Politicians should disavow Islamists and white nationalists in equal measure.
Two-party systems are great for parliamentary stability, but they require their parties to have broad appeal. When there’s a coalition to build and an election to win, it’s easy to ignore the company in which you’re traveling. That’s the sordid logic that in 2019 led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pose with Rep. Ilhan Omar for the cover of Rolling Stone.
The result is that Islamist and left-wing terrorism are closely associated with the Democrats, and white-nationalist terrorism closely associated with the Republicans. The representatives of both parties deny their complicity with the extremists who incite these actions. But extreme elements in both parties recognize these associations and exploit them, especially to convert rhetorical points into votes. The Democrats are still making hay from misrepresenting President Trump’s maladroit response to the 2017 white-nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va. Republicans will forever remind Kamala Harris that when the actor Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime with a script that implicated Mr. Trump, she leapt to decry “an attempted modern-day lynching.”
