'Abolish ICE' Was Always Right

And, as Trump's horrifying first 100 days show, so was 'defund the police.'

Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

For the past 100 days, President Donald Trump has led a wholesale effort to transform the United States into the exact sort of autocracy that anyone paying attention to the sewer slide of American politics has been warning about for decades. In just a few short months, the United States has upended its own place in the global order while recommitting the vast resources of the federal government toward an overtly white supremacist enterprise — one predicated on the punitive and increasingly violent repression of dissenters and dissent itself. For as much as this country has never been the beacon of democratic freedom and justice its founding myths would have you believe, Trump has made things much, much worse.

While pollsters and prognosticators debate whether or not the political establishment could, if it so chose, claw itself from this fascist brink, it’s worth pointing out that there was in fact a mass civic movement just a few years ago that would have — if allowed to succeed — defanged two major prongs of Trump’s dictatorial plans. But like so many good ideas originating from outside the professional pundit class, calls to both abolish ICE and defund the police were ultimately dismissed as anarchic fantasies of the radical left, rather than urgent necessities to head off the state we now find ourselves in.

It didn’t have to be this way.