Neoliberalism, the homeland security state, and the authoritarian turn

Abstract

This article interrogates the writings of Milton Friedman and Samuel Huntington to theorize the cultural and ideological processes that gave rise to the homeland security state, a complex and integral configuration of the modern capitalist state that has come to police migrants in multiple realms. Though I discuss some of the major policies and institutional shifts that were central to the forging of the homeland security state from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, I argue that such policies could not be separated from the authoritarian turn in civil society; that is a cultural and ideological tendency to support the use of violence and repression to deal with dissent and social problems writ large. I also argue that the authoritarian turn should be viewed as the civil society-based cultural and ideological counterpart of “authoritarian statism,” a concept developed by the Greek political theorist Nicos Poulantzas to characterize a repressive form of governance that can exist within the legal framework of a constitutional democracy. The article concludes with some notes about what the authoritarian turn and statism means for the migrant rights movement and parallel social movements in light of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parental Accountability.