Sending the Feds to the Cities: How UnAmerican!

 To be clear, to say something is UnAmerican or not something we do is usually to ignore a history of doing that stuff.   Voter suppression?  American as hell.  Selective enforcement of the law?  Sure.  Concentration camps?  That's been done.  But when I woke this morning and saw images of a bunch of different kinds of feds--FBI, DEA, etc--going through the streets of DC with absolutely no goddamned reason to do so, it struck me as damn near unprecedented.

I invoked the Declaration of Independence, rather than the Constitution, because the US was founded on a variety of complaints, but one was the capricious use of armed force to oppress the populace.  While several grievances cover this, one seems most on target: ""He [King George] has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance." [see here].  

Of course, over the first and now second Trump terms, Trump has seen those grievances as a checklist of things to do.  But seeing the actual deployment of feds to bully the capital, because it is convenient, because it is symbolic, because it has a Black mayor and majority Black population is simply appalling.  It is not a distraction-- it is one of the main events on the descent into autocracy.  Backsliding is too slow of a description--in less than six months, Trump has plunged the US into autocracy.  This stuff is exactly why the colonists rebelled (along with, um, yeah, other motives) and created the United States of America.

Sure, any nationalism is contested--what its meaning is, who counts and who does not count as a member of that nation--but an essential nugget of American nationalism is some kind of notion of freedom from arbitrary rule, from the federal government exerting its power just to exert its power.  So, yeah, this is UnAmerican to the core, and all Americans should be appalled by it. That those who have spent the past fifty years yammering about the threat of the federal government and the need for guns will either be silent or cheer this on, well, that's a tell on what they really care about.  For the rest of us, we need to protest, we need to lobby, we need to figure out ways to stymie the Trump administration, and we need to pressure the Democrats to fight like there is no tomorrow.... because if this stuff becomes commonplace, there will be no tomorrow.  That is, this strategy and abuse of power can be used to keep Democrats from voting and then that is the whole ballgame.