Donald Trump’s “Ban Muslims” Proposal Is Wildly
Dangerous But Not Far Outside the U.S. Mainstream
By Glenn GreenwaldDecember 09, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Intercept" - Hours 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 Gen. 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: “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 that 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 bells 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
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 in 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.
UPDATE I: The always-smart
Teju Cole with a
related but somewhat different point, a crucial one:
UPDATE II: After Trump’s
campaign spokesperson said his ban would also apply to American
Muslims outside the country, Trump in an interview
said the opposite: “If a person is a Muslim and goes overseas
and come back, they can come back. They are a citizen, that is
different.” How generous. It’s a small point — it hardly makes the
proposal less repugnant — but it’s still worth noting.
Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional
lawyer, and author of four New York Times
best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book,
No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state
and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the
world. Prior to his collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, Glenn’s
column was featured at The Guardian and
Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy
Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent
Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism
Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions
of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the
George Polk award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett
Foundation award for investigative journalism and the Gannett
Foundation watchdog journalism award; the Esso Premio for Excellence
in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian
to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award.
Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine
named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA
reporting he led for The Guardian was
awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
