The Culture of Denunciation Comes to Washington
How red states pioneered the authoritarian mechanisms now going national
Well, my fellow bugbears, it’s been another week from hell. I apologize for getting this out on a Sunday again instead of on Saturday as planned; yesterday I was down with a bad bout of my chronic pain.
To start off today, I’m going to toot my own horn a bit, although there’s no pleasure in the I-told-you-so’s that come with a surging fascism of which you are a scapegoated target. In fact, the the sense that I have largely been shouting into the void only makes me feel more powerless than I already did—which is pretty powerless. Still, I am not completely devoid of hope, and I’ll keep writing so long as I am able and there are readers who want to hear what I have to say, for posterity if nothing else. Who knows, maybe someday the bugbears will inherit the Earth?
Anyway, for years now, I’ve been sounding the alarm that as red states implemented ever more horrific dystopian policies, they could serve as laboratories and models for a federal government with Republicans in control of Congress and the presidency—and, of course, the Supreme Court and many of the federal courts, even though those are supposed to be nonpartisan. We all know what a joke that is in the current climate.
In 2023, for example, I wrote about Ron DeSantis’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in Florida, noting that “many Republicans view [Florida] as a sort of laboratory for how the GOP could transform the rest of the country.” In 2022, in writing about the election police force DeSantis formed and mobilized to terrorize African American voters, I observed that DeSantis himself had called his approach to governance a “blueprint” for a United States under a right-wing federal regime. I also wrote the following (the British spellings are because I wrote this for openDemocracy, a London-based not-for-profit outlet focused on human rights and democracy):
The fiction of a ‘voter fraud’ crisis Republicans already use to mobilise voters and stir up fear and outrage is plenty damaging; 6 January amply illustrates that point. But imagine the creation of federal machinery to enforce that phoney narrative through state terror, and the impact that would have on voting throughout the United States. It may seem far-fetched, but DeSantis is already engaging in state terror in Florida.
And here we are. Our dictatorial president Donald Trump has declared birthright citizenship a dead letter, and, while the legal case for his unconstitutional executive order is brazen bullshit and prolonged court battles are coming, his administration is already engaged in mass roundups and deportations of immigrants. Because fascism is nothing if not clownish, television psychologist and charlatan Dr. Phil reportedly tagged along with ICE raids in Chicago today. Perhaps he was able to give detainees some of his signature boot-strapping “tough love” talk as they were cuffed.
Meanwhile, in addition to (probably illegal) mass layoffs and funding freezes in the federal bureaucracy, on Wednesday the Trump regime demanded that federal employees report colleagues whose jobs relate to DEI within ten days or potentially “face adverse consequences.” Thankfully, everyday Americans stepped up to gum up the works for this fascist plan, loading up the email address provided for the reports, DEIAtruth@opm.gov, with spam.
DeSantis made masterful use of the state bureaucracy in Florida to implement his fascist agenda without always needing to rely on the legislature. Trump is trying to do the same thing in Washington.
Even so, the purges we are seeing in the federal government will undoubtedly continue, to disastrous results, even with people doing what they can to slow things down.
DeSantis made masterful use of the state bureaucracy in Florida to implement his fascist agenda without always needing to rely on the legislature. Trump is trying to do the same thing in Washington, and it remains to be seen how far he’ll be able to go. (Fascism can escalate very quickly, however, and it will if it is not resisted at every turn. Blue states must be ready to nullify federal law, and individuals must be ready to disobey if they are in a position in which they can be ordered to commit human rights violations.)
Reality TV style immigration enforcement raids and DEI denunciations are not the only way to use state machinery to attack the scapegoated demographics (immigrants, BIPOC folks, LGBTQ and espcially trans people, women who need abortions, liberals and leftists) that Trump and his fellow travelers do not consider to be full or “real” Americans, of course.
To be sure, there is no exact federal equivalent to the state medical licensing board that DeSantis stacked with far-right Catholic cronies to target healthcare for trans residents of Florida, but the Trump regime’s gagging and freezing of funds for federal healthcare agencies bodes very ill for many reasons. In addition, just as DeSantis used Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor vehicles to declare by fiat that the driver’s licenses of transgender Floridians with updated gender markers are invalid, Trump has now done the same for passports at the federal level, via executive order.
Putting those issues aside for now, I want to focus on Trump’s demand that federal employees snitch on their colleagues whose work might in some way relate to DEI. Even if this particular plan is working poorly in the short term, there are reasons related to the anatomy of authoritarianism to be very concerned about the approach.
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