The recent spate of shootings in the US has led to the usual reactions from all the usual participants to discussion. Democrats and progressives have rung the alarm bell and lamented their inability to pass even the weakest of gun control bills. Republicans and conservatives have blamed illegal immigration, street crime, and spread doubt about the motives of various gunmen without addressing root causes of gun violence.

Will we look back on the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago as the beginning of the end of American democracy, or worse? I ask the question from an entirely unsympathetic position to Donald Trump, Trumpism, and most of the Trumpian political movement members. But the question could just as easily be asked introspectively by a member of that movement, or at least someone adjacent to and sympathetic to its aims and progress.

The last decade and half has seen the rapid expansion of the quantification industrial complex. Highly intertwined and previously uncountable statistics have been boiled down into systems which take black, white, and gray and give them numeric values. Making the complex into something tangible and quantifiable has given decision makers the ability to make more well informed decisions and to, ideally, keep personal bias out of their processes.

Many hoped that the end of the Trump presidency would spell the end of American political tumult, or it would at least allow most to stop following so closely. Part of then candidate Joe Biden’s appeal was his plainness. He was the boring consensus type who had populated Washington long before our current hyper partisan era.

Immigration is a subject of intense political importance, discussion, and misunderstanding. The creation of the modern state made immigration a salient topic. Borders, citizenship, and nationality are distinct concepts which necessarily distinguish between what is within and what is without. The politics of immigration are almost always fraught because they concern the single area in which a state and a nation can decide who else is allowed to take part in society.