It Must Not Happen Here

Isolationism ignores reality.

   "It can't happen here," you say? But it nearly did, at least twice before, and now a closed-border, isolationist America is once again being proposed.
   The current political campaign is full of promises to "make America great again," shutting out those deemed undesirable, and shipping out those who somehow "don't belong."
   The danger of such an attitude was raised in this space last November, just five months after the leading GOP candidate for the presidency launched his current campaign.
   "It Can't Happen Here," said Sinclair Lewis in his book of that title in 1935.
   Philip Roth warned of "The Plot Against America" in his book published in 2004.
   Both were fictionalized novels of real possibilities.
   A third book, "The Plot to Seize the White House," written by Jules Archer and published in 1973, documented a real conspiracy by isolationist radicals of the 1930s who wanted to close all borders and build a Fortress America.
   The Jules Archer book dealt with a plan by ultra-conservative corporate moguls to oust President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install their own leader.
   A second attempt to subvert democratic channels and initiate full control by the White House was planned during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, but it was foiled by close aides, led by senior advisor Henry Kissinger.
   All three of the books mentioned were based on events of the 1930s, when isolationist thinking and metaphorical wall-building in the form of high tariffs were riding high. At the time, the Smoot-Hawley tariff act imposed high fees on imports in a vain attempt to protect American products. But retaliation by other trading nations only raised prices for consumers everywhere, and all sides suffered.
   Recently, the leading contender for the Republican nomination insisted he would not only build a wall 40 feet high to keep out people from Mexico, but would impose a 35 percent tax on all products exported from that country to the U.S. as a way of paying for the wall.
   But consider this: A wall stops travel from both sides, and a high tariff is added to the final sale price, imposing the cost of wall-building on American consumers.
  Moreover, as noted here last November, isolationist thinking at the time of the Great Depression "went hand in hand with bigotry and suppression of minority groups as well as efforts to replace democracy with authoritarianism."
   Sound familiar?
   Isolationist demagogues of the 1930s not only prolonged and worsened the economic health of all sides, but also created conditions that helped lead to war.
   Unless voters reject another such xenophobic demagogue, it likely will happen here.