There Is a Name for MAGA’s Death Cult Policies

Our nation is quickly being destroyed by “necropolitics,” which dictates who has the right to live — and who the state may kill or dispose of at its whim.

“Well, we are all going to die,” said Iowa Senator Joni Ernst to her constituents who were concerned about losing access to Medicaid. It’s a frightening way to talk to the people you represent, almost shocking in its complete indifference. But it’s an attitude that permeates every aspect of the GOP today: They’re trying to kill us. 

Vice-President J.D. Vance, a ghoul among ghouls, couldn’t wait to kick millions of Americans off Medicaid. Vance has tried to persuade constituents that immigrants are the main beneficiaries, his way of lessening the blow: “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” Vance said. “And therefore it must pass. Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” No matter that losing access to Medicaid means the GOP will most certainly have blood on its hands. MAGA is quite literally a death cult. 

There’s a proper word for this form of dangerous politics: “necropolitics.” The term, coined by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe — author of the 2019 book, Necropolitics — was created as a kind of counterpart to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics,” a study of power and how governments or others regulate health, reproduction, and bodily autonomy. But to Mbembe, biopolitics didn’t sufficiently explain what was happening to governments in the 21st century. In an era of growing militarism and democratic backsliding, Mbembe states that the ultimate form of power is “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” 

The idea that governments are intertwined with violence is nothing new. Sociologist Max Weber argued that what defines a state is that it has the sole legitimate use of violence. But necropolitics goes beyond a theoretical right to use violence against citizens. In effect, it dictates who has the right to live and who the state may kill or dispose of at its whim. 

Necropolitics aren’t new to this country. Mbembe saw them as the animating force behind the era of European imperialism: Poor whites could be sent abroad to subjugate foreign peoples, whom they ruled over with no accountability and from whom they only worked to extract wealth. There are plenty of precedents for this in U.S. history. Enslavement, by definition, was predicated on using human beings solely for their labor and denying them any kind of rights. It’s not coincidental that one of the chief targets of the Trump administration is birthright citizenship, which was enshrined in the 14th Amendment to resolve a fundamental question: What rights do formerly enslaved people have? The settling of the American West was rooted in seizing land from Native Americans; a whole mythology arose that they were “destined to fade away,” which legitimized all of the violence perpetrated against them. Now, they’re being unleashed against the whole of society. 

What historically has driven necropolitics is race and racism. Liberal democracies are undergoing, in Mbembe’s words, a “colossal process of inversion,” the purpose of which is to create separate communities of those who do and don’t belong. Mbembe studied this in the context of Palestine and South Africa but also noted that the movement of people from the Global South into the Global North was creating the same dynamic, starting with the return of everyday racism into the body politic. This should sound familiar to us. We’ve been watching the normalization of ideas like The Great Replacement, which posits that white Americans are being steadily replaced by everybody else. That drives a fear of immigration and a sense of lost control which is fueling a far-right necropolitical backlash.

This is not invisible. It is precisely what Vance, Stephen Miller and other members of the administration want to accomplish. Immigrants and people of color are to be turned into communities separate from the rest of us. The standard by which they can become part of “us” is shifting to become impossible to fulfill. In a recent rambling speech, Vance said that “conceiving of American citizenship ‘purely as an idea’ would ‘reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.’” In effect, they believe that Confederates who committed treason are still more intrinsically American than immigrants whose families came here in the 20th century. It’s an impossible barrier for immigrants to surmount, a permanent division — rendering immigrants permanently subject to violence. 

Mbembe’s predictions are frighteningly accurate. In his book, Mbembe posed the question, what the solution is according to Europeans (but could just as easily be asked of Americans). He wrote that they believed: 

We must close the borders. Filter those who make it across them. Process them. Choose who we want to remain. Deport the rest. Sign contracts with corrupt elites from the countries of origin, third world countries, transition countries. They must be turned into the prison guards of the West, to whom the lucrative business of administering brutality can be subcontracted. 

Today, the Trump administration is pursuing precisely this, seeking ways to exile people to El Salvador, South Sudan, Rwanda, Angola, and others. The people in question have no connection to these countries, don’t speak the language, and those placed in prisons in a nation like civil-war stricken South Sudan are at serious risk of death.

You might recoil at all of this because we as a country have not yet gotten to the point of extermination within our own borders, though we’re heading there at frightening speed. (Pause here to reflect on the low bar we’ve set for ourselves to preserve humanity.) But necropolitics is not solely about whether the government will shoot you. By forcing people into precarity (detention centers and concentration camps), encouraging them to hide themselves away for fear of arrest, or even subjecting them to constant reminders of their own vulnerable status places them in a state of death. According to Florida officials, part of the so-called selling point of the hastily constructed concentration camp that they’re mercilessly calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — unspeakably cynical and murderous, no surprise — is that, amid the Florida heat, it’s in a swamp surrounded by alligators and snakes, and vulnerable to hurricanes. There’s no subtlety in that: Once put there, you will likely die in captivity, and in a most gruesome manner. Necropolitics is as much about the freedom of the government to expose you to harm and death because it has no obligation to protect you. 

In that same vein, this current government will tolerate and enable all kinds of death for its citizens. Data on maternal deaths stemming from abortion bans is being suppressed or ignored, but what data we do have makes it clear that women are dying because they can’t access abortions.  It’s one of the reasons that the government tolerates gun violence at such absurdly high rates, because the people that it victimizes most heavily are historically marginalized: Half of all gun homicides happen to African American men and boys. A theoretical right to self-defense in practice has meant that the government tolerates and even encourages mass shooters by allowing them to arm themselves to the teeth.  

It will gut FEMA and disaster response and allow crises like the floods in Texas to unfold, where the death toll is over 120 people,  and likely to continue rising. FEMA wasn’t even able to join in on search and rescue operations for 72 hours because it required Kristi Noem’s personal sign-off. Thousands of calls to FEMA went unanswered because the agency had fired hundreds contractors when their contracts lapsed on July 5. Officials in Kerr County passed up funds from the Biden administration to build a warning system; the principle of having a government that will help its citizens is too risky it seems for them, so flood deaths are collateral damage.

Necropolitics is also acutely visible in public health. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suggested letting bird flu race through poultry farms, which substantially raises the likelihood of the virus crossing over to humans. Vaccine access is being threatened by RFK’s appointees to advisory panels, all of whom are vaccine denialists who will tamper with the existing schedule of vaccinations for children and bring diseases roaring back. This is where necropolitics and eugenics dovetail in a gruesome way: The whole concept of “public health” is being destroyed. If you get sick, the administration believes it’s solely your fault and the result of your decisions. If you die, it’s because something was wrong with you. In their view, the people who survive are better. They’re actively stigmatizing the LGBTQ community by cutting off access to trans healthcare, institutionalizing transphobia and homophobia by banning any discussion of gender and LGBTQ sexuality in schools, and stoking hatred of the trans community by attacking trans athletes. They’re even defunding suicide hotlines for LGBTQ youth, exacerbating kids’ depression and feelings of isolation. And all of this will stoke bullying and hate crimes.

What is all of this in service to? What is the point of building a regime of death, one that murders some of its citizens through malicious negligence, sends others to likely death by shipping them off to South Sudan, and then murders still more with drone strikes? It’s to build a white ethnostate that will prize wealth at the top, a state that plunders its own citizens to help a few people. Mbembe’s primary focus was on race and racism as the governing ideology of necropower, but capitalism and wealth is central to this as well. This is where the gutting of Medicaid and the absolutely predatory economics of the Trump administration come neatly into view. Gutting SNAP and Medicaid and raising taxes on the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires makes clear how little poor white members of this new ethnostate are valued, which is to say barely at all. 

This might be surprising, but the bonds of whiteness in this new ethnostate will not count for all that much. Poor whites are a “surplus” population. Vance, Noem, and others insist that millions of people have been taking advantage of Medicaid and the social safety net because they need to create the belief that they are unproductive. They won’t offer them jobs except for those that are being lost to our ongoing purge of immigrants. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said exactly this, that immigrant farm workers could be replaced by “able-bodied” Americans on Medicaid and through automation. That last idea really hints at what they want: no workers at all. Nobody to provide for, no social safety net to pay for, just robot workers and profit.

What we’re going to be left with is a sort of necroeconomy based on violence and extraction. The sheer amount of money being spent on ICE is greater than what is spent on the Marine Corps, and not all of it will go to salaries. Facilities have to be built, maintained, and populated; supplies have to be procured; and eventually, the same private prison contractors will want to put these detained populations back to work. It co-exists alongside an enormous military apparatus, which is one of the only other parts of the federal government not being starved for resources. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is doubling down on resource extraction. Millions of acres of public land are being opened up to be sold for development — oil drilling and mining, which will worsen climate change and spell death for many more people. The vicious detention center in Florida  demonstrates how necroeconomy and ecocide go hand-in-hand: In addition to being devastating for those imprisoned, it is an environmental disaster for the Everglades, built on vulnerable land that will harm threatened species. 

Despite how bleak this picture is, in many ways there are signs of hope too. The resistance so far to ICE and the whole project of the white ethnostate has been immense — a large segment of the American people refuse to just accept it as the new status quo. In New York and elsewhere, volunteers are escorting groups of migrants who are at risk of arrest, making sure that they have legal representation, and escorting them past ICE agents waiting to make arrests. A basketball coach warded off ICE agents who were interviewing the kids on his team. Volunteers are setting up food deliveries so that people don’t have to risk leaving their homes. This needs to be happening everywhere, especially as the massive funding boost that ICE just got allows them to hire more agents.

Centrist politics as usual are not the answer to the deathly policies that we’re now facing. Democrats cannot outflank Republicans on immigration, for example. Democrats had tried to pass an immigration bill in 2024 that would have expanded immigration detention and resumed  building the border wall. It failed, they lost the moral high ground, Republicans still refused to accept it, and it implicitly justified a number of Republican talking points by suggesting that they were valid. You can’t split the difference with necropolitics without becoming complicit in them. We need to stop treating immigrants as a hot potato or a liability, because every time that we do it legitimizes this necropolitical system. Democrats need to learn how to make positive defenses of immigration and immigrants. 

Cultural resistance is also vital, now more than ever. Necropolitics depends on dehumanization. It’s tempting to dismiss “culture war” issues or smaller political events like the defunding of the National Endowment for the Humanities as a sideshow, but in fact culture is the whole show with the Trump administration. Cultural power provides them the justification and rationale for inflicting death. It’s incumbent on us to supply the opposite.

Perhaps the most salient area to oppose necropolitics is in public health. Public health is the antithesis of a politics of death. It rejects the idea of “acceptable deaths” and embraces the idea that we have a collective responsibility to each other. This is already in motion. Defend Public Health is an all-volunteer network that was organized after Trump’s reelection to lobby and defend existing federal funding as well as to communicate with the media about the harm these cuts will inflict. That fight is going to shift because of the cuts to federal funding. It might be that activists will have to lobby states for funding to fill what has been lost, or cities. The most powerful action that civil society and our politicians can take right now is to create programs and policies for people to rally around, a positive force to fight for.