After The Collapse

What broken institutions, trafficked workers, and a dying planet reveal about the Constitution we actually need

There’s a particular kind of illusion that many Americans have clung to, the belief that our democratic institutions, imperfect though they may be, were fundamentally stable. That they could bend under pressure but never truly break. That the courts, the agencies, the laws, and the “norms” were made of something sturdier than ambition and paper.

And yet here we are, watching as entire systems buckle under the weight of a single man’s will, not because he’s especially clever, but because the institutions were already hollow. Trump didn’t shatter a robust architecture. He exposed a rotten framework, knocked on the walls, and watched them crumble like termite-ridden plaster.

It turns out, rule of law is only as strong as the people upholding it. Norms are only norms if someone’s willing to enforce them. And if a president decides that the law is flexible, facts are optional, and cruelty is a governing strategy? The system has little to say in protest. At most, it files a brief and then quietly complies.

Even if Trump were to vanish tomorrow, airlifted by divine intervention and replaced with a perfectly reasonable adult who believes in government, the damage would remain. Not just surface damage, but deep, structural erosion. Like an oil spill, it doesn’t just coat the surface; it soaks into the earth, poisoning everything that grows from it. You can’t simply scrub it off and pretend it never happened. The harm has metastasized.

And nowhere is that more clear than in our treatment of human beings.

The H-2A visa program is a legalized pipeline for importing disposable labor, a system laid bare in a powerful documentary by More Perfect Union. Corporations bring in hundreds of thousands of workers each year under the guise of “temporary agricultural work.” But in practice, it’s a system of bound servitude. Workers are tied to their employers, threatened with deportation if they speak out, and left with no viable path to justice when they’re exploited. It’s all perfectly legal, the modern-day evolution of a very old American tradition: profit built on the backs of people who are not free.

In the documentary, farmworkers describe harrowing conditions: being charged thousands in illegal recruitment fees just to access the jobs, only to arrive in the U.S. and find substandard housing, twelve-hour shifts in extreme heat, withheld wages, and no access to medical care. Some report being forced to work while injured, or denied water and bathroom breaks in the fields. Because their legal status is tethered to a single employer, speaking up can mean instant termination and deportation. In one case, a worker who tried to report abuse was locked inside a trailer without food for days. Others were threatened with violence or told their families back home would be harmed if they caused trouble. This is not a bug in the system, it is the system. A legal framework designed to extract maximum labor at minimum cost, with impunity built in by design.

The Trump administration has added a new chapter to this story, one that pushes beyond legal exploitation into state-sponsored abduction. Using a perverse interpretation of the Alien Enemies Act, Trump’s DOJ began rounding up migrants, many of whom had valid asylum claims and shipping them to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. No hearings, or warnings. Just a plane, a cell, and the door slammed shut behind them.

And what did Bukele do with these deportees? He didn’t object. He treated them like bartered goods, proof of his political alliance with Trump, a stash of bodies to parade or punish. To him, they’re assets. To Trump, they’re pawns, and to our legal system, they’re barely even people.

In a just society, this would be unthinkable. A functioning democracy would recoil in horror at the idea of legal trafficking. Of government-by-fiat deportations. Of prisons used as diplomatic tokens. But we don’t have a just society, we have a façade that a man with no moral compass and a knack for grievance easily kicked down.

And yet, perhaps, just perhaps, there’s something liberating in the collapse. If nothing else, Trump has made it impossible to keep pretending. We can no longer lie to ourselves about our institutions' sturdiness or laws' goodness. The fantasy has been pierced. The myths are in ruins.

So maybe this is our opportunity. Not to return to what was, but to build what should have been all along. A constitutional order that centers human dignity. A legal framework that outlaws exploitation, not just the most egregious forms, but all of it, in every register. One that recognizes that freedom isn't real if it depends on someone else’s bondage. And one that finally understands nature not as a warehouse of resources, but as a living system with intrinsic value worthy of protection not because of the 2x4s it can yield or the rare earths it hides, but because its continued existence makes all other rights possible. We need a democracy that doesn’t just survive strongmen but makes their rise impossible, a society where neither people nor ecosystems can be treated as disposable. Where justice isn’t the exception but the baseline.

We don’t need to patch the old system. We need to compost it, take the rot, turn it over, and grow something new. Something worth defending next time the storm comes.