Immigration, Fascism, And The Politics Of The American Creed

We have to protect what's best about America from ALL threats, not just the easiest scapegoats.

(Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The violent federal occupation of Minneapolis is, to a large degree, a catastrophic success of governance by propaganda.

It started with an influencer. A young Republican of low character named Nick Shirley, vying to be the next James O’Keefe, happened upon an old, still-unfolding story about social services fraud in Minnesota’s Somali diaspora, and pretended as though he’d blown the case wide open. The rest of the party smelled opportunity. Instead of responding to facts—that the issue was being addressed professionally; that people had been brought to justice over several years, with more prosecutions to come—the federal administration decided to collectively punish the whole community. It became the pretext to invade an American city. Until, of course, it turned into a quagmire for Donald Trump, and he lost control of his own initiative—including the fraud scandal itself. His tyrannical tactics drove several prosecutors out of the U.S. Attorney’s office there, among them the man who actually had blown the case wide open.

Democrats up and down the party—political and policy hands alike—have found the sequence of events both infuriating and baffling. They weren’t turning a blind eye to fraud—they were reining in the fraud. Those prosecutions began under Joe Biden, not Donald Trump. Investigators uncovered theft on the scale of billions of dollars and were on their way to finding more, and all it took was one pipsqueak YouTuber to invert the factual record in the public’s imagination.

It’s only in hindsight that we can identify the shortcomings of the Democrats’ by-the-book approach to this enforcement action. I do a lot of backseat driving, particularly when I see or anticipate Democrats making errors in real time. This is not like that. This was not easily foreseeable. But now that it’s transpired, we can use it to better prepare for the future.

It would be nice if both major political parties in the U.S. still shared broadly liberal assumptions about the world and fought along the margins: Democrats for broad-based social programs, Republicans for more red tape and policing, modest swings between models of caring for people in need. It would be nice if progressive politics in America could be humdrum. If a state like Minnesota could experiment with a more generous approach to social welfare, and deal with any additional swindlers in a methodical and low-key manner, without becoming a scapegoat and cautionary tale for the whole country.

But nativists and greedy men have at least as large a say as we do over our political discourse, and thus over how we should understand our governing obligations. They simply will exploit stories about black immigrants defrauding welfare programs to ensure we have fewer immigrants and less welfare. And so people who care about both welfare and immigrant communities are compelled to make a bigger public show of caring about the integrity of both.

This is an uncomfortable inference for many of us to the left of center. It implies that, to preserve our open society, humane and liberal-minded people have to carry ourselves in a more severe and demonstrative manner, and do so for the purposes of, e.g., policing fraud in public services, or jailing or deporting immigrants who choose to bilk the system. Even though we know the specter of welfare fraud is a right-wing cudgel. Even though we know immigrants are more law-abiding and economically productive than their native peers. Even though the imperative right now is to tear down the country’s main immigration-enforcement agency.

But the tradeoff is that we then get to wield our own cudgel, against homegrown Americans who make a mockery of the national creed.

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There’s a defensive and offensive reason to adopt a more accountability-minded approach to both welfare-state liberalism and immigration enforcement.

The defensive reason is the one I gestured toward above: If liberals don’t distinguish themselves as strict rule followers on each of these fronts, Republicans will. Or they will pretend to. They will comb the earth for every instance of nonwhite welfare fraud they can uncover, and use their findings to scapegoat immigrants and welfare recipients alike. If they’re able to constrain themselves enough to avoid Trump-like overreach, they’ll eventually turn majorities of the country against both.

Advertising success in rooting out rare instances of fraud is an icky, but low-effort way to neutralize that kind of opportunism. Indeed, advertising success in solving rare crimes is politically cunning in general. Donald Trump has hollowed out and corrupted the Justice Department. By any measure it’s the most incompetent version of itself we’ve seen in our lifetimes. He did this by choice, and to his political detriment. Nevertheless he and his loyalists are always on the lookout for opportunities to cover this shambolic operation in unearned glory. These guys understand the power of showmanship.

That’s the defensive purpose.

The offensive purpose is to lay sole political claim to the country’s best expression of itself: That Americans are by-and-large empathetic people who self-govern by reason and a rule of law that binds everyone equally. We’ve taken it for granted to a near-fatal extent, but in the context of human history, we’ve hit upon the most radical and effective recipe for spreading freedom as far as possible: be a creedal nation, with rights that inhere to individuals.

For this to work, though, it must be paired with non-infinite tolerance for those who’d exploit the creed but never live by it. If you take advantage of our empathy, whether it’s to steal public money or deny life or liberty to others, you will be made example of.

How we adjudicate these kinds of offenses must of necessity vary by case. Most crimes are committed by birthright citizens. Sometimes people who hope to become citizens steal bread to feed their families. We can sort between them with existing democratic and judicial processes. The point must be to distinguish between those who honor and dishonor the creed, and ostracize the latter. Not because some formula said so, but because that kind of behavior poses existential risk to the American experiment. We don’t get to make public opinion alone. People who would feign the creed to exploit the country’s generosity may be interlopers, but they also poison the well of democratic stability. They help elect fascists who then put all immigrants in their sights. It might not be fair or seemly that the right stirs in the poison with calumnies and agitprop, but it is so. We can’t wish it away.

But here’s the upshot: We also have the honor and the obligation to extend this distinction between faithful and faithless to every political community in America—not just the community of immigrants.

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Self-preservation and the creed itself compel us to apply this principle across the board. If liberals exhibit low tolerance for external threats to constitutional government, we have to be willing to identify domestic imposters too. And to be of prominence in politics and discourse, we really ought to be pretty good at it.

For Democrats this means abandoning the turn-the-page/turn-the-cheek ethos of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in favor of proud accountability for enemies of democracy. It means no longer using across-the-aisle rhetoric as a political crutch, but campaigning and governing instead under a correct assessment of the Republican Party and its deep rot of bad faith.

If holding the center requires protecting the credal nation from fraudsters or “violent criminal aliens” or other foreign bogeymen, it also means protecting the same nation from insider threats. Corrupt oligarchs. Political fascists.

That means rapid and remorseless prosecution of the criminals in their ranks. And as for the rest, the ones who paint inside our forgiving lines, we simply have to be more discerning about who’s exercising our shared rights in good faith, and who’s touting those rights as a feint to gain power and extinguish them.

Too many liberal-minded elites in elected office and on the sidelines of politics extend the presumption of good faith too far. We scold one another over whether it’s right or wrong to be tolerant of the intolerant, but are increasingly terrified to censure the intolerant themselves when they use speech or other means to exclude more and more people from the democratic community, and strip them of their rights.

Not every American fascist is like Conor Estelle, the young debater who was happy to boast that his interest in free speech is purely instrumental. Most won’t admit that their free-speech absolutism ends the moment they and their fellow travelers win, and start punishing people for speaking their minds. Most wrap themselves in the flag and carry a bill of rights in one hand, with the fingers on the other hand crossed behind their backs.

Any elite who, in earnest, mistakes Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk for free-speech warriors, good-faith interlocutors, avatars of a loyal opposition, is as much a liability to the liberal order as a progressive activist who thinks we should enforce immigration laws as laxly as possible. The model here can’t be to seize the center by showing grace to intolerant men, and no mercy to vulnerable people on the fringes; it must be to seize the center by having little patience for bad actors in both camps.

We’re morally lost when we treat men like Musk as feudal lords, while sticking it to grandmothers to prove our seriousness. We’ve found the sweet spot when we scrutinize Musk’s own path to citizenship unapologetically, and, if he broke the rules, expel him from the U.S. as a fraud and multifaceted enemy of freedom.