The oldest lie man-kings ever told

The Scapegoat Machine
Race, Caste, Propaganda, Economic Anxiety, and Elite Power in 2026 America—and the Coalition Politics That Can Counter Authoritarian Drift
There is an old chain. It runs from economic pain to caste to rhetoric to propaganda to elite benefit to authoritarian drift—and it makes enemies of people who might otherwise act together. In 2026 America, that chain is running. Economic anxiety is real: prices are rising, wages are not keeping pace, housing is unaffordable for many, health care is financially catastrophic for others, and the political system appears more responsive to donors than to constituents. That distress is being explained not as the product of decades of policy choices that shifted wealth upward and weakened labor, public services, and democratic accountability—but as the product of immigrants, Black communities, LGBTQ people, educators, bureaucrats, protesters, and other designated enemies. The explanation is false. It is politically useful. And it is protecting the power arrangements actually responsible for the distress.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a system with interlocking parts, each of which serves a function, each of which makes rational sense to those who operate it. Understanding it as a system rather than a collection of bad actors is what makes analysis useful rather than merely moralistic. And it is why the counter must be equally systemic: factual analysis and coalition politics, working together on every link in the chain.
I. The Chain
Six elements interact to produce the scapegoat machine in its 2026 form.
Economic anxiety supplies the fuel. Four decades of policy choices—tax cuts concentrated at the top, erosion of labor power, defunding of public services, corporate consolidation, weak accountability for concentrated wealth—have produced real material insecurity for working- and middle-class households. That insecurity is not imaginary, and it does not need to be manufactured. It only needs to be explained.
Caste supplies the sorting infrastructure. The United States inherited a racial hierarchy that assigns rank by birth, marks that rank through race, and trains people to absorb the ranking as common sense. That infrastructure does not need to be rebuilt for each generation. It needs only to be activated. It decides which groups can be cast as enemies and which audiences will find that casting emotionally resonant.
Rhetoric supplies the activation. Dehumanizing language—describing immigrants as poison, vermin, garbage, invaders, or animals—changes the moral status of the target. It teaches audiences to see a group as contamination rather than as people. Once that shift occurs, cruelty can be framed as hygiene, removal as restoration, punishment as self-defense.
Propaganda supplies the maintenance. The machine cannot rely on a single speech or a single fear. It must continuously control which conflicts dominate public attention—which crimes are nationalized, which groups are associated with danger, which economic causes are made invisible. This works not primarily through lying but through salience: choosing which reality the public lives inside.
Elite power supplies both the motive and the mechanism. The misdirection benefits those whose tax rates, regulatory environment, labor costs, and political accountability are protected when public anger points elsewhere. They fund politicians and media that provide this misdirection, decline to fund those who name actual causes of economic harm, and benefit when the public fights horizontally—group against group—rather than vertically, against the policies and institutions that structure inequality.
Authoritarian drift is the product. When the chain runs effectively, democratic institutions—courts, civil service, free press, oversight agencies, election administration—become obstacles to the leader's claim to speak for "the real people" against their enemies. Each institutional constraint gets reframed as obstruction. Each attack on institutional independence gets reframed as accountability.
The counter must match the chain. Factual analysis interrupts rhetoric and propaganda: it restores accuracy, names actual mechanisms of harm, and denies the lie its unopposed run. Coalition interrupts caste and the misdirection of elite power: it builds solidarity across the lines the machine enforces, refuses the psychological wage of status hierarchy, and redirects anger toward real causes. Neither works alone. Together, they form the only politics capable of breaking the chain.
II. The Fuel: Economic Anxiety That Is Real
The first obligation of honest analysis is not to dismiss economic anxiety as fake or manipulated. It is both a lived reality and the raw material the machine requires.
By mid-2026, Americans had concrete reasons to feel squeezed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices rose 4.2 percent over the twelve months ending in May 2026. Energy prices rose 23.5 percent; gasoline rose 40.5 percent. Those numbers matter because energy and gasoline costs are not abstractions—they shape commuting, groceries, heating bills, small-business expenses, and the daily sense that income cannot pace outgo. A labor market can show payroll growth while households feel worse off if costs rise faster than earnings, if debt service is expensive, and if necessities absorb more of the paycheck.
The tax policy context makes the distribution of pain explicit. The top marginal federal income tax rate has fallen from 70 percent in the late 1970s to 37 percent today. Preferential treatment of investment income allows the wealthiest households to pay lower effective rates than wage workers. The 2025 reconciliation law—Public Law 119-21, branded by its supporters as the One Big Beautiful Bill—sharpened this. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the law decreases resources for households toward the bottom of the income distribution while increasing resources for those in the middle and toward the top. It estimated the law increases the unified federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over 2025–2034. It cuts federal and state in-kind transfers by roughly $900 billion, primarily through Medicaid and SNAP. Oxfam estimated that by 2027 the top 0.1 percent of earners would receive an average annual tax reduction of $311,000, while households earning under $15,000 annually would face net tax increases.
The first point this essay must refuse to lose: the anxiety is real. Working-class Americans are not wrong to feel that something has been taken from them. The error—or rather, the lie—is in what they are told to blame.
Inequality also damages democracy structurally. A 2025 PNAS study found that income inequality is one of the strongest predictors of democratic erosion, including in wealthy and long-established democracies. Research summarized by the Roosevelt Institute found that as the top one percent captures more income, legislative bodies act less, less meaningfully, and more in favor of economic elites. Inequality does not merely produce poverty. It produces political paralysis—and political paralysis feeds the belief that democratic institutions cannot solve ordinary people's problems. That belief is what authoritarian politics feeds on. When democracy appears unable to deliver material improvement, the strongman offers a different bargain: not justice, but revenge; not structural reform, but punishment; not "who took the wealth?" but "who contaminated the nation?"
III. The Infrastructure: Caste as Pre-Built Sorting System
The scapegoat machine does not build its targeting infrastructure from scratch. It activates one already built.
Isabel Wilkerson's caste framework explains why racial hierarchy persists even when explicit racial law changes. Caste assigns rank. Race marks the rank visually and socially. The hierarchy teaches people who is presumed innocent and who is presumed dangerous, who is considered hardworking and who is considered dependent, who belongs and who must constantly prove belonging. It does not require every participant to feel conscious hatred. It requires only that enough people absorb the social ranking as common sense.
This is why caste politics is so effective during periods of economic anxiety. A person may be materially harmed by the same economic system that harms others, but caste offers psychological compensation. W.E.B. Du Bois called this the psychological wage of whiteness: even when poor and working-class white people were denied many material benefits, racial hierarchy offered something in return—public deference, symbolic superiority, the assurance that someone else remained below. That status compensation could bind ordinary people to elite political projects that materially harmed them, because the alternative—solidarity across racial lines—required surrendering the ranking that provided their sense of standing.
This is not a historical curiosity. It is the operating logic of contemporary American politics, now delivered through television and social media to tens of millions of people in real time. The psychological wage still pays. And those who benefit from misdirecting economic anxiety from its actual causes still collect the interest.
Caste also explains backlash. Hierarchies are threatened not only by the failure of the subordinated group but by its success. A hierarchy premised on natural inferiority is destabilized by evidence of intelligence, talent, civic achievement, or moral worth in those it has designated inferior. This is why, as Wilkerson describes, backlash against Black, immigrant, and other marginalized communities tends to intensify when they achieve visible progress. Equality can feel like demotion to those whose sense of self was built on inherited rank—not because any material right has been taken, but because the ranked world they were promised is failing to hold.
Michelle Alexander's analysis of mass incarceration extends the framework forward. After the fall of formal Jim Crow, the criminal justice system became, she argues, a new racial caste mechanism: labeling people "criminals" permitted the revival of exclusions—from voting, housing, employment, civic participation—that had become legally impermissible. The system used race-neutral language. But neutrality of language is not neutrality of effect. American racial hierarchy has repeatedly adapted when one language became unacceptable: the vocabulary changes, the sorting persists. In 2026, the operative terms are "crime," "invasion," "merit," "dependency," "law and order," and "real Americans." None names race explicitly. All carry caste meaning.
Cedric Robinson's racial capitalism framework grounds the structural argument: race and class are not separate tracks that occasionally intersect. Capitalism in the Atlantic world developed through racial slavery, colonial extraction, and labor hierarchy. Race was not incidental to economic development; it organized who could own, who could vote, who had legal standing. This means attempts to address economic inequality while treating race as a side issue are attempts to fix the machine while leaving its infrastructure intact.
IV. The Combustion: How Rhetoric and Propaganda Fire the Engine
Between material anxiety and political violence stand rhetoric and propaganda. Together they transform the passive infrastructure of caste into active targeting.
Rhetoric is the grammar of dehumanization. It is not decoration; it is political action. It decides who counts as "the people," who counts as a threat, what facts are relevant, and what forms of state power become permissible. When leaders describe immigrants as poison, vermin, garbage, invaders, or animals, the language changes the moral status of the target. It narrows the circle of empathy. It makes due process feel like indulgence, cruelty feel like self-defense, and the public into an audience for punishment.
Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric provides the 2026 case study. Reuters documented Trump's use of "poisoning the blood of our country"—language the Anti-Defamation League identified as directly echoing Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf—along with "vermin" and "animals" to describe immigrants and political opponents. At a December 2025 Cabinet meeting, Trump called Somali immigrants "garbage." He used expulsionist language against Representative Ilhan Omar, an American citizen, prompting supporters to chant "send her back." He described migrants as building a military "army," as deliberately released prison criminals, as conducting a military "invasion." None of these claims had evidentiary support. They were not primarily truth claims. They were emotional activations: designed to induce fear, define a group as a mortal threat, and position extraordinary state power as ordinary self-defense.
That is the grammar of authoritarian propaganda: manufacture an existential threat, attach it to a scapegoated group, present extreme power as mere protection.
Rhetoric alone, however, does not sustain the machine. Propaganda does the maintenance work—and it operates through a mechanism that standard fact-checking often misses. Research published by CEPR in 2026 found that political propaganda can intensify polarization without introducing new information at all. Simply choosing which conflicts dominate public attention—which fears to foreground, which groups to associate with danger, which crimes to nationalize—is sufficient to sharply increase factual and normative disagreement. Propaganda wins not only by convincing people of false propositions. It wins by forcing them to live inside a selected conflict.
If a politician claims immigrants are causing a crime wave, a fact-checker can show that the evidence points the other way. But if the public is shown isolated crimes attributed to immigrants every night while the correction runs once in a newspaper, the emotional reality overrides the statistical one. The bandwidth of attention is the terrain.
Institutional gaslighting works the same way. Authoritarian drift depends on weakening the shared factual world. If every court ruling, scientific report, investigative story, civil servant's testimony, or watchdog finding can be dismissed as corrupt whenever it contradicts the leader, citizens lose the ability to adjudicate truth outside of loyalty. The question stops being "What is true?" and becomes "Whose side are you on?" Propaganda does not need to make everyone believe every lie. It needs only to make truth feel unreachable—to produce a cynicism so total that the leader's lies function as just another performance rather than a disqualification.
The media environment is structurally designed to accelerate this. Oxfam reported in 2026 that billionaires own more than half of the world's largest media companies and all of the main social media platforms. That does not mean every article or algorithm operates on direct instruction from a billionaire. It means the infrastructure of attention—what gets amplified, what generates engagement, what gets suppressed—is not politically neutral. When media ownership is concentrated among people who benefit from tax cuts, deregulation, weakened labor, and reduced accountability, the relationship between elite economic interest and the public information environment is structural. The result is not conspiracy but incentive: the same misdirection serves many actors who never had to coordinate.
V. The Payoff: Elite Power and the Logic of Horizontal Conflict
The question the machine is designed to prevent is the simplest one: who benefits?
The scapegoat machine protects vertical power by intensifying horizontal conflict. Ordinary people are encouraged to fight one another over identity, status, and symbolic belonging while policy redistributes resources upward and weakens democratic checks. The people who have benefited most from four decades of deregulation, tax cuts at the top, erosion of labor protections, and the defunding of public services are not working-class voters in de-industrialized communities. They are shareholders, private equity managers, and owners of capital—who are also the funders and ideological patrons of the political movement directing those same voters to blame immigrants, Black Americans, LGBTQ people, educators, and "woke corporations" for the conditions that concentrated capital has actually produced.
U.S. history contains repeated instances of this pattern. Poor white workers and Black workers have often had convergent material interests—in wage floors, labor rights, public services, housing, health care. Racial hierarchy has repeatedly taught white workers to experience Black advancement as their diminishment rather than their potential. The result has been harm to Black communities and the systematic weakening of working-class power overall. Divide-and-rule does not only oppress the targeted group. It lowers the ceiling for everyone except those at the very top.
The feedback loop is self-sealing: inequality produces anxiety; policy stagnation prevents relief; propaganda redirects anger toward vulnerable groups; voters reward politicians who promise punishment rather than redistribution; those politicians deepen inequality through tax cuts, deregulation, and attacks on labor and democratic administration; deeper inequality produces more anxiety; the cycle begins again. The ordinary person in this loop receives a symbolic wage—the feeling of being defended against an enemy. The elite receives the material wage: law, wealth, regulatory capture, and institutional power.
That is the oldest trick. Give the public an enemy below, and the powerful above become harder to see.
VI. The Product: Authoritarian Drift as System Output
Democratic backsliding rarely announces itself. It proceeds by degrees, each step defensible in isolation, the direction of travel visible only in aggregate.
In the United States between 2025 and 2026, the pattern included: deployment of masked federal agents for warrantless arrests in immigrant communities; detention without documented legal basis; defiance of court orders; public claims of near-absolute executive authority; social media posts depicting the president as a king; use of military imagery for domestic political display; targeted use of federal power against journalists, universities, law firms, and political opponents; and the systematic restructuring of the civil service toward personal loyalty.
The mechanisms are specific. The White House order implementing Schedule Policy/Career designated broad categories of career positions as "policy-influencing" and exempted them from standard adverse-action procedures, making career civil servants more vulnerable to removal for resisting executive directives. An accompanying January 2025 executive order framed career employees' resistance to executive leadership as itself a cause for removal, inverting the meaning of accountability: professional neutrality became the problem; personal loyalty became the solution. A federal court ordered the administration in December 2025 to stop warrantless civil immigration arrests in Washington, D.C., and a May 2026 compliance order was required. The Supreme Court ruled that people targeted for removal under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to notice, an opportunity to challenge removal, and judicial review; a Fifth Circuit panel rejected the administration's "invasion or predatory incursion" rationale. By early 2026, Gallup found that roughly 29 percent of Americans named government dysfunction and political leadership—not the economy, not immigration—as the country's most important problem.
The better analytical framework is pattern recognition, not claims of imminent totalitarianism. Democracies erode through cumulative stress: attacks on independent media, loyalty tests in administration, politicization of law enforcement, normalization of emergency powers, demonization of internal enemies, weakening of oversight, intimidation of civil society. The authoritarian move presents itself as accountability. The democratic test is not the label but the direction: does power become more accountable to law, or more personally loyal to a leader?
This is where caste and authoritarianism connect most directly. Authoritarian politics needs enemies. Caste supplies ready-made enemies whose suffering can be rationalized. Once a group is imagined as criminal, foreign, or subhuman, exceptional treatment becomes easier to defend. The public is told that rights are being stripped only from "them." But the state that normalizes lawless power against one group has established a precedent that can expand. The group changes. The logic does not.
VII. The Test Case: Immigration
Immigration is the clearest contemporary example because it brings every link of the chain together: real material pressures, racialized targeting, dehumanizing rhetoric, salience propaganda, elite misdirection, and the expansion of emergency state power—all in one policy domain.
The scapegoating story says immigrants are driving crime, stealing jobs, and degrading national life. The evidence does not support that story. A Cato Institute analysis of Texas data from 2013 to 2022—one of the rare state datasets that records immigration status in criminal records—found homicide conviction rates of 2.2 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants and 3.0 for native-born Americans. The National Academies of Sciences concluded that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth and little evidence of broad negative effects on native-born employment, while acknowledging distributional pressures in specific low-wage sectors and fiscal pressures on state and local governments.
A factual analysis does not require pretending immigration creates no policy challenges. Local school systems, courts, hospitals, and housing markets can face real strain. Workers in some low-wage sectors can experience pressure, especially where employers exploit undocumented status to suppress wages. Those are governance problems. Governance problems have governance solutions: immigration courts, labor enforcement, housing investment, legal pathways, asylum capacity. They do not justify the claim that immigrants are an invading criminal force that must be dehumanized before the law applies.
A democratic response asks: How do we expand immigration courts? How do we punish employers who exploit vulnerable workers? How do we fund receiving communities? How do we build housing? How do we protect asylum rights while managing capacity?
An authoritarian response asks: Who can be punished publicly so the leader looks strong?
That distinction is the democratic test. It tests whether the public will defend due process for people who have been successfully dehumanized. If a government can convince citizens that one group is too dangerous for ordinary law, it has established a template. The first victims are noncitizens. But the lesson learned by power is broader: dehumanize a group successfully enough, and legal limits become negotiable.
VIII. Why Single-Tool Counters Fail
Three responses to scapegoating politics are commonly offered. All three fail when deployed alone.
The first: stop talking about race and focus only on class. That fails because race has been one of the primary instruments used to divide class. Ignoring racial hierarchy does not dissolve it—it makes people less able to recognize when it is being activated. Colorblind rhetoric can sound fair, but in a society already structured by unequal history, refusing to name race can preserve racial outcomes while denying racial responsibility. If a policy produces racially unequal results but discourse refuses to name race, the inequality gets blamed on culture, crime, or individual failure. That is exactly how racist ideas adapt: they no longer need to claim biological inferiority. They claim neutrality while ignoring unequal conditions. Robin DiAngelo's work documents how defensiveness around racial discussion—anger, withdrawal, attempts to recenter dominant-group comfort—makes these conversations harder and easier to manipulate. Cedric Robinson's racial capitalism framework clarifies why: race and class were never separate tracks. They developed together. Fixing one while ignoring the other leaves the machine running.
The second: correct the lies, fact-check the claims. That also fails alone. Propaganda wins primarily through salience, not deception. Correcting a specific lie does not interrupt the incentive to produce the next one, and it does not change the emotional landscape built by a hundred repetitions of the fear. A counter-strategy that operates only on accuracy within the machine's chosen conflicts is fighting on the machine's terms. The counter must also compete on which conflicts are made salient, which interests are named, and which solidarity is made visible.
The third: mobilize, demonstrate, show scale. That fails alone too. Scale is not durable power. A protest demonstrates opposition; a coalition governs the direction of a country. The No Kings movement grew to an estimated eight million participants across more than 3,300 sites on March 28, 2026—one of the largest sustained protest movements in American history. But analysis noted that earlier protests had been overwhelmingly white, with later events showing only modest progress toward multiracial breadth. A demographically narrow coalition, however large, is susceptible to the claim that it represents a particular interest group rather than a common one. Divide-and-rule works on protest movements as well as on working classes.
The effective counter requires all three simultaneously—and integrated with each other. Factual grounding, honest racial analysis, and multiracial material coalition. None works alone. Together they form the only political formation capable of breaking the chain.
IX. Factual Analysis as Political Practice
Facts do not automatically defeat authoritarian propaganda. But without factual grounding, resistance loses its discipline. It becomes vulnerable to rumor, emotional escalation, and mirror-image manipulation. And without facts, the chain of responsibility cannot be restored.
A fact-based democratic practice requires five movements.
Name the claim precisely. Vague claims resist precise refutation. If the argument is that immigrants are causing a national crime wave, say so explicitly before responding. Precision exposes the claim to evidence.
Establish the evidence. The Cato Institute's Texas analysis found homicide conviction rates of 2.2 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants versus 3.0 for native-born Americans. The National Academies found immigration has positive long-run economic effects while acknowledging distributional pressures requiring policy response. The claim of a foreign criminal invasion is not supported by the record; the claim that some communities face real local strain requiring real policy solutions is.
Identify who benefits from the claim. Anti-immigrant panic benefits politicians who promise punishment, media systems that profit from fear, and employers who avoid scrutiny for using undocumented labor to suppress wages. This is not an accusation of coordination. It is a structural observation. Follow the incentive, and the machine becomes visible.
Name the target as human. Data disproves a lie; stories break the emotional architecture of dehumanization. People must be able to see immigrants as workers, parents, neighbors, and community members—Black communities as communities rather than crime statistics—public servants as actual workers rather than abstract bureaucrats. Without this, the factual correction can win the argument and still lose the audience.
Name the actual solution. If wages are the problem: strengthen labor law and punish employers who exploit vulnerable workers. If border processing is the problem: fund immigration courts and legal pathways. If housing costs are the problem: build housing and regulate speculation. If health care is the problem: reduce medical costs and expand coverage. Real problems have policy solutions. Scapegoating replaces solutions with spectacle.
This method is not pedantry. It is a method for restoring the chain of responsibility—for asking the public to look past the nearest visible target and locate the actual mechanism of harm. That is the political act at the center of democratic resistance.
X. Coalition as Structure: The Opposite of Scapegoating
Scapegoating isolates. Coalition connects.
Scapegoating says your neighbor is your enemy. Coalition says your neighbor may be harmed by the same system in a different way. Scapegoating says safety comes from exclusion. Coalition says safety comes from shared power.
A durable democratic coalition must be multiracial, cross-class, and materially grounded. It cannot avoid race in the name of unity, because that leaves the divide-and-rule mechanism intact. It cannot avoid class in the name of representation, because that leaves economic anxiety available for demagogues. It must do both: name racial hierarchy honestly and address material insecurity directly.
That coalition would connect labor unions, civil rights groups, immigrant organizations, faith communities, tenant unions, student movements, veterans, disability-rights advocates, public-sector workers, rural organizers, health care activists, teachers, and local communities suffering the effects of economic instability. Its power comes from refusing the false choice between economic justice and anti-racism—not because these are competing obligations to be traded off, but because they describe the same structure from different angles.
Its central message must be clear: no group is free when the state can pick off one group at a time. If immigrants can be denied due process, citizens can later be denied due process—the precedent is the point. If Black protest is criminalized, labor protest can be criminalized. If educators are censored, students lose access to truth. If civil servants are purged for disloyalty, public services become political weapons. If poor people are taught to blame other poor people, the wealthy keep writing the rules.
Coalition also requires strategic generosity without moral surrender. People do not abandon scapegoating primarily because they are shamed into silence. Many need a better account of their suffering—one that preserves dignity while challenging the lie. The task is not to excuse racism or authoritarianism. The task is to separate people from the manipulative narratives aimed at them, offer a more accurate account of power, and invite them into shared action.
The most effective message is not: you are bad for being afraid.
The more effective message is: you were lied to about who caused your fear.
This is also the argument about the psychological wage. The case for coalition is not that those who have been given the psychological wage of whiteness should feel guilty about it. The case is that the wage is worth less than it appears—that it comes at the cost of actual wages, actual housing, actual health care, and actual democratic power that they share an interest in claiming—and that the people they have been told are their enemies are in fact their potential allies. The hierarchy costs everyone it nominally elevates. It keeps them fearful, rigid, and dependent on status for a sense of worth that should come from power and dignity instead.
XI. History: Warning and Template
The United States has faced versions of this contest before. The record offers neither automatic optimism nor despair—only instruction.
Reconstruction after the Civil War was a genuine experiment in multiracial democracy. Black Americans voted, held office, built institutions, and worked to remake the South. That experiment was not defeated because it failed naturally. It was overthrown through organized white supremacist violence, elite compromise, and the deliberate withdrawal of federal protection. The lesson is not that multiracial democracy is impossible. The lesson is that it requires active defense—that democratic gains are reversible, that reversal requires organized effort, and that those reversals are almost always presented as restoration rather than regression.
The New Deal demonstrated what is possible when a mass movement forces a structural economic response. Under pressure from labor organizing, Depression-era desperation, and the threat of more radical alternatives, the federal government built institutions that reduced inequality, strengthened labor, and expanded social protection. But the New Deal reproduced racial hierarchy: agricultural and domestic workers—disproportionately Black—were excluded from Social Security and labor protections through legislative compromises with southern Democrats. The lesson is not that economic reform requires racial compromise. The lesson is that racial compromise in economic reform is a wound that festers. It undermines the coalition and must eventually be addressed, or it will eventually collapse what was built.
The civil rights movement demonstrated that disciplined, morally clear, strategically organized resistance can transform law and public consciousness against organized opposition. It also demonstrated that every expansion of democratic inclusion produces a counter-movement from those invested in the old hierarchy. Progress generates backlash. That is not a reason for despair. It is the normal cost of democratic change—and the reason democratic gains must be institutionalized, not merely won once.
The Black radical tradition—from Frederick Douglass through Ida B. Wells through Du Bois through Ella Baker through contemporary organizing—has never treated oppressed people as merely victims inside systems of domination. It has produced analysis, organization, culture, and visions of freedom that exceed the categories imposed on them. That tradition is not incidental to the American democratic project. It is one of its central engines. The clearest-eyed accounts of how American power actually operates—how caste works, how racial capitalism functions, how propaganda serves hierarchy—have come disproportionately from the people most directly harmed by the machine. That analysis is a resource, not a grievance.
Conclusion: Restore the Chain of Responsibility
The through-line of 2026 America is not complicated, though it is systematically obscured.
Economic anxiety is real and measurable. Inequality is documented and worsening. The policy choices responsible for it are specific and, in principle, reversible. The groups being blamed for it—immigrants, Black Americans, LGBTQ people, educators, public servants—did not cause it. The rhetoric deployed against them is not truth-telling. It is misdirection that protects the power arrangements actually responsible.
The scapegoat machine works by breaking the chain of responsibility. It teaches people to locate their suffering in the nearest visible other rather than in the policy choices and power arrangements that actually shape the conditions of their lives. It turns fear into cruelty, confusion into loyalty, and hierarchy into common sense. It asks Americans to surrender democratic judgment in exchange for emotional certainty: the certainty of an enemy and the promise of a protector.
A fact-based coalition politics does the opposite. It restores the chain of responsibility. It asks what is true, who benefits, who is targeted, what policy would actually solve the problem, and who must act together to win it. It names racial hierarchy without reducing everything to race. It names economic insecurity without reducing everything to class. It refuses the false choices the machine offers—race versus class, facts versus values, democracy versus material politics. Those separations are part of the trap.
The real choice in 2026 is between a politics that converts pain into domination and a politics that converts pain into solidarity. The first produces scapegoats and strongmen. The second produces democratic power.
The scapegoat machine is old. So is the resistance to it.
The question is not whether that tradition of resistance exists. The question is whether enough people, in enough places, with enough organizational discipline and factual clarity, will choose to inhabit it now.
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI release, May 2026; Congressional Budget Office analysis of Public Law 119-21; Oxfam, "Resisting the Rule of the Rich" (2026) and U.S. distributional analysis of P.L. 119-21; University of Chicago / PNAS study on economic inequality and democratic erosion (2025); Roosevelt Institute, "Restoring Democratic Institutions" (2025); Jana Morgan and Nathan Kelly, legislative inequality research; ITUC analysis of billionaire power and democratic erosion (January 2026); CEPR research on propaganda and political polarization (April 2026); Cato Institute, Texas criminal conviction rate analysis, 2013–2022; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, "The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration"; Isabel Wilkerson, "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" (2020); W.E.B. Du Bois, "Black Reconstruction in America" (1935); Michelle Alexander, "The New Jim Crow" (2010); Robin DiAngelo, white fragility framework; Cedric Robinson, "Black Marxism" (1983); Reuters documentation of Trump anti-immigrant rhetoric, 2024; PBS NewsHour and Associated Press, Trump Cabinet meeting, December 2025; ACLU of D.C. litigation materials on warrantless immigration arrests, 2025–2026; ACLU and Supreme Court materials on Alien Enemies Act litigation, 2025–2026; White House and OPM documentation of Schedule Policy/Career, 2025–2026; Gallup "Mood of the Nation" survey, February 2026; Reuters, Britannica, and Guardian documentation of No Kings protest movement, 2025–2026.

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anonymous Political June 11, 2026 at 6:04 pm 1 0