Dana Milbank writes:

[U]ntil the American experiment, Jews in the diaspora were marginalized, ghettoized, persecuted and eventually converted, exiled or killed. “As Jews, we know at some point the music stops,” [the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan] Greenblatt said. “This is burned into the collective consciousness of every Jewish person.”

The United States has until now been different because of our constitutional protections of minority rights: our bedrock principles of equal treatment under law, free expression and free exercise of religion. Now, the MAGA crowd is attacking the very notion of minority rights. Ascendant Christian nationalists, with a sympathetic Supreme Court, are dismantling the separation between church and state. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), for example, calls the principle “junk that’s not in the Constitution” and claims “the church is supposed to direct the government.” Red states, again with an agreeable Supreme Court, are rolling back minority voting rights and decades of civil rights protections. And leading it all is Trump, threatening violence and going to “war with the rule of law,” as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) puts it.

Without these protections, there is no safety in the United States for Jews — or, really, for any of us. In a perverse sense, Trump’s MAGA movement shares the fear of becoming a persecuted minority. The whole notion of the bogus “great replacement” conspiracy belief is that some nefarious elite is scheming to import immigrants of color to marginalize White people.

In reality, it will be almost a quarter-century before White people are no longer a majority in this country — and they should remain a plurality well into the next century, at least. But if white nationalists truly fear becoming an oppressed minority, the best way to guard against that is to fortify minority rights. The rule of law protects us — all of us — from tyranny. [Continue reading…]