Of course the intifada against the ICE invasion doesn’t have that much to do with saving migrants from the raids to ethnic-cleanse the country of darker skins lacking a paper or two. Or at least not as much to do with it as even the protesters would have you believe. These are proxy protests. And they’re overdue.
As with the George Floyd uprising during the felon’s first term, as with the nuclear-freeze protests against Reagan of the early 1980s or the Vietnam-Cambodia protests against Nixon that culminated with his troops’ murder of four unarmed students at Kent State in 1970, we’re seeing expressions of deeper anxiety about an imperial presidency reducing civil society to uniform shut-up-and-bow servility.
Democratic institutions were stronger in the 1970s and 80s. Nixon and Reagan were both reelected with historic landslides. But Watergate cost Nixon his presidency and Iran-Contra nearly cost Reagan his as both lied, broke laws, defied Congress and mistook the presidency for a divine right.
Their thuggier political heir got back in with one of the closest elections in history but took it as a mandate to turn the clock back on a century of pluralism. A country we could often enough be proud of and feel safe in is metamorphosing into a vermin of its worst self. Democratic institutions today have all the credibility of a Potemkin village. States redder than Soviets have so criminalized the act of protesting that it is now an invitation to crack skulls, as our own attorney general threatens. The felon-in-chief is itching for it. Like all cowards, he’s always lived for violence–speaking it, inflicting it, instigating it, glorifying it.
The humiliation and baiting by ICE and troops is a scripted play for the cameras. It’s politically savvy entertainment as remuneration for all those who voted for the felon. They pruriently watch in their shag-carpeted living rooms far from the streets, most of them thriving on an economy those very migrants have helped save, many of them stoked on cruelty indistinguishable from the joys of a crowd watching gladiators torturing captives and slaves in Rome’s Coliseum a Caligula or two ago.
Migrants are getting deported. But so is American identity.
The deacons of law-and-order can claim that there’s not much legitimacy in protesters opposing deporting the lawless, and to some extent they’re right–if it were only the lawless: it isn’t. Regardless. Migrants are just the tripwire. A couple of million trans have been legally erased from existence. A single executive order disenfranchised millions of the right to vote, another will shorten the lives of millions. Another restored the kind of bigoted travel bans that once targeted Asians, but now targets a dozen “shithole countries.”
Orwellian ministries of truth are replacing university boards, history is whitewashed, academic freedom obliterated, major media cowed, law firms emasculated. The Confederacy and its slavery-exalting symbols are being restored. The White House has become a clearing house of corruption on a scale that would vindicate Mt. McKinley being renamed for Mobutu. The military parade our Mobutu is throwing to himself, supposedly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the army, recalls the $100 million bash the shah of Iran threw himself in 1971, supposedly to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of Cyrus the Great. He thought he was making Persia great again.
The mendacity is beyond accounting. The felon pardoned and beatified the cop killers and insurrectionists of Jan. 20, whose only aim was to overturn by force a free and fraudless election and hang a vice president and assassinate a few other senators if they got the chance. But he calls insurrectionists those opposing his now sacred ICE cops.
Undocumented, criminal migrants’ proper and legally calibrated removal is not an existential threat to American values. But the police-state manner and sweep of mass-migrant removals in the shadow of what’s turning into a military occupation is. It is emblematic of perversions of democratic norms far beyond the fate of migrants.
So of course there are protests. There must be. “I am not one of those who think that there can be a compromise, even one made with resignation, even provisional,” Camus would have said (as he did say when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising of 1956) “with a regime of terror which has as much right to call itself [democratic] as the executioners of the Inquisition had to call themselves Christians.”
The Mexicans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans getting jack-booted out of the country are the Jews and gays and gypsies and other non-“Aryans” post-Weimar Germans allowed to be dehumanized and terrorized until it was too late. No degree of protest would have been too great, no degree of violence unjustified to stop what happened next. Ordinary Germans–“willing executioners,” in historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s phrase–preferred not to act. They let it happen. They have lived with that tin-drummed shame since.
Angelinos may not be so obliging. Let’s hope they won’t be alone. Let’s hope we’re just getting started. Otherwise we’re well on the way of being this felon’s willing executioners.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
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