The Democratic minimum

Minneapolis is under siege from Donald Trump’s personal paramilitary force, as this editorial from the usually staid (average readership age: 81) Minneapolis Star-Tribune makes clear:

Minnesota has endured unrest before. What the state is now experiencing looks and feels different. Battalions of armed federal agents are moving through neighborhoods, transit hubs, malls and parking lots and staging near churches, mosques and schools. Strangers with guns have metastasized in spaces where daily life should be routine and safe. It feels like a military occupation.

Heavily armed and masked government agents are prone to confront any American they encounter in the street but especially people of certain colors, accents or styles of dress. The encounters are often violent. The federal agents operating under the insignia of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security, functioning largely anonymously, have disrupted the life of large swaths of a state.

The occupation of Minnesota by ICE cannot stand.

In December, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced what the administration labeled “Operation Metro Surge,” describing it as an effort to expose corruption tied to Minnesota’s documented welfare fraud scandal. “We will arrest the criminal illegal aliens hurting Americans,” she said, promising accountability for anyone who “aided and abetted” that criminality.

That is not what Minnesotans are currently experiencing. What we are witnessing is the storming of the state by the federal government.

Fraud investigation and immigration enforcement in Minnesota have become a pretext for a sweeping federal show of force that bears little relationship to the problem it claims to address. It is indiscriminate. Noncitizen immigrants without legal status make up roughly 1.5% of Minnesota’s population — less than half the national average. Nothing about that figure justifies the scale, posture or tactics now widely deployed.

Immigration enforcement in the U.S. is not going away, nor should it. But enforcement carried out without restraint, transparency or proportionality does not strengthen the rule of law. It corrodes it.

The fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good, an American citizen and Minneapolis resident, by an ICE agent on Jan. 7 brought into brutal focus what many communities had already been experiencing: an enforcement strategy that erodes trust and often puts innocent people and lawful protesters in extreme danger. Her death was not an abstraction, nor was it unpredictable. It was the foreseeable outcome of government overreach that seems to prioritize volume and spectacle over judgment and care.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara captured the current angst roiling Minneapolis and much of the state. In an interview with the New York Times, he warned that the behavior of federal agents has undermined the fragile public trust his department has worked tirelessly to rebuild since 2020. “It’s not necessarily about which laws are being enforced,” O’Hara said. “It’s about how that enforcement is happening.

Trump is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act if people in the Twin Cities keep “attacking” — meaning observing and protesting the actions of — ICE agents.

The Biden administration, for all its accomplishments and admirable characteristics, suffered from Merrick Garland Syndrome — a condition which eventually proved fatal to itself, and has helped put liberal democracy in the emergency room one year later.

This is the absolute minimum for the next Democratic administration:

The arrest and imprisonment pending trial of Donald Trump.

The arrest and imprisonment pending trial of all major law enforcement officials in the Trump administration, including Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, and their various minions.

The arrest and imprisonment pending trial of Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Russell Vought.

To say there is probable cause to arrest these people for many various forms of grotesque illegality and abuse of the powers of government is a wild understatement. This is what would happen immediately in any governmental system that was actually trying to preserve and protect itself. It’s what should have happened on January 21st, 2021 to Donald Trump and the other fomenters of the temporarily failed coup, which has, because of the failure to prosecute that coup, become a successful one five years later.

In order to make all this stick, several other things have to happen, beginning with the elimination of the filibuster in order to expand the Supreme Court immediately. I can’t emphasize enough how critical this piece of the equation is. Any attempts by John Roberts & the Furious Five to stop this should be met with the response that John Roberts has issued his opinion, now let him enforce it.

These are just the very first steps in a long process. Statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico is very high on the list of other critical reforms that are nearly as exigent. The destruction of the plutocratic conspiracy to take over the media is right up there as well. It should go without saying that the first step is to win the very few remaining number of free national elections, which may well be zero but obviously that can’t be assumed. But if the reaction to winning an election is to pretend none of this has happened and is happening, then winning elections is ultimately pointless, because very soon there won’t be any. It may already be too late. But the point is that at some point soon it definitely WILL BE too late. Nobody in the Democratic leadership shows the slightest hint of understanding this. People like AOC do but they remain far from formal positions of real power.

The only way any of this can actually happen is if the Democratic party is led by people who recognize that the Republican party has become a fascist party, in the precise historical meaning of that phrase, only slightly disguised for 21st century American cultural conditions. A fascist party is not something that’s compatible with liberal democracy by definition. Tolerating it is ultimately an act of suicide by a liberal democracy, as we are seeing now on a daily and nightly basis.

I don’t know what the odds of this kind of epiphany are, but that’s irrelevant to its necessity. Unless and until that happens, we will simply move further along a path that will result eventually in no more elections, no more legal protest, and no important media that are not creatures of the state, even more explicitly than for example Bari Weiss’s CBS News has become after it was bought by David Ellison in order to transform it into such a thing (see above list for relevant action items). We will be indistinguishable from present-day Russia in other words.

I do know that every day that passes without this happening is one day less in a very finite number of such days that remain for what needs to happen to happen, before the alternatives to fascism become purely outside the electoral and legal processes in this country.