With the midterm elections just three months away, one wonders how much more polarized American politics can get. The political right — represented by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans — is desperately busy tarnishing the other side. We are now hearing some of the most fantastical claims that any party can brandish against its rivals. Some of the most racist too: several members of Congress and senators, and even mayors and governors – not to mention the President himself — are regurgitating highly questionable tropes in public.
Yet at the center of these tropes lies a very simple thing: a fear of the Other. One can assume such a fear to be peculiar to the U.S. or for that matter, the West, but it is more common than you think. We have come to a stage in human history when such fears are not only accepted, but are seen as criteria for, among other things, masculinity. Accordingly, it’s a sign of one’s manliness, or patriotism — which itself has become masculinized these days — to demean your opponent’s ethnicity. Thus, we get endless harangues about Sharia law and how Muslim politicians and candidates are trying to import Islamic fundamentalism into the U.S., even though there’s hardly any evidence for such claims.
At one level, we seem to have little choice other than to be hopeless when confronting these developments. The primary race in Michigan is a litmus test for how things will turn out — whether fear of the Other will trump good, commonsensical, humane values or whether the MAGA right’s embrace of xenophobia will tip the scales.
The rise of this kind of hateful rhetoric is by no means recent, and it is somewhat dangerous to assume that because it is so bad, it will go away soon. Yet there are three takeaways that I think can be useful when charting a way forward for all of us — that is, if we ever survive this and if and when we ever get past this.
The “Othering” of Minorities Is Not New
The first takeaway is that, even if the level of anti-other hysteria now is unprecedented, such hysteria in itself is hardly without precedent. The political right evolves and refines its rhetoric all the time: it has always resorted to the othering of minorities. What has changed is the degree of the othering and not the process itself.
The course of right-wing politics in the U.S. is a striking case in point. In the 1980s, right down to the George W. Bush presidency in the 2000s, the Republican Party embraced many ideals that seem anathema to the Republican Party of today.
On issues like immigration, the likes of Ronald Reagan accepted the premise of assimilation, which is that outsiders coming to the U.S. and joining the “body politic” would benefit the country, its economy and its well-being. This was cloaked in Cold War rhetoric: the Republican and Democratic Parties promoted the U.S. as a beacon of freedom in contrast to communist states. Immigration was accepted as a sine qua non, and both parties enacted policies which made it easier for migrants to blend in.
“A man wrote to me and said: ‘You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’”
Those lines are from one of the last speeches of Ronald Reagan. Such rhetoric would be almost inconceivable in the political right today, which regularly dishes out fear and loathing of the Other, even in AI-generated videos. Back in the day, however, assimilation was promoted and instrumentalized to project a benign image of the U.S. — an image that either no longer exists or can no longer be sustained.
Of course, this did not mean there was no fear of the other, and that it was not then a trope of the right. It was, very much so. Under Reagan, Black and marginalized communities faced the brunt of his onslaught on social services and his law-and-order programs. Presidential campaigns used tropes of welfare queens sucking on the welfare state. The “war on drugs” eventually became a war on minorities. However, despicable though this was, there was the hint of a quid pro quo: those deploying racist messaging kept it within some bounds, and the overall pretense of assimilation was sustained by both parties. This has since been thrown out. Today, the U.S. Defense Secretary goes to Europe and slams its governments for allowing “invasion” on their shores, ironically invoking Reagan.
“Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?... The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary. As our great President Ronald Reagan once said, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Notice how the rhetoric has changed: from America — and the West – as a shining beacon of hope which opens its arms to all, it has now become a site of darkness and constant invasion. Whereas assimilation was valued before, now it is cast in a negative light and is seen as dooming the very notion of civilization to extinction.
No Vision for the World
The second takeaway is that fear of the other doesn’t represent a movement of ideas but a movement bereft of them. More importantly, it also reflects a level of insecurity. This is applicable not just to racist tropes but also the othering of women and LGBTQ+ people by the right. As Louis Theroux notes in his brilliant unpacking of the “manosphere,” misogyny is essentially a reflection of male insecurity and the manosphere has become a way of milking money out of that insecurity. This is true of othering in other respects: the right finds it so necessary to demonize Muslims and tar even the likes of Barack Obama because it has no alternative. I keep returning to this point, but it needs to be emphasized: the political right has a vision of the world, but no vision for it, at least not yet.
This was not always so. The right was once defined by concrete ideas and dominated by an overarching adulation of the past. It was able to compromise and to accept competing ideas, which showed that they could adapt to new contexts and new political environments and become a force to reckon with. Since the early 2000s, however, the right has become radicalized and disfigured. As I have mentioned in an earlier essay, the old conservative right, represented by Never Trump Republicans in the U.S. and the Tories in the U.K., are now fighting two rivals: the center-left and the one-fringe-but-now-establishment far right. This is not to say that the conservative right which now touts itself as moderate is substantively better than the far right. Yet, at a certain point, it was defined by ideas which, even if one disagreed with them, could form the basis of compromise.
“Many conservatives… accept that the cost of religious freedom is that they have to live alongside people with different belief systems and values and in the midst of a rambunctious culture that permits radical questioning of all kinds. Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance… embody a different form of politics. With particular ideas and a MAGA intellectual elite behind them, they are seeking to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share his vision.”
The Deployment of “Othering” Worldwide
Of course, we should not pretend that all this is applicable only to the U.S. In other countries, across the “West” but also the supposedly anti-colonial, anti-imperialist “Global South,” we are seeing the deployment of othering, even in the most ostensibly democratic contexts. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the unearthing of mass graves in a site in the northern province has generated horror and sympathy — but also racist backlash, in particular jibes from extremists who openly question the identity of the victims in those graves. Yet what such sentiments, whether in the U.S., in Europe, India or Sri Lanka, reveal is a fundamental insecurity and a lack of ideas. As Louis Theroux argues at the end of his documentary, these groups unravel, collapse, and are finally undone by their own contradictions.
The third takeaway is the simplest, yet at one level the most sobering: that we cannot afford to lose the fight to achieve an alternative vision. The point is obvious, but it needs to be emphasized constantly. The fracturing of the MAGA right may not be enough to bring down the MAGA that is now ruling the roost in the U.S. Yet over time, it can be a rallying call for those who are at the receiving end of the racist, sexist “anti-woke” tropes of the right. In this battle of ideas, none of us can afford to be passive or inactive. The spate of protests against the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the ongoing dismemberment of Gaza and the West Bank reveals that we are a long way from achieving our vision. But we are on our way there.
