SEDITION IS OUR TRADITION

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The press is busy reporting on the argument over whether Trump's "Go back to where you came from" campaign is "racist" or not. Duh, of course it is. Lots of white people have said worse things about Trump, but he never told them to "go home." (His opponent, white Bernie Sanders, is not only the child of immigrants, as are  three members of the "squad," he is an avowed "Socialist.-- or at least a "Democratic" one. Why hasn't Trump told him to "Go back to where you came from?" Could it be because he is white, as is Trump, who is descended from an immigrant grandfather?)

But the Trump attack is beyond racism. It is part if his campaign to stir up nativism and xenophobia. Those movements generate dangerous byproducts: an attack on freedom of speech, which is an attack on the core of our Democracy.

Trump is hardly the first President to gin up hatred for political gain. Up to now, war was the ever-handy justification.

In 1798, with a threatened war against the French in the offing, President John Adams persuaded Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts. Aside from giving the Executive enhanced powers to deport immigrants, (sound familiar?), the Sedition Act criminalized all anti-government "scandalous and malicious speech!" Newspaper editors and pamphleteers were arrested and convicted for criticizing the President. While the short-lived statutes were never challenged in the Supreme Court, the reaction in some states was so severe that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson almost led Kentucky and Virginia to secede from the union!  Oh, yeah: Adams lost his bid (to Jefferson) for a second term.

No party has a monopoly on the nativism/anti-sedition tactic. During World War I, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson pushed Congress to pass a new "Sedition Act" that criminalized

"disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government, the Armed Forces, or the flag, or which caused American institutions to be viewed with contempt."

Nearly 1000 people were convicted of violating that statute. Magazines that expressed concern about the decision to go to war were punished with increased postage rates. (Compare Trump's attack on the postage rates charged to Amazon, a company led by a Trump critic) and when the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs made a speech in which he blamed the war on "Capitalism," he was in effect "deported" to a federal prison.

Wilson also attacked all "hyphenated Americans" as "enemies of the Republic." (That phrase sound familiar?)

Wilson wanted to run for a third term in 1920, but was so unpopular he couldn't even get his party's nomination.

In the forties,  "left wing" Democrat F.D.R., following upon the attack on Pearl Harbor, imprisoned 110,000 US residents of Japanese ancestry, most of them citizens of the United States! It took decades before our government officially recognized how unthinkable that exercise of nativism was, even in wartime.

In the sixties, the American Flag lapel pin actually became a symbol of repression. Opponents of the Vietnam War were attacked both by Presidents Johnson and Nixon as "Unamerican." Draft card burners were jailed. There was a proliferation of bumper stickers bearing an American flag and the phrase: "LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT." (In the speech that prompted the "SEND HER BACK" chant, Trump told his audience "You know what? If they don't love it, tell them to leave it.")  Sixties pro-war adherents wore flag pins to broadcast their message. I remember recoiling when I  saw an adversary wearing one in court. It was like defiling the temple. (It took the tragedy of 9/11 to cleanse the flag pin of that awful message.)

Huckster Trump has managed to re-stimulate the recessive anti-democracy strain in our national genome by using "the invasion" of immigrants as a substitute for war. And he and his team are getting us closer and closer to an actual conflagration in the mid-east. Even if we manage to avoid the spark that ignites a conflagration, our democracy is at risk as Trump elevates the level of hatred, division, and fear among our populace.

The good news is we recovered from those previous frenzied "anti-sedition" nativism periods and we will recover from this one as well if we keep the faith in our Constitution and keep chipping away at Trump's awful message.

Bottom line: Going back to lede, the press can abandon the debate. There is no doubt Trump is a racist, and there is no doubt that Omar is an antisemite and a racist as well. But Omar and her three squad-mates constitute less than 1% of the House of Representatives. Trump's talent as a carnival barker has elevated these four congresswomen to a position of unwarranted prominence. The threat to our democracy in this Punch and Judy show is not Omar, it's Trump.

Sanity will prevail if we will it to happen.

A bientot.

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As my regular readers know, there is no fixed schedule for these posts. If you want a notice of each new posting, send me an email and I will add you to the notice list.  mlondon34@gmail.com