Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

All across the United States, people are rising up–refusing to be complicit in the slow-motion annihilation of democracy. They march against a regime that strips away public goods, criminalizes dissent, vanishes students, and hollows out the very institutions meant to protect civic life. But these assaults are not new; they are the culmination of what I once called the scorched-earth politics of America’s four fundamentalisms: market worship, ideological conformity, religious zealotry, and educational repression. These fundamentalisms have steadily laid the groundwork for a society governed by violence, cruelty, and unaccountable power–where the market is sacrosanct, history is erased, justice is inverted, and knowledge is policed.

Today, these forces converge in a violent crescendo, a politics of cleansing intent on purging democracy of its ethical substance and moral vocabulary. The government is hollowed out, memory is criminalized, and the law is weaponized to serve the interests of those in power. Racialized others are marked for disappearance, as society sinks into a state of profound erasure. What remains is not merely authoritarian rule, but a theater of terror, where disposability becomes the guiding principle and silence is dangerously mistaken for peace.

Politics has become the extension of crime itself, with governance morphing into organized barbarism. At every level of society, militarization and repression have taken root, directed not only at critics but at entire communities. This is a state-sponsored culture of fear aimed at immigrants, dissenters, and marginalized populations. It manifests in overt abductions of U.S. citizens, targeted because of their race, their dissent, or their opposition to Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. As the fabric of democratic life unravels, the groundwork is laid for the rise of authoritarian rule, where resistance is met with violence, and the very principles of freedom and justice are hollowed out.

This is not governance in the democratic sense; it is the blueprint for authoritarian control disguised as order. The dismantling of public institutions, the suppression of historical memory, the dismantling of legal protections, the assault on higher education, the abduction of students, and the demonization of dissent all signal the emergence of a new mode of state terrorism. This machinery of domination no longer hides its contempt for democracy. It mimics, manipulates, and ultimately discards it. It channels the darkest moments of the past, echoing the brutality of slavery, the violence of the police state, and the horror of the camps. In this rising authoritarian landscape, the state no longer serves the people; it abandons them to a ruthless order in which solidarity is shattered, justice is privatized, and hope is exiled to the margins. This is fascism on steroids.

Resistance is rising, fierce, luminous, and charged with hope. Across the nation, people are pushing back against a regime that robs them of the very essence of life: security, care, sustenance, and dignity. University faculty, students, and more and more administrators are calling for Academic Mutual Defense Compacts to defend themselves against Trump’s attacks From city streets to university campuses, this defiance grows stronger every day. Workers, educators, artists, federal employees, and students, among others, are rising up against the erosion of their rights, the violence inflicted upon their bodies, and the assault on their sense of justice and agency. As fears mount over the collapse of retirement funds, immigration status, police violence, and job security, the crushing weight of scarcity, poverty, and powerlessness takes a toll, both emotionally and physically. With food prices soaring and consumer goods becoming more elusive, the misery deepens. Yet, in the face of this darkness, resistance continues to grow, an act of bold defiance against what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of policies that crush daily life, erase memory, and hollow out the very meaning of agency.

This tide of defiance confronts a politics of cleansing and erasure, spreading like wildfire through the body of democracy: a state stripped to serve the market, memory razed and rewritten, dissent smothered beneath ideological obedience, law twisted into a weapon of vengeance, and racial others cast beyond the bounds of belonging. This is not mere policy, it is a war on the very idea of justice, equality, and freedom, and it must be named for what it is: a multi-front cleansing campaign that demands unrelenting mass resistance. These protests are not symbolic gestures; they are insurgent affirmations that the promise of a radical democracy is not dead, only endangered, and still worth fighting for. Yet, they unfold under an ominous horizon: a politics of cleansing, governmental, ideological, legal, racial, and historical that is intensifying in the U.S. and metastasizing globally, threatening to become the blueprint for a brutal new world order.

Governmental Cleansing and the Death of Social Responsibility

Governmental cleansing begins with a calculated assault on governance as an instrument of the public good. In Trump’s America, the state is no longer envisioned as a guardian of collective well-being. It no longer is seen as offering vital protections like Medicare, Social Security, affordable housing, and public education; instead it is viewed as an obstacle to unfettered capitalism. Neoliberalism provides the ideological scaffolding for this transformation. It redefines freedom as the absence of regulation, empties democracy of its social content, and reduces all human obligations to the cold calculus of profit and efficiency. In this worldview, there are no social problems only personal failures; no public goods, only private investments. This is a politics with closing horizons, one that undermines translating private troubles into larger systemic structural issues.

Milton Friedman’s infamous assertion that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” epitomizes a worldview where social justice is seen as heretical and public welfare is synonymous with socialism. Friedman’s contempt for collective responsibility and his sanctification of profit as moral imperative reveal the ideological foundation of this new horizon of barbarism and cruelty. He writes:

But the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity… That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I called it a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’… Talk about social responsibility by businessmen is nothing more than pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

Friedman was not alone. Friedrich Hayek warned that even modest forms of state intervention would lead inevitably to tyranny. Margaret Thatcher took it further, famously declaring that “there is no such thing as society,” only individuals and their families. And Ronald Reagan, the affable face of neoliberal rollback, sealed the message when he proclaimed in his 1981 inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” With that, the ideological war on the social state was no........

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