This MAGA fixation proves dystopia is now at our doorstep

The dining room table is the civic and moral hearth of our house on Constitution Street. Upon it rest a stack of utility and other bills to be sorted and paid (with cursing as necessary), issues of various magazines including The New Yorker and Fortean Times, a dog-eared Tom Wolfe anthology, and a shaker of sea salt, a squeeze bottle of raw honey and a red-topped dispenser of soy sauce. There are chocolates still being rationed from Valentine’s Day, an airplane plant, and dozens of other artifacts of daily living.

The thing that is new on the table is Kim’s application for a passport.

I picked it up when I went downtown to the post office the other day, knowing she might need it. She has studied it and made lists of documents required, some of which are at hand and others which are not. She has her birth certificate, but unless she can find legal evidence of the dissolution of her past marriage, she’ll have to request those from Missouri.

It’s not that we’re planning a trip out of the country, but that Kim would like to keep voting. She’s cast a ballot in every general election since she turned 18 and became eligible, but MAGA-inspired legislation kicking around in the U.S. House and Senate would, if passed, impose onerous new rules that require proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate. For married women who have taken a husband’s last name, now or in the past, one of the few viable options would be a passport.

Dubbed the SAVE Act, for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility,” the legislation would do just the opposite and disenfranchise millions. The House recently passed, 218-213, an amended version of the act that replaces the document requirement with a photo ID provision and directs states to submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2012, Kansas has required voters to show photographic identification at the polls. Eleven states, including Kansas, have already agreed to hand over voter data to the feds.

The SAVE Act has no chance of passage in the Senate — for now.

But Republicans have ratcheted up rhetoric around the bill to further Trump’s (and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s) claims of massive voter fraud by undocumented migrants. These claims have been repeatedly and soundly debunked, with a recent government review flagging only about 1 in 5,000 registrations. But even that number may be overstated. The verification tool used by the government is prone to mistakenly flag some citizens as potential noncitizen voters. With MAGA’s legions preparing for an all-out assault on voting rights before this fall’s midterm elections, it seems prudent for Kim to have her newly-minted passport in hand before going to vote.

This worry, on an otherwise bright February week in east central Kansas when snow and ice was just a memory, was yet another example of dystopia at the doorstep. This “show me your papers” strategy is one long favored by authoritarian regimes, past and present. The goal is to discourage voting by making it as difficult, or as risky, as possible. Also, the SAVE Act neatly folds into the Trumpian obsession with who is and who isn’t American, a centerpiece of his tinpot regime from the beginning of his second term.

The Supreme Court will hear challenges to his executive order to end birthright citizenship on April 1. This is so mind-numbing I don’t even have a joke for the date. Words and reason appear poised to fail us, given the current bench.

Among the reasons I rely so heavily on books in these columns is for the galaxy of ideas they contain. Books are the cultural currency of a rational civilization, and when you find the right book to cite, it either invokes a knowing response in the reader or, if they are unfamiliar with the title, a curiosity about the work mentioned. There are a handful of books that nearly everyone has read, or has been forced to read in high school, ranging from Fitzgerald to Orwell, that are particularly effective in illustrating a point.

Federal District Judge Cynthia Rufe also reached for George Orwell in issuing her Feb. 16 decision that the Trump administration could not scrub references to George Washington’s enslavement of nine Black people from a National Parks Service site in Philadelphia.

Rufe prefaced the ruling with a passage from Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four:

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four now existed,” Rufe began, “with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”

The city of Philadelphia sued the Trump administration after it removed exhibits about slavery from an outdoor exhibit on the site of a house once used by presidents Washington and John Adams. The removal followed an executive order last year to eliminate “divisive narratives” from museums and sites operated by the federal government. Although Washington had nine enslaved people at the Philadelphia home, during his life nearly 600 enslaved persons lived or worked at his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.

“In its argument,” Rufe writes, “the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control. Its claims in this regard echo Big Brother’s domain” in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The largest section of the (government’s) Records Department consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction.

“The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because,” Rufe writes, “as Defendants state, it has the power.”

Rufe is not only sounding the alarm of an encroaching dystopia, but is referencing the most famous line from the document upon which American democracy is built, the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It is the greatest sentence ever written, asserts a new book by historian Walter Isaacson. It may not rank as a literarily perfect sentence, but it is undoubtedly the most revolutionary and influential political statement put to paper. It was an aspirational sentence, an idea that we have spent the past 250 years trying to grow into, our journey marked by grievous failure and luminous success.

Voting equality was at the center of this struggle, with Black persons and women and young people and Native Americans claiming hard-won victories. But now we are sliding back into a regressive past through gerrymandering and legislation in red states to disenfranchise or suppress voters. The latest front in the assault on voting is a move, articulated by Trump earlier this month, to nationalize elections.

Never mind that elections are constitutionally controlled by the states. Nationalizing elections would create chaos and fear and provide an excuse for Trump to send armed federal agents to monitor polling places. Those boots could belong to ICE, and they could be expected to use the same restraint as they did in Minneapolis, where two American citizens were shot to death while observing the deportation surge there.

Add to this nightmare scenario the actual warehousing of migrants (and presumably some citizens) snared in immigration sweeps. It used to be that “warehousing” was a term for prison overcrowding, but under the Trump administration it has become a literal strategy. ICE, now the highest-funded law enforcement agency, is buying or attempting to buy warehouses in at least 18 sites across the country to provide space for an additional 100,000 detainees. Some of the purchases, such as in Kansas City, Missouri, have fallen through because of public outcry. Elsewhere, such as in Socorro, Texas, the $38 billion program advances as warehouses are slated to become concentration camps, housing thousands of people. The Socorro facility alone is expected to hold 8,500 individuals.

To call these facilities anything but concentration camps is to deny reality. For comparison, some of the mass internment sites that held Japanese Americans during World War II were similar in size. Camp Amache at Granada, Colorado, held 7,500 over an area of about one square mile.

If we don’t change course, America is about to make a terminal mistake driven by racism and blatant criminal intent. Racist because ICE isn’t stopping white people on the street, unless they’re protesting. Criminal because due process (which under the Constitution is guaranteed even to noncitizen migrants) is being denied. What is emerging is the kind of dual state historians have warned us about.

The rule of law continues to function for one segment of society, those at the top, whose wealth or cultural or political privilege keeps their environment relatively stable. Their livelihoods and civil rights are not being threatened. In fact, if they happen to be connected to the current regime, their lives might be temporarily better than ever. But at the other end are the undocumented migrants who have been unjustly blamed for stealing elections and taking away American jobs and who are subject to capture, warehousing and deportation. In between are otherwise ordinary Americans whose careers and reputations and sometimes lives are at risk for having liberal tendencies such as speaking out on behalf of the oppressed, teaching history as fact and not propaganda, or leading lives of personal nonconformity.

Democracy requires the balancing of conflicting values, an adherence to an equitable rule of law, the protection of vulnerable populations, elections conducted in nonpartisan safe zones, and checks on the disproportionate or capricious use of power. Dystopias – both real and fictional – despise all of these.

In 2024, on the occasion of my 100thKansas Reflector column, I examined America’s growing fascination with fascism. I also described how opinion editor Clay Wirestone had dubbed my brand of commentary as “late-breaking history.” What I have done, in most of my pieces, is to link some current event to something similar in the past. Today you are reading my 200th opinion essay, and the speed of the political moment over two years has outstripped my ability to compare it to something historical.

Like Judge Rufe, I rely on Orwell.

At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is broken by the state. He has betrayed his lover, Julia — and she him. Through gin-scented tears, Winston has finally surrendered and come to “love” Big Brother.

That’s the end of the story, but not the book.

In an appendix, Orwell gives us the “Principles of Newspeak,” the totalitarian language of the state. Newspeak, a kind of propagandist babble, was in the novel used to control the masses by changing history and purging language of original thought. All language must be scrubbed and bent to conform to ideology, although there were some remnants of the past that were difficult or unsuitable for transforming into Newspeak. The example given that was impossible to change or classify as anything other than CRIMETHINK began like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident …

That was written in 1949.

Well, I guess I found a historic hook after all.

The passport application remains on the dining room table, waiting for Kim to gather the rest of the documents required. With luck, she and millions of other American women won’t have to rely on their passports to vote come November. Without luck, her passport — and mine — just might be needed for an unexpected trip out of the country. Or across state lines.

• Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here