And American Muslims, despite rising Islamophobia (or perhaps because of it), were embraced by one of the two main political parties for the first time. We had a backup plan.Īmerican democracy, however, did not die, even if it finds itself in far from perfect health. We played out the worst-case scenarios, and half jokingly but also half seriously, my father reminded us that he still held Canadian citizenship. He was unable to disavow President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans. In December 2015, I remember a conversation with my parents, something akin to the Muslim version of “the talk.” Donald Trump, who was an insurgent candidate then, found himself intrigued by the idea of registering Muslims in a database. It could have been better, but it also could have been worse, maybe even much worse. The last four years, if we wish to mark the passing of time by our presidents, have rushed over me largely as a relief. This is an odd time, and so I have found myself feeling odd about my own politics. Are we actually broken? And, if we are, do we need to be put back together? Before beginning the work of rebuilding, however, it may be worth asking whether the premise is correct. And now, after the verdict, it may be time to try to pick up the pieces, to use the cliché commonly associated with days after and societies divided. It’s a foreboding that has built vaguely if steadily over the past several years, reaching its culmination in one political event-our presidential election. We don’t often have the language for that thing, whatever it is, but the inability to give that something a name is perhaps what makes it so ominous. So many of us have felt dread, that inchoate sense that something isn’t quite right: not with our politics nor our country nor even, perhaps, our own souls.
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