One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

early in the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump musing about forcing American Muslims to carry special identification cards—a proposal that is by any honest measure reminiscent of the preamble to some of history’s worst atrocities. Hillary Clinton condemned the idea and returned to her talking point about how American Muslims were important allies in the War on Terror, the government’s “eyes and ears” on the front lines of radicalization and extremism. That’s not why such a proposal deserves condemnation. It deserves condemnation because it is morally repugnant. But morals complicate the matter. They introduce an obligation to oppose. They also force everyone involved to confront the fact that a significant swath of the American electorate does indeed consider the affected group to be so threatening, so inherently barbaric, that making them carry special identification cards becomes perfectly acceptable. And that, in turn, forces a reckoning with what the United States has become, or has always been.