What used to be called “dog whistle” politics became a shrill blast heard around the world this week as American politicians reacted to the Paris terrorist attacks with an anti-refugee backlash that sounded ferocious even by the standards of the 2016 presidential race.
Where once immigration rhetoric came coded in a different frequency – designed to stir the conservative base while remaining inaudible to most – now the tone is unmistakeable, employing language that could scarcely be more offensive, to Muslim ears in particular.
“If there is a rabid dog running around your neighbourhood, you are probably not going to assume something good about that dog and you are probably going to put your children away,” said presidential candidate Ben Carson as he called for a US ban on all Syrian refugees, “rabid” or otherwise.
“By the same token we have to have [better] screening processes in place to determine who the mad dogs are,” added the retired neurosurgeon, who currently lies second in opinion polls for the Republican nomination.
Others went further still. In recent days, Republican frontrunner Donald Trumphas called for all Syrians to be deported, endorsed the surveillance and closure of mosques and even appeared to agree with suggestions that all US Muslims be placed on a government database.
“I would certainly implement that. Absolutely,” Trump said. “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases,” he added when asked how such a religious watch-list might work. “Right now, we have to have a border, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall.”
Ted Cruz, a Texas senator once seen as a conservative outlier but now lying third in the presidential polls behind Trump and Carson, has introduced legislation that would bar refugees from Iraq and Libya too.
A similar bill passed through the House of Representatives on Thursday, with the support of 47 Democrats giving it potentially enough momentum to override a threatened White House veto.
Both Cruz and Jeb Bush, a candidate once seen as the face of the Republican party establishment, have proposed limiting the US refugee programme in the Middle East to Christians only – discussing how religious tests might separate out Muslim applicants. Bush did criticise Trump’s comments, though, saying: “You talk about internment, you talk about closing mosques, you talk about registering people. That’s just wrong.”
Barack Obama has been swift to condemn the new tone in American politics as “offensive and hysterical”, as he pinned his hopes on Democrats in the Senate to stem what the White House views as a disturbing xenophobic tide.
“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,” said Obama during a trip to Asia. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
But the mood has spread far beyond the Republican presidential field. Both Democratic and Republican state governors have joined the bipartisan calls in the House for refugee reform. “We are at war whether people like to admit it or not and we want to keep Mississippi out of that war here on the home front,” said that state’s governor, Phil Bryant, in a typical response this week.
Others have suggested US politicians are only mirroring the mood in the media, where CNN suspended a reporter who criticised the House refugee bill on Twitter but allowed another to urge Obama to “take out the bastards” with more robust military attacks on Syria. Fox News lambasted the president’s spokesman for a White House response to Paris that it characterised as “aloof, apathetic and cavalier”.
“When you have a major terrorist incident you are about as likely to have good politics as you are good journalism,” says Anthony Cordesman, a former government security and intelligence analyst now based at the Center for Strategic and Intelligence Studies. “You have a posturing contest … everyone wants instant progress in complex areas where you can’t achieve it.”
And the mood is not restricted to discussion of refugee policy or the appropriate number of bombs and troops to drop on Syria.
Intelligence officials have used the Paris attack to mount a concerted pushback against recent surveillance reforms, demanding the death penalty for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with little evidence or questioning of their claims. “I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted,” the former CIA director James Woolsey told CNN. “I think the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his hands.”
For some, like Obama, or the suspended CNN reporter who suggested the Statue of Liberty would be “bowing its head in shame” at the refugee bill, the new mood is distinctly un-American.
But for now, the far louder response from those on the right suggests some US attitudes toward immigration and civil liberties have come a long way.
“The Statue of Liberty says bring us your tired and your weary, it didn’t say bring us your terrorists and let them come in here and bomb neighbourhoods, cafes and concert halls,” concluded Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. “It’s illogical and irrational to take people out of their culture, their language, their religion, even their climate, and put them in a place where they are going to be completely disoriented.”
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