Adam Serwer

are the actual Western values, individual liberty, due process, free speech.

It's sort of extraordinary how much the people aligned with the Trump administration either don't understand, as you pointed out, or don't like these things.

You know, when I was at the march, there was a young man I spoke to whose family was from Uganda.

And he mentioned that, you know, his mom had like made sure he knew where her passport was in case she got picked up by ICE.

And what he said to me was like, you know, my parents are scared because the country they fled had men in the street with masks and guns and they never thought it would happen here.

So when you think about Stephen Miller saying, oh, you know, these third world migrants recreate the conditions of their broken homelands.

No, you're doing that.

That's what you are doing.

And you're doing that because you have no appreciation of the quote unquote principles of Western civilization.

The good ones, you know, just to be clear, not the ones that, you know, led to the industrialization of chattel slavery, but the ones that say individual people have value and rights that must be respected.

And, you know, these people have nothing but disdain for those things.

And I think in part, you know, when you look at the people around the Trump administration and Miller is like an example, like we have a society now that selects for people who are excellent at getting attention, not necessarily people who are competent at the work that they do.

Not understanding what classical liberal principles are is just an example of that.

Well, you know, Langston Hughes famously said that the South was a fascist government, right?

During the rise of fascism in Europe.

And I think he was right about that, you know, even though we can distinguish between, you know, classical dictatorships and harem vote democracies.

But I think what is different here, what is novel, is that, you know, after the Civil War, the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments were like, the thing we need to really prevent is oppression of people by their state governments.

Because, you know, the original founders thought, oh, the state governments will protect the

their residents from tyranny by the federal government.

But it turned out that philosophy was one that was employed by men who wanted to own other men as property, other people as property.