I think focusing on Alex Pretti's actions is a very human defense mechanism. We tell ourselves that X happened because of Y, so if we avoid X we can avoid Y. In Saturday's New York Times [ gift link ] Masha Gessen has an opinion piece on why this is based on a false premise.
But that’s not how state terror works.
In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. Time and time again, people would tell me exactly what had led to their family members’ arrests or executions. Jealous neighbors had reported them to the authorities, or colleagues who had been arrested named them under duress. These stories had been passed on from generation to generation. How could they come to know so much, I wondered. They couldn’t. People crafted narratives out of suspicions, rumors and hints, to fill a desperate need for an explanation.
My favorite book about state terror is Lydia Chukovskaya’s “Sofia Petrovna,” a short Russian novel that has been translated into English. The protagonist, a middle-aged woman loyal to Stalin’s Communist Party, loses her mind trying to make sense of her son’s arrest. My own family history contains a corollary. After the secret police arrested most of the senior staff at the newspaper where my grandfather was a deputy editor, he waited for the knock on his door. When the secret police failed to show up night after night, week after week, he became so distressed that he checked himself into a mental institution. It could be that was how he avoided arrest. Or it could be that the secret police had filled their quota of arrests for that month.
For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.
The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive. Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay. Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.
At some point we have to ask whether random killings of civilians are the desired outcome. According to Greg Bovino the agents involved in the shooting of Pretti are not on administrative leave and have been re-assigned to other cities. This sends a pretty clear message to ICE and CBP that shooting American citizens is going to be a regular part of their duties and that the agency will protect them from any consequences.
It's a big mistake, though, for those around him who want an authoritarian take-over of the US, because to do that successfully, they can't just other a minority within the population -- they need to buy off the rest of the population. There have been no bread and circuses, no carrot, just the stick, or jackboot really.
Do authoritarians always need the carrot? Sometimes propaganda can fill the gap. "Guns not butter" is the slogan that springs to mind.
I've always heard it as "guns AND butter". And used by outside observers of the regime to describe its policies, not by the regime itself.
There was an interesting conversation on the New Yorker Radio Hour yesterday about the type of people that are being recruited as ICE/Border Patrol agents. Homeland security is basically appealing to gun owners and--hate to say it--white supremacists. They will give out recruiting information at gun shows and they are using fascist slogans. The person that was being interviewed has written rather negatively about ICE recruitment in the past. She decided to see what would happen if she applied through an online app. She said ICE called her for a six minute interview. A short time later, she got an email directing her to get a drug test. She ignored that direction, but about a week later she got a list of those recently hired and her name was on that list. She claims there was no real background check. No eyes on interview at all. Of course, she did not accept the job.
I wonder if there is any mileage in painting the idea of shooting people like Renee Good, Alex Pretti and the 30 so others they’ve killed recently as weakness - if that’s what puts them in fear of their life they must be cowards, weak, losers etc. Turning the Trumpest belief that the worst vice is weakness against them ?
Bret Devereaux has a Bluesky thread about the distinction Hannah Arendt made between violence and power.
For those unfamiliar, in On Violence, Arendt points out that the ability to dish out violence is often confused for power - the ability to get compliance without violence.
Successful governance relies almost entirely on power, because violence is expensive and limited.
We're seeing this very clearly in Minneapolis and other cities 'raided' by DHS: they do not have enough agents, enough sources of violence, to hold even a medium-sized city by force of arms.
They rely on the cooperation of the populace (power); when that is gone, they're cooked.
In other words, the resort to violence is a clear indication that power has failed. Read the rest.
NBC News cited a Trump administration official and a law enforcement official who said Customs and Border Patrol is planning to reduce the number of Border Patrol agents in the Twin Cities "sometime this week."
CNN cited an official who said Bovino's departure was a "mutual decision." According to CNN's reporting, administration officials were "deeply frustrated" with Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's handling of the shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents on Saturday, with Bovino alleging that Pretti was planning to "massacre" federal agents.
The reported development comes following a shift in strategy by the Trump Administration on Monday. President Trump posted on social media that he would be sending Border Czar Tom Homan to manage the ICE operations in Minnesota.
It's a big mistake, though, for those around him who want an authoritarian take-over of the US, because to do that successfully, they can't just other a minority within the population -- they need to buy off the rest of the population. There have been no bread and circuses, no carrot, just the stick, or jackboot really.
Do authoritarians always need the carrot? Sometimes propaganda can fill the gap. "Guns not butter" is the slogan that springs to mind.
I've always heard it as "guns AND butter". And used by outside observers of the regime to describe its policies, not by the regime itself.
The term first appeared in American politics when Williams Jennings Byran coined it in opposition to Woodrow Wilsons shift to arms production leading up to WWI.
I believe Lyndon Baines Johnson also used it as he was promoting the welfare program he was envisioning in his Great Society while he was building up or involvement in Vietnam.
Goring said "Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."
I would counter every gun we make takes food away from the poor. (to paraphrase Ike Eisenhower).
There's a big difference between "guns or butter" and "bread and circuses"; they're not describing the same thing. In Satire X, Juvenal discusses the degradation of the Roman people under the empire in the early second century CE:
They shed their sense of responsibility
Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob
That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything,
Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only,
Bread and circuses. From poetryintranslation.com
He's not writing a handbook for politicians; he's making an observation, a biting criticism of the people who have allowed themselves to be bought off with the grain dole and the spectacles and thus given up their power.
William Jennings Bryan was talking about a real choice the Wilson administration made in 1915 while he was Secretary of State: should the finite supply of nitrates go to producing agricultural fertilizer or munitions? (Wilson went with munitions and Bryan, an advocate for US neutrality, resigned.) So "guns or butter" has become a shorthand term for an economic choice between military spending and social spending (it's even in Investopedia). It's not about what you do to effect authoritarian consolidation, despite Goering's use of the term. He was speaking in 1936, in the middle of the Depression and when the Nazis had already locked everything down; he was using the economic choice as a piece of propaganda to justify the skyrocketing military budget.
Do authoritarians always need the carrot? Sometimes propaganda can fill the gap.
So leaving guns and butter aside, yes, sometimes propaganda can fill the gap, but carrots are usually offered:
Traditionally autocratic regimes expand social services for supporters as a way to buy loyalty, while stripping away their political rights, Ben-Ghiat said: “That’s how they get so many people to go along and look the other way.” But Trump, she said, has diverged from that model: rather than shoring up the social safety net, his administration, abetted by congressional Republicans, has moved to “kneecap” public health and social programs, including childcare benefits – cuts Democrats plan to foreground in this year’s midterm elections. From The Guardian, last Wednesday -- Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a NY University professor who studies authoritarian and fascism.
I think in the case of the US, carrots are especially important to consolidating authoritarianism, for several reasons.
Despite its deep flaws and the manifold exceptions to the case, American democracy is old and established. This isn't Russia, Hungary, or China, where dictators have essentially replaced monarchs -- this is one of the few instances where the oft-heard protestation "this is not who we are!" seems somewhat appropriate. We only became a full democracy after 1965, but origin stories matter. Our origin story is that we revolted against one-person rule and formed a democracy. It's not that we won't sell that out (the illiberal strain in the US is older than the country itself), but authoritarians need to give us something in return.
The US is both very affluent and has huge income/wealth inequality -- the bread and butter here are abundant and on view to everyone, so the people who don't have enough can see what they don't have. It's not a great idea to run roughshod over the people on the upside of the K-shaped economy; we have a good life, don't fuck with it. It's not a great idea to run roughshod over the people on the downside; they know the good life is right there, just out of reach, so making things worse in any way just pisses them off. So give us all carrots.
The othered group is immigrants, and the new regime already had as many citizens hating immigrants as they were likely to ever get under circumstances current at the outset of Trump 2.0 -- so how do they get more citizens to dis-identify with immigrants, or just overlook what's happening to them? Carrots. They could have given broad access to affordable healthcare to citizens, pacifiying a lot of people and taking away one of the Democrats' best issues. Or done other social spending. Instead, but federal agents are turning on citizens. They took away from citizens in Minneapolis the freedom to walk down the street unmolested way too fast for this to work well for the would-be regime. This narrative is horrible for them. They could have begun the Trump term by continuing what feds were already doing -- arresting "the worst of the worst" -- but made a bigger show of it, thus arguing that they're making citizens' lives better (carrots). And then they could have worked their way along the spectrum of immigrants, from felons here illegally to people who overstayed their visas 30 years ago. This would have cost less money (the guns vs butter curve) and lulled more people into not paying attention to the horrors.
Thank you for further clarification on the Guns or butter issue @Ruth. It was late at night when I posted about where the term came from. Did not fully explain it, though.
I am wondering how Tom Holman will be any different than Bovino or Noem, but I see they are being replaced, and Holman will answer directly to Trump.
In other news about ICE, I see Vance and Rubio are going to use ICE bodyguards at the Winter Olympics in Milan. The Italian population is none to happy about it. They point to what is happening in Minneapolis and do not want those murderous thugs on their soil.
And I see the acting head of ICE has to appear in court on Friday to answer to contempt charges. Think he will go to jail?
I appreciate the extra context of "guns not butter"; I had only previously only encountered the phrase when studying Nazi Germany (something the history curriculum in England comes back to with considerable regularity). Seeing the longer quote from Göring, I was intrigued to realise (having recently listened to the audiobook) that Pratchett in The Fifth Elephant paraphrased it and turned it, in the mouth of the Low King of the Dwarfs, into something completely benign. In the story, of course, Ankh Morpork chooses not "iron" but "fat, lots of fat".
Comments
At some point we have to ask whether random killings of civilians are the desired outcome. According to Greg Bovino the agents involved in the shooting of Pretti are not on administrative leave and have been re-assigned to other cities. This sends a pretty clear message to ICE and CBP that shooting American citizens is going to be a regular part of their duties and that the agency will protect them from any consequences.
I've always heard it as "guns AND butter". And used by outside observers of the regime to describe its policies, not by the regime itself.
Bret Devereaux has a Bluesky thread about the distinction Hannah Arendt made between violence and power.
In other words, the resort to violence is a clear indication that power has failed. Read the rest.
Remember Minnesota, Homan likes his "gifts" in a Cava takeout bag.
To the point as to whether this could be a turning point, I think Michelle and Barrack Obama said the same in their recent post.
There's this from Göring, which is the context I was thinking of:
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/596608
I believe Lyndon Baines Johnson also used it as he was promoting the welfare program he was envisioning in his Great Society while he was building up or involvement in Vietnam.
Goring said "Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."
I would counter every gun we make takes food away from the poor. (to paraphrase Ike Eisenhower).
He's not writing a handbook for politicians; he's making an observation, a biting criticism of the people who have allowed themselves to be bought off with the grain dole and the spectacles and thus given up their power.
William Jennings Bryan was talking about a real choice the Wilson administration made in 1915 while he was Secretary of State: should the finite supply of nitrates go to producing agricultural fertilizer or munitions? (Wilson went with munitions and Bryan, an advocate for US neutrality, resigned.) So "guns or butter" has become a shorthand term for an economic choice between military spending and social spending (it's even in Investopedia). It's not about what you do to effect authoritarian consolidation, despite Goering's use of the term. He was speaking in 1936, in the middle of the Depression and when the Nazis had already locked everything down; he was using the economic choice as a piece of propaganda to justify the skyrocketing military budget.
So leaving guns and butter aside, yes, sometimes propaganda can fill the gap, but carrots are usually offered:
I think in the case of the US, carrots are especially important to consolidating authoritarianism, for several reasons.
I am wondering how Tom Holman will be any different than Bovino or Noem, but I see they are being replaced, and Holman will answer directly to Trump.
In other news about ICE, I see Vance and Rubio are going to use ICE bodyguards at the Winter Olympics in Milan. The Italian population is none to happy about it. They point to what is happening in Minneapolis and do not want those murderous thugs on their soil.
And I see the acting head of ICE has to appear in court on Friday to answer to contempt charges. Think he will go to jail?