“You cannot have despotism for some and freedom for others”

Jamelle Bouie [gift link] puts the Trump administration’s assertions of unchecked power to detain people to lifetime imprisonment in torture prisons — including the vice president using a massive lie to justify a claim that due process does not apply if it is inconvenient for the ambitions of the state, a repudiation of the foundations of American constitutionalism and Anglo-American law more broadly — in historical context:

What does the antebellum kidnapping and sale of free Black Americans to slavery mean for us in the present? How does it relate to the president’s seizure and rendition of immigrants — and soon, perhaps, citizens — to a brutal foreign prison from which Trump has all but said they will not emerge?

Beyond the obvious parallels and similarities, the example of free Black Americans illustrates an important principle of political life. The question of who has rights — and of whose rights are to be respected — is inseparable from our treatment of those on the margins of political life. The mere existence of a group of nonpersons threatens the freedom of those who live within the scope of concern, however far from the center they might be.

Free Black people could not escape slavery. Nor, for that matter, could whites, whose rights to speak freely and gather as they pleased were threatened by the political power of slave owners, who had grown accustomed to dominating others as a way of life. The status of all Americans was, in truth, threatened by the existence of a class of people whose rights could be arbitrarily stripped from them, if they even had rights to begin with.

You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society. This was true of the slave system, where the large majority of people lived in conditions of servitude; it was true of the Jim Crow South, where economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement were the rule for Black and white Americans; and it will be true of our time for as long as we continue on the current path.

As of this writing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance, but about half approve of his handling of immigration and support his program of deportations. It is hard to know exactly what this means. Americans might believe the White House when it says that the only people affected by the immigration crackdown are people who have broken the law in one way or another — criminals who don’t deserve our sympathy. Americans might be unmoved by the fact that unauthorized entry is only a civil offense, or that most of the people renditioned by the administration have not been convicted of any crime.

Any American who looks at the president’s actions and nods his head in approval is sacrificing his freedom whether he realizes it or not. To allow Trump the authority to seize and disappear immigrants at will is to close the curtain on democracy for citizens, too. You cannot have despotism for some and freedom for others.

This is a major inflection point for the country, which happened in part because of a failure of too many voters to take things seriously in 2024.