What are the actual forces at work, then, in the winning of America’s “new frontiers,” beyond rosy encomia to heroic trailblazers and heated denunciations of exploiters and profiteers? What does this “creative destruction” look like in practice? It’s clear that particular groups are involved in these endeavors, with particular collective interests tied to their new venture, and a specific relationship to the state. A new conceptual frame is needed to examine the political, social, and economic logic of the periodic upheavals in American life that result from these dynamics.
We might call this process filibusterism, after its protagonists.
Blackmailing the State
Before the term “filibuster” (derived from the Spanish filibustero from Dutch vrijbuiter or “freebooter”) came to describe a method of legislative delay, it referred to a particular kind of nineteenth-century adventurer. These original filibusters led expeditions into foreign countries in the Americas, seeking to conquer territory and, eventually, persuade the U.S. government to annex it.
Tennessee native William Walker was perhaps the most famous of the early filibusters. After leading an army of mercenaries into Nicaragua and establishing himself as president of the country in 1856, he was driven out by Costa Rican–led forces and eventually handed over by the British Navy to the Honduran government, which executed him. Not a rousing success. But the process by which Texas and California became part of the United States—Americans settling land in a foreign country, establishing local control, and eventually obtaining the territory’s absorption into the Union—can only be described as successful applications of the same set of tactics.
In nineteenth-century filibusters, we glimpse the contours of a dynamic that in different incarnations has replayed itself incessantly in American society, from the colonial period to the present day: a group makes an independent venture into some “new” area that ends with the venture’s absorption by the state, on terms favorable to the group in question. This logic applies broadly: from the backwoodsmen who defied the crown’s prohibition to cross the Alleghenies and settle what became Kentucky, to the machine politicians who integrated their apparatuses into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century state, to the Uber executives who end-ran local prohibitions in a successful bid to obtain regulatory approval. “Filibusterism” is a better description of the events gestured to in these examples than “land grabs,” not just because it is less moralistic but because it points to the thing which makes all successful land grabs successful: that the state, in the end, signs on the dotted line.
Filibusterism, in this broader sense, works like this. Without asking permission, a group moves into a loosely controlled territory, and sets itself up there. The group knows that it is in violation—sometimes ambiguously, sometimes flagrantly—of established law or practice, so it seeks to entrench itself as deeply as possible, as quickly as possible, and in the greatest numbers possible. That way, it can increase its odds of survival.