THE FEAR that a country’s foreign policy can warp its internal social order is a perennial anxiety, in the United States and elsewhere. Usually, it takes the form of the claim that warfare or imperialism will trigger the militarization and regimentation of society at home, transforming the homeland into what the political scientist Harold Lasswell, in an influential 1941 article, called “The Garrison State.”

The perception that domestic social order can be shaped by a country’s interactions with the rest of the world is correct and profoundly important. Curiously, however, this subject has been neglected in traditional Western political philosophy. Typically, Western political philosophers have promoted an ideal political regime, usually a slightly idealized version of their own—the polis for Aristotle, the bureaucratic monarchy for Hegel, liberal democracy for John Rawls. Questions of war, diplomacy, and trade have been afterthoughts.

But there is a minority tradition, exemplified by thinkers like Machiavelli, with his distinction between republics for expansion and preservations, and the German historian Otto von Hintze, that emphasizes the interaction between world politics and internal political structures. This approach is found as well in Alexander Hamilton’s argument from Realpolitik for the need for union among the American states which had separated from Britain. In Federalist Number 8, in the course of arguing that rival post-colonial confederacies in North America would become militarized because of mutual fear, Hamilton explains the different internal constitutions of liberal Britain and autocratic continental powers in terms of their respective geopolitical environments:

The kingdom of Great Britain falls within the first description. An insular situation, and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army within the kingdom. … This peculiar felicity of situation has, in a great degree, contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys, in spite of the prevalent venality and corruption. If, on the contrary, Britain had been situated on the continent, and had been compelled, as she would have been, by that situation, to make her military establishments at home coextensive with those of the other great powers of Europe, she, like them, would in all probability be, at this day, a victim to the absolute power of a single man.

For generations, Americans opposed to foreign wars have warned that they might result in the conversion of American society into a garrison state. But there are other ways in which foreign policy can undermine the economic, political, and social foundations of a democratic republic like the United States, to the point at which it becomes a different kind of regime. There are two other categories of American nightmares that can be discerned in addition to the garrison state. One is what I call the tributary state; the other, the castle society.

The garrison state is a regime that sacrifices domestic liberty to preserve national independence. The tributary state pursues the opposite strategy; it sacrifices national independence to preserve domestic liberty. In contrast to both of these, the castle society does not choose between national independence and domestic liberty; it fails to achieve either. Indeed, state institutions are so weak or corrupt in a castle society that describing it as a “society” rather than a modern, institutionalized, bureaucratic state is appropriate. Government institutions are too feeble to protect individuals even from rampant crime or terrorism on the country’s own soil, forcing individuals and associations who can afford to do so to withdraw into their own secured enclaves or to hire private security forces. In such a quasi-anarchic society, like that of the Wild West or Al Capone’s Chicago in the United States, there may be no formal restrictions on individual liberty, but in the absence of effective policing and non-corrupt judiciaries, personal and commercial freedom are hardly possible. The category of the castle society includes many countries that are colloquially described as “failed states.”

The four regimes—the democratic republic, the garrison state, the tributary state, and the castle society—can be envisioned with the help of a diagram, with one axis standing for national independence and the other axis standing for civil liberty:

IN THE twentieth century, opponents of U.S. intervention in great power struggles in Europe and Asia frequently argued that U.S. participation would inevitably turn America into a garrison state. In response, proponents of U.S. intervention in the world wars and of U.S. participation in international alliances flipped this argument on its head, claiming that failure to intervene to prevent the German conquest of Europe would force the United States to defend itself by becoming permanently militarized and mobilized.

Following World War I, President Woodrow Wilson argued that the United States must take part in the League of Nations, an international collective security system, in order to create a concert of power that could avert future great power conflicts. The alternative would be an endless cycle of world wars, in which the United States, whether it took part or remained on the sidelines, would have to be permanently armed and mobilized. In that case, Wilson told an audience in St. Louis in 1919:

We must be physically ready for anything to come. We must have a great standing army. We must see to it that every man in America is trained to arms. We must see to it that there are munitions and guns enough for an army that means a mobilized nation … And you know what the effect of military government is upon social questions. You know how impossible it is to effect social reform if everybody must be under orders from the government. You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders.

The Roosevelt administration and its allies made a similar argument that the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies in the short term would avert the necessity of permanently converting the United States into a “Fortress America” besieged in the Western Hemisphere by German and Japanese empires. Douglas Miller, a U.S. diplomat, warned that in a world dominated by the Axis empires: “We should have to be a whole nation of ‘Minutemen,’ ready to rush to arms at the first sight of invasion.” Lewis L. Douglas, Roosevelt’s former budget director, argued: “To retreat to the cyclone cellar here means, ultimately, to establish a totalitarian state at home.”

The same theme informs NSC-68, the 1950 Truman administration state paper that laid out what became the containment strategy toward the Soviet Union, rejecting the alternative strategies of the tributary state and the garrison state, without using those terms.

As the Soviet Union mobilized the military resources of Eurasia, increased its relative military capabilities, and heightened its threat to our security, some would be tempted to accept “peace” on its terms, while many would seek to defend the United States by creating a regimented system which would permit the assignment of a tremendous part of our resources to national defense. Under such a state of affairs our national morale would be corrupted and the integrity of and vitality of our system subverted.

The goal of the Cold War containment policy was to prevent the Soviet bloc from ever obtaining so much relative power that Americans would be forced to choose between their national autonomy and their domestic liberty. According to NSC-68: “In essence, the fundamental purpose [of American strategy] is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” 

Truman’s successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, made the same point in his famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the American people on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex … We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes.”

Eisenhower’s speech is often misconstrued by those who claim that “war profiteers” control the government and are inventing fictitious threats to enrich and empower themselves. But that is not what Eisenhower argued. In the preceding paragraphs, he argues that the military-industrial complex, as dangerous as it is, is a necessary response to genuine foreign threats like the Soviet Union:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction … But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisations of national defense, we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

Generations of isolationists on the libertarian Right and anti-interventionists on the radical Left have caricatured Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their successors as militarists. But these policymakers themselves argued for limited, defensive militarization and U.S. participation in the world wars and Cold War as a strategy that was less threatening to civil liberty and political pluralism than never-ending, defensive mobilization in a United States besieged in North America by triumphant Eurasian empires. From their perspective, the two wars against Germany and the Cold War against the Soviet Union were temporary preventive wars. Their aim was to prevent Imperial and Nazi Germany and the USSR from establishing direct control or obtaining informal domination over the major industrial nations of Europe and East Asia. They conceded that a few years of world war and a few decades of Cold War would warp civil liberty and democracy in the United States, but to a much lesser degree than would occur in an isolated, permanent Fortress America. 

Ironically, the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of the leaders of the anti-interventionist “America First” movement in the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II following the Pearl Harbor attack, agreed that the alternative to destroying the German and Japanese empires before they could be consolidated was creating an American garrison state. He thought it was a nifty idea. Lindbergh declared: “The men of this country must be willing to give a year of their lives to military training—more if necessary.” And Lindbergh called on the United States to invade its neighbors, to create a secure North American empire from which the Germans, Japanese, and others could be kept out. He demanded U.S. bases throughout North America “wherever they are needed for our safety, regardless of who owns the territory involved.”

None of this should give intellectual aid and comfort to today’s neoconservative advocates of “global democratic revolution” or “humanitarian hawks” who favor invasions of countries that do not threaten the United States to defend “human rights” or “the liberal world order.” On the contrary, both of these belligerent approaches to U.S. foreign policy are antithetical to the approach of mainstream U.S. policymakers during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson agonized over the effects that war might have on American society. Franklin Roosevelt told the American people, “I have seen war … I hate war.” In contrast, according to her memoirs, Madeleine Albright, favoring intervention in the war of the Yugoslav succession, a conflict of only remote and indirect interest to the United States, asked General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”

Both interventionists and anti-interventionists in the United States, then, have maintained that their preferred policies would minimize the long-term threat that the American republic would be replaced by a militarized, Spartan garrison state. Advocates of intervention to prevent German or Soviet hegemony in Eurasia conceded that the temporary sacrifice of a degree of liberty and democracy during a war or cold war could be harmful, but would be less harmful to the way of life of a civilian, democratic, and liberal republic than the alternative—permanent defensive militarization of American society in an environment of regional empires and recurrent world wars. The anti-interventionists disputed this argument, claiming that U.S. participation in world war or cold war would turn America into a garrison state immediately and permanently.

Which side was right? One result of the global conflicts of the twentieth century has indeed been the emergence of a large, permanent military and defense industrial base, along with a permanent and powerful intelligence community. The world wars and the Cold War diminished the authority of Congress in foreign affairs, while giving the president vastly enhanced discretion in military affairs. Even worse, the “War on Terror” that followed the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, led a panicked Congress to delegate to the president the construction of a surveillance state which genuinely threatens the civil liberties of American citizens, who, for example, may be put on secret “no-fly lists” by government agencies without being told.

But even when these deformations of the American constitutional order are acknowledged, it is clear that the United States overall is not a garrison state. America is not an autocracy. There is no president for life; following Roosevelt’s four terms in the White House, the constitution was amended to limit a president to two terms. Indeed, two of the last four presidents have been impeached by Congress.

Conscription? Even at the height of the early Cold War in the Truman administration, proposals for universal military training were so unpopular with the public that the United States instead adopted the more limited selective service lottery system, which itself came to an end in 1973 following popular discontent with the costs of the Vietnam war.

Mobilization of industry? From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, successive presidents, singing the praises of “globalization,” complacently ignored the deindustrialization of the United States thanks to the offshoring of industry by U.S.-based multinationals, to China in particular. They also ignored the damage done to American industry by the mercantilist policies of U.S. allies like Japan, South Korea, and Germany. When Barack Obama left office in 2017, the U.S. military had to purchase rocket engines from Russia, U.S. astronauts had to hitch rides to the international space station on Russian rockets, and America had nearly lost its capacity to make many critical tech components including silicon chips. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that the United States was almost completely dependent on Chinese factories for many crucial medical supplies, from masks to the chemical precursors used in common drugs. What kind of garrison state makes itself dependent for industrial supplies on a hostile strategic rival like China?

Overgrown military? In 1944, U.S. defense spending engrossed a third of GDP. Then, between 1945 and 1950, it plummeted to less than 5 percent. As a share of GDP, U.S. defense spending rose to 11.3 percent at the height of the Korean War in 1953 and 8.6 percent at the height of the Vietnam War—hardly Spartan levels of military consumption. Following the end of the Cold War, defense spending dropped to around 3 percent of GDP, a number to which it has returned after a brief uptick to 4.5 percent at the apex of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. One may believe, as I do, that most of the small wars the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere are unnecessary, but a country that spends 3 percent of GDP on the military is not one in which military expenditure threatens to choke off the civilian economy.

As for the “standing army,” that nightmare of generations of Americans, the U.S. military has been radically downsized since the Cold War ended. The number of active-duty military personnel shrank from around two million in 1990 to a little more than a million today. Even when private contractors are considered, this has hardly the swollen military of a totalitarian state.

The American republic is not in danger of becoming a garrison state—not now, nor in the foreseeable future. But that is not to say the American republic is not in danger. The excessive militarization of society in a regimented state is not the only way that our republican social order can give way to a different kind of social order, with its own kind of foreign policy. America’s democratic republic could be warped to the point at which it ceases to be a democratic republic in all but name and morphs into a tributary state or a castle society.

THE BEST-KNOWN example of a tributary state, in the sense in which I am using the term, was Finland during the Cold War. The term “Finlandization” was coined by West German political scientists to describe the process by which Finland accommodated the Soviet Union in foreign policy, in order to maintain its nominal sovereignty and domestic autonomy. The term is unfair to Finland, because it is commonplace for small and weak states to pursue foreign policies that avoid provoking the wrath of powerful neighbors. This is certainly true in America’s neighborhood, where the United States in the last few generations has invaded the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti while engaging in proxy war and covert action to install client governments in the region.

The lack of attention to tributary states by theorists of international relations is puzzling, because the category includes the vast majority of regimes in recorded history. Premodern empires and kingdoms were not centralized, bureaucratic states, but loose conglomerations of semi-autonomous lesser kingdoms, satrapies, provinces, city-states, duchies, bishoprics, and other entities. Typically, in return for fealty and tribute, the imperial government allowed a high degree of internal independence in subordinate units. Sovereignty in the modern sense did not exist in such systems; there were only degrees of suzerainty.

The ubiquity of premodern tributary states, including dominions and colonies of the European empires that enjoyed various degrees of self-government before post-1945 decolonization, suggests that the assumption of academic neorealist theory that most states seek to maximize their relative power is too simple. The mistake of crude realism is to confuse states with elites. If the state is not an autonomous agent but merely the instrument of a social elite—an assumption shared by Marxists, populists, and others—then it may be in the self-interest of a dominant elite to maintain or increase its own status within its local society by sacrificing the state’s external sovereignty and making it a protectorate of another regime, particularly if the foreign protector can guarantee the security of the local ruling class against challenges from below. To secure its status, the social elite may even give up national independence altogether in favor of annexation. This is what the Scottish elite did with the Act of Union of 1707 and what the short-lived Republic of Texas decided when it joined the United States as a state in 1846.

The Confederate States of America (CSA), had it survived the Civil War, would have been a de facto tributary state of the British empire—formally independent, but in practice an economic colony of industrial Britain. Apologists for the Confederacy who claim that the secession of the Southern states was motivated by fear of tariffs rather than the defense of slavery have always been unpersuasive. Nevertheless, it is true that the Confederate planter class planned for their agrarian economy to complement, rather than compete with, industrializing countries—including the United States as well as Britain, France, and Germany. In his First Inaugural Address, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made it explicit that the CSA would specialize in exporting cotton to the factories of Britain and the shrunken remnant of the United States, rather than seek to compete with them in manufacturing:

An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities. There can be but little rivalry between ours and any manufacturing or navigating community, such as the Northeastern States of the American Union.

The South’s lack of the military-industrial capacity of the Northern state meant that an ignominious defeat was all but inevitable in the absence of British intervention. By the end of the Civil War, the Confederate elite was confronted with a stark choice: it could maintain its independence by centralizing power in the new national government, engaging in a crash program of state-sponsored industrialization from above, and perhaps freeing and arming Southern slaves—in other words, by revolutionizing the very social order that secession was supposed to preserve. In any event, following Reconstruction, the Southern oligarchy, through anti-Black terrorism and the repression of white populists, managed to restore and maintain a privileged position that was only undermined generations later by the mechanization of agriculture, the industrialization of the Sun Belt, and federal civil rights enforcement in the second half of the twentieth century.

Like the Southern planter class, many oligarchies in Latin America have preferred to be the dominant elites in de facto resource colonies that export commodities to the industrial nations rather than risk the loss of their own social positions that might result from the enrichment of the majorities in their countries by state-sponsored programs of national industrial modernization. And as Roberto Unger has pointed out, the refusal of Latin American countries to participate in the world wars, except at the margins, forestalled the danger that armed and mobilized masses would demand more political power and a greater share of the wealth in return for wartime sacrifice. A similar pattern can be seen in post-colonial regimes in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, in which reliance on exporting commodities like oil and gas allows local oligarchies to avoid empowering their subjects. In the case of the petrostates of the Persian Gulf, despotic monarchies like that of Saudi Arabia and Qatar do not even have to arm and enfranchise their own people to defend their countries; they can depend on the U.S. military to protect them.

THE FACT that socio-economic elites, not states, are the actual actors in world politics explains two puzzling historical episodes: the failure of Britain in the 1900s to respond to the rising industrial power of Germany and the United States, and the latter’s massive offshoring of its own manufacturing capability to Communist China from the 1990s to the 2010s. In each case, a powerful bloc of economic interests chose to sacrifice the national military power and independence of their own country to maximize their short-term personal profits.

Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, Britain became the first industrial nation in the world by pursuing a sophisticated program of national development, based on protectionism, bans on the export of technology, skilled immigration, and laws requiring its North American and Indian colonies to buy British manufactured goods rather than manufacturing for themselves. In the 1840s and 1850s, no longer needing to protect its domestic industries and seeking to open up export markets, the British abruptly abandoned protectionism and began to preach global free trade. Free trade, they hoped, would help to lock in Britain’s lead in manufacturing by encouraging Britain’s trading partners to forego manufacturing for themselves, while competing with each other to provide British factories with cheap inputs like cotton and other raw materials and British factory workers with cheap food.

Most Latin American countries, along with the short-lived Confederate States of America, accepted the offer to function as resource colonies for industrial Britain. But the British offer was rejected by the United States during and after the Civil War and by Imperial Germany after it was consolidated in 1871. Abraham Lincoln’s America and Otto von Bismarck’s Germany used protectionism and other policies to build up their own industries to compete with those of the United Kingdom. 

By the late nineteenth century, British manufacturers were being driven out of their home market as well as global markets by floods of American and German imports. Members of the British “national efficiency school”—a diverse coalition of liberal nationalists like Joseph Chamberlain, hawkish conservative imperialists and technocratic collectivists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw—called upon Britain to defend its industrial might by consolidating the entire British empire, or perhaps only the home islands and “white dominions” like Canada and Australia, into a single protected market.

Instead, Britain clung to the unilateral free trade policy which it had adopted in the mid-nineteenth century, and which had made sense only when Britain had no major industrial rivals. The warnings of the national efficiency school were vindicated when Britain was subjected to attack by technologically-advanced Germany in the two world wars, while losing even industries it helped to invent like the jet airliner and television and computer industries to the United States. Today, post-imperial Britain is, in effect, a tributary state of the United States.

Why did Britain spurn the protectionist industrial policies that might have preserved more of its manufacturing leadership and military power a century ago? The reason is simple—the British elites which benefited from free trade, chiefly the financial interests of the City of London, had more influence over British policy than British manufacturers. British investors were not threatened by the American imports that wiped out factories in the British midlands. Indeed, while high tariffs kept out American manufactured goods, American industry welcomed British investment. British rentiers were enriched by their overseas investments even as British industry declined.

The pattern has been recapitulated in the United States, from the end of the Cold War to the present. In one industry after another, American corporations have offshored production to China since the 1990s, rendering the U.S. dependent on Chinese factories for many critical supply chains and manufactured goods, from iPhones to drugs and personal protective equipment that were essential in the Covid-19 pandemic. The toleration by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations of this massive transfer of industrial power from the United States to the Chinese dictatorship, a regime seeking to eliminate U.S. hegemony in Asia and the world, is an even more remarkable case of national military-industrial suicide than that of Britain a century earlier. It is as though the British parliament in the 1900s had encouraged the offshoring of British industry to Imperial Germany, even while engaging in the Anglo-German arms race.

As in Britain in the 1900s, in the United States in the 2000s capitalist elites with no interest in the health of the national industrial base—the managers and shareholders of Silicon Valley companies like Apple that were offered cheap labor and subsidies by the Chinese dictatorship, Wall Street firms salivating at the prospect of access to Chinese financial markets, and agribusiness corporations that are content to export foodstuffs to China in return for manufactured imports—defeated the U.S. military elites and America’s national manufacturers who viewed China as a threat. The struggle between these domestic coalitions explains the paradox of American policy toward China. America’s financial and commercial elites for the most part welcome the role of the United States as a deindustrialized resource colony of industrial China, as long as they can make money accessing China’s vast domestic market and pool of cheap, unfree labor, while American military hawks and populists and the remnant of private organized labor seek to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies and rebuild American manufacturing. Paradoxically, given the ostentatious social liberalism of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, America’s tech elites and financial elites have adopted something like the voluntary tributary state strategy of Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders, with twenty-first-century industrial China replacing nineteenth-century industrial Britain as a source of manufactured imports, and a post-industrial United States which exports farm products, raw materials, and tourist and professional services to industrial Asia and Europe playing the role of the cotton-exporting Confederacy.

WHILE THE garrison state saves national independence by sacrificing civil liberty, and the tributary state sacrifices national independence to preserve civil liberty (at least for local elites), the castle society sacrifices the state and loses both national independence and civil liberty.

If Cold War-era Finland symbolizes the tributary state, Somalia or post-Gaddafi Libya might symbolize the castle society today. The erosion or collapse of state institutions and central authority produces anarchy, in which individuals and communities are forced to defend themselves or seek protection from stateless mafias or insurgent groups.

Elements of the castle society have always existed in the United States. The movement of settlers into Western frontier areas in advance of adequate law enforcement produced the anarchic conditions of “the Wild West,” with bloody clashes among native Americans and settlers and widespread crime. Criminal gangs, often specializing in the sale of prohibited alcohol and drugs, have dominated urban neighborhoods in many American cities over the generations, sometimes in collusion with corrupt police and politicians. For its part, between Reconstruction and the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the American South was a de facto state-within-a-state, with the paramilitary Ku Klux Klan often allied with the local social and political elites who controlled the one-party Democratic regime. In the post-World War II era in which U.S. troops occupied Japan and parts of Germany, the federal government was still struggling to assert its authority in the states of the former Confederacy.

A democratic republic is defined in part by the limitation of the objects of government. But within its legitimate realm, a democratic republican government must be able to protect its citizens from invasion, crime, economic immiseration, and disease—at least in part through public agencies staffed by civil servants and soldiers who are paid out of taxes.

The high-water mark of democratic republicanism in the United States was reached in the decades after World War II. Without becoming a tyranny, the government was strong enough to protect the borders, dismantle racial segregation, regulate the economy, eliminate diseases like polio, and wage cold war against the Communist bloc. At the same time, informal checks and balances operated in the social sphere, with powerful trade unions, political parties, and churches exercising what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing power” against concentrated industrial capital.

In contrast, the last half-century has seen the replacement of nation-building by nation-dismantling in the United States, at the hands of an increasingly homogeneous, rich, and powerful national oligarchy. The American managerial elite has crushed organized labor, to the point that fewer private-sector workers—around 6 percent—enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining than was the case under President Herbert Hoover. The political parties, once federations of autonomous state and local organizations, have become mere labels captured by billionaires who, like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg, view the national political parties as brands to be captured.

America’s managerial elite, based now more in Silicon Valley and Wall Street than in the old industrial sectors of oil and gas and manufacturing, have employed tax avoidance to starve the federal government of revenue, by means of offshore tax havens. In 2015, for example, U.S.-based multinationals reported 43 percent of their foreign earnings as coming from five notorious tax havens—Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—even though only 4 percent of the workforce of the same companies resided in these jurisdictions. Like many American corporations, many of America’s rich are scofflaws, using tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. And those who do pay taxes frequently benefit by paying a lower tax on capital gains than cashiers and janitors and truckers pay on their labor income.

Using libertarian ideology as an excuse for slashing the government’s capacity to provide basic public order, the bipartisan American elite in the last half-century has “deinstitutionalized” many of the mentally ill—with the result that every large American city has a homeless population of individuals suffering from untreated psychiatric disorders or drug addiction. Meanwhile, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the U.S. government has tolerated the migration of millions of illegal immigrants to the United States to provide American employers with a pliant, low-wage workforce which is unprotected by labor laws and civil rights. 

“Authoritarianism” has been redefined in American public discourse to stigmatize what were formerly considered ordinary functions of government. For example, attempts to crack down on cross-border labor trafficking are often met with cries of “fascism!” In the summer of 2020, following the death in police custody of George Floyd, left-wing calls to “defund the police” contributed to the greatest wave of vandalism and murder in American cities since the urban riots of the 1960s.

As the public realm has been taken over in much of the country by mentally ill and sometimes dangerous vagrants, drug addicts, criminal gangs, and left-wing Antifa protestors, many Americans have retreated to fortified homes in suburban or rural areas and bought guns to defend themselves. Following the example of the Latin American upper classes, America’s managerial oligarchs tend to live in secure apartment towers or gated communities with their own private security forces. Many of the same progressive elites who denounce the idea of a wall on the American border pay top dollar for the walls that protect them and their families from anarchy and squalor inside American borders.

Not content to allow public authority to wither, America’s new ruling class has begun to govern the American people informally but directly, through the “private” institutions it controls—social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and retail platforms like Amazon as well as by older infrastructures like the banking system. Twitter purged a president of the United States. YouTube and Amazon “disappear” content at variance with the left-wing social norms of the American plutocracy and its professional-class courtiers. The United States is drifting ever closer to adopting a Chinese-style “social credit” system that freezes citizens guilty of wrongthink out of bank loans, savings accounts, and air and bus and rail travel—albeit a social credit system run by nominally private corporations and financial institutions.

IN THE middle of the twentieth century, a case could be made that prolonged mobilization for war threatened to turn the United States into a garrison state. Today, despite numerous small peripheral wars and the overhang of presidential emergency powers from earlier crises, the United States is in less danger of becoming a garrison state than ever. The greatest threat to America’s future comes not from a totalitarian state bureaucracy in Washington, DC, but from unchecked private power at home and authoritarian state capitalism abroad.

Saving the United States from geopolitical weakness and domestic chaos requires a reassertion of the democratic republican state, at the expense of oligarchs at home and hostile great powers and labor- and drug-trafficking gangs abroad. Such a limited rebuilding of national state capacity will not turn America into a garrison state. But it may save the American republic from degenerating into a combination of a tributary state and a castle society.

Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a columnist for Tablet, and a fellow at New America. He is the author of The New Class War (2020) and The American Way of Strategy (2006).

Image: Flickr / The U.S. Army