Scientists Find ICE is Full of Losers
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Transcript:
Political scientists recently identified a specific type of person who is an important building block supporting fascist authoritarian regimes throughout world history: giant losers. I’m not talking about guys you wouldn’t want to sit next to at a dinner party, like Stephen Miller. I’m not even talking about guys you don’t ever want to leave alone around your uncovered drink, like Pete Hegseth. Those guys are losers, obviously, but even if they weren’t literally running the US government, they’d still be able to get jobs at Fox News or OAN.
No, I’m talking about the kind of loser who barely made it through elementary school, who developed zero life skills, and who will always choose the easiest path to success, assuming there is one made available to them. I guess maybe Kash Patel is a good “higher up” example, but this is mostly about the foot soldiers–the unnamed, masked goons who carry out the low-level on-the-street thuggery required to support an authoritarian despot. ICE. I’m talking about ICE.
This is all based on a book, titled Making a Career in Dictatorship: The Secret Logic behind Repression and Coups, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press and reviewed in May by the New York Times, which is how I happened to learn about it.
Two German researchers, Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf, were struck by how often they noticed historians refer to high-ranking officers in authoritarian secret police forces as “mediocre”, “low-skilled”, or “uneducated,” and so they set about trying to figure out why a regime would trust such people in those positions. They struck data gold when they found that Argentina kept meticulous records of their military officers throughout the past century, including graduation ranks, promotions and retirements. This allowed them to track officers who served during the country’s “Dirty War” from 1974 to 1983, during which time the military junta hunted down and murdered or “disappeared” leftists. What the researchers found was that officers who performed poorly were pushed into early retirement, but were offered a last ditch effort to save their careers: they could join Battalion 601, who performed the bulk of the “secret police” work, torturing and murdering dissidents. Those who joined Battalion 601 were able to rejoin the regular army, where they enjoyed promotions above those who had performed better than them and therefore stayed in the regular service.
The political scientists found similar data in very different regimes: the biggest losers in Nazi Germany ended up staffing the mobile killing squads in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union “deliberately recruited individuals with poor formal skills and knowledge” to serve as their secret police during Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1937.
And of course, today there’s ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement here in the United States. In an interview with the Hertie School in Berlin, one co-author, Christian Gläßel, laid out the reasons why Americans should see ICE as a sign that American democracy is not doing well:
“The fuelling of career pressure. DOGE-driven purges and budget cuts across federal agencies have created a climate of fear. ICE is actively recruiting from a pool of officers who face uncertainty,” which is an incredible point that I never even considered before. Elon Musk swooping in and laying off a whole bunch of federal workers incentivized those people to find work elsewhere in the government, and when no one is hiring but the Department of Homeland Security, well…moving on, they point to:
“Weakened oversight. The dismissal of 17 inspectors general removes key internal checks on misconduct, lowering the perceived risks of abusive behaviour.
“Signals of impunity for loyalists. Mass pardons, including for those involved in the January 6 insurrection, send a clear message that loyalists will be protected.
“These dynamics are reinforced by ICE’s recruitment practices: lowered standards, shortened training, large signing bonuses, and acceptance of candidates with criminal records. The broader lesson from our research is that repression does not require extremists; it requires only individuals whose alternatives have narrowed and whose careers depend on pleasing those in power.”
Incredibly, I poked around for any research on why people join ICE and found that all the way back in June of 2020, scientists published a paper exploring why 30% of ICE recruits and 50% of border patrol at the time were Latino: not “lack of identification with the immigrant-experience,” or “a dissociation with ethnic identity,” or “generally restrictionist immigration attitudes.” The answer was “money.” “A good job.” “Benefits.” It’s a good reminder that when we’re talking about “losers,” that also includes those who lost based on their race. In “Making a Career” the authors point out that the Nazi’s losers included people of suspect racial impurity, and understanding this aspect, I think, really fills in some gaps on why some of these people do what they do. That’s not to excuse them, of course: fuck these pieces of shit who are terrorizing our communities. But it’s helpful to understand the many ways that someone can be, well, a loser.
On that note, in that interview with the Hertie School, Gläßel pointed out a crucial finding in Making a Career that I think the New York Times article glossed over: they found that meritocracies don’t work. Well, they found that meritocratic, professional bureaucracies are not an ironclad barrier against authoritarian takeovers. When I first read that, I thought, well, clearly! Look at how our institutions have failed us here in the US, whether that be universities like Columbia or papers of record, like, well, the New York Times. And I just thought, well, it’s because they’re run by cowards.
And they are! I think I’m correct on that. But Gläßel makes a more interesting point:
“The conventional wisdom holds that professional, merit-based institutions serve as firewalls against authoritarianism. If promotions depend on competence rather than loyalty, the argument goes, you’ll get a bureaucracy committed to rules and procedures rather than to any particular leader.
“Our findings tell a different story. The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike. Prussian military advisors established this system in the early 20th century, and it persisted regardless of who held power. Yet this same meritocratic institution produced both brutal repression and repeated coups.
“The reason is structural: meritocracy by design creates losers. Any pyramid-shaped hierarchy with competitive promotions will generate a pool of officers who fall behind, who see their peers advance while they stagnate. These career-pressured individuals become a critical human resource for regimes seeking to turn a professional security organisation into a repressive machine – without provoking massive resistance or backlash. The underachievers do the dirty work, while the top performers can stay in their regular positions, untainted by direct involvement. This division of labour allows repression to proceed without alienating the institutional core.
“The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them.”
Much like with the study on Latinos in ICE, this made me pause and reconsider what a “loser” is. Obviously we can and should mock and criticize these thugs for being the worst kinds of losers, who not only lack training and education but who also have sold their neighbors, and their own humanity, for a payday. But as a weird hippie commie bleeding heart leftist, I do always want to look at the broader system that impacts our lives for better or worse. I want to live in a meritocracy of sorts, where people advance in their careers and their lives due to their talents and hard work, but even in a meritocracy like that, the fact of the matter is, there will always be “losers.” How do we make a society in which those “losers” don’t become monsters to become “winners?” How do we give them the resources they need to succeed, either at their original goal or off-ramped to something else, in a way that doesn’t make them the compliant weapon of a fascist?
It’s a complicated question that I’m afraid we’re nowhere near to answering anytime soon. As of this recording, ICE has been on an actual killing spree, gunning down two innocent people in the past week as dozens more have died in their custody this year. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to deal with the losers we have now and worry about our future losers once Republicans are out of office.
Comments (9)
Per se, identifying losers is shooting fish in a barrel. Per se... because losers spend time...sfiab
In any case, the condition the US finds itself in is directly traceable to the fact that practically no Confederates were punished (let alone executed) after the Civil War. Instead, the evil in their hearts was left to fester and grow for another century. This is why my heart sank when at his inauguration Joe Biden blathered about We’re all one nation/let’s come together. No, you’re not, and MAGA certainly doesn’t think so. They’re not interested in playing nice, only in being ICE.
Think about the teachers accused of child abuse and law enforcement officials who are far from one locality and wind up in another without any flag or comment; the new location talks about being inundated with paper and that's not as far-fetched as you think. If you get court-martialed in the Army, it’s going to be hard to join the Navy, but you can join ICE. It's not about lax enforcement, it's about what an administration puts a priority on; filling the slots or hiring quality. Outside of the fact that most of the foreign spies have passed the background checks, it’s easier to live in North Carolina and buy merchandise from Utah through Amazon or from Amador California and you want to buy car insurance from a company exported in Texas, is just a couple of clicks and for some reason they're able to access your driving history. It seems that a nationalized security check system is relevant only with a profit margin.
Meritocracies don't function in the way we are told they do. It's not that meritocracies don't work, the job will still get done, just not as good because too many people bring their "C-Game" to the job. They'll break out their B-Game, but never their A-Game. Meritocracy is more a mediocracy than efficiency. What is considered "merit" isn't necessarily merit. Jack Welch notoriously popularized stack ranking and chopping the bottom 10%. Jack Welch didn't cook the books, but he definitely did shady shit to beat analysts' expectations, giving him a lot of undue influence in the corporate world. As Jack Welch moved, so did corporate America. Corporations also ranked and chopped, often to discover that they got rid of vital people who "had little merit." "Merit" more often is based on friendships with managers, with manipulative incompetent people being more skilled at drinking with management than their jobs. So, when your dad gives you advice like, "Look around and see who is the office idiot. If you don't see him, your the idiot that's going to get cut," factor in friendships of convenience with managers. People with "merit" too often end up in management where they have no skills. And when they don't, too often narcissism sets in and they alienate coworkers and drive off very competent people, often women. Which brings up another problem with "merit." White male is the default standard with their mediocrity being considered more desirable than all but the most brilliant women and minorities. The reason people are against Affirmative Action isn't because of "unearned promotions," it's because the average mediocre white guy is too lazy to up his game by a mere 5%. Besides, why level the playing field and increase competition when privilege works in your favor?
This tracks with my own experience toiling in the cubicle mines, as well as with what I observed as a fly on the wall (I did tech support/sysadmin) at a San Francisco ad agency in the late 90s. The mediocre tenaciously defend their positions, and real talent is more often regarded as a threat, especially when it’s female or melanated. (But white women in middle management can be pretty duplicitous as well, I’d guess from insecurity as much as anything else, since they find themselves having to play by the de facto ass-kissing rules rather than being judged by actual merit.)
In other news scientists discover that water is wet.
"...the kind of loser who barely made it through elementary school, who developed zero life skills, and who will always choose the easiest path to success..." Isn't this a description of Trump?
I wonder if any studies exist on what happened to loser thugs in defeated fascist countries (Germany, Italy, Spain post-Franco)? I know that in postwar Germany (where I was born as an expat) many lower-level soldiers, police, and other officials were not only not prosecuted but allowed to take on similar jobs because the occupation authorities decided that they had to get someone to fill all those jobs just to keep the country running. Denazification was thus rather incomplete. (In the Soviet sector/East Germany, the Russians promoted the fiction that their new German state was free of fascists and manned by those Germans who were socialist and had resisted during the war, but of course there were plenty of Germans who went from enthusiastically participating in the Nazi machinery to manning lower and mid-level positions in the DDR, including working for or informing for the Stasi. The kind of people hired by ICE for whatever opportunistic reasons don’t really care about the state’s particular ideology beyond hating the Other, whomever they conceive that to be, and will gladly serve whatever master gives them the opportunity to act upon that hate, or even worse, to do it for the money, in a very amoral if desperate way. They’ll engage in whatever pretzel logic they need to to justify their choice so they can go on benefitting from the state using them.)
I can only guess that the less incompetent ones didn't get caught when the Allies turned a blind eye to vigilantism for a few days. I recommend the book Superior: The Return of Race Science. It starts with the human zoos in Paris, then moves on to talk about how eugenics never went away, it just went underground, rebranded, and was kept smoldering until things had changed enough for a favorable return, which it briefly started to under Bush Jr.