Kafka, By Any Other Name, Is Still An Unparalled Mess We Have To Clean Up

I know Monday’s are difficult. We’d all rather be in bed, sleeping peacefully. But let’s talk about where we are. Because if you’re feeling a creeping sense of absurdity, a nauseating blend of bureaucratic nightmare and chilling overreach, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong. Some commentators, looking at the dizzying events of the past weeks and months, are reaching for a specific word, one that used to feel like literary hyperbole but now lands with the sickening thud of reality: Kafkaesque.

Maybe you haven’t read Franz Kafka. Most people haven’t plowed through dense allegories about inexplicable trials and impenetrable castles penned by a German-language Jewish writer in Prague over a century ago. You don’t need to have read The Trial or The Castle to understand the feeling. Think about the most frustrating, nonsensical bureaucratic runaround you’ve ever experienced – the DMV line from hell, wrestling with an insurance company that denies claims based on logic only it understands. Now amplify that by a thousand, remove any sense of ultimate accountability, add a dash of menace, and make the stakes not just your sanity, but potentially your freedom, your rights, your very existence in society. That’s approaching Kafkaesque. It’s when the system itself, through its deliberate complexity, its procedural molasses, its sheer, baffling indifference, becomes an instrument of oppression just as potent as outright cruelty.

Look at the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, the PhD student snatched off a Boston street by plainclothes agents in an unmarked van. Why? Officially, her student visa was revoked over alleged support for Hamas, based seemingly only on an op-ed she co-authored in a student newspaper. No criminal charges, just… disappeared into the ICE detention system, bounced between states. A federal judge eventually called her arrest and detention concerning, ordering her moved back – a procedural shuffle. But doesn’t the energy just drain out when we start talking legal procedure? The core obscenity – a person disappeared for their opinions – gets lost in a swamp of habeas corpus petitions, jurisdictional disputes, and appeals that could drag on for years. That’s the point. The process is the punishment. It’s Kafka making a goddamn comeback tour, sponsored by the Punk administration.

We see echoes elsewhere. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported despite court rulings in his favor, his family told that they’re “safer” without him. The State Department is meticulously editing human rights reports, deciding that things like government corruption, harsh prison conditions (conveniently erased from the El Salvador report just as the US negotiates sending people into those prisons), extensive gender-based violence, or discrimination against LGBTQ+ people are no longer worth officially noticing on the world stage. Defining reality down, one bureaucratic memo at a time. Or consider the reports about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), demanding total access to sensitive agency data (like the NLRB’s union files and corporate secrets), allegedly disabling logs, covering their tracks, and exfiltrating massive amounts of information for reasons nobody can or will clearly articulate – all under the guise of “efficiency.” Its power operates under a veneer of process, inscrutable and unaccountable. That’s the Kafkaesque playbook.  

Now, some commentators, observing this landscape, might suggest that perhaps this generation, the younger folks, aren’t accustomed to the kind of civic action required. Let me clue you in: Some of us have been doing this shit for a very long time. I was seven years old at my first march in 1968, protesting a senseless war in Vietnam. My generation cut its teeth protesting the criminal neglect and stigmatization of people dying from AIDS in the 80s. We marched for Civil Rights alongside our elders and peers. We fought for women’s rights, for environmental protections like clean water, and for LGBTQIA+ equality when it was far from popular. We know how to organize, how to mobilize, how to shout, how to disrupt, how to put our bodies on the line. We have the muscle memory.

What feels different this time, what makes the Kafkaesque label resonate so deeply, isn’t a lack of will or experience among protestors. It’s the scope and nature of the threat. Past struggles, while impacting everyone, often had a clearer focal point – a specific war, a particular set of discriminatory laws, a defined group facing immediate persecution. Now, the assault feels broader, aimed at the very foundations of democratic society: the rule of law, the trustworthiness of institutions, the concept of objective truth, the fundamental rights that supposedly underpin everyone’s security. It’s not just one group being targeted; it feels like the entire framework designed to prevent arbitrary power is being dismantled. When the government can disappear a student for an op-ed, redefine human rights on a whim, or vacuum up sensitive data with impunity, everyone is potentially vulnerable. The arbitrary nature of the Kafkaesque nightmare means you never know when the faceless bureaucracy, or the plainclothes agents, might knock on your door.

And that’s what makes the current political response from supposed opposition leaders so utterly, infuriatingly inadequate. We are stuck in a cycle of reactionary politics. Punk farts in the general direction of the Constitution, and the response is a week of breathless commentary, pearl-clutching, and maybe a strongly worded fundraising email. There’s no offense, no proactive agenda, no anticipation. When the State Department gets gutted this week, where is the fully formed, ready-to-deploy plan from Democrats to counter it next week, or better yet, last month? Instead, we get leaders triangulating themselves into irrelevance, terrified of offending some mythical moderate voter who apparently doesn’t mind creeping fascism as long as gas prices are okay. We see governors hiding their faces in the Oval Office or dismissing deportations based on flimsy pretexts as mere “distractions” while pontificating about market accountability. We hear pollsters advising caution because victims make “bad poster children.”

It’s like watching firefighters meticulously analyze the wind direction while the entire goddamn town is burning down. They’re so deep in the weeds of political calculus, so addicted to the “crack-pipe of realpolitik,” they seem unable to grasp the existential nature of the fire. They sound, frankly, preposterous – disconnected from the visceral, Kafkaesque dread settling over millions of Americans. They believe in nothing but polling data and the next election cycle, while the foundations crumble. Contrast that with the strange-bedfellows clarity emerging from some anti-Punk conservatives – people like David Brooks or Bill Kristol – who, whatever their other flaws, seem to recognize that the regime threatens the very system they claim to cherish and are willing to say so, forcefully. They believe in something, even if it’s just orderly capitalism and procedural democracy.

This moment demands more than cautious calculation and waiting for the pendulum to swing back. It demands recognizing the Kafkaesque absurdity for what it is: a tool to confuse, demoralize, and normalize the unthinkable. It demands we shake off the reactive crouch and go on offense, articulating a clear, positive vision grounded in fundamental rights and democratic principles. It demands leveraging the deep well of protest experience many of us possess, but channeling it towards this universal threat. It’s time to stop analyzing the incomprehensible bureaucracy and start dismantling the system that enables it. It’s time to wake up from this bureaucratic nightmare, understand that the trial is not just Kafka’s fiction but our potential reality, and collectively assert that we, the people, will not “humbly submit” to this descent.

This weekend’s protests were good and we’re glad as many attended, but we’ve got to have so much more. The next national protest is set for May 3. No matter what anyone else says, we need 100 million people to be involved in some form or another to start getting the level of attention in Washington that we need to have. Why 100 million? Because that’s enough to turn an election on its head, and the jackbooted thugs in DC all know it. We can make a big enough noise to let them know we will dominate the next election and they all need to fucking fall in line.

As Franz Kafka himself put it, “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”