Last fall, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, a federally funded agency chartered to spread liberty around the world, President George W. Bush delivered a speech holding out some “essential principles” as “common to every successful society in every culture.” The first of these, the President declared, is that “successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military so that governments respond to the will of the people and not the will of the elite.” That was what America had learned in its 200-year “journey” on the road to perfecting its democracy, Bush observed, by way of encouraging less mature works in progress — namely, post-Taliban Afghanistan and post-Saddam Iraq — to follow this tried and true path.The rhetoric may seem unexceptionable. But in the context of our age — an age in which certain dark forces, most prominently terrorism, confront the state with the elemental task of maintaining security and civic order — the principles Bush named are not just irrelevant but almost precisely the opposite of the ones we should be dedicating ourselves to. Leaving aside the question of military power, the necessary response to terrorism is not to limit the power of the state but, rather, to bolster it, so as to preserve the basic order without which the defenceless citizen has no prospect of enjoying the splendors of liberty.Today’s global trend toward what might be called the Daddy State is propelled by the anxious demands of majority blocs of citizens. The Russians recently re-elected Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, with 71 per cent of the vote, handing him a mandate to continue his crackdown on Chechen terrorists.In short, we are at the dawn of a popularly sanctioned movement toward greater authoritarianism in the domain of what is now fashionably called “homeland security.”Excerpted from an article by Paul Starobin in the June issue of ‘The Atlantic Monthly’
