On Tuesday, former First Lady Laura Bush attributed our national bigotry to a phase, like a high schooler suddenly and inexplicably calling all of her friends, “Dude.”
“We go through these periods where we’re xenophobic and we’re just gonna stay home and we’re gonna be on our own and we’re doing fine and to hell with the rest of the world, and we might be going through a little bit of that right now,” Bush said on a Politico panel on Tuesday evening.
“But it’s not a smart policy for the United States, and it certainly is not a policy of everyone in the United States.”
Props to Mrs. Bush for identifying the obvious fact, but retract those props for failing to recognize that America’s xenophobia is not a harmless, ebbing trend like the Republican view of Earth’s temperature. These things are real and insidious, and stem from a global history of white macho entitlement. We did this.
Yesterday, about two-thirds of Republicans in the five primary states that voted (Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri) reportedly said that they support a temporary ban on non-citizen Muslims from entering the country. According to the Associated Press, about four in 10 Republican voters want all undocumented immigrants to be deported.