What work does it do, the spectacular and superfluous excess of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence, cruelty, and killing on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and most recently Minneapolis? As much as its immediate political and psychological ends are evident, the violence’s enduring effects on the arc of future democratic, emancipatory political projects remains elusive, because we are not yet asking the right questions about how an emboldened ICE might change the possibilities for democratic self-rule.
There is a direct political payoff from exemplary state violence. The brutality and risk of violent death, long the bitter heritage of ghettoized communities of color, offers the president’s supporters a psychological payoff: all of their enemies, even those who believed themselves immune, can be at its receiving end. That resentment has spilled over after the murder of Renee Good into a more generalized anger against white women, despite the value of that demographic to the MAGA coalition. Such irrational hatred suggest an emotional surge that overflows its motivating political logic.
There is a second, more sinister logic at work: today’s violence is accompanied by a refrain of ostentatious, obviously false gaslighting. Hence, when ICE’s erstwhile “commander at large” Greg Bovino trumpets his troops’ “lawful” and “professional” conduct at a Minneapolis press conference, it’s hard to believe he doesn’t know he’s lying. When the term “domestic terrorist” is thrown at intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti before his blood is dry on the sidewalk, and when widely available videos give the lie to that slander, one might wonder who takes such talk seriously.
Set aside the fact that this rhetoric determines the pace of reporting within the MAGA-aligned media ecosystem, which includes Fox News. It’s possible that the self-evident lies about moral atrocities help build a perverse kind of political community. Lying…
Auteur: Aziz Huq
