Things have largely cooled down regarding immigration protests in the United States, but something has been needling me over the last couple of months.
There was a video that had made the rounds on the internet earlier this year, as well as being featured on a few prime-time news stations. In it, Zeteo columnist and political correspondent Prem Thakker was doing a ride-along through the snow-lined streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the deployment of thousands of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Officers had met with moral outrage.
This particular flavor of morality is nothing new—quite the contrary—but its coming to dominate the politics of a major world power is something as novel as it is dangerous. Thakker’s mobile interview unwittingly puts this new moral-political framework on full display for anyone with eyes to see it.
If you’re anything like me, when you hear the term ride-along, your mind goes to sitting shotgun in a police cruiser or an ambulance or, perhaps even, one of those bright red fire-station ladder trucks as they scream their way across a city to put out a fire or answer a call. Thakker isn’t riding in any of those, though.
Instead, the video is shot from the backseat of a civilian vehicle, with Thakker in the passenger seat. The young woman who is driving remains strategically out of frame in order to maintain her anonymity. The vehicle drives through daytime traffic, and the reporter asks where they’re headed. The driver responds, in her highlighter-like reflective vest, calmly that there has been an ICE vehicle spotted, so they’re going to confront it. That’s because she is a part of a growing number of anti-ICE volunteers and so-called patrollers, committed to disrupting efforts to deport the area’s sizeable population of illegal immigrants.
When they arrive at the scene a few moments later, the camera pans over to the back passenger window, revealing a man on the sidewalk in a puffy vest, beanie, and a mask that covers all but a narrow strip of his face. He’s talking into the phone held in front of his fabric-obscured mouth, but it quickly becomes obvious that he’s the voice currently on speakerphone inside the car.
“They’re in front of me,” he says. “They’re just sitting in the car.”
“Hold on,” the driver says. She clicks the car into park and eagerly gets out.
The camera cuts, and she and the man in the puffy vest are approaching a vehicle parked two to three cars ahead. Then it cuts again, and Reflective Vest is laughing at the open window of a car that turns out not to be ICE afterall. “You know your car is tinted,” she says, as if that could somehow justify two citizens profiling, stalking, and confronting another citizen driving a car they wrongfully assumed was being driven by federal law enforcement officers.
A final jump-cut, and she’s working both thumbs on black glass, presumably notifying all the people in her informal network. “False alarm. False alarm,” she says. Then we’re back in the car, with Thakker asking more questions. He wants to know how she goes about regulating her emotions when confronting ICE agents—evidently, both real and imagined. What she said struck me as odd at first, but it would click into place shortly thereafter.
“There are times where I’m scared, but I’ll still approach a vehicle. Like, it doesn’t stop me or any of us from showing up,” she says, her back to the camera. “And actually, not only showing up, but putting ourselves in a position… almost like a barrier between them trying to get…” She pauses, searching for the word. Eventually, she finds it. “Vulnerablepeople—people who don’t speak the language fluently.”
Then they’re moving through the winter streets of Minneapolis again, and I realize that she’s driving what looks to be a seventh-generation Toyota Camry. I’m not a car guy, but I would recognize that dash and instrument panel anywhere, because it’s the exact same model that I bought my wife when she was pregnant with our first son. We took countless trips in that car, and I guess its aesthetic burned itself deeply into my otherwise aloof memory—perhaps because it was such a formative era of my life. Having kids will do that sort of thing to you.
It was in that moment, when all those memories collided with the words and actions of a faceless young woman confronting ICE agents to protect immigrants from deportation, that this philosophical framework snapped into place for me. Tell me if I’m wrong.
BEYOND FRIEND-ENEMY
It may be the case that there isn’t another political theorist who will be met with as much reflexive ire, rejection, and reputation-savaging dismissal as Carl Schmitt. That’s because, in addition to writing the book The Concept of the Political in 1932, Schmitt would—a year later, when Hitler came to power—join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known today simply as the Nazis.
Now, I’m no fan of Nazis. I’m not a Holocaust denier, nor am I interested in laundering Schmitt’s biography. It’s likely fair to say he was a bad egg, if by no other metric than the fact that he resisted every attempt at de-Nazification after the war was over. It’s at least safe to say that Schmitt supported the regime that was responsible for the murder of tons of innocent people in the first half of the twentieth century.
However, given all of that, I think that his most notable observation regarding the nature of the political is not only true, but it may well be—when taken to the extreme—what led an entire Western nation to go crazy enough to go along with the Nazis.
The Friend-Enemy Distinction gets a lot of blowback from people who seek to shut down the idea by permanently stapling it to the actions of the collective that embodied it. Karl Marx’s ideas, however, get eighty to a hundred million passes and end up in courses like the Children’s Literature class I took at a Christian university during undergrad. Either way, I’m not out to dwell too much on the man behind the idea so much as I’m trying to set the stage for what seems to be going on in places like Minnesota.
Fundamentally, the friend-enemy distinction boils down to this: there are instances when groups can coexist and instances when they cannot. A collective is really a group of subgroups. Those subgroups can disagree and even outright compete in ways that do not fundamentally threaten the well-being of the collective. Their conflicts and disagreements—because there are always some, even within a family—are not existential in nature. In essence, the friend-enemy distinction is the spirit that underpins irreconcilable tribalism. Which resonates, at least to me, given the rhetoric, actions, and dynamics that have progressively taken root in American politics over recent years.
Turn on the news, and there seems to be no end to the othering. The number of ways in which we seem to be dividing the country into various camps of “us” and “thems.” There’s no shortage of ways to generate enemies of existential concern. When I look at the modern world, I don’t think that the existence of this sort of dynamic is up for debate—regardless of where the idea comes from. In fact, I think it’s a primal part of human nature and is certainly playing a large part in what we’re seeing in response to thousands of ICE agents being sent into places like Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
But I don’t think it’s the whole story.
INFANT-PREDATOR POLITICS
I began to hear the term “fur baby” being thrown around in the 1990s. I thought it sounded strange even then. It sounded overly sentimental and what I’d eventually come to see as a form of cross-species maternalization—I may be wrong, but I wouldn’t say it’s much of a paternal sentiment. Even now, I find it strange when my wife will (in front of our actual children) tell our dog to “go to Dad.” I’ve long since given up trying to correct her, but the reality of the matter is this: I’m not the dog’s father. I’m its owner.
That being said, I do love my dog, as demonstrated by the massive vet bill she stacked up recently that I paid when, less than a century ago, the prescription might have been a trip behind the barn and a cure delivered by something with a lever-action. Don’t freak out. I’d pay the bill again if the situation came up in the future, but I will never be a “Dog Dad,” because there is no such thing.
Yet the sentiment that you can, in fact, be a Dog Mom has somehow remained. If anything, it’s continued to grow in acceptability to the point that there are Dog Mom groups in real life, websites dedicated to the lifestyle, and even mainstream floral companies with baskets and bouquets specifically designed for Dog Moms so that they don’t feel left out on Mother’s Day. Interestingly enough, this odd but seemingly benign cultural phenomenon seems to have coincided with another: the steady decline of actual parenthood.
In reality, U.S. fertility rates have been in a steady decline in one way or another since our nation’s founding. Decreases in infant mortality and industrialization, and a whole slew of other variables, make up for a lot of this, but up until relatively recently, we’ve always managed to trend above the average of 2.1 births per woman required for a sufficient replacement rate to maintain the population. That changed in the 1970s.
Beginning in the early 1970s, for perhaps two primary reasons, fertility rates fell off a cliff and have more or less stayed there. Recent data from the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire found that there were 5.7 million more childless women (ages 20-39) than expected, beyond the previous downward trend. If you don’t believe in biologically mediated behaviors, it may sound sexist to say that I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re seeing what seems to be a novel political framework take root in places like Minneapolis. However, I think parentlessness affects both young men and women, albeit differently.
BEYOND THE NURSERY
I remember nervously clicking in, belting down, and cinching—and recinching—the base of the Graco carseat in the back of our 7th-generation Toyota Camry. I probably did it at least half a dozen times before the nurse finally wheeled out my wife and baby boy to the curbside pick-up area, where I had pulled the car up to. I was terrified. And, even though my wife had had a nine-month head start on bonding and getting to know the little fella, I knew instinctively that this was a creature that I was supposed to protect with my life.
The ensuing months were a blur of sleeplessness and life-altering obligations. He would cry because he was hungry. He would cry because he was uncomfortable. He would cry because he was tired and cry because he didn’t want to go to sleep. Amid all of this, my wife seemed to literally lack the capacity for frustration. Fatigue? Surely. Irritability toward me and the rest of the world? On occasion. But she seemed genuinely incapable of being angry and aggressive toward this newfound disruptor of worlds, which was a good thing.
The only logical response to an infant is care and compassion. You cannot expect an infant to pay his/her way. You can’t expect to teach them or correct them. No sane person attempts to hold them accountable in any way. No matter how exhausted or depleted you are, the moral logic doesn’t change: you feed them, protect them, and structure the entire world around their needs.
If Friend-Enemy politics leads us to categorize people as “us” and “them” (or more accurately “our tribe” and “their tribe”), the Infant-Predator Distinction dichotomously categorizes everyone as either a baby or a threat—a vulnerable and inculpable thing to be taken care of or a blood-thirsty predator. In defense of this reflex, the correct response when you come into a real nursery and find some strange creature or person where they shouldn’t be—where they can hurt your baby—is to scream loudly for help if you’re not a fighter or to attack with hands and feet and teeth and with whatever implements in reach that you can turn into impromptu weapons.
You don’t negotiate with predators. You run them off or eliminate them entirely. The stakes are simply too high—too existential—for anything else. But what happens when this ethic either scales or is inappropriately mapped onto non-infant categories? I think about the anonymous young woman, and many others like her, willing to put themselves between federal law enforcement and “vulnerable” people. Does it have anything to do with the unprecedented rates of childlessness in adults aged twenty to thirty-nine? We can’t yet say for certain.
What we can say is that we have real historical examples of instances when the Friend-Enemy ethic was taken to the extreme in varying nations. Each time, the result has been tragedy. Yet, I’m confident the required amount of friend-enemy distinction in a functioning society is not zero. Likewise, there is almost assuredly a non-zero amount of Infant-Predator politics to functioning cultures. I’m unsure, however, if we have any historical examples of countries that became similarly dominated by the spirit of the Infant-Predator Distinction as we seem to be today.
That may well be because this is an entirely novel phenomenon. After all, we’ve never seen a country as large as the U.S. experience such a durable and overwhelming population collapse. However, it may well also be that this has happened in other times and other places, but that history is written by the victors, and that societies which come to be dominated by the Infant-Predator distinction are uniquely susceptible to conquest and destruction—both from within and without—and are lost to the sands of time.
Maybe time will tell.