The insightful rabbit man

For a young guy with an obsession with rabbits, that Noah Smith sure writes well and insightfully on a variety of topics.   Here's the latest example:  The End of the War on Islam. 

An extract:

Some of America’s 16-year panic over Islam was due to terror attacks, but some was due to the fact that the American Right simply panics about stuff. It is what they do. Communism, crime, rap lyrics, the War on Christmas, Dungeons and Dragons, video games — always just one thing after another. Some of the panics are much more justifiable than others, but the supply of panic is roughly fixed.

Readers on the Right are not going to like hearing this, but some portion of the panic over Islam was not really about terror attacks, but a displaced fear of the demographic and cultural changes that were taking place in America in the 2000s and early 2010s. The conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a Muslim was obviously just a stand-in for the fact that he was part African. The fear of Sharia Law probably had something to do with the decline of Christianity in the U.S. The years of 2001-2016 were years of high immigration and rapid demographic change, and many people on the Right were afraid of that, and it was easy to associate those things with a “foreign”-feeling religion like Islam, especially given the backdrop of the War on Terror.

But the Trump Era changed this in two ways. First of all, it gave people on the Right permission to express explicit worries about one of the things they were really scared of — immigration. Instead of using the foreign-seeming-ness of Islam as a proxy, conservatives were free to point the finger at actual foreigners. Second, the Trump Era saw the reignition of America’s biggest and most fundamental and most divisive social conflict — the Black-White Conflict. Given a choice to fight about the Black-White Conflict vs. anything else, Americans will choose the former. With Antifa and BLM to worry about, who needs ISIS?

This change will be durable, I think. The GOP has decisively shifted away from the party of Bush to the party of Trump, and Trumpism has decisively shifted away from attacking Islam to attacking BLM, wokeness, Antifa, anarchism, rioters, etc. etc.

He doesn't actually mention it, but surely much of the Right's panic supply has moved onto China generically as its target.  (Which is not to say that China is not a cause for concern in many respects, of course.)