State Terror, American Style

Forget about “soft autocracy”

Over the weekend I talked to a couple of people, people who generally try to keep abreast of the news, about the Chicago apartment raid last Tuesday — and discovered that they hadn’t heard about it. And that’s extremely worrying. It suggests that many people don’t realize how fast and aggressively the Trump administration is moving to end rule of law and convert America into a full-fledged autocracy.

So while I’d like to devote today’s post to economics — you have no idea how happy I felt while writing yesterday’s primer about agglomeration and productivity — I couldn’t in good conscience avoid writing about the terrible things happening in Chicago and elsewhere, and what they may portend.

About that raid: It was reported in mainstream media, but didn’t get the screaming banner headlines it deserved. Here’s what happened, according to Reuters:

U.S. Border Patrol agents deployed to Chicago led a late-night raid on an apartment building this week, rappelling from helicopters onto rooftops and breaking down doors in an operation authorities said targeted gang members but which swept up U.S. citizens and families.

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As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.

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Hundreds of agents swarmed the apartment building during the raid on Tuesday, including some rappelling down to the roof from Black Hawk helicopters, according to NewsNation.

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One resident, who asked not to be named, reported being made to lie down on the ground by agents during the raid and having his hands zip-tied.

ICE claimed that the building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua (a Venezuelan gang) members and their associates” — that is, although ICE carried out the raid, it was supposedly about crime. And they arrested two suspected gang members, while also rounding up some undocumented immigrants. But they detained everyone in the building, smashed their doors, zip-tied their children, and ransacked their homes.

This was a wildly disproportionate and illegal response, even if the raid had actually had anything to do with crime.

But none of what the Trump administration is doing in Chicago has anything to do with fighting crime. Chicago has more violent crime than, say, New York or Los Angeles, but the post-Covid bump in crime has completely receded. City officials report that this past summer had the fewest homicides in 60 years. If we’d seen this kind of decline in crime after the Trump administration began flooding Chicago with ICE agents, rather than before, they’d be touting these results as complete vindication.

But as I said, this isn’t about crime. It’s about paranoid conspiracy theories and an attempt to dismantle democracy.

Here’s Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar:

Does Miller actually believe this? The truth is that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots are very rare in this country. There have been more this year than in the previous two years, but the number is still tiny, and is normally dwarfed by right-wing terrorism:

Source

What is true is that right-wing terrorism is way down this year, possibly because potential terrorists don’t feel the need to act when the Trump administration is doing it for them. Some people who might have engaged in terrorist assaults may well be working for ICE instead.

My guess is that Donald Trump actually believes that Portland is a war zone, that residents of big blue cities are afraid to leave their apartments. But Miller almost surely knows better. He just has a different definition of terrorism: For him, it means any kind of opposition to his racist, authoritarian agenda.

Here was his reaction after a federal judge — appointed by Trump! — issued an injunction temporarily preventing Trump from taking control of Oregon’s National Guard and deploying it in Portland:

If you’ve looked at footage from Portland, you know that the “relentless terrorist assaults” on ICE officers consist mainly of people yelling at them. But in Miller’s eyes that’s a hate crime.

What do we learn from the Chicago apartment raid plus the growing number of incidents in which ICE agents have physically attacked people who posed no conceivable threat? To me, it says that even “alarmists” who warned about the threat a Trump administration would pose to democracy underestimated just how evil this administration would be.

Until recently, most warnings about the decline of democracy envisaged a scenario something like Hungary’s “soft autocracy”: Subversion of institutions from the media to the courts, rigged elections, crony capitalism that favors regime supporters, and so on. We didn’t expect America to become a country where masked secret policemen smash down your door in the middle of the night and take you away. Yet that’s where we are.

And don’t expect the attacks to be limited to immigrants. A recent White House memo directs the FBI to investigate groups as potential domestic terrorists based on incredibly expansive criteria, including “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” views. This would basically empower going after any kind of dissent.

One reason things have gotten so extreme, so fast may be that Trump, Miller and company are in a race against time. Foreign autocrats like Orban or Vladimir Putin could afford to chip away gradually at the foundations of democracy because they were, at least initially, quite popular. Trump — although he won’t admit it — has very low approval, and the public opposes him on every major issue. Yet he and his minions control much of the machinery of government, and are trying to use it to intimidate — you might say terrorize — their opponents before public anger catches up with them.

Moreover, Miller and Tom “Cava bag” Homan clearly like inflicting suffering.

What all this suggests to me is that there will be many more incidents as bad or worse than the Chicago apartment raid. If you think I’m overreacting, remember: The alarmists have been right about Trump every step of the way.

So what can people and institutions do? Resist. Don’t make concessions in the hope of buying MAGA off. Don’t mute your criticisms in an attempt to seem even-handed. As far as I know, no wannabe autocrat has managed to consolidate power while being as unpopular as Trump is right now. Don’t help him become the first to pull it off.

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