The two books under review here (Grandin 2019 and Miller 2019) form an interesting
juxtaposition. Greg Grandin maps the rise, transformation and decline of the
frontier myth as the principle ideology of the American nation state while Todd
Miller undertakes a journalistic exploration of the edges of an emerging,
American-centered empire of borders. One
way to put Grandin in relationship to Miller is to align Grandin’s account
along the vertical axis of history in which the collapse of the frontier
culminates in the rise of Donald Trump’s reactionary populism. Miller, on the other hand, can be situated on
the horizontal axis of the present, at a moment when the multiplication of
border security apparatuses is creating a nationally denominated but
transnationally organized police state. This review is focused how to assess the
politics of where these two works intersect and is less concerned with
evaluating Miller or Grandin in terms of scholarly merit. There is plenty of that here to go around in
both books.
Grandin’s discussion of the frontier parallels Walter
Hixson’s (2008) account of American identity.
This identity is rooted in solidarity between whites, couched in racism
and sexism, and periodically reproduced through recourse to war – a process
that wards off counterhegemonic alternative to this identity while hardening
racial animosities. For his part, Grandin
investigates the formation of the succession of different frontiers in American
history, each operating according to a broadly similar logic of regarding
expansion as a means of the diluting conflict, distributing opportunity, generating
wealth and reproducing identity.
Grandin’s frontiers are both political and economic regimes: they comprise cross-class coalitions that
collaborate in order to open up new pathways of territorial expansion and
economic growth. They are deeply rooted
but not inexorable. There have been
points in American history where frontier logics have been displaced or
radically reimagined. This is how
Grandin characterizes post-Civil War Reconstruction and the New Deal.
Such precedents are important to consider on account of
contemporary exhaustion of the frontier myth. The election of Donald Trump
marks an historical threshold. Grandin
remarks, in this regard, that “Trumpism is extremism turned inwards –
all-consuming and self-devouring. There
is no ‘divine, messianic’ crusade that can harness and redirect passions
outward. Expansion, in any form, can no
longer reconcile contradiction, dilute factions or re-direct the anger” (2019,
7). The end of expansion might be marked
by the end of the glorious thirty years of the growth that marked the
post-World War Two period in the United States (Streeck 2016), except that the
political rhetoric of expansionism has greatly exceeded its economic timeline. This discontinuity between reality and belief
accounts for the accumulation of anger and disillusionment associated
Trumpism. So too does the fact that the
end of “Fordist” growth in the United States has been closely associated with
the expansion of immigration, much of it undocumented, from Mexico and Central
America to the United States. Rather
than pushing out foreign elements in order to make way for a “Caucasian
democracy” – the classical version of Jacksonian frontier expansion (see, in
this regard, Grandin 2019, 47-68) – these foreign elements have instead “invaded”
the domestic social spaces which the frontier was supposed to secure. Immigration, of course, is the blowback of
neoliberal imperialism, but political discourses of immigration generally
forget this and focus instead on the figures of the illegal immigrant and the
border, a situation in which the dispersion of immigrants multiplies the
borders that have to be policed so that United States can reconstitute itself
as a pure space of identity.
After 9/11, detecting and expelling the presence of the
unauthorized persons in the United States was elevated into a new security
imperative with the construction of the Department of Homeland Security. Nearly two decades after 9/11, the trajectory
of homeland security has become clear:
not only securing the homeland with increased border security and
interior enforcement, but also the pushing of American borders outwards through
foreign aid and training programs directed toward the security forces that
would become deputized to enforce U.S. border security from abroad. Similarly, programs such as the 287g and
Security Communities deputized police in the United States for augment border
enforcement capacities. All of this
marked a simultaneous inward and outward extension of the border policing, a
development that signals the rise of the empire of borders that Miller
investigates in his book.
Miller analyzes the diffusion of the U.S. border regime as a
global the model for differentially allocating mobility between people in terms
of their specific profiles of economic value and security risk. Taken together, one has an increasingly in
neo-liberalized border regime forming itself in conjuncture with the
consolidation of an increasingly nativist political regimes in the United
States – and elsewhere in the world. Border
security does this because it is based on the postulate of assigning people to
the their territories of national origin and confining them to these spaces no matter
what the reasons are that would cause them to emigrate. Border training programs are an example of
what Anne Marie Slaughter (2005) calls transnational regulatory networks, which
create global governance networks between states. These networks operate through states and
vindicate the fundamental principle of exclusive state control over territory,
but in a manner that works to reinforce the transnational economy by means of
the allocating mobility in terms of economic value and political
trustworthiness. The result of these
procedures is the formation of what Miller terms of a “global caste system”
(see Miller 2019, 149-66) of differentiated mobility. Another expression of this same reality is
what Miller refers to as “happy flow” – the smooth circulation of the
legitimate trade and travel across international borders, all of which is consonant
with the most extreme forms of border control (2019, 163). Miller argues that the new border security
oppressively values national borders over human lives. Moreover, the empire of borders is deploying
structures that will contain one of the principle effects of climate change –
migration – in the interest of border security, an arrangement currently is and
certainly will expose hundreds of millions of people to harm. To prevent this harm, people must be allowed
unlimited mobility. This is a duty that
we have to fellow human beings, which exceeds claims about national
self-determination.
How should we assess Miller’s argument? I would suggest that the argument needs to be
evaluated not in the abstract but within specific political contexts. In this regard, Grandin’s End of the Myth provides an account of
American politics as a crucial context for evaluating Miller’s conclusions.
2.
Many Frontiers
Ironically, the mobility that is denied to migrants today
was regarded by Thomas Jefferson as a fundamental right of the British subjects
that emigrated to America. These were
not universal claims, but claims for a specific people. In Jefferson’s account, British Americans
were the descendant of Teutonic Saxons who, “in the early centuries of the
millennium were free men who governed themselves as equals, holding land in
absolute light.” Like the Jews of the
Old Testament, the Saxons fled oppression in Germany by migrating to England.
But oppression followed them to England, whereupon they migrated to the New
World and renewed their ancient freedoms.
In Grandin’s summation, “liberty was made possible by the right to
colonize when their freedom was threatened, to find free land, to carry the
torch from one place to another” (2019, 24).
When the British monarch George lll sought to constrain the migration of
colonists over the Alleghenies in the wake of the French and Indian War, Jefferson
made these constraints into one of the central grievances of the Declaration of
Independence. They were, in effect, a
violation of the Americans natural right to pursue in territorial expansion in
pursuit of freedom.
For James Madison, this freedom formed the basis of what he
termed an extensive republic, constituted not by any specific ethnicity, but
rather as a continuously multiplying diversity of interests, a hyper-pluralist
regime that would forestall the emergence of a dangerous majoritarian faction
of have-nots determined to use of political power to redistribute wealth
(Grandin 2019, 26-9). Expansion made
inequality tolerable, even desirable because it represented a competitive
struggle in which the common man would have some opportunity for economic
success and social mobility. Expansion
also implied subjugation of the non-white others because of the dispossession
of native Americans and Mexicans and on account of the extension of
slavery.
What was the glue that held America together and which
constituted the meaning of the American republic? As John Quincy Adams argued, it resided with
the cycle of conflicts that occurred between settlers and soldiers on the one
hand and natives, Mexicans, and African Americans on the other (Grandin 219,
83-9). These conflicts represented a
safety valve: race wars fought in the
context of outward expansion were preferable to class wars fought in the
context of domestic inequality. These
conflicts had a recurring political economy:
settlers who did the dirty work of dispossession and a gentry and later
a corporate elite that engaged in land speculation, slaving or large-scale
economic extraction. Once the
territorial frontier closed at end of the 19th century, military
service replaced settlement as the means through which ordinary Americans might
avail themselves of the benefits of territorial expansion. National unity became couched in the liberal
vision of the United States as spreading freedom through throughout the world –
in practice, through the subjugation of non-whites. Military service in the cause of the freedom
enabled southerners to reclaim patriotic membership within the union. But imperialism and militarism also generated
racial conflict: as Grandin emphasizes
(2019, 132-47), colonialism and informal empire abroad combined with continued
racial oppression at home.
This militarized vision of the frontier was not
uncontested. The closure of the Western
frontier also triggered a revised vision of the frontier as a space of social
transformation rather than continuous expansion in the name of freedom. This alternative conception of the frontier
rejected simple freedoms of frontier expansion in favor of the cultivation
freedom in a complex society where expansion could no longer serve as a recipe
for freedom, prosperity and security. In
fact, the frontier had limits. For a
time, the Great Depression constituted such a limit, which meant that need
provision would be facilitated by the administration of existing productive
capacity rather than growth. Freedom would have a new political foundation in
the establishment of freedom from want and insecurity (Grandin 2019, 168-33).
The New Deal vision of a complex freedom was eclipsed by the
development of the new economic capacities for mass production. Rapidly modernizing multinational
corporations interested international expansion aligned themselves with the New
Deal with the hope of opening an international investment frontier (Ferguson
1989). The U.S. military alliance with
England during World War Two was conditioned on dismantling exclusive zones of
colonial interest associated with European imperialism and the establishment of
an open world economy dominated by U.S. corporations and secured by U.S. power
projection. This reversal of Depression
era of limits reaffirmed American history as a process of
frontier expansion. In 1951, Life Editor John Knox Jessup explained
how the frontier experience had created a new kind of human being – a
pragmatic, rational, self-reliant, problem-solving individual, unburdened,
unlike his European brethren, by abstraction and ideology, and capable of
carrying out a redemptive project of human betterment via economic expansion
(Grandin, 2019, p 186). “Our
watchwords,” remarked FDR’s Democratic successor Harry Truman, “are growth,
expansion and progress,” and not simply “holding our own” (Grandin 2019, p.
199).
As Grandin emphasizes over and over, the promise of the
frontier was to dilute conflict and stabilize politics through the provision of
abundance. Post-war growth had replaced
New Deal economic polarization with the emergence of a “vital center”. Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in his 1965 State
of the Union address that “we have achieved a unity of purpose among our people
that is unmatched in the history of freedom” (quoted in Perlstein 2009: 5). The war in Vietnam and the persistence of
racial inequalities in the U.S. belied this claim. Grandin uses Martin Luther King’s turn of
phrase to the describe how war in Vietnam acted “a demonic suction tube”,
drawing resources outward “even as it worsened domestic polarization” (2019, p.
206). The Vietnam War produced “a brutal solidarity to kill foreigners” while
postponing a reckoning of internal conflicts tied to racism and poverty in the
United States.
U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam did nothing to change this
outcome. It entailed, rather, a
revitalized Jacksonian discontent as communities of the working and middle
classes increasingly espoused the view that their interests had been betrayed
by the liberal elite both at home and abroad.
Vietnam was winnable, but political leaders were unwilling to use
sufficient force. They were unable to
understand the stark reality of evil in the world in the form of foreign influences
bent on the destruction of America.
Moreover, the debacle in Vietnam marked a point where the frontier
seemed to collapse in upon itself. The
frontier no longer pushed disorder outwards.
Rather, in the context of what William Gibson (1994) terms “new war
narratives” (in pulp fiction and popular film), American borders were violated
by foreign communists, terrorists criminals and degenerates. This transformation underscores an important
turn in Grandin’s argument: the
transformation of the frontier into a border, marked by domestic turmoil rather
than external expansion.
This transformation would be both deferred and augmented by
Ronald Reagan’s reassertion of the frontier myth. One vantage point from which to discern this
was Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “national malaise” speech in which we called up
Americans to make sacrifices – in terms of their energy consumption – for the
common good. In the wake of the 1970s
OPEC price shocks and persisting economic stagflation, Americans had to
acknowledge the existence of limits to power and affluence. Carter’s speech was noteworthy because it
laid out a conception of freedom that did not draw its sustenance from frontier
myth promises of continued expansion and abundance.
It is also notable on account of Reagan’s response to
it: that Americans could have more and
more through tax cuts, deregulation, bellicose militarism toward the Soviet
Union and reactionary interventionism in the Third World. All of these policy agendas coalesced into a
struggle against collectivism in all of its forms – the formula was
simple: the evisceration of
collectivism, from the Soviet Union to the U.S. welfare state, would wrench
open new frontiers. Individual interests
harmonized by markets and secured by US power projection would blaze the path
to the future with all problems and conflicts resolvable through accelerated
economic growth. Reagan narrativized all of this through the imagery of
frontier, of pioneers “pulling us into the future,” “toward the far frontier,”
where “there are no limits to growth” (Grandin, 2019, p. 218).
What Reagan really succeed in doing was to unleash an
already incipient neoliberal transformation of U.S. economy resulting in
widespread deindustrialization. George
H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued Reagan’s project, viewing the collapse of
the communist bloc as a vast new frontier.
“We saw the frontier beyond the stars, the frontier within ourselves,”
said Bush senior (Grandin 2019, 230).
Clinton saw the emerging global economy of the 1990s as a new frontier,
arguing that “our national identity depends on our continuing to reach out”
(Grandin 2019, 233). The results of
expansion, though, were an unequal distribution of the economic rewards with
the winners of globalization steadfastly refusing to do anything to compensate
the losers via increased public investment education of job training.
In the face of rising economic inequalities, external wars
could reaffirm national purpose. Bush
senior told American troops returning home from the first Persian Gulf War that
they “helped us revive the America of our hopes and dreams;” that they had
“reignited Americans’ faith in themselves” (quoted in Grandin 2019, 230). Here is an interesting contrast: where Carter sought to renew confidence through
shared domestic sacrifice, Bush senior found it in war. But it would not be found there as any
cursory reflection about America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would
conclude. The Great Recession dovetailed
with the failures of George W. Bush’s war signaling a generalized failure of both
globalization and imperial war to advance security and well-being of ordinary
Americans. The Obama era unfolded with
the context this downturn. Obama’s
insistence that “innovation is how we win the future” and his protestations
about the virtues American exceptionalism notwithstanding, the frontier could
no longer project a viable future.
The frontier instead congealed into the embattled border
where making America great again entails expelling any foreign presence from it. The frontier has not altogether
dissipated. Its one remaining remnant is
the view that freedom means absence of constraint – no constraint on
consumption, on inequality, on pollution, on racism or sexism (entailing a
reviled political correctness), or on how much the Trump
administration punishes asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. The absence of constraint turns out to be national
fullness of being. Given these cultural
maladies, is now a good time to advocate Miller’s proposal for open
borders?
3.
Open Borders
Borders are arbitrary, Miller repeatedly emphasizes,
separating families and communities.
They were established long ago by imperial powers, with no consultation
or consent from the people who are affected by them. Miller advances the idea the state borders
are historically coterminous with the privatization of common lands. Private property and state borders are two
sides of the same coin – both equally imbued with the idea of exclusive use by
those who claim to be in possession of it.
In both cases, this possession commenced with an inaugural violence of
dispossession. Miller quotes geographer
Reece Jones on how the customary land rights to the feudalism were usurped by
the Enclosure Movement. The 1607
suppression of the Midlands Revolt marked an event of the world historical
significance: the assimilation of
commoners, stripped of customary rights, into state bounded political
communities engaged in a continuous struggles for power (Miller 2019, 91-100).
In effect, the destruction of the world’s commons were
precipitated by the conjoined origins of private property and the state. This was a process was reiterated with
colonial domination. But it still has
not obliterated non-capitalist conceptions of the commons – and with them,
alternative forms of the political community.
Surveying the empire of borders from the vantage point of Kenya, Miller
quotes one of his Maasai informants: “In
Maasailand, we travel without carrying anything because moving between villages
is like moving between the rooms of a very large house” (Miller 2019, 96). The practices of the Maasai are fluid,
enabling the Maasai to adapt to changes in their environment within a framework
of commonly held resources. But this
movement, among the Maasai - and for many other communities partitioned by
borders - has been impeded by both private property and the entrenchment of
state boundaries. “Right now,” continues
Miller’s informant, "there is a big problem of drought and there is no where you
can go for greener pasture and so you have to stay there” and endure whatever
is there “for the rest of your life” (Miller 2019, 251). Thus do closed borders (of both property and
the state) amplify the suffering associated with climate change. This suffering underscores the fundamental
inhumanity of borders. In effect, they
divide humanity between citizens and aliens, consigning the latter to an almost
subhuman condition of rightlessness.
“National borders have become more important than the basic rights of
living people” (Miller 2019, 213).
The dysfunctions of the existing state system, exacerbated
by climate change, make recognition of a “right to the world” morally
imperative. This right to the world
means that borders should not block the right of people of live, work and love
wherever they please (Miller, 2019, p. 237). The moral imperative associated
with recognizing the humanity of the excluded leads Miller (and the border
activists and scholars whose work he cites) to advocate for a borderless
commons. “The idea that individuals
should be stationary, should be confined to one place, will be replace by a
spirit of collectivity that will inspire new ideas and new negotiations – new
ways of making relationships, including borders, with other people and the
natural world” (Miller, 2019, p. 252).
Miller embraces the not uncommon idea that climate change illustrates
the failure of the core institution of Western modernity – private property and
the state. Our civilization, built on
the foundations of colonialism, deepening inequality and an expanding carbon
footprint, should perhaps die in order to make room for alternatives (Miller,
2019, p. 253).
This is a bracing message, but to whom does it appeal? Miller’s stories of suffering, fortitude and
generosity among victims and suspicion, secrecy and indifference to suffering
amongst security professionals might incline some sympathetic readers to a
similar negation of the paradigm of global border security. But such conclusions are also likely the contribute
to the kind of the ideological polarization that currently exists around
globalization. One defensive yet
plausible response to Miller’s conclusions is that anybody that does not agree
with his conclusions is a part of a failed and ultimately doomed
civilization. From the point of view of
Miller’s argument, it is hard to engage with the anxieties of developed country
citizens about immigration and, more generally, globalization. Calls for open borders are not going to do
much in the short term to undermine support of populist nationalism. Nor do such calls adequately recognize the
ideological power of nationalism as a hegemonic form of belonging –
particularly, the idea of national self-determination.
It is easy to dismiss calls for open borders as expressions
of libertarianism, which hold that the primacy of individual rights always
trumps the prerogatives national communities to determined what philosopher
Michael Walzer terms membership policy (Walzer, 1984). A political community that cannot determine
who, in effect, can be a member of it, is a very weak community indeed. It certainly would not be strong enough to
the cope with either mitigating the causes of climate change or coping with its
effects.
Miller’s examination of the pathologies of borders is
compelling, but it is a mistake to the dismiss the possibilities for
progressive forms of national self-determination because this discounts the
desire of people to have some control over their destiny. It is rather the case that national self
determination must be exercised more vigorously in terms of organizing more
resilient communities that can withstand the stresses of climate change by
means of reigning in the powers of billionaire oligarchs. The mobilization of this anti-immigrant
sentiment is central to the alignment of the downwardly mobile workers with those of extractive capitalists- the Koch Brothers, for example (Robinson 2019).
This alliance is built around the most retrograde elements of the
frontier tradition whose disintegration Grandin so ably charts in his book. Calls for open borders are simply not an
effective means of dismantling these profoundly damaging alignments.
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Gibson, J. W., 1994. Warrior
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Grandin, G., 2019. The
End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New
York: Metropolitan Books.
Hixson, W. L., 2008. The
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Miller, T., 2019. Empire
of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World. London:
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the Rise of a President and the Fracturing of a Nation. New York: Scribner.
Slaughter, A. M., 2005.
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Streeck, W., 2016. How
Will Capitlaism End?. London and New York: Verso.
Walzer, M., 1984. Sphere
of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
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