Our State, Ourselves

The “war on terrorism” has produced a remarkable convergence. Philosophical differences between the traditional Left and Right are evaporating. It’s getting hard to tell the difference between a liberal magazine like The New Republic and conservative magazines like The Weekly Standard and National Review. Even the libertarian Cato Institute supports the war.

Gregg Easterbrook of The New Republic even defends what liberals used to deride as “military bloat” on grounds that “apparent excess is required for on-call strength.” That is, we never know where we may have to fight next, and a stripped-down military couldn’t respond quickly to a new emergency. So we need a high ratio of seemingly superfluous personnel, weaponry, and supplies in order to be ready for the next Iraq, Kosovo, or Afghanistan “on short notice.” Such emergencies, as Easterbrook says, are “unpredictable” and “unanticipated.”

If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, eternal superfluity is the price of global empire. And that’s what Easterbrook is really talking about. Not liberty, not defense, but worldwide military hegemony. We could defend our own borders for a tiny fraction of the trillions we spend on military forces now. But if we want to be ready to intervene anywhere on earth at any moment, Easterbrook has a point: we need far more force than we will ever actually use.

But who is this “we” Easterbrook keeps referring to? The U.S. Government, the empire, the American people? Why should an ordinary American want to maintain (and be taxed to keep up) such colossal military power? What has it to do with the constitutional purpose of “the common defense of the United States”? How does constant intervention abroad promote our safety and liberty — or does it actually endanger them? Whose interests does it really serve?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become absurd to equate Cold War levels of military spending with “defense.” I used to assume that if the Cold War ever ended, military spending and the taxes it entailed would shrink accordingly. And I thought conservatives, favoring minimal government, would lead in insisting on this.

How wrong I was! Conservatives spoke more truly than they knew when they warned that the voracious state had become autonomous, accumulating power without reason or limit. Then they forgot their own lesson.

A recent issue of National Review included several articles on how to wage the current war, followed by an essay arguing that conservatives haven’t really changed: they still favor “limited government.” The writer seemed to see no incongruity here. I guess the idea is that government should be confined to a few strictly defined duties, such as paving the streets and ruling the world.

This is fantasy. Conservatives still like to think you can have a warfare state without a welfare state, just as liberals used to want a welfare state without a warfare state. But you can’t tame this elephant. When power becomes concentrated, it is impossible to control.

In truth, the welfare state and the warfare state are inseparable, because they are two aspects of the same thing, the state itself. Countless people depend on both for their income. Both expand inexorably. We always hear calls for emergency spending; there is no such thing as emergency saving. And as Easterbrook notes, emergencies — as defined by the state — just keep on coming.

In the days of monarchs, a man at least knew who the state was: the king. L’etat, c’est moi, and all that. When there was a war, everyone knew it was the king’s war. When the king imposed taxes, everyone knew who was paying whom. It might be tyranny, but you knew what was what; there was no nonsense about self-government. Government meant some people ruling others.

But in the age of Democracy, people think, confusedly, that they themselves are the state, when they actually have no idea what the state is doing in their name — at least, not until it does it to them. An encounter with a bureaucrat may throw cold water on the notion that the government is “we.” We no longer really know who it is. But whoever it is, we no more control our rulers than our ancestors controlled their kings.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This amorphous, global, bureaucratic empire has nothing to do with liberty, democracy, or self-government. Or the U.S. Constitution.

Joseph Sobran