The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?

This is pretty much it, I would say: This is the moment we have long feared — or, from another point of view, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. If you think you know what I mean by “this” being “it,” you’re probably right. This is the moment to bust out clichés and make them sound authentic, the moment for “Which side are you on?” or “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” to stop sounding like antique rhetoric out of earnest postwar melodrama.

Of course the moment has been more of a long, drawn-out process, and the premise that “it” can’t happen here has been slowly and gradually degraded and negated, somewhat the way Hannibal Lecter (“the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” as President Trump likes to say) keeps you alive and doped up on happy pills while he eats your brain. Still, though: Wasn’t there something like a moment for you? There certainly was for me.

The question of who understands the nature of the moment, and who does not, has been thrown into dramatic relief over the course of the last week or so — and boy howdy, have there been some surprises. This is too much of a generalization, but it’s an irresistible one: We are seeing a truly extraordinary transformation, something like the awakening of the mainstream conservatives alongside the continuing surrender of the mainstream liberals.

Yeah, I’m talking, for instance, about New York Times columnist David Brooks calling for mass action against the Trump regime and quoting the “Communist Manifesto,” pretty much non-ironically. I don’t think anyone had that on their mainstream-media bingo card. I’m also talking about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer literally hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office, and about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s dramatic heel turn, which this week included describing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, as the “distraction of the day” compared to truly important things like whether Trump’s tariff policy is “accountable to the markets.” 

But before you “well, actually” me about any of that stuff, let’s get back to the singular moment that hit me hardest — and affected a lot of other people the same way — because I think it illustrates a much larger problem. It was that video, the one shot from somebody’s window in suburban Boston that shows a group of masked people in plain clothes seizing a young woman off the street and driving her away in an unmarked van. To be more specific, it was the video itself and also what happened — and did not happen — after the world saw it. 

That woman’s name is Rümeysa Öztürk. She is a 30-year-old Turkish citizen who has lived in the U.S. for at least the last several years on a student visa. According to her LinkedIn profile (now deleted), she is a former Fulbright scholar who holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She is, or was, a PhD candidate in Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She has not been accused of any crime. The government says it revoked her student visa because she supports Hamas, but has produced no evidence beyond an op-ed she co-authored (with three other students) in the Tufts student newspaper last year. Since her arrest, although that word seems like a euphemism, she has reportedly been held in ICE detention centers in four different states.

On Friday, a federal judge ordered Öztürk returned from Louisiana to Vermont, where she was being held when her lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition demanding her release. Her arrest and detention “raised significant constitutional concerns,” wrote Judge William K. Sessions III. (Yeah, no s**t, Sherlock.) That ruling represents a procedural victory, and begins to establish some semblance of due process in this case — but you can feel the energy drain out of the conversation when we start to talk about this as a legal case, right? That’s how it works.

A woman was literally disappeared off a public street by government agents with no uniforms, no official vehicle and no visible identification because of her political opinions. No one is even pretending there is any other reason. But that fact has itself almost disappeared into a bottomless swamp of procedural questions and jurisdictional disputes and supposed contextual ambiguity, while the human being in question remains in ICE custody into the indefinite future.

People generally use “Kafkaesque” as an exaggerated metaphor, perhaps to describe the runaround you get from an insurance company or an especially aggravating trip to the DMV. But no longer: What happened, and is still happening, to Öztürk and Abrego Garcia and however many other people have been swept up into the ICE gulags, is almost exactly the situation described in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which carelessness, bureaucratic incompetence and impenetrable legalism are just as damaging as outright cruelty.  The Trump administration is making Kafka great again.

Judge Sessions’ ruling will of course be appealed to a higher court by some factotum of the Trump regime, and then that court’s decision on that appeal will be appealed as well. Öztürk has a bail hearing scheduled for May 9, and a hearing on her habeas corpus petition scheduled for May 22, more than a month from now. It’s conceivable that one or another of those proceedings will lead to her release, but it’s far more likely that they will drag out for months, or possibly years, with no clear resolution. That’s a feature of our new fascist regime, and most certainly not a bug. 

What has not happened since we saw the Öztürk video is anything approaching an admission that the policy that led to her abduction, or the way it was conducted, was a legal, moral or political mistake. Quite the opposite: Of course this individual’s fate should matter to all of us, but what ultimately happens to Rümeysa Öztürk is, in a certain sense, beside the point. The point, indeed, has been made: Donald Trump’s agents are entirely free to remove people from society on any pretext they like, or none at all. Whether they can do this to U.S. citizens as well as non-citizens remains an unanswered question. No one has made any serious effort to stop them, and they have faced no consequences beyond finger-wagging from judges and lectures from (ahem) the media.

To be entirely fair, I don’t believe that the range of responses to what is now happening in America has much to do with ideology, in the normal sense. It’s more about whether you actually believe in something — and boy, oh boy, has the wheat been separated from the chaff in that respect. 

It was certainly instructive to encounter David Brooks’ call to arms in the same week as another Times contributor, Bret Stephens — a staunch dispenser of anti-woke, pro-Israel right-wing conventional wisdom — described the Trump administration as “drowning” in policies he called “reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad.” It was also the week that Bill Kristol, onetime leading “New Right” intellectual, called for the abolition of ICE. 

Those three guys are not identical or interchangeable, but they are all non-MAGA or anti-MAGA conservatives who would tell you they believe in “liberal democracy,” more or less meaning an orderly society based in private property rights and political coalition-building. I might conclude that their views on democracy are somewhere between naive and noxious, but let’s give them credit: They have spoken out forcefully against a regime that imperils what they cherish, including the so-called principles of conservatism.

When we see Democrats like Newsom and Whitmer — and Amy Klobuchar and John Fetterman and Chuck Schumer, the list goes on — triangulating themselves into oblivion and semi-genuflecting before the Trump throne at exactly the moment when the fascist regime has made its intentions clear and the American people and the world are beginning to push back, we see people who have sucked on the crack-pipe of realpolitik for so long that, like all addicts, they have lost touch with everyday morality. They believe in nothing except political survival, and that, they believe, depends on the discount-store, focus-group version of voter psychology sold to them by expensive consultants. Any principles beyond those have atrophied into invisibility.

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Newsom and Whitmer both hope to become president in 2029, and have placed their bets on a particular understanding of reality, beginning with the premise that there is no fascist moment. The second Trump presidency, in this view, will be an especially ugly form of normal politics, and then the pendulum will swing back in customary fashion. To win the next election, they need to define a “moderate” space halfway between MAGA-world and the progressive wokeness they believe destroyed the Democrats last year. 

In similar fashion, Democratic pollster Natalie Jackson protested that Abrego Garcia made a “bad poster child” for the anti-Trump cause because Republicans had dug up some fragmentary and unconvincing dirt on him, and journalist Matt Yglesias responded that “clinging to the due process rights of people making asylum claims” had become a political problem. Again, no discernible principles are at work, only mock-jesuitical debates about what they think the collective mind of the public will think, based on last week’s poll numbers.

Jackson eventually deleted her X post about Abrego Garcia, partway through Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador to visit him. The lesson here is not complicated: Van Hollen is about as much of a normie liberal white-guy Democrat as anyone could possibly be. But he believes in something — in mildly cringe ideas about democracy, no doubt — and he understands what time it is.