Where's Waldo: The Authoritarian Game No One Ever Wins

"Due process is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. Without it, anyone can be arbitrarily deprived of life or liberty. Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants."

- Adam Serwer, "Mahmoud Khalil’s Detention Is a Trial Run"

Authoritarians, dictators, and fascists - whether still aspiring or long established - do a lot of the same damn things.

I will list several of these, but since I have not devoted my professional life to the study of authoritarianism, I will draw my list from the work of someone who has - namely Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen. From that book, I will focus particularly on authoritarians in the "personalist" tradition, who (as Ben-Ghiat notes) attract followers with their charisma, their "rogue nature," and their appeals to their followers' resentments (251).  These authoritarians:

• Promise to restore a lost glory, or "to make the country great again. This involves the fantasy of returning to an age when male authority was secure and women, people of color, and workers knew their places" (67, emphasis in original).
• Insist they are implementing "law-and-order rule," even as they permit, oversee, and benefit from "lawlessness" (251). The result, Ben-Ghiat observes, is that "government evolves into a criminal enterprise."
• Convert their personal fixations into the priorities of the entire country. "Their private obsessions set the tone for public discourse, skew institutional priorities and force large-scale resource reallocations"(12).
• Detain, deport, demonize, and scapegoat immigrants, particularly those who are Black and brown. Silvio Berlusconi, who ruled over Italy three separate times, once asked, rhetorically: "Why does xenophobia have to have a negative meaning?" (80, translation by Ben-Ghiat).
• Create "a culture of surveillance and threat" that saddles people in marginalized and targeted groups with constant worry and fear (167).
• Put their "enemies in penal colonies, prisons, and camps" (168). 
• And finally, embrace violence.

The Call from Inside of the House

I say "finally," but for millions of Americans, state-approved violence - on its own - is not new. Indeed, state-approved anti-Black violence is as old as America itself, with a very obvious historical throughline from slavery through lynching to modern policing and mass incarceration, facts I mention to make this point: Black Americans have been living in an American culture of surveillance and threat since there was an America to live in, and White Americans who are at all historically literate - or at all honest with themselves - know that to be true. We just don't really care. 

We have grown up in a nation that falsely equates Whiteness with virtue, beauty, morality, intelligence, wisdom, and basic spiritual worth, and since that equation happens to be pretty flattering to us, we believe in it worshipfully, with a radical and terrible faith. And that faith? That has primed us in this moment to choose Whiteness over democracy.  

Many of us - way too fucking many of us - prefer authoritarianism to a multi-racial democracy where we are all considered equal. 

Smooth Criminal

In his first campaign for president, Donald Trump convinced millions of Americans that building a literal wall between the United States and Mexico - and making Mexico pay for it - was not only possible but essential to restoring America's lost greatness.

During his second campaign, he abandoned the wall but doubled down on defaming and smearing immigrants, right down to the genetic level. He also promised his base he would engage in human rights violations on a massive scale, causing pain to create spectacle. But where would he put people that he seized?  

Now that he's in office, he hasn't debuted camps (yet), but he has invoked an 18th-century war statute to give himself powers not available to presidents in times of peace. And he has used those powers to dump men from Venezuela into a prison in El Salvador indefinitely - without even a whiff of due process.

The marketing, the pretext Trump is using, is public safety. He and an army of talking heads are all repeating the most electric words they can find to characterize the men they sent to El Salvador, because they want to make the men seem even more shocking than the lack of due process. We must see through that propaganda.  

In fundamental ways, America is defined, is even exemplified by the rights enshrined in our Constitution, including free speech and due process. Given that Presidents take an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," the horror here is that the American president is violating his oath. With disregard if not contempt for the Constitution, he is torching the freedoms guaranteed to individuals to grant authoritarian powers to himself.

Due what now?

Free speech is a right familiar to Americans; due process, perhaps less so.  The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution says that no person can "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." But what does that mean?  

For starters, under ordinary circumstances, it means that agents of our government are not supposed to grab a PhD student off a sidewalk and throw her in prison because her visa has just been revoked; they are supposed to tell her they have revoked her visa and give her some amount of time to take action (e.g. leave the country) before they deprive her of her liberty (read: arrest her). This component of due process is referred to as notice, or sometimes reasonable notice. 

The same would be true if your neighbor had 16 old, rusty cars in his side yard.  The government can't just show up with fleet of tow trucks, take the cars, and send him a bill for $25,000. They have to provide notice to your neighbor that he is violating code XYZ, and they have to provide some reasonable amount of time to remove the cars before they deprive him of his property. 

Except.

What if the "reasonable" amount of time they give him is 15 days? What if he has cancer and is undergoing radiation and is not physically able to meet the government's timeline?  Happily, your neighbor has the due process right to object and to be heard by what Cornell Law School describes as a "neutral decision-maker."  A judge might then grant him six months from the conclusion of his treatment, or whatever the judge believes is fair. At the end of the day, the fuel for due process is fairness. 

Pushing and Threatening

Let's briefly break down what happened to men from Venezuela put onto those planes to see how their due process rights were violated.

I quote now from the 3/24/2025 Memorandum Opinion in J.G.G. et al. v. Donald Trump et al.:

In early March, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] began interrogating Venezuelan migrants in its custody, including Plaintiffs, about gang membership. Even after 'vehemently den[ying] any affiliation with a gang, past or present,' Plaintiffs say they were moved from detention centers across the country to the El Valle Detention Facility in south Texas. The reason for this transport was unveiled on the night of Friday, March 14, when, in Plaintiffs’ telling, they were among over 100 Venezuelan noncitizens who were pulled from their cells and told that they would be deported the next day to an unknown destination (citations omitted).

I know it's not Waldo, but you can spot the problem, right?  The men told DHS, repeatedly, that they were not gang members, but they were shackled and put on planes without having a hearing before a "neutral decision-maker." 

At some point after the planes took off, agents of the state started demanding that the men sign statements that they were in fact gang members.

We know this because El Salvador had agreed to take custody of Venezuelan men (only), and therefore turned away a man from Nicaragua and eight women, one of whom later described the scene in a Declaration for use in court.

While on the plane the government officials were asking the men to sign a document and they didn’t want to. The government officials were pushing them to sign the documents and threatening them. I heard them discussing the documents and they were about the men admitting they were members of TdA. 

If the government had such strong evidence that these men were in fact members of TdA, why try to coerce them into incriminating themselves, which they have a separate Fifth Amendment right not to have to do? 

Why not just operate lawfully and give them the hearing that they are constitutionally entitled to have?

It seems pretty obvious that the government didn't want to hold lawful hearings because it could not prove these people were gang members, and that it unlawfully rushed them out of the country because it could not otherwise achieve its goal, which was to place these men into an infamous prison where they would be tortured and possibly killed - not because it bears any true animus toward these specific individuals (or even recognizes their individual humanity in any way whatsoever), but because it wanted to make them into an example.

“This is one of the consequences”

It's clear from the Memorandum Opinion that I quoted earlier, but it still bears repeating that the people put onto those planes were already being detained in the United States. If the concern were truly public safety, that would have achieved the goal. Public safety, however, was never the point.  

The prison in El Salvador is called CECOT, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem flew there to shoot a propaganda video in which she says: "I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face."

Screen shot from Newsweek

Ironically, even though this is propaganda, Noem is finally revealing the truth. The first Trump administration made family separation its official policy in an effort to stop the flow of people seeking protection, freedom, and a better life in the United States.  As quoted in a CNN article from June of 2018, DHS spokesperson Katie Waldman said, "Of course we expect the 100% prosecution policy at the border to have a deterrent effect. The application of consequences for breaking our nation’s immigration laws and violating our nation’s sovereignty will be effective."

This is the same effort, made worse. It's Family Separation: The Sequel - except it's even more terrifying because of its scope.

They are throwing aside the US Constitution in an effort to be so lawless and so cruel that they will deter people from coming to America.  And. They are also throwing aside the US Constitution to lock up PhD students from other nations who express viewpoints they disfavor.

And.

They have made clear they are willing to punish students who are American citizens for the same reason.  That is the United States government loudly threatening to ignore the First Amendment protections for Americans. Is it still a slippery slope if you're already part of the way down it?

Trump's Newest Horrors

We have to get real. We may be holding onto the idea that America is a democracy, but they aren't. They have let that go.

As Serwer says in the headnote, they want to corner us rhetorically by violating the rights of people they claim are bad.  

About that. 

They will always claim to be violating the rights of people who are bad - and not individually, but on the basis of their membership in a group. They have vilified undocumented immigrants as a group. They have vilified trans people as a group. They have vilified 'the radical left' as a group.  That's what authoritarians do.

If you want to live in a democracy, the time to act is now. They are moving as fast as they can, and now that the courts are slowing them down, they are threatening to destroy the courts. I am not trying to be an alarmist; the alarm is going off all by itself. 

They are counting on you to be afraid, stay home, keep silent, be cowed. That's the worst possible response to current events.  

• Call your elected representatives.
• Create grass roots messaging.  See this article for help.
• Speak up. Talk to family and friends. Post on social media.
• Participate lawfully in live events to the extent that you are able.
• Know your rights while they are still nominally recognized.