Anti-Muslim sentiment did not begin with Donald Trump's 'Muslim ban'

Certainly this was unexpected, especially in the liberal press. In the week running up to the election they were abuzz with talk of the tide turning, and an impending, indeed a stomping, victory for Kamala Harris.

Now, with Trump secure as president-elect, talking heads and party strategists relay what they see as hard truths about racism and sexism. In the end, it is said, these questions of identity were always too high a hurdle to leap over.

The “people” are simply too reactionary, and the Harris campaign could not account for this, even with the help of Beyonce and the star-studded cast of supporters.

Others had an alternative perspective. Bernie Sanders and the left of the Democrats lamented the lack of class politics, and the inability to make a direct appeal to Americans living on the bread line, from pay cheque to pay cheque.

With their purchasing power squeezed further by inflation, this created the ideal terrain for the Republicans to operate. The debate about the causes and outcomes of specific campaign messages and techniques will continue.

But I think the issues are far more profound, and structurally intrinsic to the United States, the role it has played in the world, and the relationship between its foreign and domestic policy.

To set the framework for this analysis, we can start with Gaza. It is true that substantial and important swathes of the electorate were affected by the Biden administration’s ongoing support for genocide, ethnic cleansing and clear-cut humanitarian breaches.

READ MORE: From polls to Gaza – what the media got wrong with the US election

But the consequences of American policy in this regard do not start and end with voters thinking twice about casting a vote that could be interpreted as support for the horror in the Middle East.

Rather, the lack of empathy shown towards the Palestinians – to the extent that even a heavily vetted Palestinian-American speaker was barred from addressing the Democratic National Convention – reinforced in the American psyche an essential Trump frame, and obliterated notions of liberal universalism.

It said that some lives are less valuable than others, and that this could, in fact, be delineated by skin colour, religion, and the geography of imperial interests – that the might of the United States should ride above international law, while its victims are unworthy of basic human dignity.

This reality has always stood in contradiction with the proclaimed “values” of Western liberalism. Indeed, the architecture for anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States did not begin with Trump and his “Muslim ban”.

It was baked in to the propaganda deployed for the Iraq war and the “war on terror” as a whole. At some level, Obama tried to turn the page on this, but only rhetorically, opting to conduct war through drone technology, rather than boots on the ground.

The “forever wars” associated with the neocons – Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and so on – came to be detested not only by the anti-war left, but of parts of what would become the MAGA movement.

These elements, weary with foreign wars while living standards collapsed at home, saw “America First” as a solution. Trump himself stated repeatedly throughout the election that he would “bring peace” and “end wars”, though anyone who believes this is sorely mistaken.

Meanwhile, the Democrats spent large sums of campaign cash promoting the Cheneys, of all people, as key supporters of Kamala Harris. In other words, the legacy of a series of disastrous wars this century, has refracted back into American society in complex and often unspoken ways.

Now, hitherto sacrilegious questions are being opened up in the liberal press. “When Did Liberals Become So Comfortable With War?” asked a headline in the New York Times, days after the election.

The standard response, the column argues, is that the wars have been “just”, and a means to extend “freedom and democracy” across the planet. Yet anyone who conducts even a rudimentary investigation knows this is simply the fluff around imperial expansion. The authors conclude: “Unless we can open up political space for dissent and confront the true costs of conflict, wars will not burn themselves out. They will simply burn.”

READ MORE: Aid group describes 'unparalleled suffering' in Gaza 

Perhaps now that space will open up, and those who have resolutely opposed the calamitous and bloody interventions as curated by the foreign policy establishment will be respected in polite society. For millions of people across the Middle East, it is already far too late.

All the while, there is much gnashing of teeth about those who voted for Trump despite his grotesqueness, his crassness, his anti-democratic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 and the appalling rhetoric of his campaign.

But maybe Trump serves as a mirror to the excesses of the society he is about to preside over once again. Cojoined with the rise of tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, including their integration into governance and politics, this is perhaps the central anti-democratic feature of contemporary capitalism.

That too has broken through in emphatic style. While it may be easy, comforting even, to blame the voters, it is immature and anti-materialist to castigate them as the originator of sin. For they don’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, the conditions for Trump are structured into the American system writ large, through imperial violence abroad, and social violence at home.