Noah, thanks for this. It is helpfully orienting, as your work always is.
For what it’s worth, I do not know a single committed Republican voter who thinks that even one Democrat is “actually committed to liberal principles.” They are told every day by people they trust that the opposite is true. And it must be said that the Democratic party has done a great deal to encourage a belief in their illiberalism, but even if the party made an absolute commitment to restoring their bona fides, news of it wouldn’t penetrate the right-wing media containment field.
It’s interesting to note, not what left or left-ish media say about the Trump administration, but what the administration says about itself:
1) That the President is not bound by national or international law but only by his own “morality” (the President himself);
2) That in governing the only things that matter are “strength ... force ... power” (Stephen Miller);
3) That because ICE is effectively serving as the executive branch’s police force, an ICE agent can kill anyone at any time for any reason and have “absolute immunity” from consequences (the Vice-President).
And roughly 40% of Americans are totally fine with all this. You could argue, of course, that many of them don’t know the specific points I have just noted, but does anyone believe that if they did know they would change their views? That would change nothing — it might even confirm some people in their support. In fact, if Trump were to declare tomorrow a state of emergency in which all elections are suspended for the indefinite future, and YouGov polled people on what they thought about that, I doubt that the numbers would be much different than they are in the poll about ICE’s actions.
So I think those of us who would like to live in a relatively free country instead of a police state should (a) thank God that the percentage of Americans who *want* to live in a police state is less than a majority and (b) understand that those 40% are unreachable by appeals to evidence or morality or the constitution of this nation.
Then the question becomes: How to engage the 22% who only somewhat disapprove of what ICE is doing or don’t know what they think? For those who would wish to see this regime constrained and (ultimately) defeated, that’s the only question. And I think that as you hint in your post, the means by which this engagement could be generated largely concern moral formation.
"So I think those of us who would like to live in a relatively free country instead of a police state should (a) thank God that the percentage of Americans who *want* to live in a police state is less than a majority and (b) understand that those 40% are unreachable by appeals to evidence or morality or the constitution of this nation."
This is grim. I wish I could argue it isn't correct.
This is a measured and thoughtful article. However, this needs to be discussed:
“…which was one of the background causes of the return of Donald Trump to the White House, even though he chaos of 2020 happened on his watch.”
Given that the protests largely occurred May-October of 2020, during the height of the campaign for the White House, which he notably lost, this is a pretty large assertion to make without evidence or citation.
You are saying that the protests didn’t propel him back into office at the peak of their salience, while the Trump campaign and it’s associated dark money groups were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to increase the salience to the election. But four years later, when the Trump campaign and it’s superpacs were running primarily on economics, immigration and queerphobia, then it was part of his return?
Especially in a piece with so much opinion polling cited, this is a claim in need of further discussion.
That's a very fair point, and I don't have polling to back up my view on the matter in any detail. But here's my view in any case:
I don't know how much the protests in 2020 actually affected the 2020 election. I suspect that, in the moment, they mostly contributed to a sense that Trump was an agent of chaos, and therefore fed a desire for a return to normalcy -- which was Biden's primary message. But I think they did long-term damage to the Democratic brand that has lingered and deepened over time. That's partly because the protests -- which Democrats generally treated as justified -- were accompanied by riots, looting and other bad behavior; partly because crime generally went up significantly in their wake (though it already started coming down halfway through the Biden years); partly because some left-wing politicians and activists took extreme anti-policing positions during the height of the protests that the public hasn't forgotten (in part because Republicans keep reminding them); partly because President Biden's lax approach to migration reinforced a general impression of unwillingness to enforce the law against certain classes of individuals, and I'm sure there are other reasons. Most important, though, I think Democrats lost standing on this issue because they appeared to be vulnerable to emotional blackmail by activists and protestors. It left the public with a general impression that Democrats are weak people afraid of making anyone on their side angry.
Whether I'm right about that perception being a key takeaway from the 2020 protests or not, the reality is that the Democratic Party in general is now widely distrusted on crime. The gap between Republicans and Democrats on the issue is huge, and it's one of the issues on which Republicans are strongest (while still generally not garnering majority support). That's not the primary reason Trump won in 2024 -- inflation was clearly the most important issue -- but I think it was an important contributing factor. And, beyond any direct effect on the election, I think the way in which it discredited Democrats contributed to tolerance by swing voters of the kind of far-right rhetoric and policies that, I suspect, would otherwise have been disqualifying.
Dual sovereignty is the check on federal overreach. When ICE breaks local law local police can arrest and charge them. Minnesota can investigate and charge Ross even if the DOJ refuses to cooperate. Walz has the option of calling in the National Guard to restore law and order. Trump's chain of command does not extend into state and municipal government, they report to the governor and mayor.
All of these are 'emergency, break glass' options may ultimately fail, but they stand in the way of rapidly consolidating dictatorship. Any of them cast a light on what is happening that is difficult to frame as "domestic terrorism". To take a small example if Minneapolis was vigorously pursuing investigating and charging Ross would other ICE agents notice? I think so. It reminds us that Trump does not control everything. Local people can helpfully observe there is no statute of limitations on murder.
This is why local executive elections are no longer limited to local concerns. Dual sovererignty is one of the few bulwarks we have against federal fascism. The character of the mayor or governor really counts at times like this. Casting the NY mayoral election, for example, as separate from core national concerns is an error.
One underlying cause of the 2020 protests was the way that current legal precedent stacks the deck in favor of homicidal police officers in this country. It's not just that protesters feared that police killers like Derek Chauvin wouldn't be judged according to the laws and cases on the books; it's that they believed, correctly in my view, that those laws and cases made a mockery of neutral and impartial justice when it comes to holding police officers accountable.
Sadly, we got relatively little systemic change in that regime under Biden. Derek Chauvin's conviction was a heartening surprise, but we didn't do much to make it less of a surprise. If we want to build a lasting equilibrium of broad support for liberal principles, that has to be fixed.
This is a very big topic -- much bigger than a Substack post, much less a comment thread!
I'll just say a few things that I believe. First, I don't think the public has any appetite for reform if crime goes up. Second, you have the difficult problem that the police don't want more restrictions on their behavior or more accountability to non-police entities, and they have the ability to stymie reform both directly and indirectly by allowing crime to go up. In practice, that means that any reform you want to enact needs buy-in from the police, or it will fail or backfire. Might not be fair, but I think that's reality.
The other thing to say is that effective reform costs money, if only because if you want to reform policing you're going to need higher standards for hires -- and that means you'll need to pay more, one way or another, to entice the people you want into the field. That money has to come from somewhere, and therefore trades off against other priorities. It also means that "defund the police" wasn't just politically foolish but practically wrongheaded.
I'd love to see America's police become less militarized, less predatory (the way Ferguson's PD depended on predatory seizures to fund the department is gross), better integrated into communities, etc. Instead, I fear the backlash to the crime spike from 2015 to 2022 is sending us -- nationally at least -- in the other direction, toward an outright embrace of authoritarianism.
100% agreed re the wrongheadedness of "defund the police". We've got to be willing to pay enough to hire and train people we can trust to do the legitimate job of policing in a respectful way. Ideally we'd pay enough to make them trustworthy to do so without union protection: one of my strongest beliefs about necessary reforms is that police unions have to be abolished, and political advocacy by "fraternal orders of police" has to be prohibited, for the same reasons that soldiers cannot be allowed to unionize or collectively lobby for their interests. But that now feels a very long way away.
Noah, thanks for this. It is helpfully orienting, as your work always is.
For what it’s worth, I do not know a single committed Republican voter who thinks that even one Democrat is “actually committed to liberal principles.” They are told every day by people they trust that the opposite is true. And it must be said that the Democratic party has done a great deal to encourage a belief in their illiberalism, but even if the party made an absolute commitment to restoring their bona fides, news of it wouldn’t penetrate the right-wing media containment field.
It’s interesting to note, not what left or left-ish media say about the Trump administration, but what the administration says about itself:
1) That the President is not bound by national or international law but only by his own “morality” (the President himself);
2) That in governing the only things that matter are “strength ... force ... power” (Stephen Miller);
3) That because ICE is effectively serving as the executive branch’s police force, an ICE agent can kill anyone at any time for any reason and have “absolute immunity” from consequences (the Vice-President).
And roughly 40% of Americans are totally fine with all this. You could argue, of course, that many of them don’t know the specific points I have just noted, but does anyone believe that if they did know they would change their views? That would change nothing — it might even confirm some people in their support. In fact, if Trump were to declare tomorrow a state of emergency in which all elections are suspended for the indefinite future, and YouGov polled people on what they thought about that, I doubt that the numbers would be much different than they are in the poll about ICE’s actions.
So I think those of us who would like to live in a relatively free country instead of a police state should (a) thank God that the percentage of Americans who *want* to live in a police state is less than a majority and (b) understand that those 40% are unreachable by appeals to evidence or morality or the constitution of this nation.
Then the question becomes: How to engage the 22% who only somewhat disapprove of what ICE is doing or don’t know what they think? For those who would wish to see this regime constrained and (ultimately) defeated, that’s the only question. And I think that as you hint in your post, the means by which this engagement could be generated largely concern moral formation.
"So I think those of us who would like to live in a relatively free country instead of a police state should (a) thank God that the percentage of Americans who *want* to live in a police state is less than a majority and (b) understand that those 40% are unreachable by appeals to evidence or morality or the constitution of this nation."
This is grim. I wish I could argue it isn't correct.
This is a measured and thoughtful article. However, this needs to be discussed:
“…which was one of the background causes of the return of Donald Trump to the White House, even though he chaos of 2020 happened on his watch.”
Given that the protests largely occurred May-October of 2020, during the height of the campaign for the White House, which he notably lost, this is a pretty large assertion to make without evidence or citation.
You are saying that the protests didn’t propel him back into office at the peak of their salience, while the Trump campaign and it’s associated dark money groups were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to increase the salience to the election. But four years later, when the Trump campaign and it’s superpacs were running primarily on economics, immigration and queerphobia, then it was part of his return?
Especially in a piece with so much opinion polling cited, this is a claim in need of further discussion.
That's a very fair point, and I don't have polling to back up my view on the matter in any detail. But here's my view in any case:
I don't know how much the protests in 2020 actually affected the 2020 election. I suspect that, in the moment, they mostly contributed to a sense that Trump was an agent of chaos, and therefore fed a desire for a return to normalcy -- which was Biden's primary message. But I think they did long-term damage to the Democratic brand that has lingered and deepened over time. That's partly because the protests -- which Democrats generally treated as justified -- were accompanied by riots, looting and other bad behavior; partly because crime generally went up significantly in their wake (though it already started coming down halfway through the Biden years); partly because some left-wing politicians and activists took extreme anti-policing positions during the height of the protests that the public hasn't forgotten (in part because Republicans keep reminding them); partly because President Biden's lax approach to migration reinforced a general impression of unwillingness to enforce the law against certain classes of individuals, and I'm sure there are other reasons. Most important, though, I think Democrats lost standing on this issue because they appeared to be vulnerable to emotional blackmail by activists and protestors. It left the public with a general impression that Democrats are weak people afraid of making anyone on their side angry.
Whether I'm right about that perception being a key takeaway from the 2020 protests or not, the reality is that the Democratic Party in general is now widely distrusted on crime. The gap between Republicans and Democrats on the issue is huge, and it's one of the issues on which Republicans are strongest (while still generally not garnering majority support). That's not the primary reason Trump won in 2024 -- inflation was clearly the most important issue -- but I think it was an important contributing factor. And, beyond any direct effect on the election, I think the way in which it discredited Democrats contributed to tolerance by swing voters of the kind of far-right rhetoric and policies that, I suspect, would otherwise have been disqualifying.
Dual sovereignty is the check on federal overreach. When ICE breaks local law local police can arrest and charge them. Minnesota can investigate and charge Ross even if the DOJ refuses to cooperate. Walz has the option of calling in the National Guard to restore law and order. Trump's chain of command does not extend into state and municipal government, they report to the governor and mayor.
All of these are 'emergency, break glass' options may ultimately fail, but they stand in the way of rapidly consolidating dictatorship. Any of them cast a light on what is happening that is difficult to frame as "domestic terrorism". To take a small example if Minneapolis was vigorously pursuing investigating and charging Ross would other ICE agents notice? I think so. It reminds us that Trump does not control everything. Local people can helpfully observe there is no statute of limitations on murder.
This is why local executive elections are no longer limited to local concerns. Dual sovererignty is one of the few bulwarks we have against federal fascism. The character of the mayor or governor really counts at times like this. Casting the NY mayoral election, for example, as separate from core national concerns is an error.
One underlying cause of the 2020 protests was the way that current legal precedent stacks the deck in favor of homicidal police officers in this country. It's not just that protesters feared that police killers like Derek Chauvin wouldn't be judged according to the laws and cases on the books; it's that they believed, correctly in my view, that those laws and cases made a mockery of neutral and impartial justice when it comes to holding police officers accountable.
Sadly, we got relatively little systemic change in that regime under Biden. Derek Chauvin's conviction was a heartening surprise, but we didn't do much to make it less of a surprise. If we want to build a lasting equilibrium of broad support for liberal principles, that has to be fixed.
This is a very big topic -- much bigger than a Substack post, much less a comment thread!
I'll just say a few things that I believe. First, I don't think the public has any appetite for reform if crime goes up. Second, you have the difficult problem that the police don't want more restrictions on their behavior or more accountability to non-police entities, and they have the ability to stymie reform both directly and indirectly by allowing crime to go up. In practice, that means that any reform you want to enact needs buy-in from the police, or it will fail or backfire. Might not be fair, but I think that's reality.
The other thing to say is that effective reform costs money, if only because if you want to reform policing you're going to need higher standards for hires -- and that means you'll need to pay more, one way or another, to entice the people you want into the field. That money has to come from somewhere, and therefore trades off against other priorities. It also means that "defund the police" wasn't just politically foolish but practically wrongheaded.
I'd love to see America's police become less militarized, less predatory (the way Ferguson's PD depended on predatory seizures to fund the department is gross), better integrated into communities, etc. Instead, I fear the backlash to the crime spike from 2015 to 2022 is sending us -- nationally at least -- in the other direction, toward an outright embrace of authoritarianism.
100% agreed re the wrongheadedness of "defund the police". We've got to be willing to pay enough to hire and train people we can trust to do the legitimate job of policing in a respectful way. Ideally we'd pay enough to make them trustworthy to do so without union protection: one of my strongest beliefs about necessary reforms is that police unions have to be abolished, and political advocacy by "fraternal orders of police" has to be prohibited, for the same reasons that soldiers cannot be allowed to unionize or collectively lobby for their interests. But that now feels a very long way away.
"Meanwhile, we desperately need to restore public appreciation of neutral and impartial justice as essential public goods."
Yes, but nobody seems to be able to agree on what is "justice" anymore. Justice, to many, is simply "my team wins."