WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON FDR, THE HOLOCAUST, AND THE REFUGEE BAN:

The refugee question is not the only uncomfortable parallel between the 1930s and our own time. The real problem in the 1930s wasn’t the lack of compassion for Jewish and other refugees; it was the feckless appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the unwillingness to confront him that empowered the Nazi persecution of the Jews and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. So today the true villain of the Syria story—aside from Syria, Russia, and Iran—is the feckless Obama foreign policy that allowed a cyst to metastasize into a cancer, just as Britain, France, and America once allowed Hitler to grow into the master of Europe.

The Obama officials and cheerleaders now guilt-tripping the country over “heartlessness” toward Syria refugees are giving hypocrisy a bad name. Bad foreign policy is the cause of the heartbreak in Syria today, not bad immigration policy. The world does not need lectures from Susan Rice and Samantha Power on what we should do about Syrian refugees; the best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening. The Holocaust was not caused by the Reed-Johnson Act; it was caused by Nazi hatred, enabled by naive liberal illusions about the “arc of history” that prevented the West from mobilizing against Hitler when he was weak and easily defeated.

What the progressives want to do now is to turn the immigration debate into a morality play with Trump cast not as FDR (who on this point he closely and even eerily resembles) but as Satan. Obama’s role (and the role of non-interventionist Democrats) in making the Syrian mess so intractable can be airbrushed out of the picture. The national conversation shall be only and always about courageous, compassionate, and deeply humane progressives resisting the forces of Republican and especially Trumpian darkness. . . .

This country needs a serious and humane immigration and refugee policy that is both enlightened and sustainable. We didn’t have it under Obama; we are unlikely to have it under Trump. Despite deporting hundreds of thousands of illegals, Obama never embraced the cause of defending America’s borders or regulating immigration in ways that clearly reassured marginalized American communities that the U.S. government was first and foremost committed to their welfare and to the defense of their way of life. And he never took responsibility for the ways in which his own repeated errors of judgment about the Middle East contributed to the mass refugee flows that he then tried to guilt-trip Americans into accommodating. Dumb cosmopolitanism leads to dumb nationalist reaction. The Obama years led to the Trump win—even as W’s years led to Obama.

Anything to distract from Obama’s disastrous foreign policy record.