Foreign Policy: Trump's hate speech has deep roots in American religious fanaticism

US President Donald Trump's influence on American politics and society will last much longer than his presidency, and the divisions across the country do not appear to be limited in duration.

Contemporary writers recall the saying of the Canadian political scientist David French (died 2010), who said that "preserving the unity of the United States is not guaranteed, as there is no cultural, religious, political or social force capable of uniting Americans more than its ability to separate them."

In an article for the US magazine Foreign Policy, the two authors, J.

The.

Tomlin and Thomas Likac that "Trumpism" is not a coherent doctrine, as there is no grand strategy that brings it together, but rather a mixture of ideologies to renew culture wars, cling to power, and deep-rooted corruption in favor of his family and economic allies.

Most of all, the ideological and material systems of violence against groups that the administration defines as "the other", but nonetheless an old idea in the United States, has not completely separated from its religious roots.

Trump has relied repeatedly on fear of fictitious opponents, to avoid responsibility for his failures, and to determine who belongs and who does not belong to American society, according to the authors.

The most recent example of this is the executive order that he issued to establish a committee to confront the New York Times project called "Project 1619", which was supposed to study the consequences of slavery in the United States, and the two writers considered that Trump with that position wanted to exclude the other and reject his version of history.

A History of American Fear

The article considers that American policy has a long history of promoting fear and hatred of the "other", and among the first of those policies was anti-Catholicism and the symbolic language associated with it, "anti-papacy."

Sectarian battles between opposition religious groups often turned into accusations of papal affiliation that were launched to intimidate and contempt in the midst of the Protestant Christian immigration community that dominated the country's settlement policy at the time of the founding of the United States.

And when the ruling conservative Quaker Party in the colonial state of Pennsylvania tried to prevent the political domination of other groups and preserve its rule in the face of the accelerating minority situation, those deprived of their rights described their enemies as "papists", a term used to alienate and exclude, just as the term "socialist" is used among the right at the time. Current.

For their part, Quakers accused the mobilized voters of rigging the elections and pretending to demand more freedom, while harboring a radical agenda for equality and wealth redistribution as is common in contemporary reality, according to the authors.

The politics of the colonial era have changed, but the most successful expressions of fear of that period remain.

Anti-Catholic language

In the early and pre-war period of the Republic, the anti-Catholic rhetoric switched again to targeting the country's new immigrants.

With the outbreak of European immigration waves, followers of nationalism within American society used anti-Catholic metaphors to complain about the employment of recent immigrants and their right to vote, according to the Foreign Policy article.

Anyone perceived as a threat to Anglo-Saxon culture was stigmatized with violent anti-papist rhetoric, and Peruvians, Evangelicals and some economic elites demanded restrictions on immigration, demanded that Americans born on foreign land be deprived of privileges, and a coalition of hate-spreading groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Christian fundamentalists carried out This slogan is strongly promoted in the 20th century, and it seems they will continue to carry it throughout the current century.

A class of political leaders has repeatedly responded to them, to motivate their constituents and potential supporters with calls, subtle and not hidden, to exclude the unwanted "other".

Trump's reliance on this kind of religious symbolism has not been hidden, as he has been openly claiming that Christians are under attack in the United States, and that he is resisting this supposed repression.

Much has been written about the various branches of Christianity that support Trump in this endeavor, such as Christian Zionists, and evangelicals in general.

travel ban

In this context came the travel ban that he issued against many Muslim-majority countries, his violent rhetoric on Muslims in America and abroad, and numerous executive laws that prohibit "Islamic Sharia law" by the state legislatures of the states controlled by the Republican Party throughout the country. .

While these are the most obvious examples of Trump's emphasis on violence toward any religious group other than white Protestants who support his policies, there are many others, for example, hate crimes against Sikhs escalated during the Trump administration.

A number of Trump's executive orders and statements and those of his supporters have been powerful defenses of colonialism, and have led to real violence against Native Americans and even religious sites on the country's southern border.

Trump's historic and enduring hatred of Latino immigrants is embodied in his rhetoric, border policies, the wall, concentration camps, and the traditional rhetoric of anti-immigrant doctrine, which is inherently anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, as the authors put it.

It is certain that Trump did not invent this political language, and it is also unlikely that he was aware of its long existence in the history of the United States and the history of the language he learned, but he stands within a long tradition with conservative political leaders who adopted the conspiratorial method within American society.

The two writers conclude that Trump's presidency will end anyway, and there will be a tendency to pretend that the country has returned to normal, but the terrifying truth is that religious violence is historically a natural thing in the United States, and when Trump goes, this violence will not disappear with his disappearance.