[The] American myth was embraced and lived out by everybody from Washington to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan. It was wrestled with by John Winthrop and Walt Whitman. It gave America a mission in the world — to spread democracy and freedom. It gave us an attitude of welcome and graciousness, to embrace the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and to give them the scope by which to realize their powers.
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And so along come men like Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon with a countermyth. Their myth is an alien myth, frankly a Russian myth. It holds, as Russian reactionaries hold, that deep in the heartland are the pure folk who embody the pure soul of the country — who endure the suffering and make the bread. But the pure peasant soul is threatened. It is threatened by the cosmopolitan elites and by the corruption of foreign influence.
The true American myth is dynamic and universal — embracing strangers and seizing possibilities. The Russian myth that Trump and Bannon have injected into the national bloodstream is static and insular. It is about building walls, staying put. Their country is bound by its nostalgia, not its common future.
The odd thing is that the Trump-Bannon myth is winning. The policies that emanate from it are surprisingly popular. The refugee ban has a lot of support. Closing off trade is popular. Building the wall is a winning issue.
We are in the midst of a great war of national identity. We thought we were in an ideological battle against radical Islam, but we are really fighting the national myths spread by Trump, Bannon, Putin, Le Pen and Farage.
We can argue about immigration and trade and foreign policy, but nothing will be right until we restore and revive the meaning of America. Are we still the purpose-driven experiment Lincoln described and Emma Lazarus wrote about: assigned by providence to spread democracy and prosperity; to welcome the stranger; to be brother and sister to the whole human race; and to look after one another because we are all important in this common project?
Since 9/11, as has been pointed out many times over the past week, no American has been killed in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil by an immigrant, or even the son or daughter of an immigrant, from any of the seven countries listed in the executive order. That’s true, but (a) it’s the sort of argument that implicitly concedes the propriety of some visa bans in some circumstances, and (b) it’s not by itself a reason to regard Trump’s executive order as wrong or irrational. National security policies such as this one aren’t prompted by statistical analysis of past events — at least one hopes they aren’t — but by current realities and prognostications based on them. The fact that no Islamist Yemeni has set off a bomb in an American city is not by itself an argument for continuing to allow Yemeni asylum seekers into the United States.
Many Americans, though, are guided by a simpler and more cogent logic than what animates policy debates in Washington and New York. It goes something like this: Islamist-inspired terrorism has taken many lives around the globe, especially, though not exclusively, in the Middle East and North Africa. The federal government allows many people from the Middle East and North Africa to enter the United States. It stands to reason that, if our immigration policy continues unchecked, the violence racking Syria, Somalia, Libya, et al., will in some measure show up here, too.
I don’t share that belief. But it is not an irrational one, and it is conceivable that I am wrong. Nor is support of the visa ban evidence of bigotry or coldhearted xenophobia. It is merely to value the safety of neighbors and countrymen whom one knows over the safety of foreigners whom one doesn’t — not an obviously malign preference. And it has the merit of reassuring ordinary Americans that, even if federal policy gets it wrong or goes too far, their government is at least trying to perform its most basic function. I’m not sure Trump’s adversaries can achieve their aims by telling such people they’re idiots and bigots.
The resisters had better pause for long enough to ask why anybody would approve of what Trump is doing. If they can’t or won’t, they’ll find themselves resisting for eight years and not just four.
WASHINGTON POST
GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST