The Welfare and Warfare State

In 2022, then-President Joseph Biden invoked the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law that gives the president the authority to direct domestic industry in the name of national defense, to increase the supply of baby formula available to Americans. Three years later, President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and associated products in the name of America’s national security. How did baby formula and kitchen cabinets come to be considered as crucial parts of America’s security? Andrew Preston’s important book, Total Defense, provides an answer to this question.

The origins of the US national security state are typically traced to World War II and the Cold War. In this telling, the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and later the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a pivotal event, establishing the core institutions of the national security apparatus. Moreover, instead of demobilizing following World War II, US government leaders decided to maintain a permanent war economy to prepare for future wars. This was justified by the Cold War, an open-ended global conflict against the Soviet Union requiring nonstop preparation to ensure the security of both America and the world.

Preston does not deny the importance of these events, but argues that this widely accepted origin story starts too late. The US national security state, he argues, was not born with World War II or the Cold War, but rather during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. He convincingly shows that Roosevelt’s policies fused domestic economic management with international security issues. The result was an expansive vision of “total defense,” which included not just domestic economic security, but also security against international threats. Importantly, the Roosevelt administration and its supporters effectively redefined “threats” to include not just the possibility of immediate military invasion, which was minimal, but also a broad range of non-military cultural, economic, and social issues. The result was a broad menu of potential government interventions, as decided by those in power, undertaken in the name of the security of the American people.

The main contribution of the book is a more accurate understanding of the foundations of the US national security state. This is not merely a matter of getting the historical timing right, although that too is important. More fundamentally, Preston’s reorientation clarifies that the American welfare and warfare states are close siblings that cannot be separated in their origins and purpose. The unifying theme is their shared foundation in the Progressive ideology. As Preston writes, “Insurance and military efficiency sprouted from the same conceptual ground as progressivism: a desire for improvement by modernizing and rationalizing society in a way that preserved what were thought to be the core elements of American identity, democracy, and sovereignty. It wasn’t a stretch, then, for advocates of a larger military to locate their position within broader trends that propelled a progressive state in the pursuit of a better society.” This ideology birthed a large-scale and sprawling state apparatus that merged traditional military activities (the maintenance and use of a standing army and military equipment) with top-down government policies related to economic, social, and cultural policies undertaken in the name of national security. Its purpose was the same as other New Deal programs—to implement top-down state control over domestic life by an expert class who promised protection to the American populace.

Over time, and especially due to the Vietnam War, many liberals and progressives became increasingly skeptical of the national security state, coming to view it as being at odds with the welfare state and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. At the same time, many conservatives came to embrace the national security state while eschewing the welfare state as a threat to American values and the country’s fiscal health. Nonetheless, officials from both parties today remain quite comfortable invoking “national security” rhetoric for the benefit of their preferred policies. As Preston emphasizes, American politicians “figured out that they could build support for just about any initiative as long as they described it as vital for national security.”

In Crisis and Leviathan, economic historian Robert Higgs presented a ratchet effect framework for understanding the growth of government. In his framing, a crisis presents a government with an opportunity to expand in scale and scope in response to the emergency. This expansion rarely fully recedes post-crisis, hence the ratchet effect of crises on the overall size of government. Part of why expansions persist is due to the economic incentives for government agencies to self-perpetuate. But more important are shifts in ideology where both political elites and the broader populace come to view the citizen-state relationship in a different light than prior to the crisis. Activities previously viewed as either unacceptable or outside of the purview of government become normalized as part of the regular actions of government. Preston’s story about the New Deal illustrates this dynamic in a new light as a domestic economic emergency was used to justify not just a narrow economic response by the state, but rather an expansive range of policies to ensure “total defense.” At the core of the story, there is a qualitative shift in the scale and scope of state power grounded in changes in ideology regarding the role of the state, both domestically and internationally.

As Preston documents, the New Deal was both grounded in, and contributed to, ideological and rhetorical shifts in American society. Many Americans came to accept and expect an expanded role of government in their lives to protect them from an ever-growing list of threats. The political elite, who were active participants in crafting the narrative of the prevalence of threats and their ability to insulate Americans from them, willingly embraced their expanded powers. At the same time, the newly expanded rhetoric of national security became prevalent across the ideological spectrum. The result was a militarization of political rhetoric and policy, characterized by security justifications for an ever-increasing range of government actions, that still exists today, as illustrated by the two examples discussed above. Beyond baby formula and kitchen cabinets, the rhetoric of government-provided national security is now tied to international trade, environmental issues, food supply chains, income inequality, (dis)information, items deemed necessary for the nation’s security (metals, minerals, etc.), technology, and public health, among a range of other areas of life. Nothing is off limits when it comes to national security.

In addition to shifting the scale and scope of state power, the rise of total defense also changed how and where this power is exercised. The idea behind the Madisonian vision of the separation of powers was to establish a set of checks and balances to safeguard against abuses of concentrated power. Crises pose a challenge to this arrangement because they concentrate discretionary political power in the hands of the executive and administrative state at the expense of the legislative branch. During emergencies, it is argued that the executive must act quickly and decisively. They cannot be bound by congressional deliberation and debate, which will slow the state’s response. The predictable outcome of a state tasked with providing total defense is a significant expansion of the powers of the executive at the expense of other branches. In the case of the United States, historians have documented the rise of the “imperial presidency” resulting from the role of the president expanding through time. Preston’s book provides insight into this phenomenon by documenting how the New Deal contributed to the evolution of the executive branch as an office of permanent emergency powers. Given this context, is it any surprise that it is seen as entirely routine for presidents to implement a range of industrial policies or to take ownership stakes in private companies in the name of national security?

It is important to appreciate how encompassing the powers of the New Deal-inspired security state are in practice. When social and welfare policies are folded into an amorphous category of “national security,” the state has an automatic justification to intrude on personal and economic liberties in the name of the public and global interest. This shift in emphasis from the primacy of individual rights to the primacy of the collective includes not only restrictions on private property but also an extensive system of state surveillance of day-to-day activities to ensure that the actions of the individual align with those of the common good as defined by the current elites in power. Also necessary is a system of punishment and enforcement to incentivize compliance and punish deviations. The risk, of course, is that these actions, which are justified on the grounds of protecting Americans from threats, end up doing just the opposite in practice as the national security state becomes the very thing it purports to protect against.

In his epilogue, Preston calls for a rethinking of what constitutes national security. He is skeptical that Americans can cast off the expansive conception of national security because “it’s just too tightly woven into the fabric of American society.” After reading the book, I reached a different conclusion. Total Defense shows that the Roosevelt administration’s vision of the state, combined with its rhetoric of what constitutes security, actively reshaped political legitimacy with long-lasting effects on American society and political institutions. In other words, the fusion between the welfare and warfare states was not inevitable, but constructed through purposeful choices. This means that it can be deconstructed.

There is a tendency to view the growth of government, especially in relation to crises, as unidirectional and deterministic, and there are certainly forces that push in the direction of state growth. At the same time, alternative images of the world matter, as does the rhetoric used to describe the visions of what might exist. While it may not be politically feasible to roll back the expansive conception of national security today or tomorrow, it is important to hold space for alternatives to the status quo, which is rooted in the progressive vision of state experts ruling over citizens.

How might members of a truly self-governing society think about security? What aspects of security are best left to non-state solutions (markets and civil society)? How can private people resolve collective action problems that may emerge in security provision without reliance on the top-down arrangements of the national state? These, and related, questions are of crucial importance precisely because of the threat posed by centralized government power to the security of the individual. Once this threat from within is appreciated, one might very well conclude that the protection of the individual is too important to be left to the national security state. The intellectual task then becomes envisioning and articulating what alternatives consistent with a free society might look like in practice.