I do not follow politics very much but I often hear concern that the US is evolving into a police state ala the dystopian 1984 scenario.
Given our political structure, is it truly possible to slowly and naturally evolve into something like that without the intervention of a more “sinister conspiracy”?
Yes, and the process appears to have already started. Tried to fly anywhere lately? Read anything about NSA in the news? Heard of the Patriot Act? We are considerably less free than we were pre-9/11.
I think you need a more serious crisis to develop into a real police state. If income inequality continues to grow until the country is just rich and poor (creating a very unstable society filled with hate and resentment), and you throw in terrorism via WMD I could see pushing for a police state.
Plus fascist police states like the ones in Europe not only had the depression, they also had large numbers of WW1 vets sitting around. We don’t have millions of unemployed vets like they did back then. I don’t think the vets in the war on terror would support a fascist coup.
Some think it’s getting there - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TT7OkBDaHU
Why does a city of 50K people need “a Ballistic Engineered Armed Response Counter Attack Truck”?
Ummm… oh, look, American Gladiators is on TV … :o
Moved to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
To evolve (devolve sounds better to me) into a police state, several things would have to happen:
A crisis big enough to be the issue would have to occur or be manufactured.
The military, meaning the men in uniform, would have to suffer a major disconnect from the normal citizenry. As long as the average soldier believes in Democracy, it’s going to be exceedingly dangerous for any authoritarian leader to hold power.
A majority of the population would have to agree to drastic measures to solve the crisis in (1).
Once you’ve got your police state, you no longer need (3). The name of the game then becomes consolidating your power base, keeping the military on your side, and making your opponents powerless.
(1) happens at regular intervals. A war. Terror attacks. Economic crisis. It’s just a matter of waiting until the next one comes around.
(2) could happen with our professional military, if they become disgusted with chaos and decadence in the general populace. I suppose a charismatic military or political leader could do it too; but to quote Pulp Fiction: “Well, we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfucking pig.”
(3) is really the only thing stopping it from happening that’s really in our control. The idol-worship some of our recent Presidents have inspired makes me a bit uneasy on this point.
I’d argue it already happened - a century ago. The Wilson administration was at the least a borderline Fascist state. The difficulty lay in the fact that in the end, people just got tired of it; Fascism lives and dies by its popular support. It actually can’t be sustained by military power alone. Note that people don’t have to like it; they just have to support it.
How on earth was the Wilson administration a borderline Fascist state? There was censorship and restriction of civil liberties during the war, but that was true of all the belligerents.
James Loewen, in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me has an entire chapter devoted to this very subject.
Consider for example the Parker Raids, in which people mere suspected of being Communist were rounded up and deported. (How do you even deport American citizens? I think it was American citizens we’re talking about.) According to our history books, this happened after Wilson, during the Harding years. According to Loewen, that’s an established lie by historians who have decided to glorify Wilson, pushing the Parker Raids into the Harding years to get them out of Wilson’s legacy. Loewen also claims that Wilson was abjectly anti-Semitic, along with a whole chapterful of scandalous claims of what went on under Wilson.
Loewen’s exposé, not only in this chapter but in all the others, is so shocking and scandalous — but most of all, so much at odds with all that we’ve learned about American history (George Washington and the cherry tree; Lincoln walking miles through the snow to return a borrowed nickel, etc.) that it’s difficult to know what to believe after reading it.
Check it out.
Or at least, go to the Amazon site linked above and read some of the reviews. It’s controversial, to say the least.
ETA: Excerpt from one of the reviews there:
(Bold added.)
Sure. Scare people enough and they will trade freedom for security, if done enough we’ll live in a text book definition of a police state.
Is it likely? I sure hope not. Fermenting political vitriol is something that needs to stop being rewarded to help though.
You do not know what you are talking about here. At all.
Remind me how many states had legalized gay marriage pre-9/11.
Remind me how that has fuck all to do with the topics mentioned in my post?
I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about freedom.
Look at Senegoid’s post; it seems to back up what Smiling was talking about with a cite to an apparently controversial book. How do you counter?
I would like for someone to name a few examples of democratic countries that “evolved,” “slid into,” or “slowly became” a police state so that we could compare and contrast the United States with those countries. Because as far as my memory takes me, I can only think of countries that went from free(ish) to police state in pretty rapid order. I can’t think of any example of a long, slow march to a police state.
I dunno how ‘police state’ works in a democracy - the OP seems to imply the absence of democratic choice which, in the case of the USA, is fair enough: corporations and other vested interests finance those standing for elections and the people get to choose between the funded few. Democracy it ain’t.
I’ve read Loewen. First of all, I don’t know anybody who claims the Palmer raids took place during the Harding administration, given that Palmer was Wilson’s Attorney General and was in private practice during the Harding administration. (And the people deported weren’t American citizens, but resident aliens, most notably, the Anarchist Emma Goldman.)
And there’s no question that Wilson was racist and carried out racist policies (like resegregating the White House). But the deportation of some alien radicals (most of whom weren’t deported after the intervention of the courts) and racist policies doesn’t make the US “fascist”.
If I cite a Glen Beck book stating we’ve only become a police state since Obama’s term do I win? I mean, no one can publish a book unless its well researched and provides solid facts for its conclusions, right?
To hear some RWs tell it, the income tax and the Federal Reserve alone made it that.