Dear Leader’s accelerating Cultural Revolution
Donald Trump spent the months after losing the 2020 presidential election stoking a conspiracy theory that he’d been robbed. Rudy Giuliani traversed the country claiming he’d assembled reams of alleged evidence (he never published) that the election had been stolen. Trump filed dozens of lawsuits he lost. It was all Sturm und Drang. Still, his months-long tantrum was enough to incite his followers to violently storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The world watched it unfold on TV. Trump watched as well from the West Wing, doing nothing to stop it for hours, a dereliction of duty for which he’s never paid. Fools that we are, Americans reelected the man last fall.
A quote zipping around the internet on Monday distilled the tensions Trump is once again stoking to satisfy his itch for revenge against unbelievers and immigrants. This time on the opposite coast in Los Angeles.
“It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor comes to take him away is somehow the good guy,” said Connor Simon last month after ICE raided his Pennsylvania pizzeria.
Spencer Ackerman writes at Zeteo that what we are witnessing in Los Angeles was foreseen in Aimé Césaire’s 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. Western colonialism came back to bite in the form of fascism in Europe:
“[B]efore they were [Nazism’s] victims, they were its accomplices,” Césaire wrote. “[T]hey tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them… they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Césaire called this a “terrific boomerang effect.” With some refinement, his concept is now known as the “Imperial Boomerang.”
Ackerman traces the origins of Trump’s unfolding pogrom against immigrants and political infidels to the Global War on Terror (GWOT) launched in the wake of September 11. After we created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and consolidated immigration enforcement, border militarization, and counterterrorism under one agency, we promoted the militarization of policing. Now the forces the U.S. unleashed in the GWOT have boomeranged. “DHS was a direct mechanism for bringing the tools of the war home,” writes Ackerman. The spinoff military weapons and training teach warrior cops to treat civilians as the enemy. Police departments are in some sense now gun clubs with uniforms.
What DHS and Trump call “mass deportation” is a lie. In practice, it is the Imperial Boomerang of the US extraordinary rendition from the first decade of the ‘War on Terror.’ Many captured migrants are not being sent to their country of origin, as the word “deportation” entails. DHS is sending them instead to completely different countries. In the case of those Venezuelans that it sent to the Salvadoran counterterror prison CECOT, DHS is sending people it dubiously calls criminals not to face prosecution, but for indefinite detention in conditions of brutality. These are the wages of US officials from both parties, particularly during the Obama administration, imposing zero accountability on the CIA officials who conducted extraordinary renditions on people it claimed and never had to prove were “terrorists.” (It should come as a lesson that countries where such kidnappings occurred were the ones to impose criminal penalties on CIA officers.)
The upshot is that people “from Boston to Minneapolis” understand “that what is done to the undocumented today will be done to US citizens tomorrow, much as it was done to Iraqis, Afghans, and many others yesterday, and indeed to Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans the day before.”
Is it our national karma we’re seeing in Trump’s militarized cultural revolution? Will it begin with immigrants and progress to camps? That’s one way of framing what we confront. Another is the decades-long, domestic conservative effort to roll back history beginning with the New Deal and progressing to undoing the Civil Rights movement. Trump first wants to work out the kinks in imposing dictatorial rule by practicing on immigrants. Targets of opportunity now that he’s spent years stoking hatred of them.
But Trump’s lackeys are attacking on other fronts simultaneously. James Fallows made the case Sunday that Trump’s Project 2025 policies are taking the form of China’s Cultural Revolution:
What the Cultural Revolution boiled down to was a cult-driven assault on knowledge itself. On scholarship, on expertise, on rules, on institutions that might outlast one mood or one set of rulers. It was “feed it into the wood chipper,” before wood chippers were invented. It was “move fast and break things,” in a country too poor to afford much breakage. It was “some men just want to watch the world burn.” It is what China did to itself, and what some Americans are doing to this country now.
No Reichstag moment
Trump dispatching the National Guard and now Marines to Los Angeles is both unprecedented and illegal. Or quasi-legal. Trump and his enablers seem intent on painting his actions as within his power and sort-of-legal by stretching the interpretation of existing statutes to their breaking point and beyond. In his first term, he used temporary appointments to get around needing congressional approval. He’s twisting emergency powers similarly in 2.0 to avoid the appearance of a Reichstag fire moment. He’s not suspending the law. He’s not coloring outside the lines. He’s moving the lines.
Trump declares an emergency or crisis where many others do not see one, enabling him to take sweeping actions, rally supporters and fight on political terrain he finds favorable.
Trump’s declaration of an economic emergency in April enabled sweeping tariffs. His declaration of an invasion on the southern border paved the way for intensified deportations. An energy emergency made it easier for him to ease regulations. His pronouncement that fentanyl entering from Canada was an emergency justified sanctions, as did a similar finding on the International Criminal Court’s approach to Israel.
By many measures, the emergencies were hard to discern. But Trump’s ability to pronounce them via executive order enabled him to instantly deploy the resulting authority.
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade tells Greg Sargent that in Los Angeles Trump is trying to provoke confrontation in a blue state. An emergency of his own making works for him. The convicted felon who has taken bribes, defied federal court orders, pardoned convicted insurrectionists, murderers, money launderers, embezzlers, fraudsters and tax evaders gets to posture as the guarantor of law and order while constructing a police state from what was recently a democratic republic.
Even if he loses in court, says McQuade — and he’s lost a lot in court — his calculation is “We don’t care what the law says, we care more about winning on the political scorecard.”
Do you feel like collateral damage yet?
Update: To drive home the point about militarizing police, here’s a video I compiled eight years ago.
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