[blind-democracy] Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous but Not Far Outside the US Mainstream

  • From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2015 15:43:22 -0500


Greenwald writes: "Trump does not need to win, or even get close to winning,
for his rhetoric and the movement that he's stoking to be dangerous in the
extreme."

Donald Trump, running for president, drew several thousand people to a rally
in Phoenix. (photo: Charlie Leight/Getty Images)


Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous but Not Far
Outside the US Mainstream
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
08 December 15

ours after a new poll revealed that he's trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa, GOP
presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement advocating "a total
and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our
representatives can figure out what's going on." His spokesperson later
clarified that this exclusion even includes Muslim-American citizens who are
currently outside the U.S. On first glance, it seems accurate to view this,
in the words of The Guardian, as "arguably the most extreme proposal to come
from any U.S. presidential candidate in decades."
Some comfortable journalists, however, quickly insisted that people were
overreacting. "Before everyone gives up on the republic, remember that not
even a single American has yet cast a vote for Trump," said New York Times
columnist Ross Douthat. The New York Daily News Opinion Page Editor Josh
Greenman was similarly blithe: "It's a proposal to keep Muslims out of the
U.S., made in a primary, being roundly condemned. We are a long way from
internment camps."
Given that an ISIS attack in Paris just helped fuel the sweeping election
victory of an actually fascist party in France, it's a bit mystifying how
someone can be so sanguine about the likelihood of a Trump victory in the
U.S. In fact, with a couple of even low-level ISIS attacks successfully
carried out on American soil, it's not at all hard to imagine. But Trump
does not need to win, or even get close to winning, for his rhetoric and the
movement that he's stoking to be dangerous in the extreme.
Professional political analysts have underestimated Trump's impact by
failing to take into account his massive, long-standing cultural celebrity,
which commands the attention of large numbers of Americans who usually
ignore politics (which happens to be the majority of the population), which
in turn generates enormous, highly charged crowds pulsating with grievance
and rage. That means that even if he fails to win a single state, he's
powerfully poisoning public discourse about multiple marginalized minority
groups: in particular inciting and inflaming what was already volatile
anti-Muslim animosity in the U.S.
As The Atlantic's Matt Ford put it yesterday: "The immediate danger isn't
Trump's actual policy, but the bigotry and violence that it both legitimizes
and encourages." Muslim Americans (and, for that matter, Mexican-Americans
and African-Americans) don't have the luxury that people like Douthat and
Greenman have to be so dismissive. That's what Al Jazeera's Sana Saeed meant
when she said that she's "tired of people telling us to not be afraid -
Trump may not win but his words will last & there are people who support"
the bile he's spewing.
All that said, it's important not to treat Trump as some radical aberration.
He's essentially the American id, simply channeling pervasive sentiments
unadorned with the typical diplomatic and PR niceties designed to prettify
the prevailing mentality. He didn't propose banning all Muslims from
entering the U.S. because it's grounded in some fringe,
out-of-the-mainstream ideas. He proposed it in part to commandeer media
attention so as to distract attention away from his rivals and from that
latest Iowa poll, but he also proposed it because he knows there is
widespread anti-Muslim fear and hatred in the U.S. Whatever else you want to
say about him, Trump is a skillful entertainer, and good entertainers - like
good fascist demagogues - know their audience.
Trump's proposal yesterday, though a new low, is not that far afield from
what other credible GOP presidential candidates previously proposed. Jeb
Bush previously urged that the U.S. be wary of Syrian Muslim refugees but
eagerly accept "proven Christians." Ted Cruz advocated an outright ban on
Syrian Muslim refugees and then introduced a bill to bar refugees from
multiple predominantly Muslim countries unless they're Christians. Ben
Carson argued that no Muslim could be President because their beliefs are
anathema to constitutional principles. Those proposals are more limited than
what Trump advocated yesterday, but they're hardly in a different universe;
they're grounded in the same principle that Muslims are uniquely dangerous
and antithetical to American values.
Lest liberals become self-satisfied about all this, this obsession with
demonizing Muslims is by no means confined to the GOP presidential field.
Residing - or so they claim - outside the far-right and Fox News swamps,
there's a sprawling cottage industry of pundits, academics, authors, TV
hosts, think tanks, and "anti-extremist" activist groups devoted primarily
to one idea: that Islam is supremely dangerous and Muslims pose the greatest
threat. Beloved Democratic General Wesley Clark, while on MSNBC earlier this
year, explicitly called for "camps" for radicalized American Muslims. CNN's
role in all this is legion.
These are the people who have laid the rancid intellectual groundwork in
which Trump and his movement are now festering. Just yesterday, The Daily
Beast's supremely loyal Democratic partisan columnist Michael Tomasky - who
in 2013 instructed us all to celebrate the Egyptian military coup of the
brutal tyrant Abdel Fattah al-Sisi because it got rid of the democratically
elected Muslim Brotherhood - repulsively demanded that American Muslims
first prove they are loyal and can be trusted before they are "given" their
rights.
Praising Obama (as always), this time for saying that religious
fundamentalism is "a real problem that Muslims must confront, without
excuse," Tomasky wrote that "if anything Obama should have been more
emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in
Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech
that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you
have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real
service." The liberal pundit added: "That doesn't mean just reading them
their rights. It also means reading them their responsibilities."
The imposition of this sort of collective responsibility - telling Muslims,
as CNN anchors did after the Paris attacks, that they are all legitimately
regarded with suspicion when individual Muslims engage in violence - is
unthinkable for almost any other group. Indeed, it's the defining hallmark
of bigotry: imputing the bad acts of individuals to all members of a group
or to the group itself. But it's commonplace when it comes to discussions of
Muslims.
It's not hard to see why this demagoguery is so effective, why it spreads so
easily and rapidly. Tribalism is a potent component of human nature, one of
the most primitive and instinctive drives. Stoking it is and always has been
easy. It's particularly easy to do in an overwhelmingly Christian country
that has spent 14 years and counting waging a relentless, seemingly endless
war in predominantly Muslim countries and which touts Israel as its closest
ally. Numerous factions have all sorts of lurking incentives to demonize
Muslims as the greatest menace, and Trump has simply become an unusually
unrestrained vehicle for expressing all of that and an unusually aggressive
exploiter of it, but he is not its creator nor its prime mover.
All of this preexists Trump's candidacy and is fueled by a wide array of
groups with all sorts of cultural, religious, ideological, financial and
tribalistic motives for isolating and demonizing Muslims. Trump is not an
outlier, and it's dangerous to treat him as one.
As for the American media, I hope nobody harbors any hope that they're going
to be some sort of backstop preventing the emergence of dangerous extremism.
They simply do not see that as their role. For most of them, a posture of
"neutrality" and "opinion-free" blankness are the highest values. Here, for
instance, was CNN anchor and dynastic prince Chris Cuomo last night
vehemently scorning the suggestion that the U.S. media has any role to play
in sounding the alarm balls on Trump's growing fascism:
In Cuomo's TV-journalism-trained mind, Trump's call for the complete
exclusion of all Muslims from the U.S. is nothing more than "a suggestion
that perhaps offends certain sensibilities," and it's not for him or other
journalists to "strike him down." When people objected, he said:
"Characterize? Hmm. Test him on the implications, bring on other opinions
and analyze the potential.that's the job." In response to an angry
individual denouncing Trump's extremism, Cuomo added (emphasis added):
"Absolutely. That's your role in voting. Accept and reject. Your role, not
mine."
Here's what Mark Halperin - whose little-watched Bloomberg TV show was just
picked up by an increasingly desperate MSNBC - had to say about Trump's
announcement:
No matter how extreme and menacing Trump becomes, that's all one can expect
from large sectors of the U.S. media: cowardly neutrality, feigned
analytical objectivity (how will Trump's fascism play with New Hampshire
independents?) as an excuse for not taking any sort of stand. We are indeed
a long, long way away from Edward R. Murrow's sustained, continuous,
unapologetic denunciations of Joseph McCarthy.
So by all means: unleash the contempt and the righteous indignation for
Trump. It's well-deserved. But that should not obscure everything that led
to this moment, nor exonerate those who for years have been spewing
unadorned anti-Muslim animus from multiple corners and under various
banners. They're more subtle and diplomatic (and thus more insidious) than
Trump, but they're reading from the same script.
* * * * *
Shortly before this article was published this morning, Cuomo re-appeared on
Twitter and apparently had a change of heart from last night's proclamation.
Faced with a tidal wave of anger over his posture of neutrality, he did a
complete reversal, seemingly thanking his critics by writing: "Thank you for
stepping up and saying #trumpban is not about sensitivities or PC but core
American values." He added: "We have crossed a line in campaign and it
deserves attention." He then basically spent the whole morning atoning for
last night's statement by arguing that Trump's "ban Muslim" policy is a
"defining moment" and telling people they "should be angry." Sometimes,
social media shaming works.
On a different note: Trump gave a speech last night in South Carolina where
he defended his "Ban Muslims" proposal. Speaking on an aircraft carrier
underneath a suspended bomber jet (picture, above), Trump added a new policy
proposal about internet freedom that provoked substantial anger and mockery:
We're losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see Bill
Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening.
We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet
up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of
speech.' These are foolish people.
As Trevor Timm noted, Trump's statement - both in substance and even words -
was strikingly similar to what Hillary Clinton said the day before while
delivering a foreign policy address at the Brookings Institution:
We're going to have to have more support from our friends in the technology
world to deny online space. Just as we have to destroy [ISIS's] would-be
caliphate, we have to deny them online space. And this is complicated.
You're going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of
speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are
truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of
foreign fighters, then we've got to shut off their means of communicating.
Again, it's easy and fun for elites to mock and scorn Trump. But he knows
what he's doing, and he's not speaking to those elites. He specifically
knows that what he's saying will find a large, enthusiastic audience because
of the ideas that have been mainstreamed in the U.S. for many years now: by
political and media figures widely respected in the same elite circles that
patronizingly mock Trump and his supporters.
The always-smart Teju Cole with a related but somewhat different point, a
crucial one:


Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.

Donald Trump, running for president, drew several thousand people to a rally
in Phoenix. (photo: Charlie Leight/Getty Images)
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/08/donald-trumps-ban-muslims-proposal-is-wi
ldly-dangerous-but-not-far-outside-the-u-s-mainstream/https://theintercept.c
om/2015/12/08/donald-trumps-ban-muslims-proposal-is-wildly-dangerous-but-not
-far-outside-the-u-s-mainstream/
Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous but Not Far
Outside the US Mainstream
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
08 December 15
ours after a new poll revealed that he's trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa, GOP
presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement advocating "a total
and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our
representatives can figure out what's going on." His spokesperson later
clarified that this exclusion even includes Muslim-American citizens who are
currently outside the U.S. On first glance, it seems accurate to view this,
in the words of The Guardian, as "arguably the most extreme proposal to come
from any U.S. presidential candidate in decades."
Some comfortable journalists, however, quickly insisted that people were
overreacting. "Before everyone gives up on the republic, remember that not
even a single American has yet cast a vote for Trump," said New York Times
columnist Ross Douthat. The New York Daily News Opinion Page Editor Josh
Greenman was similarly blithe: "It's a proposal to keep Muslims out of the
U.S., made in a primary, being roundly condemned. We are a long way from
internment camps."
Given that an ISIS attack in Paris just helped fuel the sweeping election
victory of an actually fascist party in France, it's a bit mystifying how
someone can be so sanguine about the likelihood of a Trump victory in the
U.S. In fact, with a couple of even low-level ISIS attacks successfully
carried out on American soil, it's not at all hard to imagine. But Trump
does not need to win, or even get close to winning, for his rhetoric and the
movement that he's stoking to be dangerous in the extreme.
Professional political analysts have underestimated Trump's impact by
failing to take into account his massive, long-standing cultural celebrity,
which commands the attention of large numbers of Americans who usually
ignore politics (which happens to be the majority of the population), which
in turn generates enormous, highly charged crowds pulsating with grievance
and rage. That means that even if he fails to win a single state, he's
powerfully poisoning public discourse about multiple marginalized minority
groups: in particular inciting and inflaming what was already volatile
anti-Muslim animosity in the U.S.
As The Atlantic's Matt Ford put it yesterday: "The immediate danger isn't
Trump's actual policy, but the bigotry and violence that it both legitimizes
and encourages." Muslim Americans (and, for that matter, Mexican-Americans
and African-Americans) don't have the luxury that people like Douthat and
Greenman have to be so dismissive. That's what Al Jazeera's Sana Saeed meant
when she said that she's "tired of people telling us to not be afraid -
Trump may not win but his words will last & there are people who support"
the bile he's spewing.
All that said, it's important not to treat Trump as some radical aberration.
He's essentially the American id, simply channeling pervasive sentiments
unadorned with the typical diplomatic and PR niceties designed to prettify
the prevailing mentality. He didn't propose banning all Muslims from
entering the U.S. because it's grounded in some fringe,
out-of-the-mainstream ideas. He proposed it in part to commandeer media
attention so as to distract attention away from his rivals and from that
latest Iowa poll, but he also proposed it because he knows there is
widespread anti-Muslim fear and hatred in the U.S. Whatever else you want to
say about him, Trump is a skillful entertainer, and good entertainers - like
good fascist demagogues - know their audience.
Trump's proposal yesterday, though a new low, is not that far afield from
what other credible GOP presidential candidates previously proposed. Jeb
Bush previously urged that the U.S. be wary of Syrian Muslim refugees but
eagerly accept "proven Christians." Ted Cruz advocated an outright ban on
Syrian Muslim refugees and then introduced a bill to bar refugees from
multiple predominantly Muslim countries unless they're Christians. Ben
Carson argued that no Muslim could be President because their beliefs are
anathema to constitutional principles. Those proposals are more limited than
what Trump advocated yesterday, but they're hardly in a different universe;
they're grounded in the same principle that Muslims are uniquely dangerous
and antithetical to American values.
Lest liberals become self-satisfied about all this, this obsession with
demonizing Muslims is by no means confined to the GOP presidential field.
Residing - or so they claim - outside the far-right and Fox News swamps,
there's a sprawling cottage industry of pundits, academics, authors, TV
hosts, think tanks, and "anti-extremist" activist groups devoted primarily
to one idea: that Islam is supremely dangerous and Muslims pose the greatest
threat. Beloved Democratic General Wesley Clark, while on MSNBC earlier this
year, explicitly called for "camps" for radicalized American Muslims. CNN's
role in all this is legion.
These are the people who have laid the rancid intellectual groundwork in
which Trump and his movement are now festering. Just yesterday, The Daily
Beast's supremely loyal Democratic partisan columnist Michael Tomasky - who
in 2013 instructed us all to celebrate the Egyptian military coup of the
brutal tyrant Abdel Fattah al-Sisi because it got rid of the democratically
elected Muslim Brotherhood - repulsively demanded that American Muslims
first prove they are loyal and can be trusted before they are "given" their
rights.
Praising Obama (as always), this time for saying that religious
fundamentalism is "a real problem that Muslims must confront, without
excuse," Tomasky wrote that "if anything Obama should have been more
emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in
Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech
that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you
have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real
service." The liberal pundit added: "That doesn't mean just reading them
their rights. It also means reading them their responsibilities."
The imposition of this sort of collective responsibility - telling Muslims,
as CNN anchors did after the Paris attacks, that they are all legitimately
regarded with suspicion when individual Muslims engage in violence - is
unthinkable for almost any other group. Indeed, it's the defining hallmark
of bigotry: imputing the bad acts of individuals to all members of a group
or to the group itself. But it's commonplace when it comes to discussions of
Muslims.
It's not hard to see why this demagoguery is so effective, why it spreads so
easily and rapidly. Tribalism is a potent component of human nature, one of
the most primitive and instinctive drives. Stoking it is and always has been
easy. It's particularly easy to do in an overwhelmingly Christian country
that has spent 14 years and counting waging a relentless, seemingly endless
war in predominantly Muslim countries and which touts Israel as its closest
ally. Numerous factions have all sorts of lurking incentives to demonize
Muslims as the greatest menace, and Trump has simply become an unusually
unrestrained vehicle for expressing all of that and an unusually aggressive
exploiter of it, but he is not its creator nor its prime mover.
All of this preexists Trump's candidacy and is fueled by a wide array of
groups with all sorts of cultural, religious, ideological, financial and
tribalistic motives for isolating and demonizing Muslims. Trump is not an
outlier, and it's dangerous to treat him as one.
As for the American media, I hope nobody harbors any hope that they're going
to be some sort of backstop preventing the emergence of dangerous extremism.
They simply do not see that as their role. For most of them, a posture of
"neutrality" and "opinion-free" blankness are the highest values. Here, for
instance, was CNN anchor and dynastic prince Chris Cuomo last night
vehemently scorning the suggestion that the U.S. media has any role to play
in sounding the alarm balls on Trump's growing fascism:
In Cuomo's TV-journalism-trained mind, Trump's call for the complete
exclusion of all Muslims from the U.S. is nothing more than "a suggestion
that perhaps offends certain sensibilities," and it's not for him or other
journalists to "strike him down." When people objected, he said:
"Characterize? Hmm. Test him on the implications, bring on other opinions
and analyze the potential.that's the job." In response to an angry
individual denouncing Trump's extremism, Cuomo added (emphasis added):
"Absolutely. That's your role in voting. Accept and reject. Your role, not
mine."
Here's what Mark Halperin - whose little-watched Bloomberg TV show was just
picked up by an increasingly desperate MSNBC - had to say about Trump's
announcement:
No matter how extreme and menacing Trump becomes, that's all one can expect
from large sectors of the U.S. media: cowardly neutrality, feigned
analytical objectivity (how will Trump's fascism play with New Hampshire
independents?) as an excuse for not taking any sort of stand. We are indeed
a long, long way away from Edward R. Murrow's sustained, continuous,
unapologetic denunciations of Joseph McCarthy.
So by all means: unleash the contempt and the righteous indignation for
Trump. It's well-deserved. But that should not obscure everything that led
to this moment, nor exonerate those who for years have been spewing
unadorned anti-Muslim animus from multiple corners and under various
banners. They're more subtle and diplomatic (and thus more insidious) than
Trump, but they're reading from the same script.
* * * * *
Shortly before this article was published this morning, Cuomo re-appeared on
Twitter and apparently had a change of heart from last night's proclamation.
Faced with a tidal wave of anger over his posture of neutrality, he did a
complete reversal, seemingly thanking his critics by writing: "Thank you for
stepping up and saying #trumpban is not about sensitivities or PC but core
American values." He added: "We have crossed a line in campaign and it
deserves attention." He then basically spent the whole morning atoning for
last night's statement by arguing that Trump's "ban Muslim" policy is a
"defining moment" and telling people they "should be angry." Sometimes,
social media shaming works.
On a different note: Trump gave a speech last night in South Carolina where
he defended his "Ban Muslims" proposal. Speaking on an aircraft carrier
underneath a suspended bomber jet (picture, above), Trump added a new policy
proposal about internet freedom that provoked substantial anger and mockery:
We're losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see Bill
Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening.
We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet
up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of
speech.' These are foolish people.
As Trevor Timm noted, Trump's statement - both in substance and even words -
was strikingly similar to what Hillary Clinton said the day before while
delivering a foreign policy address at the Brookings Institution:
We're going to have to have more support from our friends in the technology
world to deny online space. Just as we have to destroy [ISIS's] would-be
caliphate, we have to deny them online space. And this is complicated.
You're going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of
speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are
truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of
foreign fighters, then we've got to shut off their means of communicating.
Again, it's easy and fun for elites to mock and scorn Trump. But he knows
what he's doing, and he's not speaking to those elites. He specifically
knows that what he's saying will find a large, enthusiastic audience because
of the ideas that have been mainstreamed in the U.S. for many years now: by
political and media figures widely respected in the same elite circles that
patronizingly mock Trump and his supporters.
The always-smart Teju Cole with a related but somewhat different point, a
crucial one:

http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize


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