Social Studies

Last week, a federal judge in California issued a ruling that accused the Trump administration of directly violating a series of court orders. The government, Judge Sunshine Sykes wrote, “far crossed the boundaries of constitutional conduct,” and was determined to “continue their campaign of illegal action.” She referred to the government’s legal position as “shameless” and accused the administration of trying “to erode any semblance of the separation of powers.” The government’s conduct, Sykes wrote, could only be allowed “in a world where the Constitution does not exist.” George Pappas, a former immigration judge, told me he believes the present impasse amounts to a constitutional crisis. “This is direct interference in judicial impartiality,” he said.

The court orders that the government is accused of defying were issued over the summer and fall of last year. On July 8, 2025, DHS made an internal announcement of a change in policy. From then on, ICE’s Acting Director, Todd Lyons, instructed his agency, any undocumented immigrant arrested in the United States would be subject to “mandatory detention” and denied the possibility of release on bond.

This was a stark break from decades of past practice. Historically, ICE and other agencies have interpreted the Immigration and Naturalization Act to require mandatory detention for people who had landed in the government’s custody immediately after having presented themselves at a port of entry. As they awaited a removal hearing, the government held those immigrants, freshly arrived and with no ties to the United States, in locked facilities.

By contrast, undocumented immigrants who had been in the country for years before being arrested were typically released on bond. These were people with jobs and apartments, kids in school, and often American citizen relatives. They were unlikely to flee.

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Now, however, ICE was saying that even these immigrants had to be incarcerated for the months or even years it took to go through removal proceedings.

That internal memo was followed, in September, by a precedent-setting ruling from Teresa Riley, the Chief Immigration Judge at the Department of Justice, that made the same determination: even immigrants who had lived in the country for years or decades were subject to mandatory detention.

Hundreds of lawsuits were filed in response. Individual judges suddenly found dozens of such cases on their dockets. “The vast majority were saying, ‘yes, they’re entitled to a bond hearing,” former immigration judge Sarah Cade told me, but still, the government would come back to court again and again claiming that they were not. “A lot of judges were getting really irate.”

In November, ruling on one such lawsuit, Judge Sykes ordered the government to reverse its new practice, declaring it unlawful and unconstitutional. But two months later, Judge Riley instructed immigration judges to defy it, claiming that the federal ruling was “not a nationwide injunction” and had no bearing on the case she had ruled on in September.

This was the memo that prompted Judge Sykes’ ruling last week, which opened with a quote from James Madison referring to the concentration of judicial, executive and legislative powers “in the same hands” as “the very definition of tyranny.”

The quote points to a structural feature of the immigration courts that is at the heart of the current stand-off. Unlike most justices, immigration judges are not part of the judicial branch of the federal government. Instead, they’re part of the Department of Justice. They belong to the executive branch and are ultimately answerable to the Attorney General and the President. If the administration shows a clear preference that they rule in a particular way, they don’t have the independence of a circuit court judge to confidently do otherwise.

“The judges making these rulings fear for their jobs,” said Pappas. “They have a financial interest in how they rule.” Pappas himself was fired for not bowing to the government when the administration wanted him to dismiss cases before his bench, which would enable ICE to arrest respondents at the courthouse. Nearly 100 immigration judges have been fired by the Trump administration, which is unheard of in the profession. The threat, Pappas believes, has chilled immigration judges’ freedom to make determinations independent of politics.

The Trump administration is currently in-filling the gap with military lawyers.

University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Adam Goodman, author of The Deportation Machine, believes that the administration’s goal is to keep as many migrants in detention for as long as possible in order to coerce them to waive their rights to hearings by signing voluntary departure forms. “This is a power play by DHS,” he said. “Over a period of months or years, a certain portion of people will agree to leave the U.S. out of desperation.”

In her ruling last week, Sykes expressly vacated the precedent-setting case that Teresa Riley was relying on to defy the circuit court's orders. Cade suspects the administration will, at some point, agree to comply. But by then, perhaps thousands of immigrants who had a right to a hearing and who had legitimate claims to remain in the country will have been pushed out under the duress of detention. Justice delayed will have become justice denied.

I got in an argument with Chris Rufo on Twitter over the weekend about “white culture.” Twitter is, of course, the worst place in the universe to have any kind of productive disagreement about anything, but as I don’t regard Chris as a good faith interlocutor in the first place, maybe the platform doesn’t much matter. Chris has a political project, the goals of which take precedence over everything else for him, especially honesty and accuracy. It’s why he eagerly jumped into the “Haitians eating pets” hoax, and then invented a connection between the Somali fraud scandal and the Al-Shabaab terrorist group.

But the discussion about “white culture” is a good one to have out in the open, as the Republican Party drifts further into overt white nationalism. The kind of discourse that was shocking back in 2017 when Charlottesville happened is becoming normalized. If we don’t talk about this stuff explicitly, we’ll wake up one day and half the country will take for granted that there’s a white genocide afoot, having absorbed it more or less by osmosis.

My argument with Chris is just one little clamor in a cacophony of noise over the last few days that was ignited by this exchange in a Senate confirmation hearing. You can watch it if you want to; the details of it don’t matter that much outside of the fact that it shoved the idea of “white culture” and it’s supposed disappearance to the front of the public discourse. Chris is of the opinion, shared by many, that it’s self-evident that there’s such a thing as “white culture,” that’s it’s synonymous with “European culture,” and that it’s the bedrock of American civilization. He’s of the further opinion, also shared by many, that that culture is under attack from mass immigration, and that America is losing something vital and existentially precious in the process. It’s basically The Great Replacement but on a level of abstraction that makes it plausibly respectable to the right-of-center.

There are three steps, as far as I can discern, to the argument. First, that there’s a singular culture that united Europe over the course of the continent’s history. Second, that there is a biological race called “white people” that is synonymous with “Europeans,” such that we can speak of European culture as “white culture.” And third, that this “white culture” was the foundation of an earlier, purer, better American culture that has been contaminated and degraded over the last 65 years by immigrants from non-European countries.

All three are questionable, in my opinion. A couple of them are asinine.

Let’s start with the first.

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Europe, unlike Australia, Antarctica, Africa, or North or South America, is not a discrete landmass. It is contiguous with the continent of Asia, and the borders between the two have always been a matter of debate. In my opinion, the boundaries between them are defined more by culture than geography. Specifically, Europe is the part of the world that was historically unified under the religion of Christianity. Asia is the the land to its east that Christianity was never able to dominate.

Before Christianity’s arrival, large parts of what we now know as “Europe” were integrated under the Western Roman Empire. Roman conquest created a common culture throughout southern Europe and as far north as England, with, of course, regional variations. That common culture is reflected in stately architecture, urban planning and in the Romance languages.

While extensive, however, the Roman Empire neither fully enveloped what we now call “Europe,” nor was it limited to Europe’s current borders. Vast swathes of Germany and Scandinavia lay beyond its reach. At the same time, the empire stretched to North Africa and the Middle East, and was centered not just in Rome but also in modern Istanbul.

When the Western Roman Empire fell, the European continent, both within and beyond the empire’s former borders, underwent a millennium of commingling of once distant and alien populations. This was the Age of the Great Migrations, also known as the Age of Invasions. During this time, the Germanic “barbarian” tribes, once beyond the direct control of the empire but nonetheless subservient to it, descended into the formerly imperial lands, settled into Roman ruins and became feudal kings.

The ninth century saw the Viking invasions. Scandinavian invaders colonized almost all of England and the swathe of France that would come to bear their name, Normandy. In the east they established Kiev, from which would emerge, after much genetic mingling with the Slavs, the Russian people. During the same period, the Carolingian Empire unified many of the Germanic kingdoms under the banner of Christendom. Eventually, the Vikings, too, would embrace the new faith. Then, in the eleventh century, the Norman kings invaded England, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, the only domain to survive the Viking conquests of the ninth century, would finally fall to their descendants.

Emerging from this violence and bedlam were the embryoes of the various national cultures of Europe. As kingdoms consolidated into nation-states, the outlines began to appear of countries such as England, which developed a national culture that blended Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influences, as reflected in its syncretic language. It would be centuries, however, before England would unite politically, and even longer — within the lifetimes of some of our parents and grandparents — for the continent of Europe to do so.

But politics isn’t everything, and one could make a reasonable case that Europe had unified culturally far before the twentieth century. Doing so would suit Chris Rufo’s argument. The world wars, from this perspective, were more like blood feuds between distantly related clans than clashes of mutually distinct civilizations.

I think that argument is partly true. But what was it that unified Europe culturally? It wasn’t language. It wasn’t politics. It was religion.

Over the course of the centuries that separated antiquity from the modern age, Christianity claimed one kingdom after another in Europe. The church was able to achieve this largely through a top-down strategy of persuading rulers to convert. Those newly baptized rulers then imposed their new religion on their subject populations, though often with enough lenience to allow them to fuse it with their traditional pagan folkways.

Christianity had much to offer these monarchs, even if they had to cede some of their formal authority to the Pope. It provided them with political legitimacy. It lent them a doctrine that allowed the state to more minutely control the day-to-day lives of its subjects. It gave them a bureaucratic administrative system through the dioceses, which facilitated things like tax collection and military conscription. And it afforded them membership in the club of great European powers.

The borders of historical Christendom became those we now recognize as “Europe.” Rufo is thus not entirely wrong that there emerged, in this time, a common “European culture.” The values of Christianity were the foundation of what we understand today to be “European”-descended beliefs in such things as the equality of humankind, individual rights, and democracy.

But to call Christianity “European” is to reject the entire premise of the religion, whose hallmark is its universalism. Christian values became European values, to be sure, but the religion’s constituency was never the population of Europe, but that of the entire human race. It is also ahistorical, insofar as Christianity spread beyond Europe, even during the Roman era, to North Africa, and, of course, throughout much of the Middle East. There is, undoubtedly, huge overlap between Europe and Christendom, but they are not interchangeable terms. The faith began, of course, outside the European continent; its origins were oriental, not occidental. Europe didn’t invent Christianity, it submitted to it. The moral philosophy that came to characterize the continent, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, were as much borrowed as created.

At a certain point, however, this distinction becomes semantic, as it quickly did in my quarrel with Chris. When I pointed out to him that, while Europe was unified by the culture of Christianity, Christianity isn’t “European culture,” Chris chose, for the purpose of dunking on me on Twitter, to interpret this claim as some kind of nonsensical logical paradox. To me it’s as simple as a Venn Diagram. But it’s a waste of time to get caught up on this point. Though I reject the characterization of Christian values as “European culture,” I’m willing to go along with it for the sake of argument. The more important point is that this isn’t “white culture.”

The conception that there’s a “white race” of humans is only a couple of centuries old. Some would put its origins in the eighteenth century, when American colonists were compelled to define themselves against the Indians. But that would be a mistake. As Peter Silver documents in Our Savage Neighbors, while the American colonists routinely referred to themselves as “white,” it was used as an adjective, like “short” or “blonde.” The term “white people,” as used by the colonists, didn’t purport to describe a biologically distinct race of human beings in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the idea that there was a separate white race was an Indian concept before it was ever an American one. In the eighteenth century, Indian nativists such as the Delaware prophet Neolin began to understand their conflict with the whites as a war between two mutually alien races of human beings, made separately by the Creator. That conclusion was harder for the colonists to swallow for a straightforward reason: it stood wholly against the teachings of their religion. Christianity taught of a single creation of humankind. For many generations, this was a conceptual obstacle with which would-be Christian racists and slavery apologists were forced to grapple. It took Social Darwinism and the “discovery” of eugenics in the nineteenth century to square that circle.

But square it they did. By the nineteenth century, with Southern slavery under political attack, there was enormous demand in the United States for an ideology that could reconcile the contradiction between the practice and Christian doctrine by dividing humans into separate “races.” We’re so familiar with this reasoning that it’s hard now to fathom that at the time, it was something new under the sun. Slavery had been practiced for thousands of years all over the world, but not until Christians adopted it did it become necessary to justify it morally on racial grounds. Neither the Vikings nor the Saracens nor the ancient Greeks and Romans felt obliged to argue that the slaves they sold and kept were a different order of human being. Having no conception of universal, inherent human rights, there was no need to justify their violation. But slavery in the United States existed against the backdrop of Christianity. Its practice flew in the face of the conception that all of humankind were God’s creatures, and that the oppressed were closer to God than their oppressors. This brazen contradiction was impossible to ignore, invoked, as it constantly was, by Christian abolitionists. In response, as Barbara and Karen Fields show in Racecraft, slave owners contrived the notion that blacks were a distinct and lesser “race” of humans than whites were, and, accordingly, undeserving of the moral equality mandated by the Bible. This loophole was fused with the idea that it was slavery that brought the African heathens to Christ, so that their subjection was, in fact, part of the divine project of soul-saving. The idea that there were separate races of blacks and whites was, in other words, cope.

In objective reality there is no such thing as biological race, or to the extent there is, it’s a social construct — real only insofar as we choose to believe it’s real. Yet it’s so firmly baked into the American worldview that Chris Rufo and others who share his assumptions can use “white” interchangeably with “European” without anyone as much as scratching their heads. And now, Rufo and his allies are reifying the fiction of a “white race” yet further with the claim that America has a “white culture” that is being destroyed by non-white immigration.

Which takes us to the third and final point. Rufo appears to conceive of the founding culture of America — the Anglo-American, “European” culture — as some kind of pure form of American culture that has been corrupted over the centuries by the influence of foreign settlers. This is, at heart, a simple expression of prejudice, of valuing Anglo culture over the many other admixtures in the mongrel culture of the United States.

But it’s also ahistorical. The American colonies were never unified under a common English culture; they were divided among multipe, irreconcilable English cultures. Even after confederation, their moral and philosophical disagreements with one another were so intractable as to culminate in the Civil War. And even that didn’t result in the cultural integration of the country. Those wounds lay open and oozing through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, all the way up to the 1960s. They still resonate in our politics today.

Mainstream American culture didn’t really cohere until westward expansion. But westward expansion was exactly the period when that culture became far less exclusively English. The settling of the West ushered in the globalization of the United States, creating a new ethnic pecking order in the process. The Gold Rush brought seekers from China to South America, as well as Europeans from all over the continent. The conquest of the southwest integrated the Hispanic cultures of the former Mexican territories into American culture, fusing it into Western cowboy culture. The ten gallon hat evolved from the Mexican sombrero; the term “buckaroo” derived from the Spanish word for cowboy, “vaquero.” It would be overstating the case to say that these foreign influences had a discernible impact on the political structures and ethical values of America; these were already set more or less in stone by the founding generations. But they merged into our lifestyles just as the cultures of every succeeding wave of immigrants has.

Rufo and his allies would have you believe that there is a before-and-after story to America; that once upon a time, we were united as a nation, but then the foreigners came. The reality is closer to the inverse. We, ourselves, were once the foreign-born, and we brought the divisions of the Old World with us to the new one. But as we traveled west, we began to forget where we came from. We lived among each other, married one another, and our ancestral ties became lost in our common identity as Americans. That process continued with the wave of mass European immigration through Ellis Island and the global wave of immigration that began in 1965. Rufo insists that this integration of outside cultures has made us less American. It has in fact made us much more so.

I wrote this for the New York Times, based on themes I’ve explored here on Social Studies.

Hope you like it.

—LW

Over a period of about 200 years, beginning in the late eighth century and ending in the eleventh, a warrior civilization emerged among the pagan clans of the farthest northern wildernesses of Europe, and transformed a substantial part of the human race. These were the Vikings, and at the height of their power, their physical presence as traders, explorers and conquerers extended from Baghdad to the eastern seaboard of North America. As their ventures abroad evolved from small scale raids to wars of conquest and settlement, they merged with the populations they overran and birthed entire new peoples: the Normans of northern France, the Russians, and the English.

Before the Viking Age, there was a distinct regional culture in what would later become Scandinavia. First and foremost, the peoples of Denmark, Sweden and Norway were united in a common occult belief system which we would now somewhat inaccurately call a “religion.” But there was not a Scandinavian nation, nor a Swedish, Danish or Norwegian one. These polities weren’t even kingdoms yet. But by the time the Vikings passed from historical view, scattered and absorbed into the various nascent medieval empires of Europe, their homelands were well on their way to becoming what we would come to know as “countries,” as were the foreign lands they had taken for themselves.

The Viking story is one lens through which we can view the emergence of the modern nation-state. It’s a useful heuristic because it was short, discrete and pronounced. The social engines that drove it appear in something like bas-relief against the long and complex background of medieval European history. It is conducive, intellectually, to being reduced to three variables: violence, trade, and religion.

Of the three, violence is perhaps the most fundamental. Indeed, it’s what separated what Western Europeans experienced as the arrival of “the Vikings” from their earlier, long-standing interactions with the people of the North who would come to assume that name. One of the earliest acts of wanton, predatory violence by Norsemen was the pillage and destruction of a monastery on the Holy Island of Lindesfarne off of Northumbria in what is now England. “Behold,” wrote the English cleric Alcuin, “the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.”

The victims of the Viking massacre at Lindesfarne knew the people who had come to kill them. They had traded with them before. Indeed, it was likely from such trading expeditions that the Norsemen had come to know of the wealth to be plundered from the monastery, and its vulnerability to attack.

What accounted for this sudden, radical change of behavior, from peaceful traders to bloodthirsty butchers and robbers? The answer lay in the North, specifically, on the west coast of Norway. A rising new elite was emerging there, whose power was based not on control of land nor on bloodline — they had neither — but on their domination of the seas. They were, essentially, pirates, but their ambitions were reflected in the name the locals gave them: the sea-kings.

Where the kings of the European continent battled one another for control of land and the right to exploit the peasants who worked it, in Scandinavia, where arable land was scarce, an enterprising warrior could find surer and more lucrative prospects by setting sail for one of the many largely undefended settlements of the lands to their west, south, and east.

One might object here that violence was not an end in itself, but a means to another end: the accumulation of treasure. The desire for wealth, not violence, was thus the principal social engine driving the process of state formation. But that would be to ignore what underpinned that hunger for wealth in the first place. The medieval kings were not hedonists, pining after lives of comfort and luxury. That would come later, with the emergence of court society and absolutist rule. Rather, they sought treasure with which to pay their armies, erect fortifications, build ships, purchase weapons and engage in years-long military campaigns.

Wealth, in other words, was the means by which warlords accumulated the capacity for violence, rather than the other way around. Violence, as the ultimate foundation of all forms of power, was the guarantor of the security of one’s kingdom.

This is what drove the expansionism of the Vikings, as it did the expansionism of all of the noble warlords of Europe and the world over. As Norbert Elias describes in The Civilizing Process, the constant state of warfare that the competition between kings necessarily produced yielded the conditions for the consolidation of power in the state. As petty kings won battles, turning rivals into vassals, annexing their fiefs and agglomerating them into the victors’ expanding domains, their realms grew, individually, larger and, collectively, less numerous. A thousand principalities became, over the centuries, hundreds, and then dozens. Finally, a handful of vast territories, each united under one crown, faced each other: Spain, France, England, Denmark, Russia, Austria, Prussia. The machinery of governance advanced within these kingdoms, meeting the ever-more-challenging needs to administer huge and sprawling populations of subjects, to tax them and to raise them into armies. Kingdoms became nation-states.

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But there were other forces at work, too. Murder, rape and plunder weren’t the only activities the Vikings were engaged in. They also wanted to trade.

As far back as the ninth century, the Rus’ — the Vikings of the east who would become the Russian people — traveled as far as Baghdad, which they reached on camelback, to trade. Some of them even spoke Arabic. These far-flung trading routes reflected the imperative of commerce to the Scandinavian economy and political system.

Trade was driven by the same domestic demand that spurred raiding: the material wealth required for political competition among the sea-kings and other elites back home in Scandinavia. And, in fact, the two were so closely related as to be essentially the same activity carried out through different means. Sometimes, trade exposed the Vikings to the targets they would later pillage, as at Lindesfarne, or, on a much bigger scale, Paris. And the fruit of the Vikings’ raids was also their principal trading commodity: slaves.

Trading, raiding, or a combination of the two established Viking colonies throughout Europe that developed into proto-nation-states. One of them was the French province of Normandy; another was the English region of the Danelaw. When the Normans invaded England from the south in 1066, in the same year that the Norwegians invaded it from the northeast, the victory of the former represented the Scandinavian diaspora’s conquest over the one place left in England that the Vikings had failed to defeat and occupy: the kingdom of Wessex.

In the East, too, both trade and violence spread Scandinavian genes and culture alike throughout Europe. “Rus’” is derived from the Old Norse word for “rowers,” and it likely described the Scandinavian traders who rowed down the Baltic coast and onto the rivers that brought them into Ukraine and to the Black Sea, on their way to Constantinople. They both raided and traded on these routes, and eventually settled in points along them, producing a diaspora, just as they did in the realms of the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons. That eastern diaspora merged with the indigenous Slavic population to become Russians and Ukrainians, both of which, as the decades became centuries, evolved into nation-states in their own right, if just tenuously in the latter case.

Trade also brought foreigners to Scandinavia. Indeed, most of the reliable historical records of Viking culture come from outsiders, including Arab Muslims and Jews. Traders also brought to the Vikings the cultural influence — or contagion, depending on where you stand on the matter — of Christianity.

The earliest Christian converts in Sweden were merchants who did business with their counterparts in the Frankish empire. Likewise, the first communities to adopt the new religion were located in trading villages. Alongside them, the Norsemen learned of Christianity from the raiders who brought it back from Christian lands along with the rest of their plunder, and from captured priests and other slaves.

The Scandinavian pagans resisted Christian conversion for three centuries; indeed, their raids of their Christian neighbors can be read in part as a defense against the encroachment of the Carolingian Empire and the strange evangelical faith tied to it. But ultimately, as in Rome, Christianity prevailed because it was useful to the region’s rulers.

For one thing, as in other polytheistic societies, they regarded the Christian God not as a replacement for their traditional deities, but as a powerful addition to them, who could bring them yet more fortune and glory. And Christianity had other things to offer them, foremost, divine sanction of their right to rule, a political blessing that Odin had only ever offered to those who could claim direct descendence from him. It also provided them with a doctrine that empowered them to regulate the everyday lives of the people they governed. And lastly, it afforded them entry into the club of great powers in Europe that, by now, were almost entirely united under the Vatican. Christianity was a new form of power, one that had been shaped over centuries by Christian kings, with the help of the church, to bolster their reign.

Curiously, it was the religious unification of Europe that paved the way for the secular rationalism of the modern nation-state. The primacy the Reformation put on the separation of church and state, in order to break the political power of the Catholic church and afford Protestant dissenters a measure of religious liberty, freed political leaders to govern according to the rational needs of the administrative bureaucracy, without the messiness of doctrinal disputes that had torn the continent apart for more than a millennium. And as Max Weber has taught us, modernity was not possible without bureaucratic rationality; the two are basically synonymous.

The conversion of the Scandinavian rulers, as they transformed themselves into monarchs, spelled the end of the Viking Age. Europe was becoming an entirely new kind of system: one of sovereign countries with defined borders and novel principles of political legitimacy. The Vikings accelerated the development of that system even as they were carried along by its currents. In the end, the transformation was so complete that their distant descendants, from Kiev to Dublin, are barely conscious of the gossamer threads of their common ancestry. Beginning about a half millennium ago, they became new peoples, divided by national boundaries but united in their broad set of values and political philosophies. This was the age of the nation-state, and the birth of its subject, the modern citizen. It is the world that made us.

Recommended reading:

Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price

Dominion by Tom Holland

Feudal Society, Vol. 1 by Marc Bloch

There’s a very good book called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev, about life in Vladmir Putin’s Russia. “The Surreal Heart of the New Russia” is its subtitle, and the stories in it live up to that promise. One of them is about a woman named Yana Yakovleva, a successful entrepreneur who runs a company that sells industrial cleaning chemicals. She lives with her boyfriend, drives a Lexus and works out with a personal trainer. One day, at the gym, she’s arrested by some government agents in cheap suits. She has no idea why. And then, hour by hour, her reality unravels.

Having done nothing illegal, Yana is bewildered by what’s happening to her, but also confident that it’s a mistake that will be sorted out by the courts. With each passing day that assumption becomes more far-fetched. She’s informed that she’s a dangerous drug dealer, because the chemical she has sold legally for a decade has suddenly been deemed a narcotic, even though it isn’t one. She’s transferred from the police station to prison. Days become weeks. With every failed bail hearing, her sentence is extended. She serves seven months, until she is at last found innocent and released.

Behind her arrest were the machinations of bureaucrats. The head of the Russian security agency tasked with drug control was attempting to shake down the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. A tranche of formerly legal chemicals had been re-listed as narcotics. Veterinarians were being imprisoned for having prescribed ketamine to cats. The point was to terrorize the industries into submission to the gangster state.

Those same bureaucratic designs lurked behind her exoneration, too. The head of the agency that had targeted Yana coveted the job of the director of Russia’s premier spy agency, the FSB. The two administrators despised each other. So when the FSB chief heard Yana’s story, he engineered her very public release and exoneration to embarrass his rival.

This is a signature trait of Russian authoritarianism: laws exist as weapons to be wielded by politicians, bureaucrats and oligarchs in their conspiracies against one another. Ordinary Russians are routinely ensnared in these power games, their lives turned inside out for reasons they could never imagine. One day you’re living a normal life, following the rules, keeping your head down, making a living. The next moment you’re a high value target of the state.

David French wrote an insightful piece a few days ago that points to how the United States under Trump is being transformed into a similar regime. He relies on a different analogy — Nazi Germany — but the pattern is the same. Borrowing a concept from a Jewish refugee who taught law at the University of Chicago, French describes what is emerging here today as a “dual state.” The dual state is comprised by the “normative state,” which is the sovereign system of law and order we’re all taught to believe in, and the “prerogative state,” which is the parallel system of hazy and ephemeral laws and procedures that is entirely subordinate to the arbitrary will of those in power.

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One might presume that tyranny depends upon the displacement of the former by the latter, but, in fact, it works best when both operate in tandem. Under a dual state, most of the population live their lives within the ordinary framework of the normative state system. They know they don’t live in a democracy, but they can sustain a more or less normal existence if they keep their disagreements with the government largely to themselves — and don’t, like Yana, have a stroke of terribly bad luck. Things aren’t perfect but they don’t feel dystopian, either. Should they step over an invisible line, however, they will find themselves in a topsy-turvy world in which the familiar old rules become twisted, amorphous and incomprehensible, as if you had accidentally wandered out of the laws of Newtonian physics into the subatomic, quantum realm.

As French points out, we can now dimly perceive the existence of such a line in America today:

(Y)ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. Your killer might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

In Minneapolis, ICE is routinely pulling over American citizens who dare to follow them in their cars, film their activities, and blow whistles to alert neighbors of their presence. And it only takes one of those actions to find yourself face-to-face with the prerogative state. On the New York Times’ Daily podcast today, an activist described having followed an ICE vehicle for about 40 seconds before the agents stopped the car, got out, surrounded her, pepper sprayed her vehicle’s ventilation system, smashed her front windows, pulled her and another activist out, handcuffed and arrested them, just to release them later with no charges. The activists have found themselves operating in a world straddling the two sides of the dual state. It’s entirely unclear what the rules are from one moment to the next: Are you safe if you’re not blocking traffic? From what distance can you follow ICE? Is it ok to film from across the street, where you’re clearly not impeding? Is there even a policy to discern at all, or is it whatever the agent in front of you decides it is at a given moment?

If you’re an American citizen and you keep your nose out of ICE’s business, you can keep living a normal life in Minneapolis — albeit deprived of some of your former political freedoms. But not always. You might get questioned at the bus stop. You might have your door kicked in and be pulled out into the cold in your underwear. The van that takes your kids to school might get pulled over. You might choose to keep your kids home and do online learning, just in case.

Just a few weeks ago, it was pretty clear what counted as constitutionally-protected activity. Documenting law enforcement actions fell squarely in that category. Now it’s contested terrain. Until this month, in Minneapolis, if you were a U.S. citizen, it wouldn’t have crossed your mind to carry your passport with you to the grocery store. Suddenly it’s unclear whether agents are now allowed to stop you randomly and demand your papers. The law may be clear on the matter, but does the written law matter anymore? Minneapolis now exists in a purgatory in which neither regular people nor federal agents know what they are and are not allowed to do. But the agents have guns and badges. By default, they get to decide what the rules are at any given moment.

For those of us outside of Minneapolis, it is, if anything, even more uncertain what rights we still have. Our day-to-day lives still appear to be governed by the normative state. But is that an illusion? When ICE comes to your town, will you suddenly find yourself bargaining with men with guns over what you thought the Constitution guaranteed you? Is it still safe to voice your opinions on social media? Should you start deleting your old tweets and Substack posts? Should you start keeping your head down now, before it’s too late?

The new rules are inscrutable to us, because they’re dictated not by statutes or facts on the ground, but by the whims of sycophantic office holders competing for Trump’s ever-shifting favor. Like Yana’s imprisonment and release, it’s all a show for others. One of the audiences is you: you and your neighbors need to be adequately intimidated in preparation for the day when the White House turns its attention to your state or city. The other audience is the President, who rewards those who humiliate his enemies in ways he can watch on TV.

So you have to just keep licking your finger and putting it up in the air, to see which way the breezes are blowing. You have to guess where the written laws end and the real laws — the ones that are followed in practice — begin. You don’t know quite what you are and are not allowed to do anymore in protest of your government. You can only guess at what you’re still allowed to say. Or you can play it safe, and say nothing at all.

I join my cohost Lee Fang for a podcast discussion around the violent confrontations in Minnesota and what it might mean for America. In short order, we discuss ethnic scapegoating, whether the federal government is truly focused on taxpayer fraud, and why this Trump presidency is fundamentally different from the first administration. Will there be an offramp to the crackdown? And we end with a discussion of Christian ethics and René Girard.

Imagine you’re a conqueror. You’ve just vanquished a horde of barbarians in some faraway land. You want to claim this land as part of your empire and make the barbarians into your laboring subjects. But they have nothing in common with you. They speak a different language, practice a different religion, have entirely alien customs from the civilization that spawned you. What’s more, they’re a freedom-loving people, and they despise you for ruling over them.

You have a massive army currently occupying the land you’ve conquered and with it, you can force your will on the subjugated population. Your soldiers flog anyone who gets out of line and summarily execute anyone accused of a serious crime or act of rebellion. The barbarians are terrorized into submission. But the more you oppress them, the more their hatred of you festers. Small, clandestine acts of rebellion are becoming more frequent rather than less. You’re constantly monitoring your subjects to find out if they’re plotting against you. At any moment, you fear, a serious revolt could erupt.

It’s extremely expensive fielding this large army with its far-flung supply lines, and keeping them stationed here means they’re not out conquering new territory for you. Sometimes you think you’re losing more than you’re gaining from your effort to hold onto this slice of turf. If you’re going to keep it for the long term, you need to find a more efficient way to control the indigenous population. Killing them all is out of the question, because you need them to till your fields and build the city you’ve erected in your name. What you need is for them to choose to obey you. You need them to have a reason to do your bidding without your having to raise the whip.

You try out a few innovations. First of all, you start converting them to your religion. They’re actually quite well-disposed to this, because they see from their own humiliation how much mightier your god is than the ones they’ve traditionally worshipped. They understand that they need to win his favor. So they accept your god as the greatest in their pantheon of deities.

But you also impress upon them that your god is a different kind of god than theirs. He does not demand blood sacrifices or rituals to appease him. Instead, he demands something else: he insists that his followers live their lives according to his moral code. Those who behave in accordance with his rules will be rewarded after their death. Those who fail to will be punished mercilessly in the afterlife.

The barbarians resign themselves to their new circumstances and begin to live according to the rules of their new god. They begin to see that their subjection to your rule is not just a temporary misfortune imposed upon them by the force of your army. It is, in fact, divinely ordained. Even more than that: their obedience to you and your deity is what separates them from other, lesser men who have not yet discovered His awesome power. Those who obey you, his agent on earth, partake in His godliness. Those who do not are little better than beasts.

Now your army can withdraw from the territory. Your subjects will not just accept your rule; they will fight for the opportunity to serve you as warriors, spreading your righteous reign to the uncivilized heathens of the wildernesses beyond. Your rule is sanctioned by the heavens. It is good, and those who submit to it are good, too. Those who refuse to are evil.

Your power has now become legitimate, which is to say, it’s perceived as legitimate by those who submit to it. As long as you sustain that legitimacy, you won’t need to fear rebellion. For that reason, however, rivals will no longer rely on their armies alone to contest your rule. Their principle weapon will be to undermine your legitimacy. Wars of arms fought by soldiers will be preceded by wars of words fought by priests, philosophers, and demagogues. Where once your right to rule was merely a function of the violence you could marshal to back it up, now it is a thing of ideas, beliefs, and arguments. You need not just soldiers, but intellectuals to uphold it.

The German sociologist Max Weber defined three types of “legitimate authority.” There is “charismatic authority,” which is the awesome, other-worldy personal magnetism of a epically great leader: Hitler, Napoleon, Gandhi, Lenin, Muhammad, Jesus Christ. There is “traditional authority,” which is just what it sounds like: the authority derived from the fact that things have always been done that way. And there is “legal-rational authority,” which is rooted in the recognition that a rule was constructed through the proper bureaucratic procedures.

Weber regarded legal-rational authority as the ascendant form of legitimacy in our modern world. It makes intuitive sense: we accept laws not because we agree with them, or because they’re old, or because a great man pronounced them, but because we have a legislative process that reflects our values as a democracy. You might think a law or an administrative policy is wrong, but it was drafted by duly elected representatives or the civil servants they appointed and it was upheld by the relevant courts. If you have an issue with that, the problem is more with you than with the rule. You hear this all the time in response to those who object to Trump’s mass deportation policies.

But to me, it’s too limiting. Because what underlies those very democratic values is something much older than bureaucracy: Christianity.

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Christianity, in a sense, created political legitimacy. Before Christianity there was only power. There were gods, to be sure, but those gods, be they Greek or Roman or pagan, were not moral authorities. They were, rather, magic. They were bringers of good and ill fortune. They were loyal to those who were loyal to them, and loyalty was demonstrated principally through offering the proper blood sacrifices. In return for this tribute, the gods rewarded their followers with victories in war or with abundant harvests, while failure was punished with defeat, crop failure, natural disaster, and epidemic.

With the exception of the God of the Jews, deities tended not to have particularly strong opinions on how their followers led their daily lives. They did not instruct mortals with power on how they should and should not wield it. Those who could do so were free to partake in slavery, rape, infanticide, and torture of their enemies on a level beyond what the modern mind can comprehend. The gods had nothing to say about these behaviors other than perhaps cheering them on as the just desserts for their worshippers’ fealty. To say that they were “wrong” in a pre-Christian era would inspire not so much opposition as confusion and bewilderment, as if you cast moral judgment on the way someone treated their sofa bed. There was simply no conception of the powerless having any essential moral value, let alone “rights.” It was Christianity that brought to humanity the revolutionary idea that every human being had intrinsic value as a beloved child of God. Even more: that the poor and oppressed were closer to god than the rich and powerful.

Without this paradigm shift there would be no conception of democracy as we understand it today. Greece and Rome, to be sure, had their democracies, but they were little more than caste-based oligarchies. Their franchises were restricted to a privileged class of “citizens.” There was no notion that their slaves possessed a value as inherent to them as it was to heroes and kings. Slaves, of course, did not disappear with the arrival Christendom, but from then on, their status existed in awkward tension with the precepts of the religion of their masters. It required justification. In antiquity there was no such cognitive dissonance.

This is a pretty long prelude to a comment on what’s happening today. As I’ve argued before, Trump is not a Christian president, and by that I don’t mean that he doesn’t purport to worship Jesus Christ. By “Christian” I’m referring to the taken-for-granted assumption that almost all of us share that there is an inherent moral equality of all human beings. That belief was once the most revolutionary concept in human history; today it is so ubiquitous it transcends what we ordinarily describe as “faith,” and is shared by people of almost every religion or no religion at all. The French revolutionaries, who burned down churches and executed priests, and the various Communist revolutionaries, who denied the very existence of God, were, ideologically, Christian. They inherited, and, indeed, were the radical expression of the conviction that humans were morally equal, a conviction that did not exist before the Christian doctrine invented it.

The Trump administration does not subscribe to this basic Christian precept. It’s hard to overstate how radical a departure this is from 2,000 years of human history. It’s not that there haven’t been governments far worse. Countless atrocities and even genocides have been carried out by Christian societies, sometimes in the name of Christ. But there were always those who dissented on Christian grounds, from Bartolomé de las Casas railing against the enslavement of indigenous people in the New World to Martin Luther King, Jr. protesting Jim Crow in the American South.

This dissent was something unknown outside of Christendom. There were no ancient Norwegian dissidents protesting Viking atrocities in the name of Odin, because there was no conception of human rights ordained by the Norse gods. But as long as Christianity has existed, so has there been a set of moral principles that even despots have been forced to reckon with. Countless rulers could, and did, violate those principles wholesale, but only at a cost to their legitimacy. Through two millennia of Western civilization, such tyrants tortured logic to align their actions with Christian values, arguing, however unconvincingly, that there were “races” of men who were subhuman and therefore lived outside of the Golden Rule, or that conquering people through violence was the only way to bring them to salvation by wiping away their superstitions and forcing them to embrace Christ’s love. Often these rationales were sanctioned by the Church, but just as often, there were dissenting priests who saw through the charade and said so, citing scripture. Some of them became martyrs, and some of those became saints.

We still live in a Christian era. Betraying Christian morality erodes a government’s political legitimacy today as it has for two millennia. For that reason, those who are protesting Trump could well prevail in the end. But it’s astonishing the extent to which this administration seems to deem itself free from the obligation to offer even a convoluted justification for its actions on Christian grounds. The Bush administration draped itself in the Christian language of liberation from oppression as it invaded and occupied Iraq. The Trump administration is brazenly jacking Venezuelan oil like a bunch of Viking raiders. The rhetoric Trump and his supporters have used to demonize Somali-Americans bears not even a hint of acknowledgement that they share an equal moral standing with everyone else. The operating principle of this administration, made painfully clear by ICE’s antics in Minneapolis, is that the strong will inherit the earth. This was the assumption of the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Vikings, the Magyars and the Saracens — but not of the Christian kings, even the cruelest and unholiest of them. They were compelled to bend the knee, at least performatively, to the Lord’s commands as written in the Gospels.

Such is not the case with this White House. They seem to seek no moral justification at all. Political legitimacy is not a concern of theirs. There is no ethical foundation to their authority, however flimsy or contrived, beyond the mere fact that they were elected. They have legal-rational authority but not even the pretense of obeisance to the hegemonic moral ideology of our time. This is a world largely unknown to us, one in which there is only power, not legitimacy.

I wrote this for the Times of London:

David Velasquez, a former police officer who grew up in Minneapolis, remembers the city of his youth as a quiet place with a lot of trust. “There was a time when you could fall asleep without locking your door, no issue. You could drop your wallet with money in it, somebody would return it to you with the money in it,” he told me. “Now, that doesn’t exist.”

Once known outside of the Midwest for little other than Brett Favre, Kirby Puckett, and A Prairie Home Companion, Minneapolis is now famous for riots, political assassinations, police violence and massive fraud schemes. Last year, I spent a couple of days in the city, interviewing people for a story about Governor Tim Walz’s handling of the 2020 George Floyd riots. Now that Minneapolis is back in the news again, first for a massive Somali fraud scheme and then for an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of a civilian, I asked some of those same people what happened to their city. How did it go from “Minnesota nice” to perhaps the most politically polarized city in America?

Reverend Jerry McAffee, an African American pastor at Minneapolis’s new Salem Missionary Baptist Church, told me that Minneapolis has long been a city in which tension brews just inches beneath the surface, like Los Angeles in the 1990s. “It just flares up big at times,” he told me, when its short fuse is ignited.

Read the rest at Times of London.

I’ll have more to say on the military attack on Venezuela in the near future, but for now I just want to re-up this piece I wrote last March, which is freshly relevant.

There are a lot of self-styled realists sneering at those who criticize the intervention on legal grounds, rolling their eyes at the fantasy of a “rules-based international order” that clearly no longer exists. While they’re right to recognize the fiction of international law, it may be those who welcome a world without such delusions who are the naive ones. The rules that protect sovereignty and place legal limitations on war have always been aspirational, but the abandonment of that aspiration is not a trivial matter. It marks a transition into a darker world, one that has characterized most of human history, but that those of us who are alive today and living in the First World have only begun to experience.

Shortly before Christmas, at the Turning Point USA convention in Phoenix, I spoke to a young conservative Christian about Israel’s war in Gaza. As I reported in UnHerd, he described how it had undermined his confidence in the MAGA agenda. Since Zoomers like him were getting so much of their news from TikTok and Instagram, he told me, they were seeing the carnage of the Palestinian population unfiltered. The atrocities they saw on their screen stood in tortured juxtaposition to the speeches they heard from politicians about the fundamental goodness of the state of Israel. That contradiction, in turn, appeared as a naked repudiation of the America First principles many of those politicians purported to uphold.

The sentiment echoed what Tucker Carlson had said on stage the night before. Carlson had spoken without equivocation about the immorality of “killing tens of thousands of children,” and how wrong the U.S. government was to support the army that had done it. Carlson, like most of the convention’s attendees, is Christian. The matter is as ethically straightforward to him as Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes. The chaotic history of the region, the dueling religious claims, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and the vilification of Palestinians could not obscure this plain moral fact. “Killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” he said, “and you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.”

Carlson isn’t the only former Trump cheerleader to see it this way. “I’m not for their foreign wars. I won’t say, ‘Kill everybody in Gaza,’” Marjorie Taylor Greene told a New York Times reporter for a recent story on her break with Trump. Greene has called Israel’s war a genocide.

Like Carlson, Greene is a Christian. The world, to her, is fundamentally a battleground of good and evil. Green’s falling out with the President has largely been over issues with the most basic fault lines between right and wrong, the kinds a child could recognize: genocide, the corrupting influence of tech oligarchs, and the cover-up of an international sex trafficking ring of minors.

Millions of Christian conservatives supported Trump because he was the tool available to them to enact their policy agenda, especially around abortion. They did not mistake him for one of their own. During his first term, liberals regarded the political movement around Trump as a cult of personality, just as conservatives had viewed the movement around Obama before him. But it was never so simple in either case. The coalition around Trump was forged in resentment of liberal elitism, distrust of the political establishment, conventional Republican politicking, the transactional support of corporate lobbies, and other factors. It held together as long as the President delivered for those various constituencies.

But Trump has never been a coalition-builder. He’s a political opportunist with sharp instincts for demagoguery. It should surprise no one that he has failed to juggle the competing demands of his variegated base. He doesn’t care to, because he regards their loyalty as his entitlement rather than something he’s obliged to earn. But their love is not unconditional.

Trump has done almost nothing to fulfill his promises to American workers. His tariffs have inflicted economic pain on Americans without any obvious reward. His policy toward the only major economic engine in the country, Artificial Intelligence, has been to let the tech oligarchs have everything they ask for and to try to constrain states from implementing regulations that could mitigate its job-destroying potential. Even his draconian deportation policy has been watered down by concessions to favored industries like tech, such as his proposal to sell H1-B visas for $100,000 apiece.

Likewise, his populist pretenses have been spectacularly belied by his attention to such concerns as building a White House ballroom and installing marble armrests at a Kennedy Center newly renamed after himself. His callousness has approached Marie Antoinette levels. Even after making the conscious decision to refocus attention on the economic struggles of Americans, he couldn’t stop himself from declaring the issue of affordability a Democratic hoax.

A more calculating politician could perhaps have compensated for this abandonment of key parts of his base with the political benefits derived from the powerful new allies he sold them out for. Obama’s presidency, which saw his transformation from a pitchfork-wielding rabble rouser to celebrity darling of the cultural establishment, was a master class in just such an exchange. But Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen and David Sacks and Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are not popular figures even among elites, and the economic value they create, while dazzling, does not feel as indispensable to the workings of the real American economy as, for instance, financial services do. Politically, they have little more to offer Trump than money.

Whatever moral advantage Trump once enjoyed over his rivals was a function of his brazen rejection of their pieties and his gift for exposing them as hypocrites. But as progressives have lost their hegemonic grasp on both our politics and our culture, the catharsis he once provided by humiliating them has diminished accordingly. Where he was once a moral anti-hero, he has become a conventional villain. He speaks for no one but himself and the interests he serves are boring and profane. He inspires little more excitement than the politicians like Mitt Romney whom he once lampooned. But Romney at least had the earnestness of his faith to offset his drab corporate slavishness. Trump lacks even that. He can summon nothing to demonstrate that his political horizons extend beyond his personal resentments, his appetite for self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, and his horniness for power.

Men used to worship figures like Trump — deities who were, among other things, petty, mischievous, devious and self-interested. These were the Greek and Roman gods of a pre-Christian era. They dwelled in the muck of politics and intrigue, they served parochial interests, and they commanded obedience through the force of fear, not example. They were powerful for a time, but the civilizations they ruled over eventually became disenchanted with them. They were supplanted by a Judeo-Christian God who spoke in the language of moral principle and divided the universe into right and wrong. People learned to have a code, and to assess their leaders against it. From thence forward, the most powerful kings in the world had at least to pretend to submit themselves to that code. Their legitimacy depended on it.

Trump is a pagan hero in a Christian world. He has no authority to differentiate between what is right or wrong, only between what serves his purposes and what stands in their way. A figure like this can achieve a great deal, but in time even his most devoted followers see through him. He can create no greater meaning in their lives. He stands for less and less and eventually for nothing. There is no ground beneath his feet. There is only empty space.