When the goal is to turn a dynamic superpower into a gated community for the frightened, you end up importing the stagnation along with the prejudice.
There is a specific kind of architectural madness currently gripping the West Wing, a design flaw in the blueprint of the new American century that would be laughable if it were not so lethally expensive. The Trump administration, guided by the spectral hand of Stephen Miller and the chaotic impulses of a MAGA movement that views demography as a horror movie, has decided that the solution to the complexities of the twenty-first century is to turn the United States into a baby Europe. They do not mean the Europe of high-speed rail, universal healthcare, or three-hour lunches with wine. They mean the Europe of the imaginary past, a homogenous, white, static museum piece where the church bells ring on time and nobody speaks a language you cannot order a sandwich in. They call it “remigration.” They call it “America First.” But what they are actually building is a continental-scale replica of a gated retirement community that has cut its own phone lines to keep the neighbors out, unaware that the house is on fire and there is nobody left young enough to hold the hose.
The irony at the heart of this project is so dense it practically has its own gravitational pull. At the exact moment that Stephen Miller is drafting executive orders to purge the American workforce of the immigrant labor that keeps it breathing, the actual Europe he fetishizes is currently experiencing a slow-motion economic cardiac arrest driven by the very homogeneity he seeks to replicate. Across the Atlantic, the nations that serve as the aesthetic mood board for the American Right are staring into the abyss of a demographic winter. Germany is running out of workers. Italy is turning into an open-air museum where the average age is “deceased.” The labor forces are shrinking, consumer demand is stalling, and the social safety nets are buckling under the weight of an aging population that stopped having children two decades ago.
Yet here we are, watching the architects of American policy look at the economic sclerosis of the Old World and say, “Yes, let’s import that here.” They are looking at the empty cradles and the silent factories of the ethnonationalist fantasy and deciding that the price of purity is worth the poverty. It is a level of economic illiteracy that requires active effort to maintain. It requires you to look at a field of rotting vegetables in California, which will rot because the hands that pick them have been deported, and tell yourself that this is the price of sovereignty. It requires you to look at a hospital where the nurses have been purged because of their visa status and tell the dying patient that at least their doctor speaks English without an accent.
The vision of the United States as a “baby Europe” is not just a betrayal of the American economic engine; it is a fundamental misunderstanding of why the United States became a superpower in the first place. We are not a nation of blood and soil. We are a nation of ink and paper. We are a contract, not a tribe. The core founding contradiction of this country, the tension between the promise of “all men are created equal” and the reality of chattel slavery, has always been the engine of our history. We fight, we bleed, we argue, and slowly, painfully, we expand the definition of “we.” But the MAGA movement, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to resolve this contradiction by choosing the wrong side. They have decided that the “creed” is too difficult, too messy, too loud. They prefer the “blood.” They prefer the quiet predictability of the tribe, even if that tribe is slowly starving to death.
This retreat into racial logic is being spearheaded by a cast of characters who seem to have stepped out of a satire about the decline of empires. Chief among them is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new administration’s unofficial minister of efficiency. Musk is a fascinating case study in the psychology of the exile. He is a high-profile South African expatriate who fled a nation hollowed out by the aftershocks of apartheid, a system that prioritized racial hierarchy over economic reality until the entire structure collapsed under its own moral weight. You would think, perhaps, that growing up in the ruins of a racial caste system would teach a man a lesson about the dangers of organizing a society around skin color.
Instead, Musk seems to have looked at the failure of apartheid and concluded that the only problem was that they didn’t have better rockets. He has flirted with reviving the racial logic of his homeland in American politics, boosting theories about “replacement” and “genetics” that would have been comfortable conversation at a Pretoria dinner party in 1985. There is a dark, biting irony in a man who utilized the open, chaotic, meritocratic chaos of the United States to build his fortune now using that fortune to close the door behind him. He is the ultimate beneficiary of the American Creed, the idea that a brilliant weirdo from anywhere can come here and build spaceships, yet he aligns himself with a movement that views the “anywhere” as a threat. He is an immigrant who hates immigration, a beneficiary of diversity who funds uniformity. He is the living embodiment of the ladder-pulling instinct, the guy who gets into the lifeboat and immediately starts complaining that the other passengers are ruining the aesthetic of the rescue.
The economic consequences of this pivot to ethnonationalism are not theoretical. We have history books. We know what happens when a society decides to prioritize purity over potential. Look at Spain during the Inquisition. They expelled the Jews and the Muslims, the bankers, the artisans, the scientists. They achieved their goal. They created a perfectly Catholic, perfectly homogenous society. And they immediately plunged themselves into centuries of economic irrelevance and intellectual stagnation. When you purge the “other,” you do not just lose bodies. You lose brains. You lose the friction that creates sparks. You lose the hunger of the newcomer who has something to prove.
Or look at the ethnonationalist states of the twentieth century. Look at the rigidity of caste systems that lock talent out of the economy because it was born in the wrong neighborhood or to the wrong parents. These systems consistently lead to the subjugation of minorities, yes, but they also lead to economic stagnation, brain drain, and eventual political rot. When you decide that merit is secondary to lineage, you stop innovating. You stop competing. You become a society of heirs and gatekeepers, obsessing over who belongs rather than what can be built.
Stephen Miller, the architect of this new American darkness, understands this on some level. He knows that the “remigration” he proposes will cause economic pain. He just doesn’t care. To men like Miller, the economy is secondary to the culture, and the culture they want is one where they are comfortable. They are willing to accept a poorer, smaller, stupider America as long as it is an America where they never have to press “1” for English. They are trading the dynamism of a superpower for the comfort of a panic room.
The “baby Europe” they want to build is a fantasy that ignores the reality of modern Europe. They see the castles and the white faces and the history; they do not see the pension crises, the labor strikes, the desperate attempts by European governments to attract the very immigrants Miller wants to deport. Europe is trying to wake up from the nap that MAGA wants to force America to take. They are realizing that you cannot run a twenty-first-century economy with a nineteenth-century demography. You need youth. You need energy. You need the people who are willing to walk across a continent for a chance to work.
The mass deportation plan is the operational arm of this fantasy. It is framed as “law and order,” but it is actually economic suicide. Who picks the crops in the Central Valley when the workers are gone? Who processes the meat in the Midwest? Who builds the houses in the Sun Belt? Who cares for the elderly in Florida? The answer, according to the administration, is “Americans.” But Americans are already working. We have low unemployment. We have a labor shortage. The idea that there is a secret reserve army of native-born Americans waiting to take jobs in the slaughterhouses and the strawberry fields is a fiction. It is a lie told to soothe the ego of a base that feels displaced.
If they actually succeed in removing millions of people from the workforce, the result will be instant, catastrophic inflation. Food prices will skyrocket. Construction will halt. Services will vanish. The “economic collapse” they warn about will be self-inflicted, a wound opened by the very people claiming to heal the nation. It is the logic of the doctor who bleeds the patient to cure the anemia.
But beyond the economics, there is the moral void at the center of this project. The United States was built on a bet. It was a bet that you could take people from every corner of the earth, people with different gods, different foods, different traumas, and bind them together not by blood, but by a set of rules. It was a bet that democracy was stronger than tribalism. It has been a messy, violent, imperfect bet, but it has been the secret to our success. It is why we went to the moon. It is why we invented the internet. It is why our culture dominates the globe.
To abandon that bet now, to retreat into the defensive crouch of blood-and-soil nationalism, is to admit defeat. It is to say that the experiment failed, that we are not capable of the “more perfect union,” that we are just another scared tribe fighting for scraps on a dying planet. It is a surrender of the American idea.
The “remigration” they propose is not just a logistical nightmare; it is a spiritual one. It requires the creation of a police state. You cannot deport millions of people without checkpoints, without raids, without a surveillance apparatus that eventually turns its eye on everyone. You cannot purge a society without destroying its soul. The “homogenous” nation they want to build will be a paranoid nation, a nation of snitches and informers, a nation where every neighbor is a potential threat.
And for what? To revive the racial logic of apartheid South Africa? To copy the economic model of a dying Europe? To make Elon Musk feel more at home?
The tragedy is that the “baby Europe” they covet does not even exist in Europe anymore. London is diverse. Paris is diverse. Berlin is diverse. The world has moved on. The mixing of peoples is the reality of the modern age. You can try to stop it with walls and laws and cruelty, but you cannot stop the tide. You can only drown trying.
The administration is selling a nostalgia for a time that never was, at the cost of a future that could be. They are selling the idea that we can be great again by being small again. They are selling the idea that strength comes from subtraction.
But every attempt at forced racial or cultural purification in modern history has failed both morally and materially. It failed in Germany. It failed in South Africa. It failed in the Balkans. It leaves behind nothing but graves and poverty. It creates societies that are brittle, suspicious, and ultimately weak.
The true strength of the United States has always been its ability to absorb, to reinvent, to add. We are the country of the “and,” not the “or.” We are the country of the immigrant and the pioneer, the worker and the dreamer. To replace that “and” with a “get out” is to cut the heart out of the nation.
We are watching a political movement that has mistaken a mirror for a window. They look at the country and see only themselves, and they want to smash everything that does not offer a reflection. They do not want a nation; they want a vanity project. They want a safe space for their own anxieties, enforced by the full power of the state.
They are ignoring the real-time lessons of the world around them. They are ignoring the economic data. They are ignoring the screams of history. They are marching backward, dragging the country with them, convinced that the cliff edge is actually the finish line.
The “rot” that historical comparisons warn of is already setting in. You can see it in the discourse, where cruelty is mistaken for strength and stupidity is mistaken for authenticity. You can see it in the elevation of cranks and conspiracists to positions of power. You can see it in the hollowing out of our institutions, the purging of expertise, the celebration of loyalty over competence.
This is what happens when you decide that who you are is more important than what you do. This is what happens when you decide that the accident of birth is the only merit that matters. You rot from the head down.
The “baby Europe” of Stephen Miller’s dreams is a nightmare for anyone who loves the actual, messy, vibrant reality of America. It is a sterile, quiet, dying place. It is a place where the trains might run on time (though given our infrastructure, even that is doubtful), but where nobody is going anywhere worth visiting.
It is a vision of the future that looks suspiciously like a cemetery. Orderly. Quiet. Homogenous. And dead.
The South African expatriates cheering this on should know better, but perhaps that is the problem. They learned the wrong lesson. They think the system failed because it wasn’t harsh enough, not because it was inhuman. They are trying to re-run the simulation with better hardware, convinced that this time, the apartheid will hold.
But it won’t. It never does. The human spirit is too messy, too stubborn, too wild to be contained by the fences of the ethnonationalist. The economy is too global, too interconnected to be severed by the fantasies of the autarkist.
We are headed for a collision between the fantasy of the administration and the reality of the world. The pain of that collision will be felt by everyone. It will be felt at the grocery store. It will be felt at the hospital. It will be felt in the soul of the nation.
The question is not whether this project will fail. It will. The question is how much damage it will do before it collapses. How many lives will be ruined? How much wealth will be destroyed? How many years will we lose to this fever dream of purity?
The United States is not Europe. We are something else. We are something new. We are a project that is still under construction. To try to turn us into a replica of the Old World is to admit that we have run out of ideas. It is to admit that the American experiment is over.
But it isn’t over. Not yet. The friction we feel right now is the friction of a country deciding whether it wants to live or die. The “baby Europe” option is the option of death. It is the option of the warm bath and the razor blade.
The other option is harder. It is louder. It involves arguing with your neighbor. It involves making room for the new. It involves accepting that the country will look different in twenty years than it did in 1950. But it is the option of life.
The administration has made its choice. They have chosen the past. They have chosen the blood. They have chosen the rot.
It is up to the rest of us to choose the future. To choose the creed. To choose the ink.
Because if we don’t, if we let them turn this country into a fortress for the frightened, we will find that the walls they build to keep the world out are actually the walls of our own prison. And inside that prison, as the economy crumbles and the culture stagnates, we will have plenty of time to wonder why we traded our birthright for a bowl of white porridge.
The irony of Elon Musk, the man who wants to go to Mars, backing a movement that is terrified of the Earth, is the perfect epitaph for this era. He wants to leave the planet, but he wants to make sure the launchpad is segregated. It is a small, petty vision for a man with such big rockets.
But then, that is the nature of ethnonationalism. It shrinks the world. It shrinks the mind. It shrinks the soul. It turns giants into pygmies, terrified of their own shadow.
The “Baby Europe” project is not a sign of strength. It is a scream of weakness. It is the sound of a movement that knows it cannot win the argument, so it tries to rig the game. It knows it cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas, so it tries to close the market.
It is the last gasp of a demographic that knows its time is passing, and rather than accept a seat at the table of a new America, they are trying to flip the table over.
They will not succeed in stopping the future. But they can certainly ruin the present. And that, it seems, is the goal. If they cannot rule the country they want, they will ruin the country they have.
They would rather be the captains of a sinking ship than the passengers on a vessel sailing to a horizon they do not control.
Receipt Time
The invoice for this little experiment in retro-futurism is going to be staggering, and it won’t be paid in Bitcoin. It will be paid in the hollowed-out towns where the only growth industry is the deportation force. It will be paid in the silence of the lecture halls where the foreign students used to be. It will be paid in the stagnation of an economy that decided to fire its own engine. The receipt will show a surcharge for “purity” and a deduction for “vitality,” and at the bottom, in fine print, it will read: All sales final. No refunds on lost superpowers. And the most haunting part isn’t the cost; it’s that the people footing the bill think they’re buying insurance, when they’re actually buying a burial plot.