War Culture and the Politics of Violence

The question that really obsesses me today is not whether or not I like violence, or whether or not you like it—unless the situation is ameliorated, and very, very quickly, there will be violence.

—James Baldwin (2014, 17; emphasis in original)

Living in a War Culture

War has been redefined in the age of global capitalism.¹ This is especially true for the United States. No longer defined exclusively as a military issue, it has expanded its boundaries and now shapes all aspects of society. As Ulrich Beck observes, "the language of war takes on a new and expansive meaning today. … The notions on which our worldviews are predicated and the distinctions between war and peace, military and police, war and crime, internal and external security; particularly between internal and external in general" are being transformed as they collapse into each other (Beck 2002, 1). Beck goes on to suggest that not only are the "boundaries between the military and civil society [being] torn down, but also the boundaries between innocent and guilty, between suspects and non-suspects" (Beck 2002, 3). As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief, and death, America is quickly transformed into a war culture. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, the veneration of war in the United States has now reached a dangerous endpoint, and has become the foundation of politics itself. They write:

What is specific to our era…is that war has passed from the final element of the sequences of power—lethal force as a last resort—to the first and primary element, the foundation of politics itself. Imperial sovereignty creates…a regime of disciplinary administration and political control directly based on continuous war action. The constant and coordinated application of violence, in other words, becomes the necessary condition for the functioning of discipline and control. In order for war to occupy this fundamental social and political role, war must be able to accomplish a constituent or regulative function: war must become both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life.

(Hardt and Negri 2004, 2)

The violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the deployment and celebration of violence abroad and at home. At a policy level, an arms industry fuels violence abroad while domestically a toxic gun culture contributes to the endless maiming and deaths of individuals at home. Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart in the growth of a carceral and punishing state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the United States.² A "political culture of hyper punitiveness" (Herbert and Brown 2006, 757) serves not only to legitimate a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, but also a racist system of mass incarceration that functions as the default welfare program and chief mechanism to "institutionalize obedience" (Martinot 2015). The police state increasingly targets poor people of color turning their neighborhoods into war zones, all the while serving a corporate state that has no concern whatsoever for the social costs inflicted on millions because of its predatory policies and practices.

Moreover, the persistent killing of Black youth testifies to a long history and domestic terrorism representing "an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes" (Davis 2016, 77). The historical backdrop to the current killing of black youth, men, and women coupled with fact that "11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year" and that the United States "imprisons the largest proportion of people in the world [and] that, with 4% of the global population, it holds 22% of the world's prisoners." Moreover, 59% of these prisoners are people of color.³ These figures testify not only to the emergence of...