Dylan Saba

If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overseas empire.

The Trump Administration’s reliance on ICE underscores a transformation toward a domestic politics of domination that mirrors its lawlessness abroad. Just as Trump felt no obligation toward any kind of established diplomatic processes before invading Iran, he has positioned himself entirely against the courts, attacking the bedrock concepts of judicial review and due process as interfering with the project of mass deportation.

The way I’ve begun to think about this is that it’s just not possible to have a US imperial fortress state with Rainbow Coalition characteristics—the most multiracial genocidal coalition in the history of the world. It’s a strange fact, and it can’t be resolved.

Civilians are innocent, they have done nothing to make themselves liable to be killed. That war entails their killing, in vastly greater proportion to the killing of combatants, often under the color of law, means that our primary concern should always be on evaluating the justness of the cause of war—whether a given war can be justified at all in the face of the manifest immorality of civilian death—not the legality of the inevitable slaughter that follows.