On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator and said the sentence that would define his politics:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

You can read the full campaign announcement speech transcript here or in many other archives, but that one line is the part that stuck. At the time, a lot of people treated it like a bad joke. A clownish bit of over-the-top rhetoric that would either sink his candidacy or get sanded down once “real governing” began. Others, especially immigrants and Latinos, heard exactly what it was: an invitation. A green light for a certain kind of imagination about who “we” are and who “they” are.

Fast-forward a decade, and I’m sitting in Durham, North Carolina, reading about Operation Charlotte’s Web: heavily armed federal agents sweeping through Charlotte’s neighborhoods and business districts, grabbing people outside churches, bakeries, apartment complexes.

On the first day alone, at least 81 people were arrested in Charlotte. Reports describe masked agents, long guns, and aggressive tactics that left local immigrant communities terrified to leave home. Local coverage and national outlets have documented businesses closing, children kept indoors, and a Honduran-born U.S. citizen violently detained when he fit someone’s mental picture of what an “immigrant” looks like.

I. Introduction — The American Paradox

For as long as it has existed, the United States has carried two competing self-portraits. On one hand, it is the archetypal “nation of immigrants”—a country defined not by bloodline but by the recurring arrival of new people, new languages, and new cultural currents. On the other, it has repeatedly flirted with the idea of building a large, protective, European-style welfare state, the kind associated with stability, solidarity, and a tightly woven social safety net. These are both powerful visions of what a nation can be. But they do not always coexist easily.

The tension is simple to describe and notoriously difficult to resolve: can a country sustain both high levels of immigration and a far-reaching social-democratic welfare state? Many modern political movements treat these two ideals as naturally compatible—morally aligned, even. Yet historically, the countries that built the most comprehensive social-democratic systems did so under conditions of cultural homogeneity and slow demographic change. The United States, by contrast, has been defined by constant demographic renewal, often in rapid waves.

A century ago, though, something different happened. The United States tightened its immigration laws dramatically, shutting the door to whole regions of the world under the logic of racial “preservation.” And it was precisely in that same era—roughly from the 1930s through the 1960s—that America developed the beginnings of a modern welfare state, expanded union power, and laid the foundations of its vast administrative apparatus. These two forces—redistribution and demographic closure—grew together not because they were philosophically aligned, but because one was artificially engineered to make the other politically possible.

Why Left vs. Right Doesn’t Cover Me Anymore

I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.

You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.

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Where the Left Loses Me

Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.

But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:

1. An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.

When Identity Politics Became the Perfect Distraction

On Provoked, Scott Horton throws out an idea that isn’t hard to recognize if you lived through 2008–2011: after the federal government, together with the banks, bailed out the big players while a lot of ordinary people got wrecked, two mirror-populisms appeared — the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. Both, in different ways, were pointing at the same thing: the state–finance marriage, the bailouts, the feeling that “there’s money for them, not for us.”

Horton’s read is that this was dangerous for the establishment. Once people at the bottom started comparing notes — “hey, you rural conservative, and me, urban student… didn’t we get burned by the same people?” — a weird but effective coalition was possible. According to him, that’s exactly the moment when the identity-politics menu got pushed hardest: race vs. race, young vs. old, straight vs. LGBT, region vs. region, veteran vs. non-veteran. The point wasn’t expanding freedom; the point was to keep people from talking about money, banking, regulatory capture, and corporate welfare. Classic “turn-them-against-the-neighbor” stuff.

He’s not the only one who’s noticed something like that. Writers like Mark Lilla have argued that U.S. liberalism tied itself to a style of identity politics that fragments the electorate and weakens the majorities you actually need to govern. Others on the left have warned that if all the political oxygen goes to recognition battles, the economic structure stays exactly where it is. So even if we can’t prove a secret meeting where “big business + Democrats invented identity politics,” it’s fair to say that in the 2010s identity became very easy to weaponize for division — which is the core of Horton’s point.