Neutralizing MAGA: Applying Frederick Douglass's Fugitive Philosophy

Governments must be a terror to evildoers if they would be praised to those who do well. It will not do for a government with the knife of treason at its throat, to bear the sword in vain. [Lecture on Haiti, 1893]

Frederick Douglass lived the life of a fugitive, subverting and outright defying the law when it was unjust. In the previous essay we saw how Douglass subverted the law as a slave trying to escape slavery and as a freedman bringing enslaved Blacks out of bondage and abetting freedom fighters. But Douglass’s fugitivity could also be the ally of those in power when that was the best way to defend democracy. He exhorted President Lincoln to arm Black Americans so they could fight for their own freedom. And he not only defended but extolled Lincoln’s extraconstitutional actions to save the republic.

Trying to apply Douglass’s fugitive liberalism today is discomfiting, even frightening. Liberals are far more comfortable playing within established rules and procedures. But just as the rebel slave power took the nation outside the bounds of the Constitution by seceding from the Union, MAGA has upended the game board. Just as Douglass fought to bring Black Americans within the law, we must struggle to bring our own outlaw classes within the protective bounds of law. 

When we think about how to apply the insights of Douglass’s fugitive liberalism to the dangers facing America today, we should keep these ideas in mind:

• The political objectives of freedom, equality, and universal rights and well-being—”each for all and all for each”—take precedence over the forms and procedures of government and the law, up to and including the Constitution itself.
• Direct action is an appropriate response to severe oppression. 
• When life and physical safety are at stake, when there is no plausible legal recourse, and when such action has a reasonable chance of improving the situation, violent resistance to legal authority is appropriate.

MAGA treason

On January 6, 2021, President Trump shattered America’s record of peaceful transfers of power from one president to the next duly elected president. As the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack vividly and exhaustively demonstrated, the insurrection was violent, coordinated, intent on overturning the free and fair election that Trump lost, and directed by Trump himself.

His insurrection against the United States government alone is enough to justify barring Trump from seeking office again. 2024 is not like 2016, where he signaled his autocratic intentions but so many insisted he was all bluster and would stay within the guardrails. Trump has shown that he will not abide by the laws and norms of democracy, guardrails be damned. The only reason Trump is not barred from running for president is because Republican members of Congress were more loyal to MAGA than to America, and because House Democrats were too timid to expel those MAGA Republicans from the House of Representatives who supported the insurrection, as they were empowered to do under the Fourteenth Amendment. We are paying the price now for those who were in the “theater of action” failing to defend the Constitution.

But in the intervening years the Supreme Court, including three Trump-appointed justices, has effectively endorsed the January 6 insurrection. By ruling that the President is absolutely immune from acts involving the core powers of the executive and presumptively immune from prosecution for official acts—with nary a gesture to how official acts and private acts are differentiated—the MAGA Court has ruled not only that the January 6 insurrection was A-OK, but that Trump as President could go far further. Trump in 2025 could have Biden or Harris or other Democrats assassinated and the Supreme Court says it would consider those murders to be part of his job. This is mad, and it is transparently extraconstitutional. 

Trump has stated that his intention is to be dictator, on day one “at least.” As he told a Christian audience, “You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote.” He plans to follow the Project 2025 playbook that involves firing tens of thousands of non-partisan federal employees and replacing them with MAGA political apparatchiks, criminalizing abortion nationwide, rounding up and deporting some 20 million non-naturalized immigrants (or people who look like immigrants), ending birthright citizenship, and then using the military to crush the protests that will inevitably erupt in response to these outrages. 

This just scratches the surface of Project 2025 and Trump’s intentions—and it doesn’t touch at all upon Trump’s destructive foreign policy plans—but it all leads to violence against, incarceration of, and removal of immigrants, minorities, and Democrats. After his enemies are subjugated, Trump will try to hold onto the Presidency indefinitely by force and institutional capture. American democracy may be suspended indefinitely.

MAGA times call for fugitive measures

All of the above can be rationalized within the forms and procedures of American constitutional governance—Trump will officially act, and the MAGA Court will officially declare those acts constitutional. Douglass observed the same thing about the crisis of rebellion. To refresh the passage from the previous essay,

We appealed, to be sure—we pointed out through our principles the right way—but we were powerless, and we saw no help till the man, Lincoln, appeared on the theater of action and extended his honest hand to save the republic. No; we owe nothing to our form of government for our preservation as a nation—nothing whatever—nothing to its checks, nor to its balances, nor to its wise division of powers and duties. It was an honest president backed up by intelligent and loyal people—men, high minded men that constitute the state, who regarded society as superior to its forms, the spirit as above the letter—men as more than country, and as superior to the Constitution. They resolved to save the country with the Constitution if they could, but at any rate to save the country. To this we owe our present safety as a nation. [Sources of Danger to the Republic, 1867]

For Douglass, the mere fact that the Constitution could not hold the nation together—or liberate his people—did not mean we were obligated to slavishly allow the forces of the slave power to tear the nation apart and continue their reign of oppression. In our eerily similar circumstances, we cannot allow the calcified segments of our Constitution—which have always been turned against the people and against fully realizing liberal democracy—to dictate our range of action.

Trump and the MAGA party are illegitimate. Their lawless, antidemocratic actions have already shown this beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, and under no circumstances should we accept their return to power. It does not matter if the MAGA judges on the Supreme Court bless whatever pseudo-constitutional chicanery Trump might employ to seize power. We must defy the Supreme Court for the legal assistance it has already provided Trump in his various legal travails. Indeed, even if Trump were to squeak out a victory in the Electoral College, this would represent for every freedom-loving democrat the final, intolerable betrayal by that institution of the American people—and signal its imminent abolition.

We must defy a second Trump administration. Some ill-fated individuals will find themselves in Douglass’s “theater of action.” Executive branch officials can refuse to enact Trump’s policies, and refuse to vacate their posts when Trump tries to fire them by Section F. Governors and mayors can resist all cooperation with a Trump administration, and defend their citizens when Trump attempts his planned mass detentions and deportations. Religious and civil society leaders can reassure a frightened and anxious public, and offer moral clarity. State and national legislators must convene a constitutional convention and communicate to the public what the options are for restoring American government on a more stable democratic footing, and ultimately organize a plebiscite. Military officers can refuse to follow criminal orders, or any order contrary to American democracy. And if and when it comes to that, they must rally to the defense of the constitutional convention. The theater of action requires uncommon courage, and most of us will not be called to it. Our task is simpler but no less necessary: we must demonstrate our support both in the streets and in letters for leaders who are willing to defend American freedom.

None of this will be necessary if voters give Vice President Kamala Harris and Congressional Democrats overwhelming margins. Winning by many millions and by many states cripples the ability for MAGA legal shenanigans and violent disruptions to succeed. Even in his most radical moments leading up to and during the Civil War, Douglass favored voting and winning elections in addition to his fugitive endeavors. But if democracy falters, defiance is in order.

Defiance doesn’t mean random citizens taking up arms, at least not as isolated individuals. Fugitive liberalism always looks to restore the order of peace and freedom. Vigilantism is poisonous to that end. But MAGA oppression writes its foul story in the blood of specific targeted groups: immigrants, people of color, women, and gender-sexual minorities. Even in times of peace, individuals harassed and molested by the state have a basic human right to defend themselves. There was never a time in antebellum America when Blacks were morally obligated to obey the state or other fonts of white authority, as Douglass established. They were slaves to society as much as slaves to their individual owners. But in the moment of constitutional crisis, resistance to oppression takes on greater significance: it moves from courageous but isolated resistance to coordinated action capable of saving and renewing the republic. Douglass’s campaign to arm free and newly freed Blacks transformed the Civil War from a war to preserve the Union into a war to end slavery.

“Half a dozen or more dead kidnappers”

The aggressive closure of the American border to disfavored immigrants—including targeted hostility toward Muslims, Arabs, and Latin Americans—with mass detention, forceful separation of families, and mass deportation, leaves immigrants outside the law. Unnaturalized immigrants are not equivalent to antebellum Blacks. They are not legally seen as property to be bought, used, and sold. But unnaturalized immigrants have no democratic voice or representation in the American government, and they have no control over their conditions. They can be rounded up and put into detention camps. Children can be separated from their parents. Spouses can be split up. And any unnaturalized immigrant is subject at any time to deportation according to the whims of whatever administration happens to be in power. Even legally documented, non-citizen immigrants live subject to arbitrary changes in immigration policy and bureaucratic fiat that alter the terms of their stay and shift burdens of proving eligibility. Undocumented immigrants, who are overwhelmingly peaceful people seeking a better life and often fleeing oppression and violence, have even less protection.

In the best of times, immigrants have no freedom of movement that governments are bound to respect, and they are thus an outlaw or near outlaw class. But in the extraordinary circumstances of a MAGA regime, they will be targeted with conspicuous cruelty. The temptation will be to offer little substantial resistance to planned massive detention and deportation dragnets, because most of these MAGA efforts will be within the wide latitude recognized executive authority. But all fascist efforts begin with the low-hanging fruit of already marginalized groups. The white nationalism—including conspiracy theories that Jews are importing brown immigrants in order to replace the White race—that sustains the MAGA worldview will impact more than just undocumented immigrants. The hateful zeal and scope of the MAGA deportation campaign will inevitably, and not accidentally, pull in anyone even suspected of being an immigrant, including brown-skinned permanent residents and citizens.

We must defend and harbor those the MAGA state will kidnap, regardless whether doing so is legal. The threat of prosecution and reaction by the state is a pragmatic matter—no one fighting for American freedom should be reckless—but prosecution by the MAGA state for protecting its victims has no moral hold on us whatsoever. We can learn from Douglass’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, where whites were legally empowered to kidnap Blacks on suspicion of being an escaped slave and no bystanders could—legally—do anything about it. 

The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers … That is perfectly right as long as the colored man has no protection. The colored men's rights are less than those of a jackass. No man can take away a jackass without submitting the matter to twelve men in any part of this country. A black man may be carried away without any reference to a jury. It is only necessary to claim him, and that some villain should swear to his identity. There is more protection there for a horse, for a donkey, or anything, rather than a colored man—who is, therefore, justified in the eye of God, in maintaining his right with his arm. The man who takes the office of a bloodhound ought to be treated as a bloodhound; and I believe that the lines of eternal justice are sometimes so obliterated by a course of long continued oppression that it is necessary to revive them by deepening their traces with the blood of a tyrant. [The Fugitive Slave Law (speech), 1852]

MAGA kidnappers would take immigrants from their places of work and from their families, and take children from the embrace of their mothers. Not only have such kidnappers taken the office of bloodhound, but they do so in furtherance of a white supremacist project alien to the multicultural pluralism experienced and long celebrated in the lives of ordinary Americans. Immigrants are on the front lines of the MAGA assault on the nation. Defending and sheltering immigrants is direct opposition to the MAGA threat.

Fugitive bodies

The decision by the MAGA Court to remove the right to abortion has rendered women—and anyone who can become pregnant or who is perceived to be so capable—uniquely vulnerable. The idea is ascendant on the MAGA right that not only does personhood obtain at conception but that the interests of embryos supersede those of pregnant persons. In a real sense, women's bodies are not their own. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, women have died who have been forced to carry non-viable pregnancies to term, and incest victims have been forced to deliver their rapist’s child. Because of abortion bans and uncertainty around emergency abortions and the law, doctors are avoiding life-saving actions for fear of prosecution.

Six-week abortion bans and personhood-at-conception total bans leave women of child-bearing age marked by suspicion. Six weeks does not give many people enough time to learn they are pregnant and prepare for an abortion. And with personhood-at-conception, any woman of the right age might be pregnant, so their sexuality must be monitored. Movement to free states where abortion rights are protected is under threat and under a MAGA regime could easily be proscribed.

Forcing a person to life-altering and physically dangerous labor against their will for the sake of others constitutes violence by any reasonable definition of the term. Women, pregnant people, and sexual and reproductive suspects have the right to defend themselves in any circumstances. But pervasive misogyny and the strict control of sexuality and reproduction is a fundamental part of the MAGA worldview. Women and sexual and gender minorities must be subjugated, and reproduction oriented to the furtherance of white domination. The defense of reproductive freedom and abortion rights is another front line against MAGA. Defending the right to abortion also defends the republic against MAGA authoritarianism.

Trans people are the next front line in the MAGA assault on American freedom. The Trump era has witnessed an all-out assault on trans rights and the dignity of trans people. “Don’t say gay” laws in states like Florida and Texas have banned public school teachers from discussing even the existence of trans and nonbinary people, gays, and lesbians. States across the country have passed laws to ban gender-affirming care for minors and are beginning to restrict access for adults as well. Trans bodies have no place in the MAGA world.

Project 2025 goes even further and defines “gender ideology”—which is to say trans people, drag queens, and other gender nonconforming individuals—as pornographic. Librarians and teachers who provide accurate information about sex and gender will be classified as sex offenders. The punishment for gender nonconforming people and their allies is imprisonment. Trans people are inherently outlaws under MAGA.

In the MAGA regime, immigrants, women exercising control over their bodies, and LGBTQ people are all outlaws. Like Black Americans before the Civil War, these targets of MAGA oppression have a human right to defend themselves and free themselves. Freedom-loving Americans are obligated to aid their efforts against those Douglass would no doubt dub MAGA “manstealers and murderers.”

Like Douglass, we face a time of darkness and oppression that calls for radical, revolutionary action. The MAGA threat must be subdued and America reconstituted to realize the potential for universal democracy and freedom that Douglass saw in the Declaration of Independence even in the dark days of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Civil War, and the betrayal of Reconstruction. But defeating MAGA is just meeting the emergency. Our every action must point forward to the genuine liberal democracy of tomorrow.

… that all governments derived their first powers from the consent of the governed; make it a government of the people, by the people and for the people, and for all the people, each for all and all for each … [Sources of Danger to the Republic, 1867]