Earlier today Greenberg published the following commentary on his substack. I find it to be a very insightful though sobering piece. Perhaps you will too.
I am in mourning for America. The grief feels heavy, like losing someone I loved. The country I grew up with – flawed yet still striving – feels almost alien now. The values that shaped me, liberty, equality, the freedom to dissent, no longer seem to have a place.
The reason for that grief was on display at Quantico, where Trump and Hegseth outlined what looked less like a campaign and more like a new order. They never used the word dictatorship, yet the intent was unmistakable. The “enemy within,” they warned, would now fall to the armed forces to confront. Opposition was no longer disagreement among citizens; it was insurgency.
In anthropology, words do not simply describe reality – they remake it. To call opponents “enemies within” is to push them out of the category of rival and into the category of threat. Once that shift takes hold, repression no longer appears a violation but a duty.
This is why the rhetoric matters. Trump’s call to repurpose cities as training grounds, Hegseth’s vow to instill “warrior culture,” the proposal to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War – none of these are stray lines. They are signals that the military is being reshaped from external defense toward domestic enforcement. This is not drift but a deliberate reshaping of the military’s purpose.
The ambiguity is calculated. They never said, “We are declaring a dictatorship.” Instead, they spoke in terms elastic enough to give cover. Defenders can dismiss it as metaphor. But for those in the room – military officers being told their real battle lies at home – the meaning was unmistakable.
History shows where this path leads. When Roman generals crossed the Rubicon, they redefined loyalty to the republic as loyalty to a man. In 20th-century Latin America, juntas seized power in the name of defending against “internal enemies.” Pinochet in Chile and Franco in Spain both used the rhetoric of national salvation to justify the silencing of opposition. And even here at home, the Red Scare and COINTELPRO blurred dissent and danger, branding citizens as subversives for the ideas they held. Each case began not with a decree, but with speeches and signals that invited the military and security services to turn inward. Democracies survive only when a clear boundary separates civilian politics from the armed forces; once that wall is breached, the garrison overtakes the government.
From an anthropological lens, the Quantico speeches worked as ritual. They staged a performance that bound insiders together through repetition of threat and loyalty. Civic space was turned into a symbolic battlefield; dissent cast as heresy. The words did cultural work: producing a shared understanding that domestic opposition is no longer subjects for debate, but targets to be subdued.
The danger is not abstract. Once opponents are named enemies, the shift cascades. Police departments remake themselves in the image of an army. Protesters are policed as insurgents. Communities already marked as suspect – immigrants, students, organizers – become targets of surveillance and force. Everyday civic life contracts until obedience feels like the only form of safety.
Was this a declaration of military dictatorship? Legally, nothing was signed into law. Culturally and politically, the declaration had already been made. It was a declaration without the name – a soft launch of a governing order where citizens are sorted into loyalists and enemies, where institutions are bent toward war footing, and where the armed forces are invited to cross the line from defending the republic to enforcing the executive.
Democracy doesn’t turn into dictatorship overnight; it seeps in through the steady drip of speeches, symbols, and directives that recast rivals as threats until repression feels inevitable. Quantico was one of those moments. And it is why I mourn: because the vocabulary of war is being welded onto everyday politics, and the country I loved drifts further from itself.
I grieve because the America I knew is slipping away – a flawed republic, yes, but one that still aspired to liberty, equality, and dissent. What remains is something harder, colder, and less familiar: a nation teaching its citizens to see neighbors as enemies, and its soldiers to turn inward. That is the loss I feel most deeply: not only of a country, but of the promise it once carried.
– James Greenberg
“Mourning America:
Quantico and the Drift Toward Military Rule”
James’s Substack
October 3, 2025
“Mourning America:
Quantico and the Drift Toward Military Rule”
James’s Substack
October 3, 2025
Related Off-site Links:
Questions After Quantico – Mark Hertling (The Bulwark, October 3, 2025).
A “Green Light” for War Crimes? What Trump and Hegseth’s Lecture to Generals Really Means: An Interview with Eugene Fidell – Democracy Now! (October 1, 2025).
Furious Navy Commander Bobby Jones Speaks Out After Trump Military Stunt – MeidasTouch (October 1, 2025).
The “Department of War” Is Designed to Fight American Citizens – Jonathan V. Last (The Bulwark, October 1, 2025).
“Hitleresque”: Retired Major General William Enyart Links Trump Speech to Nazi Propaganda – MSNBC (September 30, 2025).
Is This the Beginning of the End for U.S. Democracy? – Amy La Porte (Common Dreams, September 30, 2025).
Trump and Hegseth Want to Turn the Military Into a Tool of Personal Loyalty – Eugene Fidell, William D. Baumgartner and Steven J. Lepper (The Hill, September 4, 2025).
UPDATES: Now That Fascism Is Here – John Pavlovitz (The Beautiful Mess, October 4, 2025)
White House Responds with “Authoritarian Propaganda” as Judge Blocks National Guard in Portland – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, October 5, 2025).
Governors Warn of “Martial Law” and Trump “Invasion” as U.S. Judge Halts Troop Order – for Now – Jon Queally (Common Dreams, October 6, 2025).
Trump Troops “Deliberately Attacking Peaceful Protesters” in U.S. Cities, Senator Says – Stephen Prager (Common Dreams, October 6, 2025).
Lawsuits Target Trump and Noem to Beat Back Federal “War on Chicago” – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, October 6, 2025).
The Rule of Law vs. the Rule of Trump – William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift (The Bulwark, October 6, 2025).
See also the following chronologically-ordered Wild Reed posts:
• Marisa Kabas: “We’re Witnessing a Coup By an Unelected Billionaire Propped Up By a Felonious President”
• Timothy Snyder on Resisting the Oligarchs’ “Logic of Destruction”
• “This Is Essentially Viktor Orbán’s Playbook”
• “An Extremely Clever Ruse” by and for the Rich: Owen Jones on Elon Musk’s Coup
• “To Be a Rib in This Body of Our Country”
• Quote of the Day – February 21, 2025
• Ralph Nader: “We’re Heading Into the Most Serious Crisis in American History. There’s No Comparison”
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• “This Is How Democracy Unravels”
• Jason Stanley on How Fascism Works
• James Greenberg on Trumpism: “The Tactics Are Unmistakable”
• Tony Pentimalli on Trump’s “Death Warrant for Democracy”
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• Peter Bloom: Quote of the Day – June 10, 2025
• “Protesting Is What Patriotism Looks Like in Public”: The “No Kings” Protests of June 14, 2025
• “No Kings”? Absolutely. But Also “No Oligarchy”
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 20, 2025
• Rep. Ro Khanna: Quote of the Day – June 24, 2025
• “This Is Fascism”
• The Declaration of Resistance
• The Choice Before Us
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2025
• How Democrats Can Start Winning Again
• Brent Molnar on the MAGA Cult and Its Intentions
• James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”
• Brent Molnar on the “Cold War in Our Own House”
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Donald Trump’s Militarization of Law Enforcement
• Jason Duchin: “It’s Here, and We Are Sleepwalking Through It”
• Marianne Williamson: “We’re Moving Into Totalitarianism”
• Garrett Graff: “America Tips Into Fascism”
• Bowing to an Idol
• Marianne Williamson on the Need for “Radical Love” in Responding to Trump’s Dismantling of Democracy
• Brent Molnar on the the Silencing of Jimmy Kimmel: “This Is What Fascism Looks Like in Practice”
• James Greenberg on the Identity Politics of MAGA
• Staying Strong in Trump’s Fascist America
• Memes of the Times – September 2025
• Jason Duchin: Quote of the Day – September 24, 2025
• Derek Johnson on the “Courage to Call Fascism by Its Name”
• Will Potter on Trump’s War on Dissent: “This Is What Fascists Do”
• Marianne Williamson: We Need an “Expanded Version of What it Means to Be Political”
• An Incident That Feels “Ripped from a Dystopian Novel”
See also:
• Phil Wilson Remembers “American Fascism’s First Casualty” and Warns That Donald Trump’s “MAGA Death Cult Is Coming for Us All”
• Marianne Williamson on America’s “Cults of Madness”
• “The Republican Party Has Now Made It Official: They Are a Cult”
• Chauncey Devega on the Ongoing Danger of the Trump Cult
• Jeff Sharlet on the Fascist Ideology of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene
• The Republican Party in a Nutshell
• Robert Reich: Quote of the Day – April 11, 2023
• Republicans Don’t Care About American Democracy
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