Two prominent University of Virginia historians, William I. Hitchcock and Melvyn P. Leffler, severed ties on Monday with the university’s Miller Center, a public policy and presidential-history research center, to protest the center’s hiring of Marc Short, a former Trump aide. They said Short was “complicit in the erosion of our civic discourse.” Nicole Hemmer recently explained why she, too, believes the hiring represents a betrayal of the center’s mission, and the university’s:

On a lovely, crisp morning earlier this month, I stood stock-still outside the building where I work, at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and wrestled with my conscience.

The Miller Center, an institute for the study of presidential history and public policy, had just hired a high-level Trump official — Marc Short, formerly President Trump’s director of legislative affairs — as a senior fellow.

So that morning, we joined Harvard’s Kennedy School as one of the academic institutions providing Trump officials a soft space to land. (Its Institute of Politics gave the ousted spokesperson Sean Spicer and onetime campaign chair Corey Lewandowski coveted visiting fellowships.)

The space between me and the building felt like a moral minefield. If I walked through the door, was I complicit in the destructive illiberalism of the Trump administration?

It turns out I wasn’t the only one wrestling with that question. Over the next week, the battle between the Miller Center’s leadership and the UVA community — including some Miller Center scholars, like me — over the decision to hire Short became a national story. A petition calling for Short’s contract to be withdrawn garnered nearly 2,000 signatures in just a few days.

As of now, the Miller Center’s leadership is staying firm, meaning Short will join the university in just a few weeks.  People move from government to academia all the time, but this move is different — precisely because the Trump administration represents a sharp break from past presidential administrations.

Hiring its alumni does not show that the university is open to “diverse” viewpoints, as defenders of the Short appointment suggest. Rather, rewarding advocates of intolerance with a cushy position reveals a misunderstanding of how the forces of illiberalism work.

Charlottesville has experienced Trump’s illiberalism first-hand

Part of the outrage centers on the Miller Center’s location. People here in Charlottesville are particularly touchy about Donald Trump. He repeatedly attacked residents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Gold Star parents who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. And after the white nationalist violence that left three dead and dozens injured, Trump blamed “both sides,” offering comfort to the neo-Nazis who marched through our streets.

But the controversy around Short’s hiring is also part of a national debate over what exactly the Trump administration is. Does it simply take policy positions that many professors disagree with, but which fall within the spectrum of mainstream American politics — or does it represent something darker? If it is a vehicle for white nationalism, or even, as some think, a threat to American institutions, what role ought institutions like the Miller Center and the University of Virginia play in providing a professional platform for members of that administration?

Conservative groups have tried to slot this controversy into the familiar narrative of left-wing professors quashing contrary views and conservative voices. “Administrators and faculty members who have signed this petition are making a statement that conservative ideas and perspectives are not welcome in the UVA community,” said the UVA chapter of the Young America’s Foundation in a statement.

But where the Miller Center is concerned, that charge shouldn’t stick. The center employs plenty of Republicans and Democrats, and people here have worked together happily — thrived, even — in that bipartisan and cross-ideological environment. The Miller Center has given positions to Republican foreign policy specialists including Eric Edelman (George W. Bush’s ambassador to Turkey and an undersecretary for defense), Philip Zelikow (who served on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush and at the State Department for George W. Bush), and John Negroponte (the younger Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq, as well as the first director of national intelligence); indeed, Zelikow was director of the center for several years.

No one here matches the stereotype of leftists shutting down debate

And when it comes to right-wing speakers, for better or worse, the center can pass the right-wing litmus test: Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve; Heather Mac Donald, who has been critical of aspects of the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter; and John Yoo, the Berkeley professor and Bush administration “torture memo” author, have all spoken here. (Yoo’s appearance brought out protesters.)

As a vocal critic of the Short appointment, I’ll offer my bona fides as well. A scholar of conservatism, I value working with people on the right and have a long history of collaborating with conservatives and engaging seriously with their ideas. My first book, a history of conservative media, was dedicated to my dad, a devoted conservative, and our lengthy political debates. It was glowingly reviewed by conservatives for conservative outlets including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

I’ve co-written pieces with conservatives — including one arguing that outlandishly offensive speech should be criticized but not banned — and recently moderated a panel at the center that featured the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, a major Trump supporter.

It should be a worrisome sign to those who would dismiss this controversy as a matter of mere partisanship that people who regularly speak across the ideological divide see Short’s hiring as a genuine institutional and moral crisis.

As political historians and presidential scholars, the people at the Miller Center are particularly well placed to observe that the Trump administration represents a significant rupture in American politics, a break with the general tenets and bulwarks of modern liberal democracy: equal representation, protection of minority voices, respect for the rule of law, a free press and free inquiry. 

We certainly can — and do — disagree on how well various administrations in the past 50 years have lived up to those ideas. No historian of the presidency would argue that any president has perfectly protected and respected them. But conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, they were committed to the liberal democratic order.

That the Trump administration is a powerfully illiberal force in the United States today is not a partisan judgment. It is an understanding shared across party and ideological lines. The attacks on the press, on judges, on factuality and truth; the racist exclusionary policies (from Muslim bans to border camps); the deep admiration for strongmen and authoritarians — all these features of the Trump administration have created sweeping concern that knows no party line (though far too many Republicans  still support it).

Many institutions have had a hard time adapting to that shift. For decades now, we have understood balanced debates as ones that include liberal and conservative voices, Democrats and Republicans. The Trump era has changed that, and exposed a real philosophical quandary: What do institutions dedicated to protecting an open society do when faced with the forces of illiberalism?

The paradox of tolerance

Where we draw the line has been a question of heated debate in the past few years. Should an institute of higher education host someone who questions whether Jews are people? Who contends that whites are better than other races — or that parents seeking asylum should be split from their children and placed in cages?

Ought that calculation change when someone making those arguments becomes president of the United States? And what about high-level aides and advisers like Short, who promoted that president’s agenda, even if they were not always the most vociferous proponents of the most odious views?

At the Miller Center, we bring all kinds of policymakers through our doors to help us better understand the presidency. Some of these people are incredibly controversial. But our defense of that is easy, mirroring that of journalists: They are our subjects, not our colleagues. Who gets invited to join our communities in respectable positions is quite a different question. There is a difference between Jake Tapper questioning Corey Lewandowski and CNN hiring him (a difference CNN failed to grasp).

Philosophers from Karl Popper to John Rawls have wrestled with the “paradox of tolerance”: Liberals must admit illiberal voices to the public forum, but at some point, liberals have to take a stand against illiberalism, lest they be destroyed — along with tolerance itself.  

Marc Short served in the Trump administration until July 20, and to the bitter end was vocally (and inaccurately) defending policies like family separation, asserting that 80 percent of those charged with crossing the border unlawfully don’t show up to their court hearings, when the actual number is closer to 25 percent. More importantly for those in the Charlottesville community, he defended the president’s outrageous response to the clash between white supremacists and protesters.

By all accounts, Short is a real pro as a legislative affairs director. But over the past 18 months, he used his professional skills to abet attacks on liberal democracy — and he has shown no sign that he views that as anything other than a point of pride. Allowing him to join the UVA community for a stint of reputational rehab does not prove the university’s commitment to civil debate, but rather calls into question its commitment to an open society, and makes us complicit in sanitizing and normalizing a particularly malign administration.

If his appointment stands, those of us who cherish the Miller Center and UVA will find it hard to walk through the door each morning.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The US military has begun kicking out immigrants for whom service offered a pathway to citizenship. According to a recent report from the Associated Press, dozens of enlistees — part of a program called MAVNI (Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest) — have already been discharged. That’s in addition to hundreds of recruits who had their contracts abruptly canceled last fall.

MAVNI, a program started in 2008, opened the door for immigrants who were in the country legally (including DACA recipients) to enroll in the military and, in reward for their service, have their citizenship fast-tracked.

Though the exact scope of the dismissals is unclear — the Pentagon has not supplied a number, and some enlistees say they’ve been told only that they failed an unspecified background check — the tightening restrictions on immigrants in the military (which goes well beyond this latest report) fits perfectly with the administration’s anti-immigrant and nativist policies.

Historically, for immigrants excluded from the full rights of citizenship because of their race, the military has been the most powerful proving ground for their citizenship claims. From Asian Americans who won citizenship after serving in Europe in World War I to African Americans who won support for civil rights after returning from World War II, military service created an almost irrefutable case for citizenship.

American racists sometimes still fought those claims, but they led to real advances — which is exactly why the Trump administration would aim to end such a program.

The case of Asian Americans and World War I

Perhaps the most striking case of military citizenship featured Asian immigrants in the early 20th century. This was a time when immigration from most parts of the world went largely unrestricted, but Asian immigrants faced profound barriers. Chinese immigration had been halted in 1882, through the Chinese Exclusion Act, and that ban expanded to include Japan in 1907 and most of the rest of Asia in 1917.

Not only had immigration been shut off, but so had naturalization. The 14th Amendment and 1870 Naturalization Act created a black-and-white definition of citizenship. As always, white people could become citizens. But now, so could “people of African descent,” most notably, former slaves, who had been categorically denied citizenship by the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

For everyone who fell outside those categories, including Asian, Mexican, and some Middle Eastern immigrants, the question of citizenship was unclear. They were clearly not of African descent, but were they white? A series of lawsuits pressed the question, forcing judges to pin down a definition of whiteness that excluded Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Indian immigrants. As a result, while their children would become citizens thanks to the principle of birthright citizenship, immigrants of Asian descent could not become naturalized citizens of the United States.

This did not, however, prevent Asian immigrants from serving in the US military and fighting for citizenship in return for their service. Since 1862, the US government had recognized the value of immigrant military service, and offered expedited naturalization to “any alien” who had lived in the US for at least a year and fought for the US army.

The mass mobilization that accompanied US entrance into WWI brought hundreds of thousands of noncitizen immigrants into the armed forces (the Selective Service Act required any male immigrants who intended to become citizens to register for the draft), and between 1918 and 1920, nearly a quarter-million of those soldiers were naturalized, many even before shipping off to the front.

Even conservative military men saw the military as the ultimate melting pot

Throughout the war, the government repeatedly made the case that military service was the crucible of citizenship, the testing ground that allowed immigrants to prove their loyalty, their bravery, and their fitness as Americans. One captain surveying the intake of new immigrant soldiers cheered that “out of the melting pot of America’s admixture of races is being poured a new American trained and ready to make the world safe for Democracy.” The War Department even included civics courses as part of wartime training to “Americanize” immigrants in the service.

Henry Breckinridge, the assistant secretary of war, saw this as a great contribution of military service. The soldier, “no matter from what race stock he comes — Teuton, Slav, Czech, Italian, Celt or Anglo-Saxon — all rubbing elbows in a common service to a common Fatherland — out comes the hyphen — up goes the Stars and Stripes and in a generation the melting pot will have melted.”

Note that Breckinridge did not include Asian immigrants in his list of nationalities, but those immigrants nonetheless heard the promise of soldier-citizenship and quickly moved to translate their work in the war into naturalization.

A fight for Asian-American rights

Yet had it not been for a sympathetic judge and federal agent, their efforts would have been wasted.

The initial position of the Bureau of Naturalization was that Asian immigrants remained ineligible for citizenship, being neither white nor black. But in December 1918, federal district court judge Horace W. Vaughan announced — to the surprise of the Bureau of Naturalization — that he would naturalize Chinese, Korean, and Japanese soldiers. “We had drafted them into our service,” he explained, “and they thought enough of us to be willing to serve, to risk their lives in our service.” He found an accomplice in the deputy commissioner of naturalization, Raymond Crist.

As historian Lucy E. Salyer has shown, the two worked to naturalize hundreds of Asian soldiers. They continued, fruitlessly, to issue naturalization papers to Asian soldiers even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that any veteran ineligible for citizenship by “color or race” remained ineligible, regardless of service. Crist argued anyone with naturalization papers was a citizen, regardless of the court’s stance, but his view did not have the force of law.  

But a rogue federal agent can’t save an entire group from the judiciary in perpetuity, and despite Crist’s efforts, this category of immigrant was denied citizenship under the law. What Asian veterans needed was an act of Congress that would permit them to gain their citizenship — which they got, thanks to the work of veteran Tokutaro Slocum.

Slocum, who was born in Japan and moved to America at the age of 10, was studying law at Columbia when the US entered WWI. He left school, fought in France, attained the rank of sergeant major, and was rewarded with naturalization, which he lost after the Supreme Court ruling in 1925. As a member of the Japanese American Citizenship League, he lobbied Congress for the restoration of his citizenship, along with that of all other WWI veterans in his situation.

Vaughan, Crist, and Slocum were all appealing to the idea of service over race in an era in which citizenship was strongly tied to whiteness and when anti-immigrant sentiment ran high. Indeed, in the midst of the fight over the naturalization of Asian-American veterans, the US imposed strict racist quotas on immigration — in its infamous law of 1924 —and the Ku Klux Klan flourished under a program of “100 percent Americanism.”

Notably, the 1935 Nye-Lea Act that granted Slocum and other veterans citizenship opened no pathway to other Asian immigrants; it was for veterans alone. Nor did it save Slocum from other racist laws. In 1942, when the US began rounding up Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans, Slocum and his family were sent to Manzanar internment camp, in California’s Owens Valley.

Slocum’s fate reminds us of the limits of martial citizenship: If some people, because of their race or ethnicity, are forced to show exemplary bravery and sacrifice in order to prove their fitness for citizenship, something has already gone wrong. Yet the idea that military service can be a way for immigrants to earn rights has historically been potent enough to win over even cultural conservatives.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the Trump administration would like to shut that door, as part of its broader effort to demonize migrants and restrict immigration. Since 2001, more than 100,000 immigrants have become naturalized citizens through military service (10,400 through Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest).

Slocum’s story should remind us that even as the nation’s laws and opportunities constrict — for racist reasons — activists, government workers, and judges can help pry back them back open.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

With Donald Trump in the White House, it seems like an odd time for a debate about civility on the left to break out. But after three administration officials were confronted at restaurants in separate incidents last week, calls for civility have flourished. Those advocating a more polite politics argue that civility should be the left’s m.o. not only because it’s morally desirable, but because it’s politically effective — and “incivility” is not.

On Twitter, that bastion of civil discourse, former White House advisor David Axelrod, argued that the left, by cheering press secretary Sarah Sanders’s ouster from a Virginia restaurant, was playing into Trump’s hands. He wrote that he was “amazed and appalled” to see the left embrace this form of protest.

And Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic tweeted that he was “happy to entertain” the idea that such actions might be politically productive, but he perceived mostly ineffectual self-congratulation.

“[O]n the ‘civility works better’ side I cite Ghandi [sic] and MLK and Nixon’s re-election,” Friedersdorf wrote: “What would you cite for ‘incivility gets it done’?”

Dragging Martin Luther King, Jr into the debate, though, undercuts rather than supports the pro-civility argument. Not because King rejected civility — he regularly called for nonviolence not only in action but in speech, to make unignorable the moral chasm between the tactics of the nonviolent protesters and the vitriol and bloodshed of the other side.

But not only were King and nonviolent activists regularly denounced as too uncivil, stirring up trouble in an otherwise peaceful society, but King in particular saw calls for civility as the wily weapons they were.

Many Americans viewed MLK Jr. as the opposite of a model of civility

For all the saintliness King has accrued since his death, he was regularly reviled during his life, portrayed as someone recklessly rending the fabric of a largely free and democratic society. By 1966, 63 percent of Americans had a negative perception of King. And it wasn’t just King the person they disliked. It was his commitment to direct action, frequently described as threatening civic norms in a fundamental way.

In 1965, Will Herberg wrote in the National Review: “For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country.” By calling out “mobs” to protest against injustice, Herberg argued, King and his acolytes “have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed.”

The Chicago Tribune, in an anti-King editorial following a 1966 march through the city, juxtaposed the tranquility of daily life with the disruption of protest. “Families ordinarily would be enjoying the chance to sit on the front porch reading the paper, to sprinkle their lawns and work in their gardens, or to go to the park or beach. Instead, they are confronted by a shuffling procession of strangers carrying signs and posing as martyrs. The spectacle is repulsive to right-thinking people.” In other words, why couldn’t the rabble-rousers leave Chicagoans alone to enjoy their weekend in peace (just as Sanders should have been allowed to enjoy a quiet evening out)?

Nor was it just conservative outlets that believed King and his methods contributed to incivility — or worse. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak penned a column calling for “civility” and “tolerance” to be restored to America. They found the seeds of national violence in the “un-civil disobedience” of direct action, and traced a single line from sit-ins to urban uprisings to the assassinations of King and Kennedy.

King knew “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” was no ally

King, of course, understood these calls to civility for what they were: attempts to shut down, or at least slow, the movement for equal rights. That understanding shaped his response, in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” to moderate white Alabama pastors who encouraged their congregants to reject King, a man they saw as an outsider disturbing the peaceful atmosphere of the South.

King’s famous letter spoke directly to these calls for a more “constructive and realistic” response to oppression. He denounced “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Peace, King understood, was not the primary goal. The status quo, though never as peaceful as it appeared to white Americans, existed precisely because society had created enough legal and social mechanisms to enforce inequality and oppression without obvious acts of state violence and extrajudicial terror. The civility of segregation was upheld by the threat of violence, a threat King helped make clear through his program of resistance.

The current calls for civility ignore this longer history. They overlook the way civility has been used as a cudgel, providing moral cover for immoral laws. And they fail to grapple with the limits of what really can be achieved by civility.

Which is the other problem with saying King’s actions are evidence that “civility works better”: King was only one voice within the push for black freedom; many other participants in that struggle saw nonviolent resistance as at best a useful tactic and at worst a useless one. The threat of “the fire next time” — James Baldwin’s warning of more violent resistance to white supremacy that would follow if nonviolent resistance failed — pushed lawmakers to work with King on civil rights legislation. Civility worked, sort of, but only in combination with the background threat of much less civil tactics.

In recent years, we have seen a rise in the number of voices clamoring for a return to an era of centrism, consensus, and civility. But rarely do the proponents of this other version of making America great again really grapple with the way those ideas have historically worked to protect the powerful and sustain the status quo.

Civility is a nice idea, but it should be the reward for securing a more just nation. It’s not the surest way to achieve justice. Indeed, it can be a method for denying it.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com

Last week, Rakem Balogun — who has been described as the first American citizen targeted for prosecution under a secretive government program focused on identifying “black identity extremists” — gave his first interview after being incarcerated for five months.

He’d been waiting in jail as federal attorneys tried, and failed, to prosecute him for terrorism and, when that case fell apart, illegal possession of firearms. Even that charge got dismissed by the judge.

His prosecution and time behind bars represented “tyranny at its finest,” Balogun told the Guardian.

In an August 2017 report, the FBI argued that black domestic terrorists, spurred by concerns over “alleged police brutality” following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were likely to take up arms against law enforcement.

The terrorism charge against Balogun crumbled when the FBI admitted it had nothing more on him than a few overheated Facebook posts and advocacy of black gun ownership. After the death of five police officers in Dallas in July 2016, Balogun wrote on Facebook: “They deserve what they got. LMAO!” And he took part in a rally outside the Texas Capitol at which black men carried guns and some chanted, “The only good pig is a pig that’s dead.”

Despite its failure, the aggressive prosecution signals a serious imbalance in law enforcement priorities, especially at a time when virulent and violent white nationalism is on the rise.

The long history of viewing black radicals as unique threats, even when white supremacists are wreaking havoc

While it would be easy to assume this is a symptom of the malignancies of the Trump era —the FBI report on black identity extremism was published a little over a week before torch-wielding white supremacists attacked anti-racist activists in Charlottesville, Virginia — that would be a mistake.

The disparity reflects a more longstanding problem: the inability of US officials to see white people as genuine threats, and its equally longstanding inability to see black people as rights-bearing citizens.

That long history runs through Balogun’s story. He is a co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and when he was arrested, agents confiscated two firearms (prosecutors said he was barred from owning guns because of a misdemeanor domestic violence charge) and one book: Negroes with Guns. That 1962 tract, by civil rights activist Robert F. Williams, was the first of the era to advocate for armed resistance against white supremacy, cutting against the nonviolent framework that dominated the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

The book shaped the activism of Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party, which started as an armed defense against police brutality in 1966. When the Panthers appeared on the scene with their bandoliers, berets, and guns, they were immediately framed as a threat to the system of law and order in America. White journalists overlooked their calls for police reforms to focus instead on the weapons the Panthers brandished. White Californians were so worried about armed black activists that members of both parties hurried the Mulford Act through the California legislature in 1967; it banned people from carrying firearms in public.

Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law.

The federal government was paying attention to black people wielding guns too: In 1967, the FBI targeted the Panthers as part of its campaign against “black nationalist hate groups”; in 1969, J. Edgar Hoover branded them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Considering that he was speaking at the end of a decade in which three national leaders had been assassinated (none by black nationalists), and in which white Southerners and white police officers were regularly assaulting and murdering civil rights activists, this was a stunningly disproportionate claim. Also disproportionate: the collusion between the FBI and local law enforcement to illegally jail, frame, beat, and even murder members of the Black Panther Party.

Even when white supremacists turned against the US government, they seemed like less of a threat than the Black Panthers

The treatment of the Panthers stands in sharp contrast to the treatment of white supremacists in the 1960s, and to the government’s response to the white power movement of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Early white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens’ Council, had helped shore up a government officially committed to white supremacy, but by 1983, the white power movement was in open revolution against the US government itself, as Kathleen Belew documents in her new book Bring the War Home. Its militants were well-armed. They regularly broke federal and state law, committing crimes ranging from thefts to hate crimes to murder.

Yet law enforcement repeatedly failed to intervene. In 1979, Klansmen and neo-Nazis killed five anti-racist protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina. Federal officials and local police knew about planned attacks in advance, yet did nothing to stop them. The federal government eventually pressed charges, but at that point, jury nullification reared its ugly head. The men responsible were twice acquitted, and ultimately only had to pay a settlement in a civil suit.

It’s not that the federal government has historically done nothing in response to heavily armed white nationalists. It’s that they lacked the ability to imagine them as a genuine threat to the civic order in the same way they did armed black activists. Think of the array of power that local and federal officials brought against black activists: In a joint operation between the FBI and the Chicago Police Department, officers shot more than 90 rounds into a Black Panther apartment, killing two and wounding four of the seven others who survived. In 1985, in a notorious episode, nearly 500 police officers surrounded the headquarters of the black liberation group MOVE in West Philadelphia, firing 10,000 rounds before bombing the house and the surrounding neighborhood, killing 11 people.

While federal agents did move against white power activists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, there were two important differences: Those raids were followed by intense national soul-searching, underscored by a widely shared belief that the raids should never have happened, and that there should be some reckoning for the lives lost. And they were followed by the deadliest domestic terror attack in American history, the Oklahoma City bombing. In contrast, the MOVE bombing was largely forgotten, while a coroner jury ruled the Black Panther deaths justifiable homicides.

And still, black activists are seen as a greater threat than white supremacists.

False equivalence shaped the police response to Charlottesville

Nor is this disparity a relic of the past. On August 9, 2017, Homeland Security circulated a threat assessment for the city of Charlottesville (separate from the FBI report on “black identity extremists”) — two days before white nationalists marched on the University of Virginia’s campus and attacked student protesters, three days before they murdered Heather Heyer.

That assessment discussed both white nationalists and protesters, but it did so in a telling way: It marked the protesters as the most imminent source of violence, warning that “anarchist extremists’ use of violence as a means to oppose racism and white supremacist extremists’ preparations to counterattack anarchist extremists are the principal drivers of violence at recent white supremacist rallies” [emphasis added].

Local and university police acted under similar assumptions, allowing white nationalists to move freely even after the violence on August 11, careful to protect their First and Second Amendment rights; they even brought charges against DeAndre Harris, a black activist who was badly beaten by white nationalists (he was ultimately found not guilty).

So why can’t law enforcement discern the threat posed by violent white nationalists when they so readily — more than readily — see it in the figure of an armed black activist?

The answer is deeply rooted in the long history of the United States, which for much of its history was a nation in which white supremacy, backed by state violence, was the law of the land. Segregation and black disenfranchisement were state policy, and lynching was considered a form of justice — vigilante justice, extralegal justice, but justice all the same (it was very rarely prosecuted).

At the same time, black activists have often been sharply critical of the state, particularly law enforcement. That should come as no surprise: Law enforcement has from its inception been arrayed against black Americans, from slave patrols to the prevalence of local sheriffs in massive resistance to desegregation to decades of police brutality against African Americans.

Those histories shape how law enforcement, from street patrols to FBI directors, perceive threats in America. And as we have seen time and time again, from the blood-soaked streets of Selma to the ashes of Oklahoma City to the wreckage of Charlottesville, these misperceived threats leave us all less safe.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Every workable immigration policy from the 1986 amnesty to Obama’s DACA plan has had one thing in common: They were attempts to adapt policy to the reality of migration.

Trump’s hardline immigration proposals all push in the opposite direction: They try to mold reality to fit policy.

Which is why, if history is any guide, these proposals are doomed to fail.

Trump is hardly the first to struggle to enact a hardline immigration policy. Trump wants to end the diversity lottery (which brings in immigrants from countries that rarely supply them), fund part of the border wall, and slash legal immigration. He has important precursors. In the 1920s, restrictionists put into place America’s first comprehensive immigration policy, motivated in large part by a set of racial theories that placed white Europeans from Northern and Western Europe on the highest rung of a eugenicist ladder.

They developed a set of strict national quotas that overwhelmingly favored immigrants from those areas while sharply curtailing opportunities for migrants from other regions. Germany could send more than 50,000 immigrants a year, Great Britain 34,000, and Ireland more than 28,000. But Russia was limited to only 2,200, and the entire continent of Africa was allowed a mere 1,200. Immigration from Asia was entirely barred.

Yet reality intruded even into this rigidly racialist set of policies. Despite deeply rooted anti-Mexican and anti-Latino racism, the racist quotas set in 1924 made an exception for the Western Hemisphere.

Any man born in an independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to the southernmost tip of South America, could migrate along with his wife and underage children. That exemption came about thanks to the influence of the agriculture lobby. Southwestern farmers argued that they could not function without the labor of migrants from Latin America.

And so, while ideology demanded restriction, reality required openness.

The 1920s-era restrictions changed as the world took note of American hypocrisy

Ideologies changed over the 40 years of the quota system and ideas about who should be allowed to migrate shifted. World War II and the Cold War each created incentives to end the ban on Asian immigration, if in a token way. For instance, Chinese immigration, barred since the 1880s, resumed in 1943, though only 105 entry visas were issued per year. This served both as a nod to alliances and an attempt to convince the world that the US was not fundamentally racist.

But that was a difficult fiction to maintain while the quota system existed. The combined pressures of the civil rights movement at home, which elevated the cause of racial equality, and the Cold War, which heightened the need for at least the outward appearance of equality, inspired a massive rewrite of immigration law.

The result was the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, the basics of which continue to structure our immigration system and shape our debates. The new law did away with the national-origins quota and favored family reunification and high-skilled migrants (though only if they had specific job offers or worked in a profession deemed scarce by the Labor Department). Crucially, the law also capped immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time, fundamentally redefining America’s southern border.

The law also embodied a new set of commitments to fairness. Upon the abolition of the old quota system, President Lyndon B. Johnson said it had “violated the basic principle of American democracy — the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man.” The new immigration regime restored that principle, knocking down “the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”

It was a nice idea, and the aspirations Johnson voiced were commendable. But by the 1980s, the practical flaws inherent in the new immigration regime were starting to show. 

The 1965 immigration law created fresh problems, finally confronted in the 1980s

The law’s new rules for the Western Hemisphere created a difficult new situation for migrants from Mexico, who were used to a cyclical migration pattern tied to the growing cycle. Over time, increased policing of the border spurred migrants to become long-term or permanent immigrants, often without official documentation. They brought with them young children or gave birth to children — US citizens — after arriving. They found employment, built lives, and integrated into communities first in border states and then across the country.

The presence of these undocumented immigrants, vital to the social and economic life of the United States, emerged as one of the many unintended consequences of the new immigration law. By the 1980s, some 5 million undocumented immigrants — some from the Western Hemisphere, many others from Europe, Asia, and Africa who had overstayed their visas — lived in the United States, caught in a shadow world of unauthorized residency.

At another key turning point, both parties opted to be immigration realists

Legislators had two options: a hardline approach or a realist one. A hardline “solution” — raids followed by the detention and deportation of millions of immigrants — would have destroyed lives, devastated American communities, and punched a hole in the economy.

Congress instead worked toward a flexible solution that recognized the lived realities of immigrants as well as their importance to the economy (while strengthening border security and, for the first time, fining employers for hiring undocumented immigrants).

The fix was far from perfect. By cracking down on the ability of employers to hire undocumented migrants, the bill ensured the continuation of an unstable gray-market labor economy, with the concomitant ever-present fear of crackdowns.

The Temporary Protected Status designation, created to aid refugees, likewise created new realities on the ground that politicians had to consider, forcing them to set aside rigid ideologies. Created in 1990 as a path to aid people who were in the US when their home countries were afflicted by war or natural disasters, TPS in its very name stressed the temporariness of the designation. But wars, natural disasters, and famines create chaos lasting much longer than the six to 18 months of protection offered by TPS.

Time and again migrants have seen their TPS status renewed, to the point where migrants have been in the United States for years, building lives and families in this country. In truth, there is little temporary about TPS, whether the people affected are victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquake or refugees from the Sudanese civil war. Some Sudanese have been in the US under TPS status for more than a decade.

There is no simple answer to this. Ripping people from their communities and sending them to a country they haven’t seen in more than a decade seems cruel. Creating a path to residency or citizenship is a complicated endeavor, and building a national consensus for any of those policies now appears impossible.

One policy now seen as idealistic began as blatant ethnic favoritism

The diversity visa, which Trump and his allies have been attacking, is yet another example of a policy shaped not just by ideology but by realities on the ground. Opening up immigration to countries that historically send few people to the US is a reasonable, even noble idea, in the abstract. But “diversity” was hardly the initial goal. As the historian Carly Goodman recounts, the provision was first developed to allow a route to citizenship mainly for Irish immigrants.

By the late 1980s, tens of thousands of Irish had fled poverty in their home country and were living without authorization in the United States, leading to a drive to “legalize the Irish.” These were not relatives of US citizens, nor had they come under the rules laid down in 1965.

Policy had to respond to the reality of this population. But to avoid the perception that the law was a giveaway to the Irish, legislators framed it as an issue of “diversity,” adding countries that sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the US in the previous five years.

Making the case for more Irish immigration was a political winner, and the diversity visa lottery program became a mainstay of US policy, offering a way in for 50,000 immigrants who didn’t qualify under the employment or family reunification standards. But while the visa was devised to aid Irish immigrants, it also ended up helping African immigrants, and others who indeed had been underrepresented. The push-and-pull of pragmatism and idealism had a beneficial final result.  

Immigration policy is inherently difficult because it is the locus for a collision of national values, economic calculations, and the lived experience of millions of people and their families. Policymaking is made more difficult when the issue is clouded with false claims and fear-mongering, as it is when Trump ties immigrants to crime, although the rates of crime among immigrants are lower than among native-born Americans.

But the fundamental lie underpinning all the Trump proposals is the notion that there is a simple, permanent plan that can cut through the messy reality and “fix” immigration —  and that anything short of such a solution amounts failure or a betrayal. The idea that the 1986 immigration act would forever sort out the tangle of undocumented migrants was always a fallacy; it was never going to comprehensively resolve complexities of immigration flows in the Western Hemisphere.

Immigration will always be a fluid, complicated issue that will need regular updating to account for economic conditions, unintended consequences, and shifting national values.

That is why it is imperative for Republicans to move away from apocalyptic narratives and hardline solutions, and for Americans to accept that, when it comes to immigration policy, there is no single perfect solution — only efforts to adapt and adjust the rules in humane and thoughtful ways.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The men of film, television, and radio who have been charged with sexual harassment and abuse are rapidly disappearing from the entertainment landscape.

Minnesota Public Radio has decided to stick reruns of A Prairie Home Companion in the vault following allegations against Garrison Keillor. You will never again hear those meandering tales about Lake Wobegon that either captivated or irritated you — at least not on the public airwaves (and his musical guests are collateral damage). Louis C.K.’s shows for HBO have vanished, and his movie I Love You, Daddy was shelved before it opened.

Kevin Spacey, already fired from House of Cards, was literally snipped out of the new film about the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson in 1973, All the Money in the World, and replaced by Christopher Plummer in hastily reshot scenes.

And fans of the animated series Gravity Falls might notice that one character sounds a little different: Louis C.K.’s voice was removed and redubbed with that of series creator Alex Hirsch — a powerfully metaphorical act at a time when there’s so much talk of the relative weight of harassers’ and victims’ voices.

For those who want to go further and take it on themselves to avoid the art of alleged harassers, there’s Rotten Apples, a site that flags films tied to people facing allegations of sexual harassment. Type Good Will Hunting into the site’s search engine and up pops a list including Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, and Harvey Weinstein — with hyperlinks to stories about the allegations against them. Type in any Woody Allen movie and — well, you get the point. (All of Alfred Hitchcock now comes with an asterisk, because he was allegedly abusive toward Tippi Hedren.)

The drive to erase alleged sex predators from the entertainment landscape is understandable. These men built careers exploiting the women and men over whom they had power, but they also involved the rest of us in their predation, turning us into unwitting accomplices who consumed their art and lined their pockets. Part of removing them from streaming services or public radio networks is about ending that complicity; it’s the industry’s response to the audience’s revulsion.

But the decisions by the entertainment industry to pull shows represent a flattened version of an important debate. The industry clearly bears responsibility for making sure the perpetrators are removed from positions of power. But distributors of preexisting works are surely mainly driven by the profit motive: They’re worried that audiences will be offended by any company associated with sex predators and walk away.

Despite the erasures, audiences still have to navigate their relationship to the art that remains available. We all have to evaluate how we relate to it both externally and internally (as I’ve come to think of it). By “externally,” I mean: What is the significance of consuming — and therefore supporting, financially or in terms of prestige — the art of a sexual predator? By “internally,” I mean: How does it change the experiences of consuming that art?

These questions aren’t new. Nor have they gotten any easier.

These aesthetic questions did not emerge for the first time with the Weinstein revelations. Indeed, the question of whether to boycott Allen’s films has generated so much controversy over the years that the New York Times handed it over in 2014 to their ethicist columnist, in this case Chuck Klosterman.

His equivocal answer reveals how difficult of a question it is to untangle. On the one hand, Klosterman argued, you don’t need a logical reason to avoid watching any film; it’s not like jury duty. But if you do revisit Annie Hall or Manhattan, he said, “The obligation of the audience is to watch with a fair mind: to neither deny what you know about its real-world creation nor fabricate a fictional subtext that suits what you want to believe.”

Which is murky advice for a murky quandary: What defines fair-mindedness in parsing subtext of a Woody Allen film, given the obsessive attention given to young women in his work (a theme, moreover, far more evident in Manhattan than Annie Hall)?

It’s one thing to say you don’t want to rent a Woody Allen movie because he’ll profit. But how does it affect us internally to watch a film knowing the (alleged) bad acts of the auteur who created it? Or take the similar case of watching The Cosby Show, long beloved for its depiction of a middle-class black family at a time when such depictions were almost entirely absent from the cultural landscape. When scores of women came forward to detail their experiences of sexual harassment and assault by its star, TV Land pulled reruns of the show (though it’s still watchable on Amazon).

“I think an argument can be made, in some cases, for separating an entertainer’s personal life, however messy it is, from how one feels about their art,” wrote Zeba Blay, culture writer for the Huffington Post. “But the fact that Cosby used his Cliff Huxtable persona as leverage for allegedly perpetrating and hiding his assaults makes that impossible for me to do.”

How does an audience member not view a Louis C.K. set differently when he jokes about the danger men represent to women? Having now admitted to being one of those dangerous men, his comedy takes on a darker, predatory tone, as a cover for bad acts rather than a genuine attempt at observational jokes. Humor that was once cringe-inducing becomes stomach-churning.

Make the works available, so viewers can decide

As a historian, I strongly believe that it’s important that we keep these men’s work accessible. Woody Allen films are a genuinely important part of American film history. The Cosby Show is key to understanding representation in media and tangled issues of race, class, and acceptance. But I also can’t imagine watching old episodes simply for entertainment.

Allen’s and Cosby’s work holds little personal weight for me. But I do continue to watch one of my most beloved shows, Parks and Recreation, even though Louis C.K. plays a recurring role in the second season. But now when he appears on-screen, the warmth of watching a beloved character is gone, and instead I find myself thinking not of the character Dave Sanderson but of the abuser Louis C.K., and my sense of escapism is shattered. Now I skip those episodes.

This isn’t simply a matter of personal revulsion. There is a genuine moral problem at the heart of continuing to consume shows starring these men for pure entertainment purposes. Consuming fiction requires people to wall off certain information they have: that these are actors, that there’s a script, that there is no fourth wall on that familiar living room set. That’s not information I can set aside any more, not only because I simply can’t forget, but also because to set it aside is to conclude that my need to be entertained by a particular work is more important than my need to remain aware of, and appalled by, the abuses these men have committed.

Such a calculation necessarily requires diminishing the importance of the abuse to something less than, at most, a few hours of entertainment. That’s a gross devaluation of the victims and their experiences. 

But many cases remain complicated, including the movie Frida. The film was distributed by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax. And thanks to a recent essay by the film’s star and producer, Salma Hayek, we know that Weinstein used the film to sexually harass and exploit her. (Among other things, he forced her to do a gratuitous nude love scene, Hayek says.) So pull it, right? Scrub it from the universe. At the least, don’t watch it.

Except we also know that the film was intensely personal to Hayek, the result of tireless effort to bring the story of Frida Kahlo to the big screen. Avoiding the film because it is a Weinstein production punishes the woman who endured his harassment in order to bring her vision to life. No artistic product belongs entirely to one person, especially in the world of film and broadcasting — auteur theory aside.

To take the discussion out of the realm of modern cinema for a moment, consider the case of Paul Gauguin. The pathbreaking French artist not only abused his wife but regularly had sex with — abused — the Tahitian girls he painted, some as young as 13. Many of the girls and women in his famed portraits are not just his subjects — they are his victims. Sexual violence abounds in his work. So what do we do with this information? Gaugin remains a crowd favorite. Should institutions cease exhibiting his paintings? Should they warn visitors? 

There is no one-size-fits-all answer, though we can probably build consensus on a few absolutes: Banishing a person’s work from exhibitions goes too far; letting living abusers go unpunished doesn’t go far enough.  

Beyond that, each case demands nuanced judgment that somehow avoids excuse-making, something our culture is particularly ill-suited for at this moment. And, yes, it does seem unfair to give such patient, careful regard to men who had no such care for the women and men they abused.

But as with most contentious questions, the answer seems to boil down to “more, not less”: more awareness of what these men have done and how it has affected their art and their colleagues, more debate over the best place for their art in our society, more opportunities for their victims and their art. In that light, we might view the Rotten Apples site not as an invitation to never watch a Hitchcock film again, but rather to think harder when we do.

We don’t need to erase these men and their art, but we can no longer see it as unalloyed entertainment or drama, hermetically sealed off from the “real world.” The moral compromise required to view it in that way is too great. And as the last few months have constantly reminded us, we’ve already made enough moral compromises.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vox columnist, is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.