Bishop: Calm Yorke More Outrageous Than Brash Trump
Thursday, December 10, 2015
A curious phenomenon has infected public discussion of the presidential race. If Donald Trump says it, its unfit to be heard. If anyone else says it, it’s important policy debate. This is almost the same as the new illiberal iron curtain descending on America’s campuses banishing ‘white’ thought.
As veterans of an organization that grew during the Tea Party era, we are only too familiar with being told our arguments are outside the sphere of reasoned discourse. Thus, we feel compelled to call foul when this censorship is being exercised against Donald Trump, not because we support him, but because he, and more importantly his supporters for whom he is such a capable surrogate, deserve to be heard.
The latest purported outrage in Trump’s quiver is to call for a pause in Muslim travel to America. Local radio host Dan Yorke, whose most noted schtick is striking the ‘adult in the room’ pose on any issue, is prominent among center right commentators who suggest that such rhetoric is “outrageous”. Essentially, Dan told me, it is to be expected around the water cooler but not in the presidential race.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTRand Paul’s legislation not as ‘controversial’?
He dismissed equating Rand Paul’s proposed immigration halt from 33 countries with a “high risk of terrorism”. That legislation, reading like a geographical who’s who of radical Muslim sentiment, was voted on as an amendment in the Senate a week before Trump supposedly ‘went off the reservation’ by suggesting virtually the same thing.
The Trump proposal differs slightly in that Muslim citizens of friendly nations would be encompassed. Given that both Britain and France have in recent times manifested homegrown Islamic terrorism, one can rationally debate the difference in effect and efficiency for either plan. But according, not only to Dan Yorke but to those powerhouse presidential contenders Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham, there is no debating that.
It is equally true that in using religious affiliation as shorthand for populations that harbor terrorism, Trump contributes in a modest way to the notion that we are at war with Islam. The extent of concern about entertaining or adopting such policy is, however, open to question. Eight years of withdrawing troops and bending over backwards to treat any terrorist incidents as workplace violence or akin to mass shootings by sociopaths and perhaps justified by insensitive representations of Islam certainly hasn’t brought us peace. This isn’t to dismiss the argument. Perhaps appeasement has lessened terrorist ambit if it has not eliminated it. But this is open to debate. Oh no, its not. The elite have spoken.
Constitutional Crisis ? Not !
I don’t lump Dan Yorke with the elite, but he is sure reading off their talking points on this one. He suggests that Trump should come in for special opprobrium because he recklessly proposes a ban that would thrust us into constitutional conundrum.
Dan has suggested that I’m a smart guy and I would return the compliment, so I can only assume he must be reading a different Constitution than I am. I know of no constitutional provision that affords a right or expectation for foreign nationals to travel to this country. It may be economically or geopolitically unwise to even temporarily call a halt, but it hardly poses any constitutional problem whatsoever.
There is the exception that, when questioned about Muslim-American citizens who might be out of the country when such a plan was adopted, Trump suggested that his concept would apply equally. This would have process oriented constitutional concerns. But a calm logical fellow like Dan Yorke would never use such an afterthought to suggest that Trump’s entire approach is laughable.
Be Careful What you Wish for
Trump’s (and Rand Paul’s) approach were only the ‘be careful what you wish for’ response to those, like Dan Yorke, who chided opponents to placement of Syrian refugees that terrorism in the United States was never committed by refugees. It’s true. For instance, in the case of the Boston bombers, they were second generation Muslim-American children of asylum seekers who had themselves received generous assistance from the United States throughout their lives.
It isn’t that it is inconceivable that youngsters who were well treated by our country might not come to believe they have a legitimate beef with the United States based on their understanding of their heritage as they grow into it. But that line of reasoning leads as logically to a conclusion that a wider ban on Muslim travel to the US may be appropriate as it does to the one that Yorke hoped should be drawn: that Syrians should be welcomed because refugees have only committed acts of terror in Europe to date.
Dan criticized me for ‘taking notes’ on his own performance last week dismissing concerns over Syrian refugees on this basis, suggesting it wasn’t his central argument but a response to callers. This exchange leads me to conclude that Dan would not be parsing the constitutionality of Donald Trump’s plan in any petulant and minuscule way. Rather, it appears, I got my Constitution from CATO and I assume Dan must have gotten an edited copy from the Center for American Progress.
Foundational Values are the flashpoint
Dan is usually accurate with his rhetoric, and I am thus hesitant to impute arguments. But he would be amongst noted company, e.g. Paul Ryan, if what he really means is that Trump’s proposal is a hazard to foundational American values embodied in the Constitution. That the shining city on a hill shouldn’t place a bushel over itself – if one may still be afforded a biblical analogy in public discussion – is a strong argument in favor of caution with the institution of such bans.
But this raises the question of why it is not equally outrageous that President Obama suggests the answer to terrorism is taking everyone’s guns away. Forgetting the pipe bombs, suicide vests, propane bombs, and errant airliners, isn’t that proposal constitutionally tone deaf. If there were widespread calls from the center left for Obama to resign over those assertions, perhaps I would think the approach of the center right to Donald Trump useful.
Some foundational values are just more equal than others I guess.
Of course there is no precise agreement on the contours of the 2nd amendment so simply appearing to favor less rigorous protection of the right to bear arms isn’t necessarily an impeachable offense. But there is no consensus either on the wisdom of admitting foreign citizens on a business as usual basis – except perhaps among the elite. And proposals for a pause are eminently rational, if undesirable in some ways and not necessarily emblematic of rigorous risk analysis.
Aren’t we better than the America that detained Japanese-Americans? Yes!
In hindsight, most Americans view the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II as glaringly wrong. Indeed the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case never actually approved their detention, only their exclusion from strategic regions, e.g., the west coast. That distinction could still be read as a surrogate for opportunistic racism, as the west coast is where most Japanese-Americans lived (with the exception of Hawaii where exclusions and detention were, ironically, practiced much less broadly).
But if Trump does the debate a disservice, it is by anticipating inapt criticism and accepting a comparison between Japanese American detention and a halt in immigration. This is no proposal for detention. Perhaps the halt is similar to the exclusion approved by the Supreme Court in Korematsu, excepting that the vast majority of the subjects of such a pause are not citizens or present in the United States, thus lacking standing to even re-litigate the boundaries laid down by Korematsu. There simply is very little similarity.
Rand Paul has astutely defended his proposals for a temporary exclusionary policy against the perspective that terrorists a needle in a haystack by asking: if that is the case why would we make the haystack bigger? It is, after all, the position of the government that they intend to find these terrorists and prevent their attacks. It is unsurprising that jingoistic propaganda after Pearl Harbor may have contributed to public acceptance of these detentions and it is reasonable for us all to bear that in mind. But does anyone think that the self-evident ban on Japanese travel to America once a state of war existed was problematic?
Condescension doesn’t win elections
These are momentous decisions and Trump’s critics (whose ranks include myself in some respects) are free to suggest he is flippant and lacks traditional presidential demeanor. But all this calm condescension by the center right is far more outrageous than ‘the Donald’ himself.
It will do neither the Republican Party nor the nation any service to pretend he and his followers don’t deserve to be in the debate. If the Republican contenders respond by alienating rather than wooing away the ‘Trump’eteers, that will assuredly lead to failure for the party in November.
This doesn’t necessarily mean advocating cleaned up carbon copies of Trump’s proposals with less bombastic rhetoric. But these appeals must speak directly to voters without condescension and acknowledge that what they talk about at the water cooler is relevant to policy discourse.
It isn’t, of course, fully formed policy. In a republic, the wants of an impassioned majority may be set aside by those then elected. But anyone proposing to do so who also proposes that this rump support their bid for President would do well to respect even hot blooded sentiments as widely shared as Trump’s.
The electorate may indeed hope to be talked into something else, a third way in foreign policy that is steeped in an assertion of American might while tempered with American tolerance, compassion and restraint. This surely won’t be accomplished by calling half the population racists and xenophobes. Of course its alright around the liberal watercooler, but hardly fit for presidential discourse either, at least amongst those who want to get elected.
Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, fighting overregulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.
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