The Neo-Confederate Takeover

The real invasion isn't immigration. It's red states sending their troops to take over blue ones.

Photo by Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries on Unsplash

The Trump administration has dispatched federal forces to Washington, DC to deal with the city’s alleged crime problem (more on that below). This is already a stunning overreach. But now, various red states are sending their National Guard troops to DC, too. Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina are all deploying soldiers to help take over an American city.

We should see this as what it is: the first stage of a soft takeover by the neo-Confederacy.

A president deploying the National Guard against the wishes of the state (or in DC’s case, city) authorities is rare. During natural disasters, a state governor might request National Guard help. In a few rare instances, states that have refused to follow the law have seen the National Guard deployed — for example, to escort the Little Rock Nine into their classroom. In other shameful instances, National Guard troops have been dispatched to quell protests, sometimes with bloody results — the Kent State massacre is the most obvious example.

What Trump is doing in DC is none of this. He isn’t quelling a riot. He’s not even dispatching soldiers to ensure that DC follows the law. He is simply making a show of force in order to buttress his narrative that liberal cities are crime-ridden hellholes, places deserving the discipline a Big Daddy Strongman can impose. This is the promise of the authoritarian, and it’s why authoritarian regimes often enjoy significant support, at least in the beginning: They promise to protect you from them — from those bad guys over there, from those people who don’t share your political views.

There is a lot of projection from the American right. After years of whining that The Left was imposing the scourge of wokeness on the nation, now that conservatives are in power, they are using the apparatuses of the state to impose their own vision, and it’s not limited to being annoying on Twitter. They’re banning books. They’re sending out masked agents to round people up and deport them without due process of law. And they are sending troops to liberal cities to force those cities to do their bidding. So much for small government, for free speech, and for freedom.

There is little reason to believe that the armed takeover of American cities will end with Washington, DC. Trump has claimed that many of the US’s largest liberal cities are so crime-ridden that the feds have to step in. But if DC is any indication, the troops dispatched by Trump aren’t actually fighting crime, they’re just making a big show out of dominance and humiliation. That is the point: It’s a signal to conservatives that their fears of and hostility to liberal people and liberal places are justified, and a signal to liberals that we are not part of Trump’s Real America — that we will be forced to submit.

This is all incredibly ugly and incredibly terrifying.

America is not in the midst of a civil war, and we should all hope that we never see another one. Treating liberal cities and liberal states like enemy entities rather than places with different cultures and philosophies than conservative ones is exactly what tears at a nation’s connective tissue. The US is an extraordinary place because we have managed to stitch together a single nation of radically different places and cultures and sub-cultures, and not only has it worked, but it has functioned for at least the few decades since the Civil Rights Act as a democratic place. It has often been uncomfortable and frustrating, I would argue for liberals and leftists much more than for conservatives. But we have functioned and coexisted.

Trumpism threatens this very basic Americanness by opting to attempt to dominate and humiliate liberals. He’s not just imposing conservative policies that liberals don’t like, or fighting against liberal aims. He is quite literally saying that liberals and the institutions we value — higher education, the news media — are enemies of the people. That we aren’t just un-American, we are anti-American to the point of, perhaps, not being truly American at all. In his telling and that of his far-right supporters, there is no room for compromise or mutual respect. There is only total domination demanding total submission, the way a conquering army might wipe out entire populations.

Trump is sending in his conquering armies. This is a soft launch — the National Guard is not conquering DC right now. But I strongly suspect this is the first step in a much uglier and more aggressive plan.

The response from progressives has also been… not great. “Crime in DC isn’t that bad!” or “I always feel safe here!” or “homicides are going down” is not a good response when crime in DC is actually objectively bad. But that’s because crime in the US is really bad compared to our economic peer countries. And why is crime in DC, and in the US as a whole, so bad? There are a bunch of factors, including the fact that we don’t take care of our population nearly as well as many other nations do, leaving scores of people struggling with addiction, illness, homelessness, and whatnot. But the single biggest factor is guns. We are a nation awash in deadly weapons, and it turns out that deadly weapons cause death. When you have a lot of them, you have a lot of death — and injury and instability and threats and fear. It should not surprise us that the American cities with the highest homicide rates are in red states. Even when these cities are run by Democrats, there is virtually nothing a city can do to regulate guns when the state imposes few restrictions on firearms.

If conservatives want to see homicide rates plummet, and crime rates in general decrease, the most efficient and effective solution would be to strictly regulate guns. But they don’t want to do that. So they send in more people with guns to brutalize their fellow citizens.

The second Trump administration has been even more aggressive and dangerous than the first, and it’s hard to keep up given the sheer scale of wrongdoing. But this invasion of DC by the feds and by pro-Trump conservative states is very, very bad — and I badly hope I am wrong, but it seems like it’s just a tiny preview of what’s to come.

xx Jill