Following the harrowing attack in Manchester which has left tens of parents childless, the far-right peanut gallery has returned to troll the internet and ruin the public discourse with predictable talking points about Islam, refugees, multiculturalism, and all their usual bogeymen. Amidst this familiar rhetoric, one verbal sleight of hand has stuck out to me: the assertion that they are armed with the facts, and that the people standing in the way of their righteous anti-Muslim crusades are wimpy leftists, deluded about how terrorism works and obsessed with fighting prejudice. This claim warrants deeper examination.
When it comes to terrorism and national security, the alt-right wants you to believe that they’re the rational ones in the room, that they have logical and straightforward answers to difficult problems (read: ban people who don’t look like they do), hampered only by the feelings of the left’s “special snowflakes” and the vulnerable people they want to protect. But their pretext is wrong, and their characterization of their opponents is a straw-man sham.
Liberals take pains to avoid and condemn anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy precisely because that kind of behavior only hurts other innocents without making the country safer. In fact, it weakens our partnerships with majority-Muslim nations abroad like Jordan, which only makes it harder to fight terrorism.
Liberals warn of the ill-effects of military intervention not because they are afraid of terrorists, but because they’re aware that intervention might mean killing thousands of Americans and millions of innocent civilians, while only accelerating the ability of terrorists to recruit.
Liberals see Muslims as a partner rather than an enemy because terrorists kill thousands more Muslims than they do Americans or Europeans, and when local leaders treat Muslim communities with respect instead of suspicion, it makes it easier to investigate and prevent terror attacks. American Muslims like the United States. They moved here because they want to be here. And if it weren't for the GOP's stoking of Islamophobic flames, they'd probably be voting Republican.
In both most recent attacks in the United States, the shootings in Orlando and San Bernardino, the perpetrators acted on their own volition. Neither had any meaningful connection to outside terror groups, even if they took inspiration from them. Neither were refugees. The security infrastructure we have in the United States is by and large working: groups like the Islamic State have not infiltrated our country, and if they have, then they’ve been apprehended under wraps. For this reason and others, you are far, far more likely to die from a car accident on the freeway than you are from a terrorist attack.
It’s the far right, then, who are allowing blind fear to take the steering wheel. Regarding their many supporters, I can’t blame them. It’s hard to see the attacks that don’t happen in comparison to the ones that do. The images we see on TV and on Facebook are nothing short of horrifying. People have been killed, and their families’ lives will be forever altered.
Worse, these atrocities have been committed in the name of a theocratic fundamentalist perversion of the Muslim faith, which for many people is their only exposure to Islam and the people that practice it. By no fault of their own, they lack a working knowledge of the Muslim world, and they have no meaningful relationships with Muslim people. Under these conditions, it becomes all too easy to generalize, and then to dehumanize. It’s no coincidence that the people most afraid of Islam are the people who live farthest from those who practice it: unfamiliarity means uncertainty, uncertainty warrants caution, and caution leads to fear.
There are many principled foreign policy conservatives who understand just the same premise that liberals do: that contempt toward Islam will not stop terrorism. Just the same, there are principled critics of Islam who raise ideological grievances towards the faith without attacking the people who believe it. I have many disagreements with these people, and I often find their messaging to be counter-productive. But nonetheless, they understand, as many conservatives did at the outset of the War on Terror, that our struggle is to keep America safe, not to wage a self-defeating culture war with the Muslim world.
For people like Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, the responsibility and reservation of their colleagues was a political opportunity. Rather than fighting the deep-seated impulse to lash out against the unknown, as George W. Bush did after 9/11, they shamelessly exploited the real anxieties of scared people for their own gain.
Make no mistake, their success was only possible because of mainstream politicians, both on the right and the left, failed to make their constituents feel safe in their own backyards. The administrations of Obama, of Cameron, of Hollande and to a lesser extent Merkel, made the grievous error of facing terrorism with cold, dismissive logic. Terrorism is more than a sheer body count. Symbolically, it is a wound to everything a nation represents, anathema to its values and dismissive of the lives that espouse them. It is emblematic of the many anxieties that life in an aging, sluggish West provides: uncertainty, helplessness, disconnection, and a feeling that something once great has been lost to the sands of time. Terrorists are the bogeymen, and their weapons are everything people hate about the now.
When a person comes to you, afraid for lives and their country, you do not give them numbers. You give them something to look forward to. You affirm that their lives have value, that their lives have meaning, have something worth fighting for even in times of strife. You promise that their destiny won’t be settled by some violent unseen force, and they trust you enough to believe you.
Mainstream leaders, buried as they were in details and data, never saw the forest for the trees. They worked hard to fight the terrorists but did little to fight the terror itself. Their narrative was a dismissive shrug at best, making people feel less safe through pointless TSA-type song and dance, and at worst censoring true stories that ran counter to the narrative. They used up their credibility if they ever tried to use it at all.
None of these failures excuse the tactics of far-right ideologues and their pet politicians. Their ploy has been to cynically dupe large swaths of the public into trusting them with their lives, despite knowing almost nothing about how to protect them. And when they come into office, as demonstrated by this rambling-shambling-shitshow of a Trump Administration, they clearly have no idea what they’re doing.
Take the fate of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. He functioned well enough on the campaign trail when his only obligations were to make rally chants and to de-legitimize the US Armed Forces. Yet once he entered a position of real power, where thoughtful caution was an asset and Obama-era bridge-burning was a liability, his various weaknesses and Russian closet-skeletons came back to haunt him. His outsider status made him a great campaign prop but a terrible administrator, and thus he was replaced with H.R. McMaster, someone who knew what he was doing.
Then consider the trajectory of Steve Bannon, once thought to be one of Trump’s closest advisors but now mostly a seat-filler for a made-up position. Because Bannon knows nothing about how the government works, he pushed the President to sign a travel ban without letting any of the relevant agencies know beforehand. The executive order was a complete mess, amateurishly written and executed like a middle-school talent show. He botched it so badly that the courts struck it down—twice.
In the midst of bad press and mass protest, Bannon set the administration up for failure, sullying the credibility of the White House among top-level bureaucrats and setting the tone for a constant stream of leaks. He failed so hard that it eventually led to his removal from the National Security Council and his outshining by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The intuition is basic: if you put a low-information person in charge, then surround them with low-information people, and then try to insulate them from high-information people, then bad things will happen. With the complexity of government, and the stakes of what government does, it’s akin to performing heart surgery without a medical degree; unlicensed and drunk at the wheel of a school bus on the freeway; ambling around the shopping mall holding an AK-47 without even knowing what a trigger is.
In the wake of Brexit and Trump, people are realizing what happens when you put a far-right populist in charge. Marine Le Pen was roundly rejected by a near-supermajority of French, and Angela Merkel is poised to come out on top in Germany. Trump’s average approval rating is now in the thirties, and his many swirling scandals have brought forth whispers of impeachment. Yet the fear that animated these movements won’t be going away anytime soon, and they only exist because of serious malpractice on part of mainstream politicians. By and large, the establishment doesn’t have the answers; but then again, neither does Steve Bannon.
