How conflict with Iran could supercharge Trump’s domestic agenda

A tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran has slightly attenuated the threat that the United States could still be trained in an international conflict.

But many Americans approach July 4 with a feeling of apprehension, if not squarely, such a war could still be on the horizon and that there is currently an increased risk of a terrorist attack in America because of this.

For so many reasons, we are a nation on board. This is why we must be careful not to allow our fears to go beyond our commitment to civil rights.

“Autocrats almost always use emergencies, sometimes real, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes invented … to accumulate power,” said Steven Levitsky, professor of government at the University of Harvard and author of “How Democracies Die Die”.

None of the political experts with whom I spoke in the past few days said they thought that President Trump had planned the bombing in Iran for his domestic agenda – it would be really extreme. But most of them shared Levitsky’s concern that it was in moments of anxiety, when society fears external threats, that the authorities find the most fertile land to increase their domestic power – because people too often abandon freedoms in exchange for perceived security.

Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA law professor who advised Obama-Biden’s transitional team on immigration policy, said compromise means that “the situation with Iran and Trump’s immigration policy are very closely linked.”

No place is no longer likely to see this intersection of international and national policy more downright than California, and Los Angeles in particular.

Los Angeles is a “test case”, said Brad Jones, where the Trump administration is already growing to see how far it can go. He is a professor of political science at UC Davis.

“This is a very opportunistic presidency and any opportunity they can use to transmit their immigration program, I think they will take full advantage of it,” said Jones.

We already have the Marines and the National Guard in the streets, and under federal control, supposedly because Los Angeles is in the grip of the violent chaos. Although Agelenos knows that it is ridiculous, the courts have, for the moment, took on the side of Trump that this deployment of troops on American soil is in its power. And a large part of America, flooded with right versions of the current immigration demonstrations, sees daily an anarchy account which seems to justify the repression of Trump – including the arrest or the detention of the Democratic legislators.

Benjamin Radd is a professor at the UCLA, an expert in Iran and principal researcher at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. Last year, it was presented in the documentary “War Game” on how a military insurrection could take place in the United States.

Not long ago – before the National Guard was deployed in Los Angeles against the will of Governor Gavin Newsom – Radd was hired by a group of veterans, which he refused to identify, to play what would happen if Trump federalized the national guard against the will of the governors and lit them to the American public.

“And here we are there,” said Radd.

In his simulation, the alleged that Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act, a law that could deepen the ability of a president to deploy the army in the United States.

But in the real world, it is a concern that Trump would do – either because of a real threat or a threat carried out. Rudd said it would be a “large red line”.

“I am waiting to see if this Donald Trump will really, because invoking the act will be able to give him more of this emergency powers which are currently blocked in court,” he said.

Los Angeles, underlines Rudd, houses a large community of Iranian Americans, of which he is a member.

It is not a huge extent of imagination to dream of a scenario in which the government considers this community as a potential threat if the conflict in the Middle East continues, because the Americans of Japanese origin were once considered a threat during the Second World War. Rudd said that he had not seen the probability of mass internment, but stressed that the government had already held and expelled students who were expressed in the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

“Who is swept away in this case when you are dealing with various ethical metropolises like Los Angeles who have a complex background and mixture of people?” he asks.

The administration has already announced the arrests of 11 undocumented Iranians in the United States in recent days.

“We have said that we get the worst of the worst – and we are,” said Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Internal Security, in a press release. “We do not expect a military operation to be executed; We proactively deliver the mandate of President Trump to secure the homeland. ”

Trump’s “whole game book on immigration has been to characterize immigration as an invasion and immigrants as invaders,” said Motomura. “Having a military conflict with Iran allows Trump to connect all the actions of Iran or its proxies as an additional evidence of invasion … and as even more in -depth proof that it must take drastic emergency measures against both national and foreign enemies.”

Levitsky said that “Trump administration clearly learns how useful it is” to portray immigration as a national security emergency. He underlines that the deportations of Venezuelans in Salvador this year were supposed to be necessary because it was represented as an attack against America by members of the Gang Tren of Aragua, although there is little evidence of such a planned foray.

But the story of immigration as a foreign offensive remained-remember when the “Shithole countries” deliberately emptied the prisons and psychiatric hospitals to send murderers and rapists to the United States?

And so many people have accepted any erosion of the rights that these deportations meant in exchange for the perception of life in safer communities – it does not matter that the reality is that most people now trapped in the Salvadoral prison are not violent criminals.

The success with this tactic has left the administration more and more eager to capitalize on fear and the “search for means of using language such as the insurrection or the emergency that releases it from legal constraints,” said Levitsky. “And war is a great way to do so.”

Jones warned that even the concerns of simply attributing “there are cells or people inside” wishing to hurt us could be sufficiently justified for more disintegration of rights.

Although it all seems disastrous, it is important to remember that it has not yet happened, and it may never happen. And if this is the case, that does not mean that there is no appeal to protect our civil rights – people always have power.

“There is not a single strategy, one slogan, a single movement, one group, a single leader, only one demonstration,” said Levitsky. “There are literally 1,000 different ways for people to express their opposition to what is happening, and what is important is that Americans are committed.”

Part of this commitment is to accept that democracy is not a fact and that American democracy has no special power to survive, he said.

“Frankly, that’s why we lose our democracy,” said Levitsky. “Brazilians do not have this problem. South Koreans do not have this problem. … the Germans do not have this problem. People in Spain do not have this problem. Chileans, Argentines do not have this problem.

“All of these societies have a collective memory of authoritarianism. All these societies know what a democracy means,” he said. “Americans have no idea.”

Our biggest threat right now is not Trump or what it can do or not. It is our inability to believe that authoritarianism really slips into us, that it could happen here.

And that all he could take is to deny with a hunter of fear to overthrow a democracy that once felt unbreakable.