The Incremental Surrender

Democracy doesn’t erode in headlines. It erodes in details.
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The Pajamas Are Not the Point

Pay attention to the small rules.

Not the headline-grabbing ones. Not the executive orders that spark cable news countdowns. The small ones. The petty ones. The ones that feel too ridiculous to fight over.

The ones that tell you what you can wear in public.

Fascism does not require spectacle. It requires conditioning. It advances by adjusting the boundaries of what we consider normal — one minor concession at a time — until control feels ambient, bureaucratic, inevitable.

It arrives as someone in a uniform saying, politely, that you cannot board the plane dressed like that.

And when you ask why, there is no statute to cite, no coherent definition to parse. “Pajamas” has no formal legal meaning beyond soft clothes used for sleeping. Cotton. Flannel. Elastic waistbands. The rule is aesthetic, not statutory. Subjective, not structural.

But that’s not the point.

The pajamas are not the point.

The point is habituation.

Political scientists have been warning for years that democratic backsliding rarely looks dramatic in real time. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe it as the slow erosion of norms — the weakening of institutional guardrails, the normalization of conduct that once would have ended political careers.

Democracies are not usually toppled; they corrode. Timothy Snyder calls it “anticipatory obedience,” the instinct to comply before coercion is required. Long before there are penalties, there is accommodation.

That is how it begins.

What appears trivial — a dress code, a loyalty pledge, a symbolic restriction on how one may present in public — serves a psychological function.

Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarianism does not begin with terror. It begins with isolation and the destruction of spontaneous public life. You rehearse obedience in small ways so that larger obedience feels natural. You internalize surveillance before it becomes visible.

Culture wars are rarely about culture. They are about control.

Authoritarian movements have always regulated appearance as a proxy for regulating belonging. Mussolini’s Italy cultivated a disciplined national aesthetic. In Nazi Germany, nonconforming youth were first mocked, then surveilled, then criminalized.

Even in the United States, vague “improper attire” and vagrancy laws were used during the Civil Rights era to arrest Black Americans and deny access to public accommodations. The ambiguity was intentional. When a rule lacks precision, enforcement becomes discretionary. And discretion is where discrimination thrives.

The Supreme Court recognized this in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, striking down vagrancy laws because they allowed police to decide, in the moment, who belonged and who did not. Vague standards undermine due process precisely because they hand power to the gatekeeper.

And so when we argue over whether pajamas belong in an airport, we are not debating fabric. We are debating whether access to public space can hinge on subjective aesthetic judgment.

Airports are not trivial spaces. They are gateways to employment, to family, to civic participation. They are arteries of mobility. Conditioning access to them on conformity — however minor the conformity appears — signals something deeper: presence in public is conditional.

A decade ago, mass surveillance of American citizens was considered politically toxic. The Snowden disclosures exposed bulk metadata collection and triggered bipartisan outrage. Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act to rein in certain programs. There was, briefly, a shared recognition that unchecked monitoring posed a threat to liberty.

Today, facial recognition software is embedded in police departments across the country. Biometric scanners promise faster boarding in exchange for your face. Private data brokers construct behavioral dossiers that eclipse anything Cold War intelligence agencies could have assembled. Shoshana Zuboff describes this system as “surveillance capitalism,” an economic logic built on predicting and shaping human behavior through data extraction. Monitoring is no longer exceptional; it is infrastructural.

The normalization is staggering.

It’s just metadata.
It’s just a camera.
It’s just an ID check.
It’s just pajamas.

Incrementalism is the method. Social psychology tells us that humans recalibrate quickly. Each shift in the boundary of acceptable control becomes the new baseline. Compliance increases when restrictions are framed as preserving order or safety. We do not surrender liberty because we crave authority; we surrender it because we are told instability awaits without it.

And so the justifications grow bolder.

We are told expansive data collection keeps us safe, even when oversight boards find little evidence that bulk surveillance prevents terrorism. We are told vague rules are necessary for civility, even as courts repeatedly strike down laws that fail constitutional clarity. We are told these measures are isolated, exceptional, temporary.

Levitsky and Ziblatt warn that democracies unravel when political actors begin weaponizing institutions and treating opponents as illegitimate. Once enforcement becomes selective — applied differently depending on who you are, what you believe, how you present — democracy has already thinned to a shell. Selective enforcement is authoritarianism’s quiet engine.

Absurd rules are particularly revealing. They test compliance. They measure how much friction the public will tolerate before resistance surfaces. If we accept that mobility can hinge on someone’s subjective assessment of propriety, we have accepted that public presence is a privilege, not a right.

Arendt observed that totalitarian systems first decide who belongs in public at all. Today, belonging may hinge on documentation, biometric verification, algorithmic risk scoring — or on whether your clothing satisfies an unwritten standard. It sounds small. It is meant to sound small.

Fascism rarely declares itself. It feels administrative. Petty. Procedural. It arrives with laminated badges and polite instructions. It asks for minor adjustments. A little compliance. A little conformity.

History teaches us what follows small humiliations.

The question is not whether pajamas matter.

The question is whether we are willing to normalize discretionary control over who may access public space, under what conditions, and at whose whim.

Because once we accept that logic, it does not stop at clothes.

It moves to speech.
To association.
To dissent.
To existence.

Democracy is not lost in a single rupture. It is surrendered in increments, each one easy to rationalize, each one too trivial to mobilize against — until the accumulation is impossible to ignore.

The pajamas were never the point.