Red-state inaction is the soft underbelly of border politics



Fourteen months into Trump’s second term, the verdict is in. No mass deportations. No major immigration reform. And if Democrats return to power, they will rip the doors off the hinges again.

Trump did slow the flow and put a dent in some outdated visa programs. But the results remain too small relative to the scale of what came before him and what may come after him.

One day, red states will need to enact these deterrents. The only question is timing.

That leaves one durable partial solution: Use red-state supermajorities to deter illegal aliens from settling in those states when the next wave comes. States may lack the power to deport illegal aliens outright, but they can make daily life harder. They can deny jobs and benefits, impose criminal penalties, and create a lasting deterrent that survives any one presidency.

Ron DeSantis appears to understand this in Florida. Almost no other Republican governor does.

Idaho offers the clearest example of the problem. On paper, it looks like the kind of state where serious immigration enforcement should be easy. Republicans hold 61-9 and 29-6 majorities in the House and Senate. Conservatives gained ground in the House thanks to the Freedom Caucus. Yet when the time came to pass meaningful reforms, the GOP establishment folded.

The House moved several bills. The Senate is quietly killing them. Gov. Brad Little (R) remains publicly silent, apparently hoping the issue dies in committee while he cruises to re-election under Trump’s preemptive endorsement and keeps his donor class happy.

The bills now stalled in Idaho expose the fraud.

H704 would mandate E-Verify for all public and private employers and give the state attorney general real enforcement power. It passed the House 43-26 despite opposition from 17 Republicans. It now sits dead in the Senate State Affairs Committee under Chairman Jim Guthrie and Senate President Pro Tempore Kelly Anthon.

H700 would make it a misdemeanor knowingly to hire illegal aliens without using E-Verify. That bill is also dead in the Senate, and 22 House Republicans opposed it.

H659 would require all counties and cities to cooperate with ICE through 287(g) agreements. In a state with barely any elected Democrats, one might assume mandatory ICE cooperation would be the easiest of calls. Instead, the bill passed the House 41-27, with 18 lukewarm Republicans joining Democrats in opposition, and now sits dead in the Senate State Affairs Committee.

H660 would require police to inquire about immigration status after a lawful arrest and would mandate a twice-yearly report on crimes committed by illegal aliens. By definition, this involves people already suspected of some other offense. Even so, the bill passed only 40-30 and is now being blocked in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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Blaze Media Illustration

H764 would create a state analogue to the federal statute that penalizes anyone who knowingly or recklessly conceals, harbors, transports, or materially assists illegal aliens. It includes misdemeanor and felony penalties, license revocations, and forfeiture provisions. In other words, it would build precisely the kind of standing deterrent red states will need when Democrats reopen the border. It has not even advanced out of committee.

S1318 would audit refugee-resettlement contractors in Idaho, including the number of refugees served, their demographic and language data, participation in language programs, housing use, geographic distribution, and relevant public-health statistics. It would also require disclosure if those entities aided illegal aliens. It remains blocked in the Senate State Affairs Committee.

H592 would require the state to track how many illegal aliens receive hospital services and how much that costs taxpayers. It would not deny care. It would merely quantify the burden. A similar law in Florida led to a drop in illegal-alien use of the health care system. Idaho’s bill has not moved.

H656 would do the same basic thing in schools by auditing the number of illegal aliens enrolled. It has gone nowhere.

How does this happen in a state so red? The answer is simple: Many Republican officials remain functionally progressive on immigration.

Little is deeply unpopular with the grassroots, but he neutralized the threat of a primary by securing Trump’s endorsement. Everyone knows he opposes these bills. He simply does not want to say so out loud. Better to let them die quietly in committee than risk angering the base or the business interests that still demand cheap labor.

Call it political Murphy’s law. DeSantis is term-limited in Florida. Brad Little gets a third term.

RELATED: Memo to Trump: Stop negotiating and ramp up deportations

DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images

Even Florida has not gone far enough. It already has E-Verify, but lawmakers failed to remove the 25-employee exception. Similar attempts to strengthen E-Verify have failed in West Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, all solidly red states.

A few bright spots remain.

Tennessee may pass some worthwhile bills, though lawmakers gutted legislation to charge illegal aliens tuition. Arizona’s legislature is close to passing SB 1421, which would bar illegal aliens from opening bank accounts, cashing checks, or obtaining loans by prohibiting financial institutions from accepting foreign ID cards or ITINs as sole identification. It would make life in the United States much harder without legal status. The bill passed the Senate and awaits a House vote. Unfortunately, Arizona has a Democrat governor who will likely veto it.

That only raises the harder question: Why is this not already law in the 22 Republican trifecta states?

The same problem appears in commercial trucking. Amid the rash of crashes involving illegal-alien drivers, very few states have acted seriously. Oklahoma alone passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to reciprocate out-of-state commercial driver’s licenses. Florida appears to be the one state seriously enforcing the English-language requirement and checking for illegal aliens at truck stops.

Iowa let a bill die in committee that would have required driver’s license exams to be administered only in English. Indiana passed an English-only testing bill, but still failed to address out-of-state CDLs, even after two illegal aliens killed Indiana residents in separate incidents in less than two weeks in February.

One day, red states will need to enact these deterrents. The only question is timing. Will Republicans build them now, during the lull, or will they wait until hundreds of thousands of new invaders flood back in under a future President Gavin Newsom?

That choice will tell us whether Republicans ever meant a word they said about immigration.

‘Phase one’ was quality control. ‘Phase two’ needs to be quantity control.



Everyone in America has an opinion on what has gone right or wrong at the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. To answer the Talking Heads lyric “Well, how did I get here?” would yield a thousand different answers. I have a pretty good sense of what happened. Even before President Trump returned to the White House, I argued that meeting his bold deportation goals would require very different enforcement tactics than the ones the administration chose.

That debate makes for great fodder for finger-pointing. But a better question is: Where do we go next?

The administration needs to move its attention from sanctuary cities to sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs.

To answer it, some of the nation’s leading immigration policy and legal experts, former senior and rank-and-file law enforcement officials, and advocates are coming together to devise a way forward. Details will be announced in the days to come, but the goal is straightforward: President Trump can and will meet his core campaign promise to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported about 230,000 illegal aliens from the interior of the United States. That is a far cry from the 1 million figure some administration officials floated as a projection — and far below other totals the administration has suggested at various points. Making analysis harder, the Department of Homeland Security stopped releasing enforcement data for the first time in decades.

President Trump promised to exceed the deportation efforts of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, by the most conservative estimates, removed about one-third of the illegal population in 1954. Any way you cut the data, even using the lowest-end estimates of the total illegal population in 2025, the administration is not on pace.

One reason: In its first year, the Trump administration prioritized a particular subset of illegal aliens — criminals. People can debate whether that was the right call, but that’s what happened. Prioritizing criminals means concentrating resources on fewer targets, and it has produced high-profile standoffs in cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles. I will refer to that 2025 effort as “worst first,” as Border Czar Tom Homan has sometimes called it — phase one.

RELATED: Federalism cannot be a shield for sanctuary defiance

Photo by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

We can credit the Trump administration for highlighting the issue of criminal illegal aliens, removing many, and forcing the hand of radical Democrats, some of whom have taken the absurd position of rioting in defense of rapists and murderers. They are who we thought they were.

Now phase two can begin: widening the aperture of immigration enforcement and placing quantity above the perceived “quality” of deportations. The goal was mass deportations, not the “best” deportations. In short, the public wants commas in the numbers.

The Trump administration can, at minimum, quadruple last year’s totals. It can do it quickly if it shifts priorities — especially by refocusing on worksite enforcement. The administration needs to move its attention from sanctuary cities to sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs.

Deportation is a contact sport — not only between ICE and illegal aliens, but between the Trump administration and special interests that value cheap labor, politicians who need cheap talking points, and activist judges and violent mobs. Those forces can be overcome, and in the coming weeks and months, we will show how.

The goal is to help President Trump deliver on what he promised — and to surpass President Eisenhower’s historic efforts. To do that, President Trump needs support from the base and the right, not a constant drumbeat of consultants, pollsters, and “moderate” Republicans trying to undermine him. Those forces are coming together, and I believe the result will be less drama and more commas.

Americans deserve a road map to move from phase one into a more successful phase two.

We escaped King George. Why do we bow to King Judge?



What do you call an official who claims the final say over the limits of his own power — and everyone else’s? Someone who can slap a “yes” on anything the elected branches do, or a “no” on anything they attempt, and treat his decree as the last word? That kind of power would have shocked America’s founders. In practice, it can exceed anything King George III exercised over the American colonies. Yet we keep granting it to federal judges by treating their overreach as binding even when Congress has said otherwise.

The founders worried most about the branches that wield force and money. The president commands the sword. Congress holds the purse. Both stand for election. Judges do not. Life tenure exists to protect judges while they decide cases, not to hand them an independent mandate to run the country. Judges possess no army and control no appropriations. Their influence depends on the political branches giving lawful effect to their rulings.

No individual right exists to use the courts as a substitute legislature to remain in the country. Judges cannot confer amnesty by injunction.

Those lawful bounds are not mysterious. Congress established the lower federal courts, and Congress defines their jurisdiction. Even the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction is subject to congressional regulation. Article III, Section 2 makes it subject to “such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Justice Clarence Thomas put it plainly in Patchak v. Zinke: “When Congress strips federal courts of jurisdiction, it exercises a valid legislative power no less than when it lays taxes, coins money, declares war, or invokes any other power that the Constitution grants it.”

Immigration offers the clearest test case because it sits at the heart of sovereignty. Over no issue do the political branches hold more constitutional authority than determining which foreigners may enter and remain.

As Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in Galvan v. Press (1954), policies on entry and removal are “peculiarly concerned with the political conduct of government,” and Congress’ exclusive control over them has become “about as firmly imbedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government.”

Congress, then, holds plenary authority over immigration policy and sweeping authority over federal court jurisdiction — especially the lower courts. Yet now, every loser district judge routinely grants standing to illegal aliens to challenge detention and removal, even when Congress has restricted review.

RELATED: The courts are running the country — and Trump is letting it happen

cherezoff via iStock/Getty Images

Take Temporary Protected Status. The Ninth Circuit ordered the Trump administration to continue TPS for Venezuelans, despite the Supreme Court staying the original injunction. Another district judge issued a similar mandate for Haitians — 16 years after Haitians received that “temporary” status under President Obama. What often goes unsaid: Congress barred judicial review over TPS determinations. Federal law states, without qualification: “No court shall have jurisdiction to review any determination” of DHS “in granting or withdrawing TPS.” Other provisions restrict review of many deportation-related challenges — limits judges often treat as suggestions.

Over the past year, judges who view themselves as latter-day Martin Luther Kings have used legal fog to hear cases Congress barred, even after signals from the Supreme Court. That brings the Trump administration to its decision point.

Administration officials argue — correctly — that courts lack authority to issue certain orders. But judges have neither force nor will beyond what the executive supplies. The executive’s job includes enforcing the jurisdictional limits Congress enacted. A court that lacks jurisdiction cannot establish it by decree.

If this judicial coup runs to its logical end, any district judge becomes the final arbiter of any political question: grant standing to any plaintiff, announce standing rules that override statutes, take jurisdiction Congress withheld, then command the elected branches to act. That is not the Supreme Court’s role, let alone a trial judge’s.

It also outstrips anything King George could do at the founding. He needed Parliament for matters like citizenship. We are now told a judge can dictate immigration policy regardless of the law.

Waiting on the Supreme Court to clean up the mess is a fool’s errand. District judges return with a slightly modified case and restart the process. During Trump’s first term, an immigration lawyer summed up the strategy: “May a thousand litigation flowers bloom.”

The numbers tell the story. In Minnesota alone, federal court sees an average of one habeas petition filed every hour. A judge even ordered a previously deported alien brought back. These petitions do not claim Immigration and Customs Enforcement mistakenly detained U.S. citizens. They aim to use courts to stall enforcement in bulk.

RELATED: The imperial judiciary strikes back

Moor Studio via iStock/Getty Images

Finality binds parties in cases; it does not bind the political branches into permanent policy submission. Lincoln drew that distinction in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Courts may decide individual cases. But if courts try to turn those decisions into national political rules, elected officials should not treat them as binding “political rules” that forbid any measure that does not “concur” with a judicial decision.

Lincoln practiced that view as president. His attorney general, Edward Bates, explained the judiciary’s proper scope: Judicial power is ample for justice “among individual parties,” but “powerless to impose rules of action and of judgment upon the other departments.”

Applied to immigration, the point is simple: No individual right exists to use the courts as a substitute legislature to remain in the country. Judges cannot confer amnesty by injunction. Congress has not passed a legislative amnesty in four decades for a reason: It requires majorities in both houses and the president’s signature, and the politicians who vote for it must face the voters. Yet the current judicial pattern grants amnesty through procedure — without hearings, without votes, and without accountability. Life tenure was designed for the opposite purpose.

No shortcut exists. The political branches must stop treating lawless judicial opinions as if they carry the force of law — especially when those opinions ignore statutes, exceed jurisdiction, and attempt to seize control of core sovereign functions.

A Nation That Won’t Enforce Immigration Laws Isn’t A Nation At All

It may be that the next few years will decide whether America remains a sovereign nation or succumbs to subversion from within.

Woke UK video game backfires: 'Extremist' Amelia becomes viral symbol of British pride



Hull City Council in Yorkshire, England — an area overwhelmed by third-world asylum seekers in recent years — wasted no time setting a high bar for self-owns this year.

The local authority teamed up with the East Riding of Yorkshire Council and the woke media literacy outfit Shout Out UK to create an online choose-your-own adventure video game targeting young Britons titled "Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism."

'The government is betraying white British people.'

To the chagrin of the re-education tool's makers, one of its supposed villains, a purple-haired patriotic character named Amelia, has been appropriated and used to great effect in counter-messaging campaigns by the right and other critics of the woke British establishment.

The game

Hull City Council announced last year that the game would be "made available to schools, education settings, and community and youth organizations throughout the city" and used to teach youths "about the dangers of extremism and radicalization."

One of the stated objectives of the propaganda tool was to "demonstrate the local threat picture of Extreme Right Wing activities specifically."

The game offers six scenarios in which users decide the path the protagonist, Charlie, will take.

In the third scenario, Charlie — who is referred to as "they" — watches a video that claims both that "Muslim men are stealing the places of British war veterans in emergency accommodation" and that "the government is betraying white British people."

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Screenshots from Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism.

If the player decides that "this seems unfair" and has Charlie engage with the post, Charlie ends up inadvertently sharing the content with online bad actors, sending the player's radicalization risk score through the roof.

Charlie avoids arrest long enough to attend class with Amelia in the third scenario, where she suggests that "immigrants are coming to the U.K. and taking our jobs."

Amelia features prominently in the fourth scenario, where she is introduced as a close friend of Charlie who has "made a video encouraging young people in Birdlington to join a political group that seeks to defend English rights."

After Amelia — who is depicted holding the Union Jack and a sign that says, "No entry" — asks Charlie to join a group called Action for Britain and shares a video on-theme, the player is given the option of having Charlie: ignore the video, like the video but not join the group, or share the video and join the group.

If the player chooses the third option, their radicalization risk score increases just as it will increase if they agree in the final scenario to go in Amelia's place to protest "the erosion of British values."

Screenshot from Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism.

Regardless of inputs, the game inevitably suggests that exposure to supposedly extremist views such as love for nation, concern over wage suppression by immigrants, and cultural erasure warrant Charlie's referral to an anti-terrorism expert and re-education on "how to engage positively with ideology and the difference between right and wrong in expressing political beliefs."

The Telegraph, citing official documents, revealed last year that the British government listed "cultural nationalism," defined as the belief that Western culture is "under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups," as a terrorist ideology.

The game concludes with the suggestion that only after receiving counseling on "harmful ideology" from a hijab-wearing counselor is Charlie able to "rebuild their confidence, find their identity, and continue their college course successfully."

New pathway for Amelia

Amelia has recently featured in numerous viral online videos and memes where she warns of the Islamification of Britain, champions national pride, promotes normalcy, and criticizes leftist policies.

In a popular Amelia meme shared by Elon Musk, the character underscores that the English people aren't "immigrants" and "didn't 'arrive' in England. They became England — over more than a millennium."

In another popular meme, Amelia is shown bonding with Charlie over their common love of country, getting married, then starting a family.

Amelia has also been depicted as the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend, handing an armored knight the sword Aerondight; in photo-realistic images mocking political figures; and in a multitude of other images making a wide range of political commentary.

British journalist Mary Harrington writing for UnHerd noted that "Amelia stands as a potent illustration of how desperately an officialdom accustomed to comparatively comprehensive public message control is struggling to adapt to the recursive online environment."

When pressed for comment, Hull City Council referred Blaze News to the U.K. Home Office, which did not respond. Shout Out UK for comment similarly did not respond.

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Mass immigration means dependence, and dependence means control



Power always seeks to expand. It never halts for principles or words on paper, but only for rival powers strong enough to resist it. Those rivals must have deep roots, independent resilience, and the ability to demand loyalty. They must project sovereignty in ways the state cannot easily replicate, establishing spheres of influence that can resist government overreach without ever firing a shot.

Historically, strong communities provided this check. Their religions and folkways became the rhythms of life, passed down through generations. These beliefs drew authority from transcendent sources no earthly power could reproduce. Families built churches, schools, libraries, civic organizations, unions, and fraternities to preserve culture, transmit values, and care for members.

Communities with shared traditions can limit state commands. But diversity dissolves those limits.

Such communities formed spheres of sovereignty. They made competing demands on their members and provided services the state could not: spiritual grounding, mutual aid, a sense of identity. Membership required specific behaviors to remain in good standing, norms the state could not easily reshape. Because traditions were deeply ingrained, the state had to respect them or risk serious resistance.

Over time, these communities often accumulated wealth. Virtue and stability generated surplus capital, which supported robust institutions and provided safety nets. Their members no longer relied on government in times of need. They relied on each other. These were the kulaks — the middle class — people whose independence created natural barriers to state expansion. Not atomized “self-reliance,” but communal reliance: stability rooted in culture and habit. That is precisely why governments sought to break them.

High and low vs. the middle

The political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel, in "On Power," described the classic formula: high and low versus the middle. The ruling class always wants more power, but the middle class resists. The poor, being dependent and disorganized, cannot mount opposition. Only the middle class, with property, institutions, and traditions, can stand in the way. To expand power, rulers must dissolve these spheres of sovereignty.

Their method is alliance with the dependent lower classes. Sometimes this means the domestic underclass. But that group still shares culture and traditions with the middle, making it less reliable as a tool. Importing a foreign underclass works better. Immigrants lack roots in the land or its traditions. They can be counted on to side with rulers against the entrenched middle.

Mass immigration delivers cheap labor to the wealthy while creating a new political client base. The upper class benefits from gardeners and nannies. Politicians gain millions of new voters to whom they can promise state benefits.

Dependence as a weapon

Immigrant groups rarely possess cohesive culture or resilient institutions. They lack roots, leisure, or unity to resist. They depend on the ruling class for entry, employment, rights, and welfare. Many don’t speak the language. They need the state to survive — and they reward the state with loyalty. This isn’t passive dependence. To succeed, they actively require the state to expand.

To serve this new underclass, rulers pillage the middle. Kulaks are blamed for inequality. They are guilted, taxed, or coerced into surrendering what they built. That wealth is transferred to immigrants, cementing the state’s power over both. The middle grows poorer, loses property, closes institutions, and becomes more unstable. Families that once resisted government control now depend on it.

RELATED: ‘Paperwork Americans’ are not your countrymen

Blaze Media illustration

Mass immigration also erodes culture, another obstacle to power. Communities with shared traditions can limit state commands. But diversity dissolves those limits. Forced to mingle with newcomers, the shared identity frays. Cultural separation becomes taboo. Institutions that once passed on values and provided aid collapse. Charities are drained. Public spaces decay. And those who maintained them see no reason to sacrifice for strangers.

The state ensures that escape is impossible. First taboo, then law, forbids communities to separate and reform. Those who try are smeared as bigots, then prosecuted. The middle is barred from reconstituting its way of life. Virtue fades. The spheres of sovereignty are gone. Everyone becomes a rootless dependent, giving the state a blank check to expand its power.

Why immigration became policy

This is why mass immigration became a priority across Western liberal democracies. It doesn’t just dismantle barriers to state power; it builds a machine to demand more of it. Rulers gain cheap labor, grateful voters, and excuses to raid the middle. The cost is cultural dissolution, but to elites that is a feature, not a bug.

If we want an elite that serves its people rather than undermines them, we must choke off this supply of outside populations. Stop importing clients. Stop dissolving communities. Restore the middle class and the spheres of sovereignty that protect liberty. Only then can the leviathan be caged.

Stop pretending the Democrats are imploding



Democratic leaders aren’t inciting attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers out of pure hatred for Donald Trump and his administration. Their motives are strategic. Practical. By undermining immigration enforcement, they protect a pipeline of future Democratic voters — including violent criminals like the “family man from Maryland.”

Once these illegal aliens receive driver’s licenses, they’ll land on voter rolls. They already count in the census, inflating congressional representation in blue states teeming with illegal immigrants. Democrats didn’t bring these “newcomers” here just to deport them.

Republicans imagine that all or at least most Americans are on the same wavelength with them. But that may not be the case.

If activists now ambush and shoot ICE agents, Democratic leaders seem to treat that as a price worth paying to preserve their long-term electoral advantage. And they can count on the corporate left-wing media to help them.

The press operates as an extension of the Democratic Party, not just in the United States but across the Western world. CNN, NBC, and MSNBC broadcast the same spin you’ll hear on CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and France 4. With this media backing, Democrats face little scrutiny — even when they tacitly abet violence against federal agents.

Right now, public support for deportations hovers around 50%, and it might be higher if the media didn’t stage-manage the narrative. Watch a few minutes of network television or skim the New York Times, and you’ll come away thinking border czar Tom Homan’s raids target preschoolers and migrant field hands.

Fox News insists the anti-Trump mobs are just fringe radicals. They’re not. A massive leftist electorate just nominated Zohran Mamdani to be the next mayor of New York City, and if the polls mean anything, he just might win in the fall. Other major cities are led by mayors only slightly less radical — Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, Michelle Wu in Boston. When it comes to immigration, they’re just as hostile to ICE and just as gushingly sympathetic to illegal aliens as Mamdani.

The “people” voted for these multicultural, America-be-damned leftists. The fantasy that Democratic voters are victims of a hijacked party is infantile nonsense. A growing share of the American electorate has radicalized — including black voters, government employees, and especially college-educated white women, who dominate the culturally leftist bloc in my own Pennsylvania borough.

Despite years of street violence, riots, and inflammatory rhetoric, the Democrats haven’t collapsed. They still hold a slight edge in the generic congressional ballot. RealClearPolitics polling shows the GOP ahead by only seven points. The Democrats may have lost ground — but they’re far from finished.

RELATED: ‘The Suicide Squad’: How Democrats keep blowing themselves up

Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

Let’s not forget: In the last presidential election, Democrats lost the popular vote by just two million votes, running a hapless candidate against an incumbent with enormous political energy. That’s how effective the Democratic machine remains — even in a lopsided matchup.

No one should mistake this for incompetence or insanity. Yes, the party boasts plenty of scatterbrained motor mouths such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). But don’t confuse theatrics with disarray. Democratic leaders push grotesque policies — mutilating children with “gender-affirming” surgeries, putting men in women’s sports, promoting race-based discrimination — but voters haven’t punished them for it.

Republican observers tend to judge the other side by their own standards. They also imagine that all or at least most Americans are on the same wavelength with them. But that may not be the case. Democrats don’t even pretend to feel regret when ICE officers take a bullet or when anarchists torch city blocks. They know their base relishes in the havoc.

This is calculated politics. Democrats want to expand their base through mass migration and lawfare, not persuasion. That’s cold strategy, not insanity.

If Republicans want to win, they need to stop imagining their opponents are self-destructing lunatics. They aren’t. Democrats play to win. The GOP must prepare for a real fight — not fantasyland.

The era of managerial rule is over. Long live the sovereign!



There’s a world before President Trump’s descent down the escalator, and there’s a world after it. The recent No Kings protests transmitted the idée fixe of the pre-2015 world. That idea was hostility to personal authority, or personal power — hostility to the notion of sovereignty, to the power once exercised by kings. Donald Trump, the figure who has dominated politics since 2015, is its most visible sign of contradiction. In that sense, the protesters weren’t entirely wrong. Trump’s success marks the passing of the world of the latter half of the 20th century, which was defined by hatred of personal authority.

Successive generations demolished the concept of sovereignty, casting suspicion on the notion that a leader’s decisions can legitimately reshape political or social life. This shift began in the United States when the intelligentsia promulgated the concept of “the authoritarian personality.” They found this personality in the working classes, their churches and associations, their families and fathers, and the politicians who represented them. Where there was the whiff of authoritarian character traits, fascism probably lurked.

All the elements of Trump’s personality that his opponents loathe have proved, for better or worse, to be demonstrations of strength rather than weakness.

The anti-authority impulse then extended to challenge the authority of elected bodies. Popular sovereignty became dangerous. In the late 1950s and '60s, on matters such as school prayer, unctuous judges and administrators tied the hands of potentially reactionary legislatures and frog-marched them toward secularism.

In the 1970s, the target was popular sovereignty as embodied in the office of the president. The American Constitution enabled an energetic executive or administrative presidency, traces of the monarchical form. But the president’s authority was decapitated in the great act of regicide — otherwise known as Watergate.

The ‘golden straitjacket’

Sketching the gloomy landscape of the 1970s, the sociologist Robert Nisbet saw in the twilight of authority the rise of impersonal forces; administrators touting “best practices” stepped into the breach. Therapists, managers, and other experts became increasingly important. They coordinated with economic, social, and legal networks to constrain human agents who might otherwise upset progress.

That’s what globalization was all about. At the peak of the era of what Thomas Friedman called “the golden straitjacket,” sovereignty was outré. Successful politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair dazzled their electorates with the bullion of cheap credit and narratives of an impending gilded age while tightening the bonds ever further. They weakened the power of their offices, distributing it to central banks and international agencies.

Their actions clarified the vocation of right-thinking people. Stigmatize the authoritarian personality. Banish any individual or group that displayed its signs from the helm of government and public life. Spin an ever-tighter web of legal, administrative, and economic networks that could remove the risks of exercising personal human control over government — the risks of an energetic executive — once and for all.

All that changed with Trump’s descent down the escalator. “The golden straitjacket” had numerous critics, but no major public figure exposed its hatred of political, personal power as aggressively and abruptly as Trump did. In 2015, he thrust personal authority back to the center of public life. It’s been there ever since, an example to imitate — in enthusiasm or envy.

Restoring the executive

As president, Trump has fought hard to restore the bloodied Article II of the Constitution. His executive and legal actions on behalf of presidential power even won over skeptics in the conservative legal world. Not only did he challenge the presuppositions of government via the administrative state, but he also exposed the overreaching deep state that is devouring the American Constitution.

Indeed, No Kings could very well function as a pro-Trump slogan. Prior to Trump, American presidents largely functioned as kings. Like the monarch in Great Britain, U.S. presidents had long held power in theory as the “dignified” branch, while other actors in the security state made the real decisions — the “efficient” branch. Trump has been his most republican when he has upset this double government.

RELATED: The hidden motive behind the anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

To be sure, anti-Trump No Kings protesters are more troubled by another phenomenon: Trump’s personal style of leadership. They’re not wrong to draw attention to it, but they’re wrong about its significance.

Authority depends on a person’s capacity to command in order to reshape politics. Trump mastered the new fragmented media environment, in which entertainment — rather than solemn statements — wins attention and deference. Trump made his personality an issue. His critics attacked him for it, claiming his persona was a manifestation of the dreaded authoritarian personality. But all the elements of Trump’s personality that his opponents loathe — rhetorical and physical aggression, incivility, scorn for discourse and discussion, brashness, maleness, unwillingness to apologize or express guilt, bluntly demarcating between American winners and losers, claiming the exceptional power to fix America’s problems — have proved, for better or worse, to be demonstrations of strength rather than weakness.

The importance of character traits such as “caring for people like me” or “experience,” which had mattered so much in late 20th-century mass democracy, faded away. Swaths of the electorate would of course still look for their “therapist in chief” or “expert in chief.” But more wanted a boss who asserted control and expected those under him to follow his lead.

The reassertion of personal authority, after decades of opposition to it, has been a messy affair. It’s risible to think that Trump ever intended to abolish elections, set up a dictatorship, or establish a hereditary monarchy. But his style did help accelerate the collapse of institutional authority, such as that once held by the media. Although many of his more dramatic promises have been unrealized (stymied by a variety of forces), the symbology of authority has remained key for gaining and wielding legitimacy.

The twilight of liberalism

A numinous connection has developed between an electorate that confers sovereignty upon its chosen figure and the figure who exercises it. The acoustic and visual symbols this connection generates are all the more potent because, at this point in the 21st century, as Mary Harrington has argued, a culture of mass literacy has vanished. This culture was essential to transmit the symbols associated with the print ideals of liberalism (for instance, the importance placed on the freedom of the press, or on discourse itself). As print culture goes, so go the symbols of liberalism. Other symbols step into their place.

Trump’s more subtle critics, who are troubled by the twilight of liberalism, noticed this transformation. They sense something has changed and single out Trump as the chief villain. But wielding the symbols of personal authority is one area in which Trump has long ceased to be exceptional. Even those who are very far from Trump ideologically and politically still inhabit his symbolic universe, in which personal authority, hierarchy, and one’s capacity to reshape political life are of critical importance.

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Emmanuel Macron’s predecessors, fearing being labeled authoritarians by the May ’68 generation, adopted a deliberately understated, egalitarian style. Macron shocked the French political system by embracing the persona of “Jupiter.” He seized the opportunity that Trump’s descent down the escalator made possible.

Pope Francis began his papacy in a conversational, freewheeling style, akin to a Clintonian or Blairite doing one’s best to manage the media narrative. But after the first few years, he also imitated Trump as his supporters embraced the theology of an imperial papacy.

Joe Biden likewise leaned into a “Dark Brandon” iconography of authority to create the impression that he was in charge, the simulacrum of a functioning presidency.

Politicians who can’t successfully embody the symbolism of authority, such as Biden, or those who shy away from it, such as Justin Trudeau, end up as failures. Trudeau launched his political career by an act of physical prowess, beating up a Conservative Party senator who was too lazy to train for a boxing match. It was a crude but effective way of legitimating Trudeau’s claim to lead the Liberal Party and Canada.

Even in an extremely progressive country, primal assertions of authority win admiration. But Trudeau forgot the underlying lesson. In office, he preferred the symbolism of colorful socks, and his unpopularity forced him to resign in ignominy. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s successor, who invokes the physical, masculine iconography of hockey fights to win votes, has returned to more visceral politics. The liberal norms of national civility go nowhere; it’s the brash Trumpian traits that are deployed to gain victory.

Slashing the straitjacket

The resurgence of authority is why there’s no chance of reverting to globalized, impersonal power — at least how the pre-2015 world conceived it. As candidates compete for personal authority, those vying for power repudiate the notion that economic, social, and legal networks should constrain human agents. The capacity to take back control over these networks is what matters. This helps us understand the deeper unity behind Trump’s signature policies.

All the major themes that Trump hit on when he descended the escalator — an end to mass immigration, free trade, and regime-change missions abroad — were on one level anti-globalization topics: They slashed away at the golden straitjacket.

Anti-globalization themes are now so mainstream that even Keir Starmer imitates Trump’s symbology by talking tough on border control. On one level, it’s a policy victory. But the success is more profound than that. To effect that agenda demands the reassertion of the personal, political will to effect social and political change. Faced with the diminishing returns of the old regime, that’s what more and more people are looking for.

In our new world, leaders rise and fall by how well they can speak the language of authority. Whatever the full implications of this paradigm shift may be, the longing for sovereigns shows no signs of letting up.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally as “A New Birth of Authority” at the American Mind.

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