The concentration camp tendency

Last weekend, my husband pointed out a story in The Washington Post under a headline “Justice Dept. examines homeless encampments, options for the mentally ill.” It had a quote he knew would piss me off, and he was right.

The story was about an email sent last week to workers in the Office of Justice Programs asking about how best to use federal resources to deal with homelessness and mental illness.

According to the Post, one line in the email read, “What can DOJ do to more efficiently shift chronic vagrants away from the public square and into a more concentrated space so that order can be restored and resources and services can be deployed more effectively?”

You might already be guessing what set me off. Today, I want to address why this issue matters so much and how it reveals the heart of what’s rotten in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and across the country. It reaches into every crisis underway in the present moment. We aren’t going to be able to reclaim democracy for the country until we deal with it.

Erasure from society

Call it the concentration camp tendency—the desire to exclude those deemed undesirable from society and carry on as if they didn’t exist. It’s the necklace threading together all the polices that are currently choking the country to death. And taking off one or two beads isn’t going to save us.

What do concentration camps have to do with this? Remember that a concentration camp is the mass detention of civilians without any real trial on the basis of race, religion, or affiliation—some aspect of them rather than any actual crime they’ve committed. Who they are, or who they choose stand with, is the supposed offense.

I’ve written before about how concentration camps are meant to remove a group of people from society and to exile them in detention. There, often without formal charges, they have fewer rights, as Hannah Arendt once noted, than a citizen convicted of an actual crime.

I want to look at all the paths that the administration is pursuing to banish certain people from society. In some cases, they’re talking about actually using camps and physically imprisoning people. At other times, the measures are far less severe. But looking at Republicans’ actions across the board, it becomes apparent that exclusion is the motivating principle to almost everything they’re doing.

Out of cities, out of sight

Earlier this year, I did a post about the drive to segregate homeless people in the 1920s and 1930s, and how governments in Europe and the Americas put people in concentration camps to get them out of cities. The homeless were a population the public would tolerate being mistreated, especially if they didn’t have to see the mistreatment, if it happened somewhere out of sight. That acceptance of camps for the homeless was a big step in normalizing concentration camps before the Nazis ever came to power.

It’s disturbing that the government is pairing mental illness with homelessness here, too, because using mental illness as the fig leaf for involuntary confinement is likewise an approach with an extensive past. People capable of living in the community were committed to isolated institutions, often on the basis of little or no assessment.

Precisely because these institutions held people the government wanted removed from society, the public tended to ignore rampant abuse that occurred there. There are difficult questions of autonomy among the desperately mentally ill and how to help them survive in the world, but those are not the questions that the government seems interested in weighing when it wants to “concentrate” humans to restore order.

We’ve seen other policies that stop short of removal from society but are nonetheless tilted toward erasure, especially with trans people and Black Americans. Public purges of Black leadership everywhere from the Pentagon to Harvard have been carried out in targeted fashion by the administration or its reactionary allies. Anti-DEI policies have been pushed not just at government agencies but by the government trying to influence major U.S. corporations. Trump’s henchmen are trying to keep companies from catering to, or even acknowledging, minority Americans as job applicants and consumers alike.

When it comes to trans people, the attempt to police bathroom usage through laws doesn’t so much require them to use the restroom meant for the sex they were assigned at birth as it does make it impossible for them to go to the bathroom anywhere, leaving public spaces more difficult to navigate and creating pressure to detransition. The refusal in many school systems to let trans kids be trans kids without specific permission from their parents plays a similar role of trying to keep minorities in their place, unacknowledged, even invisible.

It’s no accident that Black and queer titles are the ones being purged from libraries in censorship drives, from rural schools to the U.S. Naval Academy library. There’s an attempt to bar these communities’ visibility in public spaces and also in the public imagination.

No person is illegal

Border detention, however, is where the administration has long fully embraced concentration camps—with long-standing promises to put undocumented U.S. residents in detention to wait for deportation. That turned out not to be practicable in the short run, because the government isn’t yet able to arrest enough people, and because the larger camp infrastructure isn’t in place. So Trump’s administration resorted to sending U.S. residents to a preexisting detention camps at Guantanamo and El Salvador.

They’re now asking for a $46.5 billion budget to build a border wall, as to turn the whole country into a prison.

Another arena in which we can see this concentration camp tendency play out is Trump’s drive to call for locking up people who disagree with him. Once he returned to power, this was most easily done with student protesters, because that backlash against campus protests was begun and aided by Biden-era policies and university administrators who overwhelmingly failed to protect free speech. Trump could simply pick up their brutal policies and expand on them, using the supposed antisemitism of people largely seeking an end to the killing of civilians as a way instead to bully universities into submission in other arenas.

During the first Trump administration, the threats to lock up opponents were emptier, but officials are moving more quickly in the second administration. Think about the public threats by Attorney General Pam Bondi against Tesla protests, throwing the handful of what appear to be lone actors in incidents of destruction of property in with organized peaceful demonstrations, by saying, “We’re going to fight to protect all of the Tesla owners.” Admittedly, this does lead to funny moments, like the Interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Ed Martin accusing the Tesla Takedown movement of “domestic terrorism” in the same press release in which he announces his office is charging a District man with a misdemeanor offense for damaging “multiple Teslas.”

I can’t help laughing at the category of “misdemeanor terrorism.” But even these minor charges are concerning, because they take what should be routine enforcement of existing laws and elevate it into a crusade against public protest. Even worse are Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent comments about judges, in which she said, “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. They’re deranged.”

And we’ve seen how they might proceed. The arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan in Wisconsin after it appears she directed an immigrant to a side exit from her courtroom so that he might avoid ICE agents waiting in the hallway. And we see the impulse again in the Trump administration’s willingness to threaten Act Blue, the leading Democratic fundraising platform that he recently targeted for investigation. These kinds of actions become another dangerous front showing the concentration camp tendency and how it’s used to eliminate political opponents as well as minority groups.

A blight of billionaires

You could even make the case that Trump’s longstanding attachment to the kind of tariffs he’s now imposing, however haphazardly, also has a touch of the concentration camp tendency beneath it. My sense is that at the deepest level, Trump’s bizarre tariff obsession is about the idea that foreignness is wrong, and that foreign things coming into America are suspect, that bringing in foreign things will pollute America or make it weak, and that America should instead be sending its goods abroad to infiltrate other countries and make them dependent and weak.

Others have pointed out that the tariffs are about money, and are intended to force individual countries into arrangements that might personally benefit Trump, his advisers, or his family. And it’s true that there’s no more corrupt president in the history of the country. But it’s clear that Trump is actually destroying global trade, not to mention the U.S. economy. His preoccupation is with something more important to him even than money—his perceived sense of superiority and the need to reinforce it.

How did billionaires—whom I do not believe to be the geniuses they seem to think they are, but who occasionally show an understanding of how finance, the stock market, and business actually work—come to support Trump?

Anyone who wasn’t deliberately hiding from reality could see that what Trump was promising during his 2024 campaign would mean disaster upon disaster—wrecked trade relations and economic distortions on the market that would hobble it. But his exclusionary language was too appealing to people, from car dealers to the ultra-wealthy, for them to focus on their wallets instead of their hatred.

It’s a bait and switch, with extravagant economic promises before the election, and now talk of how improving the economy will bring pain and sacrifice. But it’s been obvious for decades that white supremacy is the more important part for Trump. He wants power, but not just power. The most important thing is not to have to accommodate other people, to not have to acknowledge any obligation to humanity or to humans as a group as the fundamental virtue of a society.

They don’t just need to believe they are better than everyone else, they need a system that affirms that idea for them. Without exercising power that excludes and punishes, they can’t comfortably exist. Which means that everything happening in Trump 2.0 relates to the metaphorical and literal removal from society of people the current government wishes didn’t exist.

A race to the bottom

Many of the problems with this are obvious—this approach destroys any humane political system, it beggars the country involved, it builds a police state. But I want to mention the most dangerous aspect: this impulse has no bottom. It doesn’t stop until it is stopped. It literally tends to kill more and more people and widen the net as it goes. This concentration camp impulse eats everything in the end, as it did in Nazi Germany, until it was interrupted from the outside, as it did in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge dislocated most of the population into internal exile and upheaval. Both those governments drove their countries to genocide.

But there is no Allied Army that will deliver America. There is no force to play the role of the Vietnamese government that halted Cambodia’s genocidal experiment in revolution in 1978, ushering in other crises.

This all sounds very grim, and I mean it to be serious. There’s no humane way to apply this concentration-camp tendency, though America has been trying to square that circle in areas like immigration and trans rights. Data shows that the best way to deal with homelessness is to house the homeless. But instead, we will try to punish those without homes into vanishing, even though half of full-time wage earners in the country don’t earn enough to comfortably pay for a one-bedroom rental at fair market rates. The best way to deal with immigration is obviously to reform a system that hasn’t functioned for decades. But instead, we’ve seen two parties compete for votes by punishing the undocumented.

Who gets to play

This might sound hopeless, but I’m not at all without hope. As Americans, we have more than enough freedom left to stop Trump in short order. He’s helping our cause by tipping his hand so soon while we can still do so much. His missteps of moving both clumsily and in haste will make the economy’s crash under the weight of tariffs—tariffs that belong to nobody but him. In poll after poll, the U.S. public is now turning against his cruel excesses on immigration.

But even after Trump is gone, in the long run, we will have harder work to do.

Years ago when I was teaching karate full-time, I was the director of outreach and ran programs for hundreds of people a week, people of every age, from preschool through adulthood. When I taught, I used some of the ideas from Vivian Gussin Paley. Paley was an innovative educator who taught in Chicago and wrote several books, among them You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. 

Paley hated to see the kind of social exclusion that she felt was harming some of her kids, even in their first years of school. So she brought up the idea of what to do about it and had her kids discuss it. The students had amazing conversations and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t fair, at school at least, for kids to be able to exclude other kids from their games. The considered adopting the rule that “you can’t say you can’t play,” meaning that kids had to let people who wanted to join the game play. What stands out in my mind is that one girl, who had a lot of the social power in her class, tried to argue that her hurt feelings over having to play with someone she didn’t want to were more important than the hurt feelings of exclusion faced by the child who got shut out.

But the class dissented mightily from this, with most of them saying it was far more painful to be excluded than to have to include someone. In the end, they adopted the new rule of inclusiveness. You can’t say you can’t play.

Inconvenience is not suffering

I’ve been thinking a lot about that girl and how human and easy it might be in your first years of life to imagine that the pain of inconvenience or discomfort is as bad as the pain of exclusion. Our problem as a country, and perhaps as a world is that we’ve raised a whole class of people for whom the pain of having to include or acknowledge the existence of others feels like suffering—and might in fact be the greatest hardship they’ve ever faced. Now, at this late stage, they can’t tell the difference between annoyance and suffering, or they no longer care.

I do have hope that this can change, and I don’t mean that in some fake positivity way. What Paley shows us is that the impulse to punish others rather than suffer even the slightest inconvenience is a natural human tic, that selfishness can come to the fore. I would say that the role of society as much as any other role, is to make sure that people don’t get to be in positions where a trifling inconvenience to their comfort is made equivalent to human suffering like hunger or imprisonment.

Unlike some Ayn Rand manifesto, selfishness carried to its endpoint doesn’t actually result in a stronger society of Übermenschen. It leads to coddled people who can’t accept the existence of other people as equals. It leads to people who can’t accommodate reality.

For too long, we’ve catered to this exclusionary impulse that can’t tolerate prioritizing mutual support, even when it’s clear it benefits society as a whole. A society that seeks to punish or exclude whole groups is a damaged and dangerous one, because it always ends up on the concentration camp trajectory.

May Day mayday

What can you do to push back against this tendency? A lot. This is one of the big reasons I’m always advocating protests. Keeping the right to speak in public is huge, even in the times it might feel like a silly parade with no point. Once authoritarian leaders can repress public expression of dissent, it is extremely hard to undo their hold on society. And even when they’re replaced, there’s often an equally nefarious actor willing to come in and take advantage of civilians’ inability to resist in public.

So get out there. You can keep up with the #TeslaTakedown protests, which along with Musk’s own missteps, are helping to drive down Tesla’s economic forecasts. The stock surges on rumors that Musk will leave DOGE and abandon his attempt to make the U.S. government his sandbox. It’s hard to see a future in which Tesla stays afloat and Musk keeps stripping agencies of employees and funding. Let’s make him choose.

You can also attend May Day protests on May 1st, with at least a thousand options available, from labor and climate demonstrations to ones focused on trans rights or justice for detainees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Rumeysa Ozturk.

Whenever you get to feeling down, try to get out and do something, even if it’s hard. Something as simple as a food drive to stock your local pantry can be a good reminder that none of us are alone. A lot of people are out there working to make this a better country. You can be one of them.

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