THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★^1125making it a felony to be in the country illegally and a crime to offer aid to illegal
immigrants.
The response was utterly unexpected: a series of massive demonstrations
in the spring of 2006 by immigrants— legal and illegal— and their support-
ers, demanding the right to remain in the country as citizens. In cities from
New York to Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas, hundreds of thousands
of protesters took to the streets. Nashville experienced the largest public demon-
stration in its history, a march of more than 10,000 mostly Hispanic immigrants.
All Congress could agree on, however, was a measure to build a 700-mile wall
along part of the U.S.-Mexico border. The immigration issue was at a stalemate,
where it remains today, its ultimate resolution impossible to predict.
Islam, America, and the “Clash of Civilizations”
The events of September 11, 2001 placed new pressures on religious liberty.
Even before the terrorist attacks, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington
had published a widely noted book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
the World Order (1996), which argued that with the Cold War over, a new global
conflict impended between Western and Islamic “civilizations.”
Many readers, including politicians, interpreted Huntington, not entirely
correctly, as reducing politics and culture to a single characteristic— in this case,
religion— forever static, divorced from historical development. (“Islam,” in
fact, consists of well over a billion people, in very different countries ranging
from South Asia to the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.) None-
theless, in the aftermath of September 11, the formula that pitted a freedom-
loving United States against militant, authoritarian Muslims became widely
popular as a way of making sense of the terrorist attacks.
What did this mean for the nearly 5 million Americans who practiced the
Muslim religion? President Bush insisted that the war on terror was not a war
against Islam. But many Americans found it difficult to separate the two, even
though most American Muslims were as appalled by the terrorist attacks as
their fellow countrymen. Some critics claimed that Islam was fundamentally
incompatible with American life— a position reminiscent of prejudice in the
nineteenth century against Catholics and Mormons.
The Constitution and Liberty
As in the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives proved far more successful in imple-
menting their views in economic and foreign policy than in the ongoing cul-
ture wars. Two significant Supreme Court decisions in June 2003 revealed how
the largely conservative justices had come to accept that the social revolution
that began during the 1960s could not be undone.
What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?