If Donald Trump’s New Hampshire Republican primary win didn’t give you enough reason to weep for our nation, you’re definitely going to want a handkerchief for this one. According to an exit poll, “66% of GOP primary voters support banning Muslims from entering the U.S.”
We’re talking here about banning all of the adherents of one of the world’s major religions, already making up about one percent of the U.S. population. We’re talking about a faith the Founding Fathers explicitly intended to include in American religious freedom. And this 66 percent of New Hampshire Republican primary voters is bringing us back to World War II. That’s not a Hitler comparison, it's a “things the United States has to be ashamed of” comparison. The United States didn’t just intern Japanese-Americans. It also rejected Jewish refugees. That was a popular position, just as turning away Muslims is a popular position today. It was an immoral, wrong position, just as turning away Muslims is an immoral, wrong position today.
So we can look at Donald Trump saying of Syrian refugee children that “I can look at their faces and say you can't come” and see how it makes electoral sense—a lot of voters are with him on that—and at the same time agree with David Nir that “The moral stakes are unchanged today: If you wouldn’t call anti-refugee hostility in the Holocaust era ‘smart politics,’ then you must also not say the same thing of hostility toward Syrian refugees.”