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The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

Among its characteristics is this administration’s willingness to deploy aggression against vulnerable people, and its apparent joy in doing so.

After about three months we see increasingly clearly what our government aims to achieve, and how. Among its characteristics is this administration’s willingness to deploy aggression against vulnerable people, and its apparent joy in doing so. This commentary is not about the developments around Harvard that became public on Monday, April 14. Instead, it is about how the government seems to relish spreading fear.  Here I am not talking about fear among Ukrainians that one of the most important factors in global politics today is mutual admiration between Putin and Trump, fear among Palestinians of being deported by the millions to make room for a beachfront project, among Canadians that an American invasion is no longer the improbable script it was until recently, or among those whose lives are wrecked because of what the world’s richest man did to an agency focused on the poorest. (For some of that, see here.) I am talking about fear all around us because of everyday cruelties inflicted on people in our midst.  

Across campuses, international students involved with pro-Palestinian protest live in fear of losing visas and being snatched off the street the way Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk was on March 25. In Massachusetts alone on visas, trailing only California (154,000) and New York (136,00). Many never had anything to do with protests but for minor run-ins with law enforcement, even if charges were dropped. Students learn of status changes : Ozturk never knew she no longer was here legally. Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia . That did not protect him from arrest by ICE and . As far as students tied to protests are concerned, the government deploys a 1952 to target legal noncitizens. This law allows the Secretary of State to terminate a legal status if there is “reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” That a could have such consequence seems absurd. Rumeysa was taken anyway. Only the courts can rein in the government now, if indeed they decide to.  , finding him guilty of enabling antisemitism. He can appeal.   

Spreading fear among international members of our community puts all this in jeopardy.

Fear among international students as well as scholars (also for getting swept up in something) is not only very real now, it will deter others from joining American universities. Who wants to live in a county where you must walk on eggshells all the time and where international offices to refrain from travelling? Canada, Europe, Asia, or Australia have great universities: they will probably become greater soon. Over the last one hundred years, American universities have educated the world, have thereby grown America’s soft power and helped create an order in which the U.S. can flourish. Spreading fear among international members of our community puts all this in jeopardy.  

Fear among noncitizens generally – much beyond universities – also grows through novel uses of the arcane to accelerate deportations. This law was previously deployed to detain individuals (including citizens) if their country of origin was at war or likely to be at war with the U.S. It is currently deployed on Venezuelan gangs. For that individuals arrested under this law must be able to contest their arrest. But courts have confirmed that in principle the government can use it to apprehend people of Venezuelan origins even though Venezuela is not at war with us and this law can be deployed against citizens. to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador is striking on many grounds, including the government’s refusal to bring him back – . This now has all the makings of an outright constitutional crisis. The manner in which this administration relishes such cruelty found a shocking expression in Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s recent trip to El Salvador, whose posturing There is no reason to expect the government will limit itself to people with tattoos (and even if, that would not be reassuring either).  The combination of these two laws has serious potential to undermine our culture of free speech. A legal framework is created that can silence critics at universities and in the press. Fear already does some of this work. It is striking how often the subject comes up in day-to-day interactions.  

That the government is in no mood from serious mistakes is one thing we learned from the Signal chat leak in March, further increasing fear that there are no standards to which this administration is holding itself. Readers of The Economist might remember that the magazine ” – rule by the worst – as word of the year for 2024, in view of how the cabinet was shaping up. These guys are now on Signal.  

Another group with much fear now is the transgender community. In his , Trump singled out transgender people. He evoked a volleyball accident involving a trans athlete who had “invaded” a girls’ match and caused injury to another player. The essence of volleyball is to smash balls around with great force, which – much as there is such a risk in other sports where groups deploy much energy to get balls from one place to another. But the imagine conjured up here is that of transgender people operating in our midst as a menace to society.  

The transgender community lives in fear. And as people in the non-binary community (broadly conceived) know, attacks on some easily become attacks on all of them.

In 2016, then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter , following a of such a decision. Carter explained that one motivation was to open service to all qualified and motivated Americans – parallel to how that has been done elsewhere – and not block them based on judgements detached from the mission. “We have to have access to 100% of America’s population for our all-volunteer force to be able to recruit from among them the most highly qualified – and to retain them,” Carter stated. He added that everyone who serves must “meet our standards.” Countries that let transgender people serve include Western European nations, Canada, Australia, and Israel. on this topic displays only one other country as prohibiting such service: Iran. The current administration questions fitness for service solely on the ground that people are expressing   (Hegseth’s presentation of his ideal of manliness in his 2024 book The War on Warriors reads like a job application to be the one who sees through the attack against transgender troops.) What this all means for the military , but what is clear is that the transgender community lives in fear. And as people in the non-binary community (broadly conceived) know, . Fear is widespread.  

Fear only increases when one watches that the legal establishment is mixed in its reactions to efforts to prevent them from defending clients against governmental overreach. While numerous law firms resist these overtures, .  These firms employ some of the best legal minds, not to mention many of the highest earners. What makes a “profession” different from just any line of work is that it serves the public good and comes with standards of excellence that advance this good. The legal profession deserves to be so-called because they serve the maintenance of the law. By far the most powerful actor in the nation is the federal government: no actor must be held to legal standards more urgently. That is the essence of the rule of law. Law firms fail country and profession by bowing to extortion: they to provide pro-bono work for “causes supported by the president” valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.  

Some decades ago, Harvard theorist Judith Shklar articulated her understanding of liberalism, coining the term “liberalism of fear.” “Liberalism,” she wrote in a piece called “The Liberalism of Fear,” “has only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom.” What matters most to advance this goal, she submits, is not pursuit of comprehensive social justice.  It is for people not to be afraid, and one key aspect of that is for the government not to spread fear. “Given the inevitability of that inequality of military, police, and persuasive power which is called government,” Shkar writes, “there is evidently always much to be afraid of.” The basic units of political life are “the weak and the powerful.”  Liberalism of fear “worries about the excesses of official agents at every level of government, and it assumes that these are apt to burden the poor and weak most heavily.” She adds that “the history of the poor compared to that of the various elites makes that obvious enough.” It does indeed, and it does so now, in the U.S. of 2025.  

For Shklar, the basic evil to be avoided is cruelty, since it is cruelty that inspires fear. Shklar understands that “a minimal level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream of an end of public, coercive government.” What she worries about is fear “created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime.” This is fear inspired by the cruelty of snatching Rumeysa Ozturk off a Somerville street, leaving a wrongly deported man in a Salvadorian jail, or depicting transgender people as enemies of the public. That a theorist whose outlook was shaped by totalitarian governance of the middle of the last century and who reached North America as a refugee illuminates current realities in the U.S. is troubling.  

It is Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who died 80 years ago, on April 12, 1945 – who is most prominent among presidents for the way he integrates references to fear into his outlook. These days it makes sense to think of FDR anyway. After all, one way of grasping what the current government is doing is trying to unravel institutions and social compacts that go back to the New Deal, the war effort that grew out of it, and a postwar understanding of what American society was all about. In this understanding a certain relationship between government and universities was a key ingredient. One aspect was the considerable amount of federal funding that has fueled American universities ever since, which was “one reason why America became the world’s most innovative economy over the past 70 years, and why Russia and China did not,” as an article in The Economist of April 12 captured it perfectly.  Another aspect was already anticipated by FDR’s “unshakable conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of using them” (letter to H. Putnam, March 1939). When Vance declares universities , he attacks this pillar of contemporary America – its prosperity and standing in the world – head-on.  

His spoke to a nation rattled by the Great Depression. FDR insisted this “great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” What mostly stands in the way “is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” As he explains, “in every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.” This is a glorified view of governance but as an ideal is worth pursuing: in times of crisis, the government must tell people the truth, and the people will accept the challenge and do their part. Within such an understanding of the relationship between government and people, indeed only fear itself holds us back: strength from being in this together drives us forward. Alas, ours is not a sincere government. In addition to its willingness of inflict cruelty on vulnerable people, that is another hallmark: this government integrates a good deal of gaslighting into its dealings, grounded in the denial of Biden’s 2020 victory that has become a loyalty test for Trump followers. Only a kakistocracy could arise this way.  

Freedom from fear is among the goals that drives both the human rights movement and liberalism.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want” in its preamble, paying homage to FDR. His “four freedoms” played a role in FDR’s aspirations for both domestic and global politics. He was dead by the time the Declaration passed, but his widow Eleanor chaired the commission that drafted it. Freedom from fear is among the goals that drives both the human rights movement and liberalism. Today we do not live in an age where the government is a partner in creating circumstances in which we are free from fear. It is the government that spreads it. But FDR’s plea still applies. Overcoming fear is harder under such circumstances, but if we are not doing our best, the struggle is lost already, and it will be worse. This is true for the U.S., and it is true at a global scale. The U.S. is indispensable to the long-term struggle for human rights and democracy globally, and much of the action must be here now. Possibilities for genuine agency are everywhere, and for everyone: showing up, speaking up, organizing, providing information, insisting on standards, writing things, funding things. We are nowhere near anything like this – and to repeat, possibilities for genuine agency are everywhere, and for everyone – but political collapse comes in stages. It is worth remembering that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a harrowing story of a society where fear has won as much as fear could ever win, is set around Harvard Square.  

Mathias Risse, Faculty Director, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights