The Power to Let You Die

Imagine there was no place to turn.

No clinic. No shelter. No hotline. No one in the agency picking up the phone. The storm hits, or the fever spikes, or the food runs out—and the institutions you once believed would respond are silent. Not because the system is overwhelmed. Not because it failed. But because it was never meant to serve you.

And in the vacuum where care should be, something else takes root. The informal economy steps in to provide what the formal one has withdrawn—sometimes with drugs, gangs, or underground markets. Desperation gives rise to recruitment. Youth with no prospects become cannon fodder for street violence, trafficking rings, and the shadow armies that thrive in failed spaces. Favela cults, prison gangs, and predatory faiths offer structure where schools and services have collapsed. It’s not just lives that are lost—it’s human potential, stolen early and squandered violently. And in response, the state doesn’t rebuild hospitals or fund mental health services—it builds more prisons. It trains more police. It militarizes public space. The state that refused to protect now returns to punish.

This is the future being quietly built around us. And in many places, it’s already here.

There’s a quiet kind of power that doesn’t announce itself with tanks in the street or the shuttering of newspapers. It doesn’t need secret police or martial law. It looks like bureaucracy. It sounds like budget cuts. It hides behind legal memos, personnel changes, and the dull drone of executive orders. It’s not the power to kill outright—it’s the power to let die. And in the United States today, that power is not only alive and well, it’s being institutionalized.

In Trump’s first term, we watched this dynamic play out in real time. The pandemic exposed a grotesque calculus at the heart of governance: whose lives are worth protecting, and whose can be sacrificed in the name of political convenience or economic ideology. Public health professionals were sidelined. Data was buried. Lives were lost—not by accident, but by design. The elderly, the poor, Black and Brown communities, the disabled—all disproportionately affected by a virus the state pretended to confront while quietly letting it run its course.

Now, in his return to office, this logic has not only returned but has been codified. Project 2025 is not just a roadmap for conservative governance—it is a blueprint for the systematic dismantling of the modern state’s protective function. Its architects envision a country where civil servants can be fired en masse and replaced with political loyalists. Where public health institutions are stripped of independence. Where the Environmental Protection Agency becomes a shell, and the Department of Justice is weaponized against protestors rather than white-collar crime. The promise is simple: if you’re not aligned with the agenda, the government will not be there for you.

This isn’t classic fascism, nor is it traditional authoritarianism. Those are too loud, too obvious. What we’re living through now is more insidious. It’s a kind of governance that operates through omission. Through silence. Through knowing inaction. A form of rule that doesn’t just fail to protect—it selects who will be unprotected.

This isn’t just a different way of governing—it’s a redefinition of what government is for. Under this emerging model, the state is no longer the protector of the people. It is the protector of the chosen. Aid, protection, and resources are not guaranteed by virtue of citizenship or human need, but are meted out according to political loyalty, racial identity, economic utility, and ideological conformity. We saw this years ago when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. The Trump administration’s response was lethargic, dismissive, and at times openly contemptuous. Vital aid was delayed or denied. FEMA, the very agency tasked with protecting all Americans in times of disaster, was used as a blunt political instrument, distributing help not according to need, but according to who counted as “American enough.” That was a warning. Project 2025 is the blueprint for making that selective abandonment permanent.

It is no accident that under this administration, trans people are denied healthcare, immigrants are herded into legal black holes, and women’s reproductive freedoms are vanishing in plain sight. It’s not a glitch that environmental regulations are being shredded while climate disasters disproportionately consume poor and racialized communities. These are not oversights. They are decisions.

When you fire the scientists, you don’t need to burn the books. When you starve the regulatory agencies, you don’t need to pass new laws. When you demonize teachers, doctors, librarians, and public servants, you make it easier to justify their erasure. What remains is a shell of governance—a theater of democracy masking a regime of ideological enforcement.

Elections still happen. Congress still meets. But underneath the procedural rituals lies a brutal sorting mechanism: some people will be protected, others will be exposed. Some will be lifted, others left to drown—literally, as hurricanes strengthen, wildfires spread, and infrastructure crumbles. This is governance by triage, not by justice.

And for those still hoping the courts will save us, consider this: the courts, too, are being remade. The judges installed are not neutral umpires; they are referees with stakes in the game. If the law becomes merely an instrument of power, then legality is no longer a shield—it’s a sword.

What we are facing is not merely a political shift. It is an existential one. A transformation in the very meaning of citizenship, of belonging, of what the state owes its people. If this blueprint is realized in full, the United States will no longer be a country where all lives are presumed to matter. It will be a place where your value is contingent—on your race, your gender, your politics, your productivity. A society where survival is no longer a right but a privilege granted to the ideologically pure and economically useful.

This isn’t a warning about what might come. It’s a map of what’s already happening.

What comes next will depend on whether enough people recognize the stakes, and whether they are willing to act—not out of partisan loyalty, but out of a deeper commitment to the basic idea that a government exists to serve all its people, not just the chosen few.

References:

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 2023.

Woodward, Bob. Rage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.