The Fork in the Road

In historical terms, the event we are witnessing is an attempt at Gleichschaltung. The Nazi term is usually translated “coordination,” sometimes “consolidation” or “streamlining.” In this phase of totalitarianism, the Movement, now elected to power, uses its hold on the legitimate authority of the state to try, illegitimately, to align neutral, nonpartisan or independent institutions with the extra-state Movement, forging an obligation to the Leader rather than to the constitutional state.

The hallmark of totalitarianism at this stage isn’t genocide or extremes of violence. It is doubled or twofold organization. The Movement (here MAGA) or its party (here the Republican Party, parasitically devoured and replaced from within) generates a vision of second institutions, however hallucinatory or inverted, with which original or real institutions are then coordinated.

The task of coordination is to reshape, refound, purge and, by all means foul and fair, shake the underlying basis of institutions and install new, arbitrary ones. Because institutions only subsist by their personnel, a Gleichschaltung should unnerve the committed participants in institutions, first within government and then in civil society, and mold minds toward constant doubt and adjustment. Personnel should feel that they require alignment with the leader, or acknowledgment of arbitrary or irrelevant Movement goals, simply to continue to work and to avoid baseless investigation or denunciation.

The Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, memo M-25-13 of Jan. 27, 2025, directed all government agencies to stop disbursing funds to groups and institutions receiving federal financial assistance within 24 hours. The memo promised that this aid represented “more than $3 trillion” “of the nearly $10 trillion spent by the federal government.” Putting aside the military and entitlements paid directly to individual citizens, this is most of the government’s work. Primarily through grants to the 50 states, it is how the United States contributes tax dollars to every valued part of society: hospitals, schools, charities, airports, roads, police, water supply, housing, agriculture, food.

The memo’s justification for the “pause” was pseudo-constitutional nonsense, namely that employees of the “Executive Branch” “have a duty to align Federal spending” with “the will of the People as expressed through Presidential priorities.” On the contrary, the duty of the executive branch is to faithfully execute the laws and acts of Congress. “The will of the people” on these matters is expressed through 435 representatives and 100 senators. The activity directed to all agencies during this pause was rationally lunatic, or absurd but explicable — perfect for coordinating.

This halt in the circulation of oxygen through the social body — or, in constitutional terms, illegal impoundment of funds authorized by Congress — had the purpose of making all agencies search themselves, their programs and their recipients for any “activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders” — those “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” A follow-up clarification enumerated seven listed executive order areas whose echoes were specifically to be searched out: those to do with immigrants (“Protecting the American People Against Invasion”), overseas aid, the environment, energy, race and gender or other diversity, trans people (“Defending Women … and Restoring Biological Truth”), and abortion.

What is the function of demanding that the entire federal bureaucracy search itself for traces that it might be funding programs to which the Leader might object? Plainly, to dement it. Or make it paranoid, make it pusillanimous, make it humiliated and bring to the forefront the narcs, toadies, informers and eager collaborators who can be promoted to replace those who continue their jobs and assert the law. (When, over the following days, individual administrators resisted the vandalism of their agencies, they were labeled “insubordinate” and fired or told to resign, or else put on “administrative leave” — a firing for those who cannot be fired.)

Make America Paranoid Again. OMB memo M-25-13 was rescinded in a two-sentence memo, two days later, on Jan. 29. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared it was a “recission of the OMB memo” but “NOT a recission of the federal funding freeze.”

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The effect of the OMB memo was to spread a contagion to all sorts of institutions. I learned of its existence from a university-wide email from my employer’s president and provost, saying “We are working to get more information and determine next steps.” Panicked anecdotes came from hospitals, laboratories, schools. Reaching a layer further than anything run directly by state governments, the OMB memo had singled out disbursements to all “nongovernmental organizations” as requiring review for verboten topics. Domestically, that includes all public charities and nonprofits. Since “diversity, equity and inclusion” have become the normal form in which non-discrimination policies are framed, and since every charity or nonprofit will possess such policies while equal opportunity is still mandated by law, every NGO can guiltily turn out its pockets for this innocent contraband.

Thus evil goes precisely to those whose mission is to do good in the world — yet who are already bureaucratic, already humbled and flexible because of their perpetual need to raise funds. Suppose these good people must now imagine justifying themselves, whatever they do — teach, feed, care, heal — to their worst fantasies of the angry Leader. Would they really give up their programs, those funded ultimately by government, for whatever intersection occurs between their work and the select scapegoats of immigrants, trans people, diversity? This moral conundrum fell particularly on those whose everyday responsibility and devotion is to continuity and normalcy, experts who must hedge against risk and liability: administrators, comptrollers, general counsel’s offices. Personnel who adjust their reporting and incidentals, as a matter of course, to meet the changing outlines of federal regulations and grants, and whose usual selfless duty is to jealously guard their status as neutral, obedient, helpful.

The deviousness of this particular step in the path to coordination is to corner the most status-quo-seeking individuals into the temptation to do wrong, and dirty their hands for the sake of keeping the status quo, inviting them to do a “minor” wrong in order to steer back toward “normalcy” — unless they can see that the status quo has been utterly broken, and a minor wrong, in this instance, is major.

In the midst of it all, on TV news or in the ambient online sphere of images of “what is going on in America,” were the roundups of immigrants, ICE agents dressed up as commandos heading into poultry farms, construction sites, car washes; deportation flights; lines of shackled or zip-tied men and women, heads down in shame or exhaustion; publicity for orders to pursue migrants into hospitals, churches and schools; and a tent city going up at Guantanamo, last cradled in the American mind as a place to hold and torture 9/11 terrorists. It is hard to measure the transfer of anticipatory fear from one population to another. But it would need a very stony-hearted citizenry to witness this without alarm and dread.

Simple advice can be offered to anyone in a decision-making role at an institution. Every tub must stand on its own bottom. If you can find solidarity with other institutions like your own, do it. But even when you can’t prevent others from defecting, there need be no solidarity in weakness. Prepare to stand on your own for a bit. Reach into reserves if they exist. Delay programs if you must. Don’t change, or kneel, or find hostages to feed into a slobbering maw. Don’t coordinate yourself, don’t align yourself, don’t appease, when it may yet prove unnecessary.

There may well be normalcy again. But it lies on the other side — not in accommodation to this malevolent insanity, run by lackeys and toads. The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.

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Next, history tells us, comes the effort to undermine the professional and non-political civil service. In 1933, the National Socialists undertook this part of Gleichschaltung with a “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Under its articles, the regime purged the civil service according to several criteria. Some could be fired to reduce expenses and shrink the bureaucracy (Article 6), others because they could not be relied upon in their loyalty to the Nazi state (Article 4). And Jews were expelled from State employment because they were Jews (Article 3).

On Jan. 28, the day after the OMB had pushed out its poison pill to government agencies and let it leak downstream to civil society, the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to some 2 million federal employees, inviting them to resign. Beneath the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same heading used in Elon Musk’s mass email to Twitter employees after he bought the company — the email combined a variety of threats in preface to a deadlined offer that if recipients chose to quit immediately, they could stop all work and still receive pay for doing nothing for the next eight months.

As a starting point for a “reform of the federal workforce,” this is not a very efficient use of funds. But most of the email was spent promising peril to those who chose to stay. All workers must return to in-office work, but numerous offices would be closed and consolidated, so workers should be prepared to relocate. Firings were on their way and withdrawal of job protections for many who survived: most “federal agencies are likely to be downsized,” with “the reclassification to at-will status for a substantial number of federal employees.” Previously independent and nonpartisan positions would be made “accountable” to the new administration’s political appointees. The email promised elevation to underlings who proved loyalty (“our performance standards will be updated to reward and promote those that exceed expectations”) and investigation of those who were disloyal (“The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy. … Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability. … Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline”). Employees had a week to choose their futures.

Around them, meanwhile, agencies and employees began to be mowed down. Civilian foreign aid and development funds have been a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy throughout the Pax Americana — the benevolence alongside the bullying. So the new regime attempted to close USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development: bullying only from now on. Oversight and memory were next to go. President Donald Trump fired the inspectors general for 17 federal agencies, officials who root out waste, fraud and abuse. Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics. Trump fired the head of the Office of Independent Counsel. Trump fired the Archivist of the United States, who oversees the preservation of documentation.

The MAGA executive then turned its yellow eyes on the FBI. Career civil servants in charge of criminal investigations, national security and cybercrime were fired. A survey was distributed to thousands of special agents requiring them to inform on themselves for involvement in the bureau’s thousands of investigations over the past four years into the Jan. 6 insurrection, with the suggestion that the wrong answers could be grounds for firing. Investigators across the FBI’s core functions were reassigned to support ICE in its immigration roundups. The Wall Street Journal reported that special agents who normally work investigations were simply given “a list of names and addresses of suspected illegal immigrants,” and Trump’s criminal defense attorney, Emil Bove, made third in command at the Justice Department, “called at least a half-dozen FBI supervisors in several cities, some in the middle of the night, to make sure they were carrying out Trump’s tough-on-immigration agenda and publicizing their role on social media.”

The demand for publicity is a giveaway. To control personnel psychologically, and to destroy the integrity of an institutional mission, you must not only assign people to what they don’t do, and shouldn’t do, but make them seem to do it to themselves, display themselves, publicize their own transition — as in the television images this month of FBI agents in Colorado, standing around awkwardly while military-clad ICE agents smashed apartment doors to try to find immigrants. Unauthorized residence in the United States is a civil, not a criminal offense; immigration enforcement is not generally associated with any federal crime that the FBI would investigate. To turn these agents to rounding up civilians who are non-criminals — who would more often appear as victims, in FBI investigations of human trafficking, exploitation and gangs — is to acclimate them to grabbing people en masse, based on who answers the door, whose name is on some list, correctly or incorrectly.

Immigrants are the scapegoats whom Trump has chosen for roundups, but the business of rounding-up is itself an all-purpose tool in the assault on law. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents are requisitioned to pursue immigrants; Drug Enforcement Administration agents are requisitioned to pursue immigrants. Last week, Trump’s new director of Homeland Security asked the Treasury for power to requisition agents of the IRS to help find immigrants.

One thing Trump’s current coordination lacks is Jews; instead of the Jewish pollution, he has transgender. Trans persons are a comparably small minority to Jews, in government as in the general population, but they exist as phantasms ripe for exorcism. The actions so far against trans rights furnish an invitation for ordinary people to distinguish themselves as bigots — hurrying to change bathroom signage or, like the NCAA, rushing to prohibit athletes from sports.

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By numbers, the MAGA executive has fired relatively few so far. By actions, it is attempting to intimidate and demoralize many. It makes perfect sense, in a coordination, to appoint some heads of agencies paradoxically: to appoint a skeptic of public health to head Health and Human Services; a drunk TV soldier as secretary of defense; a national-security risk as the director of national intelligence. In situations of arbitrariness and systematic inversion, when bad is good and down is up, the only appeal is to the decision of the Leader. One asks what he intended, rather than whether it was right or wrong. And it is strictly instrumental to appoint defenders against Trump’s past impeachments and criminal conviction as attorney general, deputy attorney general and associate deputy attorney general, as the Leader has just done, with Bondi, Blanche and Bove. They become the gatekeepers of investigation and charging of new Trump crimes, and overseers of the prosecution of Trump’s rivals and opponents.

In recent days, reports from a variety of news sources say that loyalty tests are being administered to applicants for national security and law enforcement roles, including questions on the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, whether Biden actually lost the 2020 election and whether Jan. 6 was an “inside job” by the Democrats. The structure of paradox or lunatic reversal persists here. The MAGA regime has in essence turned the attack on the Capitol into an upside-down Reichstag fire. The National Socialists used an arson of the parliamentary building to suppress their opponents, facilitating the legal transfer of power from parliament to the chancellor, Hitler. Trump in 2021 encouraged the mob attack and takeover of the Capitol, where our parliament sat to certify the election of his opponent. Participation in the subsequent investigation of that event, or mere acknowledgment that Biden was legitimately elected, proves disqualification from spotless fealty to the re-elected Leader of an insurrection.

Then there is the introduction of a “Schedule F” classification into Title 5 of the U.S. Code, concerning civil service roles and protections. According to a New York Times analysis, the office of the president currently appoints only about 4,000 non-military federal employees. Under Executive Order 14171 of Jan. 20, “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions” — reinstating an effort Trump originally made in the desperate final months of his first term — about 50,000 career independent civil service jobs are to be reclassified as political appointments, which the president may fill with loyalists or remove without protections.

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Historically, victims and close observers of authoritarianism — and of the various paths by which constitutional orders find their necessary habits of unification, centralization and efficient administration in the hands of single charismatic maniacs or the tentacles of a corrupt few — have done something to benefit their successors in the future. They have recorded lists of symptoms and conditions, like checklists.

The second Trump administration is checking many more boxes than have been checked before in the United States. Not that previous administrations haven’t checked any, nor that any outcome is inevitable; but we face a threat not seen recently, and not in this country. A threat that, paradoxically, if turned back, will lead people later to say, that was no threat at all, that was trivial. The catastrophe did not come to pass. I sympathize with the articles that say, don’t panic, don’t exaggerate, it can’t be as bad as all that.

One can identify a course of action as lunatic without dismissing it. Evil lunacy, the forms of comedy that become cruelty when acted out upon real people, is perfectly coherent. Trump is the most brilliant comedian on the American stage and certainly the best comedian ever to become president. It only adds to his crimes that he brings evil to comedy, too. (Asked if he would visit the crash site of the worst civilian air disaster in a generation, as American Airlines Flight 5342 was being recovered from the Potomac: “You want me to go swimming?”)

In this moment, Trump appears not as the destroyer, but the tempter. Tempting reasonable people to keep trying to be reasonable and do it to themselves. Coordinate themselves. Go along, seemingly to keep circumstances normal, which are, really, aberrant.

A great deal will depend upon a great many individuals. One box that has not yet been checked is the demand that they inform on their colleagues. For now, they are pressed to inform on themselves. In the “Fork in the Road” appeal for resignations with unearned benefits, in the firings of agency leaders, there is an echoing effort to approach each person alone, to force them into an isolated, individual choice, with the equivalent of a gun to the head — as opposed to the courage that comes from standing up with other people in a shared predicament. The goal is to get people to defect, without the time or opportunity to talk to others, and develop a collective courage.

Individuals have begun to show courage in ways that might seem contradictory. Federal attorneys resign when called upon to act corruptly; federal civil servants encourage one another not to resign, when the goal is to fill their chairs with flunkies or to eliminate their function altogether. “Hold the line, don’t resign” has been reported as a slogan. The apparent tension between resignation and non-resignation is a sign of strength, in resistance to coordination. In a bureaucratic showdown, heroism need not be grandiose. It is the nature of bureaucracy to produce far-reaching results from tiny administrative actions, through chains and repetitions. There is everything to be gained from every refusal, from plain unwillingness to fall into line.

Odd as it may sound, the antidote to totalitarianism, recorded by those who lived through it, is associational life. De-atomization and the creation of loyalties to other people that can’t be, or simply aren’t, coordinated with a regime. In a time of temptation to the bad, or to the worse, association is what lets people find the courage to refuse and the practical standing to do so. If things get very bad, it is also associational life that helps people circulate information, hide, escape and travel. Combinations of associations like churches, clubs, professional or activist societies, local government and local agencies, stretching from close-range to middle-range, are practically efficacious in kinds of details that can’t be seen from above, or aren’t seen until too late and are too banal to punish: accidentally failing to find or arrest someone, sponsoring and sheltering, and passing money.

In past weeks, the emergent centers of refusal and opposition to coordination have been two kinds of institutions, at drastically different scales and positions in the nation-state system: public sector unions — specifically the unions of federal employees of individual agencies — and state governments. Before this month, I had not thought anything or even known of the existence of the National Federation of Federal Employees, or the National Treasury Employees Union, or the American Federation of Federal Employees, or the American Foreign Service Association, or for that matter the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents’ Association or the Federal Law Enforcement Officers’ Association. They, along with state attorneys general, have been filing suits to block the decimation of the workforce.

At every level, people will need to think of decoupling, alongside whatever strengthening of associational life is possible now. Any institution, at any scale, would do well to prepare to sever dependencies or necessary links with organizations larger or higher, even as it thinks of gatherings or sympathies or mutual aid with peers or organizations its own size. Decoupling is a means to halt contagion, preserving the fabric of society in its separate fibers, until a later date. It’s a curious and seemingly contradictory situation to be in, but, again, a means of strength: signal every solidarity you can, but cut the mooring lines that lead from a captured state to a free people.