A New Hope

Agreed, the closest thing to a bright spot, not without collateral damage, the malefactors of great wealth may learn the value of a US Dollar is tied to the economic health of the entire Nation. If they have this FAFO, they’ll lose much of their ability to choose the priorities of government. Some progress may become possible.

Tim H 2

“the value of a US Dollar is tied to the economic health of the entire Nation”

But … for a very long time – at least 20 years and probably more – the US economy has been extremely poorly, manufacturing has been gutted* and the balance of payments is dreadful – while the dollar has held firm and stock markets have boomed. For example, the nation that turned out three Liberty ships every two days now produces almost no non-military vessels.

You could say the same for the UK, where stock markets are at record highs while living standards are in decline and non-food manufacturing is down the tubes.

If (as seems quite possible) the US hits the buffers I would be wary of the replacement hegemon – especially if, as I believe Mr Quiggin does, I lived in the Antipodes.

* “Nowhere is American weakness more apparent than in advanced manufacturing. Leadership in this category has long been a sine qua non for a superpower. Indeed, America’s mid-20th-century dominance was based on little else. But those industries have been eviscerated that a 2005 Department of Defense report pronounced America’s security at risk. “There is no longer a diverse base of U. S. integrated circuit fabricators capable of meeting trusted and classified chip needs,” the report said. “From a U.S. national security view, the potential effects of this restructuring are so perverse and far reaching and have such opportunities for mischief that, had the United States not significantly contributed to this migration, it would have been considered a major triumph of an adversary nation’s strategy to undermine U.S. military capabilities.”

Are you predicting no election in 2026? If you’re wrong about that, will you admit you’re wrong about Trump’s chances of continuing in power?
IMO Trump is a competitive authoritarian like Orban – without Orban’s initial popularity; there will be elections and he will likely lose them. Elections alone won’t remove him; but elections were a major element in removing authoritarian leaders including even Milosevic, for example.

On the one hand, I am more pessimistic than you are, because the far right seems to be on the rise all over, not only in the USA.

And as you write, the Democrats are completely useless, prompting the usual stupid or evil conundrum. That, by the way, is something I would like to see explored more. I am following a former social scientist on Bluesky who lands on stupid, recently calling the stance of the centre-left across Western countries terminal Linked-in brain. In contrast, a documentary maker whose films I enjoy watching lands on evil, arguing that Schumer’s self-admitted role in the political system is to keep down progressives. I am not sure what to think without being able to personally interview the Schumers, Carneys, and Starmers of the world. (Admittedly, though, Starmer’s performance is of the kind that the conundrum reduces to “stupid or stupid AND evil”, so that is perhaps not a case like the others.)

On the other hand, I still find it difficult to believe that US elections would simply be cancelled. I am also told that they are mostly organised by the states (?), which, if correct, would make cancelling them more difficult than if it they were organised centrally. What seems more likely to me is that elections take place, but selected Dem candidates will be arrested or investigated for corruption, and to the already long-established voter suppression efforts will be added ICE goons “guarding” polling stations and beating up or dragging off anybody who doesn’t look white enough. That way they can still say the USA are a democracy, and most editorial writers will swallow that, and also get the validation of winning elections: see, all the real Americans love what we are doing! We are popular! That affirmation is important to narcissists.

On the third hand (it seems I using generative AI for this analogy), many people who say that Trump couldn’t do that because the states/courts wouldn’t let him seem hopelessly naive. Do they think that all the other countries in the world that became dictatorships did not have rules saying that elections should take place and suchlike? When the armed thugs show up and tell the officials to do as they are told or be dragged off to a camp, what exactly is an election law or established precedent going to do? On that note, I am also skeptical about the people pointing at public opinion shifting over Minnesota and saying, “we are winning!” Are you? Even if ICE leaves that particular state and moves on to terrorise another, what is your mechanism of action for abolishing the organisation and prosecuting its goons, given that the Dems would first have to win several heavily rigged elections and then be willing to do that, both of which seem delusional? This is South Park sock gnomes levels of political strategy.

So, I would be more optimistic if the Dems at least had started to coalesce around a presidential candidate who aggressively campaigns on prosecuting MAGA abuses and corruption, shutting down DHS and ICE, and dismantling right-wing media monopolies. But nothing like that is on the horizon.

This post denotes so much the position of a “domestic citizen” of Empire… “Free world” is “still” a meaningful term? Seriously? Presumably the segregated US was more “free world” than the revolutionary Cubans in 1960… This should be obvious by now but it bears repeating: what the US is seeing now is the exact same weapons that it has always pointed outward to sustain its putative “freedom” being turned inward to its own population. I would not place my hopes on the “free world” coming to save anyone. I agree with @MisterMr above. Europe’s dismissal of the US and build-up of military power does not promise much more than concern: it demonstrates that exclusionary priorities remain firmly in place.

@11 – “something in our culture that creates too many people who simply do not like the idea of everyone doing well”

Nothing to do with culture, everything to do with economics. The thing is that a lot of people – and nearly all young people – are no longer doing very well – both in the US and in the UK. “It is no coincidence”, as the Marxists used to say, that as manufacturing has declined (i.e. moved to the Far East) housing costs have soared. Welcome to the rentier economy.

https://www.newsweek.com/american-dream-dead-opinion-1917153

“The American Dream is dead…with few exceptions, your birthdate now determines whether you will be part of a permanent class of debt-dependent renters who spend their lives scrambling to keep up or financially independent owners who have the leisure to cultivate passions and become influential members of local society.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/oct/27/private-rent-britain-record-swallows-average-wage

The typical advertised private rent outside London for properties coming on to the market rose to a record £1,385 a calendar month in the third quarter of this year, according to the property website Rightmove. The average London rent reached a new high of £2,736. The site said it was the third consecutive quarterly record for advertised rents this year, adding that affordability for would-be tenants “remains very stretched”. Despite average earnings rising by 5% compared with last year, the cost of renting was swallowing up 44% of the average wage – up from 40% five years ago.

And remember a lot of these “properties” will be single rooms in a shared house – undergraduate living for thirtysomethings.

1: „Now that the US President is carrying out the US’ agenda shamelessly“

No. Trump is not carrying out a “US agenda” in the sense of pursuing US national interests. To the contrary he’s consistently acting against the country’s interests. Neither his trade war nor weakening NATO and certainly not threatening allies like Denmark and Canada have anything to do with pursuing national interests. Neither are his corruption, his war against the rule of law, his attempt at turning the US into an anachronistic fossil fuel empire (while the fossil economy is globally in decline), his hostility to immigration. All his signature policies – really without exception – are antagonistic to the national interest and will result in the sharp decline and possibly collapse of US economic standing and geopolitical power, mostly to the benefit of China.

In this light, it is extremely remarkable that US economic elites are still mostly standing behind Trump, supporting resp enabling his most deranged moves even when they hurt their own economic interests. This behavior is most in need of an explanation. In my observation it suggests that the support of US (and even to some extent global) elites is based on real ideological alignment, not opportunism.

Btw John regarding the purported support of 40% of Americans: this support is almost irrelevant. The only support that is really relevant is that of the economic elites, and they could end this nightmare any moment if they wanted.

Laban @4, It’s been a long time falling. Decades of rationalizing how the desires of the wealthy were what was good for a Nation. It may not be done falling in my remaining years, but by the time it’s done, there may not be a government capable of “Harshing the mellow” of a wealthy person, but it’s not likely to be US Dollars that wealth is in.

Civil War, Capitalism, and Racialised Legitimacy
The present US “civil state of war” cannot be adequately understood within a narrowly national or post–civil rights frame. It must be situated within the longue durée of capitalist expansion, imperialisation, colonial domination, and their contemporary heir, neoliberal globalisation. Race and racism are not contingent cultural residues layered onto capitalism after the fact; they are constitutive mechanisms of capitalist social relations. Capitalism, as a world-system organised around geographically differentiated exploitation of labour, has historically depended on racialised dispossession, coerced labour, and population management. From slavery and colonial forced labour to contemporary regimes of migrant precarity, racialisation has functioned as a material technology of accumulation and control, not merely as ideology or prejudice.
As W. E. B. Du Bois observed, the “color line” names a global structure of exclusion: the systematic denial to much of humanity of access to the opportunities and privileges of modern civilisation. Who is racialised, how, and to what effect cannot be understood apart from capitalist exploitation and imperial hierarchy. Attempts to theorise race independently of capitalism—or to treat class and race as competing explanatory frameworks—commit a category error. They abstract a governing instrument of political economy into a free-floating moral pathology, while leaving intact the social relations that generate both deprivation and hierarchy.
This misrecognition is politically functional. Liberal and conservative efforts to mechanically separate “race” from “class,” or to pit the grievances of racialised populations against those of a mythologised “white working class,” fragment potential solidarities while preserving property relations. Deprivation in deindustrialised regions and the material inequalities borne by racialised communities are not rival injustices; they are distinct moments within a single capitalist totality, produced through imperial histories, uneven development, and ongoing global circuits of value extraction. As Theodore W. Allen demonstrated, racial categories themselves—most notably “whiteness”—were consciously constructed as ruling-class technologies, designed to fracture labour and stabilise domination by distributing differential privileges. Anti-racism that does not confront capitalism remains structurally limited; anti-capitalism that treats racism as secondary or cultural is analytically incoherent.

It is against this background that the present US condition comes into focus. The contemporary “civil state of war” is best understood not as partisan polarisation or democratic malfunction, but as a legitimacy crisis of a mature capitalist polity. Culture war, identity conflict, constitutional brinkmanship, and episodic political violence are surface phenomena generated by a deeper contradiction: the declining capacity of capitalist accumulation to reproduce social consent. As legitimacy thins, coercion is increasingly tasked with compensatory work. Policing and the carceral state therefore operate not as neutral instruments of law, but as regime technologies, managing surplus populations, disciplining labour, and containing the social fallout of enclosure, deindustrialisation, and the commodification of the commons. The escalation of force is not aberrant; it is symptomatic.
This perspective dissolves the apparent novelty of contemporary conflict. The oscillation between punitive expansion and reformist retreat—exemplified by political figures who once authored mass-incarceration regimes and later sought to mitigate them—reflects not moral inconsistency but structural contradiction. Culture-war antagonisms (Dem vs GOP, Christian family vs LGBTQ, white identity vs multiculturalism) function as ideological shunts: they mobilise affect while diverting attention from the vertical axis of capital versus labour, accumulation versus social reproduction. These conflicts absorb dissent without threatening the commodity form or the underlying relations of exploitation.
In this sense, authoritarian tendencies should not be treated as external threats to liberalism but as latent options internal to it, activated under conditions of stress. As Max Horkheimer warned, refusal to speak about capitalism forecloses any serious account of fascism; the contemporary corollary is that refusal to interrogate liberalism as the ruling ideology of the capitalist world-system renders analysis of authoritarian drift incoherent. Following the counter-historical critique advanced by Liberalism: A Counter-History, liberal freedom has always been selectively allocated, defended through regulation, hierarchy, and coercion. The present crisis does not represent liberalism’s betrayal of its ideals, but the exposure of their historical limits as coercion becomes increasingly visible where consent can no longer be sustained.
The expansion of federal immigration enforcement provides a concentrated illustration of this dynamic. The January 2026 surge in Minneapolis—where federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti and Renée Good amid ICE operations and protests—exposed how coercive state power operates at the intersection of capitalist crisis and racialised meaning. Agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now function as interiorised border regimes, extending sovereign violence deep into metropolitan space. Their actions have provoked widespread protest, jurisdictional conflict, and legal contestation precisely because they render visible the coercive underside of governance.
In the ideological terrain of late capitalism, enforcement against migrants and racialised populations resonates with long-standing narratives of demographic threat and racialised insecurity. ICE does not merely enforce immigration statutes; it stages spectacles of dominance that echo and reinforce white nationalist imaginaries—visions of existential threat posed by “others” at the nation’s edges and within its heterogeneous interiors. These dynamics are not reducible to explicit white supremacist movements alone. They draw on discursive lineages extending from the Southern Strategy to contemporary right-wing media tropes about demographic replacement. The result is a racialised logic of coercion in which immigrant bodies become privileged sites of sovereign violence, and in which claims of “law and order” are constituted through precisely those spectacles of force that further erode the state’s claim to moral authority.

https://www.newsweek.com/american-dream-dead-opinion-1917153

“The American Dream is dead…with few exceptions, your birthdate now determines whether you will be part of a permanent class of debt-dependent renters who spend their lives scrambling to keep up or financially independent owners who have the leisure to cultivate passions and become influential members of local society.”

No, not your birthdate. That’s a classic example of missing the point, as indeed is most of the Newsweek piece.

A more honest arrangement of much the same information as is included in that Newsweek piece might be structured a little like this:
America has long had a divide between poor people and rich people, but in recent decades the problem has become progressively worse: with each year that goes by, there have been more poor people and fewer but richer rich people, with the divide between them becoming harder and harder to bridge.
Although the causes of social problems are generally difficult to trace with certainty, it is at least a reasonable guess that this intensifying inequality has been a major factor in other problems that now concern many people, such as fewer people marrying and having children and rapidly increasing rates of deaths from drug overdoses and other so-called ‘deaths of despair’.
If the government acts to reduce the inequality between rich and poor, it may produce many significant benefits for all of American society.

It’s not birthdates which are making people poor, it’s the rise of the billionaires which is making people poor. Fundamentally, the Newsweek opinion writer either hasn’t thought or doesn’t dare to say ‘The government should tax billionaires out of existence’. So what does that leave them with? Roughly speaking, ‘People need to change, and they need a President who will tell them to change.’ No, that won’t cut it. Neither will attending to charlatans like Jordan Peterson, but even that is something the Newsweek writer lacks either the insight or the courage to say.

@13 – the US balance of payments deficit is very large, in goods it’s YUGE. Around $900bn a year. Not that a Brit can snipe.

@20 – I agree with you but the point is that people’s lives, especially the young, are getting worse – and property prices/rents are the major part of that. Saying that the proportion of national income going to working people has fallen sharply is another way of putting it.

Birth date just means that housing was affordable for a 20-something born in 1950, but it isn’t for a 20-something born in 2000.

If any of you knows of a book or a study which looks at MASS PROTEST, specifically as it evolves into part of the regular checks and balances in a governmental system, please list it here below. I don’t know anything about the structure of other polities in the world in specific regard to their “checks and balances” function, so perhaps a few bibliographic pointers there, too. Let me explain my idea a little, from my own U.S. viewpoint: the “checks and balances” of the U.S. system is the Constitutional structure that the legislative Congress (Article I), executive President (Article II) and judiciary courts (Article III) have separate powers, with various prescribed abilities to check and balance each other. Historically it is seen that the judiciary is the slowest of the lot, due to its long internal procedures that are necessary to finding justice (though of course not always sufficient). However in the U.S. the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) the First Amendment protects freedom of speech AND freedom of peaceful assembly (for example, street protest). Street protest is perhaps the quickest mass response; it can come sooner than any election, sooner than an executive response, sooner than congressional legislation. And though the executive and congress are sworn to uphold the Constitution, a main way that speech and assembly are protected against infringement is the judiciary: the slowest “check and balance.” Thus it is, that the slowest power (Article III) is most protective of the quickest responses afforded by the Bill of Rights, including mass protest. Furthermore, although U.S. street protest is often understood as being outside the processes of governance, functionally it becomes a rather regular part of the checks and balances provided by Article III. I would like to know of ideas or studies that look at the connections of speech and particularly protest, to the governmental structures in other countries.

The federal government doesn’t run elections, but there are a few elements of state elections that are subject to federal law, and I’d expect Trump and the GOP to attempt to declare, for example, that mail-in ballots are illegitimate and any election that involves them has to be ignored. The Republican-run Congress has refused to seat D representatives one at a time and conceivably could refuse to seat anyone Trump declared not really elected. Some of these are more likely than others. That this could be a trial run for 2028 is also something to be considered. If anything doesn’t work this year, they have to fine-tune it and try again.

I personally don’t think Trump cares that much whether he achieves totalitarian power and will just keep trying to do whatever he can, wherever he can. He doesn’t really need to cancel “the midterm elections,” there’s no additional benefit to interfering except in a few states. If he overpromises, we say TACO and he tries again later.

somebody 15: “they wont be satisfied with ethnically cleansing america. they’ll ethnically cleanse the rest of the world.”

Maybe certain Trumpist Nazis like Miller find the idea of “ethnically cleansing” the whole world appealing, but what does that even mean and how would they do it? And how does this apply to Denmark, which is a much whiter society than the US (except of course for Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland, which people is almost 100% indigenous)?

Rhetoric like this imputes way more power to the fascists than they realistically have, and turns them into unstoppable supervillains holding the whole world at their mercy. They are stoppable, and others have agency too.

We are also rapidly burning up our future economic prospects. We had been maintaining high capacity is science/engineering/technology. A large portion of our highly skilled workforce is foreign born, or second generation immigrants. Few of these are white, and the brain drain is going to be hard to reverse. Also our currently world leading companies, which have largely succedded by recruiting talent and customers from around the world, are in my opinion going to lose a lot of both. Many would rather choose a second rate employer/supplier that resides in a nice country. He is certainly not pursuing the countries interests, but actively ruining its prospects.

Birth date just means that housing was affordable for a 20-something born in 1950, but it isn’t for a 20-something born in 2000.

Strictly speaking, that’s not entirely accurate, and to the extent that it does indicate something real, neither birthdate nor age is a key variable. To use slightly technical language, what’s relevant here is neither a cohort effect nor an age effect but a period effect.

In the 1970s, housing was affordable for some twenty-somethings and some fifty-somethings but not for others, and now that much is still true; what’s changed is the proportions. Both the proportion of twenty-somethings for whom housing is affordable and the proportion of fifty-somethings for whom housing is affordable has declined sharply since the 1970s, and the cause of this effect is the same for both fifty-somethings and twenty-somethings. To talk about the subject as if people are being affected differently either because of birthdate or because of age clouds the issue.

Saying that the proportion of national income going to working people has fallen sharply is another way of putting it.

Yes, and a relevant one. The proportion of national income going to working people, regardless of how old they are or when they were born, has fallen.

Although I believe mostly you are right, there has been a long term increase in the wealth to income ratio, that in general will mean that houses’ prices will be higer relative to average income

That would be another example of something which is neither an age effect nor a cohort effect but a period effect.

LFC @27 – Chips Act is certainly doing something, I have grave doubts it’ll be sufficient. For example, TSMC are having a lot of trouble with their Texas plant. To some extent its not in their interest to make the US independent of Taiwanese chip supply.

The massive, historical change of the last 50 years, IMHO of much greater import than the fall of the Soviet Union, and certainly of more importance than who runs the US, is the rise of the Far Eastern economic system in general, and that of China in particular. After all, China was the #1 world economy for most of recorded history prior to the Industrial Revolution.

“the Chinese economic system is not capitalism, nor is it converging toward capitalism. China is operating an adaptation of the East Asian economic system launched in Japanese Manchuria in the 1930s, perfected in Japan proper in the 1950s and 1960s, and now widely copied throughout East Asia… features of the Chinese version of the East Asian economic model include a labyrinthine system of trade barriers; an artificially undervalued currency; an industrial policy focused on developing pillar industries and using export subsidies to give them competitive advantage; and pressure on foreign companies to transfer their production technologies. In some ways, this approach resembles capitalism–it makes extensive use of markets–but its fundamental logic is quite different. Whereas authoritarian political controls constitute a hindrance to the efficacy of capitalism, such controls are essential to the functioning of the East Asian system.

LFC, I’m not qualified to discuss the legal issues as you are, but I’m less confident the courts are helping in this term than they did in his first. I find it frustrating that there’s a big scandal for the worst of the first batch of cases, they eventually maybe get half remediated, but nothing really changes and the issue drops off the radar. People are still getting deported to overseas jails with inhumane conditions. People with brown skin are still being denied due process and even harassed.

Re. the OP, I’d like to believe John Q is right but it depends what effect Minneapolis has. My sense is the 1/3 of voters who are declared Republicans have a lot of practice in looking at brutality and deciding the victims deserve it, and it’s unclear in what cases the people giving ICE their orders will back off and when they’ll double down and force a confrontation.

I do not think there is any risk of Trump interfering with the midterm elections, because he only cares about himself. What does it matter to him if the GOP loses the House this November? That just means Mike Johnson is a loser.

Trump will of course do everything in his power to get himself on the ballot in 2028, in blatant violation of the Constitution, and then Vance will dutifully do the job he was hired for and pronounce Trump the winner regardless of how any of the votes go. That’s something I’m concerned about. But the midterms are safe.

JohnQ, given this recent optimistic turn, will you update the flowchart from your previous post?

I’m guessing it’s the arrows around “Effective popular resistance” that need updating most.

Both the proportion of twenty-somethings for whom housing is affordable and the proportion of fifty-somethings for whom housing is affordable has declined sharply since the 1970s, and the cause of this effect is the same for both fifty-somethings and twenty-somethings. To talk about the subject as if people are being affected differently either because of birthdate or because of age clouds the issue.

OK boomer

John Q,

I think we are mostly agreed on the intentions of the MAGA movement and the most likely scenario. So, just want to say that I think the problem with most analysis is that people think in a simple binary: dictatorship or democracy. On the one side, there are those who will absolutely refuse to accept that the USA have become a dictatorship if there are still elections in 2028, even if the democratic presidential candidate has been arrested without a warrant and voter rolls have been purged of most registered Democrats. On the other side, there are those who think that the USA was a functional democracy in 2016 despite rampant gerrymandering, even more rampant bribery (Citizens United decision and all that flows from it), systematic disenfranchisement of poor people for minor infractions such as not being able to pay a parking fine, and general inability of a population to make informed voting decisions because of being locked into cultish disinformation networks like Fox News and Facebook.

Point is, democracy versus dictatorship is not a binary switch but a gradient. It is possible that MAGA can move the USA noticeably towards the dictatorship end of the spectrum but not far enough that they won’t lose an election. My real fear is that, as mentioned above, that the Dem leadership is so Vichy that MAGA losing an election or two will not change the trajectory of the USA, that the country will be irreversibly dictatorial by, say, 2032, even if it isn’t today.

Two more aspects: lots of people conflate democracy and rule of law. We will see what the next elections look like, but currently at least, the USA are a democracy(-ish) without the rule of law, as police forces go around terrorising the population but a Democrat just won an election in Texas. There are also dictatorships that have the rule of law, and, of course, dictatorships without the rule of law, and democracies with the rule of law. The USA could land on any of the four squares in that plot, although realistically, landing one any of the “there are rules that you can rely on as a citizen to feel safe in your daily life” squares would require abolishing ICE and prosecuting all of its officers.

The final aspect is competence. MAGA may want to install a dictatorship, but they aren’t exactly geniuses. They are the equivalent of an angry and intoxicated driver who speeds his car into a group of people he dislikes. He is powerful and scary because of the power that the car bestows him, but if he is unlucky, he may end up on a tree or wall with oil and steam billowing out of his broken engine. The aforementioned social scientist pointed out today that, ironically, successful gerrymandering leads to very high losses in a wave election. If MAGA antagonises enough white people who are usually too lazy to vote, nothing short of cancelling elections will do. And again I return to the real problem being whether Dems will do anything with an election victory… so again we are only talking about whether the transition to full dictatorship will complete four years earlier or later.

In an interview with Dan Bongino, Trump spoke of nationalizing the elections. A centralized election process would be much more feasible to rig by falsifying vote counts, plus all the other ingenious ways to tip the scales.

There are at least three problems. One is that many people do not think majority rule defines democracy (even bourgeois democracy.) They see a minority veto (in practice, the propertied minority) as the essence of democracy. Another is that many people think it is more important to reject the real menace to society, mass action that threatens the fundamental status quo—-which they do not see Trump as threatening. And worst perhaps is the refusal to move beyond moralizing, to analyze questions of power. They don’t look at what Trump is doing on a structural level, they think about whether he lives up to (or down to?) Umberto Eco’s fascist check list and so on.

Sometimes I think Sinclair Lewis is now deemed to be a mediocrity who should never have won a Nobel Prize for Literature because he wrote It Can’t Happen Here.

I think all you have to know about ETB’s link is that it blames Obama and the Democrats for the financial crash that occurred under his predecessor. With friends like these, people who oppose Trump don’t exactly need enemies.

Beating a dead horse can give you some glue? Relayed by Naked Capitalism is this
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/02/us-military-helping-dhs-build-massive-network-of-concentration-camps-navy-contract-reveals.html

The point of yet another comment is how the process is relentless and widespread. It’s not just a matter of supposedly ill-trained police in a horrible lapse of judgment. I believe they are doing what they were meant to do, not rogues. And that the policy is part of an overall plan, disguised by the thinnest of subterfuges. But it is likely that even the flimsiest veneer is convincing for the salesman trying to sell.

As a brief remark notes, there is a difference between a temporary program and an infrastructure. I suppose moderate people will deem labeling this system as “concentration camps” is unreasonable. Yet the concentration camp is a practical concept well over a century old. Although I believe use in the Boer War and the war against the Cuban rebellion (prior to the Spanish-American war) have priority, those of a moderate bent can red-bait such things by saying Lenin invented them.