How Democracy Dies While Life Goes On as Usual

An ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed citizen in Minnesota, yet many Americans continue hosting dinner parties, posting casual updates on social media, and going about their daily routines. Is this response normal — or dangerously naive?

The answer lies in the work of Ernst Fraenkel, a German political scientist who watched Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. His book The Dual State, published in 1941, offers a chilling framework for understanding how authoritarianism disguises itself as normalcy — and why that makes it so effective.

The Genius of Ordinary Terror

Fraenkel's key insight was counterintuitive: life under authoritarianism is, for most people, weirdly normal. You drop your kids at school, head to the office, and yes, host dinner parties. This is what he called the "normative state" — the realm where business continues as usual.

But here's the trap. This everyday normalcy exists specifically to lull people into complacency, preventing them from recognizing that a second state operates in parallel. The "prerogative state" only becomes visible when you do something the powers that be don't like. Suddenly, you're in a realm where the rule of law doesn't exist, where citizens can be killed with impunity.

The case of Renee Nicole Good illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The 37-year-old white woman and U.S. citizen was simply sitting in her car, observing an ICE operation. She wasn't armed or threatening. She was killed anyway.

"The Dual State lives by veiling its true nature," Fraenkel wrote. Most people don't realize the prerogative state is active until it's too late — until the knock comes on their own door.

When Randomness Becomes the Point

Russian American journalist M. Gessen recently argued in The New York Times that it's precisely this unpredictability that reveals state terror is happening in America, not just routine repression.

"The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive," Gessen writes. "Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay... A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it."

If it happened to Good — a white, female citizen — it can happen to almost anyone. That's not a bug in the system; it's a feature.

The Grandkid Test

So what's our obligation when we recognize we're living in a dual state? Consider what Holocaust educators call "the grandkid test." They ask: If you were a non-Jewish German in 1940s Germany, how would you have acted? Would you have hidden Jews in your attic? Stood up to the Nazis? Or complied to save your own skin?

Now apply that question to today. Someday your grandchildren may ask what you did during Minnesota, or under this administration more broadly. Will you be able to answer in a way that makes them proud?

Passing the grandkid test doesn't require everyone to put their bodies in the street. Risk levels vary dramatically — we can't expect someone who's undocumented to take the same risks as someone with full citizenship and privilege.

For some, action means attending peaceful protests. For others, it's donating so Minnesotans can afford safety equipment, dash cams, or legal aid. For still others, it might mean bringing groceries to families who feel vulnerable and are afraid to leave their homes.

The Epistemic Duty

But before any action comes a fundamental obligation: the duty to know what kind of reality we're actually inhabiting. This is what philosophers call an "epistemic duty" — the responsibility to seek truth and resist comfortable illusions.

Once we recognize we're living in a dual state, compliance stops looking like safety and starts looking like complicity. The normative state's greatest trick is convincing us that if we just keep our heads down, we'll be fine. But Fraenkel's analysis shows us why that's false comfort.