This all reminds me of the loyalty oaths used most often against Communist Party members and so-called "fellow travelers" of the immediate post-WWII period. The Truman administration went along with right wing and then-increasingly midstream media demands that federal workers sign loyalty oaths, and that the Truman administration step up removal from government of anyone with so-called "Communist" sympathies. The Truman administration complied and did so, but with sometimes with less than consistent or full enforcement.
Enter a recently elected US Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy in 1950. McCarthy was reckless in his numbers, claimed to hold a document about Communist Party members in the State Department he did not have, etc. But his main argument was that the Truman administration was not effectively using the powers the Congress, and Truman's administration, gave Truman and his Cabinet to "root out Communist subversion." So what we who have studied the period from the end of WWII through the early 1960s know as the Red Scare saw, in the period from 1950-1956, a period mainstream pundits like to call the "McCarthy Era," when the "Red-hunting" and "Red-baiting" went into overdrive.
In this context of separating families who are either seeking a better life or more often asylum from Mexico, Central and South America, the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations did do some of the things that right wingers and corporate media punditry wanted in cracking down on such migrations. However, and this important, it first remains a fact that immigration from Mexico was much higher in the 1990s, starting post-NAFTA in 1993. The NAFTA let American agribusiness continue getting US government subsidies to flood the Mexican markets, which drove many subsistence Mexican farmers off their land, and causing them to head "El Norte." Hence, as some have posted on social media, some of the disgusting remarks from the odious Dianne Feinstein (D--what a joke--CA) just as the NAFTA was being passed, and of course Feinstein was a big booster of the NAFTA and knew this immigration was coming. How this woman has survived all these years, including this year, with her Republican mindset, is part of the problem the Democratic Party continues to face.
Bill Clinton, as president, pushed through the Reagan-Bush negotiated NAFTA with more Republican support and conservative Democratic Party support in 1993. Bill Clinton also knew the immigration was going to start up again--but damn the immigration torpedoes, full speed ahead, he and his corporate oriented allies cried. So he gave in to right wing demands to do "something" about increased migrations from Mexico and parts South in 1995, by starting to beef up border security, and signing laws and executive orders that form the basis of where we are today. Bush II, ironically, let up a bit as Mexican immigration began to go down, but missed the other blowback from American foreign policy, i.e. the rise in immigration from Central America, where gangs had become the norm following the significant number of government ordered killings of those in civil societies (teachers, union leaders, nurses, doctors, and clergy, yes, clergy) by US back military dictatorships starting in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s (see Penny Lernoux's "Cry of the People" about Carter era priest killings and going into overdrive under Reagan starting in 1981). These immigrants included both those who were victims of gangs as well as gang members themselves, who established in various U.S. cities Northern branches of those gangs. Obama came in and cracked down on those gangs, and ironically, with the Great Recession of 2008, the number of immigrants from even those nations began to decline significantly. But then, people in Central America, who were victimized by gang crime and corporate-military domination in those nations, started sending their children alone out of desperation, which is where the centers really got going...
Let's therefore be clear: What Trump and Sessions are doing is using the rhetoric of their right wing allies that led to laws and executive orders that Republican dominated Congresses, and, Clinton and Obama, under their political pressure, put into place. Trump and Sessions are, substantively, twisting those previously enacted laws and are taking advantage of those laws, under vastly different circumstance of much less migration, in ways in which neither Obama and Clinton intended, so that it is not a matter of simply "following 'Democrat' law...." Also, such language again lets Republican Congresses and right wing pundits on television and radio off the hook, which is part of the cynical game behind enactment of the cruel policies that right wingers want. For right wingers and let's call out our white Baby Boomers here, particularly those who call themselves "religious," it is almost always about punishment and cruelty, sprinkled with an extra unhealthy dose of racism.
However, unlike the time of Joseph McCarthy, there is no behinds-the-scene president to stop some of the worst aspects of the policies being followed. Sadly, we've elected, via the Electoral College, Joseph R. McCarthy as president. As with McCarthy, Trump is a reckless, mean-spirited, ignorant, racist demagogue, with henchmen such as Jefferson Davis Sessions, who sees the world through Jim Crow and other racist tropes. And as this saga of caged children unfolds, we see the majority of white Baby Boomers finding all sorts of ways to justify this, whether through outright applause from those who style themselves most "Christian," listening to lies from the likes of Baby Boomer Red Baiter Ann Coulter ("child actors"), or, from the left wing side of the political ledger, focusing on Obama's and Clinton's failures in a way that tends to numb us from what is happening NOW.
And, with this national dialogue failure, my wife and mother continue to wonder why I wrote "Boomerang"....As I said to my wife last night, I just don't know if the nation can survive white Baby Boomers at this point. Millennials and Digital Kids who are of all races and ethnicities, and minority voters in Baby Boomer age, will need to step up their voting this fall to turn Congress Democratic. The Democrats elected this time will not be the same overall as previous Democrats of recent vintage, and may be more like New Dealers who are not racist or sexist. Not all of them. Not by a long shot. But it will be much, much better for the Commonweal than what we currently have. And hopefully Special Prosecutor and former FBI head, Robert Mueller, may finally start by September some indictments of Trump administration and campaign officials, and maybe Trump himself, for obstruction of justice and the like. What is most ironic about the McCarthy loyalty oath analogy of course is that Trump himself can be seen as an agent for a foreign power, the same one McCarthy was railing against in the 1950s. One may quote Karl Marx again and talk about History repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Perhaps on that level of "Traitor Trump," as I mischievously like to style him, but with the children in cages, this is definitely a tragedy combined with cruelty. Yes, yes, I know all about the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, and US policy in Central America that concentrated on killing priests and raping and killing priests and nuns. But, can we just say right now that this is cruel and needs to stop?
UPDATE June 20, 2018: More cynicism with more cruelty to come from Traitor Trump.
UPDATE June 20, 2018: More cynicism with more cruelty to come from Traitor Trump.
