Now the time is the early 21st century; the time of the 2024 primary elections in the state of Michigan, USA, to be exact. A national columnist has come for the sort of coffee-shop interview in which columnists often plumb the local mind. However, his appointed interviewee is neither a local nor some common coffee-drinker, but Nihad Awad, a Palestinian-American immigrant based in Washington, DC, and National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After the massacre in southern Israel perpetrated from Gaza by Hamas last October, his public remarks on the subject ranged over hill and dale of common decency in a "catch me out if you can" manner that ended in his being caught out. The Biden administration condemned his palpable callousness and stopped cooperating with his organization.
Awad went to Michigan, where a noteworthy proportion of the population is of Arab descent, to urge a Democratic revolt against President Biden for continuing to support Israel despite its intense bombing of Gaza. That sounds pretty much like a normal campaign to influence public policy, but Awad's conversation with Charles M. Blow of The New York Times produced this:
He doesn't only want Biden to be politically corrected; he wants him politically crushed.
...
Awad said he doesn't like Trump and doesn't welcome a second Trump term, but he's prepared to accept that outcome for the sake of punishing Biden. "I'm going to live under Trump, because I survived under Trump, because he's my enemy," he says. "I cannot live under someone who pretends to be my friend."
This man's compulsion to punish at any cost and his Bronze Age patter about "my enemy" and "my friend" belong to the Mideast, not the Midwest. In a candid moment, he displayed the nihilism of his ancestral culture more than was good for an American political cause. Reader comments on the interview were preponderantly negative. Some readers deplored the language of vengeance; others expressed alarm at what they were beginning to see as the wholesale importation of a foreign feud. Both the interview and the general reaction to it should be eye-opening. Immigrants to the Land of the Free mustn't think they can make so free as to set up arrogant cultures-in-exile replete with all their ancient hatreds and morbid habits: the very plagues which many people have tried to escape by moving to America. And liberal-minded Americans ought not to believe in welcoming immigrants on the immigrants' terms. The novel form of nation that defines itself by its political ethos doesn't need demographic continuity to remain itself, but it does need continuity — which for some immigrants will mean rebirth — at the level of political ethos.
I chose to approach my subject, which I call by the disposable name of entrification, through a case that features concrete entry into the US before abstract entry into a sphere of political influence. It boasts a clear beginning, a fairly striking middle, and at least the risk of a self-inflicted end. However, entrification is not some effect of immigration. It's the change wrought in American political life by flooding all zones with entryism.
The practice known as entryism is commonly associated with 20th-century Leninist movements, whose leaders would prompt rank-and-file members to join moderate parties or politically neutral organizations for the purpose of radicalizing them from within. Today this practice is rampant on all sides, in varying degrees of calculation.
It's hardly necessary to recount how a cohort of Americans bred in the downstream shallows of Leninism has entered and then influenced news organizations, NGOs, university administrations, local governments, and the national Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, left-wing enthusiasts have gained such prominence in the collective mind of the news media that they're almost universally referred to as the party's "base" although they constitute a small minority well to the left of the median Democratic voter.
While "the Republican base" always refers to a numerically dominant mass of voters, it offers a study in entryism more or less loosely defined depending on the conclusion one draws from the study. The most accurate conclusion is probably the one that refers back to the Republican "Southern strategy" and related efforts to build electoral strength by pulling in socially conservative, not to say racist, voters who had little in common with the party's plutocratic establishment. After Trump — an outsider himself — personally captured those voters in the presidential campaign of 2016, he turned their subversive influence to his own advantage.
The Republican case seems pretty rough-and-ready as entryism goes; one in which a force for radicalization was carelessly introduced by the establishment itself and then harnessed to the purposes of a latter-day interloper. It's true that there's another factor to be weighed: a marked sympathy with foreign autocrats and particularly with Russia's Vladimir Putin. At this writing, a powerful faction of congressional Republicans is blocking military aid to Ukraine, much to Putin's advantage. Meanwhile, Trump has conspicuously refrained from holding Putin responsible for the death in captivity of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny. Trump has long been accused, without substantiation, of being in Putin's power. If he is, the Republican case suddenly becomes one of entryism in the extreme. However, a conscientious weighing of available evidence tends to the conclusion that Trump and his ilk simply like autocrats. They're probably not foreign agents, but rebels without a plan. Either way, they've taken over a major political party and started using it to wreak havoc. They're filling in part of a national pattern of entrification.
American parties and institutions that ought to steady the life of a democratic republic are now scenes of anarchic disruption from within. Cannon to the right of us, cannon to the left of us volley and thunder from captured heights. And in front of us, figures loom out of antiquity heralding nihilism. That, at least, must be thrown back.
