With President Trump there can be few distinctions and no subtleties. Nearly everything is all one way or all the other, all good or all bad, and must fit within the 140 or so characters of Twitter. Thus the president becomes a hopeless demagogue or ignoramus — just like many of the liberals who run Connecticut, for whom there are few distinctions and no subtleties either.

Those who run Connecticut are the mirror image of Trump on the issue of the day, immigration, for they refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration and between religion and the fascism that often hides behind it.

Those who run Connecticut cannot distinguish between abortion rights and the sexual exploitation of children. For them public policy must be all abortion, all the time, even if it conceals the rape of children who lack the protection of a parental notification law.

And those who run Connecticut cannot distinguish the highest purposes of government, the care of the innocent needy, who are politically inconsequential, from the lowest purposes, the contentment of government’s own employees, a fearsome special interest that zealously guards its privileges.

In Connecticut’s suffocating liberal fog, anyone who attempts to make such distinctions is denounced by those in power as a hater and extremist. For as Lenin is supposed to have noted, if you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it.

This sort of politics can never be more than sloganeering and can never prompt more than sloganeering in reply. It panders to the converted, changes no minds, produces only contempt, and hardens divisions. It is what its participants deserve.

God help the state and the country.

Think like the Lady

Everybody opposing the Trump administration’s attempt to restrict immigration from Religious Crazy Land is using the Statue of Liberty as a mascot.

Yes, the statue is a beautiful symbol of this country’s openness, as articulated by Emma Lazarus’ inspiring sonnet inscribed below it, but some people have made a fetish of the symbol in their hatred of Trump.

For Lazarus’ sonnet did not ennoble this country’s immigration for its own sake but rather for its awarding freedom and opportunity without regard to social class. And what would Lady Liberty herself think of the source of so much of the recent immigration to the United States, legal and illegal?

That is, for decades now the United States has been waging imperial wars or undermining governments in countries from Asia to Africa to Central and South America to the Middle East, intervening in civil wars or pursuing “regime change” in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, and now Syria, often devastating the landscape, killing or maiming hundreds of thousands, and making millions homeless. Then the United States resettles a few of the victims of its interventions as refugees and pats itself on the back for its supposed humanitarianism.

For some reason Trump’s attempt to suspend refugee traffic is upsetting many Americans but the awful cause of that traffic is not.

The other day an Iraqi general complained that Trump’s refugee order would prevent him from visiting the United States to consult with military officials here. But so much the better if Iraqi and other generals fighting these imperial wars know that there will be no refuge for them in the United States and that they have no option but to win their own wars.

Years ago the writer William F. Buckley Jr. looked at these military adventures and the refugees they created and remarked ruefully: “Lose a country, gain a restaurant.” But this country has plenty of restaurants already, and those who would be friends of refugees would be far better friends if they channeled their activism into opposing policies that manufacture refugees.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.