G Elliott Morris tried dunking on Matt for an April 2025 tweet where Matt cautioned against raising the salience of immigration in the context of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. I wonder why people have such a hard time understanding tactical vs strategic advice. In April 2025 Trump was still trusted on immigration and Garcia, just beneath the surface, had some legitimately unsavory aspects to his case. A focus on due process was appropriate, but not a focus on immigration.
Then DHS goons started shooting white Minnesotans and now it's immigration enforcement that's incinerating public trust of Trump on immigration.
This is not a hard needle to thread at a high level (sane enforcement, secure borders) but I do worry that progressives are going to take this shift in sentiment to start messaging things like "no one is illegal on stolen lands" because they think lenient enforcement is popular now. What's a pithier/better reflection of the politics than ABOLISH ICE?
I’ve increasingly found G Elliott Morris to be less of a credible source of political strategy and more of just a guy who is pandering to the heather cox Richardson/blusky crowd. Sometimes that means he has interesting posts! But his goal seems to be giving them data that satisfies their preconceived political narratives
His data analysis also seems to have become shakier to me over recent months. He's a more sophisticated statistician than I am, certainly, but it's very clear the bar for 'things Morris agrees with' is much lower and more flexible than the bar for other issues and positions. Categories get combined on assumption, everything people say that isn't 'economy' is suddenly evidence against the effectiveness of economic messaging, just way out over his skis on stuff.
Yeah, his conduct in the WAR Wars and unwillingness to clearly state “moderation (on average) leads to over performance” without excessive throat clearing has led me to this opinion of him
Apparently yes when a number of people on the left aren’t willing to acknowledge that Blue Dogs outperform New Dems, and New Dems outperform Progressive Caucus members
Yea I think MY really understates the degree to which the whole 'sanctuary city' concept and adoption of the related NGO rhetoric has been a kind of brinkmanship, daring a conservative government to do something like this. It's part of the larger set of cultural values that have rendered Democrats unelectable in huge swathes of the country. There's also a very real way in which fomenting crisis is bad for democracy. That's exactly why Trump wants it so bad. In terms of preserving our form of government, being able to win Senate seats in Ohio is millions of times more valuable than being able to win media cycles involving dead activists and dumb, undisciplined law enforcement.
Now of course we are where we are and I'm glad that Americans seem rightly disgusted by these shootings. The one over the weekend really has me seething and as a gun rights person myself I'm glad there's been at least some push back from those quarters, particularly given how craven they usually are in the face of abusive law enforcement. To the extent these can be used to get the administration to back off its most outrageous enforcement tactics I'm all for it. But it isn't a long term strategy and taken too far it risks feeding the same kind of cultural alienation thats made the Democrats a rump party run by geriatrics and clueless kids from the ivy league. If I were influential at the national level for the Democratic party I'd still be pushing for a big and total leadership shake up before going into the midterms. We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them.
"We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them."
Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists. In 2019, Movimiento Cosecha crashed his events and demanded he promise to end all deportations. He never went there but he eventually partially renounced the Obama immigration record for deporting too many people. Cut to: His incompetent border policy, include him joining the media pile-on of CBP agents who looked scary because they were shooing Haitians back over the Rio Grande on horseback.
Trump's been very successful at getting Democrats to react to an extreme restrictionist position by indulging an extreme sanctuary position. I see Dems like Ruben Gallego who are tougher than Biden - he gets screamed at for voting for the Laken Riley Act but doesn't apologize for it. But in 2028 they'll need to convince people that electing a Democrat doesn't put a "OPEN" sign on the border, and this will involve getting yelled at and being accused of being Trump 2.0.
Agree completely. I think the biggest risk right now is riding thermostatic forces, plus general backlash to Trump's madness, plus Democrats now dominating among reliable, off cycle election voters, to a really strong midterm showing, and convincing themselves that all of their problems are solved for 2028. They aren't, not by a long shot.
Hopefully with the stick now being "murdering US citizens" they'll realize how important it is to not have the stick in play. *Something* has got to give.
He had limited energy. He made a bargain with the Warren wing for support and votes. It was all internal party and coalition management. The problem is that much of coalitions' interests and priorities were misaligned with public sentiments and values. Maybe it's the Harvardization of Democratic leadership and their staffers? (And by Harvardization I mean the elitist and well off selection effect of party staffers and progressive leaders outside of the party.)
This is just my opinion, but I do get the sense that upper middle class, always-been-comfortable, Ivy League grads are our biggest liability. They can’t see how stupid most of the left’s radicalism is because they are so out of touch.
If you got some normal folks who maybe attended state public universities or even community college (gasp!) to work on campaigns and for politicians, they might not feel the need to compensate so much.
Based on my friends who work at a university that serves almost exclusively working class people (often the first in their family's to go to college), I don't think this reflects the reality of higher education. The people who are just there to get a better job are mostly checked out of politics but not significantly less left than the people who are more theoretical about it. If you go to college, you're going to be exposed to the same stuff, live in the same multi-cultural world, share the same TikToks.
Community college might be a better dividing line, but by and large, the days of an Ivy elite politically distinct from the public school masses and totally out of touch feels very dated to me.
Maybe. It’s been awhile since I have been around university students. Maybe political parties at the local level should try to court politically disengaged students. I do remember the young democrats at my public university being super clicky and not approachable at all.
>Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists<
I've said it once and I'll say it a million times: people understandably talk about The Debate, and that is indeed the event that made the scales fall from their eyes. But it was letting the inmates run the asylum that was the true calling card of Joe Biden's decline. Would the Joe Biden of 1997 have been that susceptible to getting rolled by people who gave so little heed to the necessity of competing in elections? Probably not. We certainly never saw that kind of epic, damaging cluelessness from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Your interpretation is depressingly common, pretty much universal, but dead wrong. Biden's immigration policy was 1) an economic policy and 2) very effective. I'm not sure why they just let the idea it was done for "woke" reasons flap out in the breeze, or for that matter, why people who know better are not acknowledging it was the key policy for immaculate disinflation, and instead self-flagellating on behalf of our "out of touch" party.
Harsh immigration enforcement from 2021-2024 results in Biden losing decidedly on the economy. Hard stop.
It was not effective, but it was the best tool the president had at the time. What was needed was a massive influx of money and personnel by Congress into USCIS and EOIR to get the asylum process back in order. Asylum applications should take a few months to process, not 10 years. Asylum cases shouldn’t get to the point where the applicants need to be given work authorization.
That’s the loophole that needed mending to bring order back to the system. And that’s what people want. They don’t mind immigrants. Most Americans like immigrants even. They don’t like disorder or “cheating.”
I don’t even doubt that many of those asylum cases would have been approved, which would have been good for our economy.
The problem is, it was both economic policy and socially liberal, if not “woke.” People on the left tend to be conflicted about this aspect, that having illegal/undocumented migrants lowers labor costs, because that’s “exploitation” even if the people being exploited eagerly embrace it. As far as the effectiveness of Biden’s policy is concerned, it may have been effective for the upward bar of the K shaped economy and good for growth/the stock market, but it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side. The sudden influx of people worsened housing scarcity, the key economic issue for working people.
"it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side."
This is pretty vibe-y. Low end real wages went up under Biden...
And immigration doesn't worsen housing scarcity as much labor scarcity does.
Agreed that there is a cultural aspect. And we struggle a lot with it because we fundamentally do not believe in the legitimacy of the grievance. Which I'm not even saying as a slam on us, just pointing out it's a challenge. It's so hard for liberals to appreciate the conservative POV on this when WE ARE THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY LIVE WITH IMMIGRANTS and WE KNOW THEY ARE FINE. So it's hard to put yourself in the mind of somebody who has no fucking idea what they are talking about, but is passionate about it anyway, because the nice man on TV told them to be.
Low end wages went up, but prices for food and housing went up more. And “vibes” decide elections—that was the lesson of 2024, people need to learn it if they don’t want to keep losing.
You're right, it was an effective economic policy. However, watching Colombian families sell candy bars on the street corner, shivering in the midst of a brutal Chicago winter... that radicalized the hell out of me. It was irresponsible, was rightly seen by the American public to be chaos, and set back Democratic messaging on immigration for years.
Lack of moderates in the Dem coalition and lack of influence of moderate Rs in Trump admin appears to mean this will continue to be a seesaw issue towards both extremes. The rest of us are stuck watching the extremes with horror.
The Democratic coalition is overwhelmingly filled with moderates, on the whole substantially more moderate than the GOP one.
The issue is that the moderates are generally upper-middle and professional class, educated people of high conscientiousness, and as such they are** very vulnerable to being shamed into allowing the (much smaller than in the GOP coalition) faction of extremists to drive policy and rhetoric.
** The outcomes of 2026 and 2028 will hinge on whether they've learned their lesson and we can start using the word "were" here or not.
Yeah, it's no coincidence that while most of the candidates on the 2020 debate stage were all fighting over what they assumed was the ascendant Bernie coalition, Biden won largely by remembering that churchgoing Black grandmas in South Carolina are who really decides the Democratic primary.
Sadly, Biden did not bring that understanding to his actual Presidency.
What on earth are you on about? The Democratic coalition is chock full of moderates. If I had a dime for every time I read of a center-left pundit advise Democratic candidates to “punch left” or “have a Sister Soulja moment” or “focus on broadly popular kitchen table issues,” I could afford to retire!
I dont think you understand, those people are gone. The reason people beg candidates to punch left and focus on normal issues is that they are not doing it. Thats the point.
Seriously though, this comment section is certainly not "conservative" in comparison with the median American. Centrist, yes; conservative, no. Remember that, in today's America, "conservative" = "Trump worshiper, with the exception of a small handful of principled Never-Trump conservatives." This comment section is... not that.
That’s why I called it Bush-era Republican. If we teleported 2006-era Karl Rove to read these comments, I think he’d find them very much compatible with his political views. Maybe he’d even blush at some of the more extreme ones, like that one racist guy. The irony here is that 2006 Matt Yglesias would not agree with them.
This is a downstream consequence of the Republican party realigning to become Trumpist/MAGA. Lots of old style normie Republicans can't live under the same tent with Donald Trump or RFK Jr, and a lot of them are now politically homeless. And rational centrist Democrats like Matt are at least speaking the same language as those folks.
Part of it it the context. I can spend all day complaining about the many ways that Trump administration actions range from vile to bonkers, but that's not much of a discussion here.
I would wager that universal healthcare commands near-total support here, as does infrastructure investment, and urbanist policy priorities. I’d also wager that 80% want the social safety net to be made more generous, near that want significant increases in income taxes and to uncap the payroll tax, some decent fraction support a VAT, and 90%+ support increasing immigration.
What in gods name leads you to suggest that the median commenter isn’t left of center?
I mean… they did polling on this a year or two ago…
But ok, if it makes you feel better to imagine that this place’s commenters are a hair right-of-center so you can fantasize about the chances of your own policy priorities being enacted, have fun, I guess?
I strongly disagree with this. Goading actions like we saw in Minneapolis is precisely how we smash immigration enforcement. We cannot accept a quiet, neat, polite ethnic cleansing.
What’s happening is definitely a lawless and horrifying assault on immigrant communities, but I think it’s wrong to call it an ethnic cleansing and actually a disservice to those who have actually undergone ethnic cleansings
US citizens are being detained for their ethnicity. Trump wants to "denaturalize" people. The administration has at times casually expressed a desire to deport every Latino in the country. It's on the spectrum, Ben. There's no point between "here" and "cattle cars" where things have suddenly changed. Every inch they advance from here on out is just another little step, and then another, and then another, until you're 10 feet off the edge of the cliff.
I don't, because the slow march of dehumanization and willingness to inflict violence is almost never a 0-100 thing. It ramps up over time. Seeing government agencies putting out thinly veiled Nazi rhetoric should set off some alarm bells.
I think it’s too soon to say what we’re in the midst of. The administration’s actions have not screamed “we intend to color in between the lines”, and they’re building a lot of detention facilities while being very casual about how they intend to avoid detaining citizens. Not to mention the assault on birthright citizenship.
Whether or not it is a crime depends on how it is done. If people break into your house at night without any support from a judge to steal your family member, without providing any evidence of law enforcement credential, then it is in fact a kidnapping, even if those people work by day as duly appointed law enforcement officers.
But if a random person grabs you off the street and puts you on a plane to another country, without any evidence of legal credentials, that is kidnapping. Even if the person has a job that would allow them to legally do the same thing while presenting formal credentials.
What's with all the DHS ads and political comms, then? What's with VP Vance all in on the great replacement theory? What's with POTUS constantly on about poisoning the blood of the nation?
Right now we're still "before" but the GOP is RTLM and has been working themselves up to it.
Considering the administration's rhetoric against Somali-Americans, their clear racial profiling, and choice of targets, I don't find the accusation of ethnic cleansing to be inapt. I absolutely wouldn't take offense to it.
It isn't an ethnic cleansing, but the guy actually running the show (no way it's Space Alien Dog Murderer Noem) wants it to be an ethnic cleansing. "100 million deportations" is a specific number.
Drawing a parallel between immigration enforcement and "ethnic cleansing" is why people don't trust Dems on immigration in the first place. Ridiculous comparison.
The trump admin has deployed a federal force 5x the size of the city police department in Minneapolis, and by all accounts they’re detaining people without due process based on skin color.
What trump is doing with ICE is closer to familial cleansing really, find one guy you're looking for and arrest everyone else around them who is related or looks close enough like them.
But that's the point, it's not normal immigration enforcement. It's notable because it's abnormally cruel. Pretending that ALL immigration enforcement is equal to ethnic cleansing cheapens both the severity of the current issue and claims of ethnic cleansing in the future.
Who said “all” immigration enforcement is ethnic cleansing? I think people are saying that about the current administration’s policy because of the way they are carrying out deportations (as well as denials of entry and attempts to “denaturalize”). Official asylum policy is now that only white South Africans qualify, I think that’s a sign of something. Nobody said Obama’s deportation policy was “ethnic cleansing,” though many on the left detested it and thought calling Obama “deporter in chief” was enough of an insult.
It's absolutely not substantially the same. The truth is this stance muddies the waters between normal processes and what were seeing Trump do with ICE now. It cheapens both immigration enforcement debate and ethnic cleansing conversations.
The normal processes are vastly worse than what Trump is doing now. They could quietly, neatly, gently deport millions of people. They are not. Pray they never decide to be effective.
People are terrible with large numbers. Yes, a million people stolen away from their homes and deported really is so much worse than two people dead. What martyrs give us is an opening to break the system. They are not, in and of themselves, all that bad. I expect there will be more martyrs, if the protestors are doing their job and aggravating ICE.
Is there any morally acceptably way for the US or any other country to deport people who are in the country illegally, say by overstaying a visa? Or is it all ethnic cleansing?
No. No visas, no borders, no immigration controls. Nothing. Ever.
Previously, we did not have a shot of actually resisting the policy of immigration enforcement. Now we do, because they have been so spectacularly brutish.
I think this policy proposal is both bad on the merits and also is the path to Republican control of the white house and both houses of Congress for the next couple decades.
Right, which is why this must never be Democratic policy! Instead, they only have to talk tough, avoid bad optics at the border, and simply not actually enforce the law on many people. There is more than enough room for well-meaning incompetence to allow people to stay and work.
I’ll skip the “your position polls about as well as an STI” objection and skip to the substance of the issue:
When you say “no borders,” do you mean anyone can go live anywhere at all, anytime? Let’s say your answer is yes. Ok, so now 100 million Africans and South Asians moved to The Geographical Area Formerly Known as the United States in search of better economic opportunities.
Skip over the logistics of providing housing, electricity, clean water, etc. to all these people, and answer me this:
Do these newcomers get to vote in US elections or not?
If not, then you’ve got a two-tier society, and those tend not to work great.
If so, you’ve imported a bunch of voters from traditional cultures that have regressive views on women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of religion, etc. and many of whom don’t really grok the concept of small-l liberal democracy. What happens when all these people get to vote? I can’t tell, but I see very little reason to be optimistic! Convince me I’m wrong.
Dems have the same problem today that they did in 2024. There's no viable alternative to the current leadership willing to step up and challenge them in a real way. You can't beat someone with noone. As a rank and file Democratic voter, I'm endlessly frustrated by that. Competing for leadership positions is exactly how the party moves forward, and they seem to have decided in 2020 that they're not going to allow that anymore.
I don't see this changing in 2026, at least on a leadership level. I think it'll take a presidential primary in 2028, which will actually be truly contested, for anything to change. I hope rank and file Dem voters don't feel the same pressure to fall in line behind one candidate as they did in 2020.
Yea I also worry about the primary process being a repeat of 2020 and making things even worse. The Biden presidency turned out to be a disaster in significant part due to his age but in the moment I think it was the key to him winning. He was so old, and had been around so long as a 'moderate' that you could plausibly believe that he was different from most of the other candidates who were lining up to say the craziest shit possible. There won't be anyone like that in the wings next time and even if there was we cannot have another septuagenerian at the top of the ticket and even someone in their 60s is probably a really bad idea.
What happened in 2020 was OK because, as you say, it was probably one of the only ways to win that election given the candidates who were running. But Democrats took the wrong lesson from that, deciding that leadership stagnation was a winning strategy in general. Unity is good, but the primary is exactly the right time to hash out our differences.
My opinion for what's needed in 2026 is basically another Obama - someone who can convince everyone that they're at least going to pay attention to what they want. He won in such a big landslide because he had magical powers to convince moderates that he was a moderate and progressives that he was a progressive. It takes real intelligence and charisma to thread that needle though, and I don't know who can do that right now.
Maybe! Even though I wasn't old enough to vote at the time, I remember the 2008 primaries. Although I didn't understand the feeling at the time, I could feel that Obama had a good vibe to him. I wanted him to win, and not just to beat the Republicans. If Ruben Gallego (or anyone else) can evoke that feeling early on then I'll be very happy.
The 2020 primary process outcome was good because Biden won and Sanders would have lost to Trump. We were screwed in 2024 because Biden was too old, there was no realistic alternative to him, and people around the world were punishing incumbents.
Obviously, neither Biden nor any septuagenerian will be nominated in 2028.
Whatever you thought about sanctuary cities before, you can’t comply with the current version of ICE. Trump is making that impossible. The question is whether the 2016-2024 public view of immigration enforcement continues, or if we’re in a new paradigm where the public sees that ICE isn’t doing the job they expected.
Agreed. I think there's a pretty sizable part of the electorate that are both not happy with sanctuary cities and states, AND think also think ICE is going too far.
But I do also want to push back, neighbor, against all the terror of the left seizing the narrative. This fundamentally misunderstands what has happened in the last two years: the left activist crowd is no longer running the show, has had their electoral theories thoroughly discredited; and what remains is actually a pretty sane PSA/Beutlerian faction who are simply agitating for (1) a house-cleaning of party leadership that has been strategically failing for a straight decade despite a handful of tactical victories, and (2) seizing a very real opportunity for strategic initiative at a critical moment when history has bequeathed it to us.
Yes, we need sane slogans. But it is genuinely dangerously wasting a strategic window that can VERY easily close on us before we get our shit together, if we just keep obsessing over boxing out the left internally instead of actually going on offense.
Hey neighbor! Fire ICE is really good. I agree that the left activist faction is in a weaker position than they were in 2020, and that the strongest progressive voices are those like Beutler who, credit to him, has been running circles around Matt on narrative management tactics.
I will say however that the activists I know personally still feel absolutely no responsibility (or even have an accurate sense of) message discipline. I'm seeing stolen lands merch and abolish ICE (of the old intention) slogans abounding. It's not a fair game we play, but the right is much better at painting the whole left to center left with the most unpopular aspects of the extremes.
I pray that you're right about the left losing its control over the Democrats. But when I see what they did to the DNC and how they cowed reasonable criticism of Jasmine Crockett I fear the job is still undone.
That episode felt to me like a dying gasp, not a confident flex. They are desperate to remain relevant and lashed out at a target of opportunity. They know they can’t claim a bigger scalp like Bo Burnham, and even craven careerists like Newsom aren’t afraid of them anymore.
They will likely continue to do so in attenuated form. IMO that gasping should not be misread as a zombie resurgence.
Moreover, short of the rest of us misguidedly transforming the party into a Vichy capitulationist rump, those voters hate Trump and the GOP so much that they will reliably turn out for the rest of their lives. We don’t have to worry about them jumping ship; if anything, their constant whining and threats to do so are ample evidence that they are the proverbial “hit dog”.
The Beutlers still want to use Trump's unhinged-ness to see how far left they can push things and still hit 270 EC's. One of the fundamental disagreements is whether Trumpism is enough of a threat that it's better to maximize the odds of defeating it soundly or use this opportunity to shift the "Overton Window" as much as possible.
Then there's the activists and online attention entrepreneurs who will out of either genuine emotional ideological commitment or algorithm SEO maxing push their position to point where they alienate independents. They claim to speak for the resistance and the Trumpists will also claim the least hinged among them do as well. So it's always worth being clear what you're for and against.
I think this is just a wild misread of Beutler, bordering on bad faith.
Stancil, sure, he’s a dipshit who this would be accurate of. But not Beutler. Beutler pretty obviously and clearly understands that basically all progressive policy is on hold until the emergency is over; to the extent that any particular priority is taken off hold, it should only be in service of a strategically planned campaign to use it as a pitch with voters to win the emergency.
I only follow what he says on the Politix podcast, but while he says we’re in an emergency, most of his prescriptions seem to boil down to (a) be more muscular and aggressive in fighting for progressive policy in the press and through parliamentary procedure to move the Overton window (which personally I’m dubious will be effective) or (b) replacing any Democrat in Congress over 70 with somebody younger (which would probably help on the margin but isn’t going to change things over night). What am I missing?
Well, without being too snarky about it, he elucidates all the complete thoughts on his own substack that Matt cuts him off from coherently expressing on the podcast.
From my perspective, Brian’s main goal isn’t to shift the overton window by merely issuing extreme or leftist rhetoric; it’s to strategically use levers of power to create facts on the ground that then make the public more predisposed to shifting its opinion in directions he wants.
Brian wants Dem politicians to go lead on the streets with action, and to pursue whatever legal means at their disposal to help hold the Trumpists accountable. His ultimate goal is for this to resolve the emergency and heal society such that we can have rational debates about policy and the pace of progress, hopefully in directions befitting his liberal sensibilities. He views tent-building as a critical aspect of the process, which means making common cause with people of good faith — which INCLUDES Never Trumpers and other right-wing defections, but whose good faith must be confirmed, not merely taken at face value.
Stancil, by contrast, wants every Dem to mouth the same old failed slogans to the utmost they can screech. This is primarily an attempt at hacking the Overton window concept to manufacture consent for the entire progressive omnicause program; he does not care to actually persuade anyone along the way. He wants to purge any Dem who refuses, and replace them all with prog primary challengers. If none of this works, it’s because America is a fundamentally flawed, damnable place, and none of it was his fault. He believes that the critical mass of voters who would support his program is horrifically disenfranchised, but also just waiting for a sufficiently extreme prog to come along and inspire them to turn out en masse.
I think that both Trump's drop on the issue overall, and polling on specifics showed that that approach of ceding all action on a broad issue constellation, like immigration, is dumb. Morris was poking holes in an unthinking heuristic that only ended up egging the right on, and as others have pointed out, made about as much sense as Democrats in 2006 not wanting to talk about Iraq.
It was a bad call then, and I think that past events have strengthened that case.
There’s a fundamental blindness between “this issue was unpopular for us 2 years ago”, “this issue will be better for us in 1-2-3 years”, “this issue was bad for us because we overreached or had a bad leadership”, etc.
It’s one thing to acknowledge that it’s often difficult to judge where precisely the puck is going so that it can be skated to. In actual sports, players take bad angles ALL THE TIME!
But Matt is playing scared. Like a powerplay unit who keeps passing the puck back and forth because they’re too scared to shoot, imagining that the NEXT pass will finally give them their opening, instead of forcing the issue. Yes, you still end up missing a lot of shots, but as the saying goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Matt was wrong about that advice. The Garcia case was the one that really collapsed Trump’s approval rating on this issue. Compared to that initial collapse, two dead bodies have only been moving him around 5 percentage points. Maybe this movement will accelerate, I sure hope so.
> What's a pithier/better reflection of the politics than ABOLISH ICE?
“We need a RESET to bring back trust and cooperation with local law enforcement.”
Prudentially, actually existing ICE really does have to go. That’s an institutional culture that is beyond reform. Then you work through the details on how much interior enforcement you want, how to prioritize it, and how coercive you want to try to be towards reluctant jurisdictions. Ideally, as non-coercive as possible. This is a time to rediscover local control.
RESET gets rid of ICE without conceding that means open borders. “Abolish” could mean either thing, but people who are afraid of implying they support no enforcement could say RESET instead.
A lot of this stuff is just messaging. I think Matt Y and you and most of the serious commenters here realize that the current version of ICE is toxic, and it’s likely to get much worse. You’ll have an exceptionally hard time fixing this without root and branch reform. So you’re mainly arguing about how to signal this to your base without scaring the middle who presumably care about “interior enforcement”. The thing is, ICE’s approval ratings are already terrible. Whatever people thought of the agency in 2024 is not what they think of it today, and it’s likely that they’ll be even more negative by November 2026 and 2028. The Dems have already beclowned themselves by funding DHS last week and now have to reverse course *in a matter of a week* due to a relatively predictable additional violent act by ICE. How do you think this trajectory is going to play out over the next 11-35 months?
Oh for sure. I'm not even particularly worried about the messaging of "abolish." I don't think the base is hung up on that word either, as a litmus test. I just want ICE gone as soon as possible, and to the extent a limiting factor is that frontline members or centrist Republicans need a pithy phrase that means "abolish and replace" instead of "abolish without replacement," I'm happy to brainstorm.
Personally, I'm fine with the Gallego approach of refusing to play the slogan game while saying plainly that it needs to be "torn down and replaced," be there are a lot of marble-mouthed idiots in Congress who need every sound bite fed to them on a spoon.
The massive influx of untrained people into ICE plus all the cultural changes at the top will make reform really hard. I don't think you can do it without a rebranding exercise that pretty much starts over. Not abolish as make something new.
The pithier slogan is "law and order". Law enforcement should be professional, competent and promote order. These thugs are causing chaos. And then if the people want more immigration law enforcement, then ramp up funding over time.
Far too many Democrats have been poisoned into not understanding liberal ideas, which is why we won't get that. But this isn't a difficult situation for competent politicians
Yes, the big test is going to be who wins the nomination in 2028. I could see say Shapiro or Beshear trying to "thread the needle" to an actually sustainable political equilibrium over immigration while a AOC or even Newsome might be all Leeroy Jenkins (ie stolen land) which as we saw under Biden is a recipe for major political headaches for the Dems.
AOC is a pretty skilled politician. That brand works for her now. If she ran for POTUS, she's keep progressive energy, but pivot a lot. And, honestly, the party is not going to nominate anyone who talks about stolen land.
I mean, even though Trump is taking water on immigration, it's still his strongest issue. If there was an election a month from now, it would be unwise for Democratic candidates to run on immigration and not let's say inflation where the numbers are even worse for Trump.
We see that the protests are working to a certain extent: a majority of Americans are disturbed by what's going on in Minneapolis and Trump is losing support. But it's clear that this is far from a deadly blow to Republicans' prospects.
I say this as someone who's horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis. Once this episode passes, with three years to go until the next presidential election, it might be better for people left of center to focus on the question "Why are we so weak? Why can't we decisively defeat them?" rather than questions of small-ball electoral tactics that might help in the short term (pivot to healthcare? a new immigration policy proposal?).
The issue, I think, is about values more than specific policy. Strikingly, there's one thing left and right seem to agree on: enforcement of immigration law is going to require morally reprehensible actions. The right is basically ok with this, whereas the left isn't. Most people therefore correctly understand that right now there are just two options: mass violations of civil rights or open borders, even if politicians don't explicitly say this. (Biden didn't "run on" open borders, but the borders were open!) Liberals correctly point out that there *exist* policies that would be more humane, but voters probably suspect this is just a cudgel -- when a moderate liberal gets into power, will they actually implement these?
I think that to break this dynamic and decisively win, liberals are going to have to take a look at themselves and ask how they've gotten here. My take is that liberals don't have a good answer to the question "Who are we?" Egalitarianism has such a strong hold over the left that immigrants are held in higher moral esteem than most of our countrymen.
Liberals can talk all they want about wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration law, but people understand this dynamic. Until values change, commitments to future enforcement will ring hollow. Now would be a good time for people left of center to sit down, talk with one another, and do some introspection about why their values don't resonate with most Americans. We could chalk it up to Americans being a bunch of Nazis, but actually, most Americans are responding admirably to what's happening. I think there's still some hope, but winning will require more than poring over the latest poll numbers.
Scott galloway keeps pointing out thar going after the employers would be the most effective tactic, and it has the benefit of not being morally reprehensible. Why not do that? As Matt points out in the article, the most efficient use of resources would be to go after criminals in cooperating jurisdictions.
I agree with this, but again I feel like when Democrats raise this point, it's just a cudgel. Democrats used to attack Romney over how inhumane e-verify would be!
Perfectly enforce e-verify, so that millions of undocumented immigrants are out of work? How will their kids eat?
Until the left's values change, I don't think this will happen.
I think your problem here is thinking that consequences of enforcement are negative for those affected. They are! They also broke the law. Every single undocumented migrant knows there's a chance, no matter how long they are here and how established they become, that one day they will be deported. Enforcing the law is not morally reprehensible. Promises of employment by shady business
owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible. But being deported even though you have native born kids? I mean. That's the consequences of your own actions.
Until the left understands that what I described is the median voter position they'll never get the politics of this right.
Conservative friend I was talking to about the "stop separating families!" chant put it this way: We "separate families" all the time, we put dads in jail if they commit wire fraud or drive drunk. "Stop separating families" was one of the tools in the 2013 immigration reform toolbox, then Stephen Miller assiduously pursued family separation as a way to discourage more immigration, and Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position.
This sort of legalism is unpersuasive to me. Somebody crossing a border and then living a productive life, minding their own business is far less threatening than someone recklessly endangering others by driving drunk.
A more sustainable legal status quo would be a large benefit for everyone, I agree. However the Trump administration has illegalized over a million people residing in the US, as has been pointed out elsewhere. They've been snatching people doing required check-ins and no criminal record (being in the country illegally is a civil offense). There is a vast upending of an imperfect and evolving, but still present, status quo. That is cruel. It is illogical. It will make American citizens worse off, no matter what the Senate math says. I reject the notion that sheepishly pretending it isn't is an electoral winner for Democrats, anyway.
The problem is that the public has a rough idea of who should be allowed to come here and why and who should and shouldn’t be deported, but it’s poorly aligned with who the law says should be allowed to come here. Fixing that alignment would go a long way towards addressing the issue
Somebody crossing a border and then living a productive life, minding their own business is far less threatening than someone recklessly endangering others by voting for Trump, too…
As a former Democratic voter, I actually doubt Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position. I think Democrats sort of drifted toward soft nullification (hence on precisely one level, contra Yglesias, the sanctuary policy is a kind of nullification of federal law enforcement. But there are other levels to pursue.)
They drifted into this disposition of soft nullification on drug laws, prostitutes walking the block, illegal handgun possession, a whole host of "men with guns" going after someone not immediately hurting another person in the TV frame actually. Not just immigration! It happened across a range of topics in the 2010s.
Chris Caldwell has written about this, albeit with too deterministic a view of Civil Rights law. But he's right that it's a kind of merger of 60s left-wing people power with bourgeois middle class property holding. Now a sort of memory of the 60s is the defining bourgeois moral. Which means everything is permitted, nothing is forgiven, and as Yglesias has written wisely on before, you can retreat to your priced up suburb while public quality of life enforcement falls out.
Are Dems really nullifying prostitution laws anywhere? I know that Mamdani had a few pro-Nordic solution statements before his mayoral campaign, but I thought that was as far as it goes.
(Given that prostitution is outright legalized & regulated in like 40% of developed countries, if anything I find the lack of pro-sex work voices in the US rather surprising. I feel like I never hear about this issue!)
And it worked for the Democrats in opposition. People *hated* seeing kids in cages.
It was all about finding vulnerable points and causing a thermostatic reaction after Trump's 2016 victory. It wasn't part of a considered policy position.
I mean, I agree with this. I think the left has to get to a place where they recognize that failure to enforce immigration law is a moral evil. It’s a subversion of “Our Democracy,” which they otherwise value so much.
I just think that when push comes to shove, they won’t have what it takes to enforce the law given their current values. The problem is even bigger: the whole world now knows that it’s probably a good idea to show up at the gates the second a Democrat gets elected, and the Democrat might just say “Yes, we have to let you in because that’s International Law” (which, of course, supersedes domestic law because it’s more cosmopolitan).
What international laws are you referencing? Congress has incorporated the treaties you're probably thinking of directly into US law. So when Democrats say that immigrants have the right to make an asylum claim they're basing it on US law, not international law. It's not about being more cosmopolitan.
This is exactly the legalistic BS that got us here in the first place. JA refers to the 1951 Refugee Convention as "international law" and you reply "nuh-uh, we implemented it so now it's domestic law." That's precisely what got us to where we are today: it became common knowledge in South America that a refugee is a person who presents themselves and says the word "asylum", so millions of people did that. And, that's what the law says. So, I guess we're stuck letting in everyone who can pronounce the word "asylum" in any commonly-used language.
And there are people who will insist, over and over, "yes, that's the law." They destroyed Biden's presidency and with it the fabric and future of this country. They're detestable and also just shockingly dumb.
Mostly agree, but it is notable Trudeau and Johnson also oversaw enormous waves of immigration after COVID as well that wracked their domestic politics. It sort of reduces the causal theory of Democrats have a unique ideology; I think Anglophone societies have actually done such a good job partially assimilating people around the world to speaking English that the cultural barrier to immigration falls a bit. So immigration to deal with pent-up COVID savings pursuing more goods and services than ever becomes a much more enticing option.
I believe the argument JA was making is that (a) US immigration law was arrived at through democratic means, therefore (b) failing to enforce the law is a violation of democratic principles and a form of minoritarian rule by the executive, which is (c) a moral evil. I think a fair counter-argument would be that Congress is such a sclerotic institution at this point that US immigration law no longer reflects the will of the people (or simply biting the bullet and saying democracy is immoral in some ways).
“Promises of employment by shady business owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible.
Isn’t that just how those business tacitly need to function? I don’t hear anyone talking about how cheap food is currently, so increasing labor costs seems problematic.
Yeah the options for a handful of industries (e.g. agriculture, hospitality) are basically
1. Explicit carve-outs from mandatory e-verify and accept that they’ll still use a ton of undocumented labor
2. Massively expand guest worker or other visa programs to legalize the cheap immigrant labor they currently use
3. Accept that costs are going to go up bigly in the short term, and either (a) accept that prices will go up too or (b) provide massive subsidies in exchange for price controls
My preferred policy here would be 2. We will probably get 3(b).
There are no caps on H2A temporary work visas for agriculture. For other jobs, the H2B temporary work visa is capped at 66,000 per year, but this can be administratively increased - last fiscal year, they nearly doubled it due to demand (the cap was still hit after a few more months).
I think it’s also worth pointing out that immigration enforcement is something that nearly all our “nice” countries, like those in Western Europe, Scandinavia as well as Japan, S Korea, Australia have. Like all of those with universal healthcare systems, and paid sick and maternity leave, and affordable higher education that we admire.
Yes, they turn people away. Many of them require that people carry a national ID and show it at various times, like a traffic stop for instance. They detain people and deport them.
This is a normal function of a state, even a friendly democratic one.
This is true, but also, I think there is a legitimately hard question about how to deal with people who came here illegally but since have built a reasonable life and been productive members of society, or who came here as kids and have been here their whole lives.
You can show mercy to deserving people, but only if you can couple that with being willing to actually enforce the laws. Otherwise, everyone just knows that if they hide out long enough they get to stay.
What’s the problem with letting in people who are normal productive wanna-be citizens? It worked perfectly well for the first ~150 years of American history.
I think the median voter position is a bit more nuanced as to the desirability of deporting non-criminal illegal immigrant parents of citizen children.
Which is why you don’t endorse this view. You say something entirely different. Then you come into power, allow millions of people to enter (I wish it were 30 million!) and make it impossible for the next administration to unwind it. Some things are more important than winning or losing elections.
I'm kind of astonished the regime Bryan Caplan praises (United Arab Emirates) for accomplishing more freedom of association for workers and employers is just straightforwardly more anti-liberal rights than any MAGA Republican I've met. Do you know of any libertarian writer who has criticized Caplan for this?
No, I think this is reasonable. In practice, allowing people the ability to come and go at all is much better than full rights to a selected few. Second, one is, obviously, bound to be concerned that immigrants and their children might eventually vote to restrict immigration and other socialistic measures. For that reason, restricting voting rights is reasonable. I would suggest putting the bar at a 1500 SAT or 34 ACT score.
If one were looking at it from a Rawlsian, behind the veil of ignorance perspective, it’s so obvious that one would not only support open borders but treat it as one of the most important political issues out there.
Even from a non-veiled perspective it seems like the Golden Rule should apply, I value my right to travel wherever I want with my US passport giving me visa-free access to most places and visas being pretty easy to get for a lot of the remainder, and would want to have the right to immigrate whenever I want, so others should have the same right.
They should just fake it till they make it. As soon as someone actually takes the step it will all start rolling (and people may be surprised where the opposition comes from)
The wager is that newly unemployed people will self deport, but there are many non-worki g asylum seekers clinging on at the margins in the u.s. things in Venezuela and other countries are really very bad.
Or what if the right’s value change so that they see all people as the same? If your argument is premised on voters being fixed compromise makes sense but if you want to change values anyway why not change the other side’s?
One big reason Republicans don't want to go after employers is because many of them are those employers themselves or at least the employers are big donors.
Prior to Trump, most Republican leadership avoided talking about the most effective employer focused strategies precisely because they could be effective and would hurt corporate profits.
Traditional Republicans preferred to cynically ignore effective solutions so they could use immigration as a red-meat issue to keep the base fired up while ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor for themselves and their donors.
The business lobby is always the answer whenever this question comes up.
I think we need to do better than just trotting out this tired centrist suggestion.
For instance, perhaps we do “mandatory e verify + a grace period”. I dunno; the point is, we need realistic suggestions that the business lobby won’t just tank immediately.
It's still morally reprehensible. Those people are trying to run a business in the economic system they were given, which means hiring undocumented people. And shutting them down screws their employees anyway.
We kind of reflexively think "employer = big evil corporation = victimless crime" but if you game out in your head how that kind of enforcement would go, it's not something you're doing to big evil corporations (who have the resources to avoid illegal hires) and not a victimless crime.
It also doesn’t necessarily work, I think e-verify is fairly easy to cheat. But I’m not against using it to determine who the immigrants are and jack up their SS and Medicare taxes by a few percentage points (ideally double them but that would just drive more under the table work arrangements).
They don't want to do that, because 1 - they like big business, 2 - the people working those jobs aren't the violent criminals most likely, and 3 - more importantly, Trump and the people who work for him, love performative toughness and the drama. They live for the theatre of it all, and they need to be seen as tough and make headlines. It's all about ego and demonstrating their power.
the problem is that it would be too effective. promising to sabotage the economy can be good on campaign but is politically damaging in the long run, cf. tariffs
This and the policy of only deporting undocumented people who have NOT been here long (say, less than 3 or 5 years). This would not destabilize society, as Trump is doing, AND would send a clear message that we are no longer going to tolerate illegal immigration in the future.
E-verify sounds good in theory but the issue is how it applies to small businesses and households. It could turn pretty authoritarian if you tried to apply it to family restaurants or people trying to hire babysitters or house cleaners… If you just want to apply it to big companies, fine, but I imagine those are already screening everybody.
You can negotiate the scale at which it would apply based on what would be the most efficient use of resources, but why would it be authoritarian? Obviously you don't want the companies to be paying for the verification process.
I really don’t think it would be more authoritarian than food safety regulations or abiding by your alcohol license. Both can tank your small business and leave you economically ruined if you’re not abiding by them, no doubt. We don’t generally consider those laws to be authoritarian
I-9 verification rules already apply to anyone hiring employees or 1099 workers, but auditing compliance would be a huge effort. Automating verification through e-verify would help. Making it harder to allow false documentation would also help.
> The notion that Trump, if he took office, would be willing and perhaps even eager to do something horrifying in the name of border security is part of his electoral appeal.
Yes, I thought this article was spot-on in terms of its diagnosis.
What I think liberals need to think about now is the normative part. Is this commitment to egalitarianism a good thing?
When Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates get together and say “We basically agree on almost all of our objectives, so let’s debate strategy,” is this what we want? Or is Coates’ worldview its own form of evil that can’t have a place in government?
We’re having a discussion initiated by the murder of two peaceful American citizens, and the SB commentariat is discussing whether Coates’ commitment to civil justice is the real evil.
Aside from laughing about the ridiculousness of this response: someone up above asked “why are we here” and my simple answer is: our presence here is God’s punishment because we stopped being decent.
I think there are two separate axes here - big/small tent politics and woke/normie politics.
I think it's valid to say small tenters like Coates are not allowed in the big tent because they spoil the fun. But it's not valid to say that Coates doesn't belong in the tent because of wokeness. If there are any people willing to practice anti-racism in a big tent way, they should be welcome.
I don't think enforcement of immigration law will require morally reprehensible actions. First term Obama is gold standard for enforcement. Enforcement now means reforming the asylum process, rapidly processing the Biden era asylum claims, and stepped up enforcement on employers, all of which is eminently doable without brutalizing anyone.
This will probably sound kind of wild to many people, but I sincerely believe that deterring future irregular migrants should be added to the equation when weighing morality.
I've read a lot of stories on how systematic the abuse of migrants is as they travel through Mexico and attempt to cross. As an outsider, it's of course truly hard to say what's in the best interest of another person, especially when these other persons number in the millions.
But I can safely say that if you're living in, say, Guatemala, and saved up 8 or 9,000 dollars to make the trip up north and you either a) get deported shortly after b) get abducted and abused / extorted / held for ransom along the way c) die while crossing the desert then you would have been better doing something else with your money and time. And yes, many people live in dire circumstances in these countries, but 8 or 9k can also buy a lot of safety and economic potential closer to home.
Maybe. Even that amount of money may not buy a better life if you're constantly extorted. It's too bad we can't set up manufacturing in these countries to try to stabilize the economy and make predation less of a choice for income.
I guess I would just say it's enough money to move to a different city in Mexico or Brazil, and extortion in all but the smallest of these countries is always a local phenomenon. And I think that's actually what most Mexicans, Brazilians, etc. actually do if they're dealing with extortion. Moving cities is far more common than trying to move to the USA.
The whole thing with predation (I assume we mean extortion?) and stabilizing the economies are intricately bound and driven by the same types of government corruption. The corruption makes it difficult to do business and allows the extortion gangs to operate. It seems like the kind of problem that can only be solved from within.
Agreed, and if we continue to incentivize poor migrants to come north in this manner, our policy is shoveling money into the cartels who are abusing and exploiting the migrants we claim to care about.
I favor expanded legal migration. But not this type. It's immoral and inhumane.
How would that work though? We do put bounties and go after the heads of mexican criminal organizations, ie the persons whom the smugglers answer to. But how would you go after the low level people?
I doubt that Obama only deported illegal immigrants who had committed a crime or that there was zero force involved in arresting and deporting every illegal immigrant.
The Obama administration explicitly had a policy prioritizing deportations of illegal aliens with criminal records and at the time took a lot of heat from both left and right for that policy.
The Obama administration also put an emphasis on returning recent arrivals (as opposed to illegal immigrants with established lives in the US), particularly after border crossings surged in 2014.
I think what he's saying is that this doesn't constitute enforcement of immigration law because it doesn't expel illegal immigrants who aren't otherwise committing crimes. The only way to expel those people is to take morally reprehensible actions, and therefore, we should steel ourselves to taking morally reprehensible actions.
But I don’t think it’s really possible to deport all the illegal immigrants who have been here a long time, and I don’t think the public actually wants that anyway. They want a controlled flow and a sense of order at the border, and that violent criminal illegal immigrants will be deported.
I think that is a correct assessment of what a majority of the public wants. I would also add that if your laws require you to take morally reprehensible actions in order to enforce them, then that is probably a good sign that your laws ought to be changed. But I wasn't talking about my personal views. I was just explaining the logic of the original comment, which argued that Democrats should change their values and embrace the need to take morally reprehensible actions in order to achieve the goal of deporting 100% of illegal immigrants.
This is one of the many ways Democrats lose on immigration. The idea that it's "morally reprehensible" to enforce immigration law implies it's morally acceptable to break it, so there's something "morally reprehensible" about immigration law. Not enforcing ANY immigration law because of the "morally reprehensible" parts of it flies in the face of any definition of democratic law.
The people's representatives voted for existing immigration law. Arguing that parts of it are wrong so none of it should be enforced says the people don't get the ultimate vote on the law.
In a democracy, the response to "morally reprehensible" law must be to change the "morally reprehensible" parts.
Many Americans see deliberate tolerance of law-breaking as creating moral hazard (rewarding undesirable behavior). Some of those Americans are legal immigrants who resent the suggestion that they shouldn't have followed the legal process.
No. Sorry, but that's bad reading comprehension. Sometimes in life you may have a goal that is not morally reprehensible in theory, but that in practice can only be achieved through morally reprehensible means. In that situation, you have to make a choice. You either decide that the goal is so indispensable that it justifies any morally reprehensible means that are necessary to achieve it, or you decide the opposite.
"Many Americans see deliberate tolerance of law-breaking as creating moral hazard (rewarding undesirable behavior)."
The American public is perfectly ok with tolerance of law-breaking in other law areas. For instance, most people oppose strict enforcement of traffic laws.
The difference? They, themselves, are drivers, so strict enforcement would affect them. But, they're not immigrants, so the burden of enforcement is somebody else's problem.
By "traffic laws," do you mean speed limits? I'd agree with you on that. I doubt it's true if you include running red lights, tailgating, failure to signal, aggressive driving, and other "moving violations."
Focusing on speed limits, where I think we agree people at least hope for low enforcement:
Many jurisdictions recognize "prima facie" speed limits which allow drivers to operate at reasonably safe speeds based on road, weather, and traffic conditions. Some jurisdictions apply prima facie speed limits to any road not explicitly designed for a specific speed range.
Prima facie speed limits create ambiguities in the law which naturally affect law enforcement. This is intentional because in some situations we want the law to allow for driver judgment. (This is one reason for DUI laws - we don't want people driving when their judgment is impaired.)
More generally, comparing speed limit enforcement to immigration law enforcement is a category error.
We don't want people entering and living here outside the immigration system because the security consequences can be so severe. The risk is in a different category.
Arguing that the vast majority of illegal immigrants pose no such risk is beside the point regarding immigration law enforcement. Until we can create immigration law and regulations that keep the few threats out while simplifying legal entry/residence, we must enforce existing immigration law: it's the only available mechanism for containing the threat.
Or maybe we just enforce border crossings and let society absorb the people who are here. Let them have kids and become taxpayers and contribute to our society, which sure as hell needs the labor.
I think there is consensus on securing the border if you follow from Biden’s last year. Maybe that will break down after four years of Trump making immigration enforcement into an excuse to kill protestors, but what can you do. But also: immigration from our southern neighbors has been *great* for the US. We could not be more lucky as a country.
Well, one thing I'll say is, I think all this will seem extremely hilarious and sad in 20 years when depopulation becomes the main issue globally and countries are fighting for immigrants.
The humane option is just to turn away people at the border without visas but make it easier to get them, and then deporting convicted criminals (who are in custody anyway so no civil rights violations are needed) from the interior but leaving peaceful people alone. We didn’t have open borders—that’s a frankly insulting claim to millions of people who have had their visas or family members’ visas denied.
Also, I imagine it would be a difficult choice if you had to do something morally reprehensible to save millions of lives. Doing something morally reprehensible just to keep peaceful people born in a different place out of the country? I mean okay if someone’s standard for “willing to do morally reprehensible things” is that low I don’t see how you could really trust or have a society with them and the key issue ought to just be how to disempower them.
It doesn't matter what a good system looks like. Politically, all that is possible right now is the status quo, because it's what works best for Republicans - allow the immigrants in, reap the economic benefits, and also hold it as an unassailable culture war advantage.
Any amount of disruption in the immigration system or border security is going to be blamed on Democrats, no matter who is responsible. And it'll be that way forever, because we are unwilling to argue our position and instead try to pretend the issue doesn't exist.
IMO this is a really bad outcome of this whole conflict. Both the right and the left are now invested in getting everyone to accept this idea that the only way to do immigration enforcement is masked goons and terror, and this is just not true. A likely outcome of all this is that Americans end up convinced that you have to have brutality and terror to enforce immigration law, and either decide it's not worth it or decide that they won't believe it's being enforced without the shows of force and masked goons. Both outcomes are pretty bad.
What we want is ultimately some kind of competent, non-brutal immigration enforcement. There is nothing morally bad about sending back people trying to come to the US illegally, deporting people who have overstayed their visa, fining employers for having a bunch of illegal immigrants working for them, or deporting people here illegally who get in trouble with the law. And while sometimes that (like all other policing) will look cruel and make people sad, it can be done without masked goons or standoffs on the streets or any of that. Ideally, the folks who have been here 10+ years without getting into any trouble or requiring public assistance can then get some kind of path to legal residency, we can just grant the DACA people permanent residency, etc.
As with policing, I feel like there are crazy activist demands that voters rightly will not support, and those get in the way of sensible reform of policing that could actually do some good, while keeping police around since we actually need them.
If he hadn't run on it, he would've lost. Not sufficient but necessary to his strategy. However you want to break it down, it's hard to argue that he didn't reap gigantic political advantage by calling a roughly functioning (if with duct tape) immigration system broken.
Which should have some bearing on how much we accept "immigration" as a material, non-vibes issue, because clearly the way people feel about immigration, like crime, has nothing to do with facts.
My genuine suggestion is that Democrats say a lot of tough, serious-sounding things and then basically change nothing. If the tough things piss off leftist activists that everyone hates, all the better. Biden saw his economically-driven immigration policy's jibing with the cultural left's preference for open borders as a good thing, because it kept the issue uncontroversial within the coalition. It turns out it was a weakness and a distinction he should have drawn.
I doubt changing nothing is tenable; at minimum, we need to gut asylum law.
I don't think Americans would like the results of mandating and enforcing e-verify but it's a good thing to talk about endlessly while the Republicans filibuster it.
If we can assemble a coalition for it, I'd like to *try* to scale skills and employment-based streams of immigration, even if at the expense of "whoever makes it across the border." We need to reassert our traditional advantage in this regard, ideally so strongly that China feels compelled to introduce the old Soviet "exit visa" systems and lose its propaganda war in one fell swoop.
I do agree completely that deliberating punching the left-activists in the face is the correct move on this issue if we want to win elections.
I am all for gutting asylum law - well, my preference would be to properly fund the system so that we have the capacity to detain people with asylum claims until those claims are rejected or accepted. But if we have to gut asylum law instead, I guess that would be a compromise.
(And of course, if people knew illegitimate asylum claims would be quickly rejected, you would have a lot less people claiming asylum.)
I mean, neither party seems to have internalized the very noticeable truth that Latino in-migration doesn't seem to be a political advantage for either of them, in terms of downstream demographic effects; maybe when they do, the temperature will get turned down on this issue.
Between 2009-2016 the almost-stated policy of the ruling party was to change the ethnic makeup of the country in a manner that would give them more future votes.
Democrats' most likely 2028 nominee right now (Newsom) signed a bill giving undocumented immigrants publicly funded healthcare (Medi-Cal). So, it's not obvious the party has moderated at all in response to losing all power at the federal level. Voters seem to detest politicians who are unresponsive to their concerns. It's a pretty scary prospect. Like, what does the GOP have to do for Democrats to start abandoning some of their policy planks that are unpopular either nationwide or in swing states they need to win to start winning elections again?
Sounds like a good thing for an electability focused candidate to use to beat Newsom over the head with.
Don't forget Democrats overwhelmingly selected the electability candidate in 2020. Our voters are far less dumb than our online activist base is. (And that's speaking as a member of that online base who was desperately pulling for Bernie.)
I also think it’s hilarious that anyone thinks 2028 is going to have the same immigration as ‘24. We had an immigration moment, we elected Trump, and over the next three years this issue will decline in salience until only the SB commentariat is still talking about it.
This is a good point, but even though immigration levels over the next four years are going to be much lower than 21-24 it's kind of an eternal issue. Nobody was really thinking about immigration until the gold escalator, either. Given where a lot of the electorate lies it's something you can make salient by just yelling about it a lot. Newsom's policy would be a drawback in a general in any environment.
I like Newsom fine but I think it's odd that Democrats have never taken the lesson of 1992, which is that nominating somebody that basically nobody has ever heard of can work really well. (Bennett '28!)
It’s an eternal issue that can be managed with vigilance at the border, not with insane policies. If the electorate demands insane policies even when numbers come down and stay down for a while, maybe we’re just a bad country.
Maybe I’m stuck on fighting the last war, but isn’t the humane solution Comprehensive Immigration Reform? Create a real pathway to citizenship and couple it with tough border security, e-Verify, and a reasonable level of internal enforcement. Most people on the left would fall in line and support that, however hot tempers are running now.
The pathway to citizenship is reasonably perceived as a vote harvesting measure by Republicans. And while I’m all in favor of that because MAGA is destroying America and any trick that works to reduce or eliminate it’s political voice cannot but be good, I don’t think anything with a path to citizenship works because it’s fairly transparent and a huge talking point. Great Replacement, etc. A pathway to a green card with an explicit “this will never get the bearer citizenship” provision seems to me to be more politically possible. With perhaps an exception for military service.
I think Republicans should take a look at their own extraordinary gains with Latino voters in the past several cycles and realize that demographics are not destiny after all. But I hear you that it's politically toxic and feeds into the fears of the Republican base. I think the creation of a permanent class that explicitly cannot become citizens would be a pretty weird development, though that is also effectively what we have in practice with a huge undocumented population. I think there has to be some kind of potential path, even if it is very hard. I mean, the path created by the Obama-era CIR bill was pretty tough (and lengthy) if I remember right!
This Substack is obsessed with borders. The number of border crossings was high during Biden’s term! But it had already started dropping by the time Trump was elected. It’s entirely possible to tighten the border up enough that this stops being an issue, and pursue an enforcement policy that primarily focuses on criminals. You do not need masked military police murdering protesters in cities.
No one trusts that the next Democratic administration will work to keep border crossings low. Then public opinion will quickly turn against them and they will find themselves a lame duck, just like Biden did.
Maybe that will happen in eight years. I’m hopeful you all maintain enough credibility within the Democratic coalition in the next 3-4 years so that you can head it off. Obsessing about immigration in the wrong cycle is probably not going to buy you that credibility.
I think the cruelty of Trump this time has probably made this country less attractive to immigrants even if the next cycle is more lenient. Not worth coming for 3 years and having to leave again.
The whole "border" thing is, IMO, nothing more than psychosexual inadequacy on the part of the people obsessed with it. Lines in the sand are not how modern nation-states organize themselves.
In a sense, the protests are giving the administration rope to hang itself (rhetorically).
Like the images of water cannons and attack dogs in the 1960's, the images of ICE brutality, incompetence, unjust actions, and unprofessionalism serve strategic ends. It's why protester discipline is so important in terms of allowing ICE to act in ways that look terrible for them on video.
While it doesn't seem like it or feel like it, this is winning for our side. Trump is getting hurt politically, ICE is becoming more and more perceived as a bad organization with bad people. Trump support declines, and the GOP is increasingly faced with cognitive dissonance at attempting to rationalize what’s going on.
People didn't like chaos at the border, and they will not like chaos in cities where people are unjustly killed and their civil liberties are violated.
As long as ICE keeps up what they are doing, the trends will go against them and the administration. This isn't Andor, the brutal errors of the Trump administration will come home to roost in November and beyond.
Ironically, if they decided to take a lower-key approach and be smarter, that would be very bad for generating opposition to Trump's policies. If they took MY's advice and moved to friendly jurisdictions where the level of deportation would be a lot higher and where the opportunities for brutality would be lower, then normie Americans would quickly forget about it, and left-of-center complaints about what Trump is doing on deportations would not be effective.
Partly right. But the borders were not open under Biden, not even close. It was still hard to get into this country. And wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration are in place and work but only to a limited extent.
Ultimately, there's no way to make generalized obedience to immigration law incentive compatible while practicing just proportionality and respecting human rights. Illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and the incentives to do it are very strong.
They were open in the sense that you could show up, get yourself paroled into the country on a highly dubious asylum claim, then take your chances with a far out court date, and maybe also hope in the interim to be deemed a 'long settled American' deserving of amnesty and protection in a blue jurisdiction.
In some ways, the 2021-24 situation was basically the same "anarcho-tyranny" that was rampant in municipal governance at the time; the law was enforced on those who are willing to abide by it.
Plenty of people followed the process, and very few of them were permitted into the country. Those who did not follow the process were given a "hack" that would let them in for an indeterminate period of time, something that the advocates helping them short-circuit asylum law were clearly hoping would lead to them becoming sympathetic enough to be given a more permanent pass by the time the court system wended its way to them in two decades.
"Most people therefore correctly understand that right now there are just two options: mass violations of civil rights or open borders," — I guess I'm not most people: this makes no sense. Borders are not open if we stop allowing people without traditional asylum claims, UN refugee status (which means sponsored and supported), work visas, tourist visas and all the other usual apparatus of controlled borders.
The only way this would make sense is if "mass deportation" is somehow an urgent requirement. But I figure that by now, all the true "criminal aliens" are long gone, which is why ICE relies on racial and accent profiling.
Certainly lawful deportations can be morally repugnant in that they can separate families and return people to economic vulnerability in failing nations. But the reason there are laws and procedures and judges around deportation is that it minimizes the ethical problems. And these, of course, are always up for discussion and swing with the pendulum when Congress takes up immigration policy.)
The true and available option is for Homeland Security to abide by the law in their operations.
There is also the third option of slow and steady interior enforcement for illegal entrants and visa overstays while also funding immigration courts to allow all cases to get processed faster, but specifically asylum cases. Send CBP back to boarder to patrol the boarder!
The Obama/Clinton option is there for the taking. If you call that open boarders, I don’t want to know you.
If Democrats want to go hard, enforce e-verify. That’s what Republicans won’t do, and how you know they aren’t serious.
The Democrats have been holding out for the Comprehensive Immigration Deal for a generation. I suspect many versions of it poll above 50%, but the outer wings of both parties have always been opposed nearly any compromise and willing to play brinkman.
In the meantime the 20 year limbo state of non-legal residents with quasi-non enforcement, especially with regards to work has been bad. It encourages all sorts of ID fraud, under the table payments and exploitation and precarity for the immigrants.
Actual E-verify enforcement even if strategic is probably the only way to get back to the table for the Comprehensive deal, but then something has to be given on qualifications and probably the path to citizenship.
I just don’t think it’s true that you need civil rights abuses to avoid open borders. You can get significant deterrence with regular old border enforcement, and you can increase the compliance burden on companies to do even better than that.
You're right about what Democrats and liberals need to do, but that's about 2028. 2026 is all about riding the "repudiate Trump and MAGA" train. It's good enough in November to focus voters' attention on all the bad things Trump has done.
2028 will all be about "voters, it's okay to trust Democrats again." Lot of work to do there.
Matt mentioned this in passing, but I think we should spend a bit more time on how quickly the vibes in the Minesotta story changed from "holy shit immigrants stole billions of dollars, what a cluster" to "they are killing innocent Americans in the streets".
Sending in ICE has been such a narrative loser for Trump, they could have continued milking the fraud story all the way to the elections.
Or Greenland or Venezuela! Any one of these things could easily have sustained an entire six months of discourse, and he throws them all away in order to bury the others!
This is a gift for Keith Ellison, and I hope he takes advantage of it. It looks like the Justice Department has hamstrung itself for the moment with that investigation. The Minnesota AG's office should run hard with getting to the bottom of it, framing it as evil people defrauding the government and stealing health care and child care from the poor (which it is) and getting away from "you're inherently criminal if you're a Somali".
To some extent Walz has already fallen on his sword for this. If there's inherent problems in governance let them keep falling on him.
It also reveals that having a system in place where they can "kill innocent Americans in the streets" is the objective, and the reason why they want to win elections in the first place. Maybe they made a tactical error by prematurely assuming the groundwork was laid for them to be able to start doing that. A smarter strategy would mean delaying killings now so that they can do it with impunity later.
I think that they don't really have any ideas in terms of ways they can mass-disrupt in the midterm elections to a sufficient extent to keep from losing the House, and so they're speed running things to try to create one. I really doubt they wanted to be at the "shooting peaceful 2nd amendment fans" stage 12 months in.
Yeah. And it's also hard to pull it off in a midterm because it's so fragmented, and relatedly, people's motivation will be so much lower. In a presidential race, you could theoretically swing the outcome just by screwing things up in like 5 cities.
Besides all the process violations, Trump/Noem/Miller are violating 2 principles of common-sense conservatism that are much easier for average people to understand:
1) Competence matters in using deadly force. Most people understand panic, and that's one reason most people don't want everyone carrying a gun. Regardless of your political beliefs, police are supposed to be better at this, and the folks running ICE show no interest in that half of the bargain.
2) Local matters. Our ancestors resisted a street-level federal police force in part because it's easier to resist an us-vs.-them mentality when you live in the community you're policing.
Right, local police have a much better handle on local gun laws etc. The minneapolice police chief said in a press conference that past year they confiscated 900 (i think) firearms and arrested hundreds of violent criminals, all without shooting anyone.
I think your first point is incredibly important, as is the broader point that there is a huge difference between professional military and law enforcement and the paramilitary goon squad directly under the control of the president.
The National Guard and Marines were inappropriately sent into cities, but nonetheless acted professionally and, importantly, killed zero civilians.
The federal agent that killed Renee Good has a colorable argument, but Alex Pretti was a public execution. It seems very clear from the video that they pinned him down, beat him over the head and disarmed him, but in doing so one of the agents yelled "gun". Trained professionals should know how to respond; instead they shot him repeatedly in the back.
The fascists are working hard to leverage the tendency of lefties to lump the military and law enforcement together and righties to jump to the defense of anyone with a badge and uniform. They are clearly trying to goad their political opponents into violently rioting so they can back up their murderous goon squad with tanks. They want their supporters to embrace the central lie that we are past political solutions and that force is now the only option against an existential threat to the country.
Now is a great time to go out of your way to be nice to your local cops and offer up some "thank you for your service" niceties. We're going to need them.
Although I am forever disappointed, I cling to the hope that we, collectively, will start to remember that life is also a nuanced playwright. Social media has conditioned people to take sides and reduce everything to simple binaries, expressed in a meme or 240 characters. But it just cannot be the case that putting on a uniform makes a person intrinsically good or bad.
Social media continues to amplify "defund the police" and "if you didn't do anything wrong you have nothing to fear". And if people who hold those simplistic views cannot be swayed by the whipsaw of reality that has unfolded in Minneapolis in recent years, then we might truly be screwed as a nation.
As a military veteran... please don't say "thank you for your service." It's just awkward. The most dangerous thing I did in the military was drive in Kuwait.
I say “thank you for your service” to anyone who is clearly performing a public service that is often insufficiently thanked, whether it is fighting in a war or cleaning up the streets after a festival or dealing with customer service complaints at a popular restaurant.
Also as a veteran, I appreciate when people thank servicemembers for their service. While not all of us did anything all that great, many do, and many may have to in the future. When people thank 'you' for your service, theyre actually thanking servicemenbers as a body, not you specifically and you should just graciously accept it on behalf of those that have 'done stuff.'
I work with navy veterans and some them were just electric plant operators on boats. They're in less danger on an aircraft carrier than I am walking to the bus stop.
That'd change if we went to war with China. But we haven't
Something I've wondered about Matt's obsession with Republicans generically maintaining a trust advantage over Democrats on immigration even as Trump's numbers have cratered (which, to his credit, he's at least partially adjusted as the situation has changed) is if this might be a little like how in 2006-2008, Republicans would still poll as more trusted on "national security", even as Bush overall and the Iraq War specifically were becoming more and more unpopular.
In both cases, I think that Republicans as a whole maintained some residual "we trust the right-wing party more to be tough" sentiment. But ultimately, it was the specific politics of the current president that mattered. Like on Bush and the Iraq War, Trump started with a strong political hand but the actual results of his decision-making have been transparently disastrous. And like with Bush, because of ambient discontent with the economy and this same bad decision making impacting other areas too, fence sitters are no longer inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, even on an issue where they were previously willing to.
The other reason I bring this up is that in 2006-2008, there was still some residual anxiety from the "you're with us or with the terrorists" dynamic of 2002-2004 among certain types of Democratic pundits who were too slow to recognize the changing situation. But ultimately, Democrats were on solid political ground nominating an anti-Iraq War candidate in 2008. (McCain actually was a better opportunity for the GOP to reclaim their default trust on the issue than Republicans are likely to seek in 2028, but at the end of the day, he supported the war and was associated with a discredited political party.)
I will give MY credit for understanding the issue is now "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it" and not "what is the ideal immigration enforcement regime?" Both of the people shot in Minnesota were American citizens. Six prosecutors resigned rather than try to go after the widow of one of the victims for no reason.
We're way past this being an immigration issue. A decent number of people on this board are still trying to relitigate the Biden administration or 2020. Meanwhile, local 2A groups in Minnesota are coming out against the shooting.
It's also worth noting that we haven't merely stumbled into a controversy over the issue of "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it." There is a real constituency in this country for the "yes" side of that argument, and they are well represented.
There are people who support it, but I doubt it's 30%. Much less if you don't count people who blindly accepted what they were told and didn't review video evidence.
I'm not sure if you could find any Trump administration policy that is less popular. Tariffs are close. I guess withholding Epstein docs, but they've managed to avoid framing that as "policy" so far.
During some snowed-in and ill-advised facebook arguments this weekend, there are absolutely hardcore Trump supporters who saw the videos and still parrot the MAGA talking points. Even if you bring up their mental gymnastics and inconsistencies like Kyle Rittenhouse's gun-slinging or the J6ers abusing law enforcement, they will not budge. They consider ICE to be respectable law enforcement full stop and anyone who doesn't did a FAFO to themselves. They cannot be reasoned with. And I will refrain from arguing with them God willing for another year or so.
It's rough. It's the kind of thing where "success" in using an event as persuasion usually means 1 out of 10 people changing their mind, and even that can feel very discouraging when you're going through it, almost impossible to see.
It’s just partisanship. But we knew it had all gotten that bad. I knew in my heart of hearts that Biden had to start his own unconstitutional Brownshirt army to go door to door like they’re doing in Minneapolis but rooting out MAGA on day 1, because otherwise we were going to get a Republican presidency that was 100% going to pull that trigger and do something like this, and that it will get worse. We’re seeing the consequences of misplaced faith in the system now.
I just hope and pray that the Eye of Sauron doesn’t make it to Seattle, but with 3 years left there’s not much chance of that. Maybe they’ll hit Portland and the Bay Area first, we’ll see. Hopefully Governor Bob keeps his head down.
If you can't name at least some good things that your political opponents are doing, or some bad things that your own side is doing, you are blinded by partisanship.
I agree that only a minority go that far. But (a) politics and policy do respond to constituencies that comprise 20% (or whatever) of the electorate - that's a lot of people, and they move the center of gravity, (b) one of the many problems with that ideology is that the whole idea behind it is to achieve the ability to exercise power with or without majority support - i.e. to just hold onto power once you get it. Not saying that public opinion doesn't matter in authoritarian countries. It still does, to a degree, as we can see from e.g. Vladimir Putin's reluctance to do a general mobilization. But Putin wouldn't bat an eyelash if his approvals were in the 40% range.
Yeah, 20% is enough to bring you close to a "majority of the majority" threshold that can make a policy viable. Really, the whole Trump era is a product of a Republican party that is usually a 55/45 breakdown of Romneys/McCains vs. hard right revanchists becoming a 45/55 breakdown of the same.
Fortunately, unlike Putin, the Trump regime's exposure to electoral consequences still theoretically applies, and their paths to changing that are narrow and fraught.
That does not contradict my point in any way. Dictators work on image management and propaganda? No kidding. You're telling me this for the first time. What's also true is that a dictator is in no danger just because a bare majority of the population disapproves of the job he's doing. That's the whole point of being a dictator and subverting democracy. You don't hit a danger zone until your approvals (if they could be measured) get into the 20s or whatever. At that point, not only do most people disapprove of your performance, but the share of that share who are willing to risk death to hit the streets to say so becomes significant.
I never imagined I’d see the day when the Dems were the “security” party and the GOP were the “education” party. And yet we’re heading that way. The current moment is like watching 2 soccer teams trading own-goals.
I think an interesting question here is what it means for winning back the senate. Lots of senators were haunted by voting yes on the Iraq war. Will senators be haunted for voting yes on ICE funding? Or will all of the blowback be limited to Trump who is on his way out in 3 years anyway? I'm worried that congress is going to escape without the blame they deserve.
I don't understand the shot Matt takes at Robert Hur. Hur is a patriotic hero who tried to tell the truth about President Biden's decrepitude and was attacked by lying partisan Democrats for doing it.
I seem to be misremembering. It is noteworthy that Hur is not qualified to make medical evaluations, and said so himself, and that his statements about Biden (which were 10000% partisan hackery, but whatever, if they're true they're true) were statements of impression and not evaluation.
I suppose I was taking the objective truth of "Hur did not call Biden senile" and confusing it with "Hur said Biden was not senile," when I don't think he said either thing.
Whatever. I'll take the L on that memory lapse. The bottom line is that it was indefensible of Hur to put that shit in his report. It was not what he was investigating and putting political hits in his report was blatant prosecutorial misconduct, not "heroic patriotism". He's a piece of shit who, at best, lied by omission, and I bet his pockets are lined with MAGA crypto scam dollars as a reward.
This is so fucking stupid. The report, which he had to put out, was about the decision to not prosecute Biden for his illegal retention of documents. He said that a charging decision would be unwise because a jury would likely not find Mr. Biden had the requisite intent to retain the documents unlawfully, instead seeing him as an elderly man with poor memory.
Biden's decrepitude was a lie perpetrated by SV donors. He had a speech impediment that was worsening due to normal age-related slowing of cognition. Period. He was never senile. Hur can get fucked. I don't have to call him a liar, he called himself a liar. He contradicted himself.
He was senile, inarticulate, only had "6 good hours" a day, couldn't even do friendly interviews, couldn't do a full campaign, and sounded like a blithering idiot because of his age related decrepitude at the debate with Trump.
I know I lost the debate. That doesn't mean I have to stop telling the truth.
"Biden is senile" was never a consensus, and I am not going to let the elites (who are, and deserve to be, embarrassed by how they handled the whole thing) pretend it was or is. It was ALWAYS a minority position among liberals and Democrats.
He's a partisan hack telling us what anyone with a brain already knew: Biden is a touch senile. Not good obviously, but presidential senility seems to be the preference.
Except that a bunch of actual partisan hacks on the Democratic side attacked him for saying the truth. Josh Marshall called him a prostitute for saying it!
I definitely don’t know anything about that. It would be interesting to know precisely what Matt is talking about, since at the level of description you provide, this is basically what Matt himself had been saying, but he might be objecting to something more about Hur, either in the details of the report or before.
Any one-to-one comparison is going to be a little glib, so forgive me, but I want to riff on this point: "Outsmarting your opponents with disciplined behavior is a move that you are allowed to make in politics."
There are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course. The one I covered most myself was Tea Party organizing that made life difficult for elected Democrats until they scaled back or voted against the Affordable Care Act. There were protests on the Capitol lawn, raucous town hall meetings, elected officials getting yelled at when they went to work. Democrats didn't like this, but it was generally understood as a part of politics, and they were frustrated that Obama's movement went to sleep, creating space for the Tea Party to mobilize.
More recently, there were conservative protests of COVID restrictions and school gender identity and race policies under Joe Biden. It was a major scandal when the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Merrick Garland's DOJ, comparing the disruption of school board meetings by parents who opposed liberal gender or race policies to "domestic terrorism." Garland announced that the FBI would look into it: "The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate." Fair to say that Republicans/conservatives saw an attack on free assembly. They spent years investigating the DOJ over this, and my cards on table, I think Garland and the NSBA were crazy to do it.
Obviously, Stephen Miller et al now talk about disruptive liberal protesters the way the NSBA talked about those angry parents, and the Bondi DOJ is dusting off Civil War-era codes to try to charge Democratic politicians with conspiracy to overthrow the government. There's a permission structure for this, which you can read about in the 2024 book "Unhumans," blurbed by JD Vance: The left is dangerous and you must do whatever it takes to keep them from power.
But there's a more traditionally American principle, that you're allowed to tell the government to fuck off sometimes.
<i>here are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course.</i>
I can't think of even one where the government substantively changed course, though. The ACA was passed and remains in force, school policies on gender issues are getting pressure from the administration but not changing substantively.
The analogy that I'd keep in mind is the 1950's-1960's; the pro-stability South was at least as well organized as the anti-ICE forces, and a combination of federal troops, federal police, and federal financial pressure completely won against it. Sure, it got pictures of active-duty troops attacking schoolchildren with fixed bayonets, but the media didn't care so it didn't really matter.
Greetings from academia, where we went from mandatory DEI statements everywhere to mentioning DEI anywhere becoming a fireable offense. Two years ago it was mandatory to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion in grant proposals (from any agency on any topic), now it is strictly forbidden. It is also now literally illegal (in several states) for employees of public universities to engage in "DEI activities" meaning not even tenure will protect you.
And we still risk getting cancelled (and fired) for expressing views about biological sexes on social media, but now the polarity is reversed.
"pro-stability" is an interesting phrase to use to describe what is actually "pro- an overt system of racial apartheid enshrined in law and further enforced by a terroristic murder regime."
And by interesting, to be clear here, I mean that it completely discredits your argument.
You’re talking about local school policies? Why would those need to change through protest, rather than local elections? (And if they’re not changing, maybe people just don’t share your preferences.)
"It’s Noem, Lewandowski, and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino who’ve pushed for creating these dramatic scenes. Which I bring up not to paint Homan and Lyons for sainthood, but as a reminder that this really is a choice that Trump made. He has unleashed chaos, deliberately, by choosing to side with the pro-chaos faction of his administration over the advice offered by more seasoned professionals. Contra Lowry, this is not a question of nullification or left-wing self-radicalization; it’s Trump making a choice."
This is right. And it's worth asking, why is he making that choice? The reason is that for him, and especially for Vance, their foremost enemies aren't immigrants at all. Immigrants are a means to an end. Their foremost enemies are liberals, and liberal-ism - not just the progressive left-liberalism of the last decade, but the whole tradition of classical liberalism that goes back to the Founders. Just as in foreign policy, it's now crystal clear that their #1 foreign enemy was never China. Their #1 foreign enemies are NATO, the EU, and the liberal governments behind them.
It’s a pretty direct consequence of them being backed by Silicon Valley billionaires who have basically become ungovernable and it’s weird that people like Matt would rather sing the praises of AI than point out that something should be done about this.
Remember, trying to regulate bullshit like cryptocurrency is why SV turned on Biden and went all-in on Trump.
The three major commercial AI labs (Google Deepmind, Anthropic, OpenAI) did not materially back Donald Trump during the election. Leadership at former and the latter did cravenly bend the knee after his election to avoid malicious regulatory action, but that’s a different thing, and something people in many industries did. Trying to paint the tech industry with a single brush is going to lead you to more confusion than clarity I think.
I assume you’re referring to Greg Brockman? I was thinking of the CEOs specifically, but I did not say so explicitly so thanks for clarifying. I think it reinforces my broader point though that the tech industry is ideologically heterogenous though.
I don't think "they're backing Trump because they're cowards" is really a defense here. I mean what does it say about the owner of the Washington Post that what he really cares about is his stupid space exploration business?
Well, I personally think AI should be strangled to death with regulations and Democrats are very cowardly in how they're approaching it, and there it's fine to paint with a broad brush because they're ALL going all-in on AI. There is no good tech company any more.
I don't have a Free Press subscription, but feel it is worth pointing out they have an editorial entitled "Kristi Noem's reckless lies". Anyone know what their stance on this is?
Yeah, they are taking a pretty hard line against the Trump administration on this. Not a surprise because despite what some commenters here allege, they are definitely not all in on MAGA.
So the top two comments respond to growing authoritarian violence by asking how can progressives and liberals do better, even as protestors do exactly what the commenters think they should do. Sigh.
Projecting your anxieties onto your coalition partners isn't smart analysis, it's working against unity at the very time we need to be most united.
Not to fall victim to hypocrisy murder-suicide myself, but it is funny that Lowry is all about federalism and states' rights until Minnesota is okay with having more immigrants than he is.
Eh, I agree Lowry is a hypocrite on many things (which is why I liked your comment), but the response there would be that states cannot constiturionally restrict immigrants from moving across borders once they are in the country, which makes that distinguishable from gun rights or abortion.
Unless I've missed something, there's still no federal law or SCOTUS decision precluding Illinois/Chicago from seizing guns brought into the jurisdiction from Indiana that violate Illinois/Chicago law. States, however, are constitutionally barred from having any form of immigration law of their own, nor can they independently enforce federal immigration law. Federal authorities are literally the only ones who can actually do anything to set and enforce federal immigration law.
Or abortion for that matter. See the simmering desire in red states to ban Mifepristone or prosecute people traveling out of state for an abortion.
That being said, the naturalization process and management of the border for the purpose of levying customs and duties are pretty clearly a federal responsibility under the constitution.
My understanding is that there was a lot more state involvement in immigration law before roughly 1891. The constitution only references naturalization, not immigration.
Yes, I understand that there used to be more state involvement in regulating immigration, but there has been a wave of SCOTUS decisions in the past 100 years or so that have (1) very broadly confirmed the ability of people to freely travel internally in the US, (2) generally cut back the power of states to restrict where people live, the ability to own real property, etc., and (3) generally ruled that states cannot make it a state crime for an individual to be in violation of federal immigration laws or refuse some types of state benefits. SCOTUS might go the other direction now if some of those issues were to come to it these days, but it seems by and large that no one is even setting up test cases to do that.
In retrospect voters in general received the "defending democracy" stuff by Biden and then Harris as cover for unpopular policies of the administration.
I think the problem also is that it just doesn't work as a point of persuasion. There was a lot of churn in the electorate that probably did reflect conservatives voting for Harris because they thought Trump was a fundamental threat, but those people didn't need convincing, and people who didn't already think that Trump was an authoritarian threat weren't going to be convinced by a campaign.
Yeah, once Trump gets beaten in an election, “but next time he’ll be a threat to democracy” is hard for the average voter to swallow (even though it’s correct, I never stopped believing it was correct, and I think it should have been obvious to people paying attention).
The main issue with the “defending democracy” frame is that the subtext of the argument was that in order to “defend democracy” you had to accept a whole raft of left-wing policies that poll terribly.
Biden actually won in 2020 on “return to the Obama-era normal” and instead we went from deporter-in-chief to bogus asylum claims flooding the country.
It's more like the voters seconding Joni Mitchell who said, "don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone." They just didn't take the protect democracy argument seriously because it hadn't been undermined yet.
Most Americans are materially comfortable and always have been. They can’t imagine a real crisis because it’s too far out of their frame of reference.
A substantial portion of them are also bored and aimless, and therefore highly susceptible to culture war silliness. So you end up with tens of millions ignoring important things and voting according to minor/spurious things.
It should also be mentioned that a majority of voters that voted to defend Democracy did so by voting for Trump.
IE a majority thought Biden/Harris was a greater threat to democracy than Trump. And if challenged why they would point to illegal immigration, refusal to back voter ID, ministry of truth etc.
I think it just wasn't pertinent. Clearly Trump tried to steal the election, but he also failed and is very old, so voters didn't think it was as important as the economic items.
It was too high minded to appeal to the median voter over more daily concerns, and Kamala shouldn't have gone back to that failed tactic.
Disappointed MY didn't point to "sharpening the contradictions" as a counterpoint to "slow boring of hard boards". Seems the former is the winning hand here.
Substantively, though, many commenters here are still putting this in context of immigration. It should be thought of rather in the context enforcing authoritarian rule in general and is part and parcel of legal harassment of Jack Smith, Jerome Powell and any number of other actors.
Right, all the "Biden lied too about the border being secure" talk here feels like such a bizarre preoccupation to me in a context where the people ICE has killed were natural-born American citizens as far as possible from "the border" (unless we're deciding that the lack of toughness on the Canada border is discrediting Democrats now).
I generally agree with most of what you're saying, but for "those in the know" the border really is much more than the southern border. Compared to the past, a far greater share of unauthorized immigrants arrive over the Canadian border, or through airports and visa overstays, than ever before. It's far more economical than it used to be to do so. Plus Trump has made interior enforcement a marquee part of what he's doing, so really any geography is part of the immigration debate at this point.
That is why there is Border Patrol, which is supposed to patrol the border, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is supposed to handle interior enforcement. The former is trained for encounters with armed cartels smuggling drugs and people across the border. The latter is trained more like police, to carry out investigations and arrest people in the interior. We even have a separate Customs and Border Protection for ports of entry.
The revolutionaries running the federal government are setting quotas that are detached from reality and then sending armed, masked Border Patrol agents to cities, ostensibly to work with ICE, with all the careful planning and forethought of a 3:00AM missive from the tweeter-in-chief. This is, of course, after they first tried literally sending the military into cities.
I cannot wrap my mind around the credulity required to cast any of this is as an "immigration debate". Sending the Border Patrol into cities is sending Marines to Yellowstone to support the National Park Service. If anything, the debate is whether this is all the result of deliberate cruelty or malicious incompetence.
I wasn't casting "any of this", ie Matt's post today or the news related to it as part of the immigration debate. I was specifically replying to the back half of Connor's comment, which seemed to say that if it's happening in Minnesota it can't be related to the border, either in terms of actual enforcement or presumably politically.
Put a different way - there are a lot of good ways to criticize Trump's enforcement actions, both for political reasons and as a criticism of the substantial merits or demerits of enforcement, but the fact that it's the Canadian border and not the Mexican border is not one of them.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to imply that you were being credulous. My position is that none of this has anything to do with immigration. I think it is modern fascism, full stop.
Specifically, though, Renee Good was shot in the arm, chest and through left the temple by a Border Patrol agent, not ICE. And from the looks of the video Alex Pretti was shot once in the head by a Border Patrol agent and then nine more times in the back, after he collapsed, by two Border Patrol agents. But we don't know because they were wearing masks, no clear identification and fled the scene after firing tear gas at onlookers.
The OP said ICE killed natural-born American citizens, but I don't think that is true in either case. They were killed by Border Patrol, nowhere near the border while violating no laws. For that reason, I do think it is relevant that it occurred thousands of miles from the US-Mexico border and hundreds of miles from the US-Canada border.
Moreover, the first thing they tried was sending the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles and Chicago. Now they've found a legal grey area where Border Patrol can operate anywhere under the rubric of "immigration enforcement" and treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent. Stochastic violence from masked agents of the state under the direct supervision of a president who has shown no hesitation to pardon violent felons looks, walks and quacks like state terrorism.
I think that is where the only debate is: are the people running the federal government fascists (deliberate cruelty), or are they just acting like fascists (malicious incompetence)? They want to roll this up in to a debate about immigration by painting all immigrants as violent criminals, but instead they are smashing windows and dragging parents out of their cars in front of schools; smashing down doors, pointing guns at civilians and frog-marching US citizens out of their own homes; shooting peaceful protestors at point-blank range with rubber bullets and then mocking them; shooting women in their cars and then bragging about what good shots they are; lobbing tear gas into open car windows; setting of flash bang grenades next to infants; etc.
I just don't see any plausible argument that violations of civil immigration law remotely justify any of this and that we've moved way past any debate about immigration policy.
That's all good but why were you replying to me then?
Whatever Trump does or doesn't do, there is still going to be an immigration debate, today, tomorrow and well past Trump into the far future. It may or may not involve significant interior enforcement and it's increasingly going to include places of entry apart from Mexico. The Dems will have to consider what that means for them if they have power again in 2028. It's not all about Mexico like it was in the early Obama era. That's all I was trying to say.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting unauthorized Canadians are immigrating here in great numbers. It's people from other nations who find a way into Canada and then come here across the unwatched Northern Border.
Dozens of reasons. It might be easier to obtain a tourist visa to Canada. Or cheaper to fly their from their point of origin. They might have family who immigrated to the USA, or maybe their work visa is expiring in Canada so might try their luck in the USA rather than being deported from Canada (limiting their chance to legally work in Canada in the future).
"they may be slightly poorer than us". If a person can make 20% more, might totally be worth it to them. Also it's cold as fuck there, and not everyone is up for that, especially if you grew up somewhere tropical.
SB came about at a time in 2020 where centrists needed to yell at people on the left to stop being crazy. Too many people here live in a perpetual 2020, in part because they're fundamentally motivated by their disappointment in Biden more than dealing with the specifics of the challenges of American life in 2026.
More accurately: I feel like this board has become a refuge for never-Trump Bush Republicans. Which is ironic considering Matt’s history with that political movement.
I don't think it's never Trump Republicans. It's the remnants of the Obama coalition thats since broken down. People forget but he decisively won the blue wall states plus IA and OH, PA, and FL twice (and NC once) and that the Democrats were still competitive all over the midwest and parts of the south. Politicians from all kinds of places rode his coat tails. It used to be a much bigger tent party, even if I think a lot of the harder partisans and people under, I don't know, 35 don't remember it. I strongly doubt there's any significant number of Romney or W voters here, to say nothing of Dole or HW for those who are even further up there.
Well, it’s a disproportionately educated group, so it’s not surprising they’re looking for good political discussions (the ones you can get for free being so awful).
I can't think of more than a couple of people that have self-id'd that way, and it's not exactly something a person would need to hide on a semi-anonymous internet forum.
Looked differently, something like 10-15% of the electorate has switched their presidential vote in each of the last 4 or 5 elections. So you'd expect maybe to have more never-Trump Bush Republicans if you took a random sample of Biden voters.
The loudest commenters swing far to the right of the median Democrat on virtually every issue. They’re more conservative than the median Democrat in 2012. Maybe you’re correct that Obama swept up a group that would have otherwise voted Republican but for Bush sucking and somehow they’re all here; but that’s kind of the same thing.
How are you defining "loud"? It could be the kind of thing where the comments you find most grating are the ones that stick in your head.
But still, it seems like you're saying that SB is full of people that would be republican if it weren't for Trump's flaws, but I really don't get that sense. You have lots of debate on various issues, and plenty of people that are hard to fit into predefined political categories - but that's also what the voters are like! And I hardly hear anyone embracing traditional Republican positions.
That’s not true at all. He voted for Mitt Romney for governor of MA. And I think that’s fine. He panned Romney as a Presidential candidate. He also (in college) supported the invasion of Iraq and spent a dozen years writing mea culpae about it. Mistakes as a 21 year old are formative and forgivable. The moment I most respected Matt was this one: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2008/12/22/the-cap-kerfuffle/
Yes, he voted for mitt Romney when he was in college, as I said. And he supported the Iraq war. All failures of youth to be sure. But the idea that is somehow out of sorts with moderate republicans is belied by history with them. Andrew Sullivan had Matt Yglesias Award for alleged democrats who stood up to their party on things like the Iraq war. Long way of saying, Matt has always inhabited a close place as a deliver who has quite a bit in common with moderate Republicans, libertarians, and I think so called Never Trump Republicans, whatever that means. There is nothing at all surprising about his substack being a refuge for former Republicans. His whole career has been built on it.
Hold on. The leftists went crazy in 2024 shouting “Genocide Joe” and “Trump will be better on Palestine and less involved in foreign wars” and here we are.
Amen. Top comment of the day about the SB commenters. Thank you. It is all backwards looking anger that is totally divorced from the seriousness of the moment.
This is a good piece-- and I must say, I found the comments yesterday to the effect that Matt was somehow slow or vague about responding to Minneapolis... distasteful, to put it mildly, given that the man has been seriously ill.
I also think the Second Amendment point is extremely well-taken. You can have a society where someone carrying around a gun (even if lawfully permitted) is treated as implicitly threatening anyone they talk to with the use of unprovoked lethal force. Or you can have a society where someone carrying around a (lawfully permitted) gun is treated as not sending any inherent message absent some specific act of brandishment. I am not indifferent to which of the two of these our law recognizes, and neither are the Second Amendment-aholics. But both of us have to choose, one or the other. What you cannot have is a society where carrying around a gun is given whatever message the authorities feel like giving it depending on whether they like the individual in question or not. And that's the society Noem et al want-- one that operates explicitly by the precept that the government gets to decide whether you have rights or not depending on whether you are part of their political in-group.
I dont think this is a good take as that isnt actually properly describing the relationship between carrying arms and interactions with law enforcement. Carrying a gun significantly changes your ability to project force. Obviously, differing ability to project force will change how law enforcement (or anyone) treats you in any context. In the case of law enforcement, carrying a gun means that you have a much higher ability to make someone fear for their life. That is the factor that is relevant here, so yes, if you have a gun on you and attend a protest, it is much more likely that you will legitimately be perceived as a deadly threat. There is nothing special about a gun in this formulation (it is a point of a scale of ability to project force) and that is why we arent ever going to 'pick' one of the options you presented.
No. You cannot pretend to support someone's right to do something while also holding their exercise of that right against them legally. This is why, for example, prosecutors are not allowed to say that a defendant refusing to testify at a criminal trial makes the defendant look guilty. It is in fact empirically the case that people who don't testify are more likely to be guilty than people who do. But the jury is not permitted to consider that information as doing so would burden the right to remain silent, and the prosecutor is not permitted to inveigle to get them to illegally do so.
These situations are not courtrooms and LE officers are asked to respond reasonably to credible threats. If you have a firearm on you, you represent a greater threat than someone who is not armed. In your world an officer is not allowed to view somepoint pointing a gun at them as any more of a credible threat than if they are pointing a lazer (because I cant hold against them their right to hold a gun)? Your rights allow you to carry weapons around, they dont protect you from every possible consequence of carrying that weapon around, in include the possibility of a police officer feeling that their life is more at threat.
There are worlds in which these arguments you're putting forward make sense and carry weight. In this world, in this situation, where the man was subdued, disarmed, and summarily executed, it's a load of shit, frankly.
Pointing a gun AT someone is considered a threat of imminent lethal force in every conceivable situation I am aware of. Absent justification, it's almost a per se crime.
But a. that's precisely because ordinary carry permits don't authorize you to go around doing dangerous shit like brandishing weapons at people, and b. the only guns that were pointed at anyone here were the CBP guns that murdered Pretti.
Typo: "But blanket prohibition of cooperation is an activist demand that arose in Biden’s second term and was adopted in many blue jurisdictions, often without sufficient consideration."
This was probably supposed to say Obama's second term.
I'll take the affirmative case for the 2nd Amendment here. It is correct and valuable that outrageous government misconduct results in intolerable deadly violence in a free country. The Feds are not, in fact, supposed to be able to act like the Gestapo and the fact that we have an armed populace dramatically increases the barriers to doing so. It's resource intensive. It's a huge political problem. It's bad for would be authoritarians in all sorts of ways to have to regularly execute citizens in the streets to get their policy preferences. Liberals of all stripes should always have recognized this but I'm happy to welcome the recently enlightened.
I have been subject to many, many years of claims from my right wing friends that a vast politicized federal police force was right around the corner; and just as many claims from my left wing friends that citizens with rifles could never be a check against the power of the state. Now that it's here there's been soul searching on both sides.
All governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Only in America is the feedback from the governed so direct.
Do you really believe citizens with rifles are seriously a check here against state power. The state executed the man with the gun who at no point had any chance or recourse. In fact, the state possess the capacity to do this at much higher level if so inclined. I dont see what happened in MN as ANYTHING to do with a the 2nd amendment disempowering the government.
It is the absence of regulated government which is causing the potential reduction in force and push back. It seems democracy, not the 2nd amendment is the more powerful antidote both in this case and more broadly.
Yes, government agents should definitely be held accountable for summarily executing civilians and patriots like Pretti should strive to be more combat effective when assaulted by lawless thugs.
An incompetent clusterfuck. Not an execution. Possibly murder, more likely either some form of criminally reckless homicide or massive civil liability/civil rights violations. Words matter.
We have multiple primary source videos displaying the incident. Do you really need an official narrative to make your own opinion about it first?
NYT description of one such video:
"An agent begins shoving the demonstrators, and squirts pepper spray at their faces.
At this moment, Mr. Pretti has both hands clearly visible. One is holding his phone, while he holds the other up to protect himself from pepper spray. He moves to help one of the protesters who was sprayed, as other agents approach and pull him from behind.
Several agents tussle with Mr. Pretti before bringing him to his knees. He appears to resist as the agents grab his legs, push down on his back and strike him repeatedly.
The footage shows an agent approaching with empty hands and grabbing at Mr. Pretti as the others hold him down.
About eight seconds after he is pinned, agents yell that he has a gun, indicating that they may not have known he was armed until he was on the ground.
The same agent who approached with empty hands pulls a gun from among the group that appears to match the profile of a firearm DHS said belonged to Mr. Pretti.
The agents appear to have him under their control, with his arms pinned near his head.
As the gun emerges from the melee, another agent aims his own firearm at Mr. Pretti’s back and appears to fire one shot at close range. He then appears to continue firing at Mr. Pretti, who collapses.
A third agent unholsters a weapon. Both agents appear to fire additional shots into Mr. Pretti as he lies motionless.
In total, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds."
There was an incredibly thin hook by which one could make an almost entirely disingenuous self defense case for the Good shooting. They've got nothing at all for the Pretti execution.
I’ll await the full story, but initial reports said the deceased was interfering with the feds. Maybe that was well meaning, but it certainly was ill advised.
I've had productive discussions with you in the past before, so I'm actually wondering what the hell is up with your take on this. Are you a former cop?
What would you call the ICE/CBP killings? "Execution" implies coldblooded calculation and thus I'd agree with you. "Blind rage killing by thugs with no impulse control who react violently to anyone who isn't cowed by them and should never ever have been granted authority by the federal government to wield and use firearms" is the non-pithy way I'd put it.
My understanding is that the ones who murdered Pretti have been moved to other street locations (maybe not in Minneapolis). I mean, not even put on desk duty.
My deepest belief is that the Trump folks are fervently wishing for some protester to shoot and kill an ICE agent and they will move heaven and earth to help make that happen, including putting murderers back on the street.
Government agents are the primary authorized user of force in any modern country. Which means it they should have the highest obligation of anyone for responsible behavior while armed.
Law enforcement officers need not rely on their Second Amendment rights when on duty: They have authority granted to them by legislatures. Their behavior is also governed by laws and regulations.
G Elliott Morris tried dunking on Matt for an April 2025 tweet where Matt cautioned against raising the salience of immigration in the context of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. I wonder why people have such a hard time understanding tactical vs strategic advice. In April 2025 Trump was still trusted on immigration and Garcia, just beneath the surface, had some legitimately unsavory aspects to his case. A focus on due process was appropriate, but not a focus on immigration.
Then DHS goons started shooting white Minnesotans and now it's immigration enforcement that's incinerating public trust of Trump on immigration.
This is not a hard needle to thread at a high level (sane enforcement, secure borders) but I do worry that progressives are going to take this shift in sentiment to start messaging things like "no one is illegal on stolen lands" because they think lenient enforcement is popular now. What's a pithier/better reflection of the politics than ABOLISH ICE?
I’ve increasingly found G Elliott Morris to be less of a credible source of political strategy and more of just a guy who is pandering to the heather cox Richardson/blusky crowd. Sometimes that means he has interesting posts! But his goal seems to be giving them data that satisfies their preconceived political narratives
His data analysis also seems to have become shakier to me over recent months. He's a more sophisticated statistician than I am, certainly, but it's very clear the bar for 'things Morris agrees with' is much lower and more flexible than the bar for other issues and positions. Categories get combined on assumption, everything people say that isn't 'economy' is suddenly evidence against the effectiveness of economic messaging, just way out over his skis on stuff.
1. The HCR / Bluesky crowd drive me nuts
2. The former are an important faction of the Democratic electorate
You should listen to the Nate Silver episode of Central Air w Josh Barro, they talk about Morris…
Yeah, his conduct in the WAR Wars and unwillingness to clearly state “moderation (on average) leads to over performance” without excessive throat clearing has led me to this opinion of him
The moderation thing is such a dumb argument. Run candidates who fit with their district or state. Is that really a controversial point?
Apparently yes when a number of people on the left aren’t willing to acknowledge that Blue Dogs outperform New Dems, and New Dems outperform Progressive Caucus members
In Morris's case and others, being a star statistician and having any clue about political strategy appear to be mutually exclusive.
Yea I think MY really understates the degree to which the whole 'sanctuary city' concept and adoption of the related NGO rhetoric has been a kind of brinkmanship, daring a conservative government to do something like this. It's part of the larger set of cultural values that have rendered Democrats unelectable in huge swathes of the country. There's also a very real way in which fomenting crisis is bad for democracy. That's exactly why Trump wants it so bad. In terms of preserving our form of government, being able to win Senate seats in Ohio is millions of times more valuable than being able to win media cycles involving dead activists and dumb, undisciplined law enforcement.
Now of course we are where we are and I'm glad that Americans seem rightly disgusted by these shootings. The one over the weekend really has me seething and as a gun rights person myself I'm glad there's been at least some push back from those quarters, particularly given how craven they usually are in the face of abusive law enforcement. To the extent these can be used to get the administration to back off its most outrageous enforcement tactics I'm all for it. But it isn't a long term strategy and taken too far it risks feeding the same kind of cultural alienation thats made the Democrats a rump party run by geriatrics and clueless kids from the ivy league. If I were influential at the national level for the Democratic party I'd still be pushing for a big and total leadership shake up before going into the midterms. We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them.
"We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them."
Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists. In 2019, Movimiento Cosecha crashed his events and demanded he promise to end all deportations. He never went there but he eventually partially renounced the Obama immigration record for deporting too many people. Cut to: His incompetent border policy, include him joining the media pile-on of CBP agents who looked scary because they were shooing Haitians back over the Rio Grande on horseback.
Trump's been very successful at getting Democrats to react to an extreme restrictionist position by indulging an extreme sanctuary position. I see Dems like Ruben Gallego who are tougher than Biden - he gets screamed at for voting for the Laken Riley Act but doesn't apologize for it. But in 2028 they'll need to convince people that electing a Democrat doesn't put a "OPEN" sign on the border, and this will involve getting yelled at and being accused of being Trump 2.0.
Agree completely. I think the biggest risk right now is riding thermostatic forces, plus general backlash to Trump's madness, plus Democrats now dominating among reliable, off cycle election voters, to a really strong midterm showing, and convincing themselves that all of their problems are solved for 2028. They aren't, not by a long shot.
“Complacency and hubris.”
They rely too much on the stick of Republican abuses rather than the carrot of Democratic polcies.
Hopefully with the stick now being "murdering US citizens" they'll realize how important it is to not have the stick in play. *Something* has got to give.
He had limited energy. He made a bargain with the Warren wing for support and votes. It was all internal party and coalition management. The problem is that much of coalitions' interests and priorities were misaligned with public sentiments and values. Maybe it's the Harvardization of Democratic leadership and their staffers? (And by Harvardization I mean the elitist and well off selection effect of party staffers and progressive leaders outside of the party.)
This is just my opinion, but I do get the sense that upper middle class, always-been-comfortable, Ivy League grads are our biggest liability. They can’t see how stupid most of the left’s radicalism is because they are so out of touch.
If you got some normal folks who maybe attended state public universities or even community college (gasp!) to work on campaigns and for politicians, they might not feel the need to compensate so much.
Based on my friends who work at a university that serves almost exclusively working class people (often the first in their family's to go to college), I don't think this reflects the reality of higher education. The people who are just there to get a better job are mostly checked out of politics but not significantly less left than the people who are more theoretical about it. If you go to college, you're going to be exposed to the same stuff, live in the same multi-cultural world, share the same TikToks.
Community college might be a better dividing line, but by and large, the days of an Ivy elite politically distinct from the public school masses and totally out of touch feels very dated to me.
Maybe. It’s been awhile since I have been around university students. Maybe political parties at the local level should try to court politically disengaged students. I do remember the young democrats at my public university being super clicky and not approachable at all.
All taking the same damn STEM majors, too.
I mean, yeah. This was never more obvious than when Democratic staffers went to the streets to protest their own bosses over Gaza.
To be clear, a whole lot of people felt bamboozled by the whole thing, electing Biden and functionally getting Elizabeth Warren.
>Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists<
I've said it once and I'll say it a million times: people understandably talk about The Debate, and that is indeed the event that made the scales fall from their eyes. But it was letting the inmates run the asylum that was the true calling card of Joe Biden's decline. Would the Joe Biden of 1997 have been that susceptible to getting rolled by people who gave so little heed to the necessity of competing in elections? Probably not. We certainly never saw that kind of epic, damaging cluelessness from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Your interpretation is depressingly common, pretty much universal, but dead wrong. Biden's immigration policy was 1) an economic policy and 2) very effective. I'm not sure why they just let the idea it was done for "woke" reasons flap out in the breeze, or for that matter, why people who know better are not acknowledging it was the key policy for immaculate disinflation, and instead self-flagellating on behalf of our "out of touch" party.
Harsh immigration enforcement from 2021-2024 results in Biden losing decidedly on the economy. Hard stop.
It was not effective, but it was the best tool the president had at the time. What was needed was a massive influx of money and personnel by Congress into USCIS and EOIR to get the asylum process back in order. Asylum applications should take a few months to process, not 10 years. Asylum cases shouldn’t get to the point where the applicants need to be given work authorization.
That’s the loophole that needed mending to bring order back to the system. And that’s what people want. They don’t mind immigrants. Most Americans like immigrants even. They don’t like disorder or “cheating.”
I don’t even doubt that many of those asylum cases would have been approved, which would have been good for our economy.
The problem is, it was both economic policy and socially liberal, if not “woke.” People on the left tend to be conflicted about this aspect, that having illegal/undocumented migrants lowers labor costs, because that’s “exploitation” even if the people being exploited eagerly embrace it. As far as the effectiveness of Biden’s policy is concerned, it may have been effective for the upward bar of the K shaped economy and good for growth/the stock market, but it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side. The sudden influx of people worsened housing scarcity, the key economic issue for working people.
"it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side."
This is pretty vibe-y. Low end real wages went up under Biden...
And immigration doesn't worsen housing scarcity as much labor scarcity does.
Agreed that there is a cultural aspect. And we struggle a lot with it because we fundamentally do not believe in the legitimacy of the grievance. Which I'm not even saying as a slam on us, just pointing out it's a challenge. It's so hard for liberals to appreciate the conservative POV on this when WE ARE THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY LIVE WITH IMMIGRANTS and WE KNOW THEY ARE FINE. So it's hard to put yourself in the mind of somebody who has no fucking idea what they are talking about, but is passionate about it anyway, because the nice man on TV told them to be.
Low end wages went up, but prices for food and housing went up more. And “vibes” decide elections—that was the lesson of 2024, people need to learn it if they don’t want to keep losing.
You're right, it was an effective economic policy. However, watching Colombian families sell candy bars on the street corner, shivering in the midst of a brutal Chicago winter... that radicalized the hell out of me. It was irresponsible, was rightly seen by the American public to be chaos, and set back Democratic messaging on immigration for years.
Lack of moderates in the Dem coalition and lack of influence of moderate Rs in Trump admin appears to mean this will continue to be a seesaw issue towards both extremes. The rest of us are stuck watching the extremes with horror.
The Democratic coalition is overwhelmingly filled with moderates, on the whole substantially more moderate than the GOP one.
The issue is that the moderates are generally upper-middle and professional class, educated people of high conscientiousness, and as such they are** very vulnerable to being shamed into allowing the (much smaller than in the GOP coalition) faction of extremists to drive policy and rhetoric.
** The outcomes of 2026 and 2028 will hinge on whether they've learned their lesson and we can start using the word "were" here or not.
Yeah, it's no coincidence that while most of the candidates on the 2020 debate stage were all fighting over what they assumed was the ascendant Bernie coalition, Biden won largely by remembering that churchgoing Black grandmas in South Carolina are who really decides the Democratic primary.
Sadly, Biden did not bring that understanding to his actual Presidency.
What on earth are you on about? The Democratic coalition is chock full of moderates. If I had a dime for every time I read of a center-left pundit advise Democratic candidates to “punch left” or “have a Sister Soulja moment” or “focus on broadly popular kitchen table issues,” I could afford to retire!
I dont think you understand, those people are gone. The reason people beg candidates to punch left and focus on normal issues is that they are not doing it. Thats the point.
I love it when Matt’s like “more conservative people might say…” and then it turns out his entire comment section is conservative.
Hey, I'm here, and so are Jesse Ewiak and Lisa C!
Seriously though, this comment section is certainly not "conservative" in comparison with the median American. Centrist, yes; conservative, no. Remember that, in today's America, "conservative" = "Trump worshiper, with the exception of a small handful of principled Never-Trump conservatives." This comment section is... not that.
That’s why I called it Bush-era Republican. If we teleported 2006-era Karl Rove to read these comments, I think he’d find them very much compatible with his political views. Maybe he’d even blush at some of the more extreme ones, like that one racist guy. The irony here is that 2006 Matt Yglesias would not agree with them.
This is a downstream consequence of the Republican party realigning to become Trumpist/MAGA. Lots of old style normie Republicans can't live under the same tent with Donald Trump or RFK Jr, and a lot of them are now politically homeless. And rational centrist Democrats like Matt are at least speaking the same language as those folks.
I don't agree with your premise, but aren't you excited that Democrats have won over a bunch of "conservatives?"
Although I do find it interesting and telling that the "centrist" comment section is more offended by HCR than AOC.
Part of it it the context. I can spend all day complaining about the many ways that Trump administration actions range from vile to bonkers, but that's not much of a discussion here.
What is that supposed to be telling?
I would wager that universal healthcare commands near-total support here, as does infrastructure investment, and urbanist policy priorities. I’d also wager that 80% want the social safety net to be made more generous, near that want significant increases in income taxes and to uncap the payroll tax, some decent fraction support a VAT, and 90%+ support increasing immigration.
What in gods name leads you to suggest that the median commenter isn’t left of center?
The fact that the median commenter does not in any way agree with those priorities.
I mean… they did polling on this a year or two ago…
But ok, if it makes you feel better to imagine that this place’s commenters are a hair right-of-center so you can fantasize about the chances of your own policy priorities being enacted, have fun, I guess?
I strongly disagree with this. Goading actions like we saw in Minneapolis is precisely how we smash immigration enforcement. We cannot accept a quiet, neat, polite ethnic cleansing.
What’s happening is definitely a lawless and horrifying assault on immigrant communities, but I think it’s wrong to call it an ethnic cleansing and actually a disservice to those who have actually undergone ethnic cleansings
US citizens are being detained for their ethnicity. Trump wants to "denaturalize" people. The administration has at times casually expressed a desire to deport every Latino in the country. It's on the spectrum, Ben. There's no point between "here" and "cattle cars" where things have suddenly changed. Every inch they advance from here on out is just another little step, and then another, and then another, until you're 10 feet off the edge of the cliff.
I think the lack of clear demarcations is a reason to be more choosy about when to deploy the term, not less choosy.
I don't, because the slow march of dehumanization and willingness to inflict violence is almost never a 0-100 thing. It ramps up over time. Seeing government agencies putting out thinly veiled Nazi rhetoric should set off some alarm bells.
I think it’s too soon to say what we’re in the midst of. The administration’s actions have not screamed “we intend to color in between the lines”, and they’re building a lot of detention facilities while being very casual about how they intend to avoid detaining citizens. Not to mention the assault on birthright citizenship.
Say that to the people torn away from their families. Every kidnapping is a crime.
“A crime” does not necessarily mean “ethnic cleansing”
If your family includes people in the country illegally, it is in fact not a "crime" to "tear them away" but an enforcement of the law.
Maybe you'd like to change the law in question because you think it's bad. Fair play—have at it.
For the same reasons I would reject a democratically elected holocaust, I reject this too.
Whether or not it is a crime depends on how it is done. If people break into your house at night without any support from a judge to steal your family member, without providing any evidence of law enforcement credential, then it is in fact a kidnapping, even if those people work by day as duly appointed law enforcement officers.
There's a lot of leeway in how these laws are enforced though.
Grabbing people off the street and using their children as bait is a choice.
If you are here illegally, and are deported that's not a crime. That's the law being served.
But if a random person grabs you off the street and puts you on a plane to another country, without any evidence of legal credentials, that is kidnapping. Even if the person has a job that would allow them to legally do the same thing while presenting formal credentials.
What's with all the DHS ads and political comms, then? What's with VP Vance all in on the great replacement theory? What's with POTUS constantly on about poisoning the blood of the nation?
Right now we're still "before" but the GOP is RTLM and has been working themselves up to it.
Considering the administration's rhetoric against Somali-Americans, their clear racial profiling, and choice of targets, I don't find the accusation of ethnic cleansing to be inapt. I absolutely wouldn't take offense to it.
It isn't an ethnic cleansing, but the guy actually running the show (no way it's Space Alien Dog Murderer Noem) wants it to be an ethnic cleansing. "100 million deportations" is a specific number.
Drawing a parallel between immigration enforcement and "ethnic cleansing" is why people don't trust Dems on immigration in the first place. Ridiculous comparison.
In fairness, Nicholas is a *die-hard* libertarian, not a Democrat or anything like it.
The trump admin has deployed a federal force 5x the size of the city police department in Minneapolis, and by all accounts they’re detaining people without due process based on skin color.
It’s not not ethnic cleaning.
What trump is doing with ICE is closer to familial cleansing really, find one guy you're looking for and arrest everyone else around them who is related or looks close enough like them.
But that's the point, it's not normal immigration enforcement. It's notable because it's abnormally cruel. Pretending that ALL immigration enforcement is equal to ethnic cleansing cheapens both the severity of the current issue and claims of ethnic cleansing in the future.
Who said “all” immigration enforcement is ethnic cleansing? I think people are saying that about the current administration’s policy because of the way they are carrying out deportations (as well as denials of entry and attempts to “denaturalize”). Official asylum policy is now that only white South Africans qualify, I think that’s a sign of something. Nobody said Obama’s deportation policy was “ethnic cleansing,” though many on the left detested it and thought calling Obama “deporter in chief” was enough of an insult.
Is it really better when they burst into a workplace and round up the employees?
checking someone's immigration status based on the color of their skin in profiling NOT ethnic cleansing.
None of the first paragraph means the second one is true
I am sorry I cannot tell you what you want to hear. I prefer the truth.
It's absolutely not substantially the same. The truth is this stance muddies the waters between normal processes and what were seeing Trump do with ICE now. It cheapens both immigration enforcement debate and ethnic cleansing conversations.
The normal processes are vastly worse than what Trump is doing now. They could quietly, neatly, gently deport millions of people. They are not. Pray they never decide to be effective.
People are terrible with large numbers. Yes, a million people stolen away from their homes and deported really is so much worse than two people dead. What martyrs give us is an opening to break the system. They are not, in and of themselves, all that bad. I expect there will be more martyrs, if the protestors are doing their job and aggravating ICE.
The haughtiness is unearned here because the question of whether this constitutes ethnic cleansing is a matter of interpretation, not objective fact.
Is there any morally acceptably way for the US or any other country to deport people who are in the country illegally, say by overstaying a visa? Or is it all ethnic cleansing?
No. No visas, no borders, no immigration controls. Nothing. Ever.
Previously, we did not have a shot of actually resisting the policy of immigration enforcement. Now we do, because they have been so spectacularly brutish.
You must really like living in a right wing authoritarian state if you’re pushing these goals
I think we should do what is necessary to have Democrats elected.
I think this policy proposal is both bad on the merits and also is the path to Republican control of the white house and both houses of Congress for the next couple decades.
Right, which is why this must never be Democratic policy! Instead, they only have to talk tough, avoid bad optics at the border, and simply not actually enforce the law on many people. There is more than enough room for well-meaning incompetence to allow people to stay and work.
Perfidia?
Jesus. No. Just no.
I’ll skip the “your position polls about as well as an STI” objection and skip to the substance of the issue:
When you say “no borders,” do you mean anyone can go live anywhere at all, anytime? Let’s say your answer is yes. Ok, so now 100 million Africans and South Asians moved to The Geographical Area Formerly Known as the United States in search of better economic opportunities.
Skip over the logistics of providing housing, electricity, clean water, etc. to all these people, and answer me this:
Do these newcomers get to vote in US elections or not?
If not, then you’ve got a two-tier society, and those tend not to work great.
If so, you’ve imported a bunch of voters from traditional cultures that have regressive views on women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of religion, etc. and many of whom don’t really grok the concept of small-l liberal democracy. What happens when all these people get to vote? I can’t tell, but I see very little reason to be optimistic! Convince me I’m wrong.
There is no constituency for 'smash[ing] immigration enforcement' and deporting foreign nationals illegally in the country is not ethnic cleansing.
Really? Explain sanctuary cities then. There’s a constituency, just not a majority.
Excuse me while I LMAO.
Sanctuary cities doesn't mean wanting avoiding ethnic cleansing
Is smashing immigration enforcement a worthwhile goal? Should Americans not have the ability to vote for immigration restrictions?
Dems have the same problem today that they did in 2024. There's no viable alternative to the current leadership willing to step up and challenge them in a real way. You can't beat someone with noone. As a rank and file Democratic voter, I'm endlessly frustrated by that. Competing for leadership positions is exactly how the party moves forward, and they seem to have decided in 2020 that they're not going to allow that anymore.
I don't see this changing in 2026, at least on a leadership level. I think it'll take a presidential primary in 2028, which will actually be truly contested, for anything to change. I hope rank and file Dem voters don't feel the same pressure to fall in line behind one candidate as they did in 2020.
Yea I also worry about the primary process being a repeat of 2020 and making things even worse. The Biden presidency turned out to be a disaster in significant part due to his age but in the moment I think it was the key to him winning. He was so old, and had been around so long as a 'moderate' that you could plausibly believe that he was different from most of the other candidates who were lining up to say the craziest shit possible. There won't be anyone like that in the wings next time and even if there was we cannot have another septuagenerian at the top of the ticket and even someone in their 60s is probably a really bad idea.
What happened in 2020 was OK because, as you say, it was probably one of the only ways to win that election given the candidates who were running. But Democrats took the wrong lesson from that, deciding that leadership stagnation was a winning strategy in general. Unity is good, but the primary is exactly the right time to hash out our differences.
My opinion for what's needed in 2026 is basically another Obama - someone who can convince everyone that they're at least going to pay attention to what they want. He won in such a big landslide because he had magical powers to convince moderates that he was a moderate and progressives that he was a progressive. It takes real intelligence and charisma to thread that needle though, and I don't know who can do that right now.
Ruben Gallego!
Maybe! Even though I wasn't old enough to vote at the time, I remember the 2008 primaries. Although I didn't understand the feeling at the time, I could feel that Obama had a good vibe to him. I wanted him to win, and not just to beat the Republicans. If Ruben Gallego (or anyone else) can evoke that feeling early on then I'll be very happy.
The 2020 primary process outcome was good because Biden won and Sanders would have lost to Trump. We were screwed in 2024 because Biden was too old, there was no realistic alternative to him, and people around the world were punishing incumbents.
Obviously, neither Biden nor any septuagenerian will be nominated in 2028.
Whatever you thought about sanctuary cities before, you can’t comply with the current version of ICE. Trump is making that impossible. The question is whether the 2016-2024 public view of immigration enforcement continues, or if we’re in a new paradigm where the public sees that ICE isn’t doing the job they expected.
Agreed. I think there's a pretty sizable part of the electorate that are both not happy with sanctuary cities and states, AND think also think ICE is going too far.
“Fire ICE” is my current favorite.
But I do also want to push back, neighbor, against all the terror of the left seizing the narrative. This fundamentally misunderstands what has happened in the last two years: the left activist crowd is no longer running the show, has had their electoral theories thoroughly discredited; and what remains is actually a pretty sane PSA/Beutlerian faction who are simply agitating for (1) a house-cleaning of party leadership that has been strategically failing for a straight decade despite a handful of tactical victories, and (2) seizing a very real opportunity for strategic initiative at a critical moment when history has bequeathed it to us.
Yes, we need sane slogans. But it is genuinely dangerously wasting a strategic window that can VERY easily close on us before we get our shit together, if we just keep obsessing over boxing out the left internally instead of actually going on offense.
Hey neighbor! Fire ICE is really good. I agree that the left activist faction is in a weaker position than they were in 2020, and that the strongest progressive voices are those like Beutler who, credit to him, has been running circles around Matt on narrative management tactics.
I will say however that the activists I know personally still feel absolutely no responsibility (or even have an accurate sense of) message discipline. I'm seeing stolen lands merch and abolish ICE (of the old intention) slogans abounding. It's not a fair game we play, but the right is much better at painting the whole left to center left with the most unpopular aspects of the extremes.
Fire ICE though is 🔥
I pray that you're right about the left losing its control over the Democrats. But when I see what they did to the DNC and how they cowed reasonable criticism of Jasmine Crockett I fear the job is still undone.
That episode felt to me like a dying gasp, not a confident flex. They are desperate to remain relevant and lashed out at a target of opportunity. They know they can’t claim a bigger scalp like Bo Burnham, and even craven careerists like Newsom aren’t afraid of them anymore.
They will likely continue to do so in attenuated form. IMO that gasping should not be misread as a zombie resurgence.
Moreover, short of the rest of us misguidedly transforming the party into a Vichy capitulationist rump, those voters hate Trump and the GOP so much that they will reliably turn out for the rest of their lives. We don’t have to worry about them jumping ship; if anything, their constant whining and threats to do so are ample evidence that they are the proverbial “hit dog”.
The Beutlers still want to use Trump's unhinged-ness to see how far left they can push things and still hit 270 EC's. One of the fundamental disagreements is whether Trumpism is enough of a threat that it's better to maximize the odds of defeating it soundly or use this opportunity to shift the "Overton Window" as much as possible.
Then there's the activists and online attention entrepreneurs who will out of either genuine emotional ideological commitment or algorithm SEO maxing push their position to point where they alienate independents. They claim to speak for the resistance and the Trumpists will also claim the least hinged among them do as well. So it's always worth being clear what you're for and against.
I think this is just a wild misread of Beutler, bordering on bad faith.
Stancil, sure, he’s a dipshit who this would be accurate of. But not Beutler. Beutler pretty obviously and clearly understands that basically all progressive policy is on hold until the emergency is over; to the extent that any particular priority is taken off hold, it should only be in service of a strategically planned campaign to use it as a pitch with voters to win the emergency.
I only follow what he says on the Politix podcast, but while he says we’re in an emergency, most of his prescriptions seem to boil down to (a) be more muscular and aggressive in fighting for progressive policy in the press and through parliamentary procedure to move the Overton window (which personally I’m dubious will be effective) or (b) replacing any Democrat in Congress over 70 with somebody younger (which would probably help on the margin but isn’t going to change things over night). What am I missing?
Well, without being too snarky about it, he elucidates all the complete thoughts on his own substack that Matt cuts him off from coherently expressing on the podcast.
From my perspective, Brian’s main goal isn’t to shift the overton window by merely issuing extreme or leftist rhetoric; it’s to strategically use levers of power to create facts on the ground that then make the public more predisposed to shifting its opinion in directions he wants.
Brian wants Dem politicians to go lead on the streets with action, and to pursue whatever legal means at their disposal to help hold the Trumpists accountable. His ultimate goal is for this to resolve the emergency and heal society such that we can have rational debates about policy and the pace of progress, hopefully in directions befitting his liberal sensibilities. He views tent-building as a critical aspect of the process, which means making common cause with people of good faith — which INCLUDES Never Trumpers and other right-wing defections, but whose good faith must be confirmed, not merely taken at face value.
Stancil, by contrast, wants every Dem to mouth the same old failed slogans to the utmost they can screech. This is primarily an attempt at hacking the Overton window concept to manufacture consent for the entire progressive omnicause program; he does not care to actually persuade anyone along the way. He wants to purge any Dem who refuses, and replace them all with prog primary challengers. If none of this works, it’s because America is a fundamentally flawed, damnable place, and none of it was his fault. He believes that the critical mass of voters who would support his program is horrifically disenfranchised, but also just waiting for a sufficiently extreme prog to come along and inspire them to turn out en masse.
I think that both Trump's drop on the issue overall, and polling on specifics showed that that approach of ceding all action on a broad issue constellation, like immigration, is dumb. Morris was poking holes in an unthinking heuristic that only ended up egging the right on, and as others have pointed out, made about as much sense as Democrats in 2006 not wanting to talk about Iraq.
It was a bad call then, and I think that past events have strengthened that case.
There’s a fundamental blindness between “this issue was unpopular for us 2 years ago”, “this issue will be better for us in 1-2-3 years”, “this issue was bad for us because we overreached or had a bad leadership”, etc.
It’s one thing to acknowledge that it’s often difficult to judge where precisely the puck is going so that it can be skated to. In actual sports, players take bad angles ALL THE TIME!
But Matt is playing scared. Like a powerplay unit who keeps passing the puck back and forth because they’re too scared to shoot, imagining that the NEXT pass will finally give them their opening, instead of forcing the issue. Yes, you still end up missing a lot of shots, but as the saying goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Whether or not Matt has been playing scared, today's post is evidence that he can take the morally and politically correct stand.
Perhaps? He clearly understands the morality. I just think he’s stuck fighting the last war.
100%. This is a comment I keep thinking and never quit managing to putting to pixels.
Matt was wrong about that advice. The Garcia case was the one that really collapsed Trump’s approval rating on this issue. Compared to that initial collapse, two dead bodies have only been moving him around 5 percentage points. Maybe this movement will accelerate, I sure hope so.
> What's a pithier/better reflection of the politics than ABOLISH ICE?
“We need a RESET to bring back trust and cooperation with local law enforcement.”
Prudentially, actually existing ICE really does have to go. That’s an institutional culture that is beyond reform. Then you work through the details on how much interior enforcement you want, how to prioritize it, and how coercive you want to try to be towards reluctant jurisdictions. Ideally, as non-coercive as possible. This is a time to rediscover local control.
RESET gets rid of ICE without conceding that means open borders. “Abolish” could mean either thing, but people who are afraid of implying they support no enforcement could say RESET instead.
A lot of this stuff is just messaging. I think Matt Y and you and most of the serious commenters here realize that the current version of ICE is toxic, and it’s likely to get much worse. You’ll have an exceptionally hard time fixing this without root and branch reform. So you’re mainly arguing about how to signal this to your base without scaring the middle who presumably care about “interior enforcement”. The thing is, ICE’s approval ratings are already terrible. Whatever people thought of the agency in 2024 is not what they think of it today, and it’s likely that they’ll be even more negative by November 2026 and 2028. The Dems have already beclowned themselves by funding DHS last week and now have to reverse course *in a matter of a week* due to a relatively predictable additional violent act by ICE. How do you think this trajectory is going to play out over the next 11-35 months?
Oh for sure. I'm not even particularly worried about the messaging of "abolish." I don't think the base is hung up on that word either, as a litmus test. I just want ICE gone as soon as possible, and to the extent a limiting factor is that frontline members or centrist Republicans need a pithy phrase that means "abolish and replace" instead of "abolish without replacement," I'm happy to brainstorm.
Personally, I'm fine with the Gallego approach of refusing to play the slogan game while saying plainly that it needs to be "torn down and replaced," be there are a lot of marble-mouthed idiots in Congress who need every sound bite fed to them on a spoon.
The massive influx of untrained people into ICE plus all the cultural changes at the top will make reform really hard. I don't think you can do it without a rebranding exercise that pretty much starts over. Not abolish as make something new.
The pithier slogan is "law and order". Law enforcement should be professional, competent and promote order. These thugs are causing chaos. And then if the people want more immigration law enforcement, then ramp up funding over time.
Far too many Democrats have been poisoned into not understanding liberal ideas, which is why we won't get that. But this isn't a difficult situation for competent politicians
Buddy you win
"Purge MAGA from ICE."
Yeah, based on the last 20 years, I definitely think the left is going to f*** this up.
Yes, the big test is going to be who wins the nomination in 2028. I could see say Shapiro or Beshear trying to "thread the needle" to an actually sustainable political equilibrium over immigration while a AOC or even Newsome might be all Leeroy Jenkins (ie stolen land) which as we saw under Biden is a recipe for major political headaches for the Dems.
AOC is a pretty skilled politician. That brand works for her now. If she ran for POTUS, she's keep progressive energy, but pivot a lot. And, honestly, the party is not going to nominate anyone who talks about stolen land.
Newsom too. There's no way he would do this. He's not an imbecile or a true believer.
I have already seen pretty much the exact messaging you have in your last paragraph.
I mean, even though Trump is taking water on immigration, it's still his strongest issue. If there was an election a month from now, it would be unwise for Democratic candidates to run on immigration and not let's say inflation where the numbers are even worse for Trump.
It's basic common sense.
Correct
We see that the protests are working to a certain extent: a majority of Americans are disturbed by what's going on in Minneapolis and Trump is losing support. But it's clear that this is far from a deadly blow to Republicans' prospects.
I say this as someone who's horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis. Once this episode passes, with three years to go until the next presidential election, it might be better for people left of center to focus on the question "Why are we so weak? Why can't we decisively defeat them?" rather than questions of small-ball electoral tactics that might help in the short term (pivot to healthcare? a new immigration policy proposal?).
The issue, I think, is about values more than specific policy. Strikingly, there's one thing left and right seem to agree on: enforcement of immigration law is going to require morally reprehensible actions. The right is basically ok with this, whereas the left isn't. Most people therefore correctly understand that right now there are just two options: mass violations of civil rights or open borders, even if politicians don't explicitly say this. (Biden didn't "run on" open borders, but the borders were open!) Liberals correctly point out that there *exist* policies that would be more humane, but voters probably suspect this is just a cudgel -- when a moderate liberal gets into power, will they actually implement these?
I think that to break this dynamic and decisively win, liberals are going to have to take a look at themselves and ask how they've gotten here. My take is that liberals don't have a good answer to the question "Who are we?" Egalitarianism has such a strong hold over the left that immigrants are held in higher moral esteem than most of our countrymen.
Liberals can talk all they want about wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration law, but people understand this dynamic. Until values change, commitments to future enforcement will ring hollow. Now would be a good time for people left of center to sit down, talk with one another, and do some introspection about why their values don't resonate with most Americans. We could chalk it up to Americans being a bunch of Nazis, but actually, most Americans are responding admirably to what's happening. I think there's still some hope, but winning will require more than poring over the latest poll numbers.
Scott galloway keeps pointing out thar going after the employers would be the most effective tactic, and it has the benefit of not being morally reprehensible. Why not do that? As Matt points out in the article, the most efficient use of resources would be to go after criminals in cooperating jurisdictions.
I agree with this, but again I feel like when Democrats raise this point, it's just a cudgel. Democrats used to attack Romney over how inhumane e-verify would be!
Perfectly enforce e-verify, so that millions of undocumented immigrants are out of work? How will their kids eat?
Until the left's values change, I don't think this will happen.
I think your problem here is thinking that consequences of enforcement are negative for those affected. They are! They also broke the law. Every single undocumented migrant knows there's a chance, no matter how long they are here and how established they become, that one day they will be deported. Enforcing the law is not morally reprehensible. Promises of employment by shady business
owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible. But being deported even though you have native born kids? I mean. That's the consequences of your own actions.
Until the left understands that what I described is the median voter position they'll never get the politics of this right.
Conservative friend I was talking to about the "stop separating families!" chant put it this way: We "separate families" all the time, we put dads in jail if they commit wire fraud or drive drunk. "Stop separating families" was one of the tools in the 2013 immigration reform toolbox, then Stephen Miller assiduously pursued family separation as a way to discourage more immigration, and Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position.
This sort of legalism is unpersuasive to me. Somebody crossing a border and then living a productive life, minding their own business is far less threatening than someone recklessly endangering others by driving drunk.
A more sustainable legal status quo would be a large benefit for everyone, I agree. However the Trump administration has illegalized over a million people residing in the US, as has been pointed out elsewhere. They've been snatching people doing required check-ins and no criminal record (being in the country illegally is a civil offense). There is a vast upending of an imperfect and evolving, but still present, status quo. That is cruel. It is illogical. It will make American citizens worse off, no matter what the Senate math says. I reject the notion that sheepishly pretending it isn't is an electoral winner for Democrats, anyway.
The problem is that the public has a rough idea of who should be allowed to come here and why and who should and shouldn’t be deported, but it’s poorly aligned with who the law says should be allowed to come here. Fixing that alignment would go a long way towards addressing the issue
Somebody crossing a border and then living a productive life, minding their own business is far less threatening than someone recklessly endangering others by voting for Trump, too…
If citizens engaged in the same kind of fraud that illegal immigrants do to 'live a productive life', I don't think you would tolerate it at all.
As a former Democratic voter, I actually doubt Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position. I think Democrats sort of drifted toward soft nullification (hence on precisely one level, contra Yglesias, the sanctuary policy is a kind of nullification of federal law enforcement. But there are other levels to pursue.)
They drifted into this disposition of soft nullification on drug laws, prostitutes walking the block, illegal handgun possession, a whole host of "men with guns" going after someone not immediately hurting another person in the TV frame actually. Not just immigration! It happened across a range of topics in the 2010s.
Chris Caldwell has written about this, albeit with too deterministic a view of Civil Rights law. But he's right that it's a kind of merger of 60s left-wing people power with bourgeois middle class property holding. Now a sort of memory of the 60s is the defining bourgeois moral. Which means everything is permitted, nothing is forgiven, and as Yglesias has written wisely on before, you can retreat to your priced up suburb while public quality of life enforcement falls out.
Are Dems really nullifying prostitution laws anywhere? I know that Mamdani had a few pro-Nordic solution statements before his mayoral campaign, but I thought that was as far as it goes.
(Given that prostitution is outright legalized & regulated in like 40% of developed countries, if anything I find the lack of pro-sex work voices in the US rather surprising. I feel like I never hear about this issue!)
And it worked for the Democrats in opposition. People *hated* seeing kids in cages.
It was all about finding vulnerable points and causing a thermostatic reaction after Trump's 2016 victory. It wasn't part of a considered policy position.
I mean, I agree with this. I think the left has to get to a place where they recognize that failure to enforce immigration law is a moral evil. It’s a subversion of “Our Democracy,” which they otherwise value so much.
I just think that when push comes to shove, they won’t have what it takes to enforce the law given their current values. The problem is even bigger: the whole world now knows that it’s probably a good idea to show up at the gates the second a Democrat gets elected, and the Democrat might just say “Yes, we have to let you in because that’s International Law” (which, of course, supersedes domestic law because it’s more cosmopolitan).
What international laws are you referencing? Congress has incorporated the treaties you're probably thinking of directly into US law. So when Democrats say that immigrants have the right to make an asylum claim they're basing it on US law, not international law. It's not about being more cosmopolitan.
This is exactly the legalistic BS that got us here in the first place. JA refers to the 1951 Refugee Convention as "international law" and you reply "nuh-uh, we implemented it so now it's domestic law." That's precisely what got us to where we are today: it became common knowledge in South America that a refugee is a person who presents themselves and says the word "asylum", so millions of people did that. And, that's what the law says. So, I guess we're stuck letting in everyone who can pronounce the word "asylum" in any commonly-used language.
And there are people who will insist, over and over, "yes, that's the law." They destroyed Biden's presidency and with it the fabric and future of this country. They're detestable and also just shockingly dumb.
Mostly agree, but it is notable Trudeau and Johnson also oversaw enormous waves of immigration after COVID as well that wracked their domestic politics. It sort of reduces the causal theory of Democrats have a unique ideology; I think Anglophone societies have actually done such a good job partially assimilating people around the world to speaking English that the cultural barrier to immigration falls a bit. So immigration to deal with pent-up COVID savings pursuing more goods and services than ever becomes a much more enticing option.
“Democracy” doesn’t have the right to restrict the rights of people who are outside the community because they never got to vote for those laws.
What rights do those non citizens have when they're outside the territory of our fair Republic, and who grants and protects those rights?
Does the Congress of 1900 have the right to restrict Americans in 2026?
Wait, in what way is failing to enforce immigration law a moral evil?
I believe the argument JA was making is that (a) US immigration law was arrived at through democratic means, therefore (b) failing to enforce the law is a violation of democratic principles and a form of minoritarian rule by the executive, which is (c) a moral evil. I think a fair counter-argument would be that Congress is such a sclerotic institution at this point that US immigration law no longer reflects the will of the people (or simply biting the bullet and saying democracy is immoral in some ways).
“Promises of employment by shady business owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible.
Isn’t that just how those business tacitly need to function? I don’t hear anyone talking about how cheap food is currently, so increasing labor costs seems problematic.
Yeah the options for a handful of industries (e.g. agriculture, hospitality) are basically
1. Explicit carve-outs from mandatory e-verify and accept that they’ll still use a ton of undocumented labor
2. Massively expand guest worker or other visa programs to legalize the cheap immigrant labor they currently use
3. Accept that costs are going to go up bigly in the short term, and either (a) accept that prices will go up too or (b) provide massive subsidies in exchange for price controls
My preferred policy here would be 2. We will probably get 3(b).
There are no caps on H2A temporary work visas for agriculture. For other jobs, the H2B temporary work visa is capped at 66,000 per year, but this can be administratively increased - last fiscal year, they nearly doubled it due to demand (the cap was still hit after a few more months).
I think it’s also worth pointing out that immigration enforcement is something that nearly all our “nice” countries, like those in Western Europe, Scandinavia as well as Japan, S Korea, Australia have. Like all of those with universal healthcare systems, and paid sick and maternity leave, and affordable higher education that we admire.
Yes, they turn people away. Many of them require that people carry a national ID and show it at various times, like a traffic stop for instance. They detain people and deport them.
This is a normal function of a state, even a friendly democratic one.
This is true, but also, I think there is a legitimately hard question about how to deal with people who came here illegally but since have built a reasonable life and been productive members of society, or who came here as kids and have been here their whole lives.
You can show mercy to deserving people, but only if you can couple that with being willing to actually enforce the laws. Otherwise, everyone just knows that if they hide out long enough they get to stay.
What’s the problem with letting in people who are normal productive wanna-be citizens? It worked perfectly well for the first ~150 years of American history.
I think the median voter position is a bit more nuanced as to the desirability of deporting non-criminal illegal immigrant parents of citizen children.
Enforcing immigration law is reprehensible, in and of itself. This is our best opportunity to break immigration enforcement for a decade.
Endorsing this view is the path to losing future elections and the median voter
Which is why you don’t endorse this view. You say something entirely different. Then you come into power, allow millions of people to enter (I wish it were 30 million!) and make it impossible for the next administration to unwind it. Some things are more important than winning or losing elections.
I'm kind of astonished the regime Bryan Caplan praises (United Arab Emirates) for accomplishing more freedom of association for workers and employers is just straightforwardly more anti-liberal rights than any MAGA Republican I've met. Do you know of any libertarian writer who has criticized Caplan for this?
No, I think this is reasonable. In practice, allowing people the ability to come and go at all is much better than full rights to a selected few. Second, one is, obviously, bound to be concerned that immigrants and their children might eventually vote to restrict immigration and other socialistic measures. For that reason, restricting voting rights is reasonable. I would suggest putting the bar at a 1500 SAT or 34 ACT score.
If one were looking at it from a Rawlsian, behind the veil of ignorance perspective, it’s so obvious that one would not only support open borders but treat it as one of the most important political issues out there.
Even from a non-veiled perspective it seems like the Golden Rule should apply, I value my right to travel wherever I want with my US passport giving me visa-free access to most places and visas being pretty easy to get for a lot of the remainder, and would want to have the right to immigrate whenever I want, so others should have the same right.
I reject the idea that we have ti justify it through appeals to fairness. It would beneficial to us right this very second.
On the contrary, I love white people. The free movement of labor is just that good.
They should just fake it till they make it. As soon as someone actually takes the step it will all start rolling (and people may be surprised where the opposition comes from)
The wager is that newly unemployed people will self deport, but there are many non-worki g asylum seekers clinging on at the margins in the u.s. things in Venezuela and other countries are really very bad.
California made it illegal for municipalities to mandate e-verify.
Or what if the right’s value change so that they see all people as the same? If your argument is premised on voters being fixed compromise makes sense but if you want to change values anyway why not change the other side’s?
One big reason Republicans don't want to go after employers is because many of them are those employers themselves or at least the employers are big donors.
Prior to Trump, most Republican leadership avoided talking about the most effective employer focused strategies precisely because they could be effective and would hurt corporate profits.
Traditional Republicans preferred to cynically ignore effective solutions so they could use immigration as a red-meat issue to keep the base fired up while ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor for themselves and their donors.
All the more reason for democrats to push for this
Agreed. Use it as a wedge between MAGA xenophobes and traditional pro-business republicans.
Divide Oppo on dividable ffronts & Win.
The business lobby is always the answer whenever this question comes up.
I think we need to do better than just trotting out this tired centrist suggestion.
For instance, perhaps we do “mandatory e verify + a grace period”. I dunno; the point is, we need realistic suggestions that the business lobby won’t just tank immediately.
Mandatory eVerify... starting the week before inauguration of the next Republican president.
Then ask them to come up with legalization/visa schemes to go along with it. What does it mean, 'tank it immediately'? They are, as you say, a lobby.
It's still morally reprehensible. Those people are trying to run a business in the economic system they were given, which means hiring undocumented people. And shutting them down screws their employees anyway.
We kind of reflexively think "employer = big evil corporation = victimless crime" but if you game out in your head how that kind of enforcement would go, it's not something you're doing to big evil corporations (who have the resources to avoid illegal hires) and not a victimless crime.
It also doesn’t necessarily work, I think e-verify is fairly easy to cheat. But I’m not against using it to determine who the immigrants are and jack up their SS and Medicare taxes by a few percentage points (ideally double them but that would just drive more under the table work arrangements).
They don't want to do that, because 1 - they like big business, 2 - the people working those jobs aren't the violent criminals most likely, and 3 - more importantly, Trump and the people who work for him, love performative toughness and the drama. They live for the theatre of it all, and they need to be seen as tough and make headlines. It's all about ego and demonstrating their power.
the problem is that it would be too effective. promising to sabotage the economy can be good on campaign but is politically damaging in the long run, cf. tariffs
This and the policy of only deporting undocumented people who have NOT been here long (say, less than 3 or 5 years). This would not destabilize society, as Trump is doing, AND would send a clear message that we are no longer going to tolerate illegal immigration in the future.
E-verify sounds good in theory but the issue is how it applies to small businesses and households. It could turn pretty authoritarian if you tried to apply it to family restaurants or people trying to hire babysitters or house cleaners… If you just want to apply it to big companies, fine, but I imagine those are already screening everybody.
You can negotiate the scale at which it would apply based on what would be the most efficient use of resources, but why would it be authoritarian? Obviously you don't want the companies to be paying for the verification process.
Big companies and (crucially) their contractors are not screening everyone, at least not effectively.
They are, but there are gaps that make it too easy for the applicant to use false documents and that make it too hard to audit the records.
I really don’t think it would be more authoritarian than food safety regulations or abiding by your alcohol license. Both can tank your small business and leave you economically ruined if you’re not abiding by them, no doubt. We don’t generally consider those laws to be authoritarian
I-9 verification rules already apply to anyone hiring employees or 1099 workers, but auditing compliance would be a huge effort. Automating verification through e-verify would help. Making it harder to allow false documentation would also help.
Authoritarian?
This comment makes me think of a Slow Boring piece from two years ago!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-of-cosmopolitanism-and-the
That was a great, prescient piece:
> The notion that Trump, if he took office, would be willing and perhaps even eager to do something horrifying in the name of border security is part of his electoral appeal.
Yes, I thought this article was spot-on in terms of its diagnosis.
What I think liberals need to think about now is the normative part. Is this commitment to egalitarianism a good thing?
When Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates get together and say “We basically agree on almost all of our objectives, so let’s debate strategy,” is this what we want? Or is Coates’ worldview its own form of evil that can’t have a place in government?
We’re having a discussion initiated by the murder of two peaceful American citizens, and the SB commentariat is discussing whether Coates’ commitment to civil justice is the real evil.
Aside from laughing about the ridiculousness of this response: someone up above asked “why are we here” and my simple answer is: our presence here is God’s punishment because we stopped being decent.
I think there are two separate axes here - big/small tent politics and woke/normie politics.
I think it's valid to say small tenters like Coates are not allowed in the big tent because they spoil the fun. But it's not valid to say that Coates doesn't belong in the tent because of wokeness. If there are any people willing to practice anti-racism in a big tent way, they should be welcome.
" Or is Coates’ worldview its own form of evil that can’t have a place in government?"
YES!
I don't think enforcement of immigration law will require morally reprehensible actions. First term Obama is gold standard for enforcement. Enforcement now means reforming the asylum process, rapidly processing the Biden era asylum claims, and stepped up enforcement on employers, all of which is eminently doable without brutalizing anyone.
This will probably sound kind of wild to many people, but I sincerely believe that deterring future irregular migrants should be added to the equation when weighing morality.
I've read a lot of stories on how systematic the abuse of migrants is as they travel through Mexico and attempt to cross. As an outsider, it's of course truly hard to say what's in the best interest of another person, especially when these other persons number in the millions.
But I can safely say that if you're living in, say, Guatemala, and saved up 8 or 9,000 dollars to make the trip up north and you either a) get deported shortly after b) get abducted and abused / extorted / held for ransom along the way c) die while crossing the desert then you would have been better doing something else with your money and time. And yes, many people live in dire circumstances in these countries, but 8 or 9k can also buy a lot of safety and economic potential closer to home.
Maybe. Even that amount of money may not buy a better life if you're constantly extorted. It's too bad we can't set up manufacturing in these countries to try to stabilize the economy and make predation less of a choice for income.
I guess I would just say it's enough money to move to a different city in Mexico or Brazil, and extortion in all but the smallest of these countries is always a local phenomenon. And I think that's actually what most Mexicans, Brazilians, etc. actually do if they're dealing with extortion. Moving cities is far more common than trying to move to the USA.
The whole thing with predation (I assume we mean extortion?) and stabilizing the economies are intricately bound and driven by the same types of government corruption. The corruption makes it difficult to do business and allows the extortion gangs to operate. It seems like the kind of problem that can only be solved from within.
Agreed, and if we continue to incentivize poor migrants to come north in this manner, our policy is shoveling money into the cartels who are abusing and exploiting the migrants we claim to care about.
I favor expanded legal migration. But not this type. It's immoral and inhumane.
It's kind of nuts that we aren't going after or putting bounties on smugglers and coyotes.
How would that work though? We do put bounties and go after the heads of mexican criminal organizations, ie the persons whom the smugglers answer to. But how would you go after the low level people?
Probably in a manner similar to the way we go after low-level mafia members.
But we don't go after low-levels in Mexico?
I doubt that Obama only deported illegal immigrants who had committed a crime or that there was zero force involved in arresting and deporting every illegal immigrant.
The Obama administration explicitly had a policy prioritizing deportations of illegal aliens with criminal records and at the time took a lot of heat from both left and right for that policy.
Obama didn’t remove 3 million illegals by only targeting criminals.
“In fiscal year 2015, 91 percent of people removed from inside the U.S. were previously convicted of a crime.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661
The Obama administration also put an emphasis on returning recent arrivals (as opposed to illegal immigrants with established lives in the US), particularly after border crossings surged in 2014.
Like I said, it's a lie that Obama only deported criminals. You can't get to 3 million by only deporting criminals.
That shouldn't be the standard.
I think what he's saying is that this doesn't constitute enforcement of immigration law because it doesn't expel illegal immigrants who aren't otherwise committing crimes. The only way to expel those people is to take morally reprehensible actions, and therefore, we should steel ourselves to taking morally reprehensible actions.
But I don’t think it’s really possible to deport all the illegal immigrants who have been here a long time, and I don’t think the public actually wants that anyway. They want a controlled flow and a sense of order at the border, and that violent criminal illegal immigrants will be deported.
I think that is a correct assessment of what a majority of the public wants. I would also add that if your laws require you to take morally reprehensible actions in order to enforce them, then that is probably a good sign that your laws ought to be changed. But I wasn't talking about my personal views. I was just explaining the logic of the original comment, which argued that Democrats should change their values and embrace the need to take morally reprehensible actions in order to achieve the goal of deporting 100% of illegal immigrants.
I think the OP had several good points but turned it into a strawman argument that assumed america wants 100 per cent deportations.
This is one of the many ways Democrats lose on immigration. The idea that it's "morally reprehensible" to enforce immigration law implies it's morally acceptable to break it, so there's something "morally reprehensible" about immigration law. Not enforcing ANY immigration law because of the "morally reprehensible" parts of it flies in the face of any definition of democratic law.
The people's representatives voted for existing immigration law. Arguing that parts of it are wrong so none of it should be enforced says the people don't get the ultimate vote on the law.
In a democracy, the response to "morally reprehensible" law must be to change the "morally reprehensible" parts.
Many Americans see deliberate tolerance of law-breaking as creating moral hazard (rewarding undesirable behavior). Some of those Americans are legal immigrants who resent the suggestion that they shouldn't have followed the legal process.
No. Sorry, but that's bad reading comprehension. Sometimes in life you may have a goal that is not morally reprehensible in theory, but that in practice can only be achieved through morally reprehensible means. In that situation, you have to make a choice. You either decide that the goal is so indispensable that it justifies any morally reprehensible means that are necessary to achieve it, or you decide the opposite.
If it was bad reading comprehension, no apology would be necessary. However, you seem to be committing the "ends justify means" fallacy.
If the law is morally reprehensible, in a democracy we must make an argument to so persuade voters, not tell voters "the ends justify the means."
Otherwise, we undermine the rule of law, which is one reason so many voters dislike the idea of tolerating "illegal" immigration.
1. I didn't mean "sorry" in the sense of an apology, more just as an expression of empathy in case it made you feel bad.
2. Your argument here doesn't make any sense, so I'm not going to engage with it any further. Have a nice day.
There are times when the ends do justify the means. Locking people up in prison is a terrible means, but the ends justify its use.
"Many Americans see deliberate tolerance of law-breaking as creating moral hazard (rewarding undesirable behavior)."
The American public is perfectly ok with tolerance of law-breaking in other law areas. For instance, most people oppose strict enforcement of traffic laws.
The difference? They, themselves, are drivers, so strict enforcement would affect them. But, they're not immigrants, so the burden of enforcement is somebody else's problem.
By "traffic laws," do you mean speed limits? I'd agree with you on that. I doubt it's true if you include running red lights, tailgating, failure to signal, aggressive driving, and other "moving violations."
Focusing on speed limits, where I think we agree people at least hope for low enforcement:
Many jurisdictions recognize "prima facie" speed limits which allow drivers to operate at reasonably safe speeds based on road, weather, and traffic conditions. Some jurisdictions apply prima facie speed limits to any road not explicitly designed for a specific speed range.
Prima facie speed limits create ambiguities in the law which naturally affect law enforcement. This is intentional because in some situations we want the law to allow for driver judgment. (This is one reason for DUI laws - we don't want people driving when their judgment is impaired.)
More generally, comparing speed limit enforcement to immigration law enforcement is a category error.
We don't want people entering and living here outside the immigration system because the security consequences can be so severe. The risk is in a different category.
Arguing that the vast majority of illegal immigrants pose no such risk is beside the point regarding immigration law enforcement. Until we can create immigration law and regulations that keep the few threats out while simplifying legal entry/residence, we must enforce existing immigration law: it's the only available mechanism for containing the threat.
Or maybe we just enforce border crossings and let society absorb the people who are here. Let them have kids and become taxpayers and contribute to our society, which sure as hell needs the labor.
That was the idea behind the 80's amnesty, wasn't it? But it didn't work out because we never actually secured the border.
I think there is consensus on securing the border if you follow from Biden’s last year. Maybe that will break down after four years of Trump making immigration enforcement into an excuse to kill protestors, but what can you do. But also: immigration from our southern neighbors has been *great* for the US. We could not be more lucky as a country.
Well, one thing I'll say is, I think all this will seem extremely hilarious and sad in 20 years when depopulation becomes the main issue globally and countries are fighting for immigrants.
The humane option is just to turn away people at the border without visas but make it easier to get them, and then deporting convicted criminals (who are in custody anyway so no civil rights violations are needed) from the interior but leaving peaceful people alone. We didn’t have open borders—that’s a frankly insulting claim to millions of people who have had their visas or family members’ visas denied.
Also, I imagine it would be a difficult choice if you had to do something morally reprehensible to save millions of lives. Doing something morally reprehensible just to keep peaceful people born in a different place out of the country? I mean okay if someone’s standard for “willing to do morally reprehensible things” is that low I don’t see how you could really trust or have a society with them and the key issue ought to just be how to disempower them.
It doesn't matter what a good system looks like. Politically, all that is possible right now is the status quo, because it's what works best for Republicans - allow the immigrants in, reap the economic benefits, and also hold it as an unassailable culture war advantage.
Any amount of disruption in the immigration system or border security is going to be blamed on Democrats, no matter who is responsible. And it'll be that way forever, because we are unwilling to argue our position and instead try to pretend the issue doesn't exist.
Deporting convicted criminals is literally what "sanctuary city" policies are trying to prevent, right?
In effect, sometimes but not necessarily.
IMO this is a really bad outcome of this whole conflict. Both the right and the left are now invested in getting everyone to accept this idea that the only way to do immigration enforcement is masked goons and terror, and this is just not true. A likely outcome of all this is that Americans end up convinced that you have to have brutality and terror to enforce immigration law, and either decide it's not worth it or decide that they won't believe it's being enforced without the shows of force and masked goons. Both outcomes are pretty bad.
What we want is ultimately some kind of competent, non-brutal immigration enforcement. There is nothing morally bad about sending back people trying to come to the US illegally, deporting people who have overstayed their visa, fining employers for having a bunch of illegal immigrants working for them, or deporting people here illegally who get in trouble with the law. And while sometimes that (like all other policing) will look cruel and make people sad, it can be done without masked goons or standoffs on the streets or any of that. Ideally, the folks who have been here 10+ years without getting into any trouble or requiring public assistance can then get some kind of path to legal residency, we can just grant the DACA people permanent residency, etc.
As with policing, I feel like there are crazy activist demands that voters rightly will not support, and those get in the way of sensible reform of policing that could actually do some good, while keeping police around since we actually need them.
"What we want is ultimately some kind of competent, non-brutal immigration enforcement"
We had it from 2009-2016 and the result was a candidate winning by running on instituting brutal immigration enforcement.
If that had been all he was running on, he would have lost.
If he hadn't run on it, he would've lost. Not sufficient but necessary to his strategy. However you want to break it down, it's hard to argue that he didn't reap gigantic political advantage by calling a roughly functioning (if with duct tape) immigration system broken.
Which should have some bearing on how much we accept "immigration" as a material, non-vibes issue, because clearly the way people feel about immigration, like crime, has nothing to do with facts.
My genuine suggestion is that Democrats say a lot of tough, serious-sounding things and then basically change nothing. If the tough things piss off leftist activists that everyone hates, all the better. Biden saw his economically-driven immigration policy's jibing with the cultural left's preference for open borders as a good thing, because it kept the issue uncontroversial within the coalition. It turns out it was a weakness and a distinction he should have drawn.
I doubt changing nothing is tenable; at minimum, we need to gut asylum law.
I don't think Americans would like the results of mandating and enforcing e-verify but it's a good thing to talk about endlessly while the Republicans filibuster it.
If we can assemble a coalition for it, I'd like to *try* to scale skills and employment-based streams of immigration, even if at the expense of "whoever makes it across the border." We need to reassert our traditional advantage in this regard, ideally so strongly that China feels compelled to introduce the old Soviet "exit visa" systems and lose its propaganda war in one fell swoop.
I do agree completely that deliberating punching the left-activists in the face is the correct move on this issue if we want to win elections.
I am all for gutting asylum law - well, my preference would be to properly fund the system so that we have the capacity to detain people with asylum claims until those claims are rejected or accepted. But if we have to gut asylum law instead, I guess that would be a compromise.
(And of course, if people knew illegitimate asylum claims would be quickly rejected, you would have a lot less people claiming asylum.)
I mean, neither party seems to have internalized the very noticeable truth that Latino in-migration doesn't seem to be a political advantage for either of them, in terms of downstream demographic effects; maybe when they do, the temperature will get turned down on this issue.
Between 2009-2016 the almost-stated policy of the ruling party was to change the ethnic makeup of the country in a manner that would give them more future votes.
Democrats' most likely 2028 nominee right now (Newsom) signed a bill giving undocumented immigrants publicly funded healthcare (Medi-Cal). So, it's not obvious the party has moderated at all in response to losing all power at the federal level. Voters seem to detest politicians who are unresponsive to their concerns. It's a pretty scary prospect. Like, what does the GOP have to do for Democrats to start abandoning some of their policy planks that are unpopular either nationwide or in swing states they need to win to start winning elections again?
Sounds like a good thing for an electability focused candidate to use to beat Newsom over the head with.
Don't forget Democrats overwhelmingly selected the electability candidate in 2020. Our voters are far less dumb than our online activist base is. (And that's speaking as a member of that online base who was desperately pulling for Bernie.)
I also think it’s hilarious that anyone thinks 2028 is going to have the same immigration as ‘24. We had an immigration moment, we elected Trump, and over the next three years this issue will decline in salience until only the SB commentariat is still talking about it.
This is a good point, but even though immigration levels over the next four years are going to be much lower than 21-24 it's kind of an eternal issue. Nobody was really thinking about immigration until the gold escalator, either. Given where a lot of the electorate lies it's something you can make salient by just yelling about it a lot. Newsom's policy would be a drawback in a general in any environment.
I like Newsom fine but I think it's odd that Democrats have never taken the lesson of 1992, which is that nominating somebody that basically nobody has ever heard of can work really well. (Bennett '28!)
Oh man, imagine the wonky scoops SB could get under President Bennet!
It’s an eternal issue that can be managed with vigilance at the border, not with insane policies. If the electorate demands insane policies even when numbers come down and stay down for a while, maybe we’re just a bad country.
Maybe I’m stuck on fighting the last war, but isn’t the humane solution Comprehensive Immigration Reform? Create a real pathway to citizenship and couple it with tough border security, e-Verify, and a reasonable level of internal enforcement. Most people on the left would fall in line and support that, however hot tempers are running now.
The pathway to citizenship is reasonably perceived as a vote harvesting measure by Republicans. And while I’m all in favor of that because MAGA is destroying America and any trick that works to reduce or eliminate it’s political voice cannot but be good, I don’t think anything with a path to citizenship works because it’s fairly transparent and a huge talking point. Great Replacement, etc. A pathway to a green card with an explicit “this will never get the bearer citizenship” provision seems to me to be more politically possible. With perhaps an exception for military service.
I think Republicans should take a look at their own extraordinary gains with Latino voters in the past several cycles and realize that demographics are not destiny after all. But I hear you that it's politically toxic and feeds into the fears of the Republican base. I think the creation of a permanent class that explicitly cannot become citizens would be a pretty weird development, though that is also effectively what we have in practice with a huge undocumented population. I think there has to be some kind of potential path, even if it is very hard. I mean, the path created by the Obama-era CIR bill was pretty tough (and lengthy) if I remember right!
Zero chance of amnesty happening.
This Substack is obsessed with borders. The number of border crossings was high during Biden’s term! But it had already started dropping by the time Trump was elected. It’s entirely possible to tighten the border up enough that this stops being an issue, and pursue an enforcement policy that primarily focuses on criminals. You do not need masked military police murdering protesters in cities.
No one trusts that the next Democratic administration will work to keep border crossings low. Then public opinion will quickly turn against them and they will find themselves a lame duck, just like Biden did.
Maybe that will happen in eight years. I’m hopeful you all maintain enough credibility within the Democratic coalition in the next 3-4 years so that you can head it off. Obsessing about immigration in the wrong cycle is probably not going to buy you that credibility.
I think the cruelty of Trump this time has probably made this country less attractive to immigrants even if the next cycle is more lenient. Not worth coming for 3 years and having to leave again.
The whole "border" thing is, IMO, nothing more than psychosexual inadequacy on the part of the people obsessed with it. Lines in the sand are not how modern nation-states organize themselves.
LMFAO
In a sense, the protests are giving the administration rope to hang itself (rhetorically).
Like the images of water cannons and attack dogs in the 1960's, the images of ICE brutality, incompetence, unjust actions, and unprofessionalism serve strategic ends. It's why protester discipline is so important in terms of allowing ICE to act in ways that look terrible for them on video.
While it doesn't seem like it or feel like it, this is winning for our side. Trump is getting hurt politically, ICE is becoming more and more perceived as a bad organization with bad people. Trump support declines, and the GOP is increasingly faced with cognitive dissonance at attempting to rationalize what’s going on.
People didn't like chaos at the border, and they will not like chaos in cities where people are unjustly killed and their civil liberties are violated.
As long as ICE keeps up what they are doing, the trends will go against them and the administration. This isn't Andor, the brutal errors of the Trump administration will come home to roost in November and beyond.
Ironically, if they decided to take a lower-key approach and be smarter, that would be very bad for generating opposition to Trump's policies. If they took MY's advice and moved to friendly jurisdictions where the level of deportation would be a lot higher and where the opportunities for brutality would be lower, then normie Americans would quickly forget about it, and left-of-center complaints about what Trump is doing on deportations would not be effective.
Partly right. But the borders were not open under Biden, not even close. It was still hard to get into this country. And wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration are in place and work but only to a limited extent.
Ultimately, there's no way to make generalized obedience to immigration law incentive compatible while practicing just proportionality and respecting human rights. Illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and the incentives to do it are very strong.
They were open in the sense that you could show up, get yourself paroled into the country on a highly dubious asylum claim, then take your chances with a far out court date, and maybe also hope in the interim to be deemed a 'long settled American' deserving of amnesty and protection in a blue jurisdiction.
In some ways, the 2021-24 situation was basically the same "anarcho-tyranny" that was rampant in municipal governance at the time; the law was enforced on those who are willing to abide by it.
Plenty of people followed the process, and very few of them were permitted into the country. Those who did not follow the process were given a "hack" that would let them in for an indeterminate period of time, something that the advocates helping them short-circuit asylum law were clearly hoping would lead to them becoming sympathetic enough to be given a more permanent pass by the time the court system wended its way to them in two decades.
Really, 2021-23. By 2024, the Biden folks were cracking down on the border and crossings declined sharply.
Too late, though.
Legally, yes. Not for those gaming the asylum system.
"Most people therefore correctly understand that right now there are just two options: mass violations of civil rights or open borders," — I guess I'm not most people: this makes no sense. Borders are not open if we stop allowing people without traditional asylum claims, UN refugee status (which means sponsored and supported), work visas, tourist visas and all the other usual apparatus of controlled borders.
The only way this would make sense is if "mass deportation" is somehow an urgent requirement. But I figure that by now, all the true "criminal aliens" are long gone, which is why ICE relies on racial and accent profiling.
Certainly lawful deportations can be morally repugnant in that they can separate families and return people to economic vulnerability in failing nations. But the reason there are laws and procedures and judges around deportation is that it minimizes the ethical problems. And these, of course, are always up for discussion and swing with the pendulum when Congress takes up immigration policy.)
The true and available option is for Homeland Security to abide by the law in their operations.
There is also the third option of slow and steady interior enforcement for illegal entrants and visa overstays while also funding immigration courts to allow all cases to get processed faster, but specifically asylum cases. Send CBP back to boarder to patrol the boarder!
The Obama/Clinton option is there for the taking. If you call that open boarders, I don’t want to know you.
If Democrats want to go hard, enforce e-verify. That’s what Republicans won’t do, and how you know they aren’t serious.
The Democrats have been holding out for the Comprehensive Immigration Deal for a generation. I suspect many versions of it poll above 50%, but the outer wings of both parties have always been opposed nearly any compromise and willing to play brinkman.
In the meantime the 20 year limbo state of non-legal residents with quasi-non enforcement, especially with regards to work has been bad. It encourages all sorts of ID fraud, under the table payments and exploitation and precarity for the immigrants.
Actual E-verify enforcement even if strategic is probably the only way to get back to the table for the Comprehensive deal, but then something has to be given on qualifications and probably the path to citizenship.
I just don’t think it’s true that you need civil rights abuses to avoid open borders. You can get significant deterrence with regular old border enforcement, and you can increase the compliance burden on companies to do even better than that.
Broadly agreed except i would say it is possible to do interior enforcement without breaking civil rights laws.
A focus on workplace raids is a great a place to start.
You're right about what Democrats and liberals need to do, but that's about 2028. 2026 is all about riding the "repudiate Trump and MAGA" train. It's good enough in November to focus voters' attention on all the bad things Trump has done.
2028 will all be about "voters, it's okay to trust Democrats again." Lot of work to do there.
Matt mentioned this in passing, but I think we should spend a bit more time on how quickly the vibes in the Minesotta story changed from "holy shit immigrants stole billions of dollars, what a cluster" to "they are killing innocent Americans in the streets".
Sending in ICE has been such a narrative loser for Trump, they could have continued milking the fraud story all the way to the elections.
Yes. These guys really aren't that good, are they.
I'm beginning to think that Donald J Trump was not the brilliant tactician that I thought he was.
We're not talking about releasing the rest of the Epstein files as mandated by the Congress, are we?
Or Greenland or Venezuela! Any one of these things could easily have sustained an entire six months of discourse, and he throws them all away in order to bury the others!
Who has time to talk about that when ByteDance hasn't fully divested TikTok?
https://x.com/Furbeti/status/2015823717503324425?s=20
This is a gift for Keith Ellison, and I hope he takes advantage of it. It looks like the Justice Department has hamstrung itself for the moment with that investigation. The Minnesota AG's office should run hard with getting to the bottom of it, framing it as evil people defrauding the government and stealing health care and child care from the poor (which it is) and getting away from "you're inherently criminal if you're a Somali".
To some extent Walz has already fallen on his sword for this. If there's inherent problems in governance let them keep falling on him.
When you are a Republican president and you start to lose the NRA on immigration enforcement, something has probably gone wrong.
It also reveals that having a system in place where they can "kill innocent Americans in the streets" is the objective, and the reason why they want to win elections in the first place. Maybe they made a tactical error by prematurely assuming the groundwork was laid for them to be able to start doing that. A smarter strategy would mean delaying killings now so that they can do it with impunity later.
I think that they don't really have any ideas in terms of ways they can mass-disrupt in the midterm elections to a sufficient extent to keep from losing the House, and so they're speed running things to try to create one. I really doubt they wanted to be at the "shooting peaceful 2nd amendment fans" stage 12 months in.
Yeah. And it's also hard to pull it off in a midterm because it's so fragmented, and relatedly, people's motivation will be so much lower. In a presidential race, you could theoretically swing the outcome just by screwing things up in like 5 cities.
Great point.
Besides all the process violations, Trump/Noem/Miller are violating 2 principles of common-sense conservatism that are much easier for average people to understand:
1) Competence matters in using deadly force. Most people understand panic, and that's one reason most people don't want everyone carrying a gun. Regardless of your political beliefs, police are supposed to be better at this, and the folks running ICE show no interest in that half of the bargain.
2) Local matters. Our ancestors resisted a street-level federal police force in part because it's easier to resist an us-vs.-them mentality when you live in the community you're policing.
Right, local police have a much better handle on local gun laws etc. The minneapolice police chief said in a press conference that past year they confiscated 900 (i think) firearms and arrested hundreds of violent criminals, all without shooting anyone.
And this is why the people of Minneapolis have always loved and been so respectful towards the MPD.
Different police chief. "We have learned the hard way and don't want you to come in and fuck it all up" is a strong incentive.
I think your first point is incredibly important, as is the broader point that there is a huge difference between professional military and law enforcement and the paramilitary goon squad directly under the control of the president.
The National Guard and Marines were inappropriately sent into cities, but nonetheless acted professionally and, importantly, killed zero civilians.
The federal agent that killed Renee Good has a colorable argument, but Alex Pretti was a public execution. It seems very clear from the video that they pinned him down, beat him over the head and disarmed him, but in doing so one of the agents yelled "gun". Trained professionals should know how to respond; instead they shot him repeatedly in the back.
The fascists are working hard to leverage the tendency of lefties to lump the military and law enforcement together and righties to jump to the defense of anyone with a badge and uniform. They are clearly trying to goad their political opponents into violently rioting so they can back up their murderous goon squad with tanks. They want their supporters to embrace the central lie that we are past political solutions and that force is now the only option against an existential threat to the country.
Now is a great time to go out of your way to be nice to your local cops and offer up some "thank you for your service" niceties. We're going to need them.
In just over five years the Minneapolis PD went from Derek Chauvin to protector of the people from fascistic law enforcement.
Life is a shameless playwright.
Although I am forever disappointed, I cling to the hope that we, collectively, will start to remember that life is also a nuanced playwright. Social media has conditioned people to take sides and reduce everything to simple binaries, expressed in a meme or 240 characters. But it just cannot be the case that putting on a uniform makes a person intrinsically good or bad.
Social media continues to amplify "defund the police" and "if you didn't do anything wrong you have nothing to fear". And if people who hold those simplistic views cannot be swayed by the whipsaw of reality that has unfolded in Minneapolis in recent years, then we might truly be screwed as a nation.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
😊
No, no, I actually agree with you.
As a military veteran... please don't say "thank you for your service." It's just awkward. The most dangerous thing I did in the military was drive in Kuwait.
I say “thank you for your service” to anyone who is clearly performing a public service that is often insufficiently thanked, whether it is fighting in a war or cleaning up the streets after a festival or dealing with customer service complaints at a popular restaurant.
Also as a veteran, I appreciate when people thank servicemembers for their service. While not all of us did anything all that great, many do, and many may have to in the future. When people thank 'you' for your service, theyre actually thanking servicemenbers as a body, not you specifically and you should just graciously accept it on behalf of those that have 'done stuff.'
I work with navy veterans and some them were just electric plant operators on boats. They're in less danger on an aircraft carrier than I am walking to the bus stop.
That'd change if we went to war with China. But we haven't
Something I've wondered about Matt's obsession with Republicans generically maintaining a trust advantage over Democrats on immigration even as Trump's numbers have cratered (which, to his credit, he's at least partially adjusted as the situation has changed) is if this might be a little like how in 2006-2008, Republicans would still poll as more trusted on "national security", even as Bush overall and the Iraq War specifically were becoming more and more unpopular.
In both cases, I think that Republicans as a whole maintained some residual "we trust the right-wing party more to be tough" sentiment. But ultimately, it was the specific politics of the current president that mattered. Like on Bush and the Iraq War, Trump started with a strong political hand but the actual results of his decision-making have been transparently disastrous. And like with Bush, because of ambient discontent with the economy and this same bad decision making impacting other areas too, fence sitters are no longer inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, even on an issue where they were previously willing to.
The other reason I bring this up is that in 2006-2008, there was still some residual anxiety from the "you're with us or with the terrorists" dynamic of 2002-2004 among certain types of Democratic pundits who were too slow to recognize the changing situation. But ultimately, Democrats were on solid political ground nominating an anti-Iraq War candidate in 2008. (McCain actually was a better opportunity for the GOP to reclaim their default trust on the issue than Republicans are likely to seek in 2028, but at the end of the day, he supported the war and was associated with a discredited political party.)
I will give MY credit for understanding the issue is now "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it" and not "what is the ideal immigration enforcement regime?" Both of the people shot in Minnesota were American citizens. Six prosecutors resigned rather than try to go after the widow of one of the victims for no reason.
We're way past this being an immigration issue. A decent number of people on this board are still trying to relitigate the Biden administration or 2020. Meanwhile, local 2A groups in Minnesota are coming out against the shooting.
It's also worth noting that we haven't merely stumbled into a controversy over the issue of "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it." There is a real constituency in this country for the "yes" side of that argument, and they are well represented.
There are people who support it, but I doubt it's 30%. Much less if you don't count people who blindly accepted what they were told and didn't review video evidence.
I'm not sure if you could find any Trump administration policy that is less popular. Tariffs are close. I guess withholding Epstein docs, but they've managed to avoid framing that as "policy" so far.
During some snowed-in and ill-advised facebook arguments this weekend, there are absolutely hardcore Trump supporters who saw the videos and still parrot the MAGA talking points. Even if you bring up their mental gymnastics and inconsistencies like Kyle Rittenhouse's gun-slinging or the J6ers abusing law enforcement, they will not budge. They consider ICE to be respectable law enforcement full stop and anyone who doesn't did a FAFO to themselves. They cannot be reasoned with. And I will refrain from arguing with them God willing for another year or so.
It's rough. It's the kind of thing where "success" in using an event as persuasion usually means 1 out of 10 people changing their mind, and even that can feel very discouraging when you're going through it, almost impossible to see.
It’s just partisanship. But we knew it had all gotten that bad. I knew in my heart of hearts that Biden had to start his own unconstitutional Brownshirt army to go door to door like they’re doing in Minneapolis but rooting out MAGA on day 1, because otherwise we were going to get a Republican presidency that was 100% going to pull that trigger and do something like this, and that it will get worse. We’re seeing the consequences of misplaced faith in the system now.
I just hope and pray that the Eye of Sauron doesn’t make it to Seattle, but with 3 years left there’s not much chance of that. Maybe they’ll hit Portland and the Bay Area first, we’ll see. Hopefully Governor Bob keeps his head down.
Yes partisanship blinds us all terribly.
If you can't name at least some good things that your political opponents are doing, or some bad things that your own side is doing, you are blinded by partisanship.
Apologies for linking to myself: https://www.slowboring.com/p/sunday-mailbag-thread-484/comment/205061777
I agree that only a minority go that far. But (a) politics and policy do respond to constituencies that comprise 20% (or whatever) of the electorate - that's a lot of people, and they move the center of gravity, (b) one of the many problems with that ideology is that the whole idea behind it is to achieve the ability to exercise power with or without majority support - i.e. to just hold onto power once you get it. Not saying that public opinion doesn't matter in authoritarian countries. It still does, to a degree, as we can see from e.g. Vladimir Putin's reluctance to do a general mobilization. But Putin wouldn't bat an eyelash if his approvals were in the 40% range.
Yeah, 20% is enough to bring you close to a "majority of the majority" threshold that can make a policy viable. Really, the whole Trump era is a product of a Republican party that is usually a 55/45 breakdown of Romneys/McCains vs. hard right revanchists becoming a 45/55 breakdown of the same.
Fortunately, unlike Putin, the Trump regime's exposure to electoral consequences still theoretically applies, and their paths to changing that are narrow and fraught.
"Putin wouldn't bat an eyelash if his approvals were in the 40% range."
Not true. He spends a shit ton of effort on image management and propaganda. People who say shit like this don't understand how dictatorships work.
That does not contradict my point in any way. Dictators work on image management and propaganda? No kidding. You're telling me this for the first time. What's also true is that a dictator is in no danger just because a bare majority of the population disapproves of the job he's doing. That's the whole point of being a dictator and subverting democracy. You don't hit a danger zone until your approvals (if they could be measured) get into the 20s or whatever. At that point, not only do most people disapprove of your performance, but the share of that share who are willing to risk death to hit the streets to say so becomes significant.
I never imagined I’d see the day when the Dems were the “security” party and the GOP were the “education” party. And yet we’re heading that way. The current moment is like watching 2 soccer teams trading own-goals.
This is some pretty reckless extension of trend lines.
I think an interesting question here is what it means for winning back the senate. Lots of senators were haunted by voting yes on the Iraq war. Will senators be haunted for voting yes on ICE funding? Or will all of the blowback be limited to Trump who is on his way out in 3 years anyway? I'm worried that congress is going to escape without the blame they deserve.
I don't understand the shot Matt takes at Robert Hur. Hur is a patriotic hero who tried to tell the truth about President Biden's decrepitude and was attacked by lying partisan Democrats for doing it.
I agree. If anything Hur showed a great deal of restraint
He lied. He said Biden was sharp and then changed his story later for political reasons.
No he didn't lie. We later got the tape and Biden was exactly as senile and incompetent as he said.
Can you point to reporting that supports this?
I seem to be misremembering. It is noteworthy that Hur is not qualified to make medical evaluations, and said so himself, and that his statements about Biden (which were 10000% partisan hackery, but whatever, if they're true they're true) were statements of impression and not evaluation.
I suppose I was taking the objective truth of "Hur did not call Biden senile" and confusing it with "Hur said Biden was not senile," when I don't think he said either thing.
Whatever. I'll take the L on that memory lapse. The bottom line is that it was indefensible of Hur to put that shit in his report. It was not what he was investigating and putting political hits in his report was blatant prosecutorial misconduct, not "heroic patriotism". He's a piece of shit who, at best, lied by omission, and I bet his pockets are lined with MAGA crypto scam dollars as a reward.
This is so fucking stupid. The report, which he had to put out, was about the decision to not prosecute Biden for his illegal retention of documents. He said that a charging decision would be unwise because a jury would likely not find Mr. Biden had the requisite intent to retain the documents unlawfully, instead seeing him as an elderly man with poor memory.
Spot the lie?
You should probably stop arguing this point. I find myself further from your position than I was when you first chimed in.
Biden's decrepitude was a lie perpetrated by SV donors. He had a speech impediment that was worsening due to normal age-related slowing of cognition. Period. He was never senile. Hur can get fucked. I don't have to call him a liar, he called himself a liar. He contradicted himself.
He was senile, inarticulate, only had "6 good hours" a day, couldn't even do friendly interviews, couldn't do a full campaign, and sounded like a blithering idiot because of his age related decrepitude at the debate with Trump.
You lost this debate.
I know I lost the debate. That doesn't mean I have to stop telling the truth.
"Biden is senile" was never a consensus, and I am not going to let the elites (who are, and deserve to be, embarrassed by how they handled the whole thing) pretend it was or is. It was ALWAYS a minority position among liberals and Democrats.
This is an utterly insane thing to believe. We all watched the debate - that was one hell of a speech impediment...
He's a partisan hack telling us what anyone with a brain already knew: Biden is a touch senile. Not good obviously, but presidential senility seems to be the preference.
Except that a bunch of actual partisan hacks on the Democratic side attacked him for saying the truth. Josh Marshall called him a prostitute for saying it!
You can be a partisan hack while getting attacked by other partisan hacks. These are not mutually exclusive things.
This is true. But did anyone have an opinion on Robert Hur’s partisanship before he said Biden was senile?
I definitely don’t know anything about that. It would be interesting to know precisely what Matt is talking about, since at the level of description you provide, this is basically what Matt himself had been saying, but he might be objecting to something more about Hur, either in the details of the report or before.
Did anyone know who he was prior to that?
Shame on them; he still deserves no credit for stating something everyone already knew (or were lying to themselves about not knowing).
Yeah the only problem is that it wasn't the fucking truth. It was narrative setting.
Please be more careful with the term "senile."
Exactly my thought as I was reading.
Any one-to-one comparison is going to be a little glib, so forgive me, but I want to riff on this point: "Outsmarting your opponents with disciplined behavior is a move that you are allowed to make in politics."
There are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course. The one I covered most myself was Tea Party organizing that made life difficult for elected Democrats until they scaled back or voted against the Affordable Care Act. There were protests on the Capitol lawn, raucous town hall meetings, elected officials getting yelled at when they went to work. Democrats didn't like this, but it was generally understood as a part of politics, and they were frustrated that Obama's movement went to sleep, creating space for the Tea Party to mobilize.
More recently, there were conservative protests of COVID restrictions and school gender identity and race policies under Joe Biden. It was a major scandal when the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Merrick Garland's DOJ, comparing the disruption of school board meetings by parents who opposed liberal gender or race policies to "domestic terrorism." Garland announced that the FBI would look into it: "The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate." Fair to say that Republicans/conservatives saw an attack on free assembly. They spent years investigating the DOJ over this, and my cards on table, I think Garland and the NSBA were crazy to do it.
Obviously, Stephen Miller et al now talk about disruptive liberal protesters the way the NSBA talked about those angry parents, and the Bondi DOJ is dusting off Civil War-era codes to try to charge Democratic politicians with conspiracy to overthrow the government. There's a permission structure for this, which you can read about in the 2024 book "Unhumans," blurbed by JD Vance: The left is dangerous and you must do whatever it takes to keep them from power.
But there's a more traditionally American principle, that you're allowed to tell the government to fuck off sometimes.
<i>here are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course.</i>
I can't think of even one where the government substantively changed course, though. The ACA was passed and remains in force, school policies on gender issues are getting pressure from the administration but not changing substantively.
The analogy that I'd keep in mind is the 1950's-1960's; the pro-stability South was at least as well organized as the anti-ICE forces, and a combination of federal troops, federal police, and federal financial pressure completely won against it. Sure, it got pictures of active-duty troops attacking schoolchildren with fixed bayonets, but the media didn't care so it didn't really matter.
Greetings from academia, where we went from mandatory DEI statements everywhere to mentioning DEI anywhere becoming a fireable offense. Two years ago it was mandatory to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion in grant proposals (from any agency on any topic), now it is strictly forbidden. It is also now literally illegal (in several states) for employees of public universities to engage in "DEI activities" meaning not even tenure will protect you.
And we still risk getting cancelled (and fired) for expressing views about biological sexes on social media, but now the polarity is reversed.
"pro-stability" is an interesting phrase to use to describe what is actually "pro- an overt system of racial apartheid enshrined in law and further enforced by a terroristic murder regime."
And by interesting, to be clear here, I mean that it completely discredits your argument.
You’re talking about local school policies? Why would those need to change through protest, rather than local elections? (And if they’re not changing, maybe people just don’t share your preferences.)
"It’s Noem, Lewandowski, and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino who’ve pushed for creating these dramatic scenes. Which I bring up not to paint Homan and Lyons for sainthood, but as a reminder that this really is a choice that Trump made. He has unleashed chaos, deliberately, by choosing to side with the pro-chaos faction of his administration over the advice offered by more seasoned professionals. Contra Lowry, this is not a question of nullification or left-wing self-radicalization; it’s Trump making a choice."
This is right. And it's worth asking, why is he making that choice? The reason is that for him, and especially for Vance, their foremost enemies aren't immigrants at all. Immigrants are a means to an end. Their foremost enemies are liberals, and liberal-ism - not just the progressive left-liberalism of the last decade, but the whole tradition of classical liberalism that goes back to the Founders. Just as in foreign policy, it's now crystal clear that their #1 foreign enemy was never China. Their #1 foreign enemies are NATO, the EU, and the liberal governments behind them.
It’s a pretty direct consequence of them being backed by Silicon Valley billionaires who have basically become ungovernable and it’s weird that people like Matt would rather sing the praises of AI than point out that something should be done about this.
Remember, trying to regulate bullshit like cryptocurrency is why SV turned on Biden and went all-in on Trump.
The three major commercial AI labs (Google Deepmind, Anthropic, OpenAI) did not materially back Donald Trump during the election. Leadership at former and the latter did cravenly bend the knee after his election to avoid malicious regulatory action, but that’s a different thing, and something people in many industries did. Trying to paint the tech industry with a single brush is going to lead you to more confusion than clarity I think.
The biggest donor for Trump during 2025 was an OpenAI's executive with $25 million.
I assume you’re referring to Greg Brockman? I was thinking of the CEOs specifically, but I did not say so explicitly so thanks for clarifying. I think it reinforces my broader point though that the tech industry is ideologically heterogenous though.
I don't think "they're backing Trump because they're cowards" is really a defense here. I mean what does it say about the owner of the Washington Post that what he really cares about is his stupid space exploration business?
Well, I personally think AI should be strangled to death with regulations and Democrats are very cowardly in how they're approaching it, and there it's fine to paint with a broad brush because they're ALL going all-in on AI. There is no good tech company any more.
That’s a plausible political view, but it’s very different from saying that tech is mainly backing Trump because they support him.
Why else would they be backing Trump?
Because they believe he will not strangle them to death with regulation, one presumes.
Love the all-in touch.
I don't have a Free Press subscription, but feel it is worth pointing out they have an editorial entitled "Kristi Noem's reckless lies". Anyone know what their stance on this is?
Yeah, they are taking a pretty hard line against the Trump administration on this. Not a surprise because despite what some commenters here allege, they are definitely not all in on MAGA.
Now their comment section on the other hand...
They are all in on being Republican though.
And I’m glad that there are Republicans willing to criticize ICE
Essentially, this is bad, emphasizing the hypocrisy re: 2nd Amendment Support and that there’s clear video evidence that they’re lying
The Apple News link: https://apple.news/A-c-m3AaeRuiWnNeGq3Hq9w
I can guess what their commentariat's stance is. Ugh.
So the top two comments respond to growing authoritarian violence by asking how can progressives and liberals do better, even as protestors do exactly what the commenters think they should do. Sigh.
Projecting your anxieties onto your coalition partners isn't smart analysis, it's working against unity at the very time we need to be most united.
Hear, hear!
Not to fall victim to hypocrisy murder-suicide myself, but it is funny that Lowry is all about federalism and states' rights until Minnesota is okay with having more immigrants than he is.
Eh, I agree Lowry is a hypocrite on many things (which is why I liked your comment), but the response there would be that states cannot constiturionally restrict immigrants from moving across borders once they are in the country, which makes that distinguishable from gun rights or abortion.
It’s not THAT distinct from gun rights; don’t the guns in Chicago come from Indiana?
Unless I've missed something, there's still no federal law or SCOTUS decision precluding Illinois/Chicago from seizing guns brought into the jurisdiction from Indiana that violate Illinois/Chicago law. States, however, are constitutionally barred from having any form of immigration law of their own, nor can they independently enforce federal immigration law. Federal authorities are literally the only ones who can actually do anything to set and enforce federal immigration law.
Or abortion for that matter. See the simmering desire in red states to ban Mifepristone or prosecute people traveling out of state for an abortion.
That being said, the naturalization process and management of the border for the purpose of levying customs and duties are pretty clearly a federal responsibility under the constitution.
My understanding is that there was a lot more state involvement in immigration law before roughly 1891. The constitution only references naturalization, not immigration.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_and_nationality_law_in_the_United_States
(This needs a better cite but I’m time-constrained.)
Yes, I understand that there used to be more state involvement in regulating immigration, but there has been a wave of SCOTUS decisions in the past 100 years or so that have (1) very broadly confirmed the ability of people to freely travel internally in the US, (2) generally cut back the power of states to restrict where people live, the ability to own real property, etc., and (3) generally ruled that states cannot make it a state crime for an individual to be in violation of federal immigration laws or refuse some types of state benefits. SCOTUS might go the other direction now if some of those issues were to come to it these days, but it seems by and large that no one is even setting up test cases to do that.
Federalism doesn’t mean states can do whatever they want. Immigration is properly a federal concern.
In retrospect voters in general received the "defending democracy" stuff by Biden and then Harris as cover for unpopular policies of the administration.
I think the problem also is that it just doesn't work as a point of persuasion. There was a lot of churn in the electorate that probably did reflect conservatives voting for Harris because they thought Trump was a fundamental threat, but those people didn't need convincing, and people who didn't already think that Trump was an authoritarian threat weren't going to be convinced by a campaign.
Yeah, once Trump gets beaten in an election, “but next time he’ll be a threat to democracy” is hard for the average voter to swallow (even though it’s correct, I never stopped believing it was correct, and I think it should have been obvious to people paying attention).
The main issue with the “defending democracy” frame is that the subtext of the argument was that in order to “defend democracy” you had to accept a whole raft of left-wing policies that poll terribly.
Biden actually won in 2020 on “return to the Obama-era normal” and instead we went from deporter-in-chief to bogus asylum claims flooding the country.
It's more like the voters seconding Joni Mitchell who said, "don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone." They just didn't take the protect democracy argument seriously because it hadn't been undermined yet.
Correct.
Most Americans are materially comfortable and always have been. They can’t imagine a real crisis because it’s too far out of their frame of reference.
A substantial portion of them are also bored and aimless, and therefore highly susceptible to culture war silliness. So you end up with tens of millions ignoring important things and voting according to minor/spurious things.
It should also be mentioned that a majority of voters that voted to defend Democracy did so by voting for Trump.
IE a majority thought Biden/Harris was a greater threat to democracy than Trump. And if challenged why they would point to illegal immigration, refusal to back voter ID, ministry of truth etc.
I think it just wasn't pertinent. Clearly Trump tried to steal the election, but he also failed and is very old, so voters didn't think it was as important as the economic items.
It was too high minded to appeal to the median voter over more daily concerns, and Kamala shouldn't have gone back to that failed tactic.
Disappointed MY didn't point to "sharpening the contradictions" as a counterpoint to "slow boring of hard boards". Seems the former is the winning hand here.
Substantively, though, many commenters here are still putting this in context of immigration. It should be thought of rather in the context enforcing authoritarian rule in general and is part and parcel of legal harassment of Jack Smith, Jerome Powell and any number of other actors.
Right, all the "Biden lied too about the border being secure" talk here feels like such a bizarre preoccupation to me in a context where the people ICE has killed were natural-born American citizens as far as possible from "the border" (unless we're deciding that the lack of toughness on the Canada border is discrediting Democrats now).
I generally agree with most of what you're saying, but for "those in the know" the border really is much more than the southern border. Compared to the past, a far greater share of unauthorized immigrants arrive over the Canadian border, or through airports and visa overstays, than ever before. It's far more economical than it used to be to do so. Plus Trump has made interior enforcement a marquee part of what he's doing, so really any geography is part of the immigration debate at this point.
That is why there is Border Patrol, which is supposed to patrol the border, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is supposed to handle interior enforcement. The former is trained for encounters with armed cartels smuggling drugs and people across the border. The latter is trained more like police, to carry out investigations and arrest people in the interior. We even have a separate Customs and Border Protection for ports of entry.
The revolutionaries running the federal government are setting quotas that are detached from reality and then sending armed, masked Border Patrol agents to cities, ostensibly to work with ICE, with all the careful planning and forethought of a 3:00AM missive from the tweeter-in-chief. This is, of course, after they first tried literally sending the military into cities.
I cannot wrap my mind around the credulity required to cast any of this is as an "immigration debate". Sending the Border Patrol into cities is sending Marines to Yellowstone to support the National Park Service. If anything, the debate is whether this is all the result of deliberate cruelty or malicious incompetence.
I wasn't casting "any of this", ie Matt's post today or the news related to it as part of the immigration debate. I was specifically replying to the back half of Connor's comment, which seemed to say that if it's happening in Minnesota it can't be related to the border, either in terms of actual enforcement or presumably politically.
Put a different way - there are a lot of good ways to criticize Trump's enforcement actions, both for political reasons and as a criticism of the substantial merits or demerits of enforcement, but the fact that it's the Canadian border and not the Mexican border is not one of them.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to imply that you were being credulous. My position is that none of this has anything to do with immigration. I think it is modern fascism, full stop.
Specifically, though, Renee Good was shot in the arm, chest and through left the temple by a Border Patrol agent, not ICE. And from the looks of the video Alex Pretti was shot once in the head by a Border Patrol agent and then nine more times in the back, after he collapsed, by two Border Patrol agents. But we don't know because they were wearing masks, no clear identification and fled the scene after firing tear gas at onlookers.
The OP said ICE killed natural-born American citizens, but I don't think that is true in either case. They were killed by Border Patrol, nowhere near the border while violating no laws. For that reason, I do think it is relevant that it occurred thousands of miles from the US-Mexico border and hundreds of miles from the US-Canada border.
Moreover, the first thing they tried was sending the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles and Chicago. Now they've found a legal grey area where Border Patrol can operate anywhere under the rubric of "immigration enforcement" and treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent. Stochastic violence from masked agents of the state under the direct supervision of a president who has shown no hesitation to pardon violent felons looks, walks and quacks like state terrorism.
I think that is where the only debate is: are the people running the federal government fascists (deliberate cruelty), or are they just acting like fascists (malicious incompetence)? They want to roll this up in to a debate about immigration by painting all immigrants as violent criminals, but instead they are smashing windows and dragging parents out of their cars in front of schools; smashing down doors, pointing guns at civilians and frog-marching US citizens out of their own homes; shooting peaceful protestors at point-blank range with rubber bullets and then mocking them; shooting women in their cars and then bragging about what good shots they are; lobbing tear gas into open car windows; setting of flash bang grenades next to infants; etc.
I just don't see any plausible argument that violations of civil immigration law remotely justify any of this and that we've moved way past any debate about immigration policy.
That's all good but why were you replying to me then?
Whatever Trump does or doesn't do, there is still going to be an immigration debate, today, tomorrow and well past Trump into the far future. It may or may not involve significant interior enforcement and it's increasingly going to include places of entry apart from Mexico. The Dems will have to consider what that means for them if they have power again in 2028. It's not all about Mexico like it was in the early Obama era. That's all I was trying to say.
Why would anyone immigrate here from Canada? Illegally or not, seems unwise. They may be slightly poorer than us, but they’re much more stable.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting unauthorized Canadians are immigrating here in great numbers. It's people from other nations who find a way into Canada and then come here across the unwatched Northern Border.
Dozens of reasons. It might be easier to obtain a tourist visa to Canada. Or cheaper to fly their from their point of origin. They might have family who immigrated to the USA, or maybe their work visa is expiring in Canada so might try their luck in the USA rather than being deported from Canada (limiting their chance to legally work in Canada in the future).
"they may be slightly poorer than us". If a person can make 20% more, might totally be worth it to them. Also it's cold as fuck there, and not everyone is up for that, especially if you grew up somewhere tropical.
This makes sense and I just hadn’t thought about that
The people we're talking about probably don't have legal residency in Canada either.
O
SB came about at a time in 2020 where centrists needed to yell at people on the left to stop being crazy. Too many people here live in a perpetual 2020, in part because they're fundamentally motivated by their disappointment in Biden more than dealing with the specifics of the challenges of American life in 2026.
More accurately: I feel like this board has become a refuge for never-Trump Bush Republicans. Which is ironic considering Matt’s history with that political movement.
I don't think it's never Trump Republicans. It's the remnants of the Obama coalition thats since broken down. People forget but he decisively won the blue wall states plus IA and OH, PA, and FL twice (and NC once) and that the Democrats were still competitive all over the midwest and parts of the south. Politicians from all kinds of places rode his coat tails. It used to be a much bigger tent party, even if I think a lot of the harder partisans and people under, I don't know, 35 don't remember it. I strongly doubt there's any significant number of Romney or W voters here, to say nothing of Dole or HW for those who are even further up there.
I voted for Bush (twice) and for Romney. But I’ve voted against Trump every single time.
Well, it’s a disproportionately educated group, so it’s not surprising they’re looking for good political discussions (the ones you can get for free being so awful).
I can't think of more than a couple of people that have self-id'd that way, and it's not exactly something a person would need to hide on a semi-anonymous internet forum.
Looked differently, something like 10-15% of the electorate has switched their presidential vote in each of the last 4 or 5 elections. So you'd expect maybe to have more never-Trump Bush Republicans if you took a random sample of Biden voters.
The loudest commenters swing far to the right of the median Democrat on virtually every issue. They’re more conservative than the median Democrat in 2012. Maybe you’re correct that Obama swept up a group that would have otherwise voted Republican but for Bush sucking and somehow they’re all here; but that’s kind of the same thing.
I don’t agree with this.
"Loudest", "virtually every"... Mr. Green sufficiently salted his comment with weasel words that I'm sure he can prove *a* version of it to himself.
How are you defining "loud"? It could be the kind of thing where the comments you find most grating are the ones that stick in your head.
But still, it seems like you're saying that SB is full of people that would be republican if it weren't for Trump's flaws, but I really don't get that sense. You have lots of debate on various issues, and plenty of people that are hard to fit into predefined political categories - but that's also what the voters are like! And I hardly hear anyone embracing traditional Republican positions.
Matt voted for Mitt Romney in college and supported the Bush wars in the middle east. Liberal he has never been.
That’s not true at all. He voted for Mitt Romney for governor of MA. And I think that’s fine. He panned Romney as a Presidential candidate. He also (in college) supported the invasion of Iraq and spent a dozen years writing mea culpae about it. Mistakes as a 21 year old are formative and forgivable. The moment I most respected Matt was this one: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2008/12/22/the-cap-kerfuffle/
Yes, he voted for mitt Romney when he was in college, as I said. And he supported the Iraq war. All failures of youth to be sure. But the idea that is somehow out of sorts with moderate republicans is belied by history with them. Andrew Sullivan had Matt Yglesias Award for alleged democrats who stood up to their party on things like the Iraq war. Long way of saying, Matt has always inhabited a close place as a deliver who has quite a bit in common with moderate Republicans, libertarians, and I think so called Never Trump Republicans, whatever that means. There is nothing at all surprising about his substack being a refuge for former Republicans. His whole career has been built on it.
Hold on. The leftists went crazy in 2024 shouting “Genocide Joe” and “Trump will be better on Palestine and less involved in foreign wars” and here we are.
Amen. Top comment of the day about the SB commenters. Thank you. It is all backwards looking anger that is totally divorced from the seriousness of the moment.
This is a good piece-- and I must say, I found the comments yesterday to the effect that Matt was somehow slow or vague about responding to Minneapolis... distasteful, to put it mildly, given that the man has been seriously ill.
I also think the Second Amendment point is extremely well-taken. You can have a society where someone carrying around a gun (even if lawfully permitted) is treated as implicitly threatening anyone they talk to with the use of unprovoked lethal force. Or you can have a society where someone carrying around a (lawfully permitted) gun is treated as not sending any inherent message absent some specific act of brandishment. I am not indifferent to which of the two of these our law recognizes, and neither are the Second Amendment-aholics. But both of us have to choose, one or the other. What you cannot have is a society where carrying around a gun is given whatever message the authorities feel like giving it depending on whether they like the individual in question or not. And that's the society Noem et al want-- one that operates explicitly by the precept that the government gets to decide whether you have rights or not depending on whether you are part of their political in-group.
I dont think this is a good take as that isnt actually properly describing the relationship between carrying arms and interactions with law enforcement. Carrying a gun significantly changes your ability to project force. Obviously, differing ability to project force will change how law enforcement (or anyone) treats you in any context. In the case of law enforcement, carrying a gun means that you have a much higher ability to make someone fear for their life. That is the factor that is relevant here, so yes, if you have a gun on you and attend a protest, it is much more likely that you will legitimately be perceived as a deadly threat. There is nothing special about a gun in this formulation (it is a point of a scale of ability to project force) and that is why we arent ever going to 'pick' one of the options you presented.
No. You cannot pretend to support someone's right to do something while also holding their exercise of that right against them legally. This is why, for example, prosecutors are not allowed to say that a defendant refusing to testify at a criminal trial makes the defendant look guilty. It is in fact empirically the case that people who don't testify are more likely to be guilty than people who do. But the jury is not permitted to consider that information as doing so would burden the right to remain silent, and the prosecutor is not permitted to inveigle to get them to illegally do so.
These situations are not courtrooms and LE officers are asked to respond reasonably to credible threats. If you have a firearm on you, you represent a greater threat than someone who is not armed. In your world an officer is not allowed to view somepoint pointing a gun at them as any more of a credible threat than if they are pointing a lazer (because I cant hold against them their right to hold a gun)? Your rights allow you to carry weapons around, they dont protect you from every possible consequence of carrying that weapon around, in include the possibility of a police officer feeling that their life is more at threat.
There are worlds in which these arguments you're putting forward make sense and carry weight. In this world, in this situation, where the man was subdued, disarmed, and summarily executed, it's a load of shit, frankly.
Pointing a gun AT someone is considered a threat of imminent lethal force in every conceivable situation I am aware of. Absent justification, it's almost a per se crime.
But a. that's precisely because ordinary carry permits don't authorize you to go around doing dangerous shit like brandishing weapons at people, and b. the only guns that were pointed at anyone here were the CBP guns that murdered Pretti.
Typo: "But blanket prohibition of cooperation is an activist demand that arose in Biden’s second term and was adopted in many blue jurisdictions, often without sufficient consideration."
This was probably supposed to say Obama's second term.
I'll take the affirmative case for the 2nd Amendment here. It is correct and valuable that outrageous government misconduct results in intolerable deadly violence in a free country. The Feds are not, in fact, supposed to be able to act like the Gestapo and the fact that we have an armed populace dramatically increases the barriers to doing so. It's resource intensive. It's a huge political problem. It's bad for would be authoritarians in all sorts of ways to have to regularly execute citizens in the streets to get their policy preferences. Liberals of all stripes should always have recognized this but I'm happy to welcome the recently enlightened.
I have been subject to many, many years of claims from my right wing friends that a vast politicized federal police force was right around the corner; and just as many claims from my left wing friends that citizens with rifles could never be a check against the power of the state. Now that it's here there's been soul searching on both sides.
All governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Only in America is the feedback from the governed so direct.
Do you really believe citizens with rifles are seriously a check here against state power. The state executed the man with the gun who at no point had any chance or recourse. In fact, the state possess the capacity to do this at much higher level if so inclined. I dont see what happened in MN as ANYTHING to do with a the 2nd amendment disempowering the government.
It is the absence of regulated government which is causing the potential reduction in force and push back. It seems democracy, not the 2nd amendment is the more powerful antidote both in this case and more broadly.
“…affirmative case for the 2nd Amendment here”
I think rights come with obligations; that includes the obligation to responsible behavior while armed.
Yes, government agents should definitely be held accountable for summarily executing civilians and patriots like Pretti should strive to be more combat effective when assaulted by lawless thugs.
“…summarily executing civilians…”
Those who have been saying that various protesters are terrorists are ridiculous. So are those who call the Minnesota ICE / CBP shootings executions.
I thought you had more sense.
What do you call disarming someone and then shooting him 10 times while on the ground if not an execution?
An incompetent clusterfuck. Not an execution. Possibly murder, more likely either some form of criminally reckless homicide or massive civil liability/civil rights violations. Words matter.
Words do matter.
Execution: The killing of someone as a political act.
https://googledictionary.freecollocation.com/meaning?word=execution
It fits
Has an official report from a thorough investigation been released?
We have multiple primary source videos displaying the incident. Do you really need an official narrative to make your own opinion about it first?
NYT description of one such video:
"An agent begins shoving the demonstrators, and squirts pepper spray at their faces.
At this moment, Mr. Pretti has both hands clearly visible. One is holding his phone, while he holds the other up to protect himself from pepper spray. He moves to help one of the protesters who was sprayed, as other agents approach and pull him from behind.
Several agents tussle with Mr. Pretti before bringing him to his knees. He appears to resist as the agents grab his legs, push down on his back and strike him repeatedly.
The footage shows an agent approaching with empty hands and grabbing at Mr. Pretti as the others hold him down.
About eight seconds after he is pinned, agents yell that he has a gun, indicating that they may not have known he was armed until he was on the ground.
The same agent who approached with empty hands pulls a gun from among the group that appears to match the profile of a firearm DHS said belonged to Mr. Pretti.
The agents appear to have him under their control, with his arms pinned near his head.
As the gun emerges from the melee, another agent aims his own firearm at Mr. Pretti’s back and appears to fire one shot at close range. He then appears to continue firing at Mr. Pretti, who collapses.
A third agent unholsters a weapon. Both agents appear to fire additional shots into Mr. Pretti as he lies motionless.
In total, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/minneapolis-shooting-federal-agents-video.html
There was an incredibly thin hook by which one could make an almost entirely disingenuous self defense case for the Good shooting. They've got nothing at all for the Pretti execution.
I’ll await the full story, but initial reports said the deceased was interfering with the feds. Maybe that was well meaning, but it certainly was ill advised.
I've had productive discussions with you in the past before, so I'm actually wondering what the hell is up with your take on this. Are you a former cop?
What would you call the ICE/CBP killings? "Execution" implies coldblooded calculation and thus I'd agree with you. "Blind rage killing by thugs with no impulse control who react violently to anyone who isn't cowed by them and should never ever have been granted authority by the federal government to wield and use firearms" is the non-pithy way I'd put it.
“should never ever have been granted authority by the federal government to wield and use firearms”
Perhaps not, but they have, in fact, been given such authority.
My understanding is that the ones who murdered Pretti have been moved to other street locations (maybe not in Minneapolis). I mean, not even put on desk duty.
My deepest belief is that the Trump folks are fervently wishing for some protester to shoot and kill an ICE agent and they will move heaven and earth to help make that happen, including putting murderers back on the street.
Government agents are the primary authorized user of force in any modern country. Which means it they should have the highest obligation of anyone for responsible behavior while armed.
Law enforcement officers need not rely on their Second Amendment rights when on duty: They have authority granted to them by legislatures. Their behavior is also governed by laws and regulations.