“Donald Trump At The Wheel”: He’s Driving The GOP Over A Cliff, And The Establishment Can’t Stop Him
After a week’s worth of soundbites from presidential candidates about “anchor babies” and repealing birthright citizenship, it is now clear, if it wasn’t already, that Donald Trump has the steering wheel of the Republican Party firmly in his grasp.
So despite the Republican National Committee’s infamous “autopsy” of the 2012 election — which found that the party could not compete unless it fixed its increasingly toxic image among the Latino electorate — the GOP’s presidential primary has devolved into a contest to see who can demonize and dehumanize immigrants the most. If a sensible, pragmatic Republican Party “establishment” actually existed, now is right about when it would step in. But it doesn’t, of course; so it won’t.
Which is not to say that what passes for the GOP establishment nowadays has gone silent. As recent pieces from elite conservative pundits in Slate and Politico Magazine show, something approximating an establishment is still in the mix. The problem, though, is that this establishment is completely incapable of controlling Trump, much less the party’s overall message. And whether they opt for conflict or cooptation, their attempts to manipulate Trump will inevitably fail.
Because the establishment, unlike Trump, cannot bring itself to see the Republican Party — and the conservative movement, in general — for the clumsy vehicle of politicized resentment and white identity politics that it really is.
True, conservative elites have been playing some version of this game for a while now; using extreme reactionaries to win elections but pretending the GOP is run by urbane, center-right moderates. But those forces used to be disorganized enough that long-shot protest candidacies (like the Pat Buchanan’s in the 1990s) were the best they could do. And that made maintaining the lie — that the conservative movement’s inmates did not run the asylum — a whole lot easier. At this point, however, that’s no longer the case.
Nevertheless, they’re still trying. And thus do we get pieces like this one in Slate, by National Review’s Reihan Salam, which operates from the absurd premise that conservative, iconoclastic minority voters can be brought into the GOP coalition without tearing the whole thing apart. “There appears to be a nontrivial share of black voters who are open to a center-right message,” Salam writes near the end of his piece. “Winning them over,” he continues, “will mean decontaminating a GOP brand.”
If the GOP coalition was the pluralist, cosmopolitan entity of his imagination, Salam would have a decent point. But such a GOP wouldn’t have a xenophobic, populist figure like Trump, whose mantra is that “we” must “take our country back,” as its biggest star, would it? If the Republican Party was comprised of voters who signed-up because they held “conservative positions on issues,” which is what Salam seems to think, then how could an ideological grab-bag like Trump be in the position he’s in?
As Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul complained earlier this summer, Trump is anything but a consistent conservative. But as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who hopes to be the second-choice of Trump’s supporters, seems to understand, the kind of voters who now control the GOP primary don’t see politics through that prism. They don’t love Trump because of any long-held views on taxes or abortion or Social Security; they love Trump because they see him as “one of [them].”
Obviously, Salam is not the only serious right-wing pundit to misunderstand the GOP coalition. He’s not even the only one from National Review to do it as of late. Editor-in-chief Rich Lowry recently wrote a piece for Politico Magazine that celebrated Trump’s influence. Yet he littered his praise with caveats about how Trump’s “bar-stool bombast” and “excesses” obscured his larger, more intellectually defensible views. But for the Republicans flocking to Trump, the rhetoric isn’t an afterthought; it’s what Trumpism is.
Lowry’s attempt to rush to the front of the pro-Trump mob and then try to lead it is relatively feeble. But even if his column was as powerful as it would need to be to get these people’s attention, it would still fail. Because Lowry, like Salam, doesn’t know how to talk to these people, which is due in no small part to his spending so much of his career responding to liberal criticism by pretending these folks don’t even exist. In that sense, speaking to them in their own language, as Trump does, would be a defeat.
Then again, what would Lowry or Salam actually say to these people, hypothetically, to get them to stop making the GOP look so viciously nativist? While the differences between the two groups are in a sense aesthetic, this is a case where style and substance and one and the same. Trump’s backers adore him because he’s willing to say the things they believe, but are told they shouldn’t. For them, a strategy that required no more public talk of “anchor babies” would be missing the point.
And that’s why the GOP finds itself in its current predicament, and why no one should expect a pragmatic, sober-minded establishment to ultimately step in. Until the Trump phenomenon collapses due to the public’s fatigue or Trump’s individual boredom, this is how the GOP primary will remain. The only candidates who’ll survive will be the ones willing to kick dirt on illegal immigrants. They’ll be the ones who stopped campaigning in the GOP of the pundits’ imaginations, opting instead to win over voters who actually exist.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, August 22, 2015
“Sinvergüenza”: Trump, Bush Don’t Care That ‘Anchor Baby’ Isn’t ‘Politically Correct’
The idea that pregnant women are crossing the Mexican border in droves in an effort to make their babies American citizens is mostly untrue, so it’s fitting that this week’s debate over the so-called problem has already morphed into a less substantial dispute over the term “anchor babies.” Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and several other GOP candidates used the term this week, prompting objections from those who say it’s a slur. “Children are widely seen as innocent and pure … yet there is an unspoken racial element there, for children of color are all too often pictured as criminals or welfare cheats in training,” Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, told NBC News.
Unsurprisingly, the man who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists has no problem with the term. At a press conference on Wednesday, Donald Trump snapped at a reporter who said it’s offensive. “You mean it’s not politically correct, and yet everybody uses it?” he said. “I’ll use the word ‘anchor baby.'”
Also unsurprisingly, Bobby Jindal was quick to side with Trump in the controversy du jour. He told Fox News on Thursday that people are “too politically correct” and “too easily offended,” adding, “The real issue here — yeah, I’m happy to use the term — but the reality is the real issue here is we need to secure our border.”
Jeb Bush also doubled down on his decision to take a slightly more Trump-esque tone. On Thursday, Bush got testy when a reporter asked if he regrets referring to “anchor babies” in a radio interview on Wednesday. “No, I didn’t. I don’t! I don’t, regret it!” Bush said. “Do you have a better term? You give me a better term and I’ll use it. Don’t yell at me behind my ear, though.” He dismissed the suggested phrase “children born of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.” as too clunky and noted that he merely said they’re “commonly referred to” as “anchor babies.” “I didn’t use it as my own language,” Bush said.
“From the depths of my heart, I look at someone like Jeb Bush, who really should know better and that all I can think of is the Spanish term, sinvergüenza, which means somebody who is completely without shame to attack children this way,” Representative Linda Sanchez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told NBC News.
As the New York Times recently noted, “anchor baby” isn’t the only derogatory term making a comeback in the 2016 race. During the 2013 immigration debate there was a push for media outlets and politicians to stop using the “I-word,” yet there was a question about “illegals” in the first GOP debate, and the preferred term “undocumented immigrants” has not caught on with Republicans.
Still, not everyone is embracing “anchor baby.” When asked about the issue in a CNBC interview published Thursday, Marco Rubio took the opportunity to show he’s more compassionate than his rivals on the immigration issue. “Well, these are 13 million — those are human beings,” he said. “And ultimately, they are people. They are not just statistics. They are human beings with stories.”
By: Margaret Hartmann, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 21, 2015
“An Anti-Immigrant Police-State”: The GOP’s Crazy Birthright Citizenship Debate Could Have Real Consequences
A droll Politico headline earlier this week nicely summed up the state of bemusement and incomprehension surrounding the Republican Party’s revived fixation with ending birthright citizenship.
“Trump to O’Reilly: 14th Amendment is unconstitutional.”
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly grilled Trump on Tuesday, based on the widely shared premise that ending birthright citizenship would require changing the Constitution to excise or edit the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. That sentence states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Republicans are racing to catch up with Trump, creating a fresh consensus among the party’s presidential candidates that birthright citizenship is bad, and a presumption among most critics and reporters that these candidates believe the Constitution is flawed, and should perhaps be changed.
Neither of these presumptions necessarily describes anti-birthright candidates. Many Republican presidential hopefuls share the belief that giving the children of immigrants citizenship automatically is bad. In less abstract terms, they’re affirming an unfounded nativist anxiety that birthright citizenship creates an incentive for child-bearing immigrants to stream across the border and secure all the benefits of citizenship, including welfare, for their offspring—what conservatives derisively refer to as “anchor babies.” But they disagree among themselves over how to address the problem. And because the point of contention is so politically toxic—a dramatic shift to the right relative to the also-toxic Republican primary consensus in 2012—the candidates have little interest in explaining their personal theories of how the imaginary “anchor baby” crisis should be resolved.
All of the possibilities are equally crazy.
Under the status quo, the children of undocumented immigrants are conferred citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment. If you believe this is bad, and that we should be willing to tolerate a permanent, minority underclass of stateless noncitizens, you can address it in three ways: by changing the Constitution, by stepping up enforcement so dramatically so that all unauthorized immigrants are expelled before they give birth, or by getting courts to reinterpret the Constitution as it is currently written.
In general, the Republicans who want to change the subject from birthright citizenship to literally anything else pay lip service to the issue. But they insist, for better or worse, that citizenship is a constitutional right of the children of immigrants, and that the Constitution is not going to change. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are in this category. Both intimate that they oppose automatic citizenship for the children of people without any documentation who are trying to game the Fourteenth Amendment, but argue that the right is enshrined, and it isn’t going away.
Perhaps intentionally, they are blinding themselves to the other strategies. In a statement to reporters earlier this week, Scott Walker’s spokeswoman explained how he would tackle the issue. “We have to enforce the laws, keep people from coming here illegally, enforce e-verify to stop the jobs magnet and by addressing the root problems we will end the birthright citizenship problem.” If there were no undocumented immigrants in the country, then birthright citizenship would become a mere abstraction. Without touching the Constitution, Walker suggests he would use a draconian enforcement regime to effectively moot the birthright clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This is almost certainly not feasible, but it lays down a marker for immigration enforcement on the rightmost conceptual end of the policy debate—promising to deport immigrants at such an intense clip that vanishingly few will remain in the country long enough to give birth.
Trump’s goal is even more ambitious. He supports a Walker-like anti-immigrant police-state, too, but argues that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say what it appears to say. A popular argument on the fringes of conservative legal thought holds that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment—and of the term “jurisdiction” in particular—precludes the notion that it should create a right to citizenship for the children of non-citizen immigrants. Trump has bought into it. He’s not a fan of amending the Constitution, as he told O’Reilly, because “It’s a long process, and I think it would take too long. I’d much rather find out whether or not anchor babies are citizens because a lot of people don’t think they are.” This flies in the face of a century and a half of law. It was the source of O’Reilly’s confusion, and of the tongue-in-cheek Politico headline. To test the theory, a conservative state government could pass a law stripping citizenship benefits from children of immigrants, and defend it in court. This would be easy to laugh off in a different milieu, but in a world where scores of federal judges and three or four conservative Supreme Court justices are willing to vouchsafe plainly absurd and self-serving conservative legal arguments, it is alarming. Especially if you consider the possibility that a Republican candidate wins the presidency on an anti-birthright platform, and obtains the power to nominate nativists to the federal bench.
These views are so extreme that they’re often dismissed as harmless campaign trail pandering. Since the Constitution isn’t going to be amended anytime soon, at least not for this purpose, most reporters don’t take the anti-birthright frenzy as much more than a garden variety Republican primary spectacle. That’s a big error. GOP candidates are telling us how they would use levers at their disposal to antagonize immigrants, and we should be listening.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 21, 2015
“Rabidly Xenophobic”: Donald Trump Isn’t The First Know Nothing To Capture American Hearts
Pundits have been trying for weeks to explain why Donald Trump has continued to lead Republican polls, drawing massive crowds and attracting a media circus, despite stepping in it time and again on camera. But the Donald tweeted something yesterday that may help answer all their questions. (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/626375770856927232)
While the tweet reads as nothing more than Trump’s typical bombast—more bluster than substance—the Republican frontrunner seems to be invoking a secretive political organization that dates back to the first days of the Republican Party: The Know Nothings.
The Know Nothing movement emerged during the years leading up to the Civil War as a few politicians searched for ways to build a new political party that could compete with the Jacksonian Democrats who had dominated American politics for decades. The group’s name purportedly comes from its somewhat secretive party structure. When asked about its activities, members were supposed to respond: “I know nothing.”
The Know Nothings were rabidly xenophobic. Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy had flooded the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. This was the first time that Americans had to confront an immigrant class whose origin stories, last names, and religious beliefs set them apart from the British settlers who had cleared her forests and populated her first towns centuries earlier. The Know Nothings claimed that Catholics immigrants owed their allegiance, not to the burgeoning American government, but to the Pope, whose autocratic ruling style was antithetical to American democratic values (the same argument that was trotted out when John F. Kennedy was campaigning for president). And for a country whose founding fathers had written about religious tolerance only a few decades earlier, the message was surprisingly effective.
The movement took hold of the country, establishing particularly strong footholds in the Northeast. At its peak in 1854, the party (which had taken the name American Party in 1849) got 52 candidates elected to the House of Representatives under the Know Nothing banner in a single election year. That landslide propelled Nathaniel Banks—who would later become Speaker of the House, a prominent union general, and governor of Massachusetts—to Congress for the first time. That Milliard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States who was ousted from the White House in 1852, ran for president four years later as a Know Nothing demonstrates their influence at the time.
Elected Know Nothings installed sweeping programs to trample any Catholic influence on American politics. They required reading the Protestant bible in schools, purged Catholic objects from public buildings (including the Washington Monument, where Know Nothings led a covert mission to remove and destroy a stone sent by the Pope in 1854), and moved to prevent Catholics from holding public office. In Massachusetts, where the party controlled both the state house and the gubernatorial mansion, the Know Nothings convened a “Nunnery Commission” designed to ferret out the dangers posed by nuns to society at large. According to John R. Mulkern’s book on the Know Nothings, the commission was disbanded after the Boston Daily published a scintillating expose of the exploits of the commission: Joseph Hiss, the “Grand Worshipful Instructor” of the Commission, had apparently made suggestive remarks to two nuns; his compatriots had laid in wait in the attic of a Catholic school near Boston, popping out to terrify the children.
As slavery eclipsed immigration as the political hot topic in the late fifties, the Know Nothing movement started to decline, and it was the (then still very young) Republican Party that eventually subsumed the movement, its nativist bent muffled, for the most part, by Lincoln, who spoke out sharply against it.
Since the Civil War, Know Nothings have appeared in American discourse, persisting in popular culture or in charges leveled at fringe members of the Republican Party. In Gangs of New York, Daniel Day Lewis played William Poole, a real Know Nothing leader in Manhattan during the 1850s. When Republican House Representative Eric Cantor lost his reelection campaign in Virginia, Paul Rosenberg wrote that it represented a triumph for the wing of the Republican Party that still adheres to Know Nothing nativism. Timothy Egan has written that the birther movement, which claims that President Obama was born outside the United States, was “building a nation of Know Nothings.”
This brings us back to Donald Trump, himself a candidate who has catapulted to the top of the Republican field by stoking fears about an influx of immigrants. Just last week, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer accused Trump of running his campaign on “know-nothing xenophobia” that would “damage” the Republican Party.
Like his predecessors the Know Nothings, Trump faces a challenge: how to win supporters from an electorate that, for the last eight years, has seemed to gravitate more and more toward the Democratic Party. Like the Know Nothings, Trump has chosen to denigrate immigrants, playing up the xenophobic idea that they are stealing jobs and resources from American citizens. He even went so far as to accuse Mexican immigrants of raping American women.
The rise of the Know Nothings, an episode in American history often brushed under the rug or simply forgotten, demonstrates that Trump is a part of a tradition dating to the earliest days of the Republican Party. The fear of immigrants has long driven American politics, bringing together coalitions that have propelled even the most unlikely candidates to the halls of American political power. If nativist sentiment continues to rise, just as it did in 1854 when the Know Nothings swept Congress, Trump could be a candidate to be reckoned with. And if he runs as a third party candidate—a prospect that has Republican leaders quaking in their boots—maybe Trump will choose to run as a “Know NOTHING!”
By: Laura Reston, The New Republic, July 30, 2015
“Hundreds Of Thousands Of Bad People”: Fact-Checking Bill O’Reilly’s Dumb, Hateful Lies; Fox News Propaganda Breaks New Ground
When Bill O’Reilly got his start on Fox News, he was charmingly irreverent, a moderating factor on a right-leaning news network; and I liked him for it. I was 14 years old, and would go on, in my teen years, to read one of O’Reilly’s early books, along with Christopher Hitchens’ “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” and eventually Dinesh D’Souza’s “Letters to a Young Conservative” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil.” I was hashing out a political identity into my 20s, and, as this awkward reading list suggests, it was complicated. It’s perhaps a shame that today’s O’Reilly is not complicated.
In the segment where O’Reilly calls Salon a “hate site,” and his program ambushes a handful of San Francisco civil servants, I was struck more by the “talking points memo” working in conjunction with O’Reilly’s monologue than with the breach of decorum or even the comparison of Salon to white-supremacist outlet Stormfront. The real danger of that O’Reilly segment isn’t so much the ambush tactics or the sensationalism as the sloppy thinking O’Reilly performs for his viewers, which gives the appearance of justifying that sensationalism.
For this reason I’ve decided to work through that O’Reilly segment, which Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman has reported on, paying close attention to those moments when O’Reilly uses both rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies to convey a provocatively hateful message about undocumented immigrants, a message that, ironically, comes a lot closer to hate speech than the simple act of advocating on either a conservative or progressive media outlet like National Review Online or Salon.
O’Reilly kicks off the segment by addressing the “evil” of the coldblooded murder of Kate Steinle before airing a clip of an interview with Steinle’s parents, who speak of the “battle of evil and goodness.” I mentioned Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” above because it’s a powerful critique of Manichaeism, the belief in a dualistic moral struggle of good versus evil. Manichaeism makes it easy to oversimplify conflicts and tragedies by defining actors as pure good and pure evil. This is exactly what O’Reilly will go on to do in his “talking points.” He writes, “Every sane person knows that gunning down a 32-year old woman in the street is an act of pure evil.” The memo goes on: “There are many Americans who will not act to prevent that kind of evil from taking place.”
Here we can see two important rhetorical moves designed to bring audiences to the conclusion that, despite the culpability of the evil man who murdered Steinle, we are to identify that murderous evil both with undocumented immigrants and with people who don’t agree with O’Reilly’s hard-line immigration views. O’Reilly first sets up the scenario as though it’s as simple as good people versus evil people (as opposed to, for example, a more complicated policy nexus of immigration and gun control issues). Then he swiftly aligns “the Americans who will not move to act to prevent that kind of evil from taking place” with the evil itself. In these steps O’Reilly effectively conflates the evil of coldblooded murder with the evil of some Americans who will fail to act on some measure that O’Reilly will assign as a cure for that evil.
What, then, is that measure? O’Reilly begins by blaming the media, which “does not oppose sanctuary cities,” “sanctuary city” being a term with no legal meaning that refers generally to cities that don’t spend city funds and resources to enforce certain federal immigration policies. O’Reilly claims that the “sanctuary city policy” (it’s not a coherent policy at all) “is supported by people who believe that poor illegal immigrants should not be held accountable for violating immigration law,” “folks cloaking themselves in compassion, thinking they’re being humane to the poor who want better lives.” Crucially, however, O’Reilly goes on to re-label these people “hundreds of thousands of bad people.”
Here we can see, again, O’Reilly invoking the Manichaean framework with which he started, only this time, the “evil” one isn’t simply the individual who murdered Kate Steinle, but the “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented immigrants, whom O’Reilly lumps together as “bad people.” This is the point of O’Reilly’s slippage from the evil of murder to the evil of being an undocumented immigrant, to use a negative example of one to stand in for the whole. O’Reilly completes the slippage by claiming that “it is insulting when pro-sanctuary city people equate poor immigrants with violent criminals,” going on to further conflate all undocumented immigrants with violent criminals with one phrase: he calls them “brutal undocumented people.”
From this point, O’Reilly moves onto San Francisco city supervisors, holding them up as an example of the next link in a tenuously constructed chain of evil that begins with a murderer, who, by his undocumented status, becomes a stand-in for all undocumented immigrants, and ends with the civil servants of San Francisco and the broader left, presumably the kind of people who “will not move to act to prevent that kind of evil from taking place.” O’Reilly states unequivocally that Kate Steinle “is dead because of policies that endanger the public,” conflating once again the act of murder with the refusal to support O’Reilly’s specific vision of border security. O’Reilly’s closing judgment is that “it’s a damn shame that all Americans cannot support a policy that would protect people like Kate Steinle … if you saw the heartbreaking interview with her parents last night, how could you not support tough measures against criminal illegal aliens?”
In all of this we should note three tactics of distortion. First, by framing the entire issue of Steinle’s murder as a Manichaean problem of good versus evil, O’Reilly is able to pretend for his viewers that there can only be one problem (lax immigration law), which is itself a manifestation of evil. Both gun control and wider issues of how to distribute limited city funds and resources (O’Reilly isn’t exactly a fan of higher taxes) are as significant factors in this tragedy as immigration law.
Second, O’Reilly’s entire argument relies on the fallacy of composition, which presumes that if something is true of a part of a whole, it must then be true of the whole. This is why, because an undocumented immigrant is alleged to have committed a murder, O’Reilly goes on to call all undocumented immigrants things like “bad people,” “brutal undocumented people,” “violent criminals” and “criminal illegal aliens.”
Third, O’Reilly avails himself of the fallacy of false equivalence in two ways. He equates the culpability for murder with the politically mainstream disagreement between San Francisco city officials and O’Reilly on immigration policy; and he equates sites like Salon and MediaMatters with the self-proclaimed white-supremacist outlet Stormfront, confusing yet again mainstream, partisan media outlets with neo-Nazis. A simple test to reveal the fallaciousness of the comparison would be to ask yourself how long a site like Salon or MediaMatters would exist, drawing articles from prominent policymakers, politicians, artists, academics and journalists, if any of these sites regularly proclaimed white supremacy as its reason for being.
Though it’s a little laborious to go through talking points like O’Reilly’s in this manner, it’s important to reverse-engineer them from time to time to expose what lies at the heart of the machine. In this case we find that the source of hatred isn’t a side of a mainstream political debate about immigration policy, but a desire to paint all undocumented immigrants as murderous villains, “bad people,” “brutal undocumented people” on the side of evil who threaten to put out the white light of America.
By: Aaron R. Hanlon, Salon, July 17, 2015
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