Molecular Civil War In LA

The essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger coined the phrase “molecular civil war” to describe a small-scale eruption in a divided society that is symptomatic of a larger cause and bears the seeds of general strife. This is what we are seeing in California.

If President Donald Trump were looking for some way to reaffirm support for his hardline on immigration among those who voted him into power, he got it last weekend from the out-of-control roving bands in Los Angeles waving Mexican flags, covering everything in sight with graffiti, burning cars, blocking a key freeway, throwing broken up pieces of cinderblock at law enforcement and shooting off fireworks into passing traffic.

As a demagogue like the president knows, such stirring images on the TV or smartphone screen eclipse all other context of what may have led to street turmoil in the first place, not to speak of the standard apologia that “most of the crowd was peaceful.” Worse, they distract attention from the deeper threat posed by the MAGA movement.

In Los Angeles, this danger is unfolding in two ways that are both featured in the malicious rhetoric of the Trump administration and in the president’s deployment of the California National Guard without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s authorization, which was subsequently supplemented by the mobilization of U.S. Marines to control domestic unrest.

The first way the deeper danger is unfolding is through the demonization of whole populations. In this case it is immigrants who are all said to be thugs or rapists, but it could be Gaza’s Palestinians, the Chinese or even the Europeans, also now in Trump’s crosshairs. Once dehumanized in this way, they can either be dispensed with as scapegoats or amplified into intractable enemies with no sympathetic qualities against whom every resource must be mustered.

Second is Trump’s “sovereigntist decisionism” as a theory of governance in messy democracies. This view posits that, as the electorally anointed tribune of the people facing “a national emergency,” he is above the law, indeed is the law as in the monarchic mentality: “I am the state.”

The Talent Of Demagogues

The talent of demagogues is knowing which emotional buttons to push to manipulate the body politic when the opportunity arises. Rather than playing into that game, a wise opposition would dispassionately survey the broader political landscape to determine the chief point of vulnerability in the MAGA movement and focus on that.

The most consequential resistance to President Donald Trump’s sovereigntist decisionism does not come from angry demonstrators, marginalized liberals or a disgruntled Elon Musk, but from traditional conservatives of the likes of the Federalist Society. Their defense of the constitutional separation of powers and states’ rights may well offer the best chance to save the republic from the assault on the checks and balances against too much power concentrated in one place that made America great in the first place. They blur the stark Manichean narrative that MAGA evangelists feverishly cultivate.

This cleavage on the right emerged publicly this month in typical Trump fashion, with a personal attack on a critic that ordinary observers would consider obscure. In a Truth Social diatribe, the president attacked Leonard Leo, a former key figure in the Federalist Society, calling him a “sleazebag” and “bad person” who “probably hates America” — even though he was instrumental in successfully recommending judicial appointments during Trump’s first term.

The proximate cause of the outburst is that Federalist Society associates and their fellow-travelers, along with some prominent liberal constitutional scholars, joined together to oppose Trump’s trade tariffs as “taxation by proclamation.” For these constitutionalists, the president’s actions, justified as necessary to address the nation’s “economic emergency,” are illegal because he has usurped powers that belong to the U.S. Congress, not the executive. They are not only saying so in public, but they have also filed an amicus brief challenging the president’s executive orders in a recent U.S. Court of International Trade case. The court unanimously ruled against the Trump administration, which then appealed in a district court that granted an administrative stay on the trade court’s ruling. This means that, for now, the tariffs remain in place pending further review; the case may ultimately be headed to the Supreme Court.

“The powers to tax, to regulate commerce and to shape the nation’s economic course must remain with Congress,” the brief in support of the plaintiffs reads. “They cannot drift silently into the hands of the president through inertia, inattention or creative readings of statutes never meant to grant such authority. That conviction is not partisan. It is constitutional. And it strikes at the heart of this case.”

The cross-partisan nature of this brief’s arguments is evidenced by its wide range of signatories. New York University libertarian legal scholar Richard Epstein put it starkly to The New York Times. “You have to understand,” he said, “that the conservative movement is now, as an intellectual movement, consistently anti-Trump on most issues.” Another signatory, Yale law professor Harold Koh, who served as a State Department official in the Obama administration, told the Times that “despite our political differences, the amici easily agreed, as lawyers, that the president has exceeded his delegated statutory authorities. … By unilaterally imposing unlimited tariffs on worldwide goods, he has lawlessly usurped Congress’s exclusive powers to impose taxes and duties and to regulate foreign commerce.”

States’ Rights

Until Trump’s arrival in the White House, the battle for states’ rights had long been associated with southern segregationists, like Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who fought federal race integration policies during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In 2025, the tables have turned as the powers-that-be in Washington seek to override states’ policies in a range of areas from environmental protection and energy to abortion rights.

In general, Federalist Society conservatives have been champions of states’ rights as a check and balance against the concentration of power in Washington, citing the 10th Amendment, which reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states. It has also been an advocate of the autonomous right of states to experiment with governance in their own realms, from abortion and pot legalization to the death penalty and gun laws. Now, these conservative federalist principles may most serve liberal states like California, which are resisting Trump’s overreach.

The federalization of California National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles this week, without the request or approval of the governor, is a further attempt to erode state autonomy, especially since the White House has made clear that it applies to all statesnot just California. Newsom has, in turn, sued the Trump administration over the illegality of this act. It is yet another test among many that will define the limits of the president’s power grab.

The most effective first line of defense for the states is to join conservatives in insisting on protecting all aspects of the Constitution’s division of powers. Citing harm to the well-being of its own citizens, the Golden State has also joined with 14 other states to sue the administration using the same argument as the Federalist Society allies — that the president lacks unilateral authority to tax imports under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act without congressional approval.

That these battles over states’ rights and the separation of powers have conjoined liberals and conservatives on the same track is a mark of how serious the threat to the republic has become. The accompanying visuals are set to arrive on June 14 when, in a Soviet-style parade, tanks will roll through the streets and warplanes will fly in the skies over Washington D.C. to mark the commander-in-chief’s birthday and the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. army — while Marines and federalized troops camp out in the City of Angels.

A Late-Stage Republic

This state of affairs brings to mind a recent observation in Noema by historian Niall Ferguson:

“If I could strike a very pessimistic note for a moment, there is some sense of being in the late republic in America today, by which I mean that the institutions of the republic are being corroded by a latent civil war in which the stakes of political defeat become too high. That’s something of what eroded the Roman Republic and paved the way to the Empire. My sense is that history has always been against any republic lasting 250 years. So this American republic is in its late republican phase with the intimations of empire.”

While the policies of the Democratic Party, including on immigration, were rejected at the polls last November, there is no indication that the public favored dismantling the Constitution. Traditional conservatives are seemingly much closer to the cultural temper of the body politic these days than liberals, not to mention anarchic street demonstrators. As such, these conservatives are best placed to blunt the creeping authoritarianism of the MAGA movement that is throwing out the baby of constitutional rule with the bathwater of disdain for the liberal legacy it seeks to erase. Better yet, if liberals join them.