Names Matter: DHS Was Always Going To End Up Like This

I don’t usually, but this time I’m gonna use the term “American” a bit here to only refer to citizens of the United States; this is inaccurate in a way that annoys non-U.S.-Americans but is how the rhetoric has worked here for long-enough that it’s the only way to avoid some over-complicated syntax.

The Department of Homeland Security was always going to end up as a paramilitary force of jackbooted thugs.

How could it not?

For one thing, federal law enforcement has always thought of itself as being above other cops, better and more powerful. And other cops already think of themselves as being above, better and more powerful than the actual citizens; in U.S. cop mythology, citizens only appear in two roles: as useless, ungrateful sheep or as the wolves the hero cops are here to protect the sheep from.

The portrayal of the FBI agents in “Die Hard” didn’t come out of nowhere; that thread of authoritarian entitlement was always there.

So the groups that were bundled together to make DHS were already well on their way.

But it’s really the name that guarantees it was gonna go bad.

“Homeland” is a deeply authoritarian word, and a deeply un-American one.

The United States is not a country with a long, continuous history of homogeneous culture. There are countries like that, in Europe and Asia, but we’re not one of them. It’s not who we’ve been and it’s not who we are; it’s not who we should aspire to be either.

The United States is a relatively young, mongrel of a State: we haven’t been around very long, at least compared to countries like Great Britain, and we don’t have any nationwide culture outside of the shared political ideals of personal freedom and fair and democratic governance. And even those aren’t shared by everyone here.

Our people come from all over the world, including but not mostly from here. Very, very few citizens could trace more than just a few of their ancestors’ presence in the country even 100 years back, much less the 250-year age of the country itself or further.

And very, very, very few would even bother to try.

Because where our grandparents (or beyond) are from is not what makes us Americans.

So any talk of the United States having anything that could appropriately be called “homeland” is just absurd. It doesn’t describe anything that the United States has been, or is.

What it does describe, though, is an aspiration.

It speaks to a desire, among a fairly small but still powerful minority of the population, to actually be the kind of country that has a “homeland”. Where most people look the same, and think the same.

Where we wouldn’t have to deal with the whole messy “democracy” thing.

This is a lazy, dangerous and completely un-American goal.

But it’s what names like “Department of Homeland Security” call out for.

DHS was always going to turn out this way because it was always intended to.

But this idea of the United States as being that kind of country goes against the entire “history and tradition” of the United States’ political and social identity.

It is clearly, deeply un-American.

And we should fix that.