In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films, viewers are shown the savage, primitive Romans reveling in the grotesqueries of the arena, and are meant to be disgusted by their bloodlust, even as they themselves watch along. For the Romans, one can see how the spectacle itself would have reinforced their perception of a line between themselves and their captives—a process of mass socialization in which the subordinate status of those they saw as barbarians was reinforced by their deaths being made fodder for entertainment. If the gods wanted your suffering to matter, you wouldn’t be here for my amusement. Given that the film’s audience is watching and thrilling to the same scenes, the movie seem to be asking, how different are people today from the jeering mob in the arena?

We don’t have arenas with death matches anymore. But turning human suffering into spectacle did not die out in antiquity. Instead, we have social media and reality television, which allow even more of a remove from what the audience sees. The Trump administration is now trying to showcase its program of “mass deportation” as reality-show style entertainment, through which voters will rationalize their cruelty. And just like in the past, many people become numb to brutality when they perceive it as entertainment rather than oppression.

This approach became apparent when, in January, the Trump administration had the reality-show personality and Donald Trump sycophant Dr. Phil go along on an ICE raid in Chicago, enabling him to post a video of an arrest to Instagram. Later that month, on the social network X, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted photographs and video of herself on ICE raids in New York City while in “full glam,” wearing a bulletproof vest and announcing, “Here in New York City this morning we are getting the dirtbags off these streets.” Last week, the White House—the White House—posted a video to X captioned “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” showing ICE officials cuffing people who are being loaded on a plane, presumably to be deported, while a soundtrack of roaring jet engines and unfurling chains plays. (ASMR refers to a genre of videos that feature sounds people find soothing.)

This reality-show mechanism has worked before—it convinced much of the country that Trump was a very good businessman, after all. The reality-television shows Live PD and Cops, which were canceled amid the George Floyd protests in 2020, skewed audience perceptions about violent crime and police work while, many critics observed, portraying potential abuses as effective policing. The people arrested on the shows were a punch line, there to amuse the viewer—guilt or innocence was irrelevant.

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The reality of these deportations has been ugly. Arrests and detentions of Native and Hispanic Americans have led to accusations of racial profiling. People with genuine fears of persecution are being deported to countries they’ve never been to and whose language they don’t speak.

Although the Trump administration has claimed that it is focusing on undocumented criminals, its actions suggest that it is defining criminality extremely loosely. Trump’s focus on individual horror stories of immigrants committing crimes notwithstanding, immigrants, including those who are undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than citizens—not because they are inherently more law-abiding, but because they have greater reasons to want to avoid trouble. There aren’t enough undocumented criminals to justify a “mass” deportation on the scale Trump has promised. Noncriminals will have to go as well, which is what is happening. Frustrated with the low numbers of deportations—fewer undocumented immigrants have been deported under Trump than were under Joe Biden in a similar period—Trump has now ordered ICE to focus on expelling undocumented children.

The Trump administration has withdrawn humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans who were cleared by background checks and allowed to stay for “urgent humanitarian reasons.” These are neither immigrants who are here illegally nor criminals; they are simply people from places Trump sees as “shithole countries” who have incurred Trump’s wrath for not being the type of immigrants he wants, such as Scandinavians and white people from South Africa. Many Americans might want them to be treated fairly, with due process. But the Trump administration needs people to think they are all “dirtbags” so that treating them like human beings is unnecessary. The Deportation Show can convince people that those being shipped off are so insignificant, so beneath real Americans, that people may consume their suffering as entertainment. Maybe those mobs that once filled the Flavian Amphitheater weren’t so different from us after all.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

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These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

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Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

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Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.