Mourning in America

A view from outside the zone of interest

[W]e who shape modern German policy feel ourselves to be artists … the task of art and the artist [being] to form, to give shape, to remove the diseased and create freedom for the healthy.”

—Joseph Goebbels, 1933

I think I’ve used this title before, but maybe it just feels familiar. Or obvious. In every news cycle—or rather, in the ongoing flood of news out of the United States (there’s no such thing as a news cycle anymore)—a sense of mourning inheres. Ronald Reagan’s slogan from, of all years, 1984, “Morning In America”, deserves the homophonic transposition, and Reagan’s culture wars are certainly a source of what is currently destroying American democracy.

James Ensor, Wrath, hand-coloured etching on Japanese paper, from the The Deadly Sins, ca. 1904 — Source.

Reading back over some earlier pieces in this newsletter—this and this—in which I posit the emergence of concentration camps and the transitioning of the United States into a post-judicial, dual-state entity, I can hear my own sense of unbelief that these things could happen. Even as I was happy, earlier than most, I think, to call fascism fascism, a part of me was in denial.

But how else can we react to the latest manifestation of the process, the emergence in Florida of a facility that is so unambiguously a concentration camp that its supporters are happy to refer to it as Alligator Alcatraz and sell merchandise to that effect to promote it. The name Alligator Auschwitz is also being used.

Far from hide from any potential controversy around all this, the President of the United States showed up and did a tour. “It’s known as Alligator Alcatraz,” he said at his press conference, “which is very appropriate because I looked outside, and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon but, very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,. We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swamp land, and the only way out is really deportation.”

“I thought this was so professional, so well done,” Trump said after touring the centre, which features rows of fenced-in bunk beds and a razor-wire perimeter. “It’s really government working together.”

He also said, “We'd like to see them in many states,” just in case you were in any doubt about the endgame.

Those “vicious people” he mentioned, he was happy to confirm, may well include American citizens born in the country or those who have been citizens for many years.

“We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time…they’re not new to our country, they’re old to our country. Many of them were born in our country and I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too.”

Idiot Democrats are running the idea, inevitably, that all this is a distraction. U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat who represents a district near the Florida facility, said in an emailed statement that “Trump and Republicans badly need this wasteful, dangerous, mass misery distraction” from a bill that would cause state residents to lose their health care benefits.

This is not a distraction, it is key business, central to the Bill she is referencing.

“Alligator Alcatraz” and the whole process of which it is but a small part is the central and defining matter of Trump’s entire project, just as such facilities were to Nazi Germany. As in Germany, the camps are a microcosm and precursor to the authoritarianism coming to the country proper. They are the whole writ small. (And if you can’t allow for the fact that Trump’s “Alligator Auschwitz” could grow into its “joke” name, then it’s you who are distracted.)

The centrality of all this to the Maga project is clear in the recent passage of the “big, beautiful Bill” through the Senate, a Bill which massively increases funding for ICE and other instruments of the terror:

[T]he bill stands to significantly expand the capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).

ICE’s current annual budget is around $10 billion. Under the version of the bill that passed the Senate, the agency would receive an infusion of more than $100 billion through 2029: $45 billion for detention facilities, $46 billion for border wall operations in the U.S.-Mexico border and $14 billion for deportation operations.

The agency, which currently has about 6,000 deportation officers, would also receive billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029.

And just in case you were still in any doubt about what is going on, or are buying into the distraction distraction, here’s White House Deputy Chief of State and key architect of the Nazification project, Stephen Miller:

“What you’ve done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,” he said. “There’s a 2,000-mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America.

“There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.”

…

“Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,” Miller said.

I was reading Susan Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating Fascism” the other day, and it is a startling reminder of how people get swept up in the aesthetics of fascism and how the aesthetics are an inseparable element of the violence of fascism.¹ Of how the aesthetics of fascism play out as the authoritarianism mounts. She writes, “Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” Think of those dudes creating, selling and buying their “Alligator Auschwitz” merch, or Trump and Miller and Noem, happily touring the facility itself and what its rows of bunk beds and lines of razor wire transmit.

What Hitler, Goebbels and Riefenstahl did with neat uniforms, mass rallies, and monumental architecture, Trump, Miller and Noem are doing with ski-masks, tents and Botox. As author Mel Campbell noted the other day, the “Transition from style as expression of cultural capital (linked to in-group belonging) to neoliberal style, which only communicates the wearer’s alienated supremacy (‘I don’t want or need anyone or anything else’)” is what is underway.

Every fascist nation is fascist in its own way and none of us are immune.

Recent announcement by Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs, Tony Burke

Sontag writes that Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel La Mart dans I’âme (1949)—along with Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites—was one of the first texts that “showed the erotic allure fascism exercised on someone who was not a fascist.” She quotes Sartre’s novel:

“[Daniel] was not afraid, he yielded trustingly to those thousands of eyes, he thought ‘Our conquerors!’ and he was supremely happy. He looked them in the eye, he feasted on their fair hair, their sunburned faces with eyes which looked like lakes of ice, their slim bodies, their incredibly long and muscular hips. He murmured: ‘How handsome they are!’ … Something had fallen from the sky: it was the ancient law. The society of judges had collapsed, the sentence had been obliterated; those ghostly little khaki soldiers, the defenders of the rights of man, had been routed…. An unbearable, delicious sensation spread through his body; he could hardly see properly; he repeated, gasping, ‘As if it were butter—they’re entering Paris as if it were butter.’ … He would like to have been a woman to throw them flowers.”

Stephen Miller

Or as critic Ellen Willis wrote after 911, channelling William Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “what defines a fascist movement is its ‘mixture of rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas.’” Noting people’s reaction to Hitler’s rise in the wake of the Weimar experiment in democracy and social progressivism, she writes, “While their anger was encouraged and legitimized by real political complaints, their underlying fear of freedom prevented them from contemplating real revolution. For the mass of Germans, then, Hitler offered a solution to this impasse: he represented the authoritarian father who commanded submission—only in this case submission entailed the license, indeed the obligation, to vent rebellious rage by supporting and participating in persecution and mass murder.”²

John Quiggin wrote the other day that the “idea that this process [the end of democracy in America] might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done.”

He continues:

In this context what matters is not the marginal groups of swinging voters who have absorbed so much attention: the “left behind”, the “manosphere” and so on. It’s the fact that comfortably off, self-described “conservative”, white suburbanites, historically the core of the Republican base, have overwhelmingly voted for, and welcomed, the end of American democracy.

If you really want to understand the truth of this, don’t just look at Trump and co.’s antics at the Florida concentration camp, or linger on the capitulation to Trump by white, suburbanite conservatives, look also at the broader US establishment’s reaction to the primary success in New York of Zohran Mamdani, the New York State Assembly member who is running for mayor on a social democratic ticket. Look particularly at the reaction of the Democratic establishment, where, for example, the entirely representative figure of pollster Mark Penn, a longtime adviser to the Clintons, described Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary as a “911 moment” for the party and dismissed Mamdani as “an antisemitic socialist”.

This sort of attack on candidates of the left is not an aberration in Democratic politics but part of a well-defined pattern:

In 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders almost wrested the presidential nomination away from the Democratic establishment — but after the kind of elite panic we’re seeing today, power and money won the day.

In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found a glitch in the master plan with her upset primary victory over an incumbent Democrat [and the] Democratic machine focused on crushing AOC-style primary challenges for congressional seats — and replacing other progressive lawmakers with corporate-friendly liberals.

Then came 2025 and Mamdani — a Sanders-style candidate who is openly hostile to oligarchy, who is telegenic like Obama, but who did not engage in the Obama-esque bait-and-switch of taking billionaires’ cash while winking and nodding at their political agenda.

…The establishment lined up behind Andrew Cuomo [and] armed [him] with lethal weapons of political destruction: $30 million worth of ads, a constant stream of anti-Mamdani agitprop from elite media brands, and a Hitler-invoking campaign depicting Mamdani as an antisemite.

We all used to wonder how a civilised country like Germany could slip into the thrall of a monster, and our alleged confusion was part of the problem. We were choosing not to see what people like us could become. Or could ignore.

As Martin Luther King once observed—because he wasn’t afforded the luxury of ignoring what was going on around him—“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’

It’s mourning in America, and it isn’t just Maga that is to blame.

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1. Sontag, Susan. Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 91). Kindle Edition.

2. Willis, Ellen. The Essential Ellen Willis. Kindle Edition.