For quite a long time, we heard “Law and Order” as the GOP/right wing/plutocratic war cry. My memory is that it started with Nixon, or at least was first repeated loudly and often by him and his lackeys. Whenever it started, it was code for “Those people are getting uppity. We’ll terrorize them into submission while at the same time ensuring that anyone who might otherwise sympathize with those people will instead acquiesce because of fear of the uppitiness.”
Nowadays, the war cry is “Waste and Fraud.” That’s a dog whistle for “The non-rich are getting too big a slice of the pie, which rightfully belongs entirely to us, so we’ll destroy programs that help them and suck up the resulting extra revenue for ourselves, but we’ll pretend that we’re just eliminating fraud and waste because we have successfully brainwashed the rubes into thinking that all government programs are full of fraud and waste, so they’ll support us.”
Meanwhile, “Close the Border” has been around forever in one form or another. Of course it’s just a flavor of xenophobia. “Those strange people are destroying our beautiful, sacred, pure culture with their weird music/food/religion/customs and seducing our young from the straight path and polluting our perfect bloodstream.” It’s a handy way to whip up fear and get votes, and it’s popular among politicians all over the world.
But I see something more happening in America. In the longer term, the “Close the Border” cry habituates the population to the existence of a police state. Americans have passively accepted the shocking establishment of a 100-mile wide Constitution-free zone along the border—which means around the edges of the 48 contiguous states and Alaska. Under the grotesque Trump administration, that Constitution-free zone now in effect includes anywhere that the government’s masked brownshirt thugs, a.k.a. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, happen to be. The zone won’t long be limited to wherever ICE is present; other agencies will soon be included.
The recent quick and violent expansion of the Constitution-free zone beyond the border sparked protests, which in turn sparked talk of harsh countermeasures. The protests will subside with time or be violently quashed. Perhaps the thugocracy will realize it went too far, too fast and will back off for a short time. Then it will expand the Constitution-free zone again, but a bit more slowly and less conspicuously. The end goal remains the same, though: a Constitution-free America.
