This chapter opens the exploration of imperial popular sovereignty by developing W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism, which recasts popular sovereignty in wealthy democracies as an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources of empire. Rather than a self-contained unit, the popular politics of the metropole issued claims to determine themselves (democratically), as well as others (despotically). This entanglement between popular sovereignty and empire works through affective attachments to possessions that require an excessive form of western self-determination that I call “self-and-other-determination.” Racial affective attachments bind citizens to material possessions and each other, but racialized ideologies restrict the range of mutual concern to a limited community, which allows for the imperial exploitation of racialized others, whose work is the basis of the commonwealth. I then engage Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon to show that – despite the transition from formal imperial arrangements toward neoliberalism – affective attachments mutate to allow white polities to remain democratically despotic. I discuss the absence of these questions in the critical literature on self-determination and, in concluding, reflect on the implications of this framework for understanding contemporary right-wing populism.