This essay was written in response to the killing of Renee Good and the responses of one U.S. Congressman, but also considers the continued violence in Minnesota in the two weeks that have passed since then.

REP. WESLEY HUNT (R-TX): “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them, and then you get to keep your life.”

Wesley Hunt perfectly illustrates Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics.” Necropolitics is an extension of Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics,” the state’s power over life. In “Necropolitics” (2003, 11), Mbembe writes: “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” This power is not expressed in the same ways in all places and times. Mbembe points out two times when the state most completely exercised its power to kill and made it a fundamental aspect of governing: Nazi Germany and the French Revolution. In these environments, a person was never far from the state’s necropower. Speaking out against the state or the mission it sought to promote could put one in the crosshairs with little recourse.

Ten years ago, the necropower of the United States was (relatively) subdued. The death penalty, formally ordered by the justice system, was delivered to twenty people in 2016, mostly in a few US states and usually as punishment for exceptionally heinous crimes after significant deliberation. These deaths may not have been truly fair or just, but they were at least at a great remove from the lives of most Americans. The death penalty is not the only form that necropolitics takes. Many people had their lives threatened by police violence, by the denial of health care, and by the activities of state militaries, especially abroad. Many more people experienced changes to the conditions of their lives that may contribute to or take the form of “social death”—not biologically dead, but losing key aspects of human life such as bodily autonomy and political status. Social death is often associated with slavery, but in the modern United States it may be best associated with incarceration.

All of this is to say that power of American necropolitics in the early 21^st century was pervasive, but less visible and less total than in Nazi Germany. It is possible for people to be more or less accepting of the state’s exercising its power over the life and death of its citizens. In his statement, Representative Wesley Hunt has articulated the current state of necropolitics in the United States, almost ten years after Trump’s first election victory. Hunt’s view is far from universal, and like many things today, its acceptance is likely to fall along political party lines. Nevertheless, it illustrates how far the political landscape has changed in the past decade.

In Hunt’s view, survival is contingent on obedience to the state’s enforcers, including police, federal investigators, immigration agents. The requirement for obedience is absolute in its scope and its consequences. The hands of law enforcement are not restrained by jurisdiction or legal procedure. Civilians should not condition their obedience on the furnishing of legal justification for an agent’s orders. Instead, a civilian is expected to obey immediately and unconditionally. Failure to comply is punishable by immediate execution without opportunity for appeal.

As with so many recent high-profile encounters with state violence, this one demonstrates this fact of modern necropolitics: human life is not something that any agent of the state has a particular duty to protect, but rather a privilege that can be revoked by any state agent at any time.