Radical anti-immigrant agendas advance most safely through legal institutions

Evidence

One respondent, an elected official in Rotterdam. and representative of a party critical of earlier pro-immigration policies, put it bluntly, when he said, “It would be against law-and-order for people to start going through the streets kicking Muslims around; they should just elect us, and we’ll do it for them, legally.” Though· this might suggest a fine sensibility about the need to act within existing institutions, the wider point is that political formations now exist, that are ready to take advantage of any further shift in public sentiment against the Muslim communities. — Michael A. Reynolds and Thomas D. Grant, The Future of Europe and Its Muslims, 263

Categorization

• BMF: The official’s ‘elect us and we’ll do it for them, legally’ is close kin to the state’s routinized violence in A Very Minor Prophet and to the bureaucratic capture in We — power that keeps the forms intact while changing the content.
• DEEPTHINKING: The quote reframes democratic procedure itself as the preferred instrument of ethnic coercion — legality as an aesthetic that launders violence.