Democracy versus the National Security State

Abstract

It is not possible to understand the national security state and the reasons which give rise to the need for dismantling it without mentioning the profound and wrenching events of the last fifty years. The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology.' It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals.2 In practical terms its emergence is linked to the rise of a bureaucracy that administered things and people in interchangeable fashion without concern for ends or assumptions.3 This state formation matured during a period in which the office of the President became supremely powerful as a broker and legitimating instrument of national security activity.4 This paper argues in somewhat tendentious and breathless form that the state system which has emerged in the United States is a constitutional deformation which menaces the freedom and well being of its citizenry, and which poses a danger to world civilization. What is hanging in the balance in the last twenty-five years of this century is whether the people, scholars, lawyers and judges, and members of the government, can so organize their understanding and their political actions as to avert fascism or Bonapartism, a debilitating arms race that could end in the kind of horror from which there will be no