From Mother Jones · Sophie Hurwitz · · 2m
How national security came to mean everything
A 25 percent tariff on trumpets shows how one phrase became the government's all-purpose excuse.
In brief
A 25 percent tariff on trumpets shows how one phrase became the government's all-purpose excuse. When a term can justify a ballroom, a data center, and a tariff on tubas, it has stopped describing a threat and started describing a power. Originally reported by Mother Jones.
Tariffs on trumpets
Commerce announced a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments in early August, citing reliance on foreign copper alloys as a national security risk.
A phrase that wandered off
Defending a country from threats was the original meaning. Brass instruments are a long way from that.
Washington said it first
In a 1791 address to Congress, George Washington called militias "of primary importance" to national security, partly to fight the "deluded tribes."
The New Deal stretched it
Historian Andrew Preston tracks the shift: security stopped being about territory and became ideological, normative, and global.
“It became, as it still is today, all-encompassing.”
1947 built the machine
The National Security Act created the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense, without ever defining the term itself.
“It is sort of like a Christmas tree. Everybody can just kind of hang what they want onto it.”
After the towers fell
Within days Congress passed a military authorization still on the books. Guantanamo opened by January 2002, Homeland Security a year after that.
“We became a fear-based, hyper-security state.”
Steel as saintly relic
Twisted beams from the wreckage went to a strip mall in Parma, Ohio and a Texas firehouse. Some was melted into a warship sent to the Persian Gulf.
The bill for 20 years
The wars that followed cost an estimated 900,000 lives, about 15,000 of them American, and at least $4 trillion.
Trump hangs everything on it
The White House ballroom. Canceled offshore wind leases. Looser toxic emission limits. Erasing transgender people from public life. All filed as national security.
If it means everything
Then it means nothing, except a way to aim post-9/11 legal machinery at new targets. It started with Muslims, and now reaches immigrants and anti-ICE protesters.
“The system has expanded to new uses, new targets, new opportunities to vilify, to punish, to create division.”
The key point
When a term can justify a ballroom, a data center, and a tariff on tubas, it has stopped describing a threat and started describing a power.
