Mick Hartley

Paul Berman – Homage to the Mexicans in the Time of Trump:

The Mexicans were not the first people to fall under the shadow of Donald Trump’s political slanders (an honor belonging to Barack Obama, object of the birther mania), and they may be not his target at this very moment. But the slanders against them may, even so, have outdone everything else in generating the American political atmosphere right now. It was vilification of Mexicans that led to Trump’s decisive triumph over his many rivals in the Republican primaries of 2016. He shocked everyone with his insults about rapists and criminals, and shocked everyone anew with his refusal to apologize for the original shock, and shocked everyone yet again with his disparagement of Judge Gonzalo Curiel in the Trump University fraud case. And the repeated shocks aroused a popular excitement. Masses of Americans not only cheered, they chanted, such that “Build the wall!” became a main slogan of Trump’s campaign, more insistently even than “Lock her up!”

He will, of course, build it, and there is reason to believe that, once he has done so, his public will cheer and chant still more lustily, thrilled to discover that here, at last, is a leader who fulfills his promises, and thrilled at the wall itself, and thrilled at the chilly message his wall will send to Muslims and any number of other people, not excluding the half of America that did not vote for Donald Trump. The wall in these respects will turn out to be a national monument, dedicated to the promotion of civic values, in its fashion. It will be the anti-Statue of Liberty. It will engrave vilification of Mexicans into the national landscape. And all of this, the blossoming of the new national mood, requires a response, which ought to be, above all, a defense of Mexicans, not just on narrow political or economic grounds, but culturally, as well—a defense that bears on American civilization.