Trump’s campaign against the undocumented was never simply about border security. It was always about belonging—about redefining who counts and who has rights. That has become abundantly clear as the scope of deportations has widened to include not only selected visa and green card holders but whole groups here legally under protective status. The deeper question is not simply about our borders, but about who we are willing to include as part of “We the People.”

Although we might like to think this isn’t America, our long history of roundups and deportations suggests that it very much is. So what do such actions tell us about how we define ourselves as a nation? The answer lies in an unresolved tension at the heart of the U.S. Constitution itself.

The Promise and the Problem

“We the People.” Nearly every American knows these words from the preamble to the Constitution, yet their meaning was problematic from the beginning. Enslaved people were treated as property and counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Indigenous nations were excluded from the political community. Women could not vote, and in most states voting was restricted to white men who owned property. From the outset, the question of who constituted “the people” determined who belonged, who enjoyed rights, and who could be excluded.

As a revolutionary document inspired by the Enlightenment, the Constitution broke with the idea that sovereignty came from a monarch. It placed sovereignty in the people themselves. This civic understanding of membership was among the most radical ideas in the Constitution. It envisioned a nation united not by common ancestry, religion, or culture, but by shared political principles and allegiance to a constitutional order.

And yet, the Constitution’s universal language coexisted with a far narrower understanding of who could belong to the political community. Those exclusions reflected an older cultural conception of nationhood in which peoples were bound by ancestry, religion, language, history, and shared customs.

These divergent views of the nation—the civic and the cultural—endure. The tension between them has structured the nation’s recurring struggles over inclusion.

The Politics of Belonging

From the start, the definition of citizenship was problematic. The Constitution never defined it, but it did distinguish between natural-born citizens and naturalized ones when establishing qualifications for the presidency, limiting the office to natural-born citizens. Among the first issues the newly created Congress chose to address was who could become an American. It quickly enacted the Naturalization Act of 1790, limiting eligibility to “free white persons.” Its passage reflected the rising tide of Romantic nationalism, whose definition of a nation rejected the universalisms of the Enlightenment in favor of a cultural understanding of belonging.

Romantic Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Problem of Diversity

Romantic nationalism held that nations are defined not by a social contract but by blood, language, religion, custom, shared history, and collective memory. Culture was understood as the essence of a people, each possessing its own unique spirit that could not be reduced to universal principles. Belonging was less about citizenship than membership in an imagined historical community.

Nations are rarely as culturally homogeneous as their myths suggest. Most encompass multiple peoples, languages, religions, and historical memories. Yet nation-building often requires forgetting as much as remembering. States construct narratives of common origin and shared destiny, but these narratives often erase internal diversity, suppress inconvenient histories, and marginalize peoples who do not fit the national story.

As a political project, Romantic nationalism sought to define the boundaries of the state by aligning it with what it regarded as a single people united by common culture, history, language, and ancestry. By equating the nation with a people, it it consolidated power in the hands of the dominant group and defined who belonged and who did not.

Romantic nationalism worked differently in Europe than in the United States. In Europe it often sought to unite culturally similar peoples divided among competing states. In the United States, the conditions were different. The continent held hundreds of Native nations, a large enslaved population, and a steady stream of immigrants from diverse traditions. Early loyalties ran to the states rather than the federal government. American nationalism had to invent a common identity rather than recover one. That identity coalesced around those who held power—predominantly white, European, Christian, and English-speaking. Native peoples and African Americans were left outside the imagined community.

Once a people imagines itself as the authentic nation, policies of assimilation, exclusion, removal, and, in extreme cases, ethnic cleansing become conceivable means of aligning the state with its imagined community.

The Stranger Among Us

Behind America’s struggle with belonging lie deeper questions about identity. Peoples define themselves not simply by who they imagine themselves to be, but also by who they are not. Every nation tells a story about “us,” and in doing so creates an “other.” The distinction between “us” and “them” is one of the fundamental ways collective identities are formed.

In societies marked by diversity, this becomes politically important when difference is interpreted as threatening. It is often not simply unfamiliar customs, language, religion, or food that provoke anxiety. For some, the mere presence of those who see the world differently is itself unsettling. They can make people question long-held assumptions about their own beliefs and values, and about what their country is or should be.

Our relationships with those we “other” are not defined in a vacuum. They are the product of power relations. How differently others are perceived is often shaped by political narratives. Leaders can either reassure people that diversity is compatible with national identity, or they can mobilize anxiety by portraying outsiders as existential threats. Immigration then ceases to be simply about labor or borders; it becomes a symbolic struggle over who belongs and, ultimately, over the meaning of the nation.

Despite our Constitution’s high ideals,  such episodes are not isolated departures but recurring moments when a cultural definition of the nation has overridden its civic promises. The groups may change—Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, Mexicans, Japanese Americans, Muslims, refugees, and others—but the underlying processes are similar. In times of economic stress, social change, and threats to national security, political pressures arise to exploit fear and tighten belonging.

While the circumstances differ, they share a recurring logic of boundary-making. Whenever a group is defined as alien or dangerous, its rights are abridged, and actions taken against it are presented as necessary to protect the nation. While enforcement has taken a variety of forms, the underlying question has remained remarkably consistent.

Removal: Peoples Already Here

Indian Removal

Under Andrew Jackson, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. Tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole were forcibly removed from the Southeast to territories west of the Mississippi. The most infamous episode was the removal of the Cherokee, remembered as the Trail of Tears, during which thousands died.

Even though these five nations had adopted many of the institutions Americans associated with “civilization”—including written constitutions, schools, Christianity, commercial agriculture, and legal systems—they remained outside “We the People.” Their forced relocation demonstrated that cultural assimilation alone was insufficient to secure membership in the American political community. The obstacle was not what they did, but who they were.

Diversity Lost: The American Experience

Ironically, the United States—celebrated as a nation of immigrants—became less diverse in one crucial respect during the nineteenth century. While millions of immigrants arrived from Europe, the nation witnessed the destruction, displacement, and forced assimilation of hundreds of Indigenous nations.

The struggle over who belongs is not merely political but cultural, determining which peoples, languages, and ways of life survive and which disappear. The civic ideal expanded, but the cultural definition of “the people” continued to justify exclusion and erasure. The tension between these competing visions continues to shape who is accepted, who is excluded, and whose rights are secure.

Mexican Repatriation

A century later, removal reappeared in a different form.

In the depths of the Great Depression, America again redrew the boundaries of belonging. States and local governments, with federal cooperation, launched the so-called Mexican Repatriation. Because of the way this was done, estimates vary, but between 400,000 and 500,000 people were repatriated, usually without due process. Another half million chose to return. [1] Some 40 to 60 percent of those expelled or coerced into leaving were American citizens. [2] In the Southwest, this included many families whose roots predated the United States itself. None of that mattered. Distinctions collapsed. To look Mexican was enough. Citizenship yielded to ethnicity as the operative definition of belonging.

Operation Wetback: Labor Without Belonging

Yet Mexican labor remained indispensable.

In 1942, with the United States at war and men off to fight, American agriculture needed Mexican labor. The federal government responded by creating the Bracero Program, a guest worker system that brought Mexican men to the United States under tightly controlled contracts.

In 1954, as demand continued to grow, the now-familiar claim that the federal government had lost control of the southern border became politically irresistible. The Eisenhower administration responded by launching Operation Wetback, removing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.

The deeper significance of Operation Wetback lies less in the number deported than in the pattern it exemplified: tolerating undocumented Mexican labor when economically useful, then using enforcement to discipline and expel it when political pressures demanded. By keeping these workers in a precarious legal status, immigration policy became a means of regulating both labor and membership in the national community. Like the Mexican Repatriation before it, Operation Wetback demonstrated that political winds could redraw the boundaries of national belonging, leaving Mexican Americans with only conditional membership in the American polity.

For undocumented workers, that conditionality was legal. For Mexican American citizens, it was cultural. No matter how deep their roots in America, they continued to be seen as outsiders and treated as a problem. Their culture and language were considered barriers to their assimilation.

Expelling people is only one way of drawing the boundaries of “We the People.” Exclusion asks the complementary question: Who should never be permitted to enter the nation in the first place?

Exclusion: Peoples Kept Out

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The aim of the Chinese Exclusion Act was less to deport the Chinese already living in the United States than to bar more from coming.

The California Gold Rush and the construction of the transcontinental railroad drew large numbers of Chinese immigrants. They were initially welcomed, and their work was essential to the rapid economic development of the American West.

In the 1870s, with the completion of the railroad and an economic recession, they became convenient scapegoats for unemployment and declining wages. The issue wasn’t really whether Chinese immigrants were law-abiding, but whether they could ever become Americans.

Politicians, labor leaders, and newspapers increasingly portrayed the Chinese as a racially alien people incapable of becoming true Americans. As resentment spread across the West, demands for their exclusion became a national political movement. By 1882, under growing pressure to resolve what many described as the “Chinese question,” Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. In addition to barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States, the Act made those already here ineligible to become naturalized citizens.

Under the 1790 Naturalization Act, they were defined as non-white and so already ineligible for naturalization. The significance of the Chinese Exclusion Act lay elsewhere. For the first time, federal law singled out an entire nationality for exclusion and denied its members a path to citizenship. It made national origin itself a basis for exclusion.

Unlike earlier episodes of removal and deportation, the Chinese Exclusion Act illustrates a different strategy for narrowing the American people. Rather than expelling those already within the nation, it sought to prevent entire categories of people from ever entering the circle of belonging.

From Chinese Exclusion to National-Origins Quotas

Chinese exclusion soon became the foundation for a broader system of immigration restriction.

The Act also reflected the intellectual climate of the day. Many peoples were considered inherently less capable of civilization because of supposed genetic differences. Social Darwinists distorted ideas of natural selection and competition. The phrase “survival of the fittest” became a justification for economic inequality, colonial domination, imperialism, and racial hierarchy. Eugenics carried this logic further, advocating the deliberate shaping of human populations through restrictive immigration policies, forced sterilization, and, in its most extreme forms, genocide.

Immigration restrictions in the early twentieth century extended this logic. In 1917, the geographic principle of Asian exclusion was extended by the Asiatic Barred Zone, effectively banning immigration from most of Asia. The Immigration Act of 1924 consciously sought to preserve what its supporters regarded as the national character of America. It established a system of national origins quotas that ranked groups by desirability and sharply limited those deemed culturally incompatible. Immigration from Japan was effectively ended, while immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe—home to large Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox Christian populations—was drastically reduced. Immigration policy became an instrument of nation-building, codifying a hierarchy of belonging that placed ancestry above the Constitution’s civic promise.

That system remained in place until 1965.

Conditional Citizenship and Conditional Belonging

Removal and exclusion were not the only ways of narrowing the circle of belonging. Legal citizenship itself could be politically fragile. Even peoples incorporated into American society could remain outside its political community.

Japanese American Internment (1942–1945)

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 directing the internment of Japanese Americans. Even though most were U.S. citizens, about 120,000 were incarcerated in camps. The pretext was national security. [3] Yet if that was the issue, why were relatively few Germans imprisoned under the same suspicions, despite their vastly greater numbers in the United States?

Racism was clearly part of the answer, but it does not fully explain why Japanese Americans remained so vulnerable. Their experience also reveals something fundamental about belonging in America.

Germans were already present in America in large numbers from the eighteenth century. As white Europeans they fit into this country’s racial hierarchy. They belonged. Japanese immigrants, by contrast, arrived much later, primarily between the 1880s and 1924. Like the Chinese, they were placed in a racial category that barred them from becoming citizens, marking them as permanently foreign.

They were treated as foreigners and their land ownership was restricted. While their children enjoyed birthright citizenship, no matter how many generations they had been here, or how deeply they had become rooted in American life, the nation continued to treat them as culturally conditional members of “We the People.”

That conditionality became unmistakable after Pearl Harbor, when suspicion hardened into policy and ancestry replaced citizenship as the measure of loyalty. Executive Order 9066 did not simply remove people from their homes; it declared that their place in the nation had always been contingent. Families lost farms, businesses, neighborhoods, and the constitutional protections that citizenship was supposed to guarantee. Their incarceration revealed the fragility of even formal citizenship. It clearly demonstrated that when a group was reimagined as alien, the boundaries of belonging could be redrawn overnight.

The Immigration Reform of 1965

In 1965, amid the Civil Rights Movement and its efforts to bring American law into closer alignment with the Constitution’s civic ideals, Congress passed three landmark pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

The Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the national origins quota system established in 1924. That system, designed to preserve the nation’s existing ethnic composition, explicitly favored immigrants from northern and western Europe while severely restricting others based on ancestry.

Although the new law gave priority to family reunification and occupational skills, it retained numerical limits through country caps and preference categories. Even so, it marked a decisive break with the principle that some nationalities were inherently more desirable than others, moving American immigration law closer to the Constitution’s civic ideal.

Yet the 1965 reforms also exposed a contradiction that would shape American immigration politics for the next half century. The postwar economy became increasingly dependent on immigrant labor as expanding industries continued to demand workers for jobs in agriculture, construction, food processing, hospitality, and other low-wage industries.

In 1964, precisely when this demand was growing, the Bracero Program ended, and in 1965 Congress imposed new numerical limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. The jobs remained. Employers continued to recruit workers, and long-established migration networks persisted, but legal avenues for entry had narrowed dramatically. Migration did not stop; an increasing share of it occurred outside legal channels.

Unlike earlier episodes of exclusion or expulsion, the post-1965 immigration system increasingly rested on a different logic: incorporation without belonging.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986

By the 1980s, Congress could no longer ignore the result. There were between 3 and 5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. [4]

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was Congress’s first major attempt to address the contradiction created by the post-1965 immigration system. Signed into law by Ronald Reagan, it sought to restore credibility to immigration enforcement without abandoning the civic ideal that those who had become part of American society could also become Americans. Although the law did little to stop unauthorized immigration, it reaffirmed the principle that immigration should be governed by law rather than ancestry or race.

IRCA combined stronger border enforcement and employer sanctions with a pathway to legal status for some 2.7 million undocumented immigrants who had established lives here. [5] By doing so, Congress recognized that millions who had lived and worked in this country for years should not simply remain permanent outsiders. Once their legal status was regularized, they could become lawful permanent residents and eventually citizens.

Yet IRCA failed to resolve the underlying problem. Legal pathways remained inadequate to continuing labor demand, employer sanctions proved difficult to enforce, and undocumented migration continued.

Post‑IRCA: The Growth of the Enforcement State

IRCA failed to resolve the underlying contradiction because the forces driving undocumented migration continued to intensify. During the 1980s, Mexico was rocked by economic crisis and adopted a series of reforms that displaced millions from the countryside. At the same time, opportunities for legal migration remained sharply constrained even as demand for low‑wage labor in the United States continued to grow, creating the conditions for mass undocumented migration.

This migration emerged from the interaction of U.S. immigration policy, the continuing demands of the American labor market, and economic reforms that displaced rural populations while limiting their alternatives. Border enforcement increasingly confronted a migration whose underlying conditions U.S. policies had helped to create. Rather than addressing those conditions, successive administrations relied on ever more intensive enforcement while leaving the forces driving undocumented migration largely intact.

Since then, immigration policy has followed two parallel trajectories. One has militarized the southern border through steadily expanding enforcement, surveillance technologies, and detention facilities. The other has gradually expanded the government’s discretionary authority over legal status to control who may enter, who may remain, and under what conditions they may belong. Although the political pressures behind these developments often differed, together they steadily enlarged the state’s capacity to define the boundaries of national membership.

After IRCA, both Republican and Democratic administrations accepted this contradiction rather than resolving it. They understood that the American economy depended heavily on millions of undocumented Mexican workers. They also recognized the political consequences. Rather than attempt to deport the entire undocumented population, they focused primarily on controlling the flow of undocumented migrants across the border.

This compromise had profound consequences. Undocumented immigrants not only continued to be employed, they became integral members of the communities where they lived—raising families, attending churches, starting businesses, and paying taxes. Yet despite their deep roots in American society, they remained outside its political community.

The consequences extended beyond the undocumented. Mexican Americans might possess unquestioned legal citizenship while still confronting cultural doubts about whether they truly belonged. In mixed‑status families, the distinction became painfully concrete: a single document could determine whether parents remained with their children and husbands with their wives.

Millions of undocumented workers became indispensable to the American economy while remaining politically and legally vulnerable.

Trump’s America

Trump didn’t create this struggle between the constitutional promise and an older cultural understanding of the nation. He inherited it.

What Trump has done is mobilize a disaffected segment of America that defines the nation in cultural rather than civic terms, leaving little room for those seen as outsiders. He has amplified their fears and given political legitimacy to their suspicions of outsiders.

Where Trump differs significantly from recent presidents is not simply that he has openly pursued this vision of America as a cultural nation, but that he has weaponized it. Trump is not the explanation but the culmination of a long-running project of narrowing the definition of who was understood to belong.

As much as we would like to tell ourselves that Trump’s wall, travel bans, restrictions on refugees and asylum seekers, efforts to end birthright citizenship, revocations of Temporary Protected Status, and proposals for denaturalization are aberrations, history suggests otherwise. While many of the methods his administration has employed are not new, others have no clear historical precedent.

Under his current administration, the architecture of immigration enforcement has been reengineered into a system of increasingly continuous digital surveillance. It has expanded the government’s capacity to monitor students, workers, and lawful residents in real time. At the same time, it has turned its discretionary powers to revoke visas into an instrument of political discipline.

Since virtually any type of visa can be revoked without explanation, political activity or even minor infractions can become grounds for expulsion. The administration has also moved to institutionalize denaturalization as a standing function of government. Rather than being an extraordinary measure, its stated goal is to make routine enforcement—student visa terminations, green card cancellations, and citizenship revocations—part of an integrated pipeline of exclusion.

As Trump has turned his rhetoric toward protesters, political opponents, and the imagined threat of Antifa, the question of belonging is no longer confined to immigration. Increasingly, it pits the Constitution’s civic understanding of belonging against one in which belonging becomes contingent on political loyalty.

Conclusion

America has always contained two competing visions of the nation. One, rooted in the Constitution, envisions America as a republic united by shared political principles. The other understands America as a historic people bound together by ancestry, culture, religion, language, or tradition.

Neither vision has ever completely displaced the other. The continuing struggle between them has shaped American history from the founding to the present.

Whenever the cultural vision has gained the upper hand in American politics, it has challenged the constitutional principles and rights that protect us all. The enduring promise of “We the People” lies in the idea that membership in the nation rests not on ancestry, religion, or culture, but on shared citizenship and equal rights. That promise has never been fully realized, but neither has it disappeared.

Whether that promise expands or contracts depends on which understanding of the nation prevails.

While the struggles over belonging that have shaped our nation remain unsettled, the Constitution continues to provide the civic ideal against which each generation must measure itself.

Narrowing the circle of those entitled to its protections ultimately weakens the constitutional order that protects everyone’s rights.

Endnotes

1. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, The Tarnished Golden Door: Civil Rights Issues in Immigration (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), 54–56.

2. Brian Gratton and Emily Merchant, “Immigration, Repatriation, and Deportation: The Mexican-Origin Population in the United States, 1920–1950,” International Migration Review 47, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 944–945.

3. Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 49–52.

4. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Immigration Statistics, 1986 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1987), 4–6.

5. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Immigration Statistics, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1992), 200–202.

Suggested Readings

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.

Bosniak, Linda. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Lee, Erika. America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage, 2011

James B. Greenberg

The process of boarding a flight shouldn’t stir echoes of the holocaust, but the involvement of ICE in processing people at least for me did. As I waited to board, watching the ritual sorting of passengers into groups—first and business classes, premium economy, and lastly people like myself flying economy—I began thinking about class and status. Orderings like this are always about more than the line; they are performances of social hierarchy.

What struck me first was the underlying business model. Airlines are not just selling comfort, but monetizing status, recognition, and precedence. They understand that people will pay exorbitant amounts for relatively small differences—a more comfortable seat, faster boarding, quicker exit. These are not simply perks; they are statements about status. The names are symbolic: first class, business class, premium economy, economy. What is being purchased is not just comfort, but precedence—being called first, being seen, being allowed to move ahead of others.

Marketing to status and class aspirations is such a staple of modern advertising that we rarely pause to consider its underlying message: that wealth buys privilege, and that those who cannot afford it are, implicitly, less deserving. This normalization of wealth as worth now permeates consumer culture.

We see this same model replicated in healthcare and insurance, where access is increasingly stratified. With the ascendancy of right‑wing ideas about free markets, Republicans have pursued the privatization of public goods on the theory that free markets are the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. While this may sound good, the key to market efficiency is competition. Without regulation, unbridled competition eliminates weaker firms, turning markets into engines of wealth concentration rather than broad‑based prosperity.

The danger becomes clearer when business models are applied to government agencies. Programs and services are evaluated not on the basis of need, but on profitability, with a moral calculus of who is deemed deserving. Ledger books have no family, no social conscience, no environmental concerns, nor do they care about who suffers. Under this bottom‑line logic, unless agencies can be made self‑supporting, social services are poor investments.

The shift has been more than economic; it has redefined public life. Goods once treated as collective obligations—education, healthcare, housing—have become commodities, like airline ticket classes, available to those who can afford them. Citizenship itself has been quietly reframed as consumer capacity, empowering those with purchasing power while marginalizing those without. Risk and responsibility are pushed downward onto individuals and families, recasting structural conditions as personal failings. The result is not simply a more efficient system, but a different social order—one in which inequality is normalized and the protections once associated with citizenship steadily erode.

What I sensed as I watched the boarding process is that what appears to be a set of small, everyday distinctions signals a deeper shift in American culture. A longer view helps make sense of it. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, what struck him was the relative absence of rigid social ranks. Unlike Europe, with its aristocracies, where birth and class structured every interaction, American society rested on a pervasive cultural assumption that no one should openly place themselves above others. Status had to be earned, and even then it had to be performed with restraint. That ethos, however, only functions when mobility feels attainable.

Those prospects have steadily narrowed over the last few decades. Globalization shifted industrial jobs overseas. National chains displaced local businesses. Wages have stagnated. Many households are a paycheck away from homelessness. Add to this the bite of inflation, and the prospects for mobility look dim.

We see instead the wealthy becoming wealthier, the middle class shrinking, and workers struggling to make ends meet. Over the past fifteen years, the top one percent has come to hold wealth roughly equivalent to that of the bottom ninety percent, while the number of billionaires has grown from about 400 to nearly 1,200. This rising inequality represents a fundamental restructuring of the American class hierarchy.

As the gap between those who can afford privilege and those who cannot widens, the American dream looks less attainable. The distance between what the market offers and what most people can afford is no longer an abstraction; it shapes the painful compromises people are forced to make daily.

The cultural shift has been just as profound. Where status once had to be earned, increasingly it is something that can be purchased and displayed. The market does not simply distribute goods; it organizes recognition. Priority boarding, premium tiers, exclusive access—these are not just conveniences, but signals. They mark who moves first, who waits, who matters. What was once a culture wary of overt hierarchy has grown more comfortable advertising it. The old expectation of modesty has given way to a sense of entitlement: if you can pay, you deserve more.

This shift alters not only how status is acquired, but how it is felt. Aspiration has not disappeared, but when the markers of success are everywhere and increasingly out of reach, they cease to inspire and begin to humiliate.

As such performances of class have become more public, the status anxiety they provoke is sharper and harder to escape. It is encountered daily, in small transactions and passing moments. It shows up in the line you stand in, the seat you occupy, the options you do not have. Over time, this produces not only a heightened sensitivity to where one stands, but a growing resentment toward those who appear to move more easily through the system.

While rising resentment and frustration often fuel authoritarian movements, its rise in America is rooted in a deeper tension between two opposing logics: the Constitution, designed to prevent the concentration of power, and a market system that increasingly concentrates wealth and influence.

The Constitution functions as an anti‑concentration machine. Its checks and balances, federalism, and institutional independence are designed to disperse authority and slow its exercise. Our contemporary market economy does the opposite. It concentrates wealth and power, producing a more hierarchical social order. Seen from its bottom‑line perspective, the Constitution’s system of checks and balances looks more like obstacles than safeguards. Authoritarianism, in this context, may be seen as an effort to align political power with economic concentration by removing those constraints.

While this project clearly serves the interests of elites, it also draws support from those experiencing the consequences of this economic system. As mobility narrows and inequality widens, status becomes more fragile. Authoritarian politics offers a substitute—not expanded opportunity, but restored standing, rooted in identity and belonging.

What I witnessed at the airport reflects this shift. A system of tiers and priority access does more than allocate comfort—it normalizes hierarchy, sorting people into ranks and rendering those who cannot afford these services increasingly invisible.

Such systems, by shifting responsibility onto individuals, normalize inequality. If you cannot afford a service, the answer is simple: you go without. At its harshest, when governments begin to decide who is entitled to protection and who is not, this logic hardens into one of abandonment. What follows is a form of necropolitics—the slow violence of exposure, in which those who cannot secure shelter, food, or healthcare are left to fend for themselves. It is that echo I sensed at the airport.

Closing Reflection

Culture shock is the disorientation people feel when they encounter a way of life very different from their own. As an anthropologist, it is something I have experienced many times. What unsettles me now is that I am beginning to feel it at home. The America I move through today often feels alien to the one I thought I knew.

I no longer see mundane rituals like the orderly boarding of a plane in the same way. I see in these small, everyday performances reflections of a larger social order organized around sorting: who moves first, who waits, who is visible, and who is not.

At the center of this shift is the commodification of status. What once had to be earned is now purchased. As access and recognition become matters of ability to pay, social burdens are quietly shifted onto individuals. Those who fall behind are seen not as constrained, but as having failed. The result is a pervasive, if often unspoken, alienation—one that erodes shared bonds and leaves people to navigate inequality on their own.

I sense a broader change as well: a movement from generosity to meanness, from the assumption that we are a wealthy society capable of meeting collective needs to a more anxious vision in which resources are scarce and others are seen as competitors for what little there is.

Most troubling is the way this environment feeds a politics of grievance. Anger and frustration are redirected toward scapegoats rather than toward the structures that concentrate wealth and power. Identity and culture become tools of division rather than sources of connection. In that context, authoritarianism finds its opening—not as a rupture, but as an extension of patterns already in place.

What I sensed at the airport was not simply hierarchy, but the normalization of a way of seeing—one that makes sorting, exclusion, and ultimately abandonment easier to accept.

Suggested Readings

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty‑First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Sennett, Richard. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

When news flashed that we had attacked Iran, my first reaction was: here we go again. If Trump really believed that this was going to be a short military action and that Iran would quickly surrender, the appointment of the Ayatollah’s son as supreme leader makes it clear that this belief was either an enormous miscalculation or a delusional fantasy.

While news media have focused on military actions and political consequences abroad, the domestic side of this conflict has remained largely unexamined. While many commentators frame the war as an enormous distraction from the Epstein scandal, there is more to it than that. Even if justifiable, this war is far more than an instrument of foreign policy; it is also a domestic political technology intended to reshape power, economics, identity, and democratic space.

So the questions we must ask are: Why now? What are the political benefits for the president of this war in the run-up to the midterms? Who stands to benefit economically from it? How does it further this administration’s authoritarian project? What will it do to the national debt, to the federal budget, and more broadly to the economy? How will it be used to frame partisan opposition?

The simple truth is that the war with Iran feeds the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. It not only draws down existing stocks, but even a short, intense conflict creates decades-long commitments and pork-barrel opportunities—for procurement, maintenance and replenishment contracts, and veterans’ care.

The defense industry is not the only one that stands to profit. War is particularly good for oil and gas industries. Even in times of peace, the Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. War increases this consumption sharply.

Even Iran’s targeting of the Gulf states’ oil and gas fields and oil tankers traversing the Strait of Hormuz has its upside for the American oil industry. Since 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through these straits, an extended conflict would fuel global competition for available supplies, driving oil prices and all the commodities they affect ever higher. Yet, as catastrophic as this may be for the world economy, it would bring American oil companies windfall profits.

War by its very nature raises the political stakes. Protecting the homeland from its enemies gives the president a stage like no other. The rituals of warfare—the parades, the reviewing of troops, the addresses to rally around the flag—allow the president to present himself as the defender of the nation, a strong commander-in-chief, and to justify taking extraordinary measures.

Trump’s script is familiar. Iran is an existential threat to freedom, to our culture, and to our way of life. By labeling the Iranian regime and its security forces as extremists and terrorists, he places them in a space beyond diplomatic negotiations where only bullets can settle differences.

We have plenty of examples of how Trump has demonized other populations—Mexican and Latino migrants, Haitians, and Somalis, among others—suggesting they are rapists and killers, poisoning the blood of the nation, undermining American culture and values, and taking American jobs.

For Iranian Americans, such rhetoric casts increasing suspicion on their loyalty and may expose some to increased scrutiny or to a rise in hate crimes directed at them. Trump has a long history of demonizing Muslims as terrorists.

There is another nasty side bit to this. By labeling Iran as Islamic terrorists, Trump not only plays the heroic figure defending the nation, but he can frame those who oppose this war as “soft on terrorism” and disloyal at best, or more dangerously as “pro-Iran” enemies within.

The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war, last exercised in 1941. Although since then it has authorized major conflicts, there has been long-term drift toward unilateral presidential use of force. While the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires notification within 48 hours and limits such actions to about 60 days, in practice its meaning is ambiguous. Trump’s interpretation seems to be that as long as a military action is a “limited” engagement—military strikes or covert operations that congressional involvement might put in jeopardy—congressional authorization is not required.

For Trump, this war is particularly useful in advancing his authoritarian ambitions. Each time he simply acts, he normalizes this use of military force. This tactic is part of a larger pattern of disregard for what the Constitution requires. Trump understands the difference between what is written and how it is actually practiced. As laws are enforced by the executive branch, the president has enormous sway over their actual practice.

The danger of the unchecked use of war powers is that it can easily morph into dictatorship—and is the path autocrats often take in their rise to power.

Mobilization for war reorganizes power and resources at home. History suggests that its emergency powers and security measures often produce lasting domestic transformations whose consequences endure long after the fighting ends.

The fiscal and economic costs of a prolonged war with Iran should not be underestimated. While Congress ultimately has the power of the purse, the war is largely being funded through deficit spending. If we become mired in a long-term conflict, its cost will widen the budget deficit, increase the national debt, and put greater pressure on Congress to cut spending on social programs—Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

The price of oil affects all commodities, so significant increases in its price drive inflation. For most goods, higher prices lower demand and come at the expense of jobs. Persistent conflict tends to unsettle financial markets, depress business investment, weaken consumer confidence, and slow economic growth. When this happens, it is a scenario for a recession.

One of the lessons of political ecology is that places rise and fall with the ebb and flow of people, resources, and goods. The war with Iran creates a set of dynamics that interlock. It strengthens executive powers and weakens Congress’s checks and balances. Taken together, these become a tool for reshaping the political order.

Trump’s war on Iran shows every sign of being a colossal miscalculation. Despite the extensive use of AI by the military and intelligence agencies in the planning and orchestration of the attack, for some unknown reason the ball was fumbled when it came to preventing Iran from disrupting the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz—a threat long understood but underestimated in its speed and scale.

Trump campaigned on restoring economic stability and lowering costs for American families. Instead, he imposed tariffs that made it worse. Oil and gas were the exception. His policies expanded U.S. oil production and brought down the price of gas. The war has seen its price rise sharply, and everything else as well. Each tank of gas, each trip to the market, is becoming more painful and harder for Trump to narrate away.

As rising oil prices ripple through every sector of the economy, driving inflation and depressing investment, they fall hardest on households already struggling with the rising cost of everything from groceries to gas.

The political consequences are more far-reaching. By framing the war as a civilizational struggle against an extremist Islamic regime, the administration has created a narrative that casts Iranian Americans—and Muslims more broadly—as internal threats.

The war also represents another step in the steady erosion of congressional war powers and the normalization of unilateral executive action. Each unchallenged use of military force without authorization becomes a precedent, a quiet rewriting of constitutional practice.

Trump’s miscalculations in Iran do not diminish the domestic utility of this conflict. The machinery set in motion continues to operate, reshaping institutions, identities, and the distribution of power. The deeper question is what kind of political order will emerge from this war. The answer will depend on whether Americans will recognize—and resist—the domestic uses of foreign conflict before the consequences become irrevocable.

Suggested Readings

Dudziak, Mary L. War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

Gusterson, Hugh. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016

Lutz, Catherine. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011

Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985

Watts, Michael. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2008

If you’re like most of us, you give little thought to the ecological impact of your everyday actions. You drink a bottle of Fiji water and its carbon footprint doesn’t cross your mind. That distance—between what we do and what it costs—has become the defining moral fact of modern life. In my previous essay, The Moral Landscape, I described a Mesoamerican world in which such distance did not exist, where obligation and consequence were woven tightly together. Many readers asked whether anything like that sensibility could survive in modern societies. The question is not whether we can copy those practices, but whether we can recover a way of seeing that makes consequences visible again.

These are hard questions, and there is no simple act of borrowing or imitation that would make sense. These practices are integral to a moral and cosmological system that developed over centuries and continues to function because people experience it as legitimate.

That said, there are lessons that can travel—not as rituals or beliefs to be copied, but as ways of rethinking relationships, responsibility, and how consequences are made visible.

I would begin by noting that the cultural systems and beliefs that shape ecological behavior are not unique to Mesoamerica. They are found widely wherever livelihoods are closely tied to land, water, animals, and weather. In such places, the feedback from overexploitation is immediate. Where consequences are felt directly, cosmology and ritual often emerge as ways of making limits visible, memorable, and legitimate.

In a global market economy, that feedback loop has been severed.

We live in places that cannot be sustained by local systems and depend instead on long supply chains. Those chains place the consequences of our consumption out of sight.

As a result, we often do not know where things come from—and if the price is right, we rarely ask. The hamburger you ate for lunch may well have come at the expense of clear‑cut tropical forests converted to pasture, but nothing in the transaction requires you to confront that fact.

An even more troubling dimension is that markets are largely indifferent to local ecological conditions, especially for commodities traded globally. When a species becomes scarce in one place, the market response is not restraint but price. On a world market, that higher price can intensify exploitation and give rise to a “last rhino” syndrome that perversely rewards extraction rather than curbing it.

Beneath this lies a deeper problem: the way we measure value collapses ecological complexity into a single dimension. Entire webs of life—dense with relationships, feedbacks, and limits—are reduced to dollars and cents.

Modern societies possess more information about environmental damage than any civilization in history. Yet information rarely alters behavior when the structures producing the harm remain intact.

We are living through accelerating climate change and a mass extinction event, driven by greenhouse gas emissions and by the degradation of the systems that regulate the carbon cycle. Scientists have been warning about these dynamics for more than half a century. The data are not thin or speculative—they are overwhelming.

The deeper problem is not ignorance but avoidance. It is the discomfort of inconvenient truths—conclusions that threaten powerful interests and the economic structures from which they profit.

Too often, the political response has been disinformation and denial.

The real question, then, is whether we can find within our own society cultural resources comparable to those I described among the Mixtec and Chatino—resources that could ground a different moral landscape.

Western societies are not culturally empty in this regard. Two powerful traditions deserve attention. One, rooted in biblical interpretation, understands nature as something over which humans exercise dominion. The other, drawing on older and sometimes more mystical currents—including traditions that predate Christianity—regards nature as imbued with power, as containing sacred places, as something with which we commune and toward which we owe respect.

The first tradition is not simply about domination. It also underlies the rationalism that made modern science possible, even as it facilitated the reduction of nature to commodity. The second looks to nature not merely as resource but as teacher—as a source of moral reflection.

William Wordsworth captured this sensibility in Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:

“One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.”

The tension between these traditions remains with us. But perhaps the real task is not to choose between them, as though one must cancel the other. The more fruitful question may be how we draw on both.

Properly read, the biblical tradition is not simply about dominion but about stewardship and accountability. It places a moral frame around our actions and their consequences, insisting that power entails obligation.

From the older, more mystical current, we inherit humility. We inherit the intuition that the natural world is not inert matter but presence—that forests, rivers, and mountains are not simply “resources,” but contexts of meaning. This tradition tempers calculation with reverence and resists the reduction of life to price.

Without a moral frame, science becomes a tool of manipulation and extraction. What we need is a convergence that joins empirical clarity with moral restraint.

Without science, however, mystical connection can also lead us astray. We tend to form attachments to particular species—usually the large, charismatic, or photogenic ones—while overlooking less appealing organisms that may play far more important roles in sustaining ecosystems. Science reveals the hidden interdependencies of life and reminds us that protecting nature means safeguarding systems, not just symbols.

The task is not to choose between reverence and reason but to hold them together: to cultivate a way of knowing that combines humility before the living world with the disciplined understanding needed to care for it wisely.

If ritual cosmologies once inscribed sacred values into the landscape—teaching restraint and respect through everyday practice—where might modern societies now encounter anything like that kind of moral instruction? One answer, though far from perfect, is in our schools. They can do more than transmit information. They can shape what we pay attention to. A curriculum that traces food, water, energy, and waste through the world can begin to rebuild awareness before detachment hardens into habit.

This is not indoctrination, and it is not about teaching beliefs. It is about teaching how natural systems actually work. It is about helping students see interdependence, limits, and consequences—even when political systems may make them hard to see.

It is also about using nature as a classroom—taking kids to a marsh, catching tadpoles, measuring contamination, participating in an ecological restoration project. It is making ecology and its consequences real. It is about giving them experiences that they will remember long after their textbooks are forgotten.

Schools are only a partial answer. Moral orientation cannot come from classroom experiences alone. It must be reinforced by everyday life. It must be embedded in family practices, community expectations, media narratives, and the stories societies tell about what counts as a good life. In modern societies these expectations are shaped by a range of institutions: laws that set limits, religious and ethical traditions that speak of stewardship, local norms that reward or discourage certain behaviors, and cultural narratives that define what counts as success or excess.

We live in a moral landscape that sends mixed signals. We may learn about nature’s complexity and even about the consequences of our impacts on it, but how many of us pause to think about what we consume? We reach for that imported beer, fill our gas tanks, fly across the country without giving a thought to the ecological consequences because the systems that enable these choices make the costs invisible. The hard truth is that people may learn one thing, yet live another. Consumption is rewarded; restraint is not.

This problem has been apparent for some time. Environmental groups have tried to address it, deploying a range of methods to make the hidden consequences of consumption visible at the moment of choice. Examples abound: eco‑labels, carbon‑footprint stickers, and sustainability certifications. These attempt to compress complex environmental histories into a small symbol on a package—a simple signal that says this product is “better” for the planet than those that do not carry it.

Whether they work all that well is another matter. Most are voluntary, not quite like a USDA stamp of approval on a T‑bone at the market. These certifications, labels, and symbols rarely outweigh price, convenience, habit, or desire at the moment of purchase. People still buy cigarettes despite warning labels, not because they are unaware of the consequences, but because advertising appeals to identity and lifestyle. It is hard for a symbol on a label to compete with the powerful incentives pushing in the opposite direction.

The problem with labeling is that, while it may help consumers who already share these concerns make better choices, it cannot solve the underlying problems through personal virtue alone. Government action is often required. To make this vivid: those who buy organic foods are willing to pay more for them, but what about those who cannot afford them?

Should market price outweigh health concerns about chemical and pesticide use, especially for those with limited means? My point is that modern systems of production and distribution create problems that cannot be addressed without structural and regulatory change.

The Mixtec stela in the museum does not simply commemorate a vanished world; it continues to be a living part of ritual life and reveals a different way of organizing responsibility. While we cannot return to traditional ways of life, the stela reminds us that societies endure when knowledge, obligation, and practice reinforce one another. By contrast, in modern societies individuals act within infrastructures, markets, and policy frameworks that shape what is possible, affordable, and normal.

We live in a global economy that separates knowledge, decision‑making, and consequence into different domains. Seeing harm does not guarantee the will to stop it. The deeper issue is not whether we perceive consequences, but whether we feel bound by them. Moral obligations become durable only when people perceive the natural world not as an external resource, but as the condition of their own continuity.

These traditional communities did not rely on exceptional individuals but on shared norms reinforced by social expectation. In them, ritual cosmologies, ecological understanding, moral obligation, and daily practice formed a single structure. What made those systems effective was not their specific beliefs, but their capacity to embed obligation within identity and everyday practice.

Modern societies cannot recreate the cosmological frameworks that once anchored ecological obligation. These practices are not techniques that can simply be copied. They are expressions of an entire moral universe. Remove the cosmology, and the practices lose their force. Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned from them. Laws can restrain behavior, but they rarely generate attachment. They depend on monitoring, enforcement, and the expectation of penalty. Modern equivalents must operate at institutional scale; otherwise, responsibility becomes privatized while causes remain collective.

What matters is finding other ways by which obligation becomes internal rather than imposed. These pathways can be found in ethical and religious traditions that emphasize stewardship, in attachment to place, in concern for future generations, and in forms of scientific understanding that evoke awe rather than domination.

We cannot rebuild the worlds that once bound action to consequence, but we can decide what kind of world we are willing to inhabit now. If restraint once emerged from cosmology, today it must come from institutions that make consequences visible and hard to ignore. Modern societies do not lack knowledge; they lack mechanisms that translate knowledge into restraint.

The deeper challenge is to make restraint feel meaningful rather than imposed. Knowledge alone will not change behavior, and fear is no substitute. Consequences must become present in everyday decision‑making—close enough to register as part of one’s own future and that of one’s children and grandchildren. Internalizing obligation requires more than persuasion; it requires shifting what people value and what they feel responsible for. When awareness remains abstract, it rarely governs behavior.

What endures is the recognition that our lives are entangled with the systems that sustain them. That entanglement is not a burden but a condition of survival. Whether we can build ways of living that keep this awareness active—through institutions, communities, and ordinary habits—remains uncertain. The question is whether we act while there is still room to do so, or wait until events decide for us.

Suggested Readings

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Jansen, Maarten, and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez. Encounter with the Plumed Serpent: Drama and Power in the Heart of Mesoamerica. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.

Jasanoff, Sheila. The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.

Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Monaghan, John. The People of the Middle Place: Political Economy and Cosmology in the Mixteca Alta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Park, Thomas K., and James B. Greenberg, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology of Our Time. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.

Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Rappaport, Roy A. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1979.

Sahlins, Marshall. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Weaver, Thomas, and James B. Greenberg, eds. Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico: Structures, Struggles, and Futures. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012.

There are moments when seeing something causes insights to jell. I had such a moment on a recent visit to Tututepec, once the capital of a Mixtec kingdom on the Oaxacan coast. What caught my attention was a Mixtec stela in a museum there that, despite centuries of Catholic Church suppression, continues to be part of Mixtec ritual life. Offerings are still left regularly around it.

As I pondered what kind of worldview makes such continuity not anomalous but necessary, it became clear that this stela cannot be understood as an idol emptied of agency by conversion, nor merely as a museum artifact. Its continued veneration instead reveals a cosmological view in which there is no separate realm called “nature.” Rather, the stela is embedded in a sacred landscape in which humans, mountains, hills, stones, rivers, and ancestors exist in a single field of action.

What struck me is that many of the most misunderstood dimensions of Mesoamerican culture—sacred landscape, ritual obligation, tonal and nagual beliefs, saints’ cargos, calendrical cycles—are not just “belief systems” in the way they have long been framed. They also pattern and organize ecological relations with land, water, animals, and one another with a sophistication that modern conservation often struggles to match.

Rain, fertility, health, and political harmony are not givens. They are outcomes of ongoing negotiation and ritual reciprocity with the beings who animate the landscape—mountains, springs, clouds, saints, and ancestors.

Within this sacred landscape, wild animals are commonly understood to belong to an Earth Lord, often likened to a hacendado with a great ranch inside a mountain. He protects game but will grant access to his animals if ritual payment is offered for those taken. If offerings are not made, or if hunting becomes commercialized, he may withhold game or, in more serious cases, withdraw protection from a person’s tona. Through this ownership, relations with animals are structured not by open access but by obligation, restraint, and the ever-present possibility of withdrawal.

In this worldview, humans and animals are bound intimately together in ways that differ sharply from Western cultures. Each person has a tona—an animal counterpart—whose fate is so closely joined to their own that what happens to one happens to the other. This world also includes naguals, powerful animals that curanderos and witches can become through ritual practices, sometimes involving sacred mushrooms. This transformation is understood as real, not symbolic, and allows movement between different states of reality and other-than-human worlds.

What often gets missed in analyses of tonal and nagual beliefs—many of which focus largely on symbolism—are the ecological dimensions of these beliefs and practices. These systems endure not simply because they express ideas about nature, but because they entail practices that bind human fate to animal life.

In the mid-1980s, with the help of my father-in-law, a Chatino speaker, we drew up a list of animals found in the region and interviewed Chatino from various towns. The exercise was deliberately simple. For each animal we asked three questions: whether it was killed, whether it was eaten, and whether it was associated with nagual or tona relations. There was considerable agreement across communities about pests and about the kinds of animals associated with nagual danger. When it came to tonas, however, there were differences from one town to another. These differences were not open-ended. A core group of tona animals kept reappearing, and it is on this core that I will focus here.

The exercise also revealed two additional groups that occupy very different positions in local thinking: non-tona animals that are killed and eaten, and pests that are killed but not eaten.

By far the largest category consists of non-tona animals that are hunted, killed, and eaten. These animals form the backbone of everyday subsistence and occupy a distinct position in the cosmological landscape. While their hunting is not governed by personalized moral relationships between hunter and prey, it is not morally neutral. These animals are understood to belong to the Earth Lord, and general prohibitions against waste and against selling wild meat remain in force. When these limits are violated, misfortune is understood to arise not through direct retaliation, but through the withdrawal or withholding of animals by the Earth Lord—expressed as bad luck in hunting or the disappearance of game from the landscape.

Pests occupy a distinct position in the cosmological landscape. Unlike game animals, they are not eaten, and unlike tonas or naguals, they are not bound to humans through relationships of moral identification or warning. They are understood to fall outside the protective domain of the Earth Lord and to participate in no reciprocal exchange with humans or the landscape. Their multiplication is seen not as a gift, but as a threat that consumes crops and food stores without any reciprocal return.

Killing them is not a transgression that invites retaliation. Instead, it is seen as a necessary act in a landscape whose balance depends on reciprocities among humans, animals, and the gods. In this sense, nagual animals—often predators—appear as counterweights to pests, restraining the unchecked multiplication of beings that fall outside reciprocal relations.

Taken together, these two categories establish the moral baseline against which tonal and nagual relations stand out. Most animals are either legitimate food, subject to conditional access and restraint, or pests eliminated without moral concern. Tonas and naguals do something different. They introduce moral risk where killing would otherwise be permitted, transforming encounters with particular animals into moments that demand interpretation rather than action.

Among the animals that are not killed are those associated with naguals. These tend to be predators, nocturnal, or otherwise liminal creatures—animals that live at the edges of visibility and control. Jaguars, pumas, coyotes, foxes, owls, snakes, and birds of prey recur with striking consistency, and not by accident. In cultural terms, they mark power, danger, and responsibility. They are not spared out of reverence, but because killing them is understood as an act of provocation—one that would invite retaliation extending beyond the animal itself. Their movements and appearances are read as warnings: signs of illness, impending danger, or emerging social strain.

Among the clearest cases are owls. Across Mixtec, Chatino, Nahua, Zapotec, and Highland Maya accounts, owls are widely treated as omens of death. Their cries are read not as predictions but as temporal markers of processes already underway: illness, an approaching death, or a looming conflict. Jaguars and pumas are similarly interpreted as signals of major rupture—political conflict, sorcery, or the impending death of an important person. Coyotes, foxes, and snakes encountered at unexpected times or in anomalous places function as classic warnings. Such encounters prompt immediate responses—offerings, counter-rituals, or withdrawal—aimed not at veneration, but at containment.

Common sense tells us that owls calling at night or coyotes crying in the distance are ordinary features of many landscapes. What matters is when they are noticed. A sound that passes without comment on one night becomes charged on another—when someone is ill, conflict is brewing, crops are failing, or a moral or ritual boundary has been crossed. In such moments, the encounter sharpens attention and raises the stakes, compelling people to read what is already happening more carefully and to act as if consequences are immediate.

Predators and other liminal species often respond early to shifts in prey populations, disease, human disturbance, or altered movement corridors, sometimes before those changes become legible to people. When their presence or behavior suddenly stands out, it draws attention to disturbances already underway, sharpening collective awareness at moments when imbalance is beginning to spread.

Tonas present a puzzle. On the one hand, the fate of a person and their tona animal are understood to be intimately intertwined. On the other, tonas are commonly associated with crop-raiding species—deer, peccary, coati, birds, and rabbits—that are routinely killed and eaten to protect fields. This apparent contradiction is partly resolved by the fact that people refrain from hunting their own tona animals and those of close family members.

When animals identified as tonas are examined ecologically, the central questions concern vulnerability: which species are most exposed to human pressure, and whether tona beliefs play any role in moderating that pressure. In any ecosystem, vulnerability turns on two factors: the number of hunters and the reproductive rate of the species involved. Simply put, deer are far more vulnerable than rabbits.

The ethnographic question, then, is how many hunters are likely to have a vulnerable species as a tona. That, in turn, depends on how tonas are assigned and how their human counterparts are determined. Two systems are found: one based on calendrical assignment, the other on divination by ritual specialists.

In the prehispanic system, a 260-day ritual calendar with twenty named days fixed a person’s tona by their day of birth. Among the Mixe of Tamazulapan, where I worked in the early 1990s, this system was still in use. There, roughly five percent of those born shared the same sign.

Suppose that each person with a deer as a tona has six to eight close relatives who have qualms about hunting deer; this could reduce local hunting pressure by 30 to 40 percent. The elegance of this system is that it does not require a community-wide taboo, only localized, kin-based restraint structured through calendrical assignment.

Following the conquest, the Catholic Church tried to root out Indigenous ritual practices. Few communities retained calendrical systems, and tona assignment often shifted to divinatory procedures. Commonly, ritual offerings are burned and the ashes spread in a circle around the house; the following day, a curandero interprets which animal has left its tracks.

Although the means of assignment changed, the range of animals recognized as tonas remained bounded, drawing from a familiar set of locally salient species rather than expanding indefinitely. Over time, these inventories show greater variation, at times incorporating domesticated animals; nevertheless, core species continue to recur.

Modern ethnographic accounts indicate that communities typically recognize between ten and twenty-five tona animals. While the specific composition of these sets varies considerably from place to place, they consistently include species especially vulnerable to human pressure, such as deer. Despite differences from the calendrical method, the proportion of hunters who would have qualms about killing a given species is likely to have remained broadly similar.

The fiesta system may also play a role in moderating pressure on vulnerable species. Fiestas tend to cluster during periods when household corn stocks are lowest and typically involve communal feasting. These events not only feed the community collectively but often allow households to take food home as well. In rural settings, it is often the most food-insecure households that place the greatest pressure on local natural resources. To the extent that communal feasting temporarily reduces subsistence stress, it may soften hunting intensity during these periods. Because slow-reproducing, high-value game such as deer are most vulnerable during times of scarcity, even short-term reductions in hunting pressure during the lean season could have significant effects on local populations.

Some final contemplations

What struck me about the stela surrounded by ritual offerings was how completely the museum misread it. By treating the stela as an artifact and the offerings as survivals of belief, it confines their meaning to a pre-Hispanic past and denies their relevance in the present. In doing so, the museum drains these practices of their living force. They have endured not because they are customs, but because they continue to mediate human relations with the natural world in ways that still make sense.

Humans never encounter nature directly. Nature is always perceived through systems of meaning that tell people who they are, what they owe, and what follows when those obligations are ignored.

Sacred kinship with animals required no external rules to restrain exploitation. Compared to this, modern conceptions of nature as something separate from ourselves—as a stock of resources available for use without reciprocal obligation—appear morally and ethically thin.

These practices are not some romantic vision of harmony. They are a way of inhabiting a landscape that recognizes humans are never autonomous and never exempt from consequence. Mountains, animals, rain, illness, fertility, and luck are not separate domains, but part of a single field of relations that must be continually tended.

In this world, the sacred is not confined to churches or saints’ images. It is the language through which people make sense of uncertainty, scarcity, and risk. These beliefs have material consequences. Tonas bind human fate to animal life. Naguals mark moments when balance is already slipping. The Earth Lord frames hunting as negotiation rather than entitlement, bounded by obligation and restraint. Fiestas redistribute food precisely when hunger would otherwise drive harder extraction from the landscape.

Seen from this perspective, the Mixtec stela at Tututepec is neither an anachronism nor a relic that somehow escaped modernity. It is a working element within a living system that refuses a sharp divide between humans and nature, belief and practice, the sacred and the practical. It is evidence that this way of understanding the world still works.

Modern environmental governance depends heavily on law and often pits industrial interests against those of environmentalists. Enforcement is therefore central—and notoriously difficult. By contrast, Mesoamerican sacred beliefs generated obligations that felt legitimate because they were internalized rather than imposed.

What the stela at Tututepec makes visible is not a lost past, but a missing dimension of the present—one in which governance begins not with control, but with obligation.

Suggested Readings

Greenberg, James B. Santiago’s Sword: Chatino Peasant Religion and Economics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981.

Jansen, Maarten, and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez. Encounter with the Plumed Serpent: Drama and Power in the Heart of Mesoamerica. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.

Monaghan, John. The People of the Middle Place: Political Economy and Cosmology in the Mixteca Alta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

I watch the news these days with a growing sense of dread. Each night brings another escalation, another line crossed, another sign that something fundamental is shifting. As a Jew, my thoughts sometimes run to the Holocaust; as an anthropologist, I know this moment is different. The impulse to compare them is understandable. When states begin to single out populations as scapegoats, deploy federal agents and National Guard units, use military tactics to round people up, build detention camps, and deport some to foreign prisons, historical memories surface. But comparisons must be made carefully. What matters is not asserting equivalence, but understanding what the differences between these moments reveal about the ideologies that underlie them.

The Holocaust was a project of extermination, grounded in an ideology that defined entire populations as biologically irredeemable and targeted them for destruction. What we are witnessing now operates through a different logic. It does not require mass killing, nor does it depend on explicit declarations of elimination. Instead, it rests on a more familiar and more administratively flexible ideology: one that measures human worth through productivity, cost, and burden; that withdraws protection from those deemed expendable; and that sees suffering as an acceptable consequence of policy. The distinction is not merely historical. It marks the difference between a state that kills and a state that governs through exposure—through decisions about who will be protected and who will not. When protection is withdrawn or denied, those left exposed are forced to bear risk on their own. In this sense, deportation is not the opposite of abandonment, but one of its most extreme forms.

What is unfolding now is not a single policy or a single moment, but a pattern. When I saw the immigration raids sweep up people who had lived here for decades, any illusion that this was political theater—that it would target only the “worst of the worst”—collapsed. Since then, I have watched the state expand its reach: building out surveillance systems, enlarging detention capacity, and bringing rapid response units into routine operations. This administration is continually testing what it can normalize and how far it can push the boundaries of belonging. Here the lessons of the past speak loudly. Once a government begins redrawing the lines of who counts, it rarely stops at the first group it marks for removal.

The way people are being talked about has shifted. Long before the raids, you could hear a change in tone—not neighbors or workers, but costs. Politicians framed them as drains on the country. Commentators cast social programs as indulgences. As the language of burden took hold, it reshaped the ground beneath the debate. The old market logic returned: measuring a person’s worth by productivity, and treating anyone outside the labor market with suspicion.

That same logic gives the state a ready-made justification for harsher measures that increasingly target citizens and legal residents as well. If people are cast as burdens, cutting support becomes responsible governance. If they are framed as takers, exposing them to hardship becomes discipline. And when they are portrayed as obstacles to prosperity, removing them—through deportation, detention, or neglect—becomes easier to defend. Abandonment grows out of these decisions.

This pattern has a name: necropolitics. It is a form of governance that operates not through overt violence, but by managing exposure—by deciding whose lives will be protected and whose can be left vulnerable.

Scapegoats make this shift easier. They always have. Certain groups are singled out as the source of whatever is going wrong—lack of jobs, strained services, disorder. These accusations do not need to be true; repetition is enough. Once a population is cast as the problem, the state gains room to act against them, and the public grows accustomed to their vulnerability. As the machinery grows, so does its reach. Those who once felt secure begin to wonder whether the line will reach them next.

The politics of abandonment draws on older economic logics: ones that treated entire populations as expendable—Indigenous communities pushed off their lands, enslaved people worked to exhaustion, migrant laborers treated as commodities to be cycled in and out of the economy, consumed and replaced. These histories shape how the state imagines its responsibilities—and how quickly it decides that some people can be left to fend for themselves.

These patterns continue to echo. The same logic that once justified removal and exclusion is resurfacing in quieter, bureaucratic ways—in the language of “efficiency,” in the framing of certain groups as drains, in the willingness to expose them to harm. The tools have changed, and the technologies are new. But the underlying grammar—who is protected and who is exposed—remains intact.

Authoritarian shifts are felt long before people begin to name them. Conversations grow quieter. Friends hesitate before posting online. Community leaders who once spoke freely begin weighing their words. As the administration casts more critics as disloyal, dissent carries a different kind of danger. Groups that raise concerns are accused of siding with “outsiders.” Public figures who question the policies are treated as “enemies within,” undermining the nation.

When authoritarians use fear as a mode of governance, it is imposed gradually. Examples are made, and these teach people to step back, keep their heads down, and avoid drawing attention. Authoritarian systems have always relied on this dynamic. They do not need universal support—only enough fear to make resistance costly and enough suspicion to make solidarity harder to sustain.

The consequences of abandonment are not theoretical. They are felt in daily life. When families lose access to medical care, when workers avoid hospitals for fear of detention, children grow up knowing that one absence—a missed paycheck, a sudden illness, a traffic stop—can unravel everything.

This is how necropolitics takes hold in everyday life. By withdrawing protection and normalizing exposure, the state shifts the burden of survival onto those least able to bear it. Illness becomes a private problem; injury, a personal misfortune. Premature death is rendered invisible, not because it is rare, but because it falls along lines the state has chosen to ignore.

We have seen this before. During heat waves, the elderly die alone because the systems meant to protect them have been hollowed out. During storms, neighborhoods without political power are left exposed. During pandemics, people in precarious jobs face the highest risks because they cannot afford to stay home. These losses are not counted as casualties of policy, but they very much are the victims of omission.

This is the quiet brutality of abandonment. It does not need the machinery of death, only the decision that certain people can be left to navigate impossible conditions on their own. And when those conditions lead to illness, injury, or death, the state can wash its hands because it did not pull a trigger or issue a direct order. But the harm is no less real.

Taken together, these patterns describe a political order in which power is exercised not only through force, but through abandonment. When millions of people around the world face preventable death because USAID was dismantled, and when tens of thousands at home die each year because Medicaid was cut or because they are priced out or ruled out of basic care, it should stir the same moral outrage we feel in the face of other atrocities.

But there is another grammar available to us, one just as deeply rooted in American life as the logic of abandonment. It appears in traditions that insist a person’s worth is not measured by productivity or cost, but by their place in a family, a neighborhood, a community. It appears in religious inheritances that teach that nations are judged by how they treat the least powerful among them, and in the civic stories we tell about mutual responsibility—stories that have always pushed back against the idea that suffering is a private failure rather than a shared concern.

A politics of care begins with an older understanding: that people are not ledgers to be balanced, but lives to be protected. It recognizes vulnerability not as a mark of expendability, but as a call to collective responsibility, and it rejects a political order that treats exposure as governance and abandonment as policy.

If the grammar of abandonment teaches us who can be left behind, the grammar of care teaches us who we must stand beside. The choice between them is not abstract. It shows up in budgets, in schools, in hospitals—in who is protected when systems strain. It is the work of citizenship itself: deciding what kind of nation we are, and what kind of people we intend to be.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.

Fassin, Didier. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Project 2025 supplied the outline, but the administration’s actions reveal what was left implicit. Mass deportation is not the goal; it is the justification. The government is expanding detention capacity through new contracts, reopened facilities, and emergency appropriations at a scale that exceeds any realistic deportation flow. The scale of this expansion makes sense only if detention, surveillance, and enforcement are understood not as temporary tools but as durable investments—ones that generate contracts, revenue, and institutional momentum long after any specific enforcement rationale has faded.

The promise to focus on “the worst of the worst” dissolved almost immediately. Enforcement followed stereotypes, not threat assessments. Foreign students who spoke out lost their visas. Green card holders found themselves under review. Naturalized citizens faced broadened interpretations of “disloyalty” and “terrorist association,” categories stretched to include political dissent. These measures are not about national security. They are about creating uncertainty and silence. Their durability lies in legal ambiguity: categories broad enough to defer judgment, flexible enough to persist, and vague enough to be reused long after their original justification has disappeared.

Labeling Antifa a terrorist organization serves the same purpose. Because the term has no fixed meaning, it can be applied to anyone the administration chooses to classify as a threat.

Under the banner of deportation, the government has expanded the reach of ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, Border Patrol, FBI task forces, and even the National Guard. What were once exceptional deployments are becoming routine. Missions described as “support” for immigration enforcement now extend into domestic policing. Once the infrastructure exists, its use broadens. The same apparatus is then turned toward internal surveillance, intimidation, and the management of dissent. In such environments, over-compliance becomes rational. Career incentives reward action, not restraint, and ambiguity favors those who err on the side of enforcement over those who pause to question it.

The definition of “undesirable” has widened. It no longer refers only to immigration status. Entire nationalities—Haitians, Somalis, and citizens of nineteen designated countries—have been marked as suspect. New categories such as “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” are so vague they can be applied to journalists, academics, activists, or anyone who challenges the administration’s narrative.

The armed forces are being reshaped as well. Loyalty screenings, leadership removals, and the creation of units intended for domestic deployment indicate a shift in orientation. The line between external defense and internal control is being deliberately blurred.

Alongside these changes, the state’s surveillance capacity is expanding rapidly. Firms like Palantir, working with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, now have access to federal data streams from Social Security, HHS, IRS, and the FBI. These are being combined with private-sector datasets, platform metadata, and widespread video surveillance. Privacy still exists in statute, but in practice it is eroding. The consolidation of data enables tracking and pressure with minimal friction.

Another part of the pattern has come into view. The administration has begun using federal agencies to pursue investigations and actions against high-profile political opponents. The FBI, IRS, and other offices have been directed toward individuals and institutions that have challenged or criticized the administration. Lawsuits have been filed against law firms, universities, and media organizations. These cases impose financial and legal strain, but their primary function is demonstrative.

The choice of targets is intentional. By beginning with prominent figures—people with resources, visibility, and institutional backing—the administration establishes a precedent. The message is clear: if those with standing can be pressured, no one else is beyond reach. The consequence is not universal repression but universal calculation—the recognition that even successful resistance carries costs severe enough to make silence appear prudent.

None of this proceeds in a straight line. The administration relies on a constant churn of announcements, reversals, and provocations. Public attention is drawn to spectacle while structural changes continue with little scrutiny. Over time, repetition retrains perception. What would once have registered as an institutional rupture is absorbed as background activity, processed as another update rather than a threshold crossed.

Precarity is central to this strategy. When people cannot rely on stable rules or clear boundaries, they become cautious. They withdraw. They avoid attention. Fear isolates individuals from one another, and isolation weakens collective response. The targeting is calibrated to deepen existing divisions, encouraging each affected group to believe its vulnerability is temporary rather than structural.

Democratic institutions are not built for this environment. They rely on transparency, continuity, and shared assumptions about the limits of power. The administration does not operate within those assumptions. It moves through legal and bureaucratic channels simultaneously, each change reinforcing the next. By the time the effects are visible, the shift has already taken hold.

What is unfolding is not a collection of isolated actions but a redefinition of the relationship between the state and its citizens. The tools are being assembled, the categories of who can be targeted are widening, and the constraints that once limited government power are being quietly removed. The political climate—fractured, unsettled, and saturated with conflict—allows these changes to proceed with little sustained resistance.

The result is a system in which uncertainty becomes routine and the reach of the state expands without formal announcement. The machinery is built in increments, each one small enough to pass as an administrative adjustment. Once operational, such systems no longer hinge on political will. They persist because institutions, careers, and revenue streams depend on them. Only when the pieces are viewed together does the pattern become clear. By then, much of the structure is already in place.

Suggested Readings

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Gupta, Akhil. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986–2013.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Schrader, Stuart. Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

This adoption is not accidental. It is the latest iteration of a deeper cultural grammar embedded in the very idea of the nation. From its etymological root—nacer, to be born—the nation has always carried within it the logic of blood and descent. Belonging is imagined as biological inheritance, not civic participation. To be of the nation is to share its bloodline; to stand outside it is to be marked for containment or erasure. By redefining belonging as descent rather than participation, remigration signals a retreat from the civic ideals that were meant, however imperfectly, to hold the United States together.

In the United States, this logic has long justified the treatment of Native peoples, African Americans, and immigrant minorities as problems to be managed. Assimilation was tolerated only when it erased difference. Containment was imposed when assimilation failed. Exclusion followed when distinctiveness threatened the imagined purity of the national body. Beneath this cultural logic lies an economic one. Mexican-Americans, for example, were commodified for their labor even as their language and identity were suppressed. Their worth was measured in productivity rather than belonging. Once their labor was no longer needed, they were cast as surplus, disposable, and foreign. The pattern repeats across minority histories: labor extracted, culture devalued, identity gradually erased. Authoritarian movements justify this through narratives of scarcity—jobs, safety, resources—treating minority presence as a “threat” that must be managed or removed.

The authoritarian adoption of remigration condenses these logics into a single motif. The term’s movement from Europe to the United States reveals how authoritarian strategies circulate globally, carrying with them a common script for identifying and disposing of those deemed unassimilable. The cultural logic insists that difference must be assimilated, contained, or excluded. The economic logic disciplines minorities into labor roles, commodifies their productivity, and erases their identity once they are no longer useful. Each reinforces the other: cultural exclusion makes economic disposability seem natural, while commodification provides the rationale for pushing people out of public life. Together they form a ritual grammar of authoritarian governance, where minorities are tolerated only as labor, managed as threats, and erased as surplus.

This is not new. Native peoples were confined to reservations, their languages suppressed, their lands commodified. African Americans were enslaved, segregated, and disenfranchised, their labor extracted while their civic identity was denied. Mexican-Americans were recruited into agricultural labor, their Spanish erased, their culture treated as an obstacle to productivity. Each case reveals the same grammar: difference tolerated only when it can be erased or exploited, and when it resists, exclusion follows. Communities have long pushed back against these logics—in language, in culture, in collective action—reminding us that belonging is lived and practiced, not granted through descent.

Remigration is the latest mask worn by this grammar. It is not about return—it is about erasure. It is the authoritarian rebranding of disposability, the bureaucratic euphemism for ethnic cleansing, the symbolic theft of a neutral word to normalize exclusion. In its cadence we hear the echo of the nation’s bloodline logic, the market’s commodification of minorities, and the authoritarian impulse to manage difference through discipline and expulsion. To name it is to expose its genealogy. To resist it is to reclaim the meaning of nation as civic belonging rather than descent, and to insist that culture and labor are not commodities to be erased but inheritances to be honored.

Suggested Readings

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006.

Balibar, Étienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Authoritarian drift often begins with tone. When Trump described Somali communities as “garbage” and accused them of “destroying our country,” the harm was not only in the insult but in the signal. No new rules had to be written; agencies understood, and protections began to loosen.

That signal carried into the administration’s review of nineteen countries—most of them African or Muslim-majority—placing their nationals under a blanket presumption of risk. DHS reopened settled immigration cases, treating long-term residents as provisional and echoing the rhetoric that marked them.

The timing was not incidental. Trump often unveils aggressive immigration actions when his political standing weakens or unwelcome stories threaten to dominate the news cycle. Whether meant to rally his base, divert attention, or reassert control, the move repeated a habit: when pressure builds, he turns to immigration as the stage on which he performs strength.

For me, this is not abstract. As a Jew married to a Mexican woman, my family sits at the intersection of two histories marked by suspicion. We have long understood that belonging in America is unevenly distributed and that shifts in tone can alter daily life long before any law is amended. Somali families in Minnesota are witnessing that shift now: neighbors who pay closer attention, schools that ask different questions, officials who treat paperwork as provisional. Ordinary life becomes something a family must manage rather than simply live.

Somalis, many from places where authority could reorder life overnight, noticed the change immediately—in threats to Temporary Protected Status, in naturalization files reopened years later, in encounters with immigration officers that grew more pointed. Technically permissible, these actions concentrated on one community and followed political cues, giving them a different meaning.

Enforcement no longer remains at the border; it has moved into cities. In Minneapolis, a traffic stop or a visit from a school resource officer now carries different possibilities. Families, aware of these shifts, begin organizing their days around minimizing risk. Once suspicion settles over a community, distinctions that once mattered—refugee, permanent resident, naturalized citizen, U.S.-born—begin to blur.

The country has taken this path before. Jim Crow stripped Black citizens of rights. Jews in Europe saw their citizenship peeled away step by step in the prelude to the Holocaust. The circumstances differ, but the lesson is the same: when one group is singled out, protection for all erodes.

The danger is not that this strategy is unprecedented, but that it is being deployed in a new form. Where earlier systems relied on explicit laws to exclude, the current approach relies instead on administrative discretion, rhetorical signaling, and strategic ambiguity. Rights are not formally revoked; they are treated as provisional. Belonging is not denied outright; it is made contingent. This is how unequal treatment can expand without triggering the alarms that once accompanied open exclusion.

Instability is the tool power uses to tighten its grip. Large, dramatic actions are not required; it is enough for one community to learn that its rights can be delayed or treated as conditional. Others take note and adjust. This is how authoritarians strengthen their position—not by eliminating institutions outright, but by teaching the public that unequal treatment is acceptable.

Suspicion rarely stays confined. It extends outward—to Latinos, Muslims, activists, even naturalized citizens. When government marks a group as “not fully American,” it creates an ambiguity that makes differential treatment permissible.

What is at stake is not only how one community is treated but the civic fabric that allows a plural society to function. Democracies depend on expectations: that rules operate evenly, that neighbors share the same public, that institutions avoid tilting the field without cause. When those expectations weaken, trust collapses, and unequal treatment becomes routine.

Even so, Somali communities in Minnesota have not ceded their place. Local leaders have pushed back against suspicion mapped onto entire neighborhoods. Religious and civic organizations have insisted that equal protection is not negotiable. Their response matters because it disrupts the slow acceptance of unequal treatment and reminds others that belonging is maintained through solidarity and refusal.

The danger is not that we are repeating old catastrophes but that we are normalizing the early steps that made them possible—arbitrary enforcement, selective suspicion, uneven protection under the law. Trump’s targeting of Somali Minnesotans fits this pattern, not because the circumstances are identical, but because it signals a political logic that now governs far more than immigration.

Suggested Readings

Abdi, Cawo M. Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and Refugee Lives in the United States.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Armenta, Amada. Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

Cainkar, Louise. Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009.

Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004.

Ewing, Walter A., Daniel E. Martínez, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. The End of Immigration Court Independence. Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2021.

Hassan, Ahmed Ismail. Somalis in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011.

Hernández, César Cuauhtémoc García. Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants. New York: The New Press, 2019.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Massey, Douglas S., and Karen A. Pren. “Structural Inequality and Immigrant Vulnerability.” Daedalus 149, no. 4 (2020): 97–113.

Trump’s crisis talk, symbolic reversals, and insistence on personal loyalty have pushed the country into a new kind of division. His recent executive order and National Security Presidential Memorandum on domestic terrorism widen that split, treating some people as full citizens and recasting others as internal suspects.

These measures are not isolated decisions; they grow out of the larger story Trump tells about who the nation belongs to. His populism depends on a story of a nation already taken, one in which “real Americans” have been crowded out by hostile outsiders—immigrants, bureaucrats, judges, journalists, and even former allies who failed to show the required deference. The through line is betrayal: a country rotting from within that only he can restore. This isn’t solidarity from below but a politics built on siege, where emergency becomes the norm and compromise begins to look like desertion.

Once that story takes hold, loyalty becomes the organizing principle around which everything else turns. Institutions matter only when they bend; those who comply are patriots, and those who don’t become suspect. Agencies meant to ground a shared civic world are pulled into a drama in which he stands above the law rather than bound by it, and law itself becomes a display of force instead of a common agreement about how to live together.

That demand for loyalty quickly expands into the cultural sphere, where identity itself becomes a political tool. DEI is cast as a plot against “real Americans,” migrants become invaders, protesters become insurgents, and belonging becomes conditional: measured not by citizenship or contribution but by political alignment. The dividing lines aren’t geographic; they run through the national imagination.

Spectacle makes this worldview feel lived, giving the political story its emotional force. Rallies become ritual sites and press events are staged to provoke, while social media traps supporters inside a continuous storyline that positions him as the indispensable interpreter of events. As that sense of emergency intensifies, the shared civic space needed for democratic argument shrinks, replaced by a narrative with only one reliable narrator.

And as the spectacle grows louder, the institutions that once anchored democratic life grow easier to dismiss. For years, Trump has worked to discredit elections, courts, intelligence agencies, and the press, and once these foundations are painted as corrupt, the only stable reference becomes the leader himself. Political conflict begins to feel like the only language left.

The domestic terrorism order simply translates that narrative into administrative form. On paper it targets violent actors; in practice it expands the category of threat until ideology itself becomes suspect. Anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Christian views are flagged as danger signs, Antifa is labeled a terrorist organization despite lacking structure, and agencies are told to track networks defined more by dissent than by action. The effect is predictable: dissent slides quietly into the territory of surveillance.

What stands out to me is how closely this pattern resembles systems I’ve studied elsewhere. From my years examining the PRI’s political machinery in Mexico, Trump’s use of loyalty and institutional pressure feels familiar. The PRI governed through a shifting mix of favors, punishments, and managed uncertainty; in rural communities, loyalty shaped access to land, credit, and protection, and people learned to read signals from above as carefully as they read formal rules. Dissent carried costs even when no threat was spoken aloud. Trump has adapted that repertoire to an American stage—preserving institutions as symbols while draining them of independence and making political safety contingent on personal allegiance.

And the more you look at the mechanics, the clearer the parallels become. The PRI didn’t erase opposition; it absorbed or disciplined it. Trump updates that method through media storms, administrative purges, and legal pressure rather than regional bosses. The mechanism is recognizable: create enough uncertainty about who is safe and who isn’t, and people begin to police themselves. Institutions hesitate, fear travels quietly, and—as I saw in Mexican villages during the later PRI years—the leader’s favor becomes the safest place to stand in a world made deliberately unstable.

Which is why the present moment feels less like an anomaly and more like another chapter in an old American conflict. The Civil War was fought over incompatible visions of belonging and sovereignty, and Trump revives that tension in a contemporary key—sorting Americans into categories of threat and protection and using the state to harden those divisions. In a society already strained by inequality and weakening civic norms, a fractured media landscape makes even basic coexistence feel conditional.

Recognizing the pattern is only the first step; resisting it requires something more. Stopping this slide into tyranny requires more than naming it. Courts can narrow vague definitions and strike down unconstitutional measures, Congress can limit executive overreach, states can push back, and civil society can litigate, organize, and expose. But legal remedies alone won’t reset a political imagination that treats resistance as proof of danger. Changing that mindset requires cultural work—efforts that matter as much as institutional reforms and are essential to rebuilding a world where disagreement isn’t mistaken for disloyalty.

Because beneath all of this lies a deeper question about what citizenship will mean in the years ahead. Trump’s power to divide rests not only in his rhetoric but in the way he ties citizenship to personal allegiance. He uses language to split the public, institutions to enforce the split, and national symbols to decide who belongs—The question now is whether democracy remains anchored in law and pluralism or yields to a politics built on personal devotion. That choice will shape the country we leave behind.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Berman, Sheri. Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003.

Greenberg, James B. Blood Ties: Life and Violence in Rural Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.

Greenberg, James B. “Caciques, Patronage, Factionalism and Variations among Local Forms of Capitalism.” In Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture, edited by Wil G. Pansters, 309–336. Amsterdam: Thela Publishers, 1997.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

Weaver, Thomas, James B. Greenberg, Bill Alexander, and Anne Browning, eds. Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012.

For years, Trump has applied this label to a widening circle of Americans—generals, judges, election workers, secretaries of state, members of Congress, whistleblowers, journalists, even his own vice president. The point is not accuracy; it is utility. Traitor is a working word. It signals who can be trusted and who cannot. It redraws the moral boundary where dissent becomes sedition and criticism becomes treason. It prepares supporters to see political rivals not as participants in a shared democracy, but as internal threats.

It is worth remembering that treason is the one crime the Constitution defines with the expectation of the state’s ultimate sanction—historically, the death penalty. To invoke it casually is to gesture toward the state’s monopoly on legitimate force, and to imply that certain Americans may no longer be entitled to the protection of the law.

The danger is not theoretical. We have already seen what happens when a president marks specific Americans as betrayers of the nation. January 6 was the result. Trump singled out Mike Pence, cast election officials as conspirators, and framed lawful certification as an act of treachery. The crowd acted on the logic they had been taught—responding with certainty, anger, and the belief that they were defending the country from its enemies. The chants of “Hang Mike Pence” did not emerge from nowhere; they were the predictable outcome of years of framing fellow citizens as traitors.

In his second term, the pattern has become more explicit. This month Trump labeled six lawmakers—many with military or intelligence backgrounds—as guilty of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.” The phrasing tells the story. What once appeared as outbursts now functions as a strategy: delegitimize, criminalize, and hint at punishment. He does not need to give instructions. The language itself identifies the target. Once dissent is recast as treason, the rest follows.

The Cultural Logic Behind the Accusation

Authoritarian politics begins with stories—narratives that redefine belonging and make repression seem necessary. Treason is one of the oldest of these narrative tools. It turns political disagreement into a moral crisis. Once invoked, it suggests that the nation is endangered from within. Traitors are no longer opponents; they are threats to be removed.

We have seen this pattern across cultures. Societies use accusations such as treason, heresy, witchcraft, and apostasy to manage uncertainty. These words do more than condemn individuals; they reorganize the moral universe. They show people where danger lies, who is responsible, and whom they must fear. When institutions weaken or trust declines, accusations become shortcuts—simple ways to impose order on a complicated world.

Trump deploys this logic instinctively. He reaches for the accusation when he needs to consolidate loyalty or deflect responsibility. The targets are predictable: those who resist unlawful pressure, those who protect institutional norms, those who insist on accuracy when he requires falsehoods. In any autocratic system, these are the people who must be discredited first, because they anchor power to law rather than personality.

Calling generals, judges, or members of Congress traitors is not just an insult. It strips these offices of the legitimacy democracy grants them. It teaches supporters that authority resides not in institutions, but in the leader. In that world, betrayal is no longer defined by the Constitution but by whether someone stands between the president and what he wants.

This transforms citizenship itself. Accusations of treason imply that membership in the political community is conditional—revocable not through law, but through loyalty. When dissent can be recast as betrayal, the social contract begins to shift from shared rights to graded belonging.

This is why the list keeps growing. Once loyalty becomes the measure of citizenship—and loyalty is measured by personal alignment with the leader—the category of “traitor” expands to absorb every limit, every contradiction, every guardrail.

The Drift Toward Punishment

What comes next usually follows a familiar sequence. In authoritarian systems, accusations do not remain rhetorical. They move steadily toward enforcement.

When Trump claims lawmakers are guilty of “seditious behavior, punishable by DEATH,” he is not making a legal argument. He is creating a moral frame in which punishment becomes the expected response to political resistance. He is rehearsing the logic of retribution.

Across modern illiberal regimes—from McCarthy-era purges at home to Orbán in Hungary and Erdoğan in Turkey—the accusation of treason has served the same function: softening public resistance to political cleansing by framing it as national defense. Trump’s language fits squarely within that pattern.

We have already seen how this plays out. Election workers forced from their homes. Secretaries of state requiring security details. Congressional offices inundated with threats. The cultural permission structure is well established; all that remains is the political trigger.

Every autocrat relies on the same interplay between accusation and action. The leader names the traitors. He defines the threat. Followers enforce the logic—sometimes through formal institutions, sometimes through informal pressure, often through both. Trump has grasped this dynamic. He does not need to call for violence explicitly. Identifying the target is enough.

Where This Path Leads

If this trajectory continues, we should be clear-eyed about its direction.

Escalation does not always arrive dramatically. It often comes through the slow expansion of who counts as a traitor. It begins with elected officials, moves to judges, reaches journalists and civil servants, and eventually touches anyone who refuses to affirm the leader’s narrative. Once treason becomes a political category, the boundaries must widen to maintain the logic.

We are already seeing early steps: proposals to investigate “disloyal” officials, threats of prosecutions against perceived opponents, and renewed talk of using the Department of Justice to carry out political purification. None of this is incidental. It is the structural logic of a system organized around enemies.

The question is no longer whether the rhetoric will sharpen. It will. The question is whether institutions that have absorbed years of pressure can still restrain the movement from accusation to action.

The Price of Silence

The United States has always had political hostility, but this moment is different: a leader has begun turning accusation into political infrastructure. When someone is called a traitor often enough, the public begins to reconsider how that person should be treated. Hostility starts to feel reasonable. Violence no longer feels unthinkable. This is how the moral ground shifts before formal repression begins.

Repetition erodes shock. The more Americans hear that civil servants, legislators, journalists, and military officers are traitors, the more ordinary the accusation becomes. Once it feels ordinary, the threshold for action drops. Democracies depend on maintaining that threshold—on recognizing one another as members of the same political community even in conflict. Autocrats rely on dissolving it.

We are already living with the consequences: election workers in hiding, educators and librarians facing threats, state officials harassed into silence, members of Congress warned regularly about credible risks. The boundary between rhetoric and danger is now so thin that it barely holds.

None of this is accidental. It reflects a political style that treats fear as a governing instrument and division as a form of control. Accusation becomes a way to pressure institutions and deter dissent. Recognizing the pattern is the first step toward resisting it.

Democracies do not endure by pretending this language is harmless. They endure through citizens and institutions that refuse the core premise behind it: that political disagreement is a form of betrayal. The real issue is not the individuals Trump names, but the political order he describes when he labels Americans as traitors. It is an order in which loyalty to a leader replaces loyalty to the Constitution.

What Trump is doing with the word traitor is more than rhetorical excess. He is sketching the outline of a political order in which citizenship becomes conditional and institutional loyalty gives way to personal allegiance. That shift is why this language is dangerous: it changes how Americans imagine one another and prepares the ground for actions that once would have been unthinkable. Naming that shift clearly is the first step in resisting it.

Suggested Readings

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton, 2020.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, ed. The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S.: A Feminist Perspective. New York: Columbia Law School, 2019.

Finchelstein, Federico. A Brief History of Fascist Lies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020.

Gessen, Masha. Surviving Autocracy. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

When I first wrote about climate models in 2020, my argument was straightforward: the warming trend was unmistakable, but the tools we used to predict its pace and texture had real limitations. Models, I argued, are abstractions—elegant ones, but abstractions nonetheless—shaped by assumptions, simplifications, and imperfect data. I cautioned not against the science but against apocalyptic certainty. Five years later the world has changed, and so has the science. Some processes are moving faster than expected, denial has mutated into a politics of delay, and the impacts are no longer abstract. Re-examining that earlier analysis now feels less like revisiting a forecast and more like taking stock of the terrain after the clouds have lifted.

Climate models have always required careful scrutiny. They attempt to represent a system of staggering complexity—oceans, soils, ice sheets, forests, clouds, circulation currents—all in constant interaction. No model can capture every process or feedback. But over the past five years, improvements in resolution, physics, and observational data have sharpened what they can tell us. Today’s models no longer sit apart from the world; they are anchored to direct measurements of planetary heat imbalance, ocean warming, ice-mass loss, and shifts in the jet stream. They remain imperfect, but the foundations beneath them have grown stronger.

Uncertainty remains—not because the models are wrong, but because the climate system is inherently nonlinear. Small shifts in initial conditions produce divergent outcomes; feedback loops amplify change; thresholds reveal themselves only once crossed. This is why model projections come in ranges, not guarantees. And this is where my earlier argument still holds: uncertainty is not a flaw in the science; it is a property of the world.

What has changed dramatically is the direction of that uncertainty. In 2020, many processes were expected to unfold slowly: polar melting, rainfall intensification, ocean heat storage. Today we know those processes are accelerating. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. Extreme heat waves are breaking records by margins once thought impossible. Rainfall events that were “once in a century” now occur every few years. The models didn’t miss the trend—they underestimated the speed.

As models have sharpened scientifically, they have also become cultural artifacts. They embody decisions about what counts as knowledge, which processes are prioritized, and what forms of uncertainty are treated as acceptable. They are shaped by funding structures, institutional priorities, and the metaphors scientists use to describe complexity. Models don’t just project futures; they help construct the futures we imagine. Understanding them requires not only physics but anthropology—an examination of the knowledge systems and power structures that guide their design.

A major shift of the past five years is that the dominant obstacle today is no longer outright denial; it is the political economy of delay. Delay is quieter than denial. It presents itself as caution—“We need better data,” “We can’t move too fast,” “Technology will solve this later.” But delay serves the same purpose denial once did: buying time for industries dependent on fossil fuels, protecting entrenched wealth, and shifting the burden of future loss onto the poor. In this sense, uncertainty becomes a political tool—not scientific caution, but a convenient alibi.

This politics of delay is woven through think tanks, lobby groups, finance, and state institutions. It presents itself as prudence while functioning as protection for those who profit from the status quo. Climate change becomes something to manage later: after elections, after quarterly earnings, after the next crisis. This is the logic that has eroded infrastructure, weakened public institutions, and left communities exposed long before the storms arrived. Delay is not passive; it is a form of governance.

One of the clearest lessons of the past decade is that climate change does not announce itself as a sudden catastrophe. It unfolds through the slow degradation of the systems that sustain modern life. Water tables drop. Grids fail under heat stress. Insurance markets collapse as disasters multiply. Coastal real estate becomes uninsurable. Drought turns farmland to dust. Migration pressures mount as livelihoods disappear. Climate change is not a single event; it is infrastructure breakdown—the unraveling of systems built for a climate that no longer exists.

These breakdowns expose the fault lines of inequality. The wealthy can manage risk through insurance or even relocation. The poor have no such options. In marginalized communities—in Bangladesh, in Chennai, in Central America—the poor face a different reality: saltwater intrusion, failing crops, water shortages, wildfire smoke, and collapsing fisheries. Vulnerability is not an accident of geography; it is produced by political choices, historical dispossession, and economic structures that long predate climate change.

This is why “climate conflict” and “climate refugee” narratives have always been misleading. They isolate climate as the root cause while ignoring how neoliberal restructuring, land privatization, and economic precarity created the vulnerabilities climate change now exploits. Blaming migration on climate alone erases the political responsibilities that made people vulnerable in the first place.

The question, then, is not whether climate change will cause catastrophe. It is whether societies will meet environmental stress with solidarity and adaptation—or with exclusion, authoritarian reflexes, and a fortified politics of fear. Models cannot tell us this. History can. And history suggests that crises often reveal more about political structures than about the forces that triggered them.

New “solutions” have also entered the debate—carbon removal, direct air capture, and geoengineering schemes that promise control but risk reproducing the same inequalities that created the crisis. These technologies may eventually play a role, but they often reflect a desire to solve a political problem with technical fixes, and a society that often prefers technical fixes to political ones.

We now know with much greater clarity that climate change is not a future threat; it is a present condition. Risks will multiply the longer action is delayed, the more infrastructure erodes, and the more inequality deepens. Uncertainty does not protect us. It magnifies vulnerability. It narrows pathways. It raises the cost of adaptation while lowering the capacity to respond.

Yet the future remains open. We still have agency. Optimism may feel too soft for this moment, but resignation is unwarranted. Communities have adapted to immense changes before. Indigenous knowledge systems have long managed landscapes with sophistication that climate models still struggle to capture. Local governments, social movements, and ordinary citizens are already building forms of resilience that bypass national paralysis.

The hard part now isn’t the science; it’s the politics. We know what drives the warming and who benefits from postponing action, and we know who pays the price when systems fail. The question is whether we can build institutions willing to treat climate change as the structural threat it is, not as a problem to be deferred to the next budget cycle or election. The climate will keep changing whether we act or not. What remains uncertain is whether our political system can adjust in time to preserve the world we presently inhabit.

Appendix: Statements by Scientific Organizations

For all the political noise surrounding climate change, the scientific picture is remarkably consistent. Across disciplines, nations, and institutions, the conclusions come from decades of direct measurement and peer-reviewed evidence, not ideology or speculation.

The IPCC, the world’s leading scientific authority, is unequivocal:

Human-caused climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, driving widespread losses and damages.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements/

The World Health Organization reframes the issue in terms of human survival:

Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health

NOAA, the nation’s premier atmospheric and oceanic agency, is blunt about lived impacts:

Climate change is harming food production, water systems, public health, and safety—from drought and wildfire to flooding and disease.

https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/climate-change-impacts

The American Geophysical Union, representing the world’s earth and space scientists, states it without qualification:

Extensive, independent observations confirm the reality of global warming; human activities are the principal cause.

https://www.agu.org/Share-and-Advocate/Share/Policymakers/Position-Statements/Climate-Change

The National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, echoes this consensus:

Climate change is occurring, is driven largely by human activities, and poses significant risks to both human and natural systems.

https://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/more-resources-on-climate-change/

Suggested Readings

Barnes, Jessica, and Michael Dove, eds. Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change. Yale University Press, 2020.

Caltech Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA). Climate Modeling for the 21st Century: Technical Report. Pasadena: Caltech, 2023.

Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG). State of the Climate: 2022–2024 Reports. CCAG, 2022–2024.

Greenberg, James B. “The Political Ecology of Climate Change.” In Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 97–122. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.

IPCC. Sixth Assessment Report: Synthesis Report. Geneva: IPCC, 2022.

Lenton, Timothy M., et al. “Climate Tipping Points—Too Risky to Bet Against.” Nature 575 (2019): 592–595. (See also subsequent updates 2021–2023.)

Liu, Zhihua, et al. “Accelerated Arctic Warming and the Influence of Remote Forcing.” Nature Communications 12 (2021).

Nightingale, Andrea J. Climate, Capitalism, and the Politics of Care. University of Arizona Press, 2023.

Rignall, Karen, and Jake Kosek, eds. New Political Ecologies of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2022.

Taylor, Michael, Jesse Ribot, and Michael Watts, eds. Adaptive Failure: Climate Change and the Limits of Resilience. University of California Press, 2021.

The early phase of denial was blunt: climate change is fake, scientists are lying, environmentalism is a plot. But as the evidence became impossible to ignore, the strategy changed. Today, the dominant approach isn’t to deny the problem—it’s to delay the solution. The rhetoric now sounds reasonable: “Yes, the climate is changing, but the models are uncertain.” “Yes, it’s serious, but it’s too expensive to fix right now.” “Yes, it matters, but China must go first.” This is how denial survives long after it stopped pretending to be science.

One of the most common distortions begins with a familiar half-truth: “The climate has always changed.” It has—but never at the speed or global scale now being measured. Past transitions took thousands of years; we are racing through one in a century. Natural cycles don’t explain that. Industrial emissions do.

For many people who accepted earlier denialist narratives, the appeal was never just ignorance. It was a way of preserving a moral world when the facts threatened identity. That remains true. But delay now performs the same function more subtly. It concedes the reality of the crisis while insisting that action must wait: until technology improves, until the economy stabilizes, until someone else moves first, until a future that never arrives.

The most important shift in the politics of climate change is that its fiercest opponents no longer need to argue that global warming is a hoax. They only need to argue that meaningful action is impossible—too expensive, too disruptive, too unfair. The message is different; the outcome is the same.

In corporate boardrooms, courtrooms, and regulatory agencies, outright denial became harder to sustain, so the strategy evolved. Instead of attacking the science, it now attacks the feasibility of responding to it. The new denialism is more polished and more institutional. It speaks the language of concern while obstructing every credible response. It no longer says “climate change is fake.” It says “we need more research,” “technology will solve this later,” “adaptation is enough,” or “we can’t afford to act.” The goal is not persuasion. The goal is paralysis.

This tactic is not new. In the 1980s, Exxon’s own scientists modeled global warming with unsettling accuracy. Their internal projections from the late 1970s match observed warming better than many peer-reviewed studies from the same period. Yet that knowledge did not produce leadership. It produced a risk-management strategy: treat knowledge as liability. In an extractive economy, uncertainty becomes a resource.

That logic soon migrated to policy, media, and law. When the Trump administration scrubbed climate language from federal websites, barred officials from using the term, and slashed research funding, it was not a dispute about evidence. It was a governance strategy—disable the institutions capable of responding to the crisis, and the crisis becomes unmanageable by design.

Today that strategy is sophisticated and networked. It includes legislation drafted by fossil-fuel lobbyists, litigation designed to stall renewable projects for years, and a media ecosystem that treats delay as prudence. These tactics succeed not by persuading the public, but by shaping the institutions that allocate risk, cost, and responsibility. State legislatures preempt local climate action. Fossil-fuel companies publish glossy sustainability reports while expanding extraction. The language sounds reasonable. The purpose is not.

Even the concept of the Anthropocene has been conscripted into this effort. What began as a geological hypothesis—the idea that human activity has left a permanent mark on Earth’s stratigraphy—has become a cultural narrative that spreads responsibility across everyone equally. In that framing, climate change is the work of “humanity,” not the corporations and political systems that extracted, burned, and profited from fossil carbon. If everyone is responsible, no one is accountable.

That is the logic of delay: it acknowledges the harm, but refuses the urgency. It treats time as the solution when time is the problem. It promises action later: after the market adjusts, innovation matures, or politics calm down. Caution becomes justification. Complexity becomes excuse.

We have seen this playbook before. In the 1950s, tobacco companies didn’t need to prove cigarettes safe. They only needed to manufacture doubt long enough to keep people smoking. The fossil fuel industry learned from that model and refined it. You don’t need to defeat the science. You only need to convince people that certainty isn’t possible yet.

And the strategy has worked. Even after record heat, Arctic wildfires, megafloods, and smoke drifting across continents, policymakers treat climate action as discretionary. Delay is not neutral. It preserves the flows of capital, energy, and authority that define the existing order even as the climate destabilizes around it. We behave as though delay is the middle ground. It is not. It is a decision—and the one most likely to make every future option worse.

The question today is not whether people “believe” in climate change. Belief is the wrong metric. The real question is whether knowledge can still compel action when power is organized to prevent it. The science is settled. Time is not. Every year spent waiting is a choice—not a pause.

The atmosphere does not negotiate. The carbon budget does not care about elections or cultural conflict. And the future will not distinguish between those who denied the science and those who accepted it but refused to act. Delay is simply denial carried forward in time.

Suggested Readings

Brulle, Robert J. Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Coen, Deborah. Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Dasher, Zane. “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections.” Science 379, no. 6628 (January 13, 2023): 247–251.

Dunlap, Riley E., and Aaron M. McCright. “Organized Climate Change Denial.” In The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, edited by John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg, 144–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Greenberg, James B. “The Political Ecology of Climate Change.” In Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 97–122. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.

Lamb, William F., et al. “Discourses of Climate Delay.” Global Sustainability 3 (2020): e17.

Mann, Michael E. The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. New York: PublicAffairs, 2021.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Rich, Nathaniel. Losing Earth: A Recent History. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

Supran, Geoffrey, and Naomi Oreskes. “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications (1977–2014).” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 8 (2017): 084019.

The simple answer is that fossil-fuel money turned denial into an industry. For decades, public-relations firms have flooded the media with carefully crafted doubt, transforming an empirical question into a cultural battle. Climate change has become less about carbon molecules than about identity, loyalty, and belonging.

Yet the roots of denial run deeper than propaganda. They lie in how human beings construct meaning. We do not perceive the world as it is, but through the lenses of culture and language. Our understanding of reality—and even what we count as evidence—is shaped by cultural logics that organize experience, emotion, and belief. These logics give coherence to our lives, but they can also make us blind to facts that threaten them.

An anthropologist I know who worked with Amazonian peoples once told me a story that captures this perfectly. He had lent his motorized canoe to some hunters to go downriver. On their way back, they ran out of fuel. Unfamiliar with outboard motors, they reasoned—based on its sound and the petrol’s color—that it must run on alligator blood. They killed an alligator and poured its blood into the tank. Of course, it didn’t work.

It would be easy to laugh at this, yet their reasoning was coherent. Their logic was structured by analogy and inference—the same cognitive tools science relies on. Their premises were cultural, not empirical—yet their reasoning was rational within that frame. The deeper lesson is that all reasoning operates within the boundaries of belief.

Now imagine they persisted—believing the outboard ran on alligator blood—and explained its failure as the result of a missing spell or divine interdiction. At that point, they would have crossed from hypothesis to conviction. Evidence would no longer matter. This is where cultural meaning hardens into ideology.

Every society faces uncertainty and risk. Cultures manage these by imposing order—by creating systems of knowledge, ritual, and morality that render the world predictable. Science and religion both perform this work, but through different logics. Science grounds knowledge in evidence and predictive power; religion anchors meaning in faith, ritual, and revelation.

Scientific knowledge is always provisional, open to revision. Religious belief, by contrast, rests on premises that cannot be proven or disproven: that God or the gods exist, that creation has purpose, that human rituals, prayers, and offerings are efficacious. Those premises give life moral coherence, but they also sanctify other ideas: that authority is divinely ordained, that power signifies virtue, that prosperity is a sign of favor. When belief fuses with identity, it becomes impermeable to evidence.

Climate change denial arises not from ignorance but from refusal—the insistence on preserving meaning against a truth that demands moral reckoning. Science challenges the old cosmology of human dominion over nature as a divine exemption from consequence. It reveals that nature operates under immutable laws, that our pretense of mastery has limits, that extraction carries costs, and that the planet itself can rebel. For those whose sense of order depends on human exceptionalism, that is not merely threatening—it is heresy.

Denial becomes a symbolic defense. It protects a moral and social order built around fossil fuels as emblems of prosperity, freedom, and masculinity. The internal logic runs deep: oil is abundance; regulation is tyranny; environmentalism is elitism. To accept climate science would be to admit complicity in harm and to question the premise of an economy that equates consumption with virtue.

Viewed anthropologically, denial performs the same function that ritual once did. It preserves a sense of stability when material reality no longer supports it. It transforms refusal into righteousness and disbelief into belonging. Within that logic, carbon becomes both pure and polluting—the fuel of prosperity and the stain of guilt. Denial restores purity by turning guilt into pride, indulgence into patriotism, and exploitation into faithfulness.

These meanings are not spontaneous. They are cultivated and financed. The fossil-fuel industry long ago learned that defending profits required defending the worldview those profits depended on. Its public-relations campaigns built an entire moral cosmology around carbon—freedom, growth, destiny—offering coherence in a world of uncertainty. By the time politicians joined the chorus, the theology was already in place.

This logic is powerful because it tells people who they are and who their enemies are. It replaces the complexity of climate systems with a moral drama in which faith, freedom, and prosperity are under siege by godless elites. In that story, every hurricane, wildfire, or drought becomes a test of conviction rather than evidence of change.

Historically, this cosmology descends from the Western theology of dominion—the belief that mastery over nature was proof and purpose of divine favor. It survived the Enlightenment by merging with industrial capitalism and the Protestant ethic that linked salvation to productivity. Climate denial is its late-industrial offspring, clinging to the moral promise that exploitation is destiny. The flames consuming the planet are the afterlife of a theology that mistook power for virtue.

Climate change denial, then, is not simply the rejection of science. It is the preservation of meaning in a world that feels morally unmoored. It defends a collapsing cosmology by doubling down on the myths that built it. Facts alone cannot dissolve that grip. What might is a new story—one that speaks to the same need for order and belonging, but grounds it in interdependence, care, and accountability. To change minds, we must first change meanings.

Suggested Readings

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge, 1966.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Greenberg, James B. “The Political Ecology of Climate Change.” In Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 97–122. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming.London: Verso, 2016.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980.

Rappaport, Roy A. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner, 1958.

White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–1207.

Reading Bernays’s Propaganda, I found not a historical curiosity but an operating manual for the present. Bernays—Freud’s nephew—believed democracy could not rest on rational citizens. It required experts who knew how to shape the crowd’s unconscious. His enduring invention was to fuse psychology with mass communication. He called it the engineering of consent.

Bernays emerged from the aftermath of World War I, when the power of propaganda had stunned democratic societies and the new mass media offered governments and corporations a way to manage emotion at scale. What began as a tool of war soon became an instrument of everyday governance.

A century later, his experiment has succeeded beyond measure. The techniques Bernays helped invent—symbolic association, emotional appeal, staged spectacle, the illusion of choice—have become the nervous system of modern life. They sold us bacon for breakfast, cigarettes as freedom, and wars as moral crusades. They turned the language of virtue into the language of desire. And somewhere along the way, they rewired the democratic soul.

From Pulpit to Billboard

Before Madison Avenue, the anchors of American moral life were simple: family, faith, duty, and community. They could be narrow and often hypocritical, but they gave meaning to restraint. Freedom meant responsibility to others.

Bernays and the admen who followed him replaced that moral order with a market order. Industrial capitalism required new motives—want, envy, aspiration, and self-expression—so advertising became a secular catechism. It taught that happiness was not earned through virtue but through consumption.

“Don’t sell the product,” Bernays advised. “Sell what it means.”

Cigarettes became Torches of Freedom. Ivory Soap became purity itself. A home, a car, a brand of cereal—each became an emblem of belonging. Consumption turned into a language through which identity was declared and self-worth measured.

Madison Avenue transformed not only what we bought but how we thought. It made desire seem natural and self-gratification the measure of progress. What disappeared wasn’t just restraint but connection—the sense that we owed something to one another beyond preference or taste.

Engineering Consent

Bernays’s genius lay in replacing argument with emotion. He understood that people do not deliberate; they associate. He wrapped policies in symbols, hired doctors to endorse bacon, debutantes to smoke in public, and journalists to publish stories he had written himself.

It was, as he put it, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.”

He did not see this as sinister. He saw it as efficient. But efficiency has a way of crowding out conscience.

The message was clear: the crowd could be managed. And once that assumption took hold, democracy became less a forum for deliberation than a stage for persuasion. The public was no longer a citizenry but an audience—something to be studied, segmented, and sold.

Happiness as Citizenship

After World War II, Madison Avenue perfected the fusion of emotion and commerce. The prosperity of the 1950s turned consumption into civic ritual. Buying a home, driving a car, filling a fridge—these became acts of national belonging.

Corporate psychologists, armed with Bernays’s insights, built what they called “human relations.” Happiness became productivity. Citizenship became consumer confidence.

The advertising industry didn’t just sell things; it sold us to ourselves. The market became our mirror, reflecting not who we were but who we might purchase ourselves into becoming.

The moral vocabulary of the pulpit gave way to the language of personality. Duty yielded to lifestyle, character to charm, faith to self-expression. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the habits that sustain democracy—patience, dialogue, compromise—began to erode.

The Citizen Becomes a Brand

By the time television arrived, persuasion had become the air we breathed. Political campaigns borrowed Madison Avenue’s tools: Eisenhower’s I Like Ike jingle, Reagan’s Morning in America, Obama’s Hope poster. Each sold emotion rather than argument. Each distilled politics into identity and feeling.

Bernays’s century taught us to live as brands—to manage our image, market our selves, and perform our belonging. The self became a commodity, shaped by what it consumed and displayed.

When belonging depends on image, dissent feels like betrayal. Debate becomes division. Politics turns from negotiation into performance.

The public sphere—once a place of argument—becomes a hall of mirrors.

The Authoritarian Upgrade

The same emotional circuitry that sold soap and cigarettes now sells leaders.

Populists are the logical heirs of Bernays’s gospel. They understand that in a culture trained to respond to spectacle, the performance is the policy. They govern through emotion: fear, resentment, triumph, belonging.

Trump did not invent this logic; he inherited it. He is both the salesman and the product, the showman and the show. His genius, if that’s the word, lies in instinctively grasping what Bernays knew a century ago: people do not follow arguments; they follow feelings that make them feel seen.

Authoritarianism thrives in this terrain since it no longer needs to silence debate—it only needs to drown it in emotion. When belonging is manufactured through grievance and fear, when citizens are trained to mistake outrage for truth, the demagogue becomes the default.

The Surveillance Feedback Loop

The final stage of this evolution is technological. The data economy has turned Bernays’s intuition into algorithm. The same tools that once engineered consent now engineer behavior.

Social media platforms track emotion the way factories once tracked output. They personalize persuasion, amplify outrage, and monetize division. The surveillance state and the attention economy share a single goal: prediction and control.

The result is an invisible feedback loop of power—consumers shaped by algorithms that learn what keeps them hooked, citizens profiled and targeted not only by governments but by markets.

It is the culmination of Bernays’s vision: a society where manipulation feels like freedom.

Degrading the Democratic Soul

Democracy depends on more than elections. It depends on a culture that values truth over spectacle, solidarity over self, responsibility over impulse.

The century of persuasion has eroded those foundations. It has taught us to see freedom as choice, belonging as brand, politics as performance.

We are left with citizens who feel powerful yet are easily managed—confusing consumption with agency and spectacle with truth—an audience the demagogue need only entertain.

Reclaiming the Commons

If democracy is to survive, it must relearn how to speak in the language of care rather than consumption.

We will not find our way back through nostalgia but through reconstruction—of trust, empathy, and shared purpose. The task is not to abandon emotion but to reclaim it from manipulation, not to silence desire but to reconnect it to the well-being of others.

As an anthropologist, I’ve seen how every society trains its members in what to desire and what to fear. What changes is who does the training—and to what end.

Bernays trained us to want the symbol over the substance. The challenge of our time is to reverse that spell—to remember that the freedom we were sold was always the freedom to be managed, and to recover something far older: the freedom to mean.

———

Endnote

[1] Arizona Public Media. “Edward Bernays and the Birth of Modern Persuasion.” Arizona Spotlight, KUAT-FM, Tucson, AZ. Aired November 2, 2025. https://www.azpm.org/.

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Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: Liveright, 1928.

Davies, William. Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Every culture that divides the world into opposites—life and death, purity and pollution, order and chaos—creates beings that straddle both sides. These liminal figures unsettle classification but help us think about contradiction. Modernity has produced its own versions: vampires, zombies, golems, and Frankenstein’s creature. Each emerged when faith in progress faltered and when power no longer felt life-giving.

Our fascination with the living-dead reveals less about superstition than about the emotional life of modern power. These myths reflect how we experience dependence, domination, and the erosion of empathy. Two figures in particular—vampires and zombies—speak most clearly to the present. One consumes; the other conforms. Together, they expose the moral logic of authoritarianism, where predation and submission reinforce each other.

The vampire entered Western imagination as an aristocrat feeding on peasants, but it adapted easily to capitalist modernity. It embodies extraction—the belief that vitality can be preserved by taking it from others. Its charm lies in turning dependency into desire, making the victim complicit in their own depletion. Power works the same way when domination is disguised as protection and exploitation mistaken for care.

Trump operates within this symbolic economy. His power depends on constant consumption: attention, outrage, adoration. Rallies, cameras, and scandal serve as transfusions. The more he absorbs, the stronger he appears; the stronger he appears, the more he demands. His followers are drawn into the exchange. They offer loyalty and receive identity in return, believing that by nourishing him they share in his vitality.

In vampire tales, feeding is intimate. It transforms victims into extensions of the predator. Something similar happens in Trump’s orbit. Allies, institutions, and even truths become vessels of his appetite. Corruption is not incidental—it is the mechanism by which loyalty is tested and belonging conferred. To serve power is to share in its hunger.

If the vampire seduces through charisma, the zombie enslaves through contagion. It represents the loss of self that follows when thought collapses into repetition. Zombies move and consume but do not reflect. They act out the rhythms of life after consciousness has died. The image fits a culture where information circulates faster than reflection and where belonging often depends on imitation.

Zombification requires no doctrine, only emotion. Rage and grievance suffice. Social media amplifies this process, turning private feeling into collective motion. The MAGA world runs on that circuitry. Its chants, memes, and slogans bind people through affect rather than argument. It is less a set of beliefs than a synchronized performance of outrage—movement mistaken for meaning.

Vampires and zombies share a refusal: neither accepts mortality. The vampire cheats death by consuming the living; the zombie escapes it by never fully dying. Trump’s promise of restoration—“Make America Great Again”—draws on the same imaginary. It offers revival without transformation, endless momentum without direction, a politics of survival that confuses animation with life.

Authoritarianism depends on this cycle of predation and possession. It requires a figure who feeds and a crowd willing to be fed upon. But it also divides the world into those deemed worthy of nourishment and those cast as prey. The “loyal” are promised protection, attention, and belonging; everyone else becomes expendable—targets to be mocked, stripped, or devoured. This is the architecture of the necrostate: a polity organized around the distribution of life and death, in which belonging determines who may flourish and who must be consumed. Its power grows in darkness. Secrecy and falsehood provide the shelter that allows extraction to continue.

In every vampire story, light and truth are fatal because they reveal what has been hidden. The same holds for authoritarian systems. The leader thrives in the shadows of deception—on rumor, projection, and flattery—while illumination threatens to end the spell. Trump’s politics of spectacle works like a vampire’s glamour: it seduces through distortion, casting illusion as authenticity. The necrostate feeds on those illusions, turning lies into nourishment and cruelty into proof of vitality. What it fears most is exposure—the moment when people see who is feeding on them and at whose expense.

Even these myths carry a path to recovery. Vampires lose power in daylight. Zombies fall when consciousness returns. The same cure applies to political life. The necrostate survives only while people mistake feeding for flourishing. To reclaim the living world is to step into the light—to name the lies, withdraw consent, and refuse the feast. Life begins again with recognition. The rituals of Halloween and the Day of the Dead remind us that death is not the enemy; ignorance is. We honor life not by denying death, but by protecting one another from those who would feed on it.

Suggested readings

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Solnit, Rebecca. Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969.

Trade partnerships rest on trust—on confidence that agreements will be honored and reciprocity maintained. That trust allows economies to plan, firms to invest, and states to cooperate over time. This architecture is now under strain. By substituting intimidation for reliability, Trump transforms partners into risk managers. They learn to placate him publicly while insulating themselves privately, offering ceremonial victories to defuse confrontation. His dominance is an illusion—others manage his volatility while quietly building alliances beyond his reach.

The “Art of the Deal” may suffice for single transactions; it fails for enduring partnerships. Transactional power can close a sale, but only trust sustains a relationship. This revival of dominance-as-fairness echoes a deeper economic rhythm. As I argued in Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance, systems oscillate between reciprocity and extraction. Trump’s return marks a decisive shift toward the latter.

The principle of caveat emptor—let the buyer beware—captures the logic perfectly. In its original sense, it was not a warning but a declaration: fairness is what survives the contest. These deals echo that ancient presumption. Tariffs become instruments of leverage; investment pledges are secured under pressure; the strong dictate, the weak adapt. Yet sovereign states are not firms, and global commerce is not a zero-sum market. Enforcement depends on reputation and shared norms—conditions Trump neither understands nor values, mistaking them for weakness.

Tariffs are imposed unilaterally, multilateral forums bypassed, and negotiations reduced to theater. These agreements are less about cooperation than control—rituals staged to appear historic. Counterparts from Tokyo to Beijing understand that the surest way to defuse his aggression is to feed his illusion of victory. Xi, for instance, offered no real concessions; the supposed “truce” over rare earths merely allowed Trump to save face after backing away from escalation. His partners play along publicly, even as they deepen ties elsewhere. The result is not alliance but containment—the management of a superpower’s instability.

Look closely at these agreements, and they appear more performative than real.

Japan’s $550 billion pledge includes defense procurement, semiconductor partnerships, and infrastructure financing [1]. But the terms are vague, timelines unenforceable, and concessions extracted under threat of 25 percent tariffs. The agreement is a ceremonial display of loyalty.

South Korea’s $350 billion deal mirrors Japan’s [1]. Aircraft orders, radar systems, and rare-earth ventures are framed as strategic alignment but function as symbolic overtures. The deal reinforces the U.S. industrial base through spectacle, not structure.

The agreements with Cambodia and Malaysia were staged as proof of renewed U.S. reach in Southeast Asia. In substance, they add little: token anti-China provisions and loosely defined supply-chain promises. Their real function is symbolic, allowing Trump to claim leverage he does not possess. What appears as expansion is, in fact, substitution—an illusion of reach masking strategic retreat.

The one-year truce with China, announced in Busan, pauses tariff escalation and reopens limited channels. While it reinforces Trump’s image as a dealmaker, it leaves tensions unresolved. The truce is ceremonial, not structural.

Behind the spectacle lies economic fragility. Indicators point to a 6 percent GDP contraction and a 5 percent wage decline—figures that signal structural damage beneath the celebratory headlines. Middle-income households face lifetime losses of roughly $22,000 [3]. Inflation is driven by tariff-induced price hikes and retaliatory bottlenecks. Job creation collapsed in late 2025, with only 73,000 new jobs added in October [4].

Agriculture and manufacturing absorb the damage. Soybean and seafood producers lost key markets. Automotive firms face rising costs and declining competitiveness. Consumer electronics are more expensive, demand is softening, and logistics remain unstable. These sectors are collateral damage in Trump’s theater of trade.

Deals with sovereign states are notoriously difficult to enforce. There is no court to compel compliance, no sheriff to collect damages. What Trump mistakes for strength is dependence on illusion—an authority that vanishes once others stop playing along.

While the U.S. performs dominance, others adapt and quietly rewire global trade around it. China gains strategic breathing room by letting Trump declare victory. India, Vietnam, and ASEAN nations attract diverted investment by building trust where he has destroyed it. The EU deepens intra-bloc trade, hedging against American volatility. What began as the “art of the deal” ends as the art of avoidance: a world learning to manage, rather than partner with, the United States.

These trade deals reveal the limits of transactional power. They produce headlines, not stability; theater, not trust. By reducing diplomacy to bargaining, Trump erodes the confidence that sustains global commerce and weakens the institutions that once amplified American influence. His performance of strength depends on spectacle, coercion, and the willingness of others to play along.

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Endnotes

[1] The White House. “Fact Sheet: October 28, 2025.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/10/28-195/

[2] Politico. “Trump Signs Trade Deals with Malaysia and Cambodia.” October 26, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/26/trump-trade-deals-malaysia-cambodia-00623129

[3] Penn Wharton Budget Model. “Economic Effects of President Trump’s Tariffs.” University of Pennsylvania, April 2025.

[4] Talent Traction Institute. “U.S. Jobs Report: July 2025.”⸻

Suggested Readings

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Doubleday, 2020.

Baldwin, Richard. The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2016.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Social Structures of the Economy. Polity Press, 2005.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.

Greenberg, James B., and Josiah McC. Heyman. “Neoliberal Capital and the Mobility Approach in Anthropology.” In Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico, University Press of Colorado, 2012.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park. Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital Across the Last Millennium. Lexington Books, 2017.

Park, Thomas K., and James B. Greenberg. The Roots of Western Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital in the Ancient World. Lexington Books, 2017..

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press, 1944.

Rodrik, Dani. Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press, 2018.

Trump, Donald J., and Tony Schwartz. Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House, 1987.

By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I understood how close we came to ending ourselves. That fear never disappeared; it settled deep, shaping how my generation grasped power, trust, and survival.

Trump’s October 30, 2025 announcement that the United States would resume nuclear testing brought those feelings back. It wasn’t policy so much as performance—a display of dominance that turns annihilation into spectacle. From an anthropological view, it marked the return of a worldview where existential threat becomes a tool of governance and destruction itself a language of power.

The directive, posted on Truth Social and sent to his “Department of War,” was typical—symbolic misrule mixing nostalgia, provocation, and contempt for institutions. Less a decision than a performance of sovereignty, it reminded both followers and adversaries that restraint no longer applied.

Dormant since 1992, the Nevada Test Site remains the nation’s only facility capable of full-scale nuclear detonations. Its very name—security site—carries an irony: for decades, the desert has served as testing ground and sacrificial landscape, absorbing the costs of state power. The new order would turn it once again into a ritual stage where the power to destroy becomes a proof of legitimacy.

For more than thirty years the United States honored a moratorium on nuclear testing aligned with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. That restraint was not merely diplomatic; it was cultural—a recognition that some technologies exceed human control. The new decree shatters that taboo, converting an act of collective caution into a gesture of unilateral bravado.

The consequences are immediate. The declaration reopened the door for Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea to resume or accelerate their own tests. What follows is likely to be an arms race not only of warheads but of spectacle. Each detonation becomes a ritual of dominance, reaffirming the idea that the right to rule the world is measured in megatons.

Resistance was swift—from Nevada lawmakers, Indigenous nations, and environmental groups. The desert around the Test Site is already a landscape of buried trauma—poisoned soil, downwind cancers, unacknowledged sacrifice. For generations, the Shoshone and Paiute peoples have borne the cost of experiments conducted in the name of national security. Their lands were seized, contaminated, rendered uninhabitable so that the state could perform its rituals of power far from the centers it claimed to defend. Every explosion pushed risk outward—onto the poor, the rural, the Indigenous.

Nuclear testing has always been more than technical exercise; it is the most theatrical form of statecraft ever devised. The blast is the message. Each detonation reaffirms the state’s claim to ultimate authority—the power over life and death. For Trump, that spectacle erases the line between governance and performance. Renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War” only sharpened the point: institutions are irrelevant; only will matters.

This is authoritarian theater at its most distilled—the creation of crisis to consolidate power. It exemplifies necropolitics: the governance of people and planet through the management of death. Symbolically, he commands a Death Star—but unlike Star Wars, these theatrics unfold here, not in a galaxy far away. They signal a return to a dangerous statecraft that defines sovereignty through its capacity to destroy and depends on exporting harm to lands and bodies that cannot refuse.

The effects do not stop at the Nevada border. In dismantling the taboo against testing, Trump also dismantles one of the last symbols of mutual restraint. Russia and China have already treated the declaration as provocation. Each escalation invites another; each “message” demands reply. What emerges is not deterrence but choreography—a world stage of threat where performance substitutes for policy and symbolic destruction becomes diplomacy by other means. The planet itself becomes collateral, its atmosphere, oceans, and soils turned into expendable media through which states display power.

Authoritarian rule thrives on distraction, and nuclear testing is the ultimate diversion. It shifts attention from domestic failure to existential fear, from accountability to crisis. By invoking nuclear readiness, Trump recast weakness as vigilance and dissent as disloyalty. The move was less about deterrence than control: when fear governs the public sphere, critique becomes treason and spectacle replaces deliberation.

What once haunted us as Cold War anxiety has become something darker.

The Cold War’s terror was at least governed by structure—mutual deterrence, back channels, the grim calculus of survival. Today’s fear is different. We face a man who confuses impulse with strategy and spectacle with strength. The nuclear age was born in fear of annihilation; it now teeters on ego—the ego of a leader who treats the unthinkable as theater. What once depended on restraint now hangs on the psychology of a single unstable mind. That is the new brinkmanship: not a contest of systems, but the gamble of a narcissist with the power to end the world.

Suggested Readings

Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics. Translated by Libby Meintjes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Carol Cohn. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 687–718.

Daniel Ellsberg. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Elaine Scarry. Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Joseph Masco. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Joseph Masco. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Richard W. Stoffle, David B. Halmo, and Michael J. Evans. Native American Cultural Resource Studies at the Nevada Test Site. Tucson: Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1990.

Valerie Kuletz. The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American Southwest. New York: Routledge, 1998.

What we call “surveillance” is less Big Brother than a marketplace of contracts, software, and data flows that govern everyday life. Its infrastructure may be disguised as administration, but it functions as control. Databases are linked, dashboards refined, and algorithms trained—not as science fiction, but as government procurement. The line between metaphor and mechanism has collapsed.

Here Trump’s phrase “enemy within” becomes key. This isn’t about terrorists abroad or adversaries at the border. This is about internal opposition—workers, journalists, academics, immigrants, dissenters—anyone who can be cast as disloyal. “Enemies within” is an essential category for authoritarians. It creates a permanent rationale for repression and a limitless pool of potential suspects. Surveillance technologies make the category actionable: you don’t just suspect an enemy, you can locate, track, and flag them at scale.

The build-out is already visible. Local police departments and federal agencies have turned to Clearview AI, a company that scraped billions of images from social media to power facial-recognition searches. Protest crowds, campus gatherings, even casual photos online become material for identification, cataloging, and tracking. This is the Big Brother update for the age of Instagram. Around it orbit the familiar data brokers and contractors, selling credit files, utility records, and phone traces, but it is the biometric dragnet that captures the imagination and the danger. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are already in use.

Surveillance is not just about power; it is about profit. Every expansion of government monitoring creates a market for contractors and platforms. Companies like these aren’t simply responding to state demand—they lobby for it. The efficiency and security they promise build revenue streams, and these depend on ever more intrusive data collection. This is the political economy of authoritarianism: repression subsidized by subscription, with private profit fueling public control.

What makes this so dangerous is less the data itself than the way it is framed. If dissent equals disloyalty, if criticism equals subversion, then these datasets are not neutral—they become tools for political policing. A “citizenship database” designed for efficiency can be repurposed to blacklist opponents. Social-media monitoring meant to catch smugglers can become a dragnet for journalists and organizers. Location pings bought in bulk can trace not just migrants but citizens who dared to march or worship in the wrong place. The rhetoric of “enemy within” primes these uses, and the infrastructure makes them possible.

We have seen this logic before, from the Stasi’s informants to apartheid’s racial bureaucracies. The difference now is scale and invisibility. Data brokers and cloud contractors offer authoritarian states the ability to monitor not just thousands but millions, with few fingerprints left behind. It is authoritarianism outsourced and privatized, where private profit and repression reinforce each other.

History suggests escalation follows a pattern. First comes monitoring: identifying critics, building dossiers, creating chilling effects. Then comes harassment: audits, travel delays, benefit suspensions. Finally, under the pressure of crisis—a protest wave, a terrorist scare, an electoral challenge—the apparatus turns inwards, toward mass action: sweeps, preventive detention, show trials. The United States is squarely in stage one and creeping into stage two. That is why these warning signs matter.

There are guardrails. Yes, but they are thin and fraying. Courts have split on geofence warrants, with some circuits rejecting them as unconstitutional. The Federal Trade Commission has moved to ban the sale of “sensitive location data” by brokers like Venntel and Gravy Analytics. Civil-rights groups are suing to block overbroad data purchases and challenging ICE’s contracts. Whistleblowers and watchdogs have exposed abuses, like Customs and Border Protection’s monitoring of journalists. While these efforts matter, they are being outpaced by the scale and speed of the surveillance market.

Authoritarianism works both by punishing dissent and by instilling fear, compelling people to censor themselves. The suspicion of being watched alters behavior: students avoid protests, workers hesitate online, academics soften their criticism. This isn’t just private fear—it is the redefinition of belonging, where data trails decide who counts and who should be silenced.

The stakes are no longer abstract. Our democracy will not survive if dissent is equated with treason, if citizenship is conditional, if every protester is a suspect. The surveillance build-out is not just a technical issue, it is a cultural one—about how we imagine loyalty, belonging, and truth. If we allow the “enemy within” to become the organizing principle of our data systems, then we are not just reading Orwell as metaphor. We are living in his pages. The time is already upon us.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Breckenridge, Keith. Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Funder, Anna. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta Books, 2003.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Orwell, George. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Melissa shows what happens when denial becomes policy. In past decades, a storm of this scale would have triggered a cascade of federal reports: damage assessments, cost tallies, risk analyses to guide future preparedness. This time, the public record has been thinner, delayed, harder to access. The data exist: satellites still circle, insurance firms still run their models—but what was once public has been privatized or buried, leaving citizens in the dark about the climate that governs their lives.

The dismantling of the National Climate Assessment, the silencing of NOAA’s disaster cost series, the removal of environmental justice tools like EJScreen—each step narrows what we can know collectively. Climate science is inconvenient because it points to causes, responsibilities, and solutions that threaten entrenched interests. Better, from the administration’s perspective, to make climate change a matter of opinion instead of fact. Stripped of context, Melissa becomes just another storm.

But storms won’t wait for politics. They are intensifying in ways scientists have warned for decades: warmer seas feed stronger hurricanes, higher seas amplify storm surge, hotter air wrings more rain. Insurance companies know this; their losses prove it. Reinsurers like Swiss Re and Munich Re report that insured catastrophe losses have more than tripled in thirty years, with the sharpest spikes tied to hurricanes [1][2]. Premiums in Florida and the Gulf keep climbing, pushing households out of coverage. In Jamaica, where Melissa first made landfall, the reality of its violence was stark. Homes and infrastructure were destroyed in hours, but as few have insurance coverage, much of the loss there will go uncounted. The contrast is telling: while U.S. households struggle with soaring premiums, Caribbean communities without coverage face a double catastrophe: seeing everything they own swept away, and being left with little prospect for recovery.

Why does the Trump administration continue to deny climate change? The answer is power. Denial shields fossil fuel allies whose profits depend on unrestricted carbon extraction. It protects them from accountability. It turns public knowledge into proprietary models owned by insurers, hidden from citizens but baked into every premium and mortgage. In political ecology terms, it privatizes risk and socializes loss.

Denial also controls the narrative. If Melissa is framed as a freak act of nature, no one has to admit it was intensified by decades of deregulation and emissions. Without official data, storms remain isolated tragedies instead of evidence of a pattern. That fog of uncertainty buys time for industries and politicians alike. It turns climate into a culture-war litmus test: to acknowledge the science is to side with elites, to reject it is to prove loyalty.

The suppression of climate science weakens public institutions themselves. Agencies like NOAA and EPA, once pillars of civic knowledge, are made to look irrelevant as their capacities are stripped. Citizens lose faith in the state’s ability to measure, warn, and respond. That erosion of trust is no accident. It clears the way for a politics where truth is whatever leaders declare.

Disaster aid can be politicized in this environment. With no agreed metrics of risk or need, aid can be distributed as patronage. One governor’s request is fast-tracked, another’s delayed, depending on partisan allegiance. Communities already marginalized—low-income neighborhoods, immigrant households, coastal Black towns—are left to wait, their suffering compounded. Denial doesn’t stop the storms; it redirects the benefits and burdens to consolidate power.

Beyond U.S. shores, the silence extends further. Jamaica, battered first by Melissa, has little access to the global safety nets that wealthier nations take for granted. Its damages disappear twice—once in the wreckage itself, and again in the absence of recognition from the institutions that set the terms of recovery. The geography of denialism ensures that those least responsible for the crisis carry its heaviest weight.

Melissa is not just meteorology but political economy. The storm reveals who pays and who profits, whose losses are acknowledged and whose are ignored. When official tallies vanish, insurers still count their claims, but the uninsured disappear from the record. When climate data are suppressed, developers still build in floodplains, but residents carry the risks. The storm writes its story in ruined homes and swollen rivers, but the state redacts the chapters that point to responsibility.

This is what makes denial so dangerous. It is not ignorance but strategy. It buys loyalty from donors, hides inconvenient truths, and turns disasters into political theater. Its costs are measured not only in dollars but in lives: those lost to Melissa, to Katrina, to Maria, and to the storms yet to come. Each one more expensive because the lessons of the last were buried.

Yet denial cannot stop the seas from rising. Insurers, scientists, and communities all know the truth: the climate is changing, and storms are growing more destructive. The question is whether the public will be allowed to see that truth clearly, or whether we will be governed by erasure and silence. Melissa is both a warning and a test. If we treat it as just another storm, we accept the administration’s script. If we see it as part of a pattern, we reclaim the narrative denial tries to steal.

The storm speaks. The costs are mounting. And the longer denial shapes policy, the higher those costs will rise—not only in money but in democracy itself.

⸻

Endnotes

[1] Swiss Re Institute, sigma report 2024-01: Natural catastrophes in 2024 (Zurich: Swiss Re, 2024).

[2] Munich Re, Hurricane Outlook 2025 (Munich: Munich Re, 2025).

Suggested Readings

Greenberg, James B. 2020. The Political Ecology of Climate Change. In Terrestrial Transformations: Global Interconnections and Local Adaptations in Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 33-50. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

McNeill, J. R., and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York: Crown Publishing, 2019.