Immigration, Fascism, And The Politics Of The American Creed

The violent federal occupation of Minneapolis is, to a large degree, a catastrophic success of governance by propaganda.

It started with an influencer. A young Republican of low character named Nick Shirley, vying to be the next James O’Keefe, happened upon an old, still-unfolding story about social services fraud in Minnesota’s Somali diaspora, and pretended as though he’d blown the case wide open. The rest of the party smelled opportunity. Instead of responding to facts—that the issue was being addressed professionally; that people had been brought to justice over several years, with more prosecutions to come—the federal administration decided to collectively punish the whole community. It became the pretext to invade an American city. Until, of course, it turned into a quagmire for Donald Trump, and he lost control of his own initiative—including the fraud scandal itself. His tyrannical tactics drove several prosecutors out of the U.S. Attorney’s office there, including the man who actually had blown the case wide open.

Democrats up and down the party—political and policy hands alike—have found the sequence of events both infuriating and baffling. They weren’t turning a blind eye to fraud—they were reining in the fraud. Those prosecutions began under Joe Biden, not Donald Trump. Investigators uncovered theft on the scale of billions of dollars and were on their way to finding more, and all it took was one pipsqueak YouTuber to invert the factual record in the public’s imagination.

It’s only in hindsight that we can identify the shortcomings of the Democrats’ by-the-book approach to this enforcement action. I do a lot of backseat driving, particularly when I see or anticipate Democrats making errors in real time. This is not like that. This was not easily foreseeable. But now that it’s transpired, we can use it to better prepare for the future.

It would be nice if both major political parties in the U.S. still shared broadly liberal assumptions about the world and fought along the margins: Democrats for broad-based social programs, Republicans for more red tape and policing, modest swings between models of caring for people in need. It would be nice if progressive politics in America could be humdrum. If a state like Minnesota could experiment with a more generous approach to social welfare, and deal with any additional swindlers in a methodical and low-key manner, without becoming a scapegoat and cautionary tale for the whole country.

But nativists and greedy men have at least as large a say as we do over our political discourse, and thus over how we should understand our governing obligations. They simply will exploit stories about black immigrants defrauding welfare programs to ensure we have fewer immigrants and less welfare. And so people who care about both welfare and immigrant communities are compelled to make a bigger public show of caring about the integrity of both.

This is an uncomfortable inference for many of us to the left of center. It implies that, to preserve our open society, humane and liberal-minded people have to carry ourselves in a more severe and demonstrative manner, and do so for the purposes of, e.g., policing fraud in public services, or jailing or deporting immigrants who choose to bilk the system. Even though we know the specter of welfare fraud is a right-wing cudgel. Even though we know immigrants are more law-abiding and economically productive than their native peers. Even though the imperative right now is to tear down the country’s main immigration-enforcement agency.

But the tradeoff is that we then get to wield our own cudgel, against homegrown Americans who make a mockery of the national creed.

There’s a defensive and offensive reason to adopt a more accountability-minded approach to both welfare-state liberalism and immigration enforcement.

The defensive reason is the one I gestured toward above: If liberals don’t distinguish themselves as strict rule followers on each of these fronts, Republicans will. Or they will pretend to. They will comb the earth for every instance of nonwhite welfare fraud they can uncover, and use their findings to scapegoat immigrants and welfare recipients alike. If they’re able to constrain themselves enough to avoid Trump-like overreach, they’ll eventually turn majorities of the country against both.

Advertising success in rooting out rare instances of fraud is an icky, but low-effort way to neutralize that kind of opportunism. Indeed, advertising success in solving rare crimes is politically cunning in general. Donald Trump has hollowed out and corrupted the Justice Department. By any measure it’s the most incompetent version of itself we’ve seen in our lifetimes. He did this by choice, and to his political detriment. Nevertheless he and his loyalists are always on the lookout for opportunities to cover this shambolic operation in unearned glory. These guys understand the power of showmanship.

That’s the defensive purpose.

The offensive purpose is to lay sole political claim to the country’s best expression of itself: That Americans are by-and-large empathetic people who self-govern by reason and a rule of law that binds everyone equally. We’ve taken it for granted to a near-fatal extent, but in the context of human history, we’ve hit upon the most radical and effective recipe for spreading freedom as far as possible: be a creedal nation, with rights that inhere to individuals.