Much has been said about Muslim radicalization, and the threat it represents to our way of life. Perhaps it is time to consider the threat to our way of life posed by the radicalization of a significant percentage of non-Muslim Americans.

                We are being subjected to an ever increasing barrage of inflammatory rhetoric by Republicans chasing their party’s presidential nomination. Donald Trump is the current inflamer-in-chief, but he is not alone. Nothing appears to be out of bounds, nor has anything been out of bounds for the last eight years, which is what happens when all sense of propriety and civility are tossed out the window.

                But this isn’t yet another diatribe about Donald Trump, or any of the other GOP candidates. It’s about the thousands of Americans in audiences across the country who lap up the extremist claptrap spewed by The Donald and his ilk, and then clamor for more of the same. It is about those good salt of the earth Americans without whom The Donald would merely be a silly looking man with a suspect complexion and even more suspect hairdo baying at the moon in an empty auditorium—instead of being the leading candidate of his party for the most powerful position on the face of the earth—President of these United States.

                Overwhelmingly, these are good people. They grew up believing that if you worked hard you could earn your own little slice of the American pie. You didn’t need a fancy college degree to get ahead. A good set of hands and a willingness to work would be enough to see you through. There would be wages sufficient to live comfortably. If you gave your life to a company, at the end of your working career, there would be a defined benefit pension. Change, if there had to be change, would evolve gradually and give enough time to come to terms with it. They felt safe.  They were proud of their flag. They trusted the government it symbolized. Most importantly, they knew their place in society and it gave them a sense of place.

                Then, in a comparatively short span of years, the world, as they knew it, disappeared.

                As businesses consolidated and became multi-national, the bottom line became the only line. Company CEO’s claimed their only loyalty was to their shareholders to the exclusion of all others. Collective bargaining units were at first vilified and then de-certified. On the wages front, the race towards the bottom began. The jobs they felt were secure went away. Bankruptcy courts were used by the powerful to shed contractual obligations—especially employee benefits. The tax code became a playground wherein extravagantly paid specialists found new, esoteric, and technically legal, ways to pay fewer taxes than workers paid on their own salaries. Corporate headquarters migrated to a post office box in some out of the way place off shore to avoid the corporation paying their fair share back home in the United States. People were unsure of the new world order and their place in it. The “land of the free and home of the brave” became the land of the uncertain and the home of the afraid.

                Ominously, people began to suspect that their own government was complicit in bringing about their personal catastrophizes. Congress came to be seen as a client of the money men who funded re-election campaigns. Elected officials came to be seen as agents of special interests rather than representatives of the voters who elected them.

                It didn’t take long for the disaffected to be mined for political purposes. As far back as 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew began to rail against the “nattering nabobs of negativity,” those intellectuals who had the audacity to question the will of the silent majority—as interpreted by the administration.

                And the disaffected ate it up.

                In the ensuing years, a succession of political and faith-based opportunists, primarily Republican, manipulated this segment of the population for their own ends. It wasn’t all that hard. Talk about an earlier simpler time. Suggest who was responsible for those good times going away.  Rev up the anger and the frustration, point the faithful in the general direction of a ballot box, and then wait for the predictable outcome. Do nothing beyond drumming up a new set of fears and promises for the next election. It worked time and again.

                But it does not appear to be working this time.

                It seems there is a growing suspicion among the disaffected that they have been “had.” Despite forty years of answering the call each election, nothing much has changed. Those that have, have. Those left out, remain left out.

                They are frustrated, and they are angry. They appear ready to turn against the political class that treated them as reliable patsies. They appear ready to radicalize, and it’s hard to blame them.

                This is where things get dangerous.

                On the one hand, you have a crop of Republican presidential candidates sitting on top of the polls who seem willing to sell whatever they believe the so-called base is willing to buy at the moment for short term political gain. You have a base that is willing to buy whatever is being sold by the candidates at any given time, so long as it feeds their need to lash out at the establishment they perceive as having failed them.

                Consequently, candidates can come out in support of religious tests for entry into this country. They can talk about registering members of a given religion in some kind of national registry. They can call for shutting down places of worship that they find offensive. They can call for penalizing individuals simply because of their place of origin.

                All of these tactics are illegal, unlawful, and unconstitutional. More importantly, they are not who we are as a people (we hope), and they do incalculable damage to how we are perceived in the rest of the world.

                To which the likely answer is, we are only talking about one religion, and we are at war with the radicals who use that religion as an excuse for their criminal acts, consequently, restrictions are justified as necessary measures to prosecute the “war.” It’s only common sense.” “Common Sense” comes to be seen as license to ignore considerations such as a Constitution or a Bill of Rights.

                Create tools legitimizing discrimination and repression in order to “keep us safe”  to assuage the fearful in the short term, and it is permissible to ignore the fact such tools can be used–and they will be used, and abused–in circumstances down the road never contemplated at the time of their creation.

                How much further are candidates willing to go to garner the support of a segment of the population that is increasingly volatile? At what point do the leaders become the led—and where will they be willing to be led in order to maintain their own relevancy?

                It is all very well to criticize the candidate for stepping over the line, but the candidate per se is not the issue. Candidates come and go. The real issue is the people listening to the candidate, and where they collectively are willing to go politically.

                These citizens have real grievances that need to be addressed. While it was inconvenient and unnecessary to address them when those aggrieved were more malleable, that is no longer the case. Their time has come. Should their concerns be shelved until the next election, the possibility exists that the anger, frustration, and fear of the disaffected will transition into nihilism, and that represents a grave danger to the continuation of the republic itself.