Today, it doesn't seem quite so funny—at least not to the 11 million people living in America Trump says he wants to deport. Fuckface von Clownstick could still very well flame out before a single primary vote is cast, but there's no getting the toothpaste back in the tube: A major presidential candidate waged a virulent, unabashed campaign of incitement against Latino immigrants—and was greeted with rabid adulation from millions of Americans.
Trump's candidacy did not grow in a vacuum. That a rival like Jeb Bush, a Spanish-speaking gringo with a Mexican-American family, would mimic Trump by repeating some diluted swill about " anchor babies," speaks to the pervasive nativism in American politics today. Over the past decade, the anti-immigration wing of the far-right fringe has reemerged from the shadows, led by armed vigilante groups like the Minutemen.
With the passage of state laws like Arizona SB 1070 and Alabama HB 56—legislation that have terrorized Hispanic communities and empowered coercive police action against them—the fringe is no longer the fringe. Nativism is as robust in America today as it has been in decades.
And why shouldn't it be? "When the perceived primary environment in which a person lives is directly threatened," academic David H. Bennett wrote in his 1995 book The Party of Fear:
The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement , "then individual life stresses can no longer be handled; peculiar and disruptive forms of stress demand new forms of resocialization and adaptation... frequently they focus on elimination of alien elements and influences."
Unsurprisingly, in the wake of dislocating economic crises, widening inequality, and rapid social upheaval, white Americans are spoiling for a scapegoat. It's easy to see how they could see the mainstream media dismiss Trump as ridiculous and draw comparisons to the way their own concerns— many of which are legitimate—are dismissed by "elites" and ignored by the powerful.
The grievances and resentments Trump exploits in his speeches, as pioneered by segregationist George Wallace and perfected by Nixon—whose "Silent Majority" Trump is now invoking—bubble just below the surface of polite discourse. And what better way to understand the grievances than by diving into the political cesspool, as it coheres
