[Peace-discuss] Peter Beinart: Bill Clinton's lapse into Trumpism

[Robert Naiman]

PETER BEINART  12:48 AM ET

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/bill-clintons-lapse-into-trumpism/493175/


Bill Clinton's Lapse Into Trumpism

In his convention speech, he suggested that Muslims need to earn the rights
that all other Americans enjoy.

I love Bill Clinton. But I didn’t love his speech Tuesday night in
Philadelphia. Given the job of humanizing his wife, he came across as
genuinely smitten. But he failed to do what he’s done in every convention
speech he’s delivered since 1992: tell a story about where America is today
and what can be done to move it forward. He called his wife a great “change
maker” but didn’t define the change America needs right now.

But the worst moment of the speech came near its end, when Clinton began to
riff about the different kinds of people who should join Hillary’s effort.
“If you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes, you’re
obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose
immigration reform over someone that wants to send you back,” he said. Fair
enough. Under any conceivable immigration overhaul, only those undocumented
immigrants who have obeyed the law once in the United States—which includes
paying taxes—will qualify for citizenship. Two sentences later, Clinton
said that, “If you’re a young African American disillusioned and afraid …
help us build a future where no one’s afraid to walk outside, including the
people that wear blue to protect our future.” No problem there. Of course
African Americans should be safe from abusive police, and of course, police
should be safe from the murderers who threaten them.

But in between, Clinton said something dreadful: “If you’re a Muslim and
you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win
and make a future together, we want you.” The problem is in the assumption.
American Muslims should be viewed exactly the same way other Americans are.
If they commit crimes, then they should be prosecuted, just like other
Americans. But they should not have to prove that they “love America and
freedom” and “hate terror” to “stay here.” Their value as Americans is
inherent, not instrumental. Their role as Americans is not to “help us win”
the “war on terror.”

Whether Clinton meant to or not, he lapsed into Trumpism: the implication
that Muslims are a class apart, deserving of special scrutiny and
surveillance, guilty of terrorist sympathies until proven innocent. I think
I understand where the formulation came from. In the 1990s, one of
Clinton’s key New Democratic innovations was his insistence that with
rights, come responsibilities: To receive government assistance, welfare
recipients must work. If people commit crimes, the government will punish
them harshly.

The problem with transferring that formulation to Muslims today is that
Muslims aren’t asking for benefits from the welfare state. They’re simply
asking not to be discriminated against. Clinton’s formulation was like
saying, in 1964, that as long as African Americans eschew violence and love
America, they deserve the right to vote.

The entire tone of the Democratic convention’s first two nights suggests a
defensiveness about Trump’s anti-Muslim attacks. Barely anyone has defended
Barack Obama’s proposal to admit more Syrian refugees. And so, in keeping
with that spirit, Clinton hedged his opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban by
suggesting that America should welcome good Muslims, the ones who don’t
secretly hate America.

There are, to be sure, times for the ideological triangulation that Clinton
made famous in the 1990s. But a major-party nominee calling for a religious
litmus test for entry into the United States is not one of them. It’s a
time for clarity. And Bill Clinton failed to provide it last night, thus
reminding even those of us who admire him that his political instincts
sometimes overwhelm his moral ones.
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