CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

When Dissent Becomes “Terror”

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently – Rosa Luxemburg 

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently

Every democracy worthy of the name recognizes a simple but indispensable truth: dissent is not its enemy but its lifeblood. The freedom to criticize those in power, expose injustice, challenge entrenched authority, organize collectively, and imagine a more just future is the foundation upon which a meaningful democratic society rests. Without the right to dissent, citizenship becomes obedience, violence is normalized, politics collapses into spectacle, corrupt power is legitimated, reason disappears into an abyss of lies, and freedom is reduced to little more than an empty slogan. In such a society, state violence no longer needs to hide in the shadows; it is transformed into theater, a public spectacle of fear, humiliation, and degradation.

Authoritarianism begins by reversing democracy’s foundational principle. It does not merely silence critics; it first rewrites the language through which people understand politics itself. Protest becomes disorder. Journalism becomes subversion. Critical education becomes indoctrination. Independent thought becomes disloyalty. Memory becomes dangerous. Manufactured ignorance is elevated over literacy precisely because literacy offers the possibility of agency. Citizens who refuse to submit are defined as extremists, traitors, or terrorists. Fascism emerges as a regime of regulated memory, imposing pedagogical structures that dictate what can be known, what must be remembered or forgotten, and what is permitted to be mourned or celebrated. Before authoritarian regimes imprison bodies, they colonize consciousness, imposing a cultural and pedagogical regime organized around racism, bigotry, greed, isolation, and apocalyptic visions. They teach people to fear dissent more than concentrated power, to mistake obedience for patriotism, and ultimately to embrace repression as the price of security.

This assault on democratic consciousness never relies on police power alone. Every authoritarian movement understands that force can suppress opposition temporarily, but only culture’s pedagogical power can make domination appear natural. As a result, authoritarian politics wages war not only through courts, prisons, and executive decrees but also through schools, universities, libraries, museums, the arts, the media, religious institutions, digital platforms, and every cultural apparatus capable of shaping public memory, civic identity, and moral responsibility. Democracy is won or lost not only through elections and laws but also through education, culture, language, and the stories a society tells about itself. As John Dewey argued in Freedom and Culture, a vibrant democracy depends upon a civic culture—a pedagogical matrix of habits, dispositions, and sensibilities—that ensures its survival. When that culture embraces anti-democratic values and visions while destroying the social fabric that binds people together, the formative conditions that cultivate critical agency and democratic citizenship begin to disappear. The consequences are not merely cultural; they become visible in the institutions, policies, and practices through which authoritarian power is organized and dissent is repressed.

The criminalization of dissent and the violent repression of protesters have long accompanied moments of democratic crisis in the United States. The Trump regime distinguishes itself by the scale, brazenness, and ideological coherence with which it has revived this tradition. Even more revealing, we are witnessing one of the most aggressive campaigns in generations to criminalize dissent while transforming the institutions of culture into the pedagogical machinery of authoritarianism.

The ambitions of this project extend far beyond partisan politics. It seeks to normalize state violence, legitimize the concentration of executive power, erase historical memory, and redefine democratic opposition as a form of domestic terrorism. Its goal is not simply to govern citizens but to reshape how they think, what they remember, whom they fear, and what they are willing to accept as normal. As the Lemkin Institute has warned, Trump’s attack on democratic institutions and those who defend them is part of a broader process of normalization sustained by “a language and symbolism rooted in genocidal ideology, dulling collective awareness of its harms and desensitizing society to its violence.”

That project came into sharp focus when Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened an international summit devoted to what the Trump administration described as the global threat of “far-left terrorism.” Joined by White House adviser Stephen Miller, one of the administration’s most fanatical white nationalist ideologues, Rubio warned of an international menace supposedly posed by left-wing movements while portraying political opponents as enemies of civilization whose claims to constitutional protections deserved little consideration. Embracing the dehumanizing language of the McCarthy era, Rubio dismissed the left as animated by “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, and liberation” [describing its adherents as  people driven by] “an overwhelming need to tear down, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right.” He concluded with a familiar nationalist refrain: “They despise the West because the West is great.”

Such language does more than vilify political opponents. Resurrecting the language of the Confederacy and the blood-and-soil rhetoric of racial-purification movements, this discourse casts immigrants as a civilizational threat; that is, a contaminating presence allegedly poisoning the nation’s blood, undermining its racial purity, and threatening the imagined supremacy of a white Christian America. The purpose is not merely to exclude immigrants but to redefine democratic citizenship through a racist logic that treats difference as contamination and resistance as political subversion. Those marked as foreign are cast outside the protection of the nation, while those who defend them are branded enemies from within. Rubio’s disingenuousness takes one’s breath away, embodied in a death-dealing rhetoric that feeds on its own moral rot, strips language of conscience, and embraces cruelty without hesitation, remorse, or shame.

Stephen Miller’s hysterical remarks revealed the deeper ideological architecture of this project. He claimed that the left is driven by envy and hatred of “a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and a perfect kid and goes [sic] to church every Sunday.” Beneath this sentimental Disneyified image lies a project of racial cleansing parading as a political ideal: a white Christian nationalist vision of America in which immigrants, people of color, journalists, critical educators, student protesters, and anyone who challenges state power become enemies of the nation itself.  Miller’s racialized nostalgia for the patriarchal family echoes Jack Luzkow’s observation that Trump’s vision of America “comes in the name of the Flag, the cross, and nostalgia. It comes because of the fear of the future, the fear that white Christians are being displaced by Muslims and Mexicans, the fear of irreversible decline, the fear of China, the fear of technology and the robots that are coming for American jobs.” It is an authoritarian vision that Zeteo senior politics editor Andrew Perez has aptly described as “characteristically apocalyptic and authoritarian,” one that enables Miller to live out what Perez calls his “violent fantasy.” Within this morally decrepit universe, the separation of migrant families, the expansion of privately operated ICE detention centers, the abduction of students, and U.S. complicity in the mass killing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon become either necessary acts of national defense or objects of indifference, while those who condemn such policies are branded extremists.

What is at work here is more than the delusional fiction of fanatical certainty and moral self-righteousness; it is an abject political illiteracy joined to a profound thoughtlessness, evident in the overt and self-conscious destruction of every vestige of humanity. Nowhere is this fascist logic of ethical corruption more apparent than in Miller’s portrayal of ICE agents as the real victims in Trump’s white Christian nationalist warfare state. In reality, as Andrew Perez points out, these are “violent, masked thugs who kidnap people, terrorize communities, and kill immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.” This is moral nihilism in its most dangerous form: a cultivated political thoughtlessness that refuses the claims of conscience and makes the destruction of human beings easier to ignore, justify, or celebrate. Miller thus defends a growing paramilitary force steeped in white supremacist ideology, one whose agents have exchanged the white robes of racial terror for the uniforms and machinery of authoritarian power. In this political order, cruelty becomes policy, suffering becomes spectacle, and the destruction of empathy is elevated into a civic virtue. It is a politics that wages war on the very meaning of our shared humanity.

Border czar Tom Homan, appearing on Fox News, extended this logic even further, repeatedly suggesting that Democratic politicians who resist the administration’s immigration policies are aiding terrorists or behaving like terrorists themselves. Even worse, he stated that “It all go backs [sic] to the Dems … there’s still gonna be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted.” Here fascist politics reveals its final truth: the victims of state violence disappear, those who protest their suffering are blamed for the violence inflicted upon them, and the perpetrators proclaim themselves innocent. What disappears most completely in Homan’s account is the humanity of those whose lives have been shattered or destroyed. They vanish into the bloodless abstractions of “enforcement,” leaving behind only a political narrative designed to absolve the state and criminalize its critics.

Rubio, Miller, and Homan are dangerous not only because they are white........

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