Finally, Republican leaders are speaking out against the bigotry and hate spewed by popular presidential contender Donald Trump.
On Monday, Trump called for “ a total and complete shutdown” of all Muslims entering the United States. He later compared such a move to President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. That’s an incident this nation looks back upon with shame. The U.S. issued a formal apology — and $20,000 to each surviving victim — in 1988, when Republican Ronald Reagan was president.
House Speaker Paul Ryan took the unusual step Tuesday of condemning Trump’s comments, although he did not name him.
“This is not conservatism,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, said during brief remarks. “What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for and, more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”
He noted that Muslims serve in Congress and the U.S. military. He also said “the vast, vast, vast majority” of Muslims believe in “plurality, freedom, democracy and individual rights.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, no lightweight when it comes to rounding up, imprisoning, torturing and killing Islamic insurgents, also condemned Trump. Banning a whole religion, he said during an interview with conservative Hugh Hewitt, “goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”
These condemnations aren’t likely to calm Trump’s rhetoric or diminish his support among a vocal sector of the American public. But they are an important — if belated — reminder that there are some lines that can’t be crossed. Trump also has suggested that Muslims in the U.S. be required to register with the government and hold special IDs, echoing Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
The difficulty for Republican leaders will be to move the dominant strain of dialogue in their party away from the fringes and back toward the center. Republican condemnations don’t absolve them from years of using race, sexual orientation, religion and immigration to rally their base of voters. Just because their rhetoric is not as extreme as Trump’s does not excuse it.
Recent polls show that many Republicans hold extreme views of Muslims. A September poll by Rasmussen, for example, found that 73 percent of Republicans would not vote for a Muslim for president. Thirty-five percent of Democrats said they wouldn’t as did 48 percent of those not enrolled in a party.
Another Rasmussen survey in November found that 60 percent of likely American voters opposed settling Syrian refugees in their state.
The words of Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith amid the Red Scare led by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, when many were labeled Communists, remain appropriate.
“Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of ‘know nothing, suspect everything’ attitudes,” she said on June 1, 1950.
Of her belief that Republicans must triumph over the ineffective Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman, she added: “Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
Sensible Americans cannot let this country’s politics become governed by fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.
