Trump's America is a republic in retreat

I keep thinking about masks. Not the medical kind - though God knows we've had enough of those - but the sort that suggests you've something to hide. The ICE agents currently stalking America's streets wear them constantly. Tactical, anonymous, vaguely menacing in that paramilitary way that's become oddly fashionable in law enforcement circles. They're also holding phones. Not for texting their kids or checking the football scores, but for scanning faces. Anyone's face, really. The app is called Mobile Fortify and it rifles through 200 million photographs more quickly than you can say 'Fourth Amendment'.

Within seconds, it announces whether you're deportable, detainable, or just generally suspicious. There are videos of this happening to people on bicycles in Chicago. To protesters in Minneapolis. To a driver who'd already declared his US citizenship but apparently didn't look convincing enough. One officer told a woman filming a raid, "We have a nice little database. Now you're considered a domestic terrorist." The Department of Homeland Security insists no such database exists, which is the sort of denial that makes you absolutely certain it does.

Plato saw this coming 2,400 years ago, which is either impressive foresight or depressing evidence that humans never learn. He predicted, with astonishing accuracy, that democracy, given the right circumstances, would eventually give birth to tyranny because power would fall to anyone who could tap into and harness collective emotion, leaving reason on the margins.

The demagogue's trick, he understood, wasn't complexity - it was simplicity. Fear works faster than facts. Anger spreads more easily than argument. And once you've convinced the masses that certain people are threats, well, you can do rather a lot in the name of protecting everyone else.

The brilliant perversity of what's happening in America is that it's all perfectly democratic. Trump was elected. Congress tripled ICE's budget. The Laken Riley Act, which lets ICE deport people accused of shoplifting without conviction, passed with Democratic support. Forty-eight House Democrats and ten senators voted for it, which tells you everything about how thoroughly the infection has spread. This isn't tyranny imposed from outside. It's tyranny chosen from within, which Plato understood was the most insidious kind because the people doing it to themselves think they're being patriotic.

The Trump administration has spent over $300 million on surveillance technology in the past year alone. Facial recognition from Clearview AI ($3.8 million), social media monitoring, geolocation tracking, iris scanners, spyware that can hack encrypted phones, drones, and 'skip-tracing' services normally used by debt collectors. They've revived contracts with companies the Biden government banned as unethical. Paragon Solutions, an Israeli firm whose spyware was caught targeting journalists in Europe, is back in business. The administration removed DHS's facial recognition policy - the one that specified testing for bias and prohibited profiling people based on constitutionally protected speech - from the website and called it "routine maintenance". The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board meant to prevent this sort of abuse has been whittled down to a single Republican member.

What's emerging isn't just aggressive immigration enforcement but a meticulously built infrastructure of the kind that, once built, doesn't get dismantled just because you change the target. The feared ICE now has access to the health records, tax information, utility data, driver's license photos, and live location-tracking data for one-third of American adults. They can monitor your phone without a warrant, scrape your social media for location data, and use Stingrays to trick your device into connecting with fake cell towers. All of this exists, and it's all operational.

Surveillance states quickly metastasise, and what starts as a tool for one purpose inevitably expands because the tool itself changes what's possible. If you can use facial recognition on protesters, why not on journalists documenting raids, or on activists organising opposition? The infrastructure doesn't care about intent as it just enables. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, has promised to "create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault - we're going to make them famous". The threat isn't subtle. Dissent will be tracked, categorised, and archived.

The parallel to 1930s Germany isn't convenient hyperbole but historical. The notable Barmen Declaration, signed in 1934 by astonishingly brave Christians resisting Nazi collaboration, understood that tyranny's essence isn't specific policies but entails at its core the question of moral allegiance.

Who comes first when faced with overwhelming dilemmas of conscience, the Führer or Christ, the state or conscience? And tyranny, properly understood, is when a leader places himself above divine law, trampling God-given rights in pursuit of his own authority.

Trump's January executive orders designated Antifa as domestic terrorists and called for investigating progressive NGOs as anti-American groups engaged in political violence. "The enemy within," he calls them. Critics. Protesters. Anyone inconvenient. The language isn't accidental. Once you've designated people as enemies, you've justified any action against them. The DHS memo sent to agents in Minneapolis was explicit: "Capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information" on "agitators, protesters, etc." Build the database. Track the dissidents. Make them famous.

And it's working, as ordinary people are reporting that federal agents address them by name during encounters. How did they know? Facial recognition. Social media scraping. The data assembled from a thousand surveillance contracts. David Bier from the Cato Institute calls it "a total reshaping of law enforcement", instead of investigating crimes by identifying suspects, officers point their phones at anyone and find justifications afterwards. It's law enforcement in reverse, powered by technology that makes everyone perpetually suspect.

The Americans, in the blizzard of fake news, have forgotten their own founding documents. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence wisely lists the defining marks of tyranny. Restricting immigration, sending swarms of officers to harass people, dispatching armed troops without consent, and protecting officers from accountability for murders committed. Reads rather familiar, doesn't it? The founders rebelled because a King placed his law above their God-given rights. Now Americans have elected someone doing precisely that, except this time they're cheering.

Fareed Zakaria wrote brilliantly about "illiberal democracy" in the 1990s - the phenomenon of countries holding elections whilst dismantling constitutional liberties. Democracy without constitutional liberalism isn't just inadequate, he warned. It's dangerous. It brings erosion of liberty, abuse of power, ethnic division, and war. He listed countries slipping into this pattern: Peru, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Russia under Yeltsin. He could've saved space and just written 'wait for America'.

Because that's where Americans are. Free and fair elections have produced a government that ignores constitutional limits and deprives citizens of basic rights. The rule of law replaced by executive whim. Checks and balances dismantled. Surveillance expanded without oversight. Critics labelled as enemies of the state.

The tragedy isn't that this is happening. The tragedy is that it's happening democratically. They voted for the man who promised exactly what he's delivering, and when the surveillance state he's building turns its tools on them and when the databases include their children, their neighbours, their own faces scanned at a protest they never attended, they'll discover what Plato knew: unchecked democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

We Irish have watched American democracy with a mixture of awe and horror for decades. The admiration is fast fading, and what we're seeing now is a republic in retreat, building the machinery of tyranny whilst insisting it's making America great again. The Stasi-like masked agents, the extensive databases, the terrifyingly efficient surveillance apps, the enemy-within rhetoric - these aren't aberrations but features and they're spreading.

The Barmen authors had it right, declaring that tyranny is when a leader seeks to supersede God, to place his authority above all others, to demand allegiance that belongs elsewhere. "Caesar is not Lord," they declared. "Christ is Lord." Neither can Trump usurp Christian tradition to whitewash his perversion of democracy.

In America today, Caesar is scanning your face, tracking your phone, building a file on your associations, and calling it democracy. Plato would recognise the pattern. So should Americans. The question is whether enough citizens will wake up to their changed reality before the database includes everyone.