Jennifer Sabin - The Newly Emboldened American Racist // ANDREW SULLIVAN - America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
I live in a political
bubble. A lovely, liberal, northeastern bubble. The majority of my friends and
family are Clinton supporters, and the rest favor Bernie. One or two
Republicans I’m close to voted for Kasich in the primaries. I’m pretty sure
there are a few closet Trump supporters in my life — and on my Facebook friends
list — but as long as they stay in the closet, we’re good.
It’s what’s outside my
bubble that keeps me up at night, especially now that Donald Trump has been
anointed the presumptive Republican nominee. It’s what keeps me writing on and
on about this election.
I have to thank Mr.
Trump for opening my eyes to the American ugly I didn’t want to see. I needed a
wake up call. I’m not closed off in some strange, futuristic liberal world. I
live in a diverse community with a mix of political and social viewpoints, and
I consistently read newspapers and websites with differing ideologies. I know
my American history and I know what racist people have been saying about
President Obama for the last eight years. I’ve watched the videos of young
black men shot by cops.
And I’ve listened to the calls for racial justice on
college campuses. I’ve worked on a college campus where I was the minority, and
my students have spoken and written about their experiences. Throughout my life
I’ve heard stories from my Jewish friends about the nasty comments they’ve
endured. So yes, I understand how deeply racism and bigotry run through
American culture — as much as any educated, white, Protestant person can really
understand it — even if I don’t hear it in my home or my backyard.
But what I didn’t
understand until this election, until I started paying closer attention to the
voices of ordinary Americans, is how terrifying it is to read what some of them
write on public forums, or to hear them say out loud what they really think
about other Americans. The racists and bigots of America have always been out
there. There have always been hideous trolls on the Internet. But now they are
emboldened in a big way by the bellicose Donald Trump. He’s opened Pandora’s
box, and nobody can shut it.
Imagine if you will,
for a moment, being Malia Obama this week, thrilled to be going to Harvard,
excited about the prospects of a gap year. She’s a 17-year-old high school
senior, doing what millions of other 17-year-olds — like my own daughter — are
doing now. They’re deciding on schools and making plans for their futures. They
have big dreams, and an optimistic outlook. I just hope Malia didn’t read the
comments following the story about her college plans on Fox’s website. It got so
bad Fox had to shut down the comments section.
They called her
“little monkey,” and “little ape.” One poster hoped she would get AIDS.
“I wonder if she
applied as a muDslime..or a foreign student..or just a Ni@@,” wrote another
poster. That one got the most likes. The comments go on and
on.
The astonishing thing
is that some of the posters used what appeared to be their full names. No shame
in being a vile, racist, pig. Not when the possible future leader of the free
world doesn’t know to disavow the KKK, shouts plans to build walls and keep
Muslims out at every rally, calls other candidates nasty names and disparages
women. The presumptive nominee for President of the United States eggs on the
racists and the bigots. He gives them voice where they had none.
Take the case of Julia
Ioffe, a prominent Russian-American writer who published a researched article
in GQ Magazine about Melania Trump. It wasn’t a particularly flattering profile
of Donald’s third wife. And that made Trump’s supporters very angry, because
freedom of the press is not to be tolerated in Trump’s America.
Within hours of the
article’s publication, Ioffe, who is Jewish, received a call from an
anonymous caller who played part of a Hitler speech into the phone. Someone
posted photos of her head superimposed on a mug shot from Auschwitz. Someone
sent her a photo of a cartoon man with a large nose, kneeling down as a bullet
blasts through his brain.
The comments go on and
on. But Trump has been mute.
Ioffe says her family
left Russia 26 years ago to escape anti-Semitism. And she says she’s
experienced these kinds of attacks before: in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
No wonder Trump and
Putin like each other. They are two sides of the same wooden nickel.
Look: I’m going to
write this again and again, right up until Election Day. You cannot view this
election solely as a choice between two platforms, two parties, or two
personalities. This election is about much bigger issues. It’s about the way
way we look at people, and talk about them, and care for them. It’s about the
soul of America and its relationships to the world. If you care about that, you
cannot vote Trump, or stay home, or vote for a third party spoiler.
How can this man, who
has fomented so much anger and hate, represent the United States to the World,
and to its own people? How will minorities feel safe in the U.S. if he is
president? How can this country stand to be even further divided? The chasm is
already too wide.
In his victory speech
after Indiana, Trump said, “we’re going to love each other, and cherish
each other.” But the hate will go on and on, If Trump is president, a
possibility that moved one giant step closer to reality Tuesday night. And if
that happens, none of our bubbles will be able to save us from ourselves.
An American elite that has presided over
massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a
disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly
destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is
effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a
comeuppance. The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the
elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to
govern by popular passion and brute force....
Trump is not just a wacky politician of the
far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre
working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed
by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal
democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s
long past time we started treating him as such...
