The plan has ignited an uproar among liberal media outlets. In an analysis piece, CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson called the proposed ban “a crackdown on academic freedom”, while the New York Times ran an opinion column by Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” about Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with the university. Neither the prim moralizing nor the attempted psychoanalysis understands the true nature of the Trump administration’s decree. The move is just another instance of squabbling among factions of the coalition running the United States government.

The Republican wing of the U.S. government believes (or at least claims to believe) that all non-U.S. citizens are leeches on U.S. society and must be rooted out and removed. In a remarkable show of obviously transparent projection, Republicans consider the very presence of non-citizens in United States society to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus, they view the removal of such “undesirables” as a necessary inoculation against the chaos of a world gone mad.

Harvard and other elite universities have long been bastions and promulgators of United States soft power. The elite university boasts the scion of power holders from around the world among its alumni and student body, as well as the best and brightest students from around the world, incorporating the fruits of their labor into the U.S. empire and depriving so-called “developing” countries from researchers and innovators of the future. While on campus, students rub shoulders with the next generation of U.S. business leaders, intelligence officers, media executives, and politicians. These relationships further the United States’ expansion into every nook and cranny of the planet.

Massive resource extraction deals and colossal concessions, counterrevolutions and covert operations, the wholesale mortgaging of the future of entire nations in the interests of United States capital — the bonds formed between ruling class members at universities for the privileged run like veins throughout the capitalist world, sending blood money back to the heart of empire.

The revocation of the privilege of elite education for the foreign bourgeoisies will shake networks of power that keep capitalism going. Cooperation across international borders is seen as weakness by chauvinistic, vapid U.S. politicians, who seek a greater consolidation and concentration of power among themselves and their allies, even at the expense of alienating the very facilitators of the imperial riches and success they enjoy. Members of ruling classes in the periphery judge strength among themselves by the level and quality of their connection to foreign capital and imperial power, and even a nonessential change in the dialectic of imperial oppression will prove to be a severe shock to them.

Base infighting for power is nothing but a flailing attempt by the ruling class to preserve a past that is slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. They are losing control, and while they may not foresee the tailspin into which they are headed, the brutish, panicked actions undertaken by the Trump regime should not be seen as anything other than desperation. The ruling class’s own greed is knocking out the foundations of the very state that provides them with the power they crave. 

Through it all, the Democratic Party and its cowardly leadership has done nothing apart from throwing out a few vacuous platitudes and empty threats on Sunday morning talk shows. And how could they do anything else? The thread of oppression runs throughout the history of the republic, back through the Biden and Obama administrations, back through Reagan and Carter and beyond living memory. Deportations, the “tough on crime” agenda of the Clinton 1990s, concentration camps along the border — all featured heavily in Democratic administrations, despite hypocritical screeching about the supposedly unique evils being visited upon their fair land by the Trump administration. The legacy of the Democratic Party — even among liberals — is far more than tarnished; it is irrecoverably soiled. Whatever shred of decency Democrats could clutch to themselves has vanished. 

Two groups are facilitating this hostile takeover: fascist Christian nationalists and the highest ranking members of the capitalist class. The former hungers for cultural domination and the chance to establish a religious nation based on vaguely representative and specifically theocratic principles, while the latter thirsts, as it always has, for astronomical profits and oligarchy. They have already solidified their control of the state (they were voted in), and now they are moving to install as many party loyalists as they can in government positions until the sheer mass of fascist flunkeys is too great to oppose. Behind the wave of functionaries march the new-generation propagandists, proclaiming Trumpian visions in both official and unofficial outlets, and shouting down any opposing views. The old order is dead and dying; career politicos and CIA station chiefs, newspaper editors and diplomats, graduates of prestigious universities and longtime regulars at the most prestigious parties are all being muscled unceremoniously out the door. The most rightward agents of capital, working side-by-side, are systematically dismantling the last vestiges of the post-WWII white settler coalition.

As numerous U.S. backed coups show, what will follow the fascist takeover is a wholesale pillaging of everything that isn’t nailed down. The hyperrich have their eye set on the biggest plunder imaginable: that of the imperial core itself. The core is the last orange that hasn’t been squeezed — the petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy have grown fat and happy off their share of the spoils extracted from the rest of the world, and they’re about to be put in the juicer. Every service, agency, function, apparatus, every conceivable benefit given to everyone from the settler “middle class” on up will be sold at auction to the highest bidder (see former Soviet government enterprises) or simply eliminated (see the post-coup killing of the Guatemalan land reform initiative). Every shred of value that can be appropriated will be appropriated, and the capitalist ruling class, together with its church-and-state allies, will rise to dominate the United States like the United States has dominated the rest of the world since the end of the Second World War. The boot of oppression is coming for all who thought they were comfortable, secure in an idyllic existence, sure the class struggle would never reach them, insulated from all upheaval and tumult.  

The recently-passed Trump administration policies are very unpopular now, and their unpopularity will only grow as the months and years pass. So this new ruling class coalition has ensured that units of force stand by to enforce the will of the state wherever the will of the masses is found lacking. Local police departments have been equipped with military grade weaponry and tactical assault vehicles, massive training complexes have been built to train them in their use, and multiple letter agencies have been deployed with specific instructions to wear insignias and identification on flak jackets at all times during an operation. ICE and Border Patrol are arresting entire families, congregants during a church service, legal residents who were simply overheard in public speaking Spanish, and even Indigenous people. The message being sent is loud and clear: this is the way things will be, and these are the consequences for those who don’t obey.