Point Austin: Thanksgiving Reflections

In the spirit of the season, I'm giving thanks for Nate Silver, the statistics guru of FiveThirtyEight.com, who posted a helpful piece Monday headlined, "Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump's Polls." Silver was a New York Times voice of sanity throughout the 2012 campaign season, following the actual presidential campaign dynamics instead of the clickbait Frenzy of the Day. Responding to the current centrist media anxiety that "President Trump" is a real possibility (Stephen Colbert had a funny bit choking on the phrase), Silver pointed out that Trump's actual chances of winning are really quite slim.

"Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among the roughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican," wrote Silver. "That's something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked." More­over, he points out, this early in the 2016 cycle the polling is quite superficial and speculative, and most voters aren't even paying much attention. (Hard to believe, I know, for those of us immersed in this stuff 24/7, an occupational hazard.) Considering the weakness of the available early data and the actual history of major party nominations, always-the-statistician Silver concludes, "For my money, that adds up to Trump's chances being higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent."

Conjuring Demons

Nevertheless, Trump's impact this political season is not confined to his actual chances of election. Until his bombast and naked racism descended onto the media scene, the national Republican Party had unevenly inched toward some kind of desperate attempt to accommodate if not woo minority voters. Witness Marco Rubio's 2013 Senate sponsorship of a (feeble and quite hopeless) bipartisan gesture at immigration reform. In the wake of Trump's successful appeal to the lower depths of the GOP base, Rubio and most of the competitors have scuttled to similar levels; those who haven't (Jeb Bush, John Kasich) have suffered the polling consequences from those who believe only Trump can save them from the invading hordes.

On the one hand, that makes the entire group less electable nationally, even allowing for the fact that presidential elections are decided not by popular vote, but state electors. On the other hand, Trump's nativist venom, beginning with his first denunciations of imaginary Mexican "rapists and murderers," has opened wide the public discourse to the kind of language (and actions) that actively promotes racism in all its forms. A selection of the most publicized incidents: a vandalized mosque in Pflugerville; armed and masked white "protesters" outside an Irving mosque; and of course the public and official backlash against Syrian refugees in the wake of the (nonrefugee) Paris terrorist attacks.

So I'm also thankful this week for the response of Austin Mayor Steve Adler in the wake of the national panic and Gov. Greg Abbott's shameful attempts to block any resettlement of refugees from the Syr­ian war. Adler wrote in the Texas Tribune (and reiterated in a White House conference call) that we have a "moral imperative" to assist those fleeing "horrific conditions," and to speak out against the ridiculous spasm of xenophobia that sadly recalls the treatment of Jewish refugees and Japanese Americans during World War II.

What History Teaches

Adler noted that the number of Syrian refugees bound for Austin is so small (three during the last two years, none expected in 2016) that the entire controversy is overblown and essentially symbolic. (That makes even more shameful last week's U.S. House action to add new obstacles to refugee security checks.) Beyond a handful of women and children across the country, we haven't been admitting Syrian (or Iraqi) refugees, and we aren't going to do so going forward. Meanwhile, the French government, actually reeling from the Paris attacks, announced its invitation to another 30,000 Syrian refugees. Wouldn't the French be justified in denouncing us all as "Hot Dog-Eating Surrender Monkeys"?

All this said, I'm thankful as well that the holiday prompts us to recall our actual history as a nation of immigrants. My grandparents, my father, and many of my relatives fled warfare and privation to find safety, livelihoods, and community in this country; how ungrateful would I be to allow Greg Abbott to speak for me, and turn my back on those fleeing war, terrorism, and privation in this generation? And how blind and unfeeling would we all be, as we gather this week here and elsewhere with our families, not to recall the country's founding – not just in immigration and thanksgiving, but in blood, and the terrible history of genocidal war against indigenous people?

May we give thanks for all that we have received. But may we also reflect on the complicated and mixed history of our times and our national story. May we welcome the stranger, and may we try to live by the best of our traditions, rather than act out of our worst.