A power too much
What is an enemy? What is an alien?
Sometimes we need to know.
The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to pause the deportation of a group ofalleged Venezuelan gang members.
A civil liberties group had sued to stop the removal of the men, currently in detention in Texas, saying they had not been able to contest their cases in court.
Donald Trump has sent accused Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president power to detain and deport natives or citizens of “enemy” nations without usual processes. The act was previously used only three times, all during war.
We’re not at war with Venezuela, or with El Salvador. We’re not even at war with Mexico or Panama, although we act as if we are. Let’s see what the Brennan Center has to say about the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
In wartime, the United States must protect its people and territory. Doing so may require actions that might not pass legal or political muster in peacetime, such as the preventive detention of enemy combatants for the duration of the war. But the Alien Enemies Act, an authority that permits summarily detaining and deporting civilians merely on the basis of their ancestry, goes too far and must be reconsidered. Passed in 1798 as a part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, the Alien Enemies Act is a deeply flawed authority with a sordid history.
Ancestry is a funny thing. Some people care deeply about it but others don’t. That’s a consequence of modernity and technology and the like – many people are not fixed in the same place as their parents, let alone their ancestors, and they don’t always feel obliged to consider their ancestors’ enemies their enemies. Feuds and rivalries that go on for centuries depend on low tech. Once people can just leave, lots of them do, and family ties can weaken over time. That can be sad but it can also be liberation. Not all parents are good parents; not all children owe their parents. In short it is no longer a slam dunk that all people of X nationality are loyal to other people of that nationality rather than to the different set of people they now live among. It’s miles from a slam dunk. Some people cling to the ancestors but some just don’t, and that’s a fact.
Back to the Brennan Center.
The law was last invoked in World War II as the legal authority for interning noncitizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. Those internments — along with internments during previous wars — were shameful episodes in our nation’s past. The Alien Enemies Act and complementing authorities have allowed presidents to target people on the basis of their identity, not their conduct or the threat they pose to national security. In 1988, when Congress apologized and provided reparations for Japanese internment, it acknowledged that the policy was rooted in “racial prejudice” and “wartime hysteria,” not valid security concerns. Congress would later describe Italian internment as a “fundamental injustice,” and the Department of Justice would recognize that German noncitizens had been targeted “based on their ancestry.”
The Japanese-Americans got the worst of it because they looked more different than Italians and Germans – that’s how thoughtful humans can manage to be. We think we know better now, but if we’d been born in 1900 who knows what we would have thought of Manzanar.
Notwithstanding this widespread condemnation, the Alien Enemies Act was not repealed or amended after the war. Indeed, the law has not been substantially modified since its adoption. If the United States were to declare war in the future, the president would be able to invoke the Alien Enemies Act’s vast detention and deportation power. Worse still, the language of the law is broad enough that a president might be able to wield the authority in peacetime as an end run around the requirements of criminal and immigration law.
Yup, a president might, and oh gosh golly gee, he is.
The White House called challenges to using the law for mass deportations “meritless litigation”.
Nope. The litigation has merit. We haven’t done this before, and there are good reasons to think we should never do it.
Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist, for whom I have enormous admiration, has just died. Here is a paragraph from his obituary — the comment he makes on one of his novels, the terrifying “The Feast of the Goat”, is very relevant to what is going on now, :
“The Feast of the Goat (2000) is his outstanding contribution to a long tradition of Latin American novels examining the abuses of power by dictators in the region. It deals with the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the moral, sexual and political corruption implied by authoritarian rule. ‘I wanted a realist treatment of a human being who became a monster because of the power he accumulated and the lack of resistance and criticism … Converted into a god, you become a devil,’ Vargas Llosa commented of what many saw as his finest book.”
I recall Trump’s undisguised, drooling fascination with Kim Jong Un’s murders of his brother and his uncle.
I really dunno how to deal with the reality that people I’ve viewed as the Enemy my whole life possess the words and through a certain lens the values that we need right now:
“Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.” – Ronald Reagan
Why do we need Reagan? Because as bad as he may have been, these people are really fucking evil, with no redeeming qualities. They hate America, they hate Americans, and they hate every person in the world that isn’t as diseased as they are. Reagan, Nixon, Bush, etc don’t even begin to dip to their level of foul anti-humanism and anti-Americanism.
“…the only country not founded on race…”
Say what? Every nation but USA was ‘founded on race’? No. And given the two-tiered nation built by the US founders, with the tiers being explicitly racial, double no.
Regardless of your opinion of conservatives, I have long been critical of attempts to portray Trumpism as simply the logical consequence of what “conservatives” or “the Right” have been up to all along*. As I keep saying, the betrayal of the ideal of “meritocracy” for a model that rewards loyalty to the leader over accomplishment is probably more offensive to traditional fiscal conservatives than to Leftists who think there’s no such thing as “meritocracy” anyway, just unearned privilege perpetuating itself from one generation to the next. Traditionally Conservatives have also seen trade as a positive sum game in which both parties stand to gain something. As David Frum and others have pointed out, the idea of a positive sum game doesn’t even compute in Trump’s mind. The only way his brain is able to make sense of the world is in terms of zero-sum conflicts in which any gain made by anyone else is a net loss to him and his cronies. It was generally understood by fiscal conservatives that the way to generate wealth was by being attractive to potential investors, and that being attractive to investors meant an even playing field as well as a certain degree of predictability, not a system in which contracts go to the people most useful to the president and the rules keep changing by the minute. Conservatives also tended to emphasize things like “character”, integrity, personal responsibility etc., far more than Leftists who were more inclined to blame society for personal failings. Once again Trump is the most perfect antithesis imaginable to the Conservative ideal.
As I have previously said, the main conflict of our time is not between “The Left” and “The Right” (as if these were monolithic blobs, rather than umbrella terms, each covering a vast range of incompatible, and even mutually hostile, movements, ideologies, and political systems), but between those who still respect liberal values, the rule of law, democratic rules of the game etc. and those who don’t. I almost wrote “on both sides” out of old habit, but the very idea of two clearly identifiable “sides” is very much part of the problem. Neither “Left” nor “Right” means what it used to mean back in the day when the main division in society was between capital and labor, employers and labor unions, capitalists and socialists, and the main focus of public debate was on the level of taxation and the relative sizes of the public and private sectors. It’s my firm conviction that the compulsive urge to force-fit our current situation into this same increasingly anachronistic and outdated framework is becoming a major impediment to getting out of the mess we’re in. As it stands the prospect of getting back to arguing about taxes and public vs. private looks more Utopian by the minute.
*Just like I’m critical of attempts to conflate Wokeism with “cultural Marxism” or even “Liberalism”. There is nothing “Marxist”, let alone “Liberal”, about it.
Sorry for quoting myself but:
Add “facts”. To the list as well. As I keep saying, Trumpism and Wokeism are both very much post-truth ideologies.
I would like to recommend this interview with Anne Applebaum on The Bulwark, that is relevant to the topic*. In it, among other things, Applebaum once again makes the point that, contrary to the American exceptionalist “it can’t happen here” myth, the abuses of power going on in the Trump administration are actually more blatant and egregious than what we have witnessed in places like Orban’s Hungary. Never mind the “Boiling Frog Metaphor”. Rather than slowly and gradually heating the water one degree at a time without the frog noticing, Trump and Musk have decided to skip straight to the boiling stage.
Applebaum also concedes that, contrary to the familiar accusations of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, those who care about democracy and the rule of law actually under-reacted to the abuses of Trump’s first term. This, incidentally, seems like a bit of a 180° turn from just a few years ago on Applebaum’s part. I seem to remember her once saying that she thought Biden was essentially doing the right thing by calming things down, changing the topic, and focusing on other things, like the economy, in the hope that temperaments would eventually start cooling off. Oh well. Everyone’s an expert after the fact, I guess…
* I was going to post this in the Miscellany Room, but it seems to have reached the maximum number of posts?
“Ancestry is a funny thing. Some people care deeply about it but others don’t.”
I recall a conversation with a woman whose parents had immigrated to Canada from Croatia. Her parents had told her they were fine with her marrying anyone but a Serb. She met a man whose parents had immigrated to Canada from Serbia, and who told him they were fine with him marrying anyone but a Croat. They dated for a while as a sort of rebellion against their parents, but eventually decided they didn’t fit well enough to marry, but that had nothing to do with ancestral enmities.
Bjarte, that’s only partially true. One reason the Sedition Act was passed was to promote loyalty to the leader. John Adams leaned strongly toward monarchism (he preferred he be the monarch), and his party was much in that mode. Throughout the history of the US, there has always been a faction that was fascinated by and in love with monarchy.
Adams lost the presidency, and the republican idea won. It was an interesting election. I recommend Magnificent Catastrophe by Edward Larson. It looks at those conflicting ideas in the 1800 election.
And in view of the fact that the only requirements for being president are being at least 35 and being born in the US (or on US soil abroad), I suggest that we have never been a meritocracy.
iknklast, that’s kind of what I’m talking about, though. What, if anything, justifies lumping together John Adams, Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Anne Applebaum, Angela Merkel, and Donald Trump as “conservatives”, or “the Right”, as if we were talking about a single identifiable group with a common ideology and common goals? Obviously there are relevant differences between fiscal conservatives and cultural conservatives, but I think I made it clear that I was talking about the former.
(Not that Trump is a cultural conservative either, of course. I think he is best understood as a Ferdinand Marcos-style kleptocrat, not as a protector of traditional values, as much as I hate and despise said traditional values.)
Bjarte, I would say about the same as lumping lemurs, orangutans, gorillas, and humans together in a taxonomic category. There is evolution. The same basic driving principle is underlying all of them – the wish for power, and the wish to have others recognize their power, plus, for many, the wish not to pay taxes.
Yes, there has been a change in conservatives. No, I don’t think Trump is a conservative. It is nevertheless the case that the conservatives enabled him, supported him, and cheered him on. In Trump, they are finally getting what they have wanted for a long time – shrinking the government to a size they can drown it in a bathtub, as infamously stated by the annoying Grover Norquist.
They are not the same, no, but they are all living on the same evolutionary bush.
I think that’s retro fitting the argument. I suspect the Japanese got the worsdt of it because, unlike Italy and Germany, Japan mounted a first strike attack on the USA. Much like 9/11 the warning signs of 1941 were ignored, and now vengeance had to be wrought on those closest at hand. Look Japanese even though you’re 6th generation American? You’re guilty! Look Muslim, even though you’re a Sikh? Gotta be your fault.