Trump "legitimates" language that "was previously not acceptable"

Trump’s Immigration Remarks Outrage Many, but Others Quietly Agree

What is meant in this piece by "was not acceptable"?

And it matters to whom, and where.

The article, otherwise intelligent and accurate in many respects, misleadingly ignores the fact that speech subject to legal punishment in many parts of Europe is completely legal in the US, where PC speech codes are not enforced by the government but only by fierce social pressure, including punishment by employers.

There is pushing back both in Europe and America, but there is more to push back against, and the cost is much higher, in Europe.

So when President Trump said he did not want immigrants from “shithole” countries, there was ringing silence across broad parts of the European Union, especially in the east, and certainly no chorus of condemnation.

In fact, some analysts saw the remarks as fitting a pattern of crude, dehumanizing and racist language to describe migrants and asylum seekers that has steadily edged its way into the mainstream. 

Coming from the White House, such words may be taken by some as a broader signal that racism is now an acceptable part of political discourse.

“What we see now is a conscious policy to reintroduce language that was previously not acceptable in debate,” said Gerald Knaus, the director of the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based research organization that has played a leading role in forming recent European migration policy.

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s choice of words drew condemnation from around the world. 

Botswana and Haiti asked for meetings with American diplomats to clarify what Mr. Trump said and what he believes. 

The president of Senegal, Macky Sall, was one of many who saw racism in the remarks. “Africa and black people deserve the respect and consideration of all,” he wrote on Twitter.

Even the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, weighed in, declaring Mr. Trump’s comments “particularly harsh and offensive.”

But the political reality is that migration has become a salient issue — and not only for right-wing, populist and nativist politicians. 

Across many affluent societies, people are anxious about technological change, rising inequality and stagnant wages, and they have focused their ire at the global flows of capital and, especially, labor. 

There are also concerns about demographic change, as the world becomes less white and as western societies age.

The Duce, throughout his campaign and since, has defiantly insisted he will not comply with PC speech codes.

As for his merely salty and derogatory but not clearly racist language, it has never been unacceptable in private to anyone but the hypersensitive and the hopelessly anti-profane.

Certainly its use was not unacceptable to those in the White House who have privately called him a moron, and worse.

For that matter, even much more plainly racist talk in non-public settings has never been unacceptable to all - the Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood have always been with us, it seems, recently cheek by jowl with the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers - and has been rigidly unacceptable "in polite company" maybe only for ten minutes in 1975.

All the same, it is absolutely beyond question that the attitudes, speech, and conduct of the anti-immigrant right, both in Europe and in America, sometimes feature a degree of scorn for the countries from which immigrants come, for their cultures, for their customs, for their non-Christian or non-Protestant religions, for their languages, or for being economically and politically failed states and nearly failed states.

And at the same time it is beyond question that rejection -  some with but also some without scorn or contempt - of immigrants is driven in part by their being racially, or even merely ethnically (think of the opposition in the western countries to immigrants from the eastern ones, within the EU), different from the peoples of the states to which they come.

What we are seeing among Europeans and Americans is a widespread Nativism, a determination to prevent significant changes to the cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic, or racial compositions of their countries by people who, in those countries, believe they are threatened by such changes to the demographic status quo, often having an exaggerated idea of its homogeneity to begin with, much as the hostility to multiculturalism often rests on such error.

For example, it has always been more accurate to speak of America as a cultural, ethnic, religious, and racial salad bowl than a melting pot, anyway - and three cheers for the Statue of Liberty.

Now as in earlier times, we are all of us "hyphenated Americans," though very, very few of us have or have had the seriously divided loyalties so feared by Wilson and both the earlier and later Roosevelts.

But it is only the pro-immigration folks, always aware their policies do and will upset existing demographics and sometimes pursuing this precisely as a goal, who have insisted on outright criminalization of the speech, the aims, or the values of their political opponents.

Perhaps because our discourse does not much damn them as anti-white racists, Christianophobes, anti-Brits or French or Italians, or anti-Catholics - or anti-Semites, when we consider their opposition to Israel's specifically Jewish character - some or all of which they not infrequently are.