And Whether Approved By A Cowed Public Or Not
“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” is gay racist philosopher George Santayana’s best known aphorism. We don’t want to relive the darkest chapters of human history, do we? But over 76 million of our countrymen (nearly half the voters) elected Trump president anyway. Let’s contemplate for a moment the dangers of propaganda and the consequences of normalizing xenophobic and exclusionary policies and the ease with which public opinion can be swayed in times of economic or social anxiety.
Yesterday, Ariel Edwards-Levy, writing for CNN, noted that polls suggest growing support for Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Let’s not forget that the MAGA movement, as ugly as it is, is a continuation of a long, cyclical history of American nativism and xenophobia. What sets each wave apart are the specific groups targeted and the particular fears exploited, but the underlying themes remain remarkably consistent: an imagined “real America” under threat, the scapegoating of “outsiders,” and the political mobilization of identity-based fears.
Xenophobia has been deeply ingrained in American history, as American as apple pie. The MAGA agenda, with its emphasis on “America First” and a return to a perceived golden age, is far from the first nativist wave to gain national prominence. Historical parallels abound, revealing recurring patterns of exclusionary politics tied to economic anxiety, cultural change and the manipulation of identity-based fears. And that started in colonial days. In some ways John Adams was the Trump of his day and his Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 targeted immigrants, particularly from France and Ireland, who were deemed subversive. The 19th Century was marred by the Know Nothing Party, the Chinese Exclusion Act and both rampant antisemitism and anti-Catholicism, all based on claims that Asians, Jews and Catholics could not assimilate into “American” culture.
Edwards-Levy reported that support for deporting undocumented migrants has grown since Trump’s first term— “as have nativist sentiments more broadly. But the level of public backing for mass deportation varies significantly depending on the framing of the question, suggesting there are limits to the public appetite for denying any pathway to citizenship to people in the US illegally.
Trump made promises to carry out mass deportations a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign. His allies have already begun planning for ways to carry that out.”
CNN’s national exit polling this year found that immigration was a strong issue for Trump in this election, but it doesn’t suggest a mandate for mass deportation. Voters gave Trump a roughly 9-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris on trust to handle immigration, according to the latest data.
But they also said, by about 56% to 40%, that most undocumented immigrants in the US should be offered a chance to apply for legal status, rather than being deported to their home countries. One-quarter of Trump voters said they favored a pathway to citizenship, while only about 9% of voters who backed Harris said they wanted to see most undocumented immigrants deported. Nearly 4 in 10 of Hispanic voters who backed Trump said that they favored a path to citizenship.
…Surveys that ask respondents to choose between deportation and a path to citizenship, meanwhile, often find more support for the latter. In CNN’s final pre-election survey this year, two-thirds of registered voters said that the government’s top priority for dealing with immigrants living illegally in the US should be developing a plan to allow some to become legal residents.
In a summer Pew Research Center poll, 59% of registered voters said there should be a way for undocumented immigrants who meet certain requirements to stay in the country, with 37% saying there should not be, and just one-third saying there should be a national law enforcement effort to deport all immigrants living illegally in the country.
Regardless of framing, however, national polls agree on a rise in support for deportation policies over recent years, coupled with a broader increase in nativist sentiment.
In Nazi Germany, mechanisms for gauging genuine public opinion, like free polls or independent media, were nonexistent. The Nazi regime's extensive use of propaganda, alongside an atmosphere of fear and repression, shaped public opinion. Approval of state actions, including anti-Jewish policies, was driven by indoctrination and coercion rather than genuine consensus. Still, by the late 1930s, many Germans accepted or were indifferent to the exclusion of Jews from public life and were fine with the Nuremberg Laws. However, outright support for mass deportation, let alone genocide, is less clear. Some Germans supported deportation as part of the Nazis’ rhetoric about a “Jew-free” Germany, but many were unaware of or disbelieved the full extent of Nazi plans.
Nazis justified deportations as part of a “racial purification” narrative, while MAGA discourse tends to use economic or legal arguments. Just as many Germans were passively complicit due to indifference or fear, the polls shared by CNN suggest a gap between active support for harsh deportation measures and broader support for pathways to citizenship. The rise in public xenophobia in the U.S. parallels the nationalistic rhetoric used by the Nazis to garner support for exclusionary policies in Germany.
I have to say that while there are parallels in terms of Hitler’s government's ability to shape public opinion around “mass deportations” and what we have been able to see of Trump’s— and in-house Nazi Stephen Miller’s— plans, have to confront some differences between Germany and the U.S. The fully totalitarian context of Nazi Germany eliminated dissent and alternative viewpoints, while the democratic context of the U.S.— if shaky— still allows for competing narratives and outright challenges to MAGA/Project 2025 policies, even amid ginned up and rising nativist sentiment. We're not them, at least not yet.
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