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The Shallow-Bottomed Optimism of Jay Winik by Joseph R. Stromberg
Security the Mother of Liberty? Jay C. Winik’s article "Security Comes Before Liberty" (Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2001) is already a classic by virtue of the title alone. The title does not bode well. Things get worse straight-away. Naturally, I try to keep things in perspective. Last week was, after all, Gang Initiation Week for Neo-Conservatives, which explains why every man-jack of them was going on about the benefits of torture. This is the most fun these fellows have had since the good old days when James Burnham, war-keen forebear of the Neo-Cons, used to advocate torture back in the 1960s. Without torture, how could Portugal keep hold of Angola or France hang on to Algeria (although the latter cause was already lost)? Well, do we actually care whether those people hold Angola or Algeria? But I leave all that to one side, so we may deal with the more pressing aspects of Mr. Winik’s article. Winik laments that "Today our international might may be at its zenith, but we as a nation have never been more vulnerable to debilitating and destablilizing attacks at home." Now, a perversely critical sort of person might see a structural, causal relation between the uses of that international might and recent events. He or she could notice that without "justifying" those events. This, too, may be left to one side. Repression: People from the Nicest Families Do It Winik now takes us on a historical cook’s tour of repression by US administrations during certified emergencies. He seems to be of two minds (at least) on this. On the one hand, it must have been good, because only the very best presidents have done it, and we may deduce their goodness from some assumptions about their character. Thus – Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. I don’t know if this must necessarily warm the hearts of opponents of those worthy gents – then or now; if it doesn’t, the proof falls somewhat flat. Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln’s arbitrary arrests of more than 13,000 Northern citizens and a goodly section of the Maryland legislature, St. Woodrow’s reign of terror, and FDR’s "relocation" of Japanese-Americans all get their due. I cannot tell if Winik is warning us, cheering us up, or just handing out lessons of history. Maybe he isn’t warning us, since he states that these historically vindicated repressions were far more severe than anything now planned by the Bushites. Let us savor our good fortune. I especially like Winik’s discussion of Wilson’s little efforts at protecting freedom from the terrible Huns – his propaganda committee, for instance, which "cultivated a kind of war madness. All dissent became suspect…." The country entered upon an unedifying bout of jack-booted paranoia. The government even tried people for offenses as slight as criticizing the Red Cross. There is Progress! Now the US government itself bombs the Red Cross, although not in our immediate neighborhood. But Winik tells us not to worry. He writes: "It is hard to think of a group of presidents more passionate in their staunch support of democracy than Adams, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt." Well, his own evidence calls for a contrary conclusion, if by "democracy" Winik has in mind constitutional, republican government based on a guarantee of certain liberties. Never mind, assumptions about these men must overrule their actual deeds. Winik concedes that, except for dear old Abe, the Gang of Four had little real reason for their campaigns of repression. But don’t worry, folks, however unconstitutional or unnecessary our past waves of repression have been, we always get our liberties back after the war. Hooray! Winik’s propositions, then, are the following: Good democrats may "suspend" our liberties. Historically, these suspensions have mostly been unnecessary and unconstitutional. Don’t worry about it. Things always go back to normal. I do not believe that even the Neo-Cons’ favorite, much-mooted foreign agency could torture a coherent thesis out of that. Just in passing, if repression during emergencies is always praiseworthy, understandable, or whatever, then why, oh why, has Winik not said a kind word for Senator Joe McCarthy? I guess Tailgunner Joe isn’t on the list of certified democrats of good character. Anyway, we mustn’t fret: Things will be normal again. Yes,
but according to vice president Dick Cheney, quoted in the Boston Well, to paraphrase John Lennon, we might say the Veep’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one. For Winik, "the Bush administration has thus far shown remarkable restraint." Not so, old chap, they have only been plodding, bureaucratic, and systematic. That is their style. Country club Republicans, you know. The intended outcome is a whole set of permanent inroads on our liberties. Interested readers should look at two recent articles on the oddly named enabling act (something about patriotism) just signed into law, one by Bryan Bender, and one by John Nichols. Our Many Restored Freedoms Winik does not seem to think that inroads on freedom are cumulative. No, indeed, "our democracy can, and has, outlived temporary restrictions and continued to thrive." This is an odd failing in an historian, one attributable perhaps to the current Hegelian mood of the Neo-Cons. Each liberticide wave, on this view, enters into a new synthesis of freedom and unfreedom. The new blend is then taken as the only possible form of freedom at this historical moment. Our ancestors signed on for a different plan. Let us see how this works in practice. The election of 1800 smashed the Federalist Party, leaving them only their foothold in the judiciary. The hated Alien and Seditions laws fell largely by the wayside. Yet in a matter of a few years, Jefferson sought – in another emergency – to enforce an embargo with methods which would have made Adams blush for shame. (See Forrest McDonald on this.) As for Lincoln’s assaults on liberty, so lovingly detailed by Winik, did none of them have lasting effects? They did indeed. First comes the wonderful set of "precedents," appealed to ever since, for suppression of liberties in emergencies. One of these happy precedents was mass conscription. Another was the pernicious doctrine that presidents have, constitutionally, a vast treasury of unknown powers under the commander-in-chief clause. Raoul Berger demolished this doctrine twenty some years ago, but no one took notice. Further, Republican neo-mercantilism – subsidies, tariffs, greenbacks, new kinds of taxation – outlived the war. If Reconstruction is taken into account, all manner of unconstitutional proceedings became possible in the backwash of Lincoln’s war. One wonders, too, if the courts’ utter uselessness, as far as liberty went, during Wilson’s crusade did not involve the institutional memory of how Lincoln ignored and overrode unfavorable court decisions during his emergency. What of World War I? It is true that citizens jailed for the "crime" of thinking they had chartered rights were pardoned by the dull Republican presidents who succeeded Wilson. Nevertheless, the war left behind new sources of state revenue and a further precedent for mass conscription. The "war socialism" overseen by the War Industries Board spawned a full-blown theory of corporatism – government-business partnership – which high-minded reformers sought to impose in peacetime under the first New Deal. The habit of political surveillance survived the war and carried through into the New Deal and the New Dealers’ war. If the scale of state activity lessened after each emergency, the new bureaus, methods, precedents, and state aspirations attendant on each crisis lingered on, waiting for their next opportunity for expansion. Professor Robert Higgs has chronicled the steady upward curve of state-building in his very useful book, Crisis and Leviathan. Now, a high-falutin Neo-Con (if Winik is such) could sneer that much to which I have pointed is "mere" economic freedom beneath the notice of Left-Reaganites. Some idle rhetoric about "democratic capitalism" arises from that quarter, but very little focused defense of free markets will be found there. One wonders, though, if Japanese-Americans who lost their livelihood and property under the benign FDR and Dog Fala were robbed of their civil liberties or of their economic liberties. Perhaps the two are somehow connected. Under the truncated definition of freedom offered by Winik – at least as far as I can spy one – such matters hardly intrude at all. We still have our intact "democracy," after all. Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips wrote in 1913 that the US Constitution "provided the machinery for a government of the people, by the political majority, in behalf of the interests which control that majority" (my emphasis). We may lose our power to make our own decisions about a growing array of issues – economic, social, educational – but, by God, we still have the right to vote for two utterly corrupt and venal sets of professional politicos from time to time. It follows that we are "free." State Managers Reaching for Total Power But I mentioned Professor Higgs just now. That somehow brings us to perhaps the most amazing omission from Winik’s list of emergencies at the end of which our freedom was restored to us only slightly tarnished and wrinkled. That omission involves forty-some years of semi-mobilization for war and steady bureaucratic encroachment known as the Cold War. Here we had an emergency-in-permanence, behind cover of which sundry post-constitutional bureaucracies and agencies could do whatever it was they did. They’ll let us know in a few decades, under our own approximations to the British Official Secrets Act. It was a Teddy Bears’ picnic for state-builders, a sort of Trotskyite permanent revolution for the state managers. Far more is involved than a few poisoned sheep in Nevada and neighboring states and exploding cigars for Fidel. (This is one reason why the question of whether or not one prominent Neo-Con was or wasn’t a Stalinist hardly seems very interesting.) One might think that an "emergency" lasting almost half a century had lasting consequences for American freedom. Apparently not, as far as Winik can tell. He doesn’t worry much, it seems. Yet it seems that great damage was done – economic, political, institutional, and moral. After World War II, we did not "get our liberties back." The Cold War saw to that. Edward S. Corwin, Professor of Law, observed that what we got was: "(1) the attribution to Congress of a legislative power of an indefinite scope; (2) the attribution of the President of the power and duty to stimulate constantly the positive exercise of this indefinite power for enlarged social objectives; (3) the right of Congress to delegate its powers ad libitum to the President for the achievement of such enlarged social objectives; (4) the attribution to the President of a broad prerogative in the meeting of ‘emergencies’ defined by himself and in the creation of executive agencies to assist him; (5) a progressively expanding replacement of the judicial process by the administrative process in the enforcement of the law – sometimes even of constitutional law." Higgs, who quotes these words of Corwin’s, adds: "Under these conditions the only impediment to the relentless growth of the central government consisted of partisan and interest-group opposition to particular proposals. Time would reveal that such obstructionism, ever-shifting with the winds of partisan politics and immediate interest-group objectives, could no more than slow the onrushing Leviathan" (Robert Higgs, "War and Leviathan: Conscription as the Keystone," in John V. Denson, ed., The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, 2nd ed. [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999], pp. 386-387). There was, however, one group with a longer-run vision. Unfortunately, it was the rising class of state apparatchiks whom Richard J. Barnet pegged as National Security Managers. (On this topic, see Leonard P. Liggio, "American Foreign Policy and National-Security Management," in Ronald Radosh [how times have changed] and Murray N. Rothbard, A New History of Leviathan [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972], pp. 224-259.) In the staged, piece-meal takeover of American life by these gentry, Winik can see only the nicest Bushian "restraint." By his lights, individuals should quit bitching about how little practical freedom they have, as against what their ancestors had, and sign up for total Sicherheit for the duration. But a fellow who can ignore the whole Cold War may not be a very good forecaster when it comes to the timely recovery of our beleaguered freedoms. I grant that I have said little about the present emergency. If it were possible to find and punish the perpetrators of September 11, if any remain, no one would complain. But if that crime becomes an excuse or occasion for the permanent US regime to expand its imperial reach or try out its doctrine of two and half wars at the same time, then we shall have on our hands an emergency of a very different kind. With the military-political classes reaching for total control, cheered on by kindly Neo-Con academics, it is time to reject once and for all the notion that the US Empire embodies anything besides the cause of empire. It is probably also time never again to vote for any Republican politician, except perhaps in local elections where he or she could do little harm, but that is by the way. Ditto for the Democrats. As for the idea that "security comes before liberty," our ancestors signed on for a different plan. It is too bad we’ve been swindled out of it. October 31, 2001 Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for Antiwar.com. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com The
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