The lunatic fringe talks about "taking our country back" and "making America
great again" but they propose to do this by going back in time, not
forward
It is difficult to conceive of forward and backward in the same
sentence, as in, going forward using old methods. I wouldn’t choose a
horse over a car, or a row boat over a propeller. Nor would I try to fly
by strapping on some wings and diving off a cliff.
But that is exactly the plan Republicans are offering us. They talk
about “taking our country back” and “making America great again” but
they propose to do this by going back in time, not forward. Time, as we
all know, moves inexorably forward. Backward isn’t possible.
We’ve seen where Republican policies take us. 2008 was a cusp. We
could have lurched forward (as we eventually did) or sunk backward. As
with the Great Depression, the Great Recession was a crisis from which
Democratic leadership saved us. Saved us by going forward, by putting
some original thought into new problems.
We lost a step in 2008, thanks to the policies of the
shrub junta. In many ways, we haven’t caught up even now. But we’ve
made great strides in restoring the economic prosperity of our country.
We didn’t do it by invading countries that don’t need to be invaded or
by fighting un-taxed wars.
We did it with a measured, pragmatic approach, not with the Bush “play a hunch” and “shoot from the hip” method.
To hear all the Republican candidates talk, it’s still 2008, and none
of this recovery took place. They talk about America as though it is
the last days of the Bush administration, not the final year of Obama’s.
So skewed is their thinking that they can’t acknowledge the past seven
years have even taken place. They have the same difficulty, as we’ve
noted on numerous occasions, admitting that the Bush presidency
happened.
But it did. They both did. And the results of neither can be ignored.
The country the say they want to take back never existed. We all know
that. It’s bad theater and nothing more, about as cringe-worthy as the
worst movie you ever saw. As for making America great again, America is
great already. We’ve taken some lumps and we’ve been down, but never
out.
And what exactly does “make America great again” mean? Trump, who
stole that phrase from the past to signify his intent for the future
(and that should tell you all you need to know), is vague. He has no
clear policy positions, no straight answers. Just a lot of emotive
exclamations of “I’ll do this” and “I’ll do that.”
Never
how. How always trips him up. Ryan, like Boehner, says he knows how. His “how” is what got us into trouble in 2008.
In fact, what Trump means is not great, but “white.” He wants to
“Make America white again.” Old Racists like Buchanan love this
backward approach, with immigration bans and mass deportations. Yet in
his syndicated column
Friday, Buchanan announced that “The establishment seemed to have
become unhinged” in response to Trump’s call for an immigration ban.
Sessions (R-AL) came to Trump’s defense on Breitbart News’ SiriusXM program Thursday, telling Bannon:
“Well, he’s treading on dangerous ground, because Americans are
so deeply committed to freedom of religion, that is a major part of who
we are.”
“But at the same time, we’re in an age that’s very dangerous
and we’re seeing more and more persons enter and a lot of them have
done terrorist acts and a lot of them believe it’s commanded by their
religion…So I think it’s appropriate to begin to discuss this, and he
has forced that discussion.”
So we’re to be thankful to Trump now for bringing this
backward-looking idea to the table. Collective guilt. Scapegoating.
Ethnic and religious profiling. Racism. By deporting people who aren’t
white, whether Mexican or Muslim, it’s ethnic cleansing. An ugly word
for ugly thinking.
So something good out of the past – religious freedom, something
guaranteed by the constitution – should be superseded by something far
older and uglier.
Yet if we surrender our values in an effort to survive, we’re not
really surviving, are we? I’m not giving up who we are out of fear.
That’s surrendering. Might as well stand our military down now if we’re
just going to join the enemy to avoid being destroyed by the enemy.
Bryan Fischer hearkened to the Nazi past on Friday when he called Islam the Ebola virus of culture in order to support Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants:
“We’re not saying all Muslims are carriers of this toxic poison,
but the problem is we don’t know who is a carrier and who is not. It’s
like the Ebola virus. Remember when the Ebola virus hit? We simply
banned travel from any country where there was an Ebola outbreak. We
just said we cannot take the risk. Well, Islam is the Ebola virus of culture.”
The Nazi era image above reads “krankheitserreger” –
pathogen.
Jews, for the Nazis. Muslims, for Republicans. In fact, this thinking
predates Nazism: Nineteenth century German ethnic nationalist Paul De
Lagarde called the Jews a “bacillus, the carrier of decay … who pollute
every national culture … and destroy all faith…” As far back as the 18th
century, German ethnic nationalists were speaking of “parasitic”
Semitic culture.
Fischer might well have been quoting de Lagarde. It’s the same
language. This thinking is a couple of hundred years out of date. The
Second World War should have put it to bed forever. But here are the
Republicans, resurrecting it while claiming to be pro-life.
But pro-who’s life? And when taking our country back, back to what?
The facts on the ground are buried under a carpet of fear and hatred, xenophobia and Islamophobia and homophobia and misogyny.
How can they know which way to jump away from the little mouse with
the ISIL banner when they can’t see the floor? That’s a crude analogy,
but then it is no cruder than the thinking it represents.
Clearly, we need more than slogans. Fear and hate are the doors to fascism. We don’t need that either.
If we’re going to go forward, 2030 should be our objective, not 1930.
When you’ve got new problems, like asymmetric warfare or hybrid
warfare, you need new ideas, not old. The Islamic State can’t defeat the
United States. We can, however, defeat ourselves. The Islamic States
knows this, and they know their best ally is the Republican cabal and
it’s long list of old ideas.
We’re not going to find our answers in the past. The future demands new thinking, not old.
![Donald Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson discusses his proposed ban on Muslim immigration on Dec. 8, 2015. [CNN]](http://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Katrina-Pierson-120815-CNN-478x257.jpg)
