Luke Ford

The elites are nervous. America has not had a populist and a nationalist this close to the presidency in at least a century.

Arthur Chu writes:

If I were still in a mood to make jokes about the Trump campaign I’d say the makers of “Allegiance” and “The Man in the High Castle” both owe Donald Trump money for free publicity.

The Philadelphia Daily News hailed Trump’s plan to ban all Muslim immigration–which would bring us back to the era of the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act–with the barely-even-a-pun headline “The New Furor.” The New York Daily News, not to be outdone, showed Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty.

Prominent Republicans have been coming out of the woodwork to bash Trump for escalating Republican discourse about immigration from veiled bigotry to open bigotry. The First Amendment-defying concept of applying a religious test to immigration is apparently a bridge too far even for the Dick Cheneys and Lindsey Grahams of the world.

Twitter, of course, has been a-twittering nonstop. Jeff Bezos threatened to shoot him into space. J.K. Rowling weighed in, calling him a worse villain than Lord Voldemort. (A stretch, considering Donald Trump has not yet assassinated anyone nor created an army of mind-controlled slaves nor fused his soul to that of a giant man-eating serpent, though I guess we’ll see in 2016.)

All of this naturally leads to the question: If everyone hates him so much, why are we so worried about him? Ross Douthat points out we haven’t even held our first primaries yet; Trump has yet to win a single actual election. Nate Silver, our nation’s election oracle, recently implored the media to “stop freaking out” about Trump’s position in opinion polls as the “Republican frontrunner.” Trump gets a lot of attention, but not that much support–his overwhelmingly “high unfavorables” basically mean the nation is split between a minority that backs Trump and a majority that hates him but hasn’t decided whom they’d prefer as president instead.

As Silver says, “Nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era”; for Trump to succeed, he’d have to beat the entire Republican Party apparatus lined up against him and thus prove that the party itself is ineffectual against a determined enough wealthy individual. People who’d like to think that the two parties are obsolete lick their chops at Trump’s headline-grabbing status for this reason, but for better or for worse that’s probably wishful thinking.

To put it bluntly, Trump isn’t Hitler, not because Trump’s views aren’t as personally odious as Hitler’s were but because Trump doesn’t live in Hitler’s Germany and, to be blunt about it, he doesn’t have Hitler’s balls. The Adolf Hitler who took power in 1933 was a man who’d previously taken politics seriously enough to lead an armed revolution against the state and be imprisoned for it. His party already had a paramilitary wing (the SA) of organized, uniformed thugs who seriously thought of themselves as a rival to the existing military. He rose to power in a country that saw itself as a desperate underdog, having lost a major war and been forced to make massive reparation payments that crippled the economy.

None of this describes Donald Trump. It’s impossible to imagine the effete reality-show billionaire at the head of a Beer Hall Putsch or going to prison as a martyr for his cause. His supporters are violent, frightening, boorish mobs but they’re nothing at all like an army, not even the ersatz army the SA were. And despite how ugly things have gotten in the United States during the War on Terror we are still comfortably the world’s wealthiest superpower; Weimar Germany would be lucky to have our problems.

No, as disgusted as I am that a leading candidate for president can mouth fascist slogans and trumpet fascist ideals in 2015, I don’t seriously believe the America is Germany in 1933 or Trump is Adolf Hitler.

That doesn’t mean I’m not scared.

Because there is an example of a country a lot like America in 2015 that had a candidate in mind much like Trump–an ultra-rich dilettante who seemed to treat politics like a show and shoot his mouth off without any concern for actually winning, who did indeed “freak out” the chattering classes by skyrocketing in popularity against all common sense.

That country is America in 1924, and that would-be candidate was Henry Ford.

Like Trump, Ford vacillated about which party he even belonged to but seemed none the worse for wear for his shifting allegiances–his personal brand outshining the brand of whatever party he belonged to. Like Trump, Ford’s popularity was blamed on mass media–in 1924 that was the “movie mind” overstimulated by Hollywood features; in 2015 it’s apparently the fault of the “social media mind” of self-sustaining Internet outrage.

Like Trump, Ford surged to national attention in 1924 because of the country’s deep disenchantment with the “serious” candidates, a sense that party politics was just a corrupt elite trading favors with each other–Trump, like Ford, somehow managed to be an “outsider” and to represent the “common man” despite being incredibly wealthy.

And, like Trump, Ford was beloved by his fans because he was perceived as a straight-talker, a truth-teller, someone insulated enough by his wealth he didn’t have to recite polite fictions. Among serious pundits of the chattering classes, an eccentric billionaire who goes on rants about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate has disqualified himself from being taken seriously for office. Among voters who hate and resent the serious pundits of the chattering classes, those “fringe” views only underscore the billionaire’s “outsider” credentials.

It may well be the case that Ford, had he not bowed out of running for the Republican nomination in 1924, would never have won a general election once enough people blasted the contents of his raving anti-Semitic newspaper the Dearborn Independent to a national stage–indeed, the Anti-Defamation League successfully shut down that newspaper with a boycott in 1927. It may be that historians are correct that Ford would never have made it that far into the election because, like most people who storm into presidential elections with no past political experience, he simply didn’t have the taste for politics.

Cleveland Jewish News: When Donald J. Trump announced a proposal for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until the country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” criticism poured in.
The condemnation came swiftly from his fellow candidates, from national organizations – and from local rabbis.
One example was Rabbi Richard A. Block, senior rabbi at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood and Cleveland, who took to Facebook with strong feelings about the New York business magnate’s proposal.
“In a political season when a leading presidential candidate advocates the exclusion of Muslims from our country, we understand anew the importance of the Torah’s commandments to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ and to ‘love the stranger,’ and of Hillel’s teaching that ‘what is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn,’” Block wrote. “How many radicals will (Trump) inspire to commit mass murder? If we remain silent in the face of Trump’s despicable proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., we become complicit in it.”
For Rabbi Rosette Barron Haim, also of The Temple-Tifereth Israel, Trump’s proposal hit home – as in her family’s ancestral home in Turkey, where her family had many Muslim friends.
“I’m just very much aware that not all Muslims feel the same way about any given issue really,” Haim said. “It’s never good to lump all people, all minorities into any one category. I think that’s as true for Muslims as it is for people of Jewish background. That’s what they did in the countries where they wanted to persecute the Jews was that they made a generalization from an experience with perhaps just a few people and made policy that way.”
…Block said Jews might be extra sensitive to Trump’s proposal, recalling how Jews attempting to flee Nazism were kept out of the United States, including the famed case of the MS St. Louis, a ship with nearly 1,000 refugees forced to turn back toward Europe.
“I believe that the Jewish people’s experience with bigotry, persecution and rejection should stimulate special sensitivity to discrimination against other minorities,” Block wrote in an email. “We still recall with bitterness that the doors of the world were shut in the face of Jews attempting to flee Nazism. The vast majority of American Jews are the descendants of immigrants. The Torah reminds us more than 30 times that we were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
It’s hard to find a parallel for Trump’s proposal in American history – a time when an entire race or religious group was denied entry into the United States.
Certainly, Jewish refugees from Europe during World War II were denied entry due to a “nativist movement tinged with hysteria about hidden spies,” according to Jay Geller, Samuel Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Geller noted “active anti-Semitism” in the State Department and that officials had “carte blanche” to refuse German Jews. In that case, however, there were already quotas in place from the Immigration Act of 1924, which aided American efforts to prevent immigration of undesirables.
“America at that point simply needed to admit far more German Jews than the law stipulated they could and there was no widespread movement among non-Jewish-Americans to revise the quota or make an exception,” Geller said.
The idea of keeping out a seemingly dangerous minority then is not new. Still, his proposal is fairly unique in American history.
As a result, it’s also difficult to imagine how it would work. How would American authorities be able to figure out if someone was Muslim?
“The very first thing I thought was how would border control in this country even know who’s Muslim,” Geller said.
Geller said that the Germans solved that problem by putting a big red “J” on the passport of Jewish citizens, allowing other European countries like Switzerland to easily deny them. Most countries, however, including the United States, don’t put religion on one’s passport.
“I think the important thing is to remember that they’re all human beings,” Haim said. “We’re all human beings.”

REPORT:

“It speaks of the broader problem that our country always has to fight against and that is ignorance, hatred and xenophobia,” said Rabbi Victor Urecki, longtime rabbi and spiritual leader with the B’nai Jacob Synagogue in Charleston.

“He is speaking to a group of people — and it’s a small group of people, but they’re very vocal — that find the stranger is a person to be hated. That’s not the America that I grew up in.”

Urecki was a guest on Tuesday’s MetroNews “Talkline” a day after attending a community meeting involving Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders at the Islamic Center of West Virginia, located in Kanawha County, that was organized to dispel myths about Islam.

Hundreds of people attended the Monday night event.

“The Muslim community has been speaking out. Unfortunately, they do not have a lot of traction in the media because it’s a softer voice, but they do speak out,” Urecki said of efforts to push back against anti-Muslim rhetoric that has intensified in the wake of the San Bernardino, California terrorist attack that left 14 people dead and more than 20 injured.

On Monday, FBI investigators confirmed Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the two shooters who opened fire last Wednesday at San Bernardino’s Inland Regional Center, had been radicalized “for quite some time” and were possibly ISIS sympathizers.

Urecki said he understands very well that the U.S. has its enemies.

“There are people that are an enemy, not just to the American way of life, but immigrants which include Muslims who want to be part of the American experience,” he said.

However, “The overwhelming number of Muslims are not here to damage this country.”

As a Jew, Urecki said he’s bothered by the statements now being made about Muslims. “The same statements that are being said about Muslims were being said about Jews in America in the 1930s,” he said.

Urecki was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. in 1965.

His father grew up in Argentina, one of the few sanctuary countries for Jewish people fleeing from Poland in 1938. At that time, the United States was not an option. Urecki sees parallels to what Syrian refugees seeking refuge are now facing.

Trump has called for the ban on Muslims entering the U.S. until, “our country’s representatives can figure out what’s going on,” according to a campaign statement. He’d previously proposed surveillance at mosques and the creation of a database of Muslims living in the U.S.

Rabbi Aaron Panken writes for HuffPo: “With Donald Trump’s suggestion of banning all Muslims from entering the United States, people of good conscience must raise the alarm. This was not some insignificant hate-monger speaking to a limited band of fanatics — as presidential candidates speak, they define the essential boundaries of what is reasonable discourse in America. The dangerous and irresponsible speech we now hear coming from Mr. Trump has the potential to foster hatred, ignite violence and cause irreparable harm to individuals and our nation at large. When a candidate’s speech veers into such unconstitutional, un-American territory as proposing a religious litmus test for entering our country, the core values of America are in jeopardy.”

I don’t recall many of America’s founding fathers talking about the importance of having lots of Muslims in the country.

The rabbi is scared that Donald Trump is expanding the Overton Window and making it possible for Americans to discuss publicly things the rabbi wants forbidden, such as noticing that different groups tend on average to behave in different ways.