If George W. Bush were seeking the Republican presidential nomination today, he’d face at least one big problem: his defense of Muslims and Islam. In a 2000 debate with Al Gore, Bush condemned the fact that “Arab Americans are racially profiled” using “what is called secret evidence.” After 9/11, he called Islam “a faith based upon love, not hate,” and made a highly publicized visit to a mosque. One Muslim Republican even called Bush America’s “first Muslim president.”
A decade and a half later, the climate on the American right has radically changed. In January, the Republican presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal argued that “it is completely reasonable for [Western] nations to discriminate” against some Muslims in their immigration policies, on the grounds that radical Islamists “want to destroy their culture.” In February, another GOP contender, Mike Huckabee, declared, “Everything [President Obama] does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community.” In March, after New York City announced that public schools would close for two Muslim holidays, Todd Starnes, a Fox News contributor, lamented, “The Islamic faith is being given accommodation and the Christian faith and other religious faiths are being marginalized.”
This is strange. Why are conservatives more hostile to Muslims and Islam today than they were in the terrifying aftermath of 9/11? And why have American Muslims, who in 2000 mostly voted Republican, apparently replaced gays and feminists as the right’s chief culture-war foe?
For half a century, cultural conservatives have vowed to protect America against threats from domestic insurgencies: black militancy, feminism, the gay-rights movement. But those insurgencies involved large and restive groups. Muslims, by contrast, make up only 1 percent of the U.S. population. And they are not restive. Yes, a tiny share sympathizes with Salafi groups like the Islamic State, or ISIS. But unlike the civil-rights, abortion-rights, and gay-rights activists of eras past, American Muslims are not seeking to transform American culture and law. They are not marching in the streets. For the most part, they constitute a small, well-educated, culturally conservative minority that wants little more from the government than to be left alone.
