Still trying to understand the anger and resentment from both sides of the electorate after Donald Trump’s recent victory; I began writing several articles trying to explore the reasons for rising tensions amongst Americans. After beginning a large research article on the growth of the alt-right I came to the realization that clearly both sides of the electorate are neither overtly racist nor unintelligent. This lead me to the question, why do both sides call the each other racist? After digging into this question and spending obscene amounts of time looking into the rhetoric put out by liberals, conservatives and the media I have come to the realization that most if not all of the hoopla is nothing more than avoiding the questions that a lot of Americans would like discussed: Should and can immigrants be pushed to assimilate to American ideals? What are our core ideals? And lastly, what happens when an immigrant’s religion is diametrically in opposition to core American ideals?

It is the failure of politicians and media to have real public discourse on these topics that has lead us to our current state of political tensions. The causes of this failure are many and varied but a lot of it comes down to modern taboos on discussing religion and the fear of being perceived as racist.

Trump attacking both Hillary Clinton and President Obama on failing to use the term “Islamic Terrorism” while taking a hard stance on curbing the immigration of muslims highlighted this problem and in reality became a central issue of the campaign. Democrats where right to quickly point out that this would be unconstitutional but questions of assimilation never truly came up. Trump then revised his position to state that he would stop immigration from countries that have terrorists. Instead of democrats stating their position and discussing their views on assimilation and dealing with the social concerns, they side stepped the debate and began lobbing accusations of racism not only at Trump but all of his supporters. Both parties further sidestepped the issue by talking about the economic concerns of immigration which I believe is not the primary concern Americans have right now on the subject of immigration.

It doesn’t matter if you take the view that Trump is a racist, it is a true statement that the majority of his supporters are not. The democratic party failed to understand that these questions are very important to a large portion of Americans and many felt relieved that Trump at least attempted to bring the issue up.

The part I find frightening in all of this is that we really do not fully know the positions of either party on these questions. The one thing that we do know is that the democratic party supports immigration. That is useless information especially in the context of increased terrorism and growing social problems in the United States and Europe. Donald Trump takes a little clearer position by taking the position that he supports immigration but only wants to take the good people while still avoiding the core questions.

I firmly believe that most Americans want and believe in immigration but also want limitations on those allowed to enter (which we already do). And then going the final step that many politicians refuse to discuss, Americans would like to have our society set the expectation that those who do come here need to assimilate to our core ideals. I completely understand the pitfalls of having this discussion but it has been an American tradition that immigrants and especially children of immigrants should assimilate. Now that Americans are beginning to see children of immigrants conducting acts of terrorism they have started to believe that this tradition has broken down which is further reinforced by the lack of real discussion.

There are a lot of moral and constitutional pitfalls when answering these questions and extreme positions can lead us to having real human rights issues as stated may times by those on the left and then there are real security, and social concerns as feared by the right and as we have seen Europe and more recently in the US.

I am not proposing that we need laws to try and enforce assimilation, in fact the idea of that is frightening and would more than likely have an opposite effect. What I am proposing is that we attempt to rebuild the tradition of assimilation through public discourse. We should talk about these issues through healthy discussion and begin to create some social consensus. If we do not, we open ourselves up to either stopping our tradition of reasonably open immigration, the implementation of draconian assimilation laws, or maintain course and see a continued increase in social problems and rising domestic terrorism.