How to Absolve America of Everything
The security state brain disease that unites our political leaders.
Let me discuss briefly here two events of the past week that may seem unrelated but which are actually two small outcroppings of the same iceberg of political brain disease that renders many Americans blind to our own sins. The first is the public letter from a group of retired FBI officials which garnered a huge amount of coverage in right wing media. The letter, addressed to Congressional leaders, warns of a “current, specific threat that may be one of the most pernicious ever to menace the United States.” That threat: “Military aged men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing on waves on our soil by the thousands,” by coming across the southern border. This, according to the officials, constitutes an “invasion of the homeland,” an “unprecedented penetration by uninvited foreign actors.” They are sad to say it, but “having a large number of young males now within our borders who could begin attacking gatherings of unarmed citizens, in imitation of 10/7 and at the behest of a foreign terror group, must be considered a distinct possibility.”
My immediate reaction to this letter—which is being presented very gravely by the Fox News demographic—is that cops should be forced as part of their training to take a class in how to write in a breezier tone. Everything doesn’t have to sound like the voiceover in a Michael Bay movie. Relax. My second thought is that this letter is an excellent demonstration of why it is necessary to ensure civilian rather than military control of the government. If you put these people in control you will wake up the next day and find that your entire nation has become an armed camp in the name of “security.” Relax.
More seriously, though, this letter is a window into how quickly our valorization of law enforcement and the security state can spiral into insanity. When you only have a hammer, all you see is nails; when you’re a cop, all you see is crime. To these FBI officials, people are not wondrously complex manifestations of humanity, each with an infinite number of unique and fascinating qualities; they are, instead, potential security threats, and the extent of these men’s interest in them is in how much of a security threat they might be. People are not people—they are “military aged men.” They are not from many different countries with interesting cultures and understandable socioeconomic crises that prompt people to relocate for increased opportunity; they are from “countries or regions not friendly to the United States.” And what will they do here? Will they pick the crops that no Americans are willing to pick? Will they landscape the homes of the rich? Will they do the construction work to build the apartment buildings your kids will live in? Will they start a small business, will they make great sacrifices so that their children can live The American Dream, will they go to school and learn English and add their own contributions to the rich history of our nation of immigrants? Maybe—or maybe they will begin attacking gatherings of unarmed citizens. That can’t be ruled out. It is a physical possibility. And if you are mired in Cop Mind, it is the only possibility that matters.
What we see here is the scary consequence of a mentality in which “homeland security” is given all of the weight and every other attribute of human life is given zero weight. It leads to sickening places. Once you get people to accept the kind of shallowly plausible premise that safety is important, it is very easy to lead them to a place where it seems reasonable to categorize young men who might be your son as nothing but THREATS, and to assume the worst of entire nations full of people because of the United States government’s current geopolitical policies. Immigration, the search of desperate people for a chance to flourish, slips naturally into INVASION. The need to understand the complexity of the world is neatly obliterated. The only rational response becomes razor wire and guns. This view of the world is reductive, and it is wrong, but it has the virtue of offering nice, digestible certainty. It absolves the believer from the need to question his own motives, to think about his own role in creating the world that itself created the incentives that drove people to come here. No need for that troublesome scrutiny, in Security World. All we need to do is keep out the bad guys.
It is comforting, but false, for progressive types to think of this as a flaw that exists only among right wingers, because they are dumb racists. Now let’s look at another thing that happened just yesterday: Nancy Pelosi’s comments on CNN that some of the protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza may be funded by Russia, and that she wants the FBI to investigate whether some of the protesters are Russian “plants.”
Like the letter from the paranoid FBI retirees, it is easy to dismiss Pelosi’s comments as the words of an old coot who lives in a weird bubble. And, sure, that is an accurate assessment, to a certain extent. But it is worth thinking about the deeper similarity between groups of people like Republicans who are calling for soldiers to repel the “invasion” of immigrants, and Democrats who see the shadowy hand of Putin in the groups who are unfurling “Stop Genocide” banners and shouting down Joe Biden during his speeches. Both of these groups are part of the good old Paranoid Style in American Politics. The impulse to see Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of right wing FBI guys as representatives of different political philosophies is wrong. They are united by their connection, above all, to the establishment. They are each part of a long tradition of the American establishment’s protective mechanism that transforms all dissent and complexity into a simple slop bucket of Outside Threat. Scariest of all is the fact that these consummate insiders actually believe what they are saying.
Pelosi and FBI agents are each victims of the same Insider Brain Disease. It is one that can afflict anyone, if they find themselves subjected to the right indoctrination. If you spend years and years in private conference rooms being read Top Secret National Security Briefings, it is quite natural for your mind to shape itself into a tool that evaluates the world in terms of National Security. This is a fundamentally fascist concept, an embrace of a perpetual state of war between America and a hostile outside world, a mean and scared way of thinking that focuses on the threat of actions that do not comport with our national interest to the exclusion of all else. This is the water that insiders swim in. It soaks deep into the minds of those who subject themselves to it for too long. It results in the worship of the totems of law and order and the acquiescence to ever harsher versions of the security state and the gradual disappearance of moral imagination, calcifying into a firm disinterest in understanding other humans as equals to us, with interests as important as ours, who are deserving of the same rights and considerations as us. Those nuances can only slow the goal of National Security down. And so they fade away. The inhumanity of governments under both red and blue administrations is downstream of this tendency.
If nothing else, this is a good chance for everyone to reflect on the inadequacy of the view that Democrats and Republicans represent opposite poles of political philosophy. The most powerful leaders of the two parties are, by and large, completely united in their adherence to this National Security brain disease. This explains, for example, how Joe Biden can suffer great personal tragedies and be known for great acts of human empathy and can embrace a suite of domestic policies aimed at empowering the working class, while also enabling the mass slaughter of Palestinians, and being the guy who helped to usher in the age of mass incarceration. Not all people are people. Some of them are just security threats. Once other people become security threats, it is considered perfectly acceptable to replace our empathy with the barrel of a gun.
Also
I published a piece at In These Times about seeing AI as a public good—on avoiding a false “labor versus technology” framing and focusing instead on who is going to get the benefits. You can read that here.
Yesterday I dropped my book tour schedule, which you can find here. Come out and see me! My book, “The Hammer,” will be published Feb. 13, and you can preorder it here. One of my events will be on Sunday, February 18 in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s. A reader alerted me to the fact that the union representing Powell’s workers, ILWU Local 5, has a link on its site that you can use to order books that gives a cut of the proceeds to their strike fund. Use it! Support unionized book stores.
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Having worked with immigrant students for the last 4 years, I work with many young men who due to interrupted education are still in high school at "military age". Not only do most young immigrants understand the privilege it is to be in the U.S. and work hard to achieve their dreams, but the violence they are fleeing almost all has roots in U.S. policy. There's not enough room to go into the U.S. backed coups, but I will say ATF found that 40% of guns recovered from crimes in Central America and 70% in Mexico came from the U.S.
We need to look at everyone through the lens of humanity, even terrorists and criminals. The less OTHER'ing we do with people, the better off society is in general. Thank you for writing this though :)