I am beginning to develop some sympathy for Rep. Ilhan Omar.
She seems like a dangerous Islamist, sure, and a likely socialist, too — so two big red checkmarks against her — but she does understand that the foreign policy of the United States towards the Islamic East has not been a matter of sweetness and light. It has, instead, consisted of a long string of interventions that too often look ominously like state terrorism against civilian populations. So when folks on the right express horror at the apparent moral equivalency she draws between the British and U.S. governments, on the one hand, and Al Qaida, on the other, I shrug.
Just a bit, at least.
She is in many ways both the prettiest and most intelligent of the four “women of color” U.S. Representatives now known as “the Squad.” But my sympathy for her is muted, for she does seem like an ingrate, unable to articulate an appreciation for what is good about these United States, and seemingly unwilling to repudiate what is bad among her own political allies, the aforementioned Al Qaida as well as the violent communist/anarchist/insurrectionist mob antifa.
Thinking primarily about Rep. Ilhan Omar, apparently, Donald Trump tweeted up a storm on Sunday:
Trump got called a racist for this, of course. While he doesn’t mention race, progressives and other feeble-minded people made the connection that he must’ve been thinking of the four first-term Congresswomen who have cliqued up around Sandy Ocasio (known by her nom d’politique Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even better by her initialism, AOC, the other contender for the Hottie award), all of partially non-European, non-Nordic descent. You know, “women of color.” But his remarks only made sense if directed against Rep. Omar alone, for she was the only one of the three born outside the country, in Somalia.
So how were these remarks not racist? Well, Trump provided the ideological/cross-cultural context: of coming “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” That is the context: political, ideological, focusing especially upon comparative institutions.
Much has been made how the phrase “go back to X” is a “racist trope.” And while I will not deny that there is some racism involved in some usages, that was not its primary function. I remember the “trope.” I was alive in the Sixties. It was not primarily used against brown people. At least, I never heard it like that. It was used against communists. And comsymps. And anyone leftist to a perceived dangerous extent. The most oft-used formulation was, I kid you not, “go back to Russia!”
It was often — in fact usually — deployed against non-Russians.
It was an anti-commie, pro-American gambit.
So, for a variant of it to be directed against four socialists (forgive me, “democratic socialists”!), does not back up the whole racist charge. It seems to be what it was obviously intended to be: an attempt to make an ideological point and to criticize the four for ingratitude and a general anti-Americanism.
Oh, and also to force Speaker Nancy Pelosi to defend them, thus tarring the Democratic Party with the antics and immoral stance and rank unpopularity of The Squad. (His line about Pelosi and “free travel arrangements” is hilarious when you remember a specific moment when Trump cancelled a foreign junket of Nancy’s, during the government shutdown a few months back.)
The general and specific reactions to the Trump versus the Squad twitterstorm was mostly idiotic, of course, including the elaborations made by the president himself, who while clarifying some things (stepping back a bit) botched up a few other facts, as well. As is his wont.
But how, you ask, does any of this account for my growing sympathy for the Somali-American jihadist-socialist pol? Well, telling her to “go back to Somalia” stirs my sympathy for I, too, have been razzed in such a manner: “why don’t you move to Somalia?”
By leftists.
Yes, this is particularly rich.
You see, until fairly recently, it was a game progressives liked to play, taunting libertarians with the Somalia Gambit. Their argument, such as it was, ran like this: libertarians don’t like government, and many of them talk about “anarchy”; Somalia (for a time) did not have a State; therefore, libertarians should move to their utopia, Somalia!
It is rather witless, as syllogisms go, but I tried to be tolerant of the benighted progressives who engaged in it. After all, many libertarians do not make clear enough what it is they oppose and what it is they support. And what are those opposed and promoted institutions? Well! Let me keep this short. Even the anarcho-capitalists, please remember, do not want any old stateless society, they want a society with institutions in place to defend rights. Somalia did not have that, therefore it is and could be no libertarian utopia. As Benjamin Tucker put it, Anarchy is freedom of libertarians defended by libertarians. It is not the statelessness of people without much interest in freedom as understood in terms of individual rights. (This is not to say that my brand of libertarianism is anarchist. Or that it is not. A long discussion would be required to make clear all that.) Of course, progressives generally know so little history and so little anthropology and so little legal theory and so little anything that they are largely unaware that rights can and have been defended by institutions not demanding territorial coercive monopoly, which Max Weber and Barack Obama informed us serve as the hallmark of the State.
The droll aspect to all this? Those witless leftists who taunted libertarians to “go to Somalia” were doing something not too dissimilar from what Trump was doing: defending their beloved government while expressing their umbrage at their targets’ ingratitude. The implicit message to the left’s Somalia Gambit being “you libertarians pretend to hate our State, but the State does so much for you! Go to somewhere where there is no such State and see how you like it!” Likewise, much of the oomph behind Trump’s taunt is to tweak the ingratitude and lack of perspective of the Somali-born Omar, who never seems to have a good thing to say about America.
So now you can see my emerging sympathy for the Hottest of the Squad. She was told to go back to her Somalian hellhole while I have been told to go to my Somalian utopia!
Six of one, half dozen of the other . . . intension/extension!
I am, of course, not nearly as anti-American as is the Somalian-American lady in the hijab. I am not so much anti-American as Ameri-skeptic. Also, and unlike Rep. Omar, I feel it incumbent upon myself to try to convince nationalists and globalists of my sort of anti-nationalism — she seems uninterested in convincing anyone not already in her political tribe. Just like most leftists, today. It is all Them versus Us. The puritanically moralistic prigs versus The Racist Deplorables!
And I definitely do not want to subsidize more immigrants, legal or illegal, from anywhere.
But especially from Somalia.
twv
Wirkman Comment 