When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to read the Declaration once again, what do we find in this most hallowed of American political texts? When I sat down, with a grudging sense of Boy Scout dutifulness to revisit those 1,337 words, I saw that it was no longer the document I remembered from high school. The bits lodged in my memory were the oft-quoted glowing abstractions: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” “all men are created equal,” “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These words, justly famous, do not represent the Declaration’s main thrust. (All of the above phrases appear in a single sentence in the text’s second paragraph.) The bulk of the Declaration is given over not to the articulation of Enlightenment principles but the enumeration of concrete grievances. Why declare independence? Because the British seem bent on establishing “absolute Tyranny.” “To prove this,” the Declaration’s authors write, “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” There follows a list of “facts”; and the abuses described may seem, to a denizen of contemporary America, troublingly familiar.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people…. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies…. Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us…protecting them…from punishment from any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States…. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the work of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.
The grievances describe a sovereign waging war on his subjects, deploying unaccountable soldiers and officers to harass and sometimes even kill them. The political psychology of the Declaration is that of a people under siege.
Readers often skip over this tally of abuses. It’s hard not to prefer the stirring invocations of rights that open the Declaration, or the oath that closes it (“we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”). Some of the complaints seem now like relics of a vanished world. The claim, for example, that King George “has called together legislative bodies at places unusual…for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures” summons up images of exhausting rides on horseback. But even the most specific grievances possess an odd durability. The forms of fatigue may vary, but fatigue remains as important a tool as ever for dominating populations and crushing them into quiescence.
This neglected section of the Declaration offers an anatomy of political cruelty. Its words can help us register how state cruelty operates and name its constituent parts. A report on what it feels like to live under subjection, the grievances remind us that daily experiences of harassment, fatigue, violence, and humiliation have, in the past, pressed Americans toward revolutionary uprising.
The “swarms of Officers” denounced in the Declaration were tax collectors. Here, the Declaration’s authors indulge in a bit of propagandistic inflation. The word “swarms,” the political theorist Danielle Allen suggests in Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, evokes the swarms of locusts in Exodus. “The Declaration’s list of grievances is something like the collection of plagues in Exodus,” she argues. Each set of miseries “describes the type of trouble that arises in a land when a tyrant reigns.” Strictly speaking, however, there were, at the time of the Declaration’s composition, only about fifty new customs officers throughout the colonies—hardly “swarms” of biblical scale.
Today, by contrast, immigration enforcement commands a domestic army. ICE now has more than twenty-two thousand officers and agents (some twelve thousand hired since Trump retook office). Tens of thousands of other federal personnel have been diverted from their jobs to assist with immigration enforcement, and more than thirteen thousand local and state police officers and sheriff’s deputies have been deputized, through 287(g) agreements, to conduct ICE arrests. In September 2025, the Cato Institute estimated the total number of agents assisting with ICE’s enforcement and removal operations at more than forty-two thousand; the Department of Homeland Security has announced new hiring surges since then. The U.S. Border Patrol, meanwhile, now boasts more than twenty-one thousand agents on the ground, the highest staffing level in that agency’s history.
Around 5:30 in the morning on October 30, 2025, a team of masked ICE officers pulled over a van of farm workers in Oregon. They ordered the driver to roll down the window. Seconds later, before giving the driver time to comply, an officer shattered the side window in a shower of glass. Recently published video shows a woman inside the van conducting a frantic 911 call in Spanish. “What are the police going to do?” an agent says to her. “We are the police.” The officers haul the seven workers out of the van, handcuff them, and, shining flashlights in their faces, scan them with a facial-recognition app, Mobile Fortify, which matches biometrics with existing state and federal databases. The agents had no warrants for the arrests. They did not know the identities of anyone inside the van. They had been guided to the area, known for its density of agricultural workers, by the Palantir app Elite.
This illegal stop is less spectacular than the immigration raid in Chicago when agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter and hurled flash-bang grenades; less obscene than Kristi Noem smirking in front of men in cages in El Salvador; less starkly tragic than the public executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the private execution of Keith Porter Jr., and the deaths of dozens of others in ICE custody. (Recall that the Declaration decries “armed troops” protected “from punishment from any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”)
The Oregon incident, however, perhaps better represents ICE’s ordinary state of play. There is the principle of reverse visibility: the agents’ faces are sheathed in masks; the faces of the public are spotlit and scanned. There is the deference to surveillance technology: the agents locate targets through one app and identify them with another (according to Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking member of the House homeland-security committee, if the face-scanning Mobile Fortify app says someone is an alien, an ICE officer can ignore other evidence of citizenship, including a birth certificate). Finally, there are the mundane bureaucratic imperatives that structure the operations. One ICE agent on the Oregon team said in court that his team had been given a quota of eight arrests a day; Todd Lyons, who served until May 31 as acting director of ICE, said he’d like to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
These three elements—reverse visibility, surveillance technology, and the bureaucratic administration of violence—are part of a larger structure of antidemocratic asymmetry. Democracy requires “that people’s lives be private and government actions be public,” the philosopher and critic Elaine Scarry wrote in response to the Patriot Act. The present regime not only inverts that requirement but also funnels the forced visibility of the public into a scalable and routinized apparatus of state violence. Our new “circumstances of Cruelty” marry the brutality of “the most barbarous ages” with the smooth logic of tech optimization.
Cruelty, writes the philosopher Judith Shklar, involves “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear.” One of Shklar’s key sources for thinking about cruelty is Michel de Montaigne. Across several essays in which Montaigne turns his profound and infinitely generous attention toward the problem of cruelty, two features emerge that should strike us today as pertinent. First, cruelty is nourished by cowardice. Tyrants “lust for blood,” Montaigne writes, because “when they fear a scratch their cowardly minds can furnish them with no other means of security save exterminating all those who simply have the means of hurting them.” Second, cruelty reaches its most depraved form when it devolves into spectacle. Some men, Montaigne laments, “cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and forms of murder…for the one sole purpose of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony.”
Montaigne’s insights into the psychology of cruelty—that it is born in cowardice and culminates in spectacle—are readily confirmed by Trump’s theater of domination, the videos and migrant-crime maps and quasi-surrealist propaganda promulgated by official government channels. Cruelty, ever fearful, needs spectacle to reassure itself of its power.
And the “circumstances of Cruelty” catalogued in the Declaration? What does this central American document teach us about cruelty and power? The final report of Trump’s 1776 Commission—aimed at “restoring patriotic education that teaches the truth about America”—begins, after a short introduction, with “The Meaning of the Declaration,” a section focused primarily on the claim that “all men are created equal.” From there, the report denounces “false and fashionable ideologies” in the teaching of American history that “tell America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood.” The report’s authors particularly decry “the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of Americans.” In ongoing debates about civic education, right-wing complaints about “victimhood” and “victim ideology” are familiar. A return to the lessons of the Declaration is sometimes hailed as an antidote to a new, unpatriotic culture of victimhood.
The difficulty for such simple and self-flattering schemas is that the Declaration is written from the point of view of the “victims.” As we read the litany of grievances, with its grammar of accusation (“He has forbidden… He has refused…”), we inhabit the standpoint of the injured. The patriotic campaign against “victim ideology” turns a blind eye on the very document it claims most to admire.
Recognizing that the Declaration offers a view of politics from below—that it is a complaint about cruelty from the victims of a hostile sovereign—helps us better understand the text’s famous egalitarianism. “All men are created equal”: the authors of the 1776 Commission report accurately describe this line as “the core assertion” of the Declaration. Egalitarianism is a response, perhaps the only worthy response, to cruelty. Cruelty is predicated on inequality, the stronger injuring the weaker. A reading of the Declaration against cruelty is also a reading in defense of equality, because cruelty craves subordination. Today’s circumstances of cruelty depend on a large and porous class of people in American society who are vulnerable enough that they can be hurt with apparent impunity. How large? There are perhaps fourteen million undocumented immigrants living in America, collectively paying about $100 billion in taxes (enough to fund the latest $70 billion immigration-enforcement bill with some left over for the new White House ballroom). Add journalists, protesters, and bystanders to this group, and the zone of impunity expands wider still.
One of the more clarifying, if pessimistic, appraisals of America on the eve of its 250th comes from the historian Nikhil Pal Singh, who argues that Trump has created a “Homeland Empire,” recasting “swathes of the country, and particularly major cities, as ideologically and racially alien, enemy territory to be ruled by force.” “From Caracas to Minneapolis,” Singh writes, “legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.”
The Declaration’s grievances offer a portrait of political domination, teaching us what it feels like to be subjects rather than citizens. Reading the Declaration again today, can we recognize the predicament it describes?
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