What about the unprecedented naked corruption and bribery? Trump is running the country like a third world corruption racket, the only comparable example that comes to mind is Eric Adams, who thankfully was just kicked out. They’re both scam artists. It still baffles me how Adams was allowed to run the city in such a brazenly corrupt way the more we learn about his mismanagement, lies, and bribes. Like with Adams, we are learning all the shit he did now that he’s out of office, it will take years to uncover the amount of money Trump stole from the public and all the other shit he engaged in.
A somewhat recent comparison is Berlusconi in Italy, who normalized a level of corruption in politcs. But that didn't mean the entire system devolved into authoritarianism.
Andrew Jackson and post Civil War GOP also come to mind.
It's going rather too far to say Berlusconi normalised corruption - the Italian state has never been a shining example in this regard (watching some Italian-Italian movies going back to the 1970s makes this painfully self-evident)
Rather Italian own-tolerance has been declining.
In the US one can readily find prior examples at national government level of which across span of 19th century until the muckrackers backlash led to clean-ups. But it's hardly that if one looks at 20th century in detail and w/o partisan blinders on that it's as clean as idealised.
Of course Trump backsliding to 19th c. type habits is not a great thing but it's nothing like unprecedented and shouldn't lead to Woe Is Us US we are doomed...
Asking "how is he allowed to do this" as you do with Adams here, is the wrong question, since the answer is trivial: because nobody stopped him.
So the right question is: Who will stop him? Who, specifically, which individual or group of people, is going to stop Adams or Trump from doing whatever horrible thing that is brazenly corrupt and/or brutally anti-democratic?
Reframing the question this way helps me think about it in a less abstract way, which I find useful in both assessing risk and determining next steps.
I’m still not feeling optimistic. The corruption is so staggering and no one is being held accountable, it feels like we are entering into something different.
Always keen to ask you - do you support illegal immigration? Just "yes or no".
No rational person could answer other than "no".
Yet the entirety of the American left, inclusive of everyone that votes for a Democrat, if answering honestly, would have to say "yes".
This failure has nothing to do with a breakdown of "democracy". It is a breakdown of law enforcement.
I am all for removing all hypocrisy. Let those that employ illegals face liability. Let America accept the economic consequences of losing this illegal labor force. Or better yet have those that want to employ them do it with some actual documented and enforce legal process.
ICE is enforcing the immigration laws. Others including everyone on the left in American is resisting that.
Explain how that is rational or sustainable without the entire country coming apart?
I don’t think ICEs tactics can rationally be explained in terms of effective immigration enforcement.
It’s more of an “own the libs” situation, especially in Minnesota, where Trump seems more interested in political points against a Dem state than fair enforcement. His base wants the optics of cruelty in blue cities because of grievance politics against elites.
There are better, fairer ways to pursue immigration enforcement.
First, recall it was CBP, not ICE, that shot Pretti. People keep saying ICE even when ICE wasn't involved. Second, the tactics can be interpreted as saying to illegal immigrants: "Don't think you can go to these 'sanctuary cities' and hide there. US laws have jurisdiction there as well, and we will find you and deport you, even there. It would be better if you leave on your own. Also, please tell your friends and relatives back in your native country about your struggles here, so they won't be tempted to enter the US illegally as well."
Given that US law says they should be deported, what would you say are the better, fairer ways to have them deported?
Well, says you ("refusing"). Evidence? And recall that those courts are tremendously backed up. I think we'd both agree we should be hiring a lot more judges for those cases. Most people aren't here legally and their asylum claims are denied (64% at the end of the Biden administration, for example). That's all it would take to make it more fair?
If you are a legal resident, with constitutional rights, the fact there is a backlog of cases and not enough judges is not great comfort as you sit in detention, unable to see your lawyer.
You can choose to ignore the many cases in the news about legal residents getting swept up, but that’s on you.
That’s partially why this is a dumb immigration enforcement strategy. It looks much more like intimidation.
You simply aren’t honesty engaging with what the “left” (read anyone less right wing than MAGA) actually believes about immigration. The fact that your worldview seems oriented around the strawman of democrats and ALL of their voters “supporting illegal immigration” frankly IS a break down in democracy, particularly our ability to work together in good faith and craft policy
Nobody here can make a case how/why this is an actually good way of doing immigration enforcement. If you cared about that issue, you’d realize this doesn’t work.
My answer to your initial question is no, and yet I’m far to your left. How is this possible?
A functional democracy must be able to enforce its laws but that’s not fundamental to what makes it a democracy. A democracy makes and can change laws based public consensus.
This is what the left actually proposes, that we step back and reassess the laws we’re writing so they can be enforced effectively in the face of a specific problem (a large undocumented population that’s been here for decades due to previous permissive policies) while also being humane and protecting the rights of individuals and communities.
The Trump administration has chosen instead to ignore the need for consensus or debate or even new legislation, and is instead pursuing an enforcement policy which actively harms communities across the country while treating those who object as enemies of the state. This has invited resistance; you should expect nothing less from Americans
The vast number of people even on the far left don't "support illegal immigration" per se, they think that many people who illegally immigrated are nonetheless today a pretty essential part of America and should be given legal pathways to residency or citizenship, especially "dreamers" i.e. people who were brought to the US illegally as children and have never known life anywhere else.
And as Nate sort of alludes to in his article, most people who are anti-ICE don't even believe that much. Many just don't think deportations are a practical way to enforce illegal immigration, and that the real solution is better enforcement at the employer level. (If they can't get jobs in the US, more immigrants will go home themselves.) And an increasing number of people who believe mass deportations are the answer are nonetheless becoming anti-ICE because of the chaos caused by their current tactics and the killing of American citizens who, whether you agree with them or not, posed no imminent threat to law enforcement before being killed by them. Ultimately a law enforcement agency that is infringing on people's rights to live without a paramiltary organization stomping through their neighborhood and causing chaos tends to be a greater concern than whether said organization is completing the job they might nonetheless want done.
Funny because corporations have been escaping it for basically ever.
Deportations are easily escapable. We determine who is and is not here legally. All it would take is an act of congress.
What you are presenting as inevitable is simply a smokescreen for a badly described (possibly intentionally) policy position you don’t want to say out loud.
My main point is that most people who are currently against ICE agree with that. Plenty of people got deported before ICE and current ICE tactics. The group of Americans who want open borders or completely unenforced immigration law is very small.
Actually yeah I kinda am fine with illegal immigration, it's a good problem to have. Not the best case scenario but it's help kept our demography healthy and our economy booming.
Probably at an impasse here because sounds like you believe that illegal immigrants are a significant drain on welfare spending, which I think is false. Social security, Medicare and defense are vastly more expensive than whatever paltry sums some illegal aliens might be receiving. Besides, they skew younger than the average American so have more productive working years ahead of them, and have more children who grow up to enter the workforce. Mass immigration, legal and otherwise, is the reason we have a fertility rate above replacement levels at all. Otherwise we'd be headed for demographic disaster, with too many elderly recipients taking from too few workers.
Sure, but the qualifications in your comment do suggest something a little more nuanced than full throated support for all illegal immigration regardless of circumstance. Presumably if US immigration law had been permissive enough for those people to enter legally that would have been the best case scenario you're hinting at.
It's not the entirety of the left. There are some of us who remember that illegal immigrants take jobs and lower incomes of low-income citizens, while increasing housing costs. It's more that the "left" has become the party of well-educated elites, who don't seem to care who's mowing their lawn, as long as the work gets done for cheap.
As someone from the left who bought their house with African-American neighbors, it's painful to me that my neighbor lost his lawn care business because the other contractors were hiring illegal immigrants and paying them slave wages. Other people weirdly prioritize illegal immigrants over their own low-income neighbors, but maybe they just make sure they don't live with lower income people of color so they don't call them neighbors.
I'm for illegal immigration because the GOP would rather use the issue as a cudgel and scare-tactic to rile up their base than fix the problems you articulate. Remember how Trump tanked the immigration bill because he couldn't take credit? If Republicans would negotiate in good faith then perhaps I'd change my mind - but for now the rational thing is to support illegal immigration.
Your comment reads as extremely partisan to me, but I'm curious. Here's a thought experiment I had.
Let's say a genie offered you the following tradeoff. From now on, nobody will ever be deported from the United States. But also, from now on nobody can ever enter the United States illegally or overstay their visa ever again. This isn't a trickster genie, we're not changing our immigration laws to define all immigration as legal, we're not fundamentally changing American society, etc. The deal is exactly what it seems like. We're also not concerned with the mechanics of how that happens, the genie can magically make it happen without causing other issues or degrading our democracy.
Would you take that offer?
Edit - in case it wasn't clear, the point of the thought experiment is that anyone who is currently in the US illegally gets to stay, but we don't get any new illegal immigrants.
Your premise is wrong. It isn’t close to true that everyone who votes Democratic supports illegal immigration. I have no issue at all with Trump closing the border. It is also true that a great many Republicans support illegal immigration to the extent that it is convenient for the businesses they run or the household help that they hire,
The biggest divide really has less to do with left and right as coherent ideologies anyway. Anti Trump people are open to a wide range of conservative priorities such as tight border enforcement, deportation in principle and even reassessment of asylum policy. The real difference is non MAGA people see the existing illegal population as a distinct problem that needs to be solved flexibly and pragmatically. The far right has a brittle hard nosed approach of uncritically enforcing laws which weren’t designed for problems at this scale, even if that means building a police state apparatus, explicitly pursuing a policy of intimidation an terror, and ignoring when this conflicts with individual and states rights
As a non-American not that convincing. Historical democratic tradition might be far less relevant after the great schism (lack of any connection to history) caused by the increasing digitization of the populace.
This sentence about the Pretti murder by government agents fills people from less violent countries with the chills: “Even among Republicans in the poll, only 41 percent thought the killing was justified”. Talk about “normalization”.
As an American, I think this is a fair critique- that's still an amazingly high number in absolute terms. Part of me thinks there's a substantial number of people who answered without having actually seen footage and just resorted to tribalism as usual because i don't know how you can watch it as a human being and justify it in any way.
Otoh that really reinforces your original point about people not being connected to history and i would add not being connected with actual reality if one's echo chamber is really that strong.
I'm probably more optimistic than you (i live here so i kinda have to be for my own sanity lol) but i think it's still a really dangerous moment for us.
The midterms are the real test imo- if they go off mostly as normal despite a probable GOP shellacking incoming i'll feel much less anxious about the near-term future. If not, i'd argue all bets are off for US democracy
You add an excellent point: The connection to reality has also been completely fractured by our near immersion in over 50 years of digital technologies.
The real test - unspoken by Americans but talked about plenty elsewhere- is what happens with the death or debilitation of Trump
Why don't you get back to us when he does something unconstitutional? So far, he's done things that are within our laws and the Constitution. Even the birthright citizenship executive order hasn't actually taken effect. It has raised the issue back at the Supreme Court, which is fine, because birthright citizenship is based on a Supreme Court interpretation of a clause in the 14th amendment, and that clause is open to other interpretations. It's absolutely normal for the Supreme Court to reconsider interpretations of the Constitution. If we don't like that, we can always just amend the Constitution.
All the arguments over immigration are ignoring the fact that he's just enforcing existing immigration law. People should think of it more as an opportunity - if enough people see what he's doing and change their mind about immigration, we might actually get the change in those laws we've all been arguing about for the past three decades. But don't hold your breath.
That's a very generous interpretation, considering the high percentage of "pick-ups" that result in releases and the number of "arrests" that are reversed in court. Whatever he is "enforcing" is not fully in existence in legal actuality.
If Trump had taken the time to actually design and implement the plan Susie Wiles scripted for him for the '24 campaign trail, he would be well north of the 35-40% approval rating. But, instead of crafting a low-visibility targeted pick-up of undocumented that also have a felony conviction.....which strategy produced very high deportations for Obama, he is trying to shortcut the timeline and go for "numbers" and resultant political advertising. The fact that his "net" numbers are so far below his "gross" numbers proves he is not effectively enforcing, and he is getting his political tail handed to him............which is why I choose to believe the autocracy experiment starts to get disassembled starting in November
"Get back to us when he does something unconstitutional?"
Emoluments & colluding with foreign powers & insurrection have already been proven. Problem is people like you only care about certain parts of the constitution.
I think people who have a deep doomer perspective aren’t well versed in US History. They think the norm in politics in the US is post Cold War partisan cooperation. In reality without a common enemy, the US has mostly existed in a kind of low grade destabilizing partisan warfare. The institutions move around, become more or less powerful, but the political reality is more like 2025 than 1990.
We were a nation that was founded by four seperate waves of immigrants fleeing persecution, and at least two of those waves persecuted each other.
Of course we've never trusted each other.
The fact that the last vestiges of Cromwell's supporters and his puritan followers ended up here (after originally setting up said colonies as a base of operations to persecute the fleeing royalists and democratic types) is the forgotten piece of the American experience.
I agree with much of this, but Trump has arguably gotten more popular over time. After COVID and January 6th, he got nominated again with little opposition, and then proceeded to win the popular vote with 77m votes, more than in the previous two elections. He's picked up many younger voters (who'll obviously be around for more elections then their elders). And something like 80% of Republicans don't believe we've been having free and fair elections (per exit polls) recently. The only hope is that perhaps there can't be a successor to the cult of personality, but it's unclear at this point.
Trump is not the 2013 Broncos, his offence often sucks and he trips over himself, he’s most certainly the ‘85 Bears. Trump’s biggest skill is creating turnovers, he goads the left into taking a broadly popular position and then extending it in a way that alienates the average American. That’s why he’s been so good at fracturing the anti-authoritarian right from the left. The right would be very happy if the left would just run the ball, pick up the first down and regroup, but they keep lining up for a run and then calling an audible to instead throw the ball downfield to a receiver in triple coverage. (I.e. if the democrats ran a true moderate or a national unity ticket, they’d likely cash in on a ton of support from conservatives who dislike Trump. But even when they do name a moderate, à la Biden, that candidate ends up taking a series of unpopular, very progressive positions, to shore up support to their left, which frequently leads to a turnover)
The resilience against authoritarian drift is not only social (public opinion and mass mobilization) but deeply institutional. Across U.S. history, presidents with strong mandates and ambitious agendas - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon - were all constrained when they attempted to stretch or bypass constitutional limits. Roosevelt failed in his attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court despite overwhelming popularity; Truman’s executive order to seize steel factories during the Korean War was struck down by the Court; and Nixon was forced from office when Congress and the judiciary asserted their authority during Watergate. All of these cases suggest that even highly powerful presidents cannot easily turn the “three-legged stool” of American governance into a throne. So yes, good to be cautious, but I wouldn’t be too worried.
I'm glad you are optimistic. I, on the other hand, am feeling more frightened than I ever have. David French wrote a hugely scary column in the NYT recently, where he lays out the case for Trump's ability to massively interfere with the mid-term elections in November. I have no doubt that this would trigger giant protests, but they may not matter if 2024 was the last free and fair federal election.
The guardrails are holding, and the TACO pattern is clear: Trump meets reality, and reality is winning more often than losing. The Warsh appointment, Homan stepping in to replace the cashiered Bovino, SCOTUS tea leaves on the tariff case, the SEC stepping up on crypto - these are all evidence of institutional constraints on the would-be authoritarian. We’re a resilient society and we’ll get through this.
Wild that North Korea avoids bottom ranking in the Economist Intelligence Unit's scale. I wouldn't think Myanmar or Afghanistan have their act together enough to compete with the DPRK on authoritarianism...
You hinted to the "heavy hand of the state" later in your post, but "mobilization for autocracy" was in full (albeit veiled) display from the very start of the Biden administration and several other countries during the pandemic.
I would also suggest those politicians who advocated the abolishment of police are acting in an authoritarian manner when there is little to no evidence the general public is in favor of the same.
Our "concerns" of authoritarianism must seem ridiculously overstated to those in the Silent and Greatest Generations.
It's important to remember that since the founding of our country (arguably the most successful "startup" country in the history of mankind), we have always been (for good reasons) a constitutional federal representative republic, and not a pure democracy. Would reasonable people truly want to be subject to policies dominated by those who live in the largest cities (i.e., with the most votes)?
Finally, to truly protect us from authoritarianism, just like the POTUS office, we should have TERM LIMITS to enforce what (most of) the founders of country's governmental system intended. That is, the best and brightest should "volunteer" to serve their country's government for a few years, then return to the general public to live by the policies they help create as well as allow others to voice the concerns of their constituents. Instead, we have career politicians that gain way too much power, supported by special interest groups, and rarely have to deal with the policies they impose.
What about the unprecedented naked corruption and bribery? Trump is running the country like a third world corruption racket, the only comparable example that comes to mind is Eric Adams, who thankfully was just kicked out. They’re both scam artists. It still baffles me how Adams was allowed to run the city in such a brazenly corrupt way the more we learn about his mismanagement, lies, and bribes. Like with Adams, we are learning all the shit he did now that he’s out of office, it will take years to uncover the amount of money Trump stole from the public and all the other shit he engaged in.
The corruptoin is neither unprecedented in scope nor nakedness. The US has seen as bad, worse before.
Engaging in over-done drama rhetoric that's also ahistorical leads to doomerist pessimism.
Trump is very bad, worse President clearly since the 19th century, but it's not unprecedented.
A somewhat recent comparison is Berlusconi in Italy, who normalized a level of corruption in politcs. But that didn't mean the entire system devolved into authoritarianism.
Andrew Jackson and post Civil War GOP also come to mind.
It's going rather too far to say Berlusconi normalised corruption - the Italian state has never been a shining example in this regard (watching some Italian-Italian movies going back to the 1970s makes this painfully self-evident)
Rather Italian own-tolerance has been declining.
In the US one can readily find prior examples at national government level of which across span of 19th century until the muckrackers backlash led to clean-ups. But it's hardly that if one looks at 20th century in detail and w/o partisan blinders on that it's as clean as idealised.
Of course Trump backsliding to 19th c. type habits is not a great thing but it's nothing like unprecedented and shouldn't lead to Woe Is Us US we are doomed...
Pratical reforms on otherhand...
Asking "how is he allowed to do this" as you do with Adams here, is the wrong question, since the answer is trivial: because nobody stopped him.
So the right question is: Who will stop him? Who, specifically, which individual or group of people, is going to stop Adams or Trump from doing whatever horrible thing that is brazenly corrupt and/or brutally anti-democratic?
Reframing the question this way helps me think about it in a less abstract way, which I find useful in both assessing risk and determining next steps.
I’m still not feeling optimistic. The corruption is so staggering and no one is being held accountable, it feels like we are entering into something different.
Always keen to ask you - do you support illegal immigration? Just "yes or no".
No rational person could answer other than "no".
Yet the entirety of the American left, inclusive of everyone that votes for a Democrat, if answering honestly, would have to say "yes".
This failure has nothing to do with a breakdown of "democracy". It is a breakdown of law enforcement.
I am all for removing all hypocrisy. Let those that employ illegals face liability. Let America accept the economic consequences of losing this illegal labor force. Or better yet have those that want to employ them do it with some actual documented and enforce legal process.
ICE is enforcing the immigration laws. Others including everyone on the left in American is resisting that.
Explain how that is rational or sustainable without the entire country coming apart?
I don’t think ICEs tactics can rationally be explained in terms of effective immigration enforcement.
It’s more of an “own the libs” situation, especially in Minnesota, where Trump seems more interested in political points against a Dem state than fair enforcement. His base wants the optics of cruelty in blue cities because of grievance politics against elites.
There are better, fairer ways to pursue immigration enforcement.
First, recall it was CBP, not ICE, that shot Pretti. People keep saying ICE even when ICE wasn't involved. Second, the tactics can be interpreted as saying to illegal immigrants: "Don't think you can go to these 'sanctuary cities' and hide there. US laws have jurisdiction there as well, and we will find you and deport you, even there. It would be better if you leave on your own. Also, please tell your friends and relatives back in your native country about your struggles here, so they won't be tempted to enter the US illegally as well."
Given that US law says they should be deported, what would you say are the better, fairer ways to have them deported?
We’re detaining people and refusing them their day in court to prove whether or not they’re here legally, which frequently many are.
Well, says you ("refusing"). Evidence? And recall that those courts are tremendously backed up. I think we'd both agree we should be hiring a lot more judges for those cases. Most people aren't here legally and their asylum claims are denied (64% at the end of the Biden administration, for example). That's all it would take to make it more fair?
If you are a legal resident, with constitutional rights, the fact there is a backlog of cases and not enough judges is not great comfort as you sit in detention, unable to see your lawyer.
You can choose to ignore the many cases in the news about legal residents getting swept up, but that’s on you.
That’s partially why this is a dumb immigration enforcement strategy. It looks much more like intimidation.
No Democrat wants immigration enforcement. None existed under Biden
Look at the great moderate, "Spannberger", all in within a week to convert Virginia to a sancturay state
So it is not a matter of tactics. It is a matter of will.
You simply aren’t honesty engaging with what the “left” (read anyone less right wing than MAGA) actually believes about immigration. The fact that your worldview seems oriented around the strawman of democrats and ALL of their voters “supporting illegal immigration” frankly IS a break down in democracy, particularly our ability to work together in good faith and craft policy
with respect, enforcing immigration laws are fundamental to any functional democracy, underscore functional.
Nobody here can make a case how/why this is an actually good way of doing immigration enforcement. If you cared about that issue, you’d realize this doesn’t work.
My answer to your initial question is no, and yet I’m far to your left. How is this possible?
A functional democracy must be able to enforce its laws but that’s not fundamental to what makes it a democracy. A democracy makes and can change laws based public consensus.
This is what the left actually proposes, that we step back and reassess the laws we’re writing so they can be enforced effectively in the face of a specific problem (a large undocumented population that’s been here for decades due to previous permissive policies) while also being humane and protecting the rights of individuals and communities.
The Trump administration has chosen instead to ignore the need for consensus or debate or even new legislation, and is instead pursuing an enforcement policy which actively harms communities across the country while treating those who object as enemies of the state. This has invited resistance; you should expect nothing less from Americans
The vast number of people even on the far left don't "support illegal immigration" per se, they think that many people who illegally immigrated are nonetheless today a pretty essential part of America and should be given legal pathways to residency or citizenship, especially "dreamers" i.e. people who were brought to the US illegally as children and have never known life anywhere else.
And as Nate sort of alludes to in his article, most people who are anti-ICE don't even believe that much. Many just don't think deportations are a practical way to enforce illegal immigration, and that the real solution is better enforcement at the employer level. (If they can't get jobs in the US, more immigrants will go home themselves.) And an increasing number of people who believe mass deportations are the answer are nonetheless becoming anti-ICE because of the chaos caused by their current tactics and the killing of American citizens who, whether you agree with them or not, posed no imminent threat to law enforcement before being killed by them. Ultimately a law enforcement agency that is infringing on people's rights to live without a paramiltary organization stomping through their neighborhood and causing chaos tends to be a greater concern than whether said organization is completing the job they might nonetheless want done.
Illegal immigration is just untenable for a rational society.
Deportation is inescapable.
So is putting liability on those that employ illegals.
Funny because corporations have been escaping it for basically ever.
Deportations are easily escapable. We determine who is and is not here legally. All it would take is an act of congress.
What you are presenting as inevitable is simply a smokescreen for a badly described (possibly intentionally) policy position you don’t want to say out loud.
My main point is that most people who are currently against ICE agree with that. Plenty of people got deported before ICE and current ICE tactics. The group of Americans who want open borders or completely unenforced immigration law is very small.
Actually yeah I kinda am fine with illegal immigration, it's a good problem to have. Not the best case scenario but it's help kept our demography healthy and our economy booming.
The logical extension of that view is economic destruction.
No country has infinite capacity for welfare.
Probably at an impasse here because sounds like you believe that illegal immigrants are a significant drain on welfare spending, which I think is false. Social security, Medicare and defense are vastly more expensive than whatever paltry sums some illegal aliens might be receiving. Besides, they skew younger than the average American so have more productive working years ahead of them, and have more children who grow up to enter the workforce. Mass immigration, legal and otherwise, is the reason we have a fertility rate above replacement levels at all. Otherwise we'd be headed for demographic disaster, with too many elderly recipients taking from too few workers.
Sure, but the qualifications in your comment do suggest something a little more nuanced than full throated support for all illegal immigration regardless of circumstance. Presumably if US immigration law had been permissive enough for those people to enter legally that would have been the best case scenario you're hinting at.
It's not the entirety of the left. There are some of us who remember that illegal immigrants take jobs and lower incomes of low-income citizens, while increasing housing costs. It's more that the "left" has become the party of well-educated elites, who don't seem to care who's mowing their lawn, as long as the work gets done for cheap.
As someone from the left who bought their house with African-American neighbors, it's painful to me that my neighbor lost his lawn care business because the other contractors were hiring illegal immigrants and paying them slave wages. Other people weirdly prioritize illegal immigrants over their own low-income neighbors, but maybe they just make sure they don't live with lower income people of color so they don't call them neighbors.
I'm for illegal immigration because the GOP would rather use the issue as a cudgel and scare-tactic to rile up their base than fix the problems you articulate. Remember how Trump tanked the immigration bill because he couldn't take credit? If Republicans would negotiate in good faith then perhaps I'd change my mind - but for now the rational thing is to support illegal immigration.
Your comment reads as extremely partisan to me, but I'm curious. Here's a thought experiment I had.
Let's say a genie offered you the following tradeoff. From now on, nobody will ever be deported from the United States. But also, from now on nobody can ever enter the United States illegally or overstay their visa ever again. This isn't a trickster genie, we're not changing our immigration laws to define all immigration as legal, we're not fundamentally changing American society, etc. The deal is exactly what it seems like. We're also not concerned with the mechanics of how that happens, the genie can magically make it happen without causing other issues or degrading our democracy.
Would you take that offer?
Edit - in case it wasn't clear, the point of the thought experiment is that anyone who is currently in the US illegally gets to stay, but we don't get any new illegal immigrants.
Your premise is wrong. It isn’t close to true that everyone who votes Democratic supports illegal immigration. I have no issue at all with Trump closing the border. It is also true that a great many Republicans support illegal immigration to the extent that it is convenient for the businesses they run or the household help that they hire,
The biggest divide really has less to do with left and right as coherent ideologies anyway. Anti Trump people are open to a wide range of conservative priorities such as tight border enforcement, deportation in principle and even reassessment of asylum policy. The real difference is non MAGA people see the existing illegal population as a distinct problem that needs to be solved flexibly and pragmatically. The far right has a brittle hard nosed approach of uncritically enforcing laws which weren’t designed for problems at this scale, even if that means building a police state apparatus, explicitly pursuing a policy of intimidation an terror, and ignoring when this conflicts with individual and states rights
Interesting.
As a non-American not that convincing. Historical democratic tradition might be far less relevant after the great schism (lack of any connection to history) caused by the increasing digitization of the populace.
This sentence about the Pretti murder by government agents fills people from less violent countries with the chills: “Even among Republicans in the poll, only 41 percent thought the killing was justified”. Talk about “normalization”.
As an American, I think this is a fair critique- that's still an amazingly high number in absolute terms. Part of me thinks there's a substantial number of people who answered without having actually seen footage and just resorted to tribalism as usual because i don't know how you can watch it as a human being and justify it in any way.
Otoh that really reinforces your original point about people not being connected to history and i would add not being connected with actual reality if one's echo chamber is really that strong.
I'm probably more optimistic than you (i live here so i kinda have to be for my own sanity lol) but i think it's still a really dangerous moment for us.
The midterms are the real test imo- if they go off mostly as normal despite a probable GOP shellacking incoming i'll feel much less anxious about the near-term future. If not, i'd argue all bets are off for US democracy
You add an excellent point: The connection to reality has also been completely fractured by our near immersion in over 50 years of digital technologies.
The real test - unspoken by Americans but talked about plenty elsewhere- is what happens with the death or debilitation of Trump
Why don't you get back to us when he does something unconstitutional? So far, he's done things that are within our laws and the Constitution. Even the birthright citizenship executive order hasn't actually taken effect. It has raised the issue back at the Supreme Court, which is fine, because birthright citizenship is based on a Supreme Court interpretation of a clause in the 14th amendment, and that clause is open to other interpretations. It's absolutely normal for the Supreme Court to reconsider interpretations of the Constitution. If we don't like that, we can always just amend the Constitution.
All the arguments over immigration are ignoring the fact that he's just enforcing existing immigration law. People should think of it more as an opportunity - if enough people see what he's doing and change their mind about immigration, we might actually get the change in those laws we've all been arguing about for the past three decades. But don't hold your breath.
"he's just enforcing existing immigration law."
That's a very generous interpretation, considering the high percentage of "pick-ups" that result in releases and the number of "arrests" that are reversed in court. Whatever he is "enforcing" is not fully in existence in legal actuality.
If Trump had taken the time to actually design and implement the plan Susie Wiles scripted for him for the '24 campaign trail, he would be well north of the 35-40% approval rating. But, instead of crafting a low-visibility targeted pick-up of undocumented that also have a felony conviction.....which strategy produced very high deportations for Obama, he is trying to shortcut the timeline and go for "numbers" and resultant political advertising. The fact that his "net" numbers are so far below his "gross" numbers proves he is not effectively enforcing, and he is getting his political tail handed to him............which is why I choose to believe the autocracy experiment starts to get disassembled starting in November
"Get back to us when he does something unconstitutional?"
Emoluments & colluding with foreign powers & insurrection have already been proven. Problem is people like you only care about certain parts of the constitution.
I think people who have a deep doomer perspective aren’t well versed in US History. They think the norm in politics in the US is post Cold War partisan cooperation. In reality without a common enemy, the US has mostly existed in a kind of low grade destabilizing partisan warfare. The institutions move around, become more or less powerful, but the political reality is more like 2025 than 1990.
We were a nation that was founded by four seperate waves of immigrants fleeing persecution, and at least two of those waves persecuted each other.
Of course we've never trusted each other.
The fact that the last vestiges of Cromwell's supporters and his puritan followers ended up here (after originally setting up said colonies as a base of operations to persecute the fleeing royalists and democratic types) is the forgotten piece of the American experience.
I agree with much of this, but Trump has arguably gotten more popular over time. After COVID and January 6th, he got nominated again with little opposition, and then proceeded to win the popular vote with 77m votes, more than in the previous two elections. He's picked up many younger voters (who'll obviously be around for more elections then their elders). And something like 80% of Republicans don't believe we've been having free and fair elections (per exit polls) recently. The only hope is that perhaps there can't be a successor to the cult of personality, but it's unclear at this point.
Trump is not the 2013 Broncos, his offence often sucks and he trips over himself, he’s most certainly the ‘85 Bears. Trump’s biggest skill is creating turnovers, he goads the left into taking a broadly popular position and then extending it in a way that alienates the average American. That’s why he’s been so good at fracturing the anti-authoritarian right from the left. The right would be very happy if the left would just run the ball, pick up the first down and regroup, but they keep lining up for a run and then calling an audible to instead throw the ball downfield to a receiver in triple coverage. (I.e. if the democrats ran a true moderate or a national unity ticket, they’d likely cash in on a ton of support from conservatives who dislike Trump. But even when they do name a moderate, à la Biden, that candidate ends up taking a series of unpopular, very progressive positions, to shore up support to their left, which frequently leads to a turnover)
The resilience against authoritarian drift is not only social (public opinion and mass mobilization) but deeply institutional. Across U.S. history, presidents with strong mandates and ambitious agendas - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon - were all constrained when they attempted to stretch or bypass constitutional limits. Roosevelt failed in his attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court despite overwhelming popularity; Truman’s executive order to seize steel factories during the Korean War was struck down by the Court; and Nixon was forced from office when Congress and the judiciary asserted their authority during Watergate. All of these cases suggest that even highly powerful presidents cannot easily turn the “three-legged stool” of American governance into a throne. So yes, good to be cautious, but I wouldn’t be too worried.
I'm glad you are optimistic. I, on the other hand, am feeling more frightened than I ever have. David French wrote a hugely scary column in the NYT recently, where he lays out the case for Trump's ability to massively interfere with the mid-term elections in November. I have no doubt that this would trigger giant protests, but they may not matter if 2024 was the last free and fair federal election.
Thanks for this. While the authoritarians have the ball, we cannot be bystanders. This is a short, worthwhile watch for everyone reading this article.
https://youtube.com/shorts/fEHradUEeMQ
The guardrails are holding, and the TACO pattern is clear: Trump meets reality, and reality is winning more often than losing. The Warsh appointment, Homan stepping in to replace the cashiered Bovino, SCOTUS tea leaves on the tariff case, the SEC stepping up on crypto - these are all evidence of institutional constraints on the would-be authoritarian. We’re a resilient society and we’ll get through this.
To sum up, don't be overly concerned that your house is on fire. We have a really good fire department just down the street.
Wild that North Korea avoids bottom ranking in the Economist Intelligence Unit's scale. I wouldn't think Myanmar or Afghanistan have their act together enough to compete with the DPRK on authoritarianism...
You hinted to the "heavy hand of the state" later in your post, but "mobilization for autocracy" was in full (albeit veiled) display from the very start of the Biden administration and several other countries during the pandemic.
I would also suggest those politicians who advocated the abolishment of police are acting in an authoritarian manner when there is little to no evidence the general public is in favor of the same.
Our "concerns" of authoritarianism must seem ridiculously overstated to those in the Silent and Greatest Generations.
It's important to remember that since the founding of our country (arguably the most successful "startup" country in the history of mankind), we have always been (for good reasons) a constitutional federal representative republic, and not a pure democracy. Would reasonable people truly want to be subject to policies dominated by those who live in the largest cities (i.e., with the most votes)?
Finally, to truly protect us from authoritarianism, just like the POTUS office, we should have TERM LIMITS to enforce what (most of) the founders of country's governmental system intended. That is, the best and brightest should "volunteer" to serve their country's government for a few years, then return to the general public to live by the policies they help create as well as allow others to voice the concerns of their constituents. Instead, we have career politicians that gain way too much power, supported by special interest groups, and rarely have to deal with the policies they impose.
It would be great if the Democrats had a competent quarterback