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IT’S NOT GOVERNMENT THEY DON’T LIKE  
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Jamelle Bouie
October 8, 2025
New York TImes
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_ Like the slave owners, the MAGA movement and its allies are opposed
only to those aspects of government that they can’t wield against
their enemies. They will happily enlarge the scope of federal
authority beyond the limits of our Constitution. _

, Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

 

One way to look at much of the second Trump administration is that it
is a recapitulation of some of the worst episodes in the history of
the United States.

The president’s crusade against diversity programs — his efforts
to purge the federal government, private businesses and elite
universities of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — is
reminiscent of the second Red Scare, the postwar effort to banish and
blacklist Americans with left-wing views from positions of authority
and influence in and outside government. It’s not that D.E.I. is
left wing but that the president views it as a pernicious and
dangerous ideology to be rooted out by every available means,
including targeting those thought to represent the drive for greater
diversity in our institutions. You could also see the push to punish
private citizens who refused to indulge the state’s official
narrative of the life of Charlie Kirk as another moment with parallels
to the Red Scare.

The president’s mass deportation program — spearheaded by the
masked men and women of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is, by
his admission, an indirect callback
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President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, a militarized
campaign of intimidation and harassment aimed at the millions of
Mexican immigrants who had entered the United States, many of them
legally. Then, as now, federal agents crowded immigrants, legal and
illegal, onto buses and planes for quick removal from the United
States. Then, as now, all of this is marked by the unmistakable scent
of racism.

And the immigration raids themselves, such as the one in Chicago where
federal agents detained citizens, including children, for questioning,
are reminiscent of the Palmer raids under President Woodrow Wilson
during the first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920. The raids, ordered by
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, saw federal agents sweep through
cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, where they made
warrantless arrests of thousands of suspected radicals, many of them
recent immigrants. Hundreds were detained in makeshift camps with
abysmal conditions. At one such location, the historian Beverly Gage
observes in her biography of J. Edgar Hoover, who was involved in
planning the raids, 600 men were “jammed into barracks planned for
300, with no heat and dwindling food.” At another, “800 prisoners
had been stuffed into a windowless corridor with only one working
bathroom and no beds.”

I mention these antecedents because yet another came to mind while I
was observing the president’s latest actions.

On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, with the backing of the White
House, announced that members of the Texas National Guard would be
sent to assist federal operations in Chicago and Portland, Ore. Both
cities stand as bugbears for the far right in general and for
President Trump in particular. Portland, to Trump, is a shorthand for
“antifa,” which, to his mind, seems to be the primary domestic
terrorist threat facing the United States. And in the right-wing
imagination, Chicago has long been a byword for crime and violence.

As Trump describes it, both cities are in the grip of anarchy and
destruction. Portland is “burning to the ground,” he says, with
“insurrectionists all over the place.” Chicago, he asserts, is
“like a war zone.”

“You can go to Afghanistan, you can go to a lot of different places,
and they probably marvel at how much crime we have,” Trump said.
This is a fantasy, easily disproved by walking outside in either city.
If anything, beyond the issue of street crime, what chaos and disorder
there is in Portland or Chicago has more to do with the lawless
behavior of federal officers with ICE and Customs and Border
Protection than it does with any resident on the streets.

On Saturday, Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for the
District of Oregon blocked the president’s efforts to federalize and
deploy the National Guard to Portland. “This is a nation of
constitutional law, not martial law,” she wrote. Undeterred, the
White House has sent the Texas troops to occupy Chicago, under the
familiar pretext of quelling violence and mayhem. Trump also floated
use of the Insurrection Act to circumvent any opposition from state
and local leaders. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people
were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors
were holding us up,” he said. For his part, Gov. JB Pritzker of
Illinois has called this what it is, an “unconstitutional
invasion.”

“Their plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use
that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power,” Pritzker
said. Although there are no doubt clever lawyers skilled enough to
spin some logically plausible argument that the president’s actions
are aboveboard, both history and the Constitution say otherwise. As
the legal scholar Stephen I. Vladeck wrote in a guest essay for Times
Opinion
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“Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based
on facts that they contrive? The text of the relevant statutes
doesn’t answer that question. But our constitutional ideals, to say
nothing of common sense, should — and the answer must be no.”

Here I will say that this effort to use the military against American
citizens — an effort backed, it seems, by almost the entire
Republican Party — makes a mockery of the longstanding conservative
claim that theirs is a movement of small government and states’
rights. Trump’s push to invade cities using the National Guard is as
aggressive a use of federal power as one can imagine. And as we think
about antecedents to this administration, this episode is structurally
similar to the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which
required the citizens and officials of Northern free states to act as
slave catchers against their will and often against the laws of the
states in which they lived.

The Lost Cause cliché about the Civil War is that it was fought to
settle the question of states’ rights. We know that for the seceding
states, this was false. They were less concerned with states’ rights
than with their so-called right to preserve and extend slavery.
What’s lost in this conception of the war, however, is that
states’ rights were a real concern — for the North.

In the two decades preceding the 1860 secession crisis, Northern
legislatures had lost much of their power to keep the institution of
slavery out of their states. First, in 1842, the Supreme Court
invalidated a set of Pennsylvania laws that, it said,
unconstitutionally interfered with a slave owner’s right to retrieve
a fugitive slave; then, in 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave
Act that all but required the residents of Northern states to assist
slave catchers. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri
Compromise of 1820 and raised the specter of slavery’s return to the
North, and the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v.
Sandford allowed slave owners to retain slave property in free states.
This led many Northerners to fear that the court, backed by slave
interests in the national government, would soon force free states to
accept the legality of slavery within their borders.

After the war, Southern reactionaries cried “states’ rights.”
But before the war, they eagerly used federal power for their own
ends, curbing and crushing the rights of those Americans who opposed
them. They were happy to wield the heavy hand of the state in defense
of their interests and more than willing to use Congress, the courts
and the presidency to impose their vision on the public as a whole.

Again, in 2025, the national government is in the grip of determined
reactionaries. And again, we see that their commitment to small
government is merely rhetorical. It is not small government to abuse
and misuse the National Guard to invade the cities led by your
political opponents. It is not small government to send roving bands
of masked agents across the nation to intimidate and harass the people
you’ve deemed to be outside the political community. It is not small
government to turn the federal law enforcement apparatus into a
machine for the persecution of your political opponents.

The reason this antebellum battle over slavery and the scope of
federal power is a useful antecedent to the Trump administration is
that, like the slave owners and their minions, the MAGA movement and
its allies are opposed only to those aspects of government that they
can’t wield against their political enemies. They will happily
enlarge the scope of federal authority beyond the limits of our
Constitution so that they can subject the country to nakedly
authoritarian rule.

To recognize this dynamic is to see something important. Consistency
is worthwhile only inasmuch as it is useful. Trump and his allies will
use whatever political approach is necessary to achieve their goals.
As their opponents contemplate a response, they should take this as a
lesson.

_[xxxxxx moderator: Also of interest from the New York Times -- Zora
Neale Hurston's Play Comes Alive for the First Time, by Salamishah
Tillet.
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"SPUNK," a fable weaving together music and movement, is getting its
first full staging since being rediscovered in 1997.]_

_JAMELLE ANTOINE BOUIE is an American columnist for The New York
Times. He was formerly chief political correspondent for Slate. In
2019, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, David Uberti called
Bouie "one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the
Trump era."_

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
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* Donald Trump
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* DEI
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* mass deportation
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* Presidential powers
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* Military
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* Fugitive Slave Law
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* states rights
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