There’s a reason Chris Armitage’s account from Minneapolis doesn’t read like most political writing right now. (Read Chris’s account here) It isn’t just because he’s physically there. It’s because he’s describing something many of us sense but haven’t quite named.
He’s standing inside a moment where the visible structures of authority are still upright, still issuing statements, still promising review, but no longer doing the work they were designed to do. The scaffolding remains. The weight is no longer being carried.
What he’s documenting isn’t only brutality by federal agents, though that’s real and horrifying. It’s something more unsettling. A quiet institutional withdrawal that leaves ordinary people improvising safety while those with formal power hesitate, defer, or hide behind process.
Chris never uses the word federalism. He doesn’t need to. Its absence is the point.
The American system wasn’t designed for elegance or balance as an abstraction. Power was divided because force is dangerous. Because proximity matters. Because the people closest to a community are supposed to be the first to defend it, not the last to issue condolences.
States were never meant to be ornamental. Governors and attorneys general were meant to stand between centralized power and civilian life when that power became reckless. That was the promise. That was the bargain.
What Chris is showing us is what it looks like when that bargain quietly fails.
His anger isn’t primarily aimed at the men shouting in the streets. It’s aimed upward. At the people who possess lawful authority and refuse to use it. He keeps asking the same question in different forms. Why are masked men allowed to threaten civilians without consequence. Why are there no arrest warrants when crimes are visible. Why is the National Guard treated as a talking point instead of a protective force.
Those questions only make sense if you believe the state still has power and responsibility.
He clearly does.
That’s the tragedy threaded through his piece. Federalism hasn’t vanished. It’s stalled. The machinery exists, but it’s idling while fear moves faster than deliberation. Authority hasn’t been seized. It’s being abandoned inch by inch.
What fills that space isn’t ideology. It’s necessity.
The networks he describes didn’t form because people wanted to feel heroic. They formed because the most basic expectation of protection collapsed. Legal observers, mutual aid coordinators, nurses hiding children, parents rearranging their lives to respond to sightings. These aren’t radicals. They’re civilians compensating for institutional absence.
That’s what civil resistance looks like before it’s romanticized. It’s careful. It’s exhausting. It’s grounded in restraint because everyone involved understands the cost of escalation.
This is where Chris’s frustration with documentation gets misunderstood.
He isn’t dismissing evidence or law. He’s reacting to a system where recording harm has become a substitute for stopping it. In a functioning republic, documentation leads to intervention. In a failing one, documentation becomes ritual. Files grow thicker while danger spreads outward.
When he says we’re past prep and document, he’s saying protection delayed becomes protection denied. He’s saying people don’t live inside timelines. They live inside days.
There’s another implication in his account that deserves to be named plainly.
He still believes legitimacy flows upward from states, not downward from federal force. That’s why he keeps returning to state arrests, state charges, state executive action. He’s grasping for the last place where authority might still be exercised without triggering full authoritarian consolidation.
That isn’t naïve. It’s the final stabilizing move available.
It’s also fragile.
Because when states refuse to act in moments this clear, people learn something whether we want them to or not. They learn that process won’t save them. That patience won’t protect them. That appeals to normal channels go unanswered while danger remains immediate.
That’s how societies drift sideways into something darker without ever declaring the turn.
Chris understands this even when he doesn’t say it outright. He’s careful, even in anger. He notices provocateurs. He understands that violence wouldn’t defend the community, it would complete the argument being built against it. All it takes is one dead officer or a few wounded and restraint becomes impossible. The response would be overwhelming, applauded, and permanent.
That isn’t fear speaking. It’s pattern recognition.
Here’s the part his piece leaves hanging, maybe because it’s too heavy to say from inside the moment.
If federalism fails here, not in theory but in practice, the ground for nonviolent resistance narrows dangerously. People can only absorb so much fear while being told to trust institutions that refuse to show up. Eventually restraint starts to feel like surrender. Patience starts to feel like complicity.
That isn’t a threat. It’s a warning.
The real question his account poses isn’t whether people will keep organizing. They will. He proves that. The question is whether the system meant to protect them will meet them there, or continue retreating behind careful language while communities are forced to govern themselves under duress.
A republic doesn’t fall when laws are broken. It falls when laws are enforced selectively and authority stops recognizing the people it governs as its own.
What’s unfolding in Minneapolis isn’t only about immigration enforcement. It’s about whether the state still understands itself as a shield rather than a spectator. Whether those entrusted with power see their role as active guardians of civic life or as risk managers waiting for permission that never arrives.
Chris’s account matters because it captures the moment before that question is answered for us.
If those with the clearest authority continue to hesitate, the work will continue anyway, but the terms will change. And once they do, no investigation, no election cycle, no retrospective statement will restore what was lost.
Federalism was never meant to be admired from a distance. It was meant to be used when power pressed too hard and too close.
If it won’t be used now, we should be honest about what that teaches the people who are watching, organizing, and deciding how much longer they can afford to wait.
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