The Grammar of Abandonment

How Modern Authoritarianism Governs Through Exposure Rather Than Extermination

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James B. Greenberg

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Modern authoritarian states no longer need mass killing to produce mass suffering. They govern by deciding who will be protected — and who can be left exposed.

I watch the news these days with a growing sense of dread. Each night brings another escalation, another line crossed, another sign that something fundamental is shifting.

As a Jew, my thoughts sometimes run to the Holocaust; as an anthropologist, I know this moment is different. The impulse to compare them is understandable. When states begin to single out populations as scapegoats, deploy federal agents and National Guard units, use military tactics to round people up, build detention camps, and deport some to foreign prisons, historical memories surface. But comparisons must be made carefully. What matters is not asserting equivalence, but understanding what the differences between these moments reveal about the ideologies that underlie them.

The Holocaust was a project of extermination, grounded in an ideology that defined entire populations as biologically irredeemable and targeted them for destruction. What we are witnessing now operates through a different logic. It does not require mass killing, nor does it depend on explicit declarations of elimination. Instead, it rests on a more familiar and more administratively flexible ideology: one that measures human worth through productivity, cost, and burden; that withdraws protection from those deemed expendable; and that sees suffering as an acceptable consequence of policy.

The distinction is not merely historical. It marks the difference between a state that kills and a state that governs through exposure — through decisions about who will be protected and who will not. When protection is withdrawn or denied, those left exposed are forced to bear risk on their own. In this sense, deportation is not the opposite of abandonment, but one of its most extreme forms.

What is unfolding now is not a single policy or a single moment, but a pattern. When I saw the immigration raids sweep up people who had lived here for decades, any illusion that this was political theater — that it would target only the “worst of the worst” — collapsed. Since then, I have watched the state expand its reach: building out surveillance systems, enlarging detention capacity, and bringing rapid response units into routine operations.

This administration is continually testing what it can normalize and how far it can push the boundaries of belonging. Here the lessons of the past speak loudly. Once a government begins redrawing the lines of who counts, it rarely stops at the first group it marks for removal.

The way people are being talked about has shifted. Long before the raids, you could hear a change in tone — not neighbors or workers, but costs. Politicians framed them as drains on the country. Commentators cast social programs as indulgences. As the language of burden took hold, it reshaped the ground beneath the debate. The old market logic returned: measuring a person’s worth by productivity, and treating anyone outside the labor market with suspicion.

That same logic gives the state a ready-made justification for harsher measures that increasingly target citizens and legal residents as well. If people are cast as burdens, cutting support becomes responsible governance. If they are framed as takers, exposing them to hardship becomes discipline. And when they are portrayed as obstacles to prosperity, removing them — through deportation, detention, or neglect — becomes easier to defend. Abandonment grows out of these decisions.

This pattern has a name: necropolitics. It is a form of governance that operates not through overt violence, but by managing exposure — by deciding whose lives will be protected and whose can be left vulnerable.

Scapegoats make this shift easier. They always have. Certain groups are singled out as the source of whatever is going wrong — lack of jobs, strained services, disorder. These accusations do not need to be true; repetition is enough. Once a population is cast as the problem, the state gains room to act against them, and the public grows accustomed to their vulnerability. As the machinery grows, so does its reach. Those who once felt secure begin to wonder whether the line will reach them next.

The politics of abandonment draws on older economic logics: ones that treated entire populations as expendable — Indigenous communities pushed off their lands, enslaved people worked to exhaustion, migrant laborers treated as commodities to be cycled in and out of the economy, consumed and replaced. These histories shape how the state imagines its responsibilities — and how quickly it decides that some people can be left to fend for themselves.

These patterns continue to echo. The same logic that once justified removal and exclusion is resurfacing in quieter, bureaucratic ways — in the language of “efficiency,” in the framing of certain groups as drains, in the willingness to expose them to harm. The tools have changed, and the technologies are new. But the underlying grammar — who is protected and who is exposed — remains intact.

Authoritarian shifts are felt long before people begin to name them. Conversations grow quieter. Friends hesitate before posting online. Community leaders who once spoke freely begin weighing their words. As the administration casts more critics as disloyal, dissent carries a different kind of danger. Groups that raise concerns are accused of siding with “outsiders.” Public figures who question the policies are treated as “enemies within,” undermining the nation.

When authoritarians use fear as a mode of governance, it is imposed gradually. Examples are made, and these teach people to step back, keep their heads down, and avoid drawing attention. Authoritarian systems have always relied on this dynamic. They do not need universal support — only enough fear to make resistance costly and enough suspicion to make solidarity harder to sustain.

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The consequences of abandonment are not theoretical. They are felt in daily life. When families lose access to medical care, when workers avoid hospitals for fear of detention, children grow up knowing that one absence — a missed paycheck, a sudden illness, a traffic stop — can unravel everything.

This is how necropolitics takes hold in everyday life. By withdrawing protection and normalizing exposure, the state shifts the burden of survival onto those least able to bear it. Illness becomes a private problem; injury, a personal misfortune. Premature death is rendered invisible, not because it is rare, but because it falls along lines the state has chosen to ignore.

We have seen this before. During heat waves, the elderly die alone because the systems meant to protect them have been hollowed out. During storms, neighborhoods without political power are left exposed. During pandemics, people in precarious jobs face the highest risks because they cannot afford to stay home. These losses are not counted as casualties of policy, but they very much are the victims of omission.

This is the quiet brutality of abandonment. It does not need the machinery of death, only the decision that certain people can be left to navigate impossible conditions on their own. And when those conditions lead to illness, injury, or death, the state can wash its hands because it did not pull a trigger or issue a direct order. But the harm is no less real.

Taken together, these patterns describe a political order in which power is exercised not only through force, but through abandonment. When millions of people around the world face preventable death because USAID was dismantled, and when tens of thousands at home die each year because Medicaid was cut or because they are priced out or ruled out of basic care, it should stir the same moral outrage we feel in the face of other atrocities.

But there is another grammar available to us, one just as deeply rooted in American life as the logic of abandonment. It appears in traditions that insist a person’s worth is not measured by productivity or cost, but by their place in a family, a neighborhood, a community. It appears in religious inheritances that teach that nations are judged by how they treat the least powerful among them, and in the civic stories we tell about mutual responsibility — stories that have always pushed back against the idea that suffering is a private failure rather than a shared concern.

A politics of care begins with an older understanding: that people are not ledgers to be balanced, but lives to be protected. It recognizes vulnerability not as a mark of expendability, but as a call to collective responsibility, and it rejects a political order that treats exposure as governance and abandonment as policy.

If the grammar of abandonment teaches us who can be left behind, the grammar of care teaches us who we must stand beside. The choice between them is not abstract. It shows up in budgets, in schools, in hospitals — in who is protected when systems strain. It is the work of citizenship itself: deciding what kind of nation we are, and what kind of people we intend to be.