The Case of Mahmoud Khalil and the Limits of Democracy

Trump is testing my commitment to respecting democratic outcomes that I don't like

Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash

As longtime readers will know, I only really have one “non-negotiable” — respect for democratic outcomes that are not to our liking. This, for me, is the bedrock of a society like our own. Without it, all we have is brute power and coercion.

At some level, at least in retrospect, I think Trump’s re-election or something like it was inevitable (although it’s worth remembering that nothing is truly inevitable until after the fact). I’m torn: It didn’t have to happen this way, but it also felt foreordained. Democrats should have won but they deserved to lose. They had browbeaten, patronized, and otherwise gaslighted voters by telling them that everything was okay. The system worked, the status quo was just fine, and America was already great. But as I’ve written, it was only great for some of us. We have to check our privilege.

How to Check Your Privilege

But now my own commitment to respecting democratic outcomes is being tested. If this is what democracy is producing, then is democracy good? The answer I offer in my book The Problem of Democracy is an unequivocal yes, but it’s not easy when it feels so personal. With Trump’s second term, I knew this would happen, but it’s still jarring to feel it on an emotional level. As much as I was, and still am, open to the idea that America and the global order needed some sort of reckoning to do away with old illusions, it is coming at a very high short-term cost. That was never a cost I thought we as Americans should have to pay. But here we are.

The DOGE efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy will have real repercussions for years to come both at home and abroad, in ways that will tangibly cost lives. USAID, for all its faults, actually did some useful things in the poorest corners of the planet. I totally take the point that some of these employees were what

Matthew Gasda

calls “virtue referees” and glorified email machines, but DOGE and Elon Musk don’t seem to care about distinguishing between people who were actually redundant and those who were serving their country in honorable, if quiet, ways.

One could argue that the effort to reduce the federal workforce, while noxious in practice, is the sort of thing one might expect from a democratically-elected president. It’s well within his permit to try, and it’s something that has broad support among the American public, at least in theory.

But it pales in comparison to the ongoing effort to, effectively, de-person and deport the pro-Palestine activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, which has deeper and more profound implications on our most cherished rights. It also sets a dangerous precedent that the Trump administration, if it gets its way, can begin to apply to an ever-expanding number of permanent residents and perhaps, one day, even citizens.

Khalil is a U.S. permanent resident. His wife, 8 months pregnant, is an American citizen. She might give birth while he is in jail. No one is even trying to argue that he committed a crime. There isn’t really an argument beyond the fact that he is supposedly “pro-Hamas.” The catch, though, is that several days later not a single person or media outlet has been able to come up with any evidence that Khalil ever praised or "supported" Hamas. Yet a student's name has been permanently tarnished and his very freedom taken away. Here we are.

What makes this different — and worse — is that it cuts at the very fabric of our constitutional order and how we view fundamental matters like freedom of speech and the right to assembly. It reminds one of the days of woke cancelations but this time with the active involvement and complicity of the federal government.

It is ironic that many who claimed to be anti-woke took wokeness and repurposed it to create a weird kind of pro-Israel safetyism. They were never committed to free speech, and it’s worth remembering that. Again, here we are.

But it also speaks to something deeper, a deeper pathology if you will. It's no accident that the pro-Israel voices who backed the brutal assault on Palestinian life in Gaza seem to have no problem with a U.S. green card holder having his rights stripped away. They don't see the humanity of Arabs and Muslims either at home or abroad. The two are connected. It's sad, but I think we have to start confronting this reality about many if not most "pro-Israel" arguments. Now, being "pro-Israel" increasingly means dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims.

The sooner we confront this reality, the better.