Mass deportation is the only issue

Zohran Mamdani is probably going to be the mayor of New York.

Mamdani was born in Uganda to a Marxist academic, becoming a US citizen only in 2018. He effortlessly switches between a bobblehead Indian accent, a multiculti South-African Ali G, and the flat respectable Broadcast American that he now campaigns on. He got married this year so he can be Definitely Officially Not Gay for the 0.5% of over-65 New York Democrats for whom that still matters.

Basically, Democrats are taking another whack at the Obama playbook.

But this time, the electorate is 30% white and 60% native-born — so he’s pretending to be Muslim instead of pretending to be Christian, owning his red-diaper middle name, and being totally open about communism: state-run housing, state-run food commissaries, state-run healthcare (including free! genital mutilation), and explicit white expropriation.

There is, obviously, no sense in which this guy is American, and he hardly pretends to be. If it’s a nation of blood and birth (which is to say, an actual nation), then he isn’t from here. If it’s a “nation of ideas”, well, he’s a communist. He rejects the ideas.

In theory, this is grounds for denaturalization: in practice, the Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that open advocacy for violent communist revolution was within the scope of “attachment to the principles of the Constitution.” (Thou sayest!)

(In case you were wondering if the Supreme Court was just fanatically dedicated to freedom of speech and inquiry, they denaturalized an immigrant three years later for joining the Bund.)

Mamdani’s political formula works because the American people have lost coherence with the state and with each other.

The United States today is neither a nation of blood and birth nor a “nation of ideas”. The MAGA movement represents, roughly, the idea that there ought to be an American nation.

The numerically-outnumbered right wing of MAGA wants it defined as the primarily-Anglo, broadly northern European settler stock — the modal place to snap the line is somewhere around the Civil War. (I would argue that the critical distinction is between “settlers” or “pioneers” taming a wilderness, and “immigrants” swarming developed cities with welfare states.)

The MAGA mainstream wants a restoration of America’s civic identity, inclusive of international Elite Human Capital like Vivek Ramaswamy, or the proverbial Nigerian or Egyptian cab driver who hangs an American flag, bursting with gratitude to be here. (Some of these characters are more sympathetic than others.)

But very few have the stomach to say what “civic nationalism” should mean for a person like Mamdani (or AOC, or Ilhan Omar, or Hasan Piker, etc. etc.)

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, represents a repudiation of both America’s founding stock and its founding principles.

For them, the moral polarity between settler and immigrant is reversed: the settler is an oppressor, and the rights and freedoms he claims for himself are hypocritical. Democrats would only invoke these principles cynically, to convince Heritage Americans to cooperate in their own expropriation.

The immigrant has a superior claim to America because he’s “hungry”: for Elon & Vivek, this means “ambitious”; leftists mean it literally.

Unlike a settler, an immigrant’s hands are untainted by conquest. What he takes from America’s welfare, healthcare, and criminal justice system is not even really a down payment on what he is owed due to the Legacy of Colonialism.

He’s here to be a solid citizen and contribute — and anyway you deserve it.

Anticolonialism is a powerfully convenient framing for people like Mamdani, who come from the very top of brutal, millennia-old social hierarchies in their own countries. It turns the poverty and suffering of the countries they dominated into an asset.

Like the Chinese having themselves declared Officially Black in South Africa, it’s a way for foreign elites to launder their wealth and political connections into the inverted hierarchy of Western liberalism — claiming the moral entitlement of the aggrieved and oppressed, while exulting openly in the will to power and the right of the strong.

Democracy is a pressure release valve for war.

A vote is a straightforward proxy for the headcount and mobilization capacity that would be required for organized violence. Democracies vote to settle internal political questions because it’s less wasteful than civil wars or wars of succession, and gets us to (putatively) the same conclusion.

But now, America’s borders have collapsed: not only its physical, geographic borders, but its social and affiliative borders (who the average American considers American), and the membranes of the internal organs of American power.

Whether you map “America” as a landmass, a social network, a power structure, an economy, a culture, a race, a government — its whole body is full of salients and tumors of foreign, hostile actors.

The problem would be bad enough if it were a straightforward “clash of civilizations”, with a coherent area of infiltration by a coherent set of invaders — but what looks like a foreign salient in the social or economic domain (for instance) does not cleanly overlap with what looks like a foreign salient in the political or ethnic domain.

So America’s borders are not only incoherent, but multidimensionally incoherent.

So electoral politics is still a proxy or alternative to war — but instead of a proxy for civil war between Red America and Blue America, it’s a proxy for invasion.

After Mike Lee canceled his attempt to put federal land sales in the Big Beautiful Bill, a friend reached out to ask why right wingers were so adamant about it.

Don’t we hate the federal government? Don’t we like capitalism? etc.

Obviously if they wanted to surrender those lands to me and my friends, that would be acceptable. But selling them “on the open market” was immediately recognized as selling them to foreign interests, on behalf of foreign interests — either directly, to some Chinese shell corporation, or some other multinational developer who would immediately fill them with taxpayer-subsidized immigrant barracks.

In terms of its reciprocal loyalty and connection to Americans, Blackrock is as foreign as the Chinese Communist Party.

The online right didn’t chimp because we want the federal government to own public lands, but because we reject the legitimacy of a captured and infiltrated federal government’s right to sell them.

This is also why the Right is utterly allergic to foreign interventionism.

It’s probably better for Americans, all else equal, if Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons — but Americans are coming to a correct understanding that their government is largely controlled and animated by foreign ethnic hatreds, and if a US military deployment serves the best interest of Americans, it is by coincidence.

When half of Congress is flying Israeli flags to court AIPAC donors, and the other half is flying Palestinian (or Somali) flags to court third-worldist vote banks — when foreign ethnic militias funded by US tax dollars conduct kinetic operations on US soil — the only foreign policy Americans can afford is confronting the foreigners within their own borders and in their government.

All of these crises spring from the same crisis of mass democracy:

There is always pressure to expand the franchise and vote for the expropriation of productive people — but when the national identity is fully porous and abstracted to nothingness, internal political constituencies have access to an infinite supply of foreign voters with zero stake in the commonwealth and everything to gain from its consumption.

This is also why there was no appetite for fiscal conservatism in the debate over the Big Beautiful Bill. Even if you are committed in principle to the preservation of the American commonwealth, the one thing you must not do under these conditions is relinquish power.

The second you hand it back to the forces of open borders mass democracy, they’ll throw open the floodgates to the Mamdanis of the world and their clients. If avoiding that means running up deficits for another year, then that’s what it means.

No temporary victory in foreign policy, fiscal policy, or the culture war will matter at all if the logic of mass democracy is permitted to reach its natural conclusion.

Trump has four years to rationalize America’s borders and reform the electoral system to the point that Mamdani-style “anticolonial” Hutuism is rendered permanently politically inert — which means he has to eject or disenfranchise an enormous number of Paper Americans.

If he fails in this one task, whatever else he may accomplish will be effortlessly undone the moment he is gone.

Of course, this crisis generates all sorts of policy derangements.

It’s likely that the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities was driven at least in part by the need to secure the AIPAC caucus’s support for mass deportations.

Thomas Massie and Elon Musk were right about the unsustainable fiscal trajectory created by the BBB, but all those compromises were required to get mass deportations.

Mass deportation is the only issue because a house divided cannot stand.

Under present conditions, the only coherent political objective Americans can have is to regain self-government — some group of people mutually recognizable as “us” independently managing their own affairs.

Mass deportation doesn’t solve this problem, but it reduces some of the complexity. If we can sort out the tens of millions of people who unambiguously shouldn’t be here, then we will have accomplished two things:

1. Arresting the collapse of American mass democracy by starving the communist entropy engine of its fuel (infinity Bomalians).

2. Repudiating the idea of postwar America as an anti-nation, and establishing the idea that it at least ought to have concrete conceptual and physical borders.

By itself, mass deportation won’t make Americans a people again.

Ethnogenesis (or, “learning who your friends are”) only comes from struggle — but mass deportation is a test of whether they can be a people again.

If we can’t even enforce the clearest and most binary boundaries, there’s very little hope of addressing the tangle of overlapping loyalties underneath.

Even if we achieve that, it seems unlikely that America’s borders can be rationalized all the way down the stack (“America” as one people, with a common self-understanding) with its current contiguous borders and its current system of government.

Your grandchildren may understand themselves as “American”, but if the word means anything, it will derive that meaning from the new loyalties, values, and shared history that emerge from the cataclysm of partition.

No matter what happens, a tremendous number of people are going to have to move.

My hope for the Trump Administration is to achieve the maximum extent of this rectification of names under peaceful, orderly, voluntary conditions.

I want Trump/Vance to capture as much as possible of the old regime’s territory, weapons, uniforms, legal and habitual legitimacy, etc., so that, as much as possible, the rationalization of America’s borders is not performed ad hoc by frightened and desperate people.

It starts with mass deportations. Nothing else matters until that happens.

But regardless of how it shakes out, the people who do best in the coming volatility will be those who already know who they trust, who are ready to cooperate, and who take on responsibility and leadership as it is abdicated by others.

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