Red scare 2.0: America’s worst moments redux

One way to look at much of the second Trump administration is that it is a recapitulation of some of the worst episodes inAmerican history.

President Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity programs — his effort to purge the federal government, private businesses and universities of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — recalls the second Red Scare, when Americans with left-wing views were banished from positions of influence. DEI isn’t left-wing, but Trump treats it as a dangerous ideology to be rooted out, even by targeting those who represent the drive for diversity. The push to punish private citizens who defy the state’s narrative echoes that same spirit of intimidation.

The president’s mass deportation program — led by masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is, by his own admission, a throwback to President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, a militarised campaign of intimidation against millions of Mexican immigrants, many of them legal. Then, as now, federal agents herded people onto buses and planes for removal, and then, as now, the effort reeked of racism.

The immigration raids themselves, such as the one in Chicago where agents detained citizens, including children, evoke the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920. Ordered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, those raids saw federal officers sweep through cities like New York and Detroit, making warrantless arrests of thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants. Hundreds were held in abysmal conditions — men crammed into freezing barracks or windowless corridors with a single bathroom and no beds.

Another antecedent came to mind with the president’s latest move. On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, backed by the White House, announced that members of the Texas National Guard would be sent to assist federal operations in Chicago and Portland, Oregon — cities that have long been bugbears of the far right. Portland, to Trump, is shorthand for “antifa”; Chicago, a byword for crime and chaos.

As Trump tells it, Portland is “burning to the ground” and Chicago is “like a war zone.” “You can go to Afghanistan,” he said, “and they probably marvel at how much crime we have.” This is fantasy. Whatever disorder exists in those cities stems more from the lawless behaviour of federal officers than from residents on the streets.

On Saturday, Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for Oregon blocked Trump’s attempt to federalise and deploy the National Guard to Portland, writing, “This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.” Undeterred, the White House sent Texas troops to occupy Chicago under the pretext of quelling violence. Trump has floated using the Insurrection Act to override local opposition. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker rightly called this an “unconstitutional invasion.”

This attempt to use the military against American citizens — backed by most of the Republican Party — mocks the conservative claim of small government and states’ rights. Trump’s push to occupy cities with the National Guard is an extreme assertion of federal power. Structurally, it resembles the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced citizens of Northern free states to act as slave catchers against their will.

The Lost Cause cliché holds that the Civil War was about states’ rights. In truth, the seceding states fought to preserve slavery. But before the war, it was Northern states that worried about federal overreach. In 1842, the Supreme Court struck down Pennsylvania’s laws protecting fugitive slaves; in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, compelling Northerners to aid slave catchers. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 allowed slave owners to keep enslaved people in free states. Many Northerners feared the federal government, captured by slave interests, would soon impose slavery everywhere.

After the war, Southern reactionaries cried “states’ rights.” But before it, they eagerly wielded federal power to crush their opponents. They used Congress, the courts, and the presidency to impose their vision on the entire nation.

Again, in 2025, the national government is in the hands of determined reactionaries. Their commitment to small government is rhetorical. It is not small government to abuse the National Guard to occupy opposition-led cities. It is not small government to send masked agents across the nation to harass those deemed outsiders. It is not small government to turn federal law enforcement into a machine for persecuting political enemies.

The antebellum struggle over slavery and federal power offers a fitting parallel. Like the slaveholders and their allies, the MAGA movement opposes only those aspects of government it cannot control. It will happily expand federal authority beyond constitutional limits to impose authoritarian rule.

Recognising this dynamic clarifies something essential: consistency is not their goal — power is. Trump and his allies will use whatever approach serves their ends. Their opponents should take this as a lesson.

The New York Times