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A protest at the Utah State Capitol against the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, April 2025.
A growing chorus of voices proclaims that the United States has all but officially split in two.
“We might think of America as two nations of roughly comparable power, contending with each other for authority and resources and cultural influence,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson in June at the New York Review of Books. “Since they occupy the same terrain and govern the same population, each of them, when it wins an election, is in effect superimposed on the other for a limited period. This system maintains equilibrium well enough, so long as both sides accept it.”
Except this time, one side has seized and made toothless our previously shared institutions, Robinson explained: “I am proposing, of course, that America actually is, at present, an occupied country. I will call the occupiers Red and the occupied Blue, since these colors are in general use for distinctions of this kind and seemingly cause no offense.”
Our long-festering political divide has indeed finally caused administrative fracture. As this issue goes to press, the State Department 1,300 employees, and the Department of Education was to move forward with 1,400 layoffs—both the result of recent Supreme Court decisions. This on the heels of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with a budget larger than that of most militaries on Earth.
It’s tempting to call what is happening an occupation within an occupation. After all, the imperial power that is the United States of America began with bloody land theft across this continent. Today’s occupation, however, is instead a continuation of that earlier one. Martinican author, poet, and politician Aimé Césaire memorably explained this phenomenon in his influential 1950 text Discourse on Colonialism. “Each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam,” he wrote of colonial powers that accept such acts as a matter of course, “. . . a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread . . . .
“And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
“People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”
In fewer words, fascism is colonialism that has returned home. It’s a framework that implicates more than just the Trump Administration—but the very project of “America” as we know it as precondition for where we are now. Throughout these pages, our writers document the nature of belonging in a country whose borders—physical, legal, and cultural—have begun to shift.
Our courts correspondent Bill Blum details decisions made in the Supreme Court’s 2024-25 term that have fundamentally altered U.S. governance. Covering the Chicago Teachers Union’s plan to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of public schools, writer Nyki Duda previews how local governments, like the Democrat-led sanctuary city of Chicago, are already resisting and may fully break from federal mandates. Ben McCarthy shares how powerful interests have pushed the false narrative that homelessness is primarily a mental health issue as they fail to provide affordable housing. John McAulay, sharing the stories of Israeli citizens offering their “protective presence” to Palestinians in the West Bank, and Jim Carrier, reviewing the findings of eighty years of research on the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, demonstrate the worst of what our imperialist impulses have in store for us. Tiffany Hearsey, writing from Los Angeles, tells the story of the rise of Altadena, California, from the ashes of the Eaton Fire. “We know we are here to rebuild this community,” one recovery volunteer, a migrant himself, tells The Progressive.
Not one of us asked to be born in the United States of America. But if the promise of “justice for all” is one that this country—or even just half of this country—would like to keep as it transforms, we must assume a collective responsibility for one another. Together, we face a critical question: What will we do now that the boomerang is back in our hands?
In solidarity,
Alexandra Tempus