Democrats Are to Blame for Springfield Too

JD Vance's Nazi lies are a direct outgrowth of the bipartisan drive to demonize immigrants.

CNN

On Sunday, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance straight-up admitted that his despicable attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, were based on lies.

"The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance cheerfully told CNN’s Dana Bash. Cool cool.

Vance saying this kind of made everyone flip out, including Bash, whose eyes practically popped out of her head. Well, almost everyone. As of this writing, one pretty large institution does not seem to be flipping out that much: the Democratic Party.

I spent quite some time looking to see what the party had said about the Springfield horror—and, from what I can tell, the answer is “not much.” Neither Kamala Harris nor Tim Walz nor the Democratic National Committee appears to have made any public statement, whether written or spoken, about the terror that Haitians and their neighbors in Springfield are going through as a direct result of Donald Trump and JD Vance whipping up Nazi-style hatred against them. Instead, the party has decided to lean into the weirdness of Trump ranting about cats at last week’s debate, rather than highlight the bigotry underlying those rants. Harris herself used that tactic at the debate, laughing at Trump rather than hammering his racism.

The one Democrat who has—briefly—said something about Springfield is Joe Biden, who made these comments at a Congressional Black Caucus gala on Saturday: “Right now, [Trump’s] running mate is attacking Haitian Americans in Ohio. It is wrong. It has got to stop. Any president should reject hate in America, not incite it.”

Harris spoke at the same event but made no mention of Springfield.

The president making a statement is, obviously, not nothing. But Biden is a hugely diminished figure now. People aren’t paying that much attention to him. So having him squeeze a very short reference to Springfield into a Saturday night speech, while Harris, whose every utterance is newsworthy these days, avoids the topic completely on the campaign trail, is a clear political choice.

There are lots of reasons you could point to for why this choice is being made. Maybe, for instance, Democrats think Republicans are digging their own grave on this one, and want to stay out of the way. Or maybe, given that Harris has taken pains to avoid foregrounding race in the campaign, the party wants to resist wading too deeply into this issue.

But I would guess that the main reason for such a conspicuous silence is that Democrats don’t want to say anything that makes them seem too welcoming towards immigrants. The party sees immigration as a third rail, and is now determined to match the GOP when it comes to “cracking down.” Long gone are the outraged visits to the border or pledges (including from Harris) to “reexamine” the role of ICE that we saw during the Trump years.

Now, Biden is helping to destroy the right to seek asylum in this country, and Harris is touting her support for the hard-right bipartisan border bill that stalled in Congress this past winter. Presumably, the strategists at Kamala HQ think that standing up for the rights of people from Haiti—a country that has been immiserated and left in ruins by centuries of American imperialism—would cut across this mission, invite questions about Harris’s border policies, and give Trump and Vance an excuse to hammer her on a vulnerable issue.

This has been the game plan for months and months. I went back and looked at the transcripts from both presidential debates and from Harris’s extended CNN interview with (again) Bash. Not once, across these three events, did Harris or Biden ever object to the idea of deporting 11 million people from the United States, or mount any defense whatsoever of immigrants or immigration. Instead, they rushed to talk about how much they wanted to send troops to the border and reduce immigration.

I’m not going to try and play amoral pundit about the strategic merits of such a stance. Maybe the Democratic embrace of hard-right immigration policy will help Harris in November, and maybe it won’t.

But this—JD Vance and Donald Trump spreading Nazi lies and inciting violence against vulnerable people—is what you get when both parties push the idea that immigration is a problem. Republicans are taking the subtext of what Democrats keep saying (we don’t really want that many immigrants here either!) and making it text. And they are signaling to voters that, no matter what Harris says about making life hard for immigrants, there’s no substitution for the pure high of overt fascism.

A bipartisan push to hyper-militarize immigration policy will only ever fuel the kind of racist nationalism currently infecting our discourse. The universal refusal to champion immigrants will only ever lead to their endangerment.

Inevitably, this hostility towards migrants filters down into the media. Witness this comment by Bash in her interview with Vance:

The policies, yes, I am agreeing with you that what I heard is that there is concern that these migrants, there's a lot of them and the integration isn't being done fast enough and well enough. And that's a totally legitimate conversation.

We all agree that migrants are a problem! “There is concern that…there’s a lot of them.” But maybe don’t say all these extra-crazy things about them?

This is what you get. There, in just a couple sentences, is the consensus that both parties have helped establish.

Democrats may benefit politically from this consensus. But they are playing with peoples’ lives while they do so—and ensuring that, at the end of the day, the racists and fascists are the ones who benefit even more.