I’ve long had a morbid fascination with totalitarian states, starting with a major in Soviet Studies back in college. I immersed myself in the Orwellian mechanics of Stalin’s four-decade reign of terror, and I’ve been a student of autocracies, kleptocracies, theocracies, and hypocrisies ever since. I will eagerly engage in any conversation about Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, or Muammar Khadaffi, even if I don’t know what I’m talking about.
One thing they all had in common was the prioritization of loyalty over ability. The people charged with carrying out the regime’s agenda inevitably lurched their way into remarkable inefficiencies and dysfunction, which, in almost every case, culminated in the collapse of the regime itself. Not that they didn’t do cataclysmic damage in the meantime.
Of course, I was fortunate to be studying these rogues from a distance, and the thought of actually living under one of them was, until recently, the furthest thing from my mind. So while I’m horrified and appalled at the possible contours of this new American reality, I also understand that very little of it is new, and nothing about it will be a slam dunk for our would-be tormentors.
I believe I have a fair sense of the slippery slope we’re now on, and going forward I intend to share the dimensions of that slope with anyone caring to read about it. It won’t be pleasant reading, but it won’t be all doom and gloom either. I will try to look on the bright side wherever possible.
I feel I should mention the obvious here, which is that nothing has happened yet. Everything between now and January 21 is pure speculation, fueled by media whores and bad actors of every stripe. It’s all designed to scare us into submission, and we’d do well to listen with our BS detectors on full alert.
But if there’s one big, overarching bright side we can look on, it’s the grandiose scope of the MAGA agenda, and the chronic ineptitude of those charged with carrying it out.
These people may be good at talking the talk, but most of them can’t even limp the limp. Their skill sets are long on cruelty, sucking up, and punching down, while short on intellect, basic competence, and the ability to play well with others. These are not qualities that scale well.
If they really intend to accomplish even a fraction of the things they’ve said they want, they will need huge effort from hacks and frauds who are ill-equipped to provide it. The sheer magnitude of the schemes being bandied about will assure that people far smarter than they will throw every sort of obstacle — legal, administrative, financial, logistical, and, yes, moral — in their path. How they deal with these obstacles will show us how serious they are about the whole police-state thing.
A case in point would be immigration, specifically Stephen Miller’s plan to arrest, detain, and deport millions of immigrants he deems illegal.
While the inhumanity and utter depravity of this very idea has received breathless media coverage, the superhuman exertion needed to achieve it has not.
Not that Miller won’t try. There are now, as we speak, private prison companies anticipating major government contracts to build a network of “detention facilities” — a/k/a concentration camps — all over the country. These companies have long done business under the radar, with minimal scrutiny from either the government or the media. This is about to change.
Everything they do from now on will be under a microscope, and what gets exposed will not be attractive. Even if they weren’t relying on promises from Donald Trump — whose word is not exactly his bond — the logistics alone would be formidable.
Take, say, Florida. If there really are two million “illegals” there, and if, as Miller promises, they’re all to be deported, then he needs to be able to confine tens of thousands of detainees at a time, pending their deportation. Which means he’ll need a vast infrastructure of such facilities, where people who’ve been rounded up by ICE can be held until their deportation can be “processed,” often to countries that are not inclined to accept them.
They will be doing this in the full glare of public outrage, with atrocities in the news every day. It will be a test, not just of their ability to achieve what they set out to do, but also of how much they can cow the media into looking the other way. We’ll get to see which media outlets step up, and which will choose to obey the new administration in advance. It will be a learning experience for everyone.
It’s worth remembering that the removal of two million workers from the Florida economy would devastate both the construction and agriculture sectors, with ripple effects stretching to much of the world. Consumers may not connect their own hardships to MAGA cruelty, but they will feel those hardships nonetheless. When every migrant citrus-picker has been deported — when the middle class is priced out of the orange juice market — even Republicans will feel the effects.
Which will bring up questions of just how far down the totalitarian road they’re prepared to go. Because I have no doubt that Stephen Miller knows exactly what he wants to do with all those people awaiting deportation, people he knows he’ll have to house, clothe, and feed, maybe indefinitely.
As the optics of outright extermination would be problematic even for him, he’ll probably want to make them earn their keep. He’ll try to rent them out, pennies on the dollar, to the same farms and construction projects they worked on before. This time they’ll work for room and board alone, actual wages being an affectation of the woke left.
Can Miller pull this off? Besides the obvious public relations problem, he’s looking at enormous expenditures, which will have to come from somewhere. And with Elon Musk publicly vowing to cut two trillion from the federal budget — another monumental undertaking, which we need not discuss now — we’re sure to see some epic squabbles over resources, some of which would be entertaining, were they not so fraught.
The point here is not to minimize the horrendous human-rights implications of detaining so many people in such a cruel way. It’s rather that the sheer scale of the project will subject it to huge costs, stunning incompetence, a lavish array of unintended consequences, and the real risk of failure.
I understand that I may be way off, that I could be surprised at the speed and efficiency with which these fascists decimate our laws and institutions. But every one of Trump’s grotesque promises to his base — which have never once been either consistent or coherent — has obscured the fact that his lackeys have no idea how to run anything, let alone the world’s biggest and most complex government. If their only agenda is slash-and-burn, I think they’ll face more pushback, even from Republicans, than they seem prepared for.
It’s hard to gauge any group’s capacity for evil, and the Millers and Musks do seem amply endowed in that regard. But it would be a mistake to confuse the capacity for evil with the ability to carry it out.
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