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Since the early 1930s, the United States has become significantly militarized in government, economy, society, and culture. While never quite slipping over the edge into militarism either in behaviors, policies, or norms and values, the American people's identification with and use of war images and thinking, and a belief in the primacy of standing military forces for American safety, have become normalized. The danger of an endless "war" on terrorism is that the militarization common to America society in wartime will become permanent, infecting the country with militarism, and transforming the United States incrementally, over time, into a nation its founders would recognize, but abhor.
In 1935 at the depth of the Great Depression, the historian Charles A. Beard warned of a dangerous war fever sweeping the United States. Worried by "the spectre of armed violence, foreign and domestic," Congress was considering, along with large increases in military spending, "a whole flock of alien and sedition bills" so "harsh and sweeping" as to make "the old laws of 1798 . . . pale" by comparison. Among them were authorization to deport any nonresident alien who "engages in any political activities," and any resident alien "whose presence in the United States is inimical to the public interest" or who belonged to a group that "teaches or advises 'a change in the form of government ... or engages in any way in domestic political agitation'"; the instituting of mandatory loyalty oaths for all teachers and employees in public education; and fines or prison for anyone "counseling, advising or urging any man" in the army or navy "to disobey any military or naval regulations," including allowing "the search of homes and other places and the seizure of books, papers and pamphlets counseling, advising, or urging such disobedience." While these measures were eventually defeated, the trend frightened Beard; "it may be that the Supreme Court will provide the last shelter for civil liberty in the United States," he wrote.1
Beard clothed his fears in the discourse common to wartime threats to American civil liberties. Two years later, a gifted young political scientist used the language of scholarship to express a deeper, more disturbing thought about the character of modern societies. Surveying trends in government as World War...