White Centrism in a Time of Armed Power
How racialized power and state violence exposed the limits of a 1990s political worldview.
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In the last seventy-two hours, armed federal immigration agents have shot people in two American cities. One involved ICE. The other involved CBP. This is not noise. It is a pattern. And it should immediately end the fiction that immigration enforcement in the United States is still about law rather than power.
What we are watching is immigration treated as a racialized manhunt, a modern echo of slave-catcher logic, built on the idea that America is for men, and particularly White men, only. We now have an immigration apparatus with an oversized budget and armed agents operating in civilian spaces, shaped by years of grievance politics that insist diversity is a weakness and describe the country as “becoming third world,” whatever that Cold War slur is even supposed to mean. When fear is elevated to policy, violence stops being accidental and starts being procedural.
None of this is new. American history is littered with moments where racialized class terror was justified as order and patriotism, only to spiral outward. In 1917, officials in Bisbee, Arizona, rounded up more than a thousand striking miners, mostly immigrants, some White citizens, loaded them into cattle cars, and dumped them in the desert under a national-security pretext. No one was punished. In Colorado, the suppression of immigrant miners at Ludlow escalated into open warfare that killed not only workers and their families, but guards and soldiers as well. During the Red Summer of 1919, racist mob violence meant to terrorize Black communities erupted into urban chaos that killed White civilians, too, and forced federal troops into American cities. In the 1930s, mass deportations targeted Mexican communities so broadly that U.S. citizens were expelled without due process, shattering families and damaging local economies that White Americans depended on. The pattern is consistent: systems built to terrorize one group do not stay contained. They expand, they generalize, and they eventually endanger everyone.
What makes this moment especially damning is how predictable it was. A consultant class lost a winnable election in 2024 by trying to triangulate in the wrong direction and refusing to name racial, religious, and gendered grievance out of fear of upsetting a mythical centrist electorate. In doing so, they cleared the runway for a vindictive president to return to power, now wielding a national-security apparatus bloated by post-9/11 excess and bipartisan cowardice. We are left with pundits and podcasters who want to tone-police the people most harmed, debate whether basic rights are “too divisive,” and pretend this is still a messaging problem rather than a violence problem.
Now we are in the consequences. Armed federal agents have shot people in two cities in two days. This is not a breakdown of norms. It is the logical outcome of a politics that normalized grievance, rewarded fear, and refused to confront what it was unleashing. History is clear: once a society decides some people can be hunted in the name of order, the rule of law becomes optional for everyone else.
The paid section traces how we got here, and why undoing it will be far harder than stopping any single man.
When Frameworks Fail
This is the point where I try to slow myself down and interrogate my own ire, much of which I have directed at the centrist elite I’ve been writing about consistently. Not to absolve them, but to understand the limits of the world they are operating in, and why those limits have now become dangerous.
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark is an instructive example. She is clearly skilled at what she does and relies heavily on focus group data to interpret the electorate. Her analysis offers a vivid picture of how many Americans describe their own lives, particularly within professional, suburban, and politically engaged circles. But it is also rooted in a worldview shaped by a specific political era and a specific set of social environments, often racially homogeneous and insulated from the sharpest edges of state power.
The underlying belief is familiar: if the economy collapses, Trump’s support will follow. That assumption makes sense in a political world where material conditions are understood as the primary driver of behavior and where identity-based threat feels abstract rather than lived. What this framework struggles to account for is that Trump is not functioning primarily as an economic actor. He is functioning as a symbol of a perceived lost hierarchy tied to race, religion, gender, and sexuality. That symbolic role allows him to absorb blame in ways a normal political candidate cannot. Economic pain does not necessarily weaken him; it is often repurposed as proof that something has been taken.
This is not a failure of intelligence or intent. It is a limitation produced by proximity. When one’s political imagination is formed in spaces where racial grievance is muted, coded, or socially discouraged, it becomes easier to believe that persuasion, norms, and economic indicators are sufficient to contain it. But for those who experience American power more directly, as enforcement, surveillance, or exclusion, that grievance has never been subtle, and it has never been dormant.
That assumption and that politics ultimately resolve back to material conditions was forged in a period when political conflict was more coded, more polite, and easier for elites to misread. For Americans who came of political age in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, it was possible to believe that the country was entering a post-racial phase. Formal desegregation had advanced, rights revolutions were remembered as settled victories, and many racially and religiously homogeneous communities allowed older ideologies, like Lost Cause myths, racial stereotypes, and quiet resentments, to persist without being openly challenged. In those environments, especially for people insulated by class or geography, it was easy to believe the worst was behind us.
I can attest to that distortion personally. I grew up an upper-middle-class Black kid in predominantly white environments, often without strong community institutions to teach Black history or contextualize what I was seeing. Even within marginalized groups, proximity to Whiteness and professional success can make post-racial narratives feel plausible. Segregation doesn’t just isolate the marginalized; it distorts the political imagination of everyone inside it. Experience filters reality long before ideology ever enters the picture.
The election of Barack Obama reinforced that distortion for many. His presidency did not end blood-and-soil politics, but it obscured and energized it while elites came to believe racial grievance had been contained, rendered symbolic, or safely managed through norms and procedure. Politics could now be treated as a technocratic exercise with Sunday shows, persuasion tactics, and economic indicators. But Obama’s visibility also intensified resentment among those who experienced his presidency not as progress, but as disruption. Trump did not invent that backlash; he weaponized it. He turned visibility itself into provocation and hierarchy restoration into a governing logic.
This is where the present moment matters. When armed federal immigration agents shoot people in multiple cities within days, it reveals something the old frameworks cannot explain. American politics has never been governed solely by economic rationality. Again and again, perceived threats to status have overridden material self-interest, producing movements defined more by identity restoration than policy coherence.
None of this is meant as an exercise in shame. It is an attempt to understand why so many pro-democracy podcasters, consultants, and strategists are relying on a stale toolbox while confronting a political force that is intrinsically about white supremacy and cannot be reasoned with on those terms. Old assumptions about persuasion, accountability, and voter behavior no longer hold when the foundation of political identity is the preservation of hierarchy itself.
America is still a young nation, governed by the same Constitution it began with. That endurance is often celebrated as stability, but it also means we continue to operate within a framework that, at its founding, was explicit about who the country was for. As representation has expanded and become more visible, the impulse to reassert dominance has grown more volatile and strong enough to justify supporting a convicted criminal who attempted to overturn democratic outcomes and continues to traffic openly in racial, gendered, and religious contempt.
It may be understandable that this reality exceeds the imagination or comfort of analysts shaped by a different era. But it also means the conversation has moved beyond them. They no longer get to monopolize the terms of debate. What we are living through is not a failure of tone or messaging. It is the collision between an outdated political grammar and a system organized around grievance and force. Pretending otherwise is no longer just an analytical error.
It is negligence.
If this section changed how you understand what’s happening and why elite analysis keeps misfiring, why violence feels both shocking and predictable, then that’s the work the paid section exists to do. I use it to step out of the daily churn and trace patterns that don’t fit inside a headline. That’s where this newsletter is going.
I’m not interested in soothing anxieties or predicting outcomes. I’m interested in naming patterns while there’s still time to interrupt them. That’s what this work is for.
References:
Benton-Cohen, Katherine. “Borderlands: Industrial Capitalism and the Racialized Order of the Arizona–Sonora Borderlands.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 2 (2001): 113–141.
Britannica, Encyclopaedia. “Chicago Race Riot of 1919.” Last modified n.d. Accessed January 2026.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Chicago-race-riot-of-1919Guardian Staff. “Millions of Mexican Americans Were Deported in the 1930s—but the US Has Never Apologized.” The Guardian, January 28, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/28/mexican-americans-deported-1930s-repatriation-apologyMauk, Ben. “The Ludlow Massacre Still Matters.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2014.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-ludlow-massacre-still-mattersMoyers, Bill. “US Workers Were Once Massacred Fighting for Protections. Why Is That History Ignored?” BillMoyers.com, April 25, 2014.
https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/25/us-workers-were-once-massacred-fighting-for-protections-why-is-that-history-ignored/National Archives. “Racial Violence and the Red Summer.” Last modified n.d. Accessed January 2026.
https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/red-summerWills, Matthew. “The Bisbee Deportations.” JSTOR Daily, July 12, 2017.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-bisbee-deportations/
You had this backwards: "What we are watching is immigration treated as a racialized manhunt, "
should read a racilized manhunt disguised as immigration.
Here is the irony, Although one of my 9th Great grandfathers and others have a long history in this family, dating back to 1610.
The vast majority of my ancestors are Irish indentured servants,. I mention this because the Irish were the dregs of society, and in the 19th Century they were not considered white, sane with, Italians,Portuguese, Jews
There were even signs on lawns in Boston, Dogs and Irish stay off my lawn,
And who can forget the Nativists, as portrayed in the movie Gangs of New York.
Yet in the 21st Century, so many of their descendants form the base of MAGA., racists, KKK
BTW many of them, including KKK members, have African ancestry.