ArcaMax

The first time I encountered a police checkpoint was in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. My first reaction was excitement. I'd read about this facet of autocracy; here it was! It quickly gave way to fear. The men posted on the Almaty street intersection were armed. They had the power of the state. They could do anything they pleased.

What if they arrested me? What if they beat me? Shot me? What if, what if, what if?

They robbed me.

Relative to people in other countries, we in the United States have long enjoyed great freedom of movement and freedom from government tracking. Unlike the French, who are required by law to carry a national ID card or similar government-issued document when they leave their homes and present it upon request to police, Americans may leave their wallets at home unless they're driving a car. Most nations force citizens to provide their identities before being permitted to vote. Until the recent passage of voter ID laws in red states, our voters authenticated themselves with a signature. When we check into a hotel, neither we nor our check-in clerks must register where we're spending the night with the authorities. That's not the case in many other countries.

Reveling in the endless sense of possibility enshrined by Jack Kerouac, we have been allowed to wander the city streets and highways of our vast country with little fear of encountering the checkpoints and random searches characteristic of other nations, not all of them officially authoritarian. If you were careful to avoid a traffic infraction, you needed not risk an encounter with a police officer for thousands of miles.

Donald Trump is changing that.

The president framed his federalization of the California National Guard and its deployment to Los Angeles as part of his crackdown on illegal immigration. Now, saying he's trying to reduce crime and remove the eyesores caused by homeless encampments, he has seized control of Washington's civilian police and sent in military troops, who have established checkpoints and assumed domestic police duties like writing tickets for drivers' failure to wear their seatbelts.

Trump's explanations don't pass the smell test. According to both cities' mayors, neither the Los Angeles Police Department nor the Metropolitan Police is able to handle all their current challenges. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and related agencies tasked with scooping up undocumented workers have been successfully seizing and deporting thousands of people (including some U.S. citizens) all over the U.S. without assistance from local law enforcement or the Army. Crime in D.C. is down, except in its Southeast quadrant -- and the National Guard hasn't been sent there. They're concentrated in high-traffic areas, federal buildings and tourist locations like the National Mall, White House and Union Station.

The sole practical effect of militarizing city streets is to normalize the presence of heavily armed soldiers in our everyday lives.

Though dramatic and disturbing, Trump's weaponized invasion of civilian spaces in brazen violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is not unprecedented. Checkpoints entering lower Manhattan and young National Guardsmen wielding rifles longer than they are tall became a fixture at New York's Penn Station after 9/11; the troops remain. Police roadblocks on highways near the U.S.-Mexico border, where police and armed three-letter-agency men scan motorists' faces and detain the Latinos, have been around for decades under Democratic and Republican presidents. The current administration is expanding upon those precedents and exploiting our failure to resist them.

Trump is now threatening to target other cities, including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Nothing affects the relationship between a government and its citizenry as much as how the agents of state present themselves. In a country like the United Kingdom or Norway, where soldiers stay on base and cops are lightly armed (or not armed at all), and in U.S. cities free of military checkpoints, framing the system as being of, by and for the people is not a heavy lift. It's next to impossible someplace like Israel, where young soldiers casually sling Uzis over their shoulders at the mall with little regard for whom they're aimed at, or throughout the developing world where paramilitary, army and police forces that are so intermingled as to be indistinguishable. Regimes that rely on heavily armed gunmen to enforce order tend to be paranoid, fragile and authoritarian. They owe their power less to the mandate of heaven than to terrorizing their populations into a permanent state of fear and wariness.

Few are democracies.

Retired Lt. Gen. Russell L. Honore thinks Trump is dipping his toes into the waters of fascism to see how much he can get away with. "He has a political objective to this," Honore told The New York Times after the L.A. action. "To set the conditions and see how far he could go."

No one knows Trump's real motivation for unleashing soldiers who are trained to kill enemies overseas -- a skillset diametrically opposed to civilian policing -- on American citizens in American cities. The effect, however, is clear. "What worries me most are the normalization of political involvement by troops, and novel and expansive interpretations of executive power," Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said.

Emotional responses like fear and discomfort diminish with repeated exposure to a stimulus, leading to desensitization. I've navigated hundreds of checkpoints in dozens of countries since that first time with the Kazakh militsia. I'm used it. I'm good at it.

Even when the media normalizes what had been aberrant by repeatedly portraying it positively or neutrally, as we're seeing here and now, it's possible to identify a phenomenon as an evil to be rejected. When the Nazi invaders marched into Paris in 1940, they were greeted by empty streets, locked doors and closed shutters. By 1941, the French Resistance was shooting German occupation troops in the Metro.

Native Washingtonians and tourists have been reacting with bemusement, taking selfies with troops and their armored personnel carriers. If this is a test -- if Trump is watching to see if he can boiling-frog us into a darker system of government radically different from what older Americans grew up with -- we're failing.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

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