Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Donald Trump has begun to speak openly about placing the federal government in charge of overseeing elections in as many as 15 states where, he claims, corruption is rampant. What might Minnesota and Venezuela have in common under this framing? The answer points toward an emerging imperial logic of rule—one that increasingly displaces the constraints associated with the United States as a constitutional republic.

Trump’s approach follows the logic of the South’s Lost Cause, now scaled up to the national level. This logic implies not merely the containment of the civil rights revolution, but its reversal. Where federal authority was once deployed to dismantle segregation and discrimination by limiting states’ rights, it is now mobilized against Democratic strongholds—not to advance civil rights, but to entrench Republican power. Pushing the analogy further, blue states are recast as the new rebel states: jurisdictions that resist the rightful initiatives of the federal government and must therefore be brought to heel for the sake of a Trumpian “union.”

Under this logic, blue states........

© CounterPunch