We Are Those People: Power and Denial in Post-Democracy Washington, D.C.

I’ve always been haunted by fables of doppelgängers, humans transfigured by sickness or greed. In Washington, D.C., the transformation isn’t always dramatic—but it’s staring us right in the face.

AP Photo by Lose Luis Magana

As we pulled into the terminal the overheads flicked on, bathing the interior of the bus in an unflattering glare. Not that it mattered; I hadn’t slept a wink since we’d left New York, four hours before. I clambered off, my legs wobbly and cramped.

Outside, a small crowd was gathered at the entrance to the rail terminal. I picked my way past men in filthy sneakers and no socks, a middle-aged woman sitting cross-legged on the tile floor. Beside her was a little girl clutching a knockoff Gameboy. She looked up at me with wide eyes as I walked by. She looked to be four years old, max.

Being as sleep-deprived as I was, it took me a moment to realize they weren’t waiting for a train. It was nearly midnight, and they were only looking for a place to sleep inside the terminal. Only they couldn’t; station agents had barred the doors. I peered through the glass, and then I saw something strange.

At first, the massive entry hall of the station seemed deserted. Then I saw a cluster of distant figures making their way across the mezzanine. They were soldiers in tan camo, their automatic rifles held at “low ready,” barrels angled towards the ground. I felt my pulse quickening—which is, I suppose, the reaction military-grade weapons are supposed to elicit. Then I saw another patrol, and another, each walking the empty concourse with guns at the ready.

Welcome to Union Station, Ground Zero of the Federal occupation of Washington, D.C.

Seeing Is Believing

Does witnessing something terrible implicate us in its outcome? In Dispatches, Michael Herr’s epochal account of the war in Vietnam, he wrestles with the question:

“I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything…it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.”

In those first days back in the District, what I was seeing was troops on the streets, and it freaked me out. Washingtonians have a complicated relationship with self-governance; legally speaking, they lack some of the basic democratic rights—a vote in Congress, the ability to elect their own prosecutors and judges—the rest of us take for granted. But in the last six weeks, that condition changed from being an abstraction into something very tangible. The presence of the Guard—which, incidentally, costs about a million dollars a day—is a visceral reminder that our city is not actually ours.

Wanting to slip past the edges of my discomfort, I started approaching Guardsmen, asking some variation of: “How’s this going for you?” Some were stoic; others were upbeat, pausing to pose for tourists’ snapshots. One was a cheerful young trooper in Ray-Bans posted outside the Gallery Place Metro.

“It’s good!” Packed into a flak jacket, he seemed oblivious to the 85-degree heat. “I mean, most people seem like they’re grateful. We’re, like, helping old ladies across the street, Picking up trash.”

“What about the ones who aren’t?”

“Yeah, like every 13th, 14th one. Some people curse us out or flip us off. Someone tried to grab a gun. We had to hold him until the police showed up.”

His colleague, a young Black man with a wispy mustache, seemed uneasy. I turned to him. “How about you?” His eyes shifted left and right, desperate not to meet mine. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or embarrassed or angry with me for asking.

“I’m indifferent of it,” he finally mumbled. “I mean, we don’t have a choice.”

“You from here?”

“Yeah, I’m on the police force,” he said. “I live here too.”

“What about ICE?”

“We’re not ICE.”

“We’re definitely not ICE,” the first guy chimed in.

Maybe that last bit was for my benefit, though I don’t think so. In fact, this was the common denominator in all my conversations with troops, and it heartened me. Speaking with these actual humans—a burly Black man with a sergeant’s bearing; a woman with graceful tattooed script flowing down her neck—I felt my unease melting away. These weren’t True Believers making America great again; they were ordinary Washingtonians put in an uncomfortable position.

And yet it was this very ordinariness that nagged at me. At times I could even forget they were troops on city streets, and that the rest of us had somehow decided this was more or less okay. I thought again of Michael Herr’s question: What part of this was I responsible for?

Family History

Wendigo; doppelgänger; skinwalker. There are countless myths of people transfigured by greed or ill fortune into wraiths, indistinguishable from ordinary humans but for their unquenchable need. My fascination with them comes not from fables but from my own family history. In 1944, my 15-year-old father saw this transformation taking place right before his eyes:

“It was a Sunday, and the first thing we noticed was a number of German warplanes patrolling the skies over Budapest, occasionally buzzing low over the rooftops in a demonstration of strength. I remember, also, watching on the street as by about noon the advance formations, light tanks and motorcycle troops, arrived in Budapest and with unerring, fearsome efficiency—seeming to know the city by heart—fanned out and secured all vital bridges and other points. They seemed tough, disciplined but somehow unthreatening.”

Of course, he was wrong on that last count. In the coming days, the Germans would be deluged by some 35,000 calls from Budapesters denouncing their neighbors for the crime of being Jewish. Presumably, the do-gooders didn’t look any different than they had the week before. Something had changed—or finally shown its face.

In my first days in D.C., I couldn’t shake the sense my father’s world had finally caught up with me. Of course, there were some subtle refinements. At least the doppelgängers and skinwalkers have faces; ICE’s power is predicated on its anonymity. How do you confront the faceless, the nameless, the badgeless? It’s harder than it sounds. Friends have described the horrifying sight of masked agents pulling brown-skinned people from schools, from daycare centers, off their mopeds as they work minimum-wage delivery jobs. I’ve read ICE’s appalling press releases, ripe with mugshots of brown-skinned invaders:

“What makes someone a target of ICE is if they are illegally in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.” —DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin

Sure. We arrested that delivery guy because his driving seemed…undocumented. I’ve toyed with the idea of engaging with ICE myself—there are multiple apps that track their activity—even as I imagine what it would get me: my phone smashed, my body thrown against (or into) an unmarked van.

If the dominant paradigm of life in 2025 is a free-floating sense of powerlessness, this is the full-contact version. I’m desperate to wake up from this trance, a spell as cloying as the late-summer humidity. There’s also a part of me that wants to believe I could look and somehow not be responsible. That it’d be enough for me to say I didn’t vote for this; I’m a good guy, mostly. There’s still another part of me, a part I’m not proud of, that knows it’s other people who are in greater danger than I, and that my acquiescence is proof that I’m more or less okay with this.

The future, they say, is already here—it just isn’t evenly distributed.

Even now, all these weeks later, it’s the scene at Union Station that still haunts me. The frightened eyes of the little girl outside and the troops inside, patrolling the empty terminal with guns drawn. If there’s a more potent symbol for just how wrong we’ve gotten it, it’s hard to imagine.

My whole life, I’ve never understood how seemingly ordinary people could turn into monsters, becoming if not fascists then at least people who were more or less okay it. Now I see what I couldn’t before: That this spell does not require subterfuge, or secrecy, or even darkness to work. That we, too, are those people. And that it’s always been us all along.