About that executive order mess - ahhh - well, it’s a mess. Putting the actual merits of the policy aside for a moment, like others I see three disturbing elements here: the incompetence, that the incompetence has surrendered any hope of a rational ‘Islamist ideology threat’ narrative to the rhetorical predations of the left which is in active irrational denial of such a threat even existing - and that this whole thing is evidence of the Bannon wing of the Trump administration being in control of the Oval Office. All of that is just flat out bad - for Trump sceptics who were regardless willing to give the guy a chance because what the hell choice did you have this mess is a manifestation of their fears: political inexperience and the iffy contours of Trump’s personality leading to bad decisions - and Bannon morphing into the Trump whisperer - him being granted a permanent seat on the NSC would seem to cement that unnerving reality.
As for the policy itself - to me it’s beside the point and if it had been rolled out with anything resembling competence would have had little meaningful impact - it looks like red meat for the anti-Muslim crowd or maybe more accurately grandstanding for the anti-Muslim crowd - and it certainly doesn’t serve the cause of a rationalist approach to the Islamist threat which I see as the only hope [understand, when I say ‘anti-Muslim’ I mean a populist push back against the progressive elite’s agenda - it takes the form in Europe and the US of an ‘anti-Muslim’ appeal because the thinking of the liberal elite seems governed by a pronounced anti-Western animus that drives their agenda and worldview - which brings their agenda and worldview in line with Islamist ideology - so I don’t see the ‘anti-Muslim’ appeal of the populist movements as being racist - I see it rather as the clash of civilizations manifesting itself at street level in the lives of average citizens who quite rightly view the progressive elite as the enemy - quite rightly because the leftist cultural elite has clearly been waging war against the Western/Christian ethos of the white working class for at least a generation now - that it has gotten to the point that merely expressing an opinion, no matter how reasonably argued, that seems opposed to the progressive agenda can cost a person their job or worse is proof of just how advanced this war is - that the left is fine with forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortions but wants to throw you in jail if you dare question the ‘settled’ science of climate change or assert gay marriage strictly as a matter of logic to be nonsensical or use actual historical facts and verbatim quotes from the Koran and Sunna to criticise Islam pretty much defines an unbridgeable cultural divide - and it’s the extremist ideological chauvinism of the left that makes it unbridgeable]
Trump is president because the left has moved very far to the left and that move seems to be built upon a foundational desire to impugn, demonise and demean working class, middle class, often christian values associated predominantly with ‘middle America’ and therefore often, with some accuracy, simply referred to as the ‘white working class’. This contempt the coastal liberal elite seems to feel for middle America has incited a counter reaction - Trump was well suited for a variety of reasons to become the ‘spokesperson’ for this discontent - although I think Christie would have done a good job of harnessing this discontent too had not ‘bridgegate’ ruined his political brand. In short, an ideology built almost entirely around identity politics fueled by a contempt for middle class values created, predictably I guess, a counter reactive identity group formed within that reviled working class - essentially, Newton’s third law applied to politics and culture. Key to this disgruntled new identity group’s thinking [and it’s testament to just how far left the left has moved that being a ‘typical American’ is now to have an ‘identity’ under threat] - but key to their discontent is a hatred of ‘political correctness’ which they view - rightly - as the weapon the left wields, through its media and institutional outlets, to beat down dissent, delegitimize debate and impose progressive orthodoxy on all - the political ‘establishment’, cowed by fear of this weapon, were seen as being complicit. Not hard then to see why Trump appealed to these people and why they were not interested at all in someone like Bush.
[as said, Islam becomes a focus for this populist backlash not because of racism but because of culture - cultural agitation and racism are often seen as the same thing but that is true for the most part only in a superficial way - that race enters into cultural differences is generally just an accident of history and geography - the cultural divide between Iowan farmers and the Hollywood elite for instance has nothing to do with race and everything to do with two cultures that do not fit well together - just like Islamist culture and the West - but that the left insists on labelling the latter cultural divide ‘racist’ to the point where if Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant reformation and a man who once called the Pope the devil, were to reappear today in his country of birth and criticize Islam the way he criticized Catholicism he’d be tossed in jail for a hate crime speaks volumes re what's motivating the populist backlash - it’s quite remarkable that in countries whose histories were in many ways defined by religious dissent it is now, in order to appease one specific religion, considered a crime to express religious dissent, which oddly enough aligns the liberal elite with the thinking of the Catholic Church of 500 years ago - I mean, such thinking essentially renders the Anglican Church the product of a hate crime - one can see why anger re the appeasing of Islamist ideology becomes a sort of proxy for pushing back against the anti-Western animus that drives the progressive agenda]
But to get back to the executive order - knowing why Trump won tells us nothing at all about how he’ll do in the job - the troublesome executive order may be the first clear indication that he will not do well. Much will depend on how the administration adjusts to this significant misstep - if the ‘loser’ in this adjustment ain’t Bannon then count me as worried.
