We currently live in a world that is rapidly changing. And depending on where you stand, many would say it is for the worse. Long before the recent attacks on Iran, the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, made the observation at Davos in mid-January that we have moved beyond a transition to a “rupture,” suggesting that the old world order is gone or disintegrating, and it is time to think about a new one. Similarly, the writer Masha Gessen observed that for a long time we have been in decline, and recently have begun to “fall off a cliff.”
For some time, many have wondered how to slow or hamper authoritarian impulses, and the incipient tyranny or established fascism that seems to be sweeping across the United States and the world. There is an emerging consensus, as reflected in these comments, that we have crossed that line, that we are no longer in an emerging, but in fact already within an authoritarian society.
President Trump openly mused about canceling elections; about having the states’ rights to regulate elections “taken over” by the federal government, seemingly suggesting that the president would have his agents and appointees decide how to run or decide elections, even in blue states. By some accounts, Project 2025, with prevailing rhetoric, has been implemented more than 50 percent.
This is an amazing time, and a dangerous time, and not just outside the United States. We see federal troops and ICE agents invading American cities, harassing and killing people on video. What is maybe even more amazing is that this is occurring with impunity, and the administration is defending it, even slandering the victims.
If we are in a time of rupture, if we are on the verge of falling off a cliff, and, in fact, not at the beginning, but within an established authoritarian order, what should our response be? What should we do differently?
One of the things to observe is that institutions and norms that we ordinarily expect to act as a break on impunity and violence and even meanness are not fully operating and sometimes not even operating at all. According to some reports, ICE agents have been secretly instructed to disregard the 4th Amendment. Trump and others within the administration wrongly maintain that non-citizens lack due process rights afforded by the 5th Amendment. And ICE officers seem to be defying the 1st Amendment. In one video, an ICE agent tells an American citizen observing their enforcement action that if they talk back, “I will erase your voice.” The Department of Justice may be covering up, rather than investigating, these crimes. And the Congress, especially the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, has failed to serve as a check on the executive branch’s overreach and lawlessness.
We see beautiful and wonderful examples from all over the country and indeed the world, particularly in Minnesota, of organizing and resistance. In that vein, we should consider different actions. The decisions and matrix of options pre- and post-rupture cannot be the same. The choices we make to oppose the established authoritarianism and to clawback our democracy and our rights are not the same.
Imagining our new world
I suggest we need to think about new and inventive ways both to oppose the dangerous norms being established, but also to promote something new going forward. Part of the difficulty of imagination is that we have historically thought in terms of left and right, Democrat and Republican, progressive and reactionary. And more generally, the order that was in place – what was often called the liberal or democratic order – was accepted by both Republicans and Democrats.
Most debates and disagreements (such as on marginal tax rates or reproductive rights) occurred within this accepted frame, or at the margins of it. Even if our leaders and institutions did not always hew to these principles, they outwardly and explicitly embraced them. Today, the Trump administration is not even pretending to care about this order. As Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for the Trump administration told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
What was this so-called “liberal order”? There is no simple answer to this, but I will identify a few key elements. In addition to respecting democratic principles, it begins with recognition of individual rights, the autonomy and dignity of the individual, including rights to speech, autonomy, religion, and conscience. But also the idea of equality, and due process for all. And, fundamentally, the idea of the rule of law, not that of a charismatic or empowered leader or individual, and that everyone is accountable.
There have long been critiques of this order, from Charles Mills to David Theo Goldberg. There have long been charges that this order was either at worst a deception to cover pillage, theft, slavery, and colonialism, or at best hypocritical, and those critics would not be entirely wrong. These ideas may not have been fully realized, but they were shared principles and values espoused from the Obama administration to the Bush administration, from the Johnson administration to the Nixon administration. And when they were violated, the violation undermined the legitimacy of the political actors that did so. Now, those values are not even embraced or espoused, as evidenced by the administration's statements and actions in places like Venezuela, Greenland, Gaza and Iran, just to name a few.
The validity of the criticism of the liberal order is not because those values or principles are inherently flawed or wrong, but because of our inability to always live up to them, which is different than abandoning those values or walking away from them. This was a critique of disappointment rather than a critique of the values themselves. What we are dealing with now and must confront is something entirely different.
The Trump administration is filled with so-called “post-liberals,” a variety of belief systems and ideologies that share a rejection of classical liberalism. Patrick Dineen, for example, maintains that liberalism has proven too “thin” or weak to give meaning, and has become corrosive to social bonds and community. Curtis Yarvin, another liberal critic, has infamously proposed abolishing our democracy and replacing it with a CEO-like monarch. And Peter Thiel has embraced the anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideas of Carl Schmitt.
This new and emergent group of thinkers has been described as “the Dark Enlightenment." This is not really a new set of ideas so much as a much older set of ideas, a pre-liberal set of ideas, that reject the values of equality, non-domination, and non-hierarchy, and instead embrace blood and soil, domination, and raw power over international law and international norms.
They are arguing for a much deeper and darker notion of society in the world. But they are no longer just arguing or pushing for it; they are implementing it at every level, in rejecting or dismantling of international treaties on climate to nuclear arms control to the unshackling of limits and constraints in almost every way throughout our government and society.
At a deeper level, this is the issue we must face: not just the unshackling, but the anti-liberal and pre-liberal paradigm that is now largely embraced on the right and in power. And by “we,” I do not mean only or even largely classical liberals in the traditional sense, or social justice advocates and activists on the other hand. I also mean those of us who believe in the principle of human equality as an ideal, those of us who believe in the rule of law and human rights, and in some version of fairness and human dignity, in non-domination and in belonging without othering.
To be clear: I am not saying we should return to the world before this moment, where we espoused values on the one hand, but seemed to defy them with our actions. I am saying we should go forward in a more robust way. We should oppose the notion of domination, that some people don’t matter because of their race, ethnicity, religion or the part of the world they are from. But we also have to think about what a world where everyone belongs and no one is othered could look like?
Belonging without othering
I was recently in Utah during the Sundance festival on a panel to discuss these issues. It was important to be in Utah, a state that is deeply red and deeply Mormon, but where many people were nonetheless grappling with these and other similar issues.
One audience member asked me, both as a challenge, but also as a provocation and a sincere query, “How is it possible to have belonging without othering?” The person was saying, isn’t it true that — in terms of everyday reality — some people don’t belong? In the midst of the fight over immigration, that seems to be a legitimate position. Do immigrants belong in the country? Do people belong in a certain neighborhood or school system? Are there conditions for belonging?
All of these are legitimate questions to be taken up. But I want to return to a founding principle reflected in the Declaration of Independence, in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and in many religious traditions, and elsewhere. This principle maintains that there is something deeply abiding in every human and even beyond humans that deserves respect. These traditions endorse this principle and maintain that we recognize it, not necessarily as a current reality, but as an aspiration that we reach for.
Does that mean we have completely open borders? Does it mean someone can come into your house and say, “I belong here”? Does it mean we can’t have places where our presence is conditional? Does it mean that anyone belongs in every context?
Our aspiration must be more sophisticated than that. One way of holding those two seemingly opposing ideas together is to recognize that there are different spheres in society, and that the imperative of belonging has greater force in some contexts than in others. In some spheres, our presence or belonging may be conditional. But in other spheres, it cannot be. In a free and democratic society, belonging cannot be denied based upon race, religion, or sexual orientation.
But even in spheres where belonging may be conditional, one must justify non-belonging. It may be acceptable for a school system to only serve people based upon geography, but not based upon race. The school system would have to justify any exclusion to maintain its legitimacy. That justification would be subject to scrutiny and democratic debate.
Ultimately, however, in any democracy, there are spheres in our society – important spheres – where everyone belongs unconditionally. What are those spheres, and can we expand them? I will give a few examples. Certainly the ability to participate in the political process, to express one's views, of conscience or politics, and exchange ideas, must be protected. But there may also be rights that are necessary to liberty or freedom or human dignity that must also be protected beyond political participation. One important example is the right to “due process.”
In the face of captures in the middle of the night, and deportations of people in the United States without seeing a lawyer or a judge to a confinement center in El Salvador, and other ICE violations on the constitutional rights of due process, the conservative New York Times columnist David French wrote an important opinion article reminding us that everyone enjoys due process rights. French reminded his readers that the status or even the moral worth – as fathers, breadwinners, and workers – is irrelevant to the issue at hand. He explained how such rights cannot be reduced to legal codes or liberty concerns, but touches something even more elemental. He writes that “the best arguments for due process transcend self-interest. They’re aimed straight at the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. They appeal directly to the idea that each of us is made in the image of God — that each of us is endowed with unalienable rights.”
Due process extends to everyone, not just citizens, not just law-abiding citizens, and not just white people. It extends to everyone: even the criminal, even the gang-members, and, he went on to say, even Nazis. Due process rights are universal. We should hold onto that universality as a requirement not just to maintain human dignity, but to ensure belonging without othering.
This vision of belonging without othering is also embodied in the late Pope Francis’s criticism of Trump’s immigration and refugee policies. In a February 2025 letter to US bishops, the pontiff redefined ordo amoris (order of love) against interpretations that prioritize national or familial bonds, emphasizing a universal, non-concentric love. He argued that true Christian love, inspired by the Good Samaritan, builds a fraternity open to all without exception, challenging views that limit responsibility based on proximity. Vice President JD Vance rebuked this letter in an interview on Fox, in which he said that there is an order of love: “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” At the 2024 Republican convention, Vance maintained that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” To illustrate that “shared history,” Vance told the audience about a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky near his family’s ancestral home, and about how in that cemetery, there were people born around the time of the Civil War, seven generations of them. He concluded, “Now that’s not just an idea, my friends… that is a homeland.” This blood and soil vision of citizenship revived what Jamelle Bouie described as one of “our worst traditions” (harkening back to the infamous Dred Scott decision) that creates a hierarchy of belonging and tiers citizenship.
To the extent that the far right – not Republicans, or conservatives, or anyone for that matter - maintain that some people are outside of the circle of human concern, and should be regarded as an inherent threat, it denies not just our human rights and our constitutional rights, but also our humanity itself. Moreover, to the extent that Stephen Miller and others maintain that the world is and ought to be “governed by strength …, governed by force …, governed by power,” that is a denial not just of democracy, liberalism, and the founding vision of this country, but also of the root values of Western civilization, and I would dare say the very idea of civilization.
There are people now questioning whether – in this age of AI – humanity deserves to continue to exist, or whether our civilization should transform into some form of transhuman or even post-human one. Some believe that humans are merely an intermediate step towards another species of intelligence, perhaps of our own creation. I will not delve into the details of such claims except to insist that we reject it. Human life, and other life, must be protected and celebrated. Any system must be evaluated in terms of how well it serves the flourishing of life, including organic life, and the systems that sustain that life.
This does not mean doubling down on traditional humanism, however. The fundamental flaw in humanist philosophy is that it reinforced the pre-humanist idea of domination of the planet and nature by humans, by giving humans pride of place in the universe. We need to embrace humanist values without facilitating the hierarchical rendering that places humans above all or some humans above other humans. This is a very tricky thing to do, but it is something that must be done. Nor does our concern for life need to be secular. But it does need to be pluralistic.
Claiming our values
Let us now return to the original question: given these trends, and the ruptures in our world, does bridging and belonging without othering make sense? It will not surprise the reader that my answer remains the same: yes, but not without examination or scrutiny. What do we do in the face of violence? Or meanness? Or ICE shooting people in the street because they are defending others? We should learn from what worked in Minnesota and elsewhere: collective action is important, speaking out is important, protecting each other is important. The practices should be picked up and spread across the country if not amplified across the world. And new things have to be experimented with. The whistles are an ingenious way to help, but there are others that must be tried.
But there are two important limitations that must be obeyed, and another limit that must be transgressed. The limit that must be transgressed is a belief in our own lack of agency. There is little doubt that many of us are, and remain, structurally disadvantaged, and institutionally constrained. But this is true of everyone, including the most powerful people and institutions in our society. Even the president, in theory, can be checked by other branches of government. The titans of AI, to take another example, claim that they can’t slow down anything because other firms will surpass them. Our leaders say we can’t slow down because China or other countries will overtake us. We cannot use our constraints as an excuse for inaction. We must do what we can, where we can, to the most we can.
In terms of the two limitations that must be obeyed, the first is to heed the principle of Gandhian non-violence. We must engage in these activities in a non-violent way. And, if we decide not to bridge – either out of fear or impossibility – we must avoid breaking. We must avoid the tendency or impulse to push others away because they are different, to deepen the chasms between peoples, even defensively. To break is to deny the humanity on the “other side.” Refusing to break does not mean we cannot oppose what the other side is doing, or saying, or believes in, but we must do so in a way that does not deny their humanity either.
Think about the abolition of the death penalty. Societies that have done so (as most have), do so not out of ultimate compassion for those subjected to such penalties, but rather out of an understanding that to subject anyone to such a penalty degrades the humanity and dignity of the people effectuating such policy. The abolition of the death penalty is not for the convicted criminal; but for society itself.
When we bridge and refuse to break, it is not for the other side. It is to claim our own values and embody our own humanity.
For people who would challenge these limitations and take exception, I would ask: what is the alternative? If we are willing to engage in violence, and deny the humanity of others, how are we different from those who would do the same?
I often say we should be hard on structures, but generous and kind to people. Instead, we are often kind to structures, and hard on people. I don’t pretend to have every answer. But I do know that we must step up, examine, and experiment, even if some of those will fail. We must organize. We need new stories, new institutions, and new expressions and ways of thinking.
The old form of classical liberalism, with all its foibles, is a paradigm in decay. There is a new world order emerging. But that does not mean abandoning those things of value, and we have reason to value, from the old order. The new order cannot be one we walk into blindly, but must be created together, with active participation rather than passive inevitability.
There is violence, fear, and rapid change in the world today. We don’t know whether it is going to land. We don’t control where it is going to land, but we do have agency. And agency requires that we be involved; not that we know how things will turn out or that our vision will prevail.
Involvement by itself is not enough. We must be grounded in certain moral values and commitments, and at the Institute, we believe that those values are belonging without othering, the human dignity of all people, and the value of life itself.
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Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this essay are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the author.
