Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State
For all the precedent of social security and the bridge Roosevelt erected to national security, America didn’t cross it because of the new framework. “Not everyone believed the fundamentals of world order had changed so much,” Preston concedes. They changed because of the Japanese attacks on our imperial holdings in the Pacific, in both Hawaii and the Philippines. For that matter, even the ideology of free security would counsel a response to a declaration of war from the most belligerent and best-outfitted state in the world, which—having smashed France the prior year—Nazi Germany was at the time. But Preston is certainly right that national security crystallized at that time, even if it was far less a cause than a consequence of war.
Astonishingly quickly, FDR made the ideology of national security almost inevitable, mainly because the war gave the United States more authentic global interests than ever before. A large permanent military became fundamental overnight to American life, and eventually a world-spanning force. In 1939, when World War II began, the country had barely 300,000 service members; by 1941, when it entered the conflict, that number had expanded to more than a million. By 1945, a whopping 12 million Americans were part of the armed forces. The economic mobilization was also extraordinary, with military spending increasing tenfold during the course of the war—a budgetary item that has never receded to prewar levels since. Meanwhile, European powers were brought low, suffering far more death and destruction, their imperial glory things of the past, leaving the United States further ahead of any rivals than any country has ever boasted.
In other words, the dynamic of fighting the war actually exacerbated the risks that Preston suggests had undergirded the ideology of national security in the first place. Once you have a lot to lose, you have more to fear losing. If the extraordinary mobilization of men and materiel to fight made the United States the most powerful country in world history, it also created a reason to see threats everywhere. “With great power, it seems, comes great fear,” Preston himself observes.
The new liberalism of fear that triumphed through World War II, and which Preston captures so well, was primed for skewed priorities. In his emphasis on anxiety as an emotional source of historical change, Preston’s claims are close to—and inspired by—Ira Katznelson’s classic Fear Itself, a 2013 analysis of New Deal politics. Katznelson championed FDR for keeping America democratic in an environment in which totalitarianism won out across Europe in response to economic insecurity. Preston, however, asserts that fearmongering was a brilliant move but also a faulty basis for political change: Roosevelt, he writes, “embraced a kind of liberalism of fear even if it wasn’t at all well-suited to a politics of progressivism,” given that a “liberalism of fear is reactive, not progressive.” It served national security better than social security.
