I spent last week between the two coasts of America. Five years on from the 2020 Summer of Floyd, murals, flags, t-shirts, and other signs of loyalty swore allegiance everywhere to the ultra-progressive BLM cause. But what was it all for?
Today, most of my American friends view Europe as the real tinderbox. Several asked during my visit about Starmer’s war on free speech, or about Elon Musk’s warning — latterly echoed by King’s College war studies professor David Betz — of imminent civil conflict in the UK. I dare say it didn’t help that JD Vance recently scolded European leaders for endangering their nations’ stability via a mix of repressive domestic policies and lax border control. And despite all this, as my plane left Boston for Starmergrad, civil conflict broke out first figuratively between Musk and Trump — and, hours later, literally, when pro- and anti-deportation groups clashed in California.
Widespread protests, triggered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on shops and workplaces, were read by one side as repressive domestic policy, and the other as an attempt to fix the previous administration’s lax border control. The resulting chaos has seen self-driving Waymo cars burning on the streets, crowds looting shops, and immigration officials barricaded into buildings or driving through hails of projectiles. In other words: all very BLM. Except, in a reversal of those events, Trump has actually done what Senator Tom Cotton was cancelled for suggesting in 2020, via a NYT editorial deemed so fascistic it triggered the sacking of the editor James Bennet. He has sent in the troops.
Not only has Trump deployed the National Guard to quell the riots, but he did so against the wishes of California governor Gavin Newsom, and LA Mayor Karen Bass. This assertion of federal power is itself controversial within America’s tradition of state autonomy. Worse yet (at least from the progressive perspective), this approach seems to command net public support across America.
Do these events represent an escalation in the (mostly) cold civil conflict that has roiled America since the first Trump victory? Perhaps. But the disagreements, especially where border control is concerned, are complicated by having more than two “sides”. It’s not just the ruling Right versus a Left-wing #Resistance; the poles are fractured, producing sometimes contradictory allegiances. And all these patterns have ominous implications for Europe’s future, too.
One of the prevailing divisions can be crudely summed up as “nationalist” versus “globalist”. That is: on one side, a belief that groups of people are entitled to draw boundaries around an in-group, and confer privileges to that group based on internally determined measures of belonging. This is the worldview held, by and large, by the majority of Americans who support Trump’s deportation programme: citizenship means something, and you shouldn’t get to be an American citizen, with all its perks, just by crossing a border and existing in the country for a given period of time. For this group, deporting people in the country illegally is obviously the right course of action.
Against this stand a range of more or less utopian globalists, who believe national boundaries are variously arbitrary, cruel, racist and/or fascist, or simply bad for the economy. A cluster of such sentiments, for example, animates a recent Washington Post article lamenting the deportation from wealthy New England holiday island Martha’s Vineyard of “undocumented workers who form the backbone of the workforce”. The article’s hand-wringing over the impact of ICE raids on local pool maintenance and construction projects offers a clue as to the role played by “undocumented workers” in such elite playgrounds: a fortunate convergence of utopian ideals with economic interest.
But within “nationalist” and “globalist” lie further complicating divisions. Notably, there are people on both sides of the current unrest who believe it’s fine to prefer your in-group; but they disagree on who that includes. And perhaps counter-intuitively, the ethnocentrists are mostly not on the Trumpian side. Certainly, Trump’s supporters surely include a few whose explicit aim is to advance the interests specifically of “heritage Americans”, which is to say white ones. But the generous leavening of Indian, Cuban and other ancestries in Trump’s own front bench suggests the President is not dogmatic about American ethnic heritage, even if he’s historically been vocal in decrying mass migration to the USA via the southern border. Trump’s equivocation on H1B visas, and his efforts to stamp out DEI policies legitimating overt racial discrimination within organisations, support the idea that overall he’s more of a civic nationalist than dogmatic ethnocentrist.
By contrast, it’s clear that many of those protesting Trump’s California deportation programme do so from a strong sense of what the eighth-century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah. More plainly: a sense of in-group preference grounded in shared ethnicity. Protesters wear or wave Mexican flags, and one report described Mexican-heritage US passport-holders protesting not in solidarity with their fellow US citizens, but with other Mexicans living in America illegally. This, said one, is “what it looks like when community comes together”. The President of Mexico, too, has spoken out in solidarity with her nation’s diaspora, following the recent California raids. (No wonder, perhaps, when remittances from the USA represent 4% of Mexico’s GDP.) This is all further complicated by the fact that some of California was, at one point, Mexican territory.
This faction encompasses, in other words, a sense of ethnic “nationhood” that stretches even across time, and latterly across geography to a diaspora. It represents a vastly more ethnocentric understanding of what “nation” means than the civic-nationalist one within which — despite the accusations of progressives — Trump still appears to operate.
Meanwhile, the “globalist” side is every bit as internally contradictory — at least on the surface. For if nationalists sit on an axis from “civic” to “ethnocentrist”, so too universalists occupy a scale from “ordered” to “anarchic”. On the side of order, we find well-off progressives, who cheer on the abolition of borders as they did the defunding of police, while dismissing the impact on less wealthy fellow-citizens. But this is with the proviso that their vaunted “openness” produces not gang warfare or street crime, but merely a supply of affordable seasonal workers with limited employment rights thanks to their “undocumented” status. When the streets of California got too squalid in the aftermath of all the post-Floyd “defunding”, for example, the backlash came hard and fast, with local officials recalled and tent encampments stamped out.
On the side of chaos, meanwhile, we find the Skittle-haired “Death to Amerikkka” face-mask radicals, and the shop-looting opportunists who tend to follow in their wake. The frontline of such chaos tends to be disaffected individuals whose political aim, inasmuch as one can be discerned, seems simply to be attacking institutional structures of all kinds in the belief that life will be better in their absence. Since borders constitute a kind of structure, these too must go.
“The frontline of such chaos tends to be disaffected individuals whose political aim, inasmuch as one can be discerned, seems simply to be attacking institutional structures of all kinds.”
But whereas “nationalism” is riven by internal disagreement on who comprises the relevant in-group, the relation between order and chaos on the globalist side is much more ambiguous. For example, anti-migrant protesters have prompted sympathetic coverage in publications such as The Economist and the Financial Times. These outlets are read not by Skittle-haired radicals but wealthy liberals, and generally don’t endorse anti-state violence — and yet their support for “open” policies on economic migration seems to override any concerns about public order. This sense that Left-wing radicals receive tacit endorsement from rich liberals is deepened by indications that the “chaos” itself is not wholly spontaneous. Rather, at least some of it may be organised and intensified by radical NGOs — or even bankrolled by a radical billionaire with CCP affiliations.
And yet despite such allegiances, it’s a safe bet that even the most progressive of wealthy border-haters holds such views only provided any resulting chaos doesn’t affect them personally. For example, when in 2022 Florida governor Ron DeSantis airlifted 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, the island described by the Washington Post as “a liberal enclave known for welcoming everyone” held a panicked townhall meeting about the situation, before briskly moving the unwanted migrants on to mainland Massachusetts. Perhaps the expectation is that once the supply of cheap labour is assured, order can always be re-imposed. If the echo of European political battles isn’t clear yet, you haven’t been paying attention.
As regards America, meanwhile, this week’s Floyd Redux makes several things clear. Firstly, Trump’s legacy rests on whether, or how far, he’s able to make good on his pledge to control America’s borders. (As a second-order issue, if Trump fails, then so too will Vice-President Vance’s moral standing for castigating European leaders over mass inward migration.) Secondly, and relatedly, Trump’s programme is complicated by ambivalence at the elite level about what is meant by “nation”, while no such ambivalence exists among the ethnocentric migrant blocs that oppose his border control efforts.
Thirdly, Trump’s opponents — both the respectable and radical ones — are not going to make any of this easy. Rather, both the orderly and chaotic facets of the anti-border movement are mobilising, via the network of radical NGOs, supportive journalists, and disaffected haircuts in face-masks that coalesced in the Floyd Times. These are now throwing everything at thwarting Trump’s border pledges.
If the Floydian “racial reckoning” achieved anything, then, it was to consolidate a style of politics — and, in the process, to create its own worst nightmare. The spectre of an assertive, gloves-off Right-wing regime, conjured by the progressive #Resistance in 2016 without ever quite being realised, today occupies the White House. It’s not backing down: an American Right, at least some of whom went into the Floyd era still sort-of-believing their opponents shared their overall political framework, now views the struggle as existential.
And no wonder: the divergent operative understandings of “nation” in the migrant dispute place American (mostly) civic nationalists on a collision course both with foreign ethnocentrists and domestic globalists, neither of which groups evince much loyalty to America as an in-group, but all of whom are keen to continue extracting resources from her wealthy economy. This is a difference in political priors fundamental enough that even so deliberately pluralistic a polity as the United States has found it impossible to metabolise.
I hope the process of finding a resolution turns out to be less “fiery” than “mostly peaceful”. I say this for the sake of a nation where I have many dear friends — but also for Europe’s sake. Never mind foreign-policy grandstanding, or tit-for-tat about which regime is the real tyranny or first in line for civil conflict. Modern Europe is, in a very real sense, a lunar reflection of the American political sun. As such we should watch what happens in California closely. For whether we’re talking polyamory, tech startups, or race riots, what begins in the Golden State will usually, in due course, bless us too.
