Can Democracy Survive a Culture of Cruelty?

From a dehumanizing deportation game to the AfD’s school agenda, the right is remaking identity. The states are our wall — if they defend culture, too.

What do a new White House arcade video game and Germany’s AfD party have in common? An ideology. And a method. Change what it means to be American or German, and you change society’s direction.

So we have no choice but to fight over what it means to be American.

This month, the White House website launched a new arcade with gamified versions of key Trump administration policy ideas. The most striking is a version of the Nokia phone game Snake, rebranded as Rio Run. Instead of a snake eating glowing orbs, the player is a white-skinned man in a suit chasing brown-skinned people who get flipped into orange jumpsuits as soon as they are caught. The action is all gamified Kavanaugh stops, the roving, appearance-based immigration stops blessed by a concurrence written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in Noem v. Perdomo. The brown-skinned people (and when I played, all the people I collected were brown) form a human chain being pulled along by the agent. This makes them “deported.” It’s a foul, cruel, dehumanizing game.

The game’s explicit purpose is to convert policy into culture, a “culture of fun and winning,” in the words of a Trump administration spokesperson. If only. More like a culture of racial discrimination and racial domination.

We can spend all the time we want trying to put the institutions of constitutional democracy back in the hands of the people — with all-party primaries and ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform — but that doesn’t do us any good if we lose the war over who we, the people, fundamentally are. This is a battle over American identity.

What kind of people we are when we use the institutions of democracy matters tremendously. If we are a pluralistic people who love and embrace our own pluralism, we will use our institutions to empower human flourishing. If instead we accustom ourselves culturally to dehumanizing people who are different, we will use our institutions to dehumanize people who are different from us. If we are a generous and compassionate people, we will build a society of connection and neighborly support. If we are a cruel and disdainful people, we will build a society of walls, conflict, and loneliness.

The reality that the democracy renovation fight cannot look away from the culture wars hit me as I read about the AfD’s recent victory in Saxony-Anhalt, in the former East Germany.

According to the Wall Street Journal, AfD leaders have pledged crackdowns on migrants and to shift school curricula to focus more on 19^th-century Germany than on the Nazi-era past. They’ve pledged to create a volunteer militia to back up police and to reduce funding “to museums and arts groups with ‘anti-German goals.’” They want to strip Ukrainians of their refugee status and “to house all asylum seekers in a small number of centers away from urban areas, seize their assets and compel them to work.” Think of Haitian refugees who have lost temporary protected status and whose journey home has involved being stripped of all their property.

We’ve all recognized for a while that Donald Trump and his cronies, such as Elon Musk and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are actively restoring white-dominated racial hierarchies in the United States. In 2016, 96 percent of Black women voted against Trump. I’ve always believed this was because we, more than anyone else, understood the reordering of cultural values that Trump was about to attempt. We could see a million miles away the animus against people who looked like us.

There is an important asymmetry, though. As a federal government, the Trump administration controls border policy; the AfD, governing a single German state, does not. But the AfD controls Saxony-Anhalt’s schools; the Trump administration does not control American schools.

I often say and firmly believe that the states and our federal structure create a wall limiting the extension of Trump’s will. We’re seeing that right now as he hammers at the election system.

Yet by working at the level of culture, he might find a way over and under that wall. By convincing Americans that it’s better to be a conniving, corrupt, self-dealer than a person with benevolent energy whose word is good, Trump is eroding the foundations of American sociability and big-heartedness on which healthy democratic institutions rest.

Our states need to protect our election systems, yes. They need to make sure that our election systems are the property of the whole people, and that the whole people genuinely have a chance to participate with a meaningful vote. But that is not enough. They also need to protect our culture — the culture of a people ready to share power with one another, regardless of how we all look.

My home state of Massachusetts recently took an important step toward an immigration policy that pursues safety without a police state, as I argued for in a Renovator piece. The legislature passed and the governor signed a law called the PROTECT Act. On a first read, its numerous specific proposals seem primarily focused on the good of immigrants. Among other things, the law bars warrantless civil immigration arrests at courthouses, public schools, childcare centers, and healthcare facilities; prohibits police from asking about immigration status unless directly material to a criminal offense; codifies that local officers can’t hold people on an ICE detainer alone; creates civil rights claims against government officials, including ICE agents; lets parents arrange guardianship in case of detention or deportation; and requires every school district to have a written emergency response plan.

In other words, the law rests on the view that safety comes from strong, fair institutions, not force — from economic stability, educational opportunity, civic trust, health systems that support mental health, and social cohesion. This is the right framework for pursuing a sane immigration policy.

But this law also has an even deeper significance. It defends who we are as Americans. We are a people who honor basic human rights and fairness, who reject cruelty and arbitrary treatment, who respect families and the human good in helping families stay together, who accept people who don’t look like us, who draw a firm distinction between those who are responsible for criminal actions and those who are not.

Though we might think that a law like this is mainly sheltering immigrants, it is, in fact, protecting all Americans by saving our souls.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. Her Substack, The Renovator, is dedicated to Renovating Democracy.

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