The Two Americas

      One of my favorite social/political commentators is David French,

...a formerly staunch conservative and evangelical Christian intellectual who these days sounds like a voice crying out in the wilderness in his relentless opposition to the corruption and inhumanity propagated by Donald Trump and the MAGA ideology. I believe his writing must come from the heart, because it always speaks to mine.
       But David French's commentaries also tend to be informative and illuminating, as was an op ed piece he wrote for the New York Times last week entitled "An Old Theory Helps Explain What Happened to Renee Good." (Published, ironically, a few days before the similar death of Alex Pretti also at the hands of ICE agents).
        The theory Mr. French referred to in his article was one put forth in 1941 by a German Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel in his book, "The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship."

        Though Ernst Fraenkel fled Germany in 1938 and emigrated to the United States in 1939,  he had lived enough years under Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime to have formulated his observations as a Jew in a country where those considered  enemies of the Nazi ideology - this included all Jews - were denied any civil rights and so could be oppressed, assaulted,  killed, or dragged off to the concentration camps by the Gestapo, Hitler's brutal secret police who operated above the law and without accountability.
        Meanwhile, for the rest of the German population, that is, most Germans, life went on day to day in a normal way under protection of the law as it had always done, business got taken care of, things were fine. Too bad what was happening to those others.
        Here, then, was Fraenkel's dual state: a country where part of the population lives a seemingly normal, stable, law-governed existence which he called the "normative state," alongside others who are delegated to what he called the "prerogative state," which "exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.” This was Fraenkel's description of how dictatorships in general, and Nazi Germany in particular, functioned.
         David French contends that the precautions that were set up by our founding fathers to protect our country from falling under an authoritarian rule have failed in the era of Donald Trump. "And so," he writes, "we’ve slowly but surely created the mechanisms of 'the dual state'...you can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now." 
          French then offers that Renee Good died as she did because when an ICE agent began circling her car she thought she was still in the normative state, where, as Mr. French points out, "your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands."    
           Renee Good had no idea that in her encounter with that ICE agent she had crossed over a line from the normative to the prerogative state where, French writes, "you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. Your killer might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies."
         Of course, David French could have - and probably would have - said that Alex Pretti lost his life two weeks after Renee Good lost hers because in trying to help a woman who had been pepper sprayed in the face by ICE agents he, like Ms. Good, also crossed over from the normative state to the prerogative state.
​         I expect it's good to have thinkers like David French - and Ernst Fraenkel - provide us with the words to help us shape and clarify our our own thoughts in these troubled times. But why, in 2026 in the United States of America, should we have to be thinking such thoughts?

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/renee-good-ice-immunity.html

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dual-state-a-contribution-to-the-theory-of-dictatorship-ernst-fraenkel/53d8d232e332b285?ean=9781616190699&next=t&next=t&affiliate=12476