With a goal of processing more than one million annual removals (and as many as 10 million in the coming years), ‘mass deportation’ effectively recasts swathes of the country, and particularly major cities, as ideologically and racially alien, enemy territory to be ruled by force. Meanwhile, from Greenland to the “Gulf of America”, fantasies of lucrative resource wars and land grabs beckon. Like a latent image formed after harsh exposure, the Homeland Empire is what comes into view after the dissolution of America’s fading liberal imperium.
But a theory of violence is not a theory of power. Trump’s Homeland Empire is incapable of generating consensual order or lasting hegemony: it can only sustain itself through short-term clearing operations – smash and grab. Maybe this is what happens when the actual, functioning empire enters its terminal, attritional phase: construction, growth and visions of progress are replaced by pyrotechnic convulsions. Rather than banishing the spectres of deindustrialisation, stagnant wages and rising midlife morbidity, it creates new spectacles of deportation and extrajudicial killings, and prospective annexations of oil wealth and ice fields – in order to conjure a world in which dominance affirms its own necessity.
2.
At the triumphal end of the Cold War, influential thinkers imagined liberal democracy, market society and the rules-based international order overseen by the US as “the final form of human government” and “the end of History”. Within a few years, Americans were sucked into the maw of the War on Terror and the financial ruin of the Great Recession. Barack Obama’s election promised cooperative diplomacy, healthcare reform and the overcoming of racial division; it seemed to reestablish the trendline of what he called “our better history”. We know what came next. Trump ascended by telling the people of the United States that the best days were behind them – that the liberal internationalist period was not only an exception, but a sucker’s game.
In one of his last interviews, the most cunning operative of postwar statecraft, Henry Kissinger, described Trump as the type of personage who emerges at the end of a dying age “to force it to give up its old pretenses”. Trump builds on long-term institutional arrangements – including the imperial presidency and the idea that the US is perpetually in semi-war – while turning these against an equally fundamental premise of the postwar period, that Homo liberalis would thrive in the protected space of US imperium. That is over.
The Homeland Empire is best understood as an experiment in despotic rule over a differentiated population of citizens and subjects. It embraces recently discredited practices such as racial profiling and drone assassination, and adds new ones such as masked and anonymous police agents. It involves a significant reinvestment in “tough on crime” policies from the past 40 years – but also a decidedly new effort to place federal police power on the same normative and legal plane as military authority.