Fear Is Now a Market Force — and We’ve Seen This Before

The current debate over immigration enforcement funding — framed as a standoff between Susan Collins, Janet Mills, and newer political voices — is being treated as a disagreement over tactics. It’s not. It’s a disagreement over whether governance still matters once fear has entered the system.

What’s happening around ICE right now looks uncomfortably familiar to anyone who lived through the collapse of senior care.

I did.

Fear did not enter the senior care system at the beginning. It entered after we had almost entirely dismissed nursing homes as institutions worth protecting. Once closures accelerated, once workforce stability was no longer treated as infrastructure, fear moved in — and it began shaping every decision.

That’s the point many people are missing now.

When fear enters a system, it becomes a market force.

We’re watching it happen again. Around ICE, fear is now shaping behavior on all sides: how agents operate, how communities respond, how businesses decide whether to open or close, how public officials message rather than govern. Decisions are no longer being made primarily around outcomes or standards, but around avoidance — avoiding backlash, avoiding exposure, avoiding being next.

We’ve seen this movie before in care.

After nursing home closures, families and providers began pricing in system fragility: no beds, unstable discharges, thin staffing, unclear oversight. Visibility became risky. Workers withdrew. Institutions became defensive. The system didn’t fail all at once — it hollowed out under fear.

One is a fear market driven by reputation.
The other is a fear market driven by survival logistics.