
support the Japanese war effort, was seen as irrelevant. Two days after Pearl
Harbor, Germany declared war on America. Germany was allied with Italy. The
Roosevelt administration did not intern or take any action against
German-Americans or Italian-Americans.
Trump’s outburst against Muslims, like
all his other fatuous statements, is intended to gain votes. He says he wants Americans
to protect what they have and seek protection from adverse outside influences,
not to mention foreigners. No wonder Trump is preaching to the converted. He
can speak to the working class, the blue collar types who fear job competition
and to the self-righteous, many of whom may feel Trump is talking sense.
However, there are vast numbers of Americans who are disgusted by Trump’s
small-minded, discriminatory, racist and Islamophobic remarks.
What infuriates me is that Trump wants
to deny entry to all Muslims as potential murderers, yet he embraces gun
ownership and all National Rifleman’s Association policies. His outspoken support
for guns after the Paris shootings demonstrates a lack of understanding that
those who live in the West - America apart - loathe gun culture and see gun
ownership as counter-productive. Trump is content to accept mass killings
almost daily on the streets of American cities. Talk about double standards.
Recently, President Obama summed up the facts. In the past decade, 24 Americans
have lost their lives to terrorist activities. In the same period, more than
280,000 Americans have died from guns.
One wonders what populist cause Trump
will embrace next in order to hog headlines and ensure he remains in the news.
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