Almost all the things that has gone badly, deeply, terribly improper in America’s current — for those who’re studying this, you in all probability don’t want a listing — may be present in America’s previous. Your favourite truism concerning the energy of history could apply right here; mine comes courtesy of Salon contributor Mike Lofgren: “Those that fail to study from historical past are doomed to repeat well-known quotations.”
I don’t imply that we’re trapped in an rigid sample of endlessly repeating historic cycles, as within the extra esoteric propositions of Vico and Nietzsche. (“Time is a flat circle,” as some lowlife says within the first season of “True Detective,” moments earlier than getting murdered by cops.) However too many people, together with a big proportion of liberals who should know higher, are certainly trapped within the delusional one-way narrative of progress often known as American exceptionalism, main us to announce in horrified tones, with each new outrage of the Trump administration, that that is “not who we’re.”
So it’s with the Florida focus camp for migrant detainees often known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” which was at first a gleeful MAGAsphere nickname and is now what this jury-rigged assemblage of cages beneath tents is definitely referred to as. To explain this evil little zone of exclusion as sadistic, despicable and insulting, or as a symptom of incipient or precise fascism, is correct sufficient. However it’s most undoubtedly who “we” are in 2025. If we declare that such a factor is “un-American,” then we’re those who haven’t paid consideration to historical past — and as profoundly ignorant about all the things as Donald Trump and his supporters could also be, they know that a lot.
Simply as America’s penchant for spiritual mania and ethical panic goes clear again to the Puritan settlers and the small-town schism of the Salem witch trials, the punitive, paranoid spirit behind Alligator Alcatraz — the will to divide those that “belong” to the imagined nationwide group from those that don’t — has deep roots on this nation’s historical past. On the similar time, the focus camp is a contemporary international phenomenon with its personal ironic historical past, which lengthy precedes the Nazi demise camps. It was a product of the commercial age, colonialism and newly racialized concepts of citizenship. If something, Alligator Alcatraz is a basic instance of the shape, proper right down to its ugliness and cheapness, to not point out its express goal as a showcase for humiliation, struggling and dehumanization, however not fairly for deliberate homicide.
It was a grievous historic error to imagine that the positive factors made by way of passionate and painful battle by racial justice actions, feminism, LGBTQ+ Pleasure and so forth have been pure, inevitable and irreversible.
The delusional narrative of progress talked about above, wherein democracy retains on increasing, human rights progressively lengthen to everybody in every single place, and America attracts ever nearer to forging the “extra excellent union” promised by the Structure, is understandably alluring, and nearly irresistible. For many people who grew up within the tumultuous many years between the civil rights motion and the Patriot Act, it served as a sort of civic faith: The “arc of the ethical universe” was bending in our path, and all that.
However that was at all times a subjective notion of historical past, not a common legislation. It was broadly shared by educated middle-class individuals infused with Enlightenment values, though not by all of them. It was true, after all, that the dizzying historic and technological adjustments of the Twentieth century had introduced dramatic social progress. However it was a grievous historic error to imagine that the positive factors made by way of passionate and painful battle by racial justice actions, feminism, LGBTQ+ Pleasure, environmental crusaders and so forth have been pure, inevitable and universally accepted, or that nobody past a handful of left-behind troglodytes severely needed to reverse them.
Alligator Alcatraz, like practically all the things else concerning the second Trump regime, is a deliberate, overt mockery of the liberal narrative of progress. It’s a manifestation of “proudly owning the libs” in bodily, tangible and nearly literal kind. (To date, MAGA’s secret police haven’t particularly focused the regime’s home opponents, however the threats get more explicit daily.) Terrorizing, incarcerating and deporting immigrants is a vital regime objective in its personal phrases, after all, however the actual goal of terrorism — state terrorism included — is at all times the broader public. Liberal outrage, to some important diploma, is the purpose, as are a mounting sense of powerlessness and growing nervousness concerning the rule of legislation and the constitutional order.
In that sense, Alligator Alcatraz can be a postmodern phenomenon — a hamfisted ironic commentary on the failure of liberal democracy, and on how simple it was to undermine — in addition to a website for the precise torment of precise human beings. As Andrea Pitzer, the creator of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” observes in an MSNBC commentary, American historical past affords many pre-echoes of the Trumpian anti-immigrant campaign: Centuries of genocide and forcible elimination towards Native individuals “set the stage for abuse of these not counted as residents,” and slavery legal guidelines enabled human trafficking and created classes of human beings with no authorized rights.
These historic crimes paved the way in which for a newer instance, the infamous concentration camps of the 1940s wherein 120,000 Japanese People, most of them native-born U.S. residents, have been interned for years after being dispossessed of their properties, their livelihoods and most of their property. I grew up within the San Francisco Bay Space, amongst many neighbors and classmates whose dad and mom and grandparents had survived these camps, and I don’t keep in mind the topic ever being talked about. I’m unsure I knew internment had occurred, or understood its scale, earlier than I reached maturity.
The meant lesson of Alligator Alcatraz is that there are no lessons in the past: no errors to appropriate, nothing to apologize for and nothing higher to aspire to, solely energy and domination.
The overt racism and grotesque unfairness of Japanese-American internment finally provoked a point of societal reckoning, if solely years later. Historians have just lately begun to concentrate to the much less well-known internment of German People a number of many years earlier, throughout World Warfare I. Situations in these camps weren’t particularly harsh, and only some thousand U.S. residents have been incarcerated. However anti-German propaganda campaigns, together with outlandish claims that a whole bunch of 1000’s of disloyal German People may stand up in revolt, left a long-lasting impression.
German tradition and the German language have been nearly erased from American society nearly in a single day — sauerkraut was rebranded as “Liberty cabbage,” severely — and as historian Matthew Stibbe writes, the “enemy alien hysteria” of the conflict years fed proper into the Pink Scare instantly afterward:
[Q]uestioning the loyalty of particular person residents and non-citizens from specific ethnic backgrounds grew to become customary observe for American businesses concerned in home safety after 1918 and the affiliation of German- in addition to Russian-born émigrés with left-wing subversion continued by way of to the late Forties and past.
There’s no mistaking the weird historic irony at work right here: German immigrants and their youngsters confronted systematic persecution and discrimination within the U.S. barely 15 years earlier than Hitler took energy within the Fatherland — and the long-tail results included a decades-long campaign towards socialists, anarchists and labor activists. If you wish to go even deeper into WTF, contemplate this: Historian Caroline Elkins argues that the primary systematic use of focus camps towards a civilian inhabitants got here in the course of the Boer Warfare round 1900, when British authorities rounded up and interned 1000’s of Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa — in different phrases, the individuals recognized to us right now as Afrikaners.
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Precisely how these occasions rebounded in later historical past is an advanced query, not a simple equation of trigger and impact. Each self-defined human group winds up with a way of historic grievance alongside the way in which, whether or not or not it is smart to outsiders. That’s a technique of understanding the place we’re right now, with a startlingly excessive proportion of white People — most of them descended from immigrants who confronted hardship or persecution in some unspecified time in the future — having solid a gaggle identification of everlasting resentment, pursuing an incoherent marketing campaign of retribution towards these they imagine have cheated them, lied to them or tried to switch them.
Alligator Alcatraz is the image of their campaign, and it might hardly be extra American. It channels this nation’s lengthy historical past of paranoia, xenophobia and systematic exclusion by way of the grotesque Twentieth-century innovation of the focus camp, all of that repackaged as an aggressively silly meme full with AI-slop pictures, Etsy insta-merch and an nearly lifelike salesbot in Kristi Noem.
Most vital of all, it inverts the liberal narrative of historical past, wherein the misdeeds of the previous provide us vital classes, errors to be confronted, repented and transcended on the trail to one thing higher. The meant lesson of Alligator Alcatraz is that there are no lessons in the past: There are not any errors to appropriate, nothing to apologize for and nothing higher to succeed in towards. There’s solely energy and domination, and they need to be celebrated. Loads of People have believed that every one alongside.
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