What's the Harm in "The Homeland"

The second recommendation in my series of post-Trump reforms may seem nit-picky, but it is huge: stop calling our country “the homeland” and remove the phrase from all government offices, laws and references.

By not standing up against the use of the post 9/11 adoption of the term “The Homeland” when we should have, Dems inadvertently helped lay one more paver on the pathway to the white, Christo-authoritarian administration that we are fighting today.

And, very much in the same way that Hollywood did a disservice to us by creating the two-dimensional Nazi, the broad adoption of calling our country “the homeland” has only served to obscure how many on the right had been implementing a multi-generational plan to move our country away from multi-ethnic democracy.

To people of a certain age, the post 9/11 hysteria truly is a short time ago, and the intervening years feel like anything but a short history.

For all three of my readers who were too young to remember those days when Rudy Giuliani was national symbol of strength and Facebook did not yet exist, let this note about “the homeland” serve as an example of how easily language can recalibrate our national course.

I remember in the months after 9/11 feeling very uncomfortable with the sudden use of “the homeland.” It was not because I was particularly well-read in Nazi history.

It was probably because I was raised in western Europe, which suffered so specifically at the hands of the Nazis. Even I knew that “the homeland” is translated the famously frightening German word heimat, itself originating from heimatstadt, or “homeland state”.

And, even though I’ve carried this discomfort for decades now, I only recently looked around to see who was protesting this usage back in the early aughts.

A late 2001 article in The Ethical Spectacle was a great primer on why this term is so dangerous. “Homeland” was constructed by the Nazis out of thin air to describe an ethnic place of origin, thus allowing them to exclude anybody who was not in their in-crowd.

Per the article: “There's the heart of the issue--the reason why "homeland" doesn't feel right. America's doors have always been open to the whole world. No better phrase defines the United States than "a nation of immigrants." The only native Americans are Native Americans.” … “Instead, we've depended on a set of ideals to do it--the rule of law, freedom of thought, action, and belief, democratic government, hard work, sacrifice. Historically, anybody willing to share a belief in those ideals has been able to find a home here, no matter where they were born.”

As we know from recent developments in the US, the act of excluding “the other” is foundational to allowing fascistic ideas to take hold. The term “homeland” helps to create that exclusion in the public’s mind.

It is notable that Stephen Miller was only about 16 when our country adopted this framing. To him, it probably seemed natural. And, as a racist xenophobe the term was quite convenient in his rise to power.

As 2001 is virtually the neolithic era of the Internet, I’ve not been able to find too many examples of people back then standing up to the use of the word.

And for those who did, I’m sure they were pigeonholed as “unpatriotic”.

Bad habits are tough to break. As an example, I hear far too many Democrats adopting the right wing’s grammatically incorrect and trolling “democrat (sic) politicians” construction, unwittingly playing in to a decades-long effort to disrespect them.

We should all resist this because words matter. Further, it is not snowflake behavior to stand up for what is correct.

Of course, the homeland construction, itself, is infinitely more harmful than the grammatical schoolyard name calling of the right wing.

“Homeland” is even more difficult to deprogram. Since 2001, we’ve unified our collective psyche more completely with this noxious term than we have with hashtags, tattoos and social media.

However, as with the example of the misuse of “democrat”, we have to start with awareness. I’ve been a total buzz kill at a cocktail party for two decades every time I bring up things like these.

Thankfully I’m not alone.

There are some great examples of people over the last 20 years talking about this. Chris Matthews brought it up in 2009, only to be called out on it a few years later because he used the term admiringly back in 2001.

But we don’t do ourselves any good by playing a game of holier-than-thou. I’m sure I’ve let the word slip a time or two after a couple Bulleit Rye Whiskeys around the camp fire.

It’s been heartening to see a few more recent articles, such as this, bringing up the subject again. Yet another dove deeper on the term’s use to construct as an engine for the entire US national security enterprise. Even the great Heather Cox Richardson addressed the knock-on effects of adopting “homeland”, as we saw in the tumult in the summer of 2025, and the Department of Homeland Security’s unconstitutional and racist policies.

“Homeland” is not an American term, and to be truly American we have to reject that framing. Just as many of us rejected being told that we were unpatriotic by questioning the Iraq war in 2003 (by many of the same people who now blindly lob bombs at children in Iran today), we need to stand up to anybody who suggests that we don’t love our country when we reject terms like this.

While many adopted the term unwittingly in 2001, I am certain that for many others it was an intentional step toward their dark vision for our country.

So, add this to your list of favorite reforms to talk to your member of Congress about over the next few years.

It is certainly not number one on your list. Nor should it be.

But, just as West Germany erased all mention of their horrid past from public view, we should set about very quickly after the Trump era to remind people that we are a nation of diverse peoples who are bounded by common ideas about law, justice and the constitution, and not an imaginary homeland for an ethnic group that never really was.

We should re-build the Department of Homeland Security from the ground up, while scrubbing the name from every letterhead, plaque and law on the books.

There are about 40 occurrences of the word “homeland” in Arizona Revised Statutes.

We can start by eliminating those, updating any references to the hopefully-eliminated federal department and then setting about updating any references in plaques monuments or on buildings.