Breaking Political Winds

Well, how did [we] get here?
--Talking Heads

After Orlando President Obama's position is clear and, as he and supporters (including the Republican establishment) see it, non-controversial: we've decided to create a larger Muslim population in America as part of a process of ethnic diversification for its own sake as well as economic growth; attacks such as Orlando will have to be endured to achieve that goal, but we'll lessen their severity through greater surveillance, stricter gun laws and early suppression of any right wing reaction to this policy or its effects.

(There's another version of this that holds the increasing Muslim population not a deliberate undertaking but an inevitability contingent on economic necessity or due to the impossibility of restricting migration; this you often meet with in person-to-person encounters, expressed with a shrug and shift of subject)

The president and House Speaker Paul Ryan did what politicians must do after tragic events of political consequence (if often lost in or deliberately disguised by all the conspicuous sorrow): they identified the political and social battle lines created or reinforced by the event, declared where they stand in relation and offered policy solutions.

Remarkably, the political and media elite are nearly unanimous in taking the occasion to denounce Trump and his "Muslim ban" and in dictating that our energy shall be put to addressing a proximate cause of the massacre (guns) while opposing, as bigotry, the identification of Islam as the ultimate cause. It isn't wild-eyed to suggest they are allied against us with the Muslim world. And they do this without a hint of doubt. Is there a historical precedent for such people as these?

President Obama and Paul Ryan unite to ally with Islam against their ideological and cultural domestic enemies--basically, middle-class whites. This alliance was always there, and is revealed in tragedy when their shared core goals are threatened. When it's time to fall back and defend the fort, the Republicans and Democrats find themselves in the same place. Donald Trump turned over the political rock and this is what he exposed.