The politics of fear

Newt Gingrich– he’s no George Washington.  In fact, as Lloyd Bentson might have said, he’s no Dan Quayle either.

Entering this week’s Republican National Convention, it’s remarkable how low our political rhetoric has sunk.  Gingrich last week offered his vision of how best to restore calm to an increasingly anxious and traumatized nation.  The former Speaker and erstwhile candidate for Vice President of the United States suggested that “we should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia law, they should be deported.” 

Tolerance in America has a complicated and tortured history.  But the ideal is clear, and Jews know its vision well.  After nearly 2000 years of persecution in Christian Europe, Jews arrived on the shores of a nascent United States to find the blueprint for a very different kind of society. In his famous 1790 Letter to the Jews of Newport, George Washington declared that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

America has not always lived up to that standard. In the 1930s, mired in the depths of the Depression and facing the looming Nazi threat in Europe, the State Department sharply curtailed Jewish immigration from Europe.  The most public manifestation of that xenophobic policy was American officials’ refusal to allow the MS St. Louis permission to dock in this country, ultimately forcing its Jewish refugee passengers back to Nazi Germany and into the gas chambers.  Citing in part fears of Nazi agents embedded among the clamoring Jews, the heartbreaking action was heavily influenced by inflamed anti-Semitic rhetoric, emanating from the likes of Father Charles Coughlin and Henry Ford.

Later, again fearing an unseen and ill defined threat of alien forces, the United States forced nearly 120,000 persons of Japanese descent into relocation centers during most of World War II.  In 1944, the United States Supreme Court affirmed this tragedy, ruling that the concerns of wartime, and particularly the fear of espionage, justified such extreme measures. 

History has ultimately been unkind to these deviations from the vision of American tolerance.  Critically, they have never resulted in the increase of personal safety for Americans their proponents have promised.  The wartime restrictions on Jewish immigration have regularly been cited as having been inconsistent with the nation’s historic role as a refuge from evil.  As for the wartime relocation of Japanese Americans into relocation centers, the acting U.S. Solicitor General issued a rare “admission of error” in 2011, conceding the suppression of vital evidence, and nullifying the precedential impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling.  Even former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the decision “will not survive,” and will eventually be overruled.

These are no doubt difficult, and in some ways unprecedented times. Just as the world seemed to be spiraling toward collapse in the 1930s and ‘40s, international terrorism and domestic gun violence today appear to be rampant and out of control.  Coupled with dizzying technological change, it feels as if real security is quickly slipping away.  The sense of dislocation is palpable; the fear understandable and real.  And the result is a politics of fear.

The rising threats of the 21st century may be unique, but the moral choices they present are not.  Americans– in World War II but at other times as well– have been tempted to seek illusory comfort by lashing out at the “other,” to close doors, to circle the wagons, to abandon the principles that make this country great.  In each instance they sought to build a wall and, to paraphrase Paul Simon, “to keep out the foreigners, they made it strong.” 

There is a reason that Donald Trump speaks the way he does.  He lashes out at Mexicans generally as “rapists” and “drug dealers.” He stirs fears of unnamed Muslims celebrating in the streets after 9/11.  He suggests barring Muslims as a group from entering this country.  

He accuses a federal judge of bias based upon his national origin.  He accuses unnamed blacks of calling for a moment of silence for the Dallas police shooter.  And his sycophant would-be running mate suggests that a test to evaluate Muslim religious belief might be the solution to our woes.

They speak in such vagaries because there is simply no evidence to subject an entire people, an entire nation, an entire belief system, to collective punishment. Those who seek to do so need, by definition, to resort to demagoguery, innuendo, and broad strokes of accusation. They stir up the suspicion necessary to indict the mysterious stranger, to abandon cherished values, and to jettison the ideals upon which this nation was founded.  People are increasingly terrified of the unknown, of violence that appears unabated, and they seek comfort amid simple answers.  They seek someone to blame.  And at times like these, sensing a leadership vacuum, there’s always someone willing to stir the pot and provide that scapegoat.  Rational evidence of individual culpability is too cumbersome, fealty to American values too idealistic.  Much easier to cut to the chase, to root out the problem with a single stroke of group exclusion.

These are not normal times, and this is not a normal election.  The world is an uncertain place; the fear of lost personal safety is legitimate, and that fear is real.  The stark choices presented are the same as they have always been in such times: the impulse towards Father Coughlin’s darkness, versus the vision of George Washington’s light.  Until now, more or less, our nation has generally found its way back to Mount Vernon.  

Make America great again?  Rarely has the call seemed more urgent.  Now is the time to defeat the gathering forces of darkness, and confine this ugly movement to its rightful place in the dustbin of history.

Stuart Tochner is a shareholder at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, a national employment law firm.  He is also an executive committee and board member at Temple Beth Am, currently serving as the Vice President of Personnel, and a member of the Board of Trustees of Camp Ramah in California.