A Particular Form of American Despair
Things are looking bad, largely because they are. But that's not the end of the story.
I read the news today, oh boy. Although I’ve been trying my best not to. I’ve been on a two-month book leave, which is about to end, as all things must. I’m trying to get back into things, into following the news. When I do, I sometimes feel a rush of blood to the head. It’s physical. I feel frustrated, first, and then frustration transforms into something closer to anger. And then anger turns into despair.
Confusion, too.
It was just reported by The Guardian that a 35-year old Irish tourist was detained by ICE for 100 days because he overstayed his visa by three days. He was visiting his girlfriend. He had 90 days, and was planning to fly back in time but was “unable to do so due to a health issue, his medical records show.”
Three days made all the difference. And so he spent over three months behind bars in three separate facilities. Part of that time was in a federal prison, during which he suffered conditions that he described as “less than human.” The reason this happened is that federal prisons now lease beds to ICE. You can decide for yourself whether this is a good or smart idea. But the more important question is: why?
For those who dislike Palestinians or anyone who sympathizes with their cause, there was a period when they may have been able to say: “Well, at least they have bad ideas, so maybe they deserved their own detention.” According to this line of thinking, they — and they are often Muslim — support Hamas, because somehow Hamas and the Palestinian cause are interchangeable. These are the sorts of arguments that have become mainstream. By extension, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are effectively terror supporters, since the overwhelming majority of Muslims in America support the Palestinian cause (I’m personally only aware of one or two nationally that don’t).
For pro-Israel hardliners, the deportation or detention of these pro-Palestinian students and activists may not have been entirely justified, at least not legally, but it’s always easier to justify the bad things that happen to your enemies, or at least people you don’t particularly like. What these defenders of the indefensible perhaps didn’t realize is that once you shift your moral standards for your political opponents, they inevitably shift for others too, and those people might just be ordinary Irish citizens.
The catch, in the story, is that the Irish man was detained during the twilight of the Biden administration, a month after Trump won but a month before he took office — although the worst parts of the ordeal, namely the period in federal prison, took place during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
I mention this because it isn’t, and rarely is, as simple as Trump = bad. The country that I love, and that I now despair of, contains multitudes. Average monthly deportations were higher during periods of the Obama administration than they are today under Donald Trump, yet it is obvious that there is a darker, lawless and chaotic nature to how Trump does it and who he does it to, shirking due process and making a mockery of both fairness and justice. For Trump, the gratuitousness is the point.
And, so, I think
’s quip is as accurate and fair as it is frightening: “A nation of immigrants has become a nation of potential deportees.” We were never perfect, but we are growing more imperfect, and that imperfection isn’t the result of good intentions gone awry but bad intentions pursued with zeal and determination.Does this mean that we are in “decline”? That’s also something I’ve been thinking a lot about. I have a new book coming out — The Case for American Power (pre-order here) — in which I argue that decline is, more than anything else, a feeling. If you think the past was great, you’re more likely to believe the present is worse. These are subjective things.
For the entirety of my adult life, America has supposedly been in decline. But this preoccupation with our own fall from grace can be misleading in its own way. The declinist story is, in the end, a story — and one that may not be entirely true.
There are two ways to respond to (perceived) decline — to truly despair and to assume that decline will persist indefinitely. The other, second response, and the one I prefer, is to assume that it won’t. That part is up to us — assuming we, the citizenry, have agency in a democracy. Which we do.
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In some ways Trump is perhaps less worse than what will follow him. His disorganised and childish need to 'win' and be 'loved' makes him susceptible to changing his mind a lot. I do think the right of American politics has entered a disordered stage where nothing matters except winning, not even if they violate the sanctity of the ballot box. Reading Caro's second volume of his monumental biography on LBJ, they remind me a bit like him in the early years. Just a relentless focus on power at any cost.
I do think this 'decline' if we want to call it that in the American body politic is only fixable if a significant majority of Americans are willing to stand and fight for values which were embodied in the constitution. If as Fukuyama said on the podcast a few weeks ago, they are 'bored' or unable to sustain political action based on their own values, then I'm not sure where the US goes from here except lurching towards a neo-authoritarian regime which starts to significantly narrow the parameters of who is an American.
I am not defending what ICE did to the Irish tourist, but I'll say this. When I came to the US on student visa 1n 1994, I was paranoid of being out of status. After finishing graduate studies I worked on F1 (1 year work permit all international students get) visa and transitioned to an H1B visa before the F1 expired. I changed jobs multiple times and each time I ensured I was never out of status, and finally got my Green card in 2002. I feel things got really lax and people have been no longer worrying being out of status, as evidenced by the example of the Irish tourist (though I get it he was sick and that is why he ended up out staying the visa by a mere 3 days).
I think the Trump administration goal is to change the Overton window - that non citizens and permanent residents can no longer have a lackadaisical attitude on being on a valid visa, and more generally visitors to the US need to be more careful on how they engage on political issue on campus or otherwise. What they are doing is extreme but that is what you have to do to change the Overton window. In many ways, it looks like Trump administration is taking us back to 1990s when the country was probably right of center as a whole than left of center since the Obama administration.
I believe (at least hope) we will again return to center in a presidential term or two simply because there will be a huge backlash to the policies of Trump administration.