In the first days and weeks after Donald Trump’s election, for me one of the most heartening signs of immediate grassroots opposition to the president and his foul agenda was the number of people who made it clear that they would not stand idly by while Muslims in our country were harassed and demonized, whether by government actions or by individual assholes. Many resolved to intervene to deescalate and defend if they were ever to witness such harassment in person.
In Portland yesterday, three men stepped to the defense of a pair of girls, one of whom was Muslim, who were being threatened by a man who has turned out to be a white supremacist. Two of those men’s bravery cost them their lives; the other man received serious injuries.
I don’t know if these three were among those who had previously given thought to how they’d respond if they saw Muslims specifically threatened, or whether they simply acted out of a basic, instinctual human decency; this matters not a whit in judging their bravery, as they did the right thing in the moment.
The simple fact of their right action when faced with an existential choice is a reminder that the ongoing threat to Muslims is a threat to all Americans, regardless of race or religion, because conscience, common humanity, and adherence to our country’s core values means that Americans don’t stand idly by when others are threatened by hate.
We all need to get really clear on something really fast: attacks like the one we’ve just witnessed here in Portland are the tip of the spear of a right-wing, white nationalist movement that has its roots in the darkest passages of American history, finds its foot soldiers in fools like yesterday’s killer, and whose most potent enabler is the current occupant of the White House, for whom anti-Muslim hatred is part of a larger package of racial and Christianist supremacy. Let us never forget that Donald Trump named as his chief advisor Steve Bannon, a central figure in mainstreaming the vile white nationalist movement. A less overtly violent strain of this movement has overtaken the Republican Party, whose electoral strategy is based on gerrymandering and voter restrictions that disproportionately affect people of color to ensure that majority rule in our country is deferred indefinitely.
What we saw in Portland yesterday reminds us that what might seem like violent outliers are the inevitable byproduct of a world view that essentially breaks us down into those who are fully citizens and those who are not, and by extension those who are fully human and those who are not. As a glaring example: how can anyone look at efforts in states like Texas and North Carolina to restrict voting rights in ways that obviously target African-Americans, and not see a clear line back to the three-fifths compromise embedded in the U.S. Constitution, whereby certain human beings were deemed not to count as fully human at all?
As Dan Rather has pointed out this morning, Donald Trump has not yet voiced (or even tweeted) his recognition of the two American heroes who died here in Portland. Frankly, I don’t expect that he will, and here is the chilling reason why: to Donald Trump, the victims of this incident were not real Americans — neither the two girls (one African-American and the other Muslim), nor the three casualties of the attack, who proved their un-Americanness by acting heroically against a man motivated, directly or indirectly, by hatreds promoted from the highest office in the land.
For Trump, and increasingly for the Republican Party as a whole, real Americans are the thirty-five or forty-percent of overwhelmingly white citizens who unquestioningly support Donald Trump, who are in fact far along the road to embracing a racist identity politics fused with a cult of personality based on Donald Trump himself, so that in the end the only real American is one who unswervingly accepts whatever insane actions and words that are vomited out by this deranged administration.
Violence and political repression are symbols of the right wing’s weakness, not strength. Simply put, you don’t resort to violence when you have a popular agenda that can win fair elections. That a party ostentatiously committed to law and order is increasingly winking and nodding as violence is inflicted on those they perceive as their enemies — the press, protestors at Trump rallies — is a scary subset of this fact: when forced to choose between maintaining power at the expense of giving up its unpopular policies in order to gain new voters (aka normal politics in a democracy), and maintaining power by undemocratic, anti-American means (gerrymandering, opposing stricter accountability for police departments inflicting injustice on African-American communities, supporting and enabling a president who has by this point committed gross abuses of power), they have chosen power over all. We are at the point where it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that the Republican Party as a whole has begun to forfeit its claim to be a legitimate American political party, if legitimacy is measured by a commitment to actual rule of law and equal political rights for all Americans.
At the Oregon state and local level, it’s reassuring that politicians have overwhelmingly called out the hatred and violence of this attack. But it's hardly enough to stop there, not by a long shot. A white supremacist movement, thriving in an atmosphere created by one of our two major political parties, has effectively declared war on our free and open society, insinuating the possibility of violence into as mundane an activity as taking mass transit to get to work or go shopping.
We need to make it clear to our elected officials that we expect the full power of our law enforcement agencies to come down like a hammer on these right-wing extremists — to ascertain whether the killer was acting alone or had accomplices, to determine whether he is part of a larger cell, and to infiltrate and dismantle this violent movement before its adherents shed more blood.
We need to broadcast the connections between the G.O.P. and this resurgent bigotry and violence, and to force that party to disown and reform itself, or face electoral destruction.
We need to impress upon Democratic politicians that voters have a zero tolerance policy for enablers of violence, and that we expect them to fight the Republicans every step of the way where voting rights, religious protections, racism, and the free press are concerned.
And in our cities and towns, we need to make it clear to each other — to our friends, to our neighbors, to people of different faiths and races from ourselves — that we have each other’s backs.
