The Dual State

We are witnessing the terrifying rise of a dual-state government: one in which two realities—one defined by the normal enforcement of law, the other by its complete disregard for it—coexist in parallel, with profound moral stakes for all of us

Nearly a century ago, as Hitler’s rise destabilized Germany, a young lawyer fled Berlin for the United States. There, he wrote of the horrifying political paradigm threatening his homeland: one in which enforcement of the rule of law was subject to the whim of its new leaders. His name for what he’d seen was the dual state.

Today, in our own communities, legal scholar Aziz Huq explains, evidence of a domain in which the law simply does not apply is impossible to ignore: the arrests of citizens of the wrong nationality or political views; the aggressive prosecutions of unremarkable offenses; the withholding of funding for research out of step with the state agenda. At the same time, day-to-day normalcy continues for many of us, fostering complicity and tolerance for otherwise intolerable acts—this psychological manipulation a key weapon in the dual-state arsenal.

In this groundbreaking work blending politics, philosophy, and culture, Huq illuminates the past, present, and future of dual-state authoritarianism—from its origins in Nazi Germany, to post-revolution China, to its flourishing in Trump’s America. He explains how the ongoing degradation of the rule of law threatens not only democracy, but also a stable economy, community bonds, and our moral integrity as individuals—and reveals where and how the Constitution has left an open door for dual-state autocracy to waltz in.

As Huq unlocks the mechanisms threatening our way of life, he is not content to merely sound the alarm. With bracing precision and moral clarity, he asks how we might live ethically as the law dissolves for our neighbors and challenges us to resist acceptance of the dangers that surround us.