admiralchimpspoliticalthoughts:

sadoeconomist:

kontextmaschine:

I have been rolling my eyes at a lot of the “ICE will be the spearpoint of the new Trumpian reich” stuff coming out of the left recently but this… is actually something worth keeping an eye on.

“The Government” is not a monolithic whole but a semi-integrated collection of squabbling feifdoms and “The FBI is the agency in charge of federal domestic policing/repression” is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. At various points in American history the equivalent role’s been filled by the US Marshals, the US Postal Inspection Service, Treasury Department agents - the Secret Service and “revenuers” presaging the modern BATF. For a while in the Gilded Age it was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency acting directly under leading capitalists with the government cut out of the loop entirely.

The FBI’s 20th century preeminence was not foreordained but a consequence of bureaucratic maneuvering in reaction to specific moments and events – the anarchist wave of the early 1900s; WWI; the First Red Scare; Prohibition; the early automobile-era motorized bandit gangs; the Kansas City Massacre (before which the FBI didn’t carry guns or make arrests); WWII; the rise of TV (and J. Edgar Hoover’s cooption of same); the Second Red Scare; COINTELPRO; RFK’s anti-Mafia crusade and the wrap-up of white ethnic urban machine politics; Cold War cocaine ‘80s Miami; the 1993 Waco seige (starting as a backfired ATF attempt at profile-raising and positioning in the face of Clinton-era budget trimming).

And now, with the FBI and the old-line three letter agencies at loggerheads with the elected executive and his party in Congress, a young upstart agency known for its enthusiastic loyalty to said executive, in the middle of a massive staffing-up, bids to expand its capabilities and portfolio…

that’s exactly the scenario under which things might change

You know what this could be like, if we’re sticking with the Third Reich metaphor? The Night of the Long Knives

If Trump declared that the FBI was plotting a coup against him and sent ICE to arrest key FBI officials, and they picked up Mueller, some sanctuary city mayors, and other political opponents in the process too, and all those people just disappeared into Guantanamo or some other secret overseas prison, would anyone be able to do anything about it? If they released a bunch of salacious fake material showing FBI officials conspiring with foreign powers to remove Trump - if they did the same thing as the Steele dossier but harder, basically - and then tortured the captives into signing confessions and turning on each other to confirm every scandalous detail? You know how Trump loves torture. I think it could be done. And who would dare to get in Trump’s way after that? Only a handful of high-ranking administration & ICE figures would have to really be in on that conspiracy and it’d all happen in a matter of days. There’d be all kinds of rumors about what really happened but no one would know anything for sure and there’d be enough surface plausibility to the official story that the public would accept it. Congress and the courts would have little choice but to retroactively legalize the president’s actions.

The other thing he could do would be to create a massive paramilitary organization under ICE control and send them into the streets - the way I would do it would be to declare that this organization was the ‘well-regulated militia’ in the Second Amendment and therefore anyone who was part of it would have unrestricted gun ownership rights but everyone else’s gun rights would be heavily curtailed, so basically everyone with an AR-15 who didn’t want to have to turn it in would have to join the goon squad and become a nominal federal law enforcement officer and spend one weekend a month and two weeks a year singing Trump loyalty songs and searching house to house for illegals, that’s one of the few ways I can really see the problem of millions of undocumented immigrants already living here being dealt with without giving any of them amnesty

And sure, this would probably cause all kinds of civil disorder and riots in the streets and whatnot but that’s a feature, not a bug, the administration would be able to take whatever powers they wanted at that point to bring back law and order, and millions of Trump’s opponents would be imprisoned and have their voting rights taken from them

Of course, you’d wind up with millions of undesirables in overcrowded prison camps at that point with nowhere to go, and we’d probably be getting into several major wars as well about that time, so what protocol would ICE adopt to cut down on expenditures? Hmm

Shit, I wrote this thinking ‘haha what would it look like if Trump really did the exact same thing as Hitler, wouldn’t that be crazy’ but this actually sounds like it could happen…shit

I don’t hold with the “Night of the Long Knives” stuff here, but the reality of our federal agencies all scrambling for power, funding, and jurisdictional territory is accurate.  The frightening lack of accountability to the public is also accurate.

For the ICE to become the leading enforcer and top funded agency they would need access to intelligence gathered by other agencies and be seen as a main intelligence gatherer.  I can totally see them seeking to become an intelligence agency in order to get more funding and expand their power.

yeah that’s a decent paperback plot where everything gets done in a coherent series of events for 220 pages but nah

if you want a Reich parallel it’s the way the SS outmaneuvered the SA less in wetwork than in grinding years of staffing, lobbying, knife-fighting for budgets, forming branches to dominate need-spaces as they became visible, and went on to swallow the state and federal police forces, and with the Waffen-SS was taking on the Heer

and part of that was organization, the Nazi state was continuous with the preexisting party which was more or less continuous with the freikorps which were continuous with the Prussian Army and civil service, which were of course the most effective organizations the modern world had seen and what all our schools, militaries, and governments have been modeled after ever since

of course the Heer was just as continuous, and a lot of what got gleichschaltunged, it could be productive to understand post-WWI Germany as a protracted succession crisis

and yeah Trump doesn’t have anything near that level of coordinated structure, the thing about Kushner losing clearance the other week is that he’s depending on an immediate family structure and even then that structure’s losing factional fights inside his own palace,

I’ve said before and I stick with, I think Trump will move things people thought couldn’t be moved but his main effect will be power dissipating and decentralizing to more autonomous local actors

So ICE might claw its way up in the next decade or two – or might not! Remember when Dubya’s term suggested Blackwater was going to be the next big thing? They’re still around in Chinese Africa on a plot arc that might loop back at some point but they’re nowhere near central to anything.

If you want a short-term ooga booga, it’s all the rural and college and weight-gym white groups, not even for risk of them going around jumping the browns, but because they’re the exact types – young, angry, marginal lower middle classers, already a bit tested and esprited de corps – that get recruited as heavies when labor or tenant movements start up (which I suspect they shortly may)

the way I’ve seen Charlottesville dynamics drag on over months even starting with a college town-level left base makes me think they could probably hold anything in a rural area or a third- or lower-tier city, anywhere that’s got property developers and car dealership owners already in the habit of spending duffel bag cash on recruiting college sports stars