Addictions: The National Security State

 In one or more of his essays, Gore Vidal railed against the National Security State - CIA, etc. - and for a return to our being a Republic, instead of an Empire. I admire the idea, even if I am no longer sure that it is practical. Trump may prove me right without implementing a retreat back to our being a Republic. Politics hate a vacuum as much as nature, if we give up our empire then who, and what replaces us? China and authoritarianism and global instability. Domestically, Trump and his people want nothing more than power over us, so there will be no end to the security state, but an aggrandizement of domestic security against any opposition to MAGA.

(I have not read Vidal's essays in an age; my recollection is that they were better thought out and written than his fiction. Check them out.)

Having come this far, I want to point you to Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State (The New Republic). Samuel Moyn's book review/essay may point a way to implementing Vidal's ideas. It starts with assuming the need for the security state/empire as supplying domestic bliss.

Sullivan was going back to the future, the historian Andrew Preston’s new book implies. In Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, Preston argues that, between 1937 and 1942, Democrats in power created the idea of national security out of a New Deal liberal commitment to economic fairness for the common man. If so, the discovery of the domestic foundations and purposes of national security today is a rediscovery—the moment at the end of liberal internationalism when we “arrive where we started,” in poet T.S. Eliot’s lines, and “know the place for the first time.” And yet, unlike when New Dealers invented national security at the height of Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity, and saved the country from economic ruin, the concept’s Biden-era revamp has not helped Democrats to win elections. A return to their origins shows that they need to move on to a new beginning.

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In other words, the dynamic of fighting the war actually exacerbated the risks that Preston suggests had undergirded the ideology of national security in the first place. Once you have a lot to lose, you have more to fear losing. If the extraordinary mobilization of men and materiel to fight made the United States the most powerful country in world history, it also created a reason to see threats everywhere. “With great power, it seems, comes great fear,” Preston himself observes.

The new liberalism of fear that triumphed through World War II, and which Preston captures so well, was primed for skewed priorities. In his emphasis on anxiety as an emotional source of historical change, Preston’s claims are close to—and inspired by—Ira Katznelson’s classic Fear Itself, a 2013 analysis of New Deal politics. Katznelson championed FDR for keeping America democratic in an environment in which totalitarianism won out across Europe in response to economic insecurity. Preston, however, asserts that fearmongering was a brilliant move but also a faulty basis for political change: Roosevelt, he writes, “embraced a kind of liberalism of fear even if it wasn’t at all well-suited to a politics of progressivism,” given that a “liberalism of fear is reactive, not progressive.” It served national security better than social security. 

And national security became an addiction.

Though always redistributive in fact, social security functions as a trust fund to allow ordinary workers to insure themselves against risks, including living into old age. National security, by contrast, gave the state a far bigger role than mere trustee. Americans came to understand the state itself as least controversial when it was at war, or planning for it on a permanent basis. “If distant countries really did pose a threat to the security of the United States, there was no feasible way private interests could address such challenges,” Preston writes. “Americans’ social security at home was becoming less statist than their national security abroad.” Even today, Elon Musk hasn’t touched military spending.

How is Iran a danger to our survival? It is not. The price of oil might rise, but we will not come under the rule of Iranians.

I close with Moyn's closing:

War itself is anything but over, recent years attest, and neither are other threats, like pandemic waves crisscrossing a warming planet. It’s hard to argue with Preston’s judicious conclusion that Roosevelt’s “success trapped later generations of policy-making” into an American posture that is no good for dealing with any of these dilemmas. What would an American statecraft beyond the ideology of national security look like? Preston doesn’t say, but he clearly thinks the fear of fear itself that drove Americans to embrace a quest for security has outlasted its usefulness. Democrats must talk and think about the good life in more uplifting terms, rather than arming to the teeth for war, as if intolerance of threats will satisfy the people’s desire for hopeful alternatives.

Not an answer, only a place to start thinking.

sch