Trump’s Wall is the New Confederate Monument

James Bennet’s first inexplicable reaction to the ascension of Donald Trump was to hire sub-replacement-level pundits who represent the miscroscopic constituency of never-Trump Republicans (cf. such recent comedy classics as “the 2018 midterms were excellent. news. for. the. Republican. Party,” “the 2018 midterms will be excellent. news. for. the. Republican. Party and your unconventional piercings are making me uncomfortable now get out of my lobby,” and “My Trip to Australia, By Bari Weiss, Age 7.“). But he’s now shifted course and hired smart people who are well-informed and can write, what a novel idea. Most recently, Jamelle Bouie:

But the paramount reason for resisting this deal, and any other, is what it would mean symbolically to erect the wall or any portion of it. Like Trump himself, it would represent a repudiation of the pluralism and inclusivity that characterizes America at its best. It would stand as a lasting reminder of the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history, a monument to this particular drive to preserve the United States as a white man’s country.

In fact, you can almost think of the wall as a modern-day Confederate monument, akin to those erected during a similar but far more virulent period of racist aggression in the first decades of the 20th century. Built as shrines to white racial dominance as much as memorials for any particular soldier, they were part of a larger, national drive to uphold white supremacy against what one nativist thinker termed a “rising tide of color.”

This manifested itself across American society. At the grass roots, there was the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan, inspired by D.W. Griffith’s heroic 1915 depiction of Reconstruction-era “night riders” in “The Birth of a Nation.” The Klan strove to secure the power of the white petite bourgeois against perceived threats from capital and labor as well as uphold a stridently anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-black vision of white patriarchal authority. At the elite level, likewise, lawmakers and intellectuals fretted about the impact of an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as China and Japan. Their answer was something of a legislative wall — the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which sharply limited European immigration and all but banned it from much of Asia. (A former influential member of the Trump administration praised that law for its severe restrictions on who could enter the United States.)

The wall of Trump’s rhetoric and imagination channels all of this, up to and including the nativist tropes that associate nonwhite immigrants with crime and disorder. “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!” the president said in a Wednesday morning tweet.

It is true that Democrats have backed both barriers and harsh border policies in the past. President Barack Obama repeatedly offered strict immigration enforcement in return for Republican buy-in to comprehensive reforms. Now Democratic leaders have committed to new funding for additional border security. And the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, has floated the possibility that Democrats could be moved on funding for the wall, provided it’s a “smart” wall. If, beyond Trump, the larger concern is policies that militarize the border and dehumanize migrants, then Democrats have had a significant part in creating the status quo.

But the president’s wall still looms as a racist provocation, a total repudiation of what the historian John Higham called “America’s cosmopolitan faith — a concept of nationality that stresses the diversity of the nation’s origins, the egalitarian dimension of its self-image, and the universality of its founding principles.” For Trump the wall signals his commitment to upholding existing hierarchies and strengthening their material foundations; for his supporters it validates their fears of cultural conquest. For the targets of their anxiety and aggression, it is a threat.

Excellent stuff. It ain’t Maureen Dowd’s op-ed page anymore.