On Friday the president of the United States posted the following, in reference to smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires:
The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air.
Four words. Invaded. Filthy. Polluted. Unhealthy.
He has used all four before, repeatedly, at rallies and in interviews and from podiums, applied to human beings crossing a border. The vocabulary was not adjusted for the new subject. It was not softened, repurposed, or translated. It arrived intact, deployed against atmospheric particulate matter with precisely the same grammar and precisely the same emotional charge it carries when it is aimed at a family from Guatemala.
That is not a rhetorical flourish worth a paragraph of mockery. It is diagnostic, and it explains everything else about this episode, including the parts that appear to be simple stupidity.
One Vocabulary, One Operation
Scholars of fascism have converged, across decades and considerable disagreement about everything else, on a small set of features that define the thing. Roger Griffin’s formulation is a myth of national rebirth from decay. Umberto Eco catalogued the fear of difference and the obsession with contamination. Robert Paxton described a preoccupation with community decline and compensatory cults of unity and purity.
Purity is the common term, and purity is a spatial idea before it is a moral one. It requires a clean interior and a contaminating exterior, and a boundary between them that is always under threat. The nation is conceived as a body. Bodies do not have foreign policies. Bodies have immune responses.
Once that architecture is installed, it becomes the only available operation, because it is not a position the person holds. It is the apparatus through which everything is processed. Every entity encountered gets sorted into inside or outside, and everything sorted outside is by definition either subordinate or contaminating, and there is no third bin.
Which produces the specific incoherence on display this week. A neighboring country experiences a catastrophe. Eight hundred and ninety-six active fires. Two hundred burning in Ontario alone, eighty-one of them out of control. The smoke reaches roughly a hundred million Americans and puts more than a dozen states under air quality alerts.
An alliance has a well-established response to this, which is aid. Crews, aircraft, coordination, money. That response requires the ability to conceive of a relationship that is neither dominance nor threat, and the apparatus cannot generate it, because it has no bin for a partner in distress. So the catastrophe was processed the only way the machine processes anything arriving from outside the boundary.
It was classified as an invasion. And then it was invoiced.
The cost of this pollution, the president wrote, must of necessity be added to the tariffs Canada is currently paying.
The Fires That Crossed the Other Way
Here is the fact that removes any possibility of reading this charitably, and it has been almost entirely absent from the coverage.
Minnesota is burning. More than six hundred firefighters are working over seventy thousand acres in the northeast of the state, in extreme heat and drought, with evacuation orders in place as flames approach residential and resort areas. Air quality records in Minnesota have been broken outright in recent days.
The photographs of the hazed-over Capitol and the obscured Lincoln Memorial that circulated on July 17, the images that prompted the president’s post, were of smoke from Canadian and Minnesotan fires together. Some of the air he described as an invasion was manufactured domestically.