Democracy Doesn't Die in Darkness. It Dies in HR.
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I spent years as a cop. I worked with plenty of good ones, and plenty of bad ones. I will tell you exactly what the bad cops had in common.
They were guys nobody else wanted.
They couldn’t make it on the regular force. They had disciplinary letters in their files. They washed out of the military or never qualified in the first place. And the moment somebody handed them a badge and a gun and told them they were finally important, they became the most dangerous people in the building.
I think about those guys every time I watch ICE roll into another American city in tactical gear. Because there is now actual research that proves what I learned the hard way on the street: the people who build authoritarian regimes are not the fanatics on TV. They are the mediocre men looking for a promotion.
The Idiots Who Ran the Death Squads
The New York Times this week [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/world/authoritarians-mediocre-employees.html] broke down a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, called Making a Career in Dictatorship. The two men got their hands on something almost no researcher has ever had: complete personnel records for Argentina’s military going back to the late 1800s.
That dataset covers the Dirty War, the period in the 1970s and 80s when the Argentine military junta disappeared roughly thirty thousand of its own citizens.
The Argentine military ran a standard up-or-out system. Perform, get promoted. Underperform, wash out. But there was a side door: a unit called Battalion 601. Army intelligence. The secret police. The guys who did the kidnappings, the torture, and the death flights, where they threw drugged prisoners out of helicopters into the South Atlantic.
Here is the part the authors documented, with receipts: the worse an officer’s academic record was at the military academy, the more likely he was to end up in Battalion 601. The bottom of the class. The guys who couldn’t hack it in the regular army. They volunteered to torture people because it was a career detour. A few years running a torture cell, and they came out the other side with promotions, raises, and pensions that put them ahead of the guys who had actually earned their rank.
The lowest performers got assigned to the most brutal units. Why? Because the work was so morally disgusting that nobody else wanted it. Which meant the career payoff was the biggest. A stint as a monster could rehabilitate the worst loser in the academy.
This is what Hannah Arendt was getting at when she wrote about the banality of evil after the Nuremberg trials. The people who run the machinery of mass atrocity are rarely impressive. They are usually the guys who couldn’t get a real job.
The Same Pattern, Every Single Time
Once you know what to look for, you see it everywhere.
Nazi Germany. The Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing squads that murdered close to two million Jews in Eastern Europe by walking them into pits and shooting them — were staffed by guys with blemished records. Disciplinary problems. Questionable “racial purity” in a system obsessed with it. No real military or police experience. Joining the killing squads was how they fixed their resumes.
Stalin’s NKVD during the Great Terror of 1937. The secret police who killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were, in the words of the book, “deliberately recruited” because they had few skills and not much education. Their bosses ran competitions between offices to see who could arrest more people. Like a sales contest. Except the product was your neighbors.
Hungary under Viktor Orban. For fifteen years he ran what the European Parliament officially labeled an electoral autocracy. He didn’t do it with stormtroopers. He did it with judges. A Princeton researcher quoted in the piece estimates that five to ten percent of Hungarian judges — the careerists looking for the next promotion — did the dirty work of carrying out the regime’s agenda from the bench. The rest just kept their heads down. Hungarians finally threw him out last month. It took fifteen years.
Venezuela under Maduro. When he stole the 2024 election and needed to crush the protests that followed, he didn’t call the regular army. He called the National Guard, described by a historian in the Times piece as the lowest rung of the armed forces. He also called the colectivos, the armed neighborhood gangs the regime had been feeding government jobs to for years. They killed dozens of opposition supporters and detained thousands.
Same playbook every time. Find the people who can’t make it on merit. Give them a back door. Give them impunity. Watch them do anything you ask.
And Now, the United States
The researchers behind the book are saying out loud that ICE under Trump’s second term fits the pattern. Not loosely. Precisely.
Here is the playbook, lifted directly from their work:
* Repurpose an institution into a second ladder for career promotions.
* Pump it full of money.
* Lower the barriers to getting hired so it attracts people who can’t find work elsewhere.
* Cut other government jobs to grow the pool of desperate applicants.
* Signal impunity, so the recruits know there will be no consequences.
Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.
ICE is getting a budget in the current funding bill that dwarfs every other federal law enforcement agency in this country. Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers across other agencies, creating exactly the desperate labor pool the book describes. The training standards have collapsed. A former training academy instructor named Ryan Schwank testified to Congress [https://www.congress.gov/] in February that new cadets are graduating despite widespread concerns from their own trainers that they don’t grasp the tactics or the law required to do the job. In 2021, recruits had to pass twenty-five practical exams. Today, nine.
And after ICE officers killed a protester in Minneapolis in January, Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller publicly assured ICE officers of immunity.
Immunity. They said the word out loud.
This is the part where Amanda Taub, who wrote the Times piece, is being polite about what’s happening. I don’t have to be f**king polite. What we are watching, in broad daylight, is the mass mobilization of a federal force whose loyalty is to one man instead of to the Constitution.
And it is being staffed by exactly the kind of guy this research warns about. The guy who couldn’t make the local PD. The guy who washed out of the military. The guy with the disciplinary letter in his file. He puts on the ICE uniform, and suddenly he is somebody. He has authority, a gun, a paycheck, and the second-in-command of the executive branch on the record telling him he will face no consequences.
I have known that guy my entire career. I have arrested that guy. I have testified against that guy. And now the federal government is hiring him by the thousand.
What History Actually Tells Us
The lesson of Argentina and Hungary and Venezuela and Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is that you do not need a country full of fascists to lose your democracy. You need a few thousand mediocre men who want a promotion and don’t have the spine to ask any questions.
America has plenty of those. We always have.
The question is whether the rest of us have the spine to push back before the ladder they are climbing right now gets too tall to take down.
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