David Frum – The Atlantic:
If the goal is to exclude radical Muslims from the United States, the executive order Trump announced on Friday seems a highly ineffective way to achieve it. The Trump White House has incurred all the odium of an anti-Muslim religious test, without any attendant real-world benefit. The measure amounts to symbolic politics at its most stupid and counterproductive. Its most likely practical effect will be to aggravate the political difficulty of dealing directly and speaking without euphemisms about Islamic terrorism.
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We need a new paradigm for a new time. The social trust and social cohesion that characterize an advanced society like the United States are slowly built and vulnerable to erosion. They are eroding. Trump is more the symptom of that erosion than the cause.
Trump’s executive order has unleashed chaos, harmed lawful U.S. residents, and alienated potential friends in the Islamic world. Yet without the dreamy liberal refusal to recognize the reality of nationhood, the meaning of citizenship, and the differences between cultures, Trump would never have gained the power to issue that order.
I’ve been reading about the “irrelevance” of borders since the rise of the internet, yet the need for well-attended and defended borders re-asserts itself every few years. As Frum wisely writes, Mr. Trump’s unintelligent and over-reaching act makes it more difficult to deal forthrightly with actual threats. He claims his actions are against “Islamic terrorists,” yet somehow Saudi Arabia didn’t make the list. America has actually been attacked by Saudis inspired by radical Islam.
Trump is the weight at the end of the pendulum, now swinging hard right. The thing about pendulums is, they always revert to mean.
#Trump #GOP #fraud #terrorism #immigration #radicalislam
A Random Stroll 