Elaine Tyler May: Anger and Security
[Elaine Tyler May is a professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her most recent book is America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books). This essay is based on her 2010 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians. The full text will appear in The Journal of American History in March 2011.]
The first decade of the 21st century was marked by the events of September 11, 2001, and the military campaign against terrorism that followed. Since then, we have seen a major preoccupation with security that sparked a wide range of antidemocratic policies, from torture to the Patriot Act to Guantánamo. We have become accustomed to orange alerts, metal detectors, and taking off half our clothes at airports. But if we assume that all that started with 9/11, or that the trouble lies primarily with public policies, we miss the deeper roots of our national-security obsession, which began more than half a century ago, permeating not just public life but private life as well.
The preoccupation with security, and the anger at enemies unseen and the lack of faith in government to protect against them, emerged during the same decades that American democracy expanded to become more inclusive and more tolerant. As a result of what some have called the "rights revolution"—the civil-rights, feminist, gay-liberation, and disability-rights movements—America came much closer to reaching its full democratic promise.
Those two goals—one to expand democracy, the other to achieve security—need not be in conflict. Democracy and security depend upon each other. But when citizens retreat from public life, they are unable to achieve meaningful change on behalf of the common good. People are more likely to feel insecure and distrust each other; democracy withers, and fear and anger prevail....
Americans altered the way they live because of fear of crime. A study of eight major cities shows that nearly half of all Americans have changed their lifestyles to avoid crime, by not going out alone or at night, avoiding downtown areas of major cities, subways, and contact with people who look or seem dangerous. Many parents, dubbed "hel-icopter parents," are so worried about their children's safety that they hover over them, refusing to let them out of their sight. Cities spend millions on surveillance cameras, but there is not sufficient evidence that those devices make public spaces safer. Cameras might help to identify and prosecute criminals after a crime takes place, but they do not often deter crime....
The cold war was a factor in the obsession with security and the antidemocratic response to it that continued long after the war ended. There are many outstanding studies of the domestic culture of the cold war that point to several possible avenues for further exploration. We know that not all its aspects were antidemocratic. After all, in an effort to eradicate inequalities and showcase to the world that the United States could live up to its ideals, national policies supported civil rights, women's rights, and the expansion of the welfare state in the Great Society programs. It is worth further study to examine why those liberal cold-war impulses were not powerful enough to prevent the antidemocratic tendencies that fostered the security obsession. It is also worth exploring the extent to which exaggerated concerns about security may have pushed the American political center to the right....
And what about democracy? Democracy depends on citizens accepting their differences and trusting each other, at least to the extent that they understand themselves as belonging to a civic sphere as well as a private sphere. It requires investing in the common good, and holding the government accountable as the institution that represents, and acts on behalf of, the citizenry. If, in the name of security, Americans distrust one another and the government, and value private protection at the expense of the public good, then the basic social and political practices that ensure a healthy democracy cannot survive.
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The first decade of the 21st century was marked by the events of September 11, 2001, and the military campaign against terrorism that followed. Since then, we have seen a major preoccupation with security that sparked a wide range of antidemocratic policies, from torture to the Patriot Act to Guantánamo. We have become accustomed to orange alerts, metal detectors, and taking off half our clothes at airports. But if we assume that all that started with 9/11, or that the trouble lies primarily with public policies, we miss the deeper roots of our national-security obsession, which began more than half a century ago, permeating not just public life but private life as well.
The preoccupation with security, and the anger at enemies unseen and the lack of faith in government to protect against them, emerged during the same decades that American democracy expanded to become more inclusive and more tolerant. As a result of what some have called the "rights revolution"—the civil-rights, feminist, gay-liberation, and disability-rights movements—America came much closer to reaching its full democratic promise.
Those two goals—one to expand democracy, the other to achieve security—need not be in conflict. Democracy and security depend upon each other. But when citizens retreat from public life, they are unable to achieve meaningful change on behalf of the common good. People are more likely to feel insecure and distrust each other; democracy withers, and fear and anger prevail....
Americans altered the way they live because of fear of crime. A study of eight major cities shows that nearly half of all Americans have changed their lifestyles to avoid crime, by not going out alone or at night, avoiding downtown areas of major cities, subways, and contact with people who look or seem dangerous. Many parents, dubbed "hel-icopter parents," are so worried about their children's safety that they hover over them, refusing to let them out of their sight. Cities spend millions on surveillance cameras, but there is not sufficient evidence that those devices make public spaces safer. Cameras might help to identify and prosecute criminals after a crime takes place, but they do not often deter crime....
The cold war was a factor in the obsession with security and the antidemocratic response to it that continued long after the war ended. There are many outstanding studies of the domestic culture of the cold war that point to several possible avenues for further exploration. We know that not all its aspects were antidemocratic. After all, in an effort to eradicate inequalities and showcase to the world that the United States could live up to its ideals, national policies supported civil rights, women's rights, and the expansion of the welfare state in the Great Society programs. It is worth further study to examine why those liberal cold-war impulses were not powerful enough to prevent the antidemocratic tendencies that fostered the security obsession. It is also worth exploring the extent to which exaggerated concerns about security may have pushed the American political center to the right....
And what about democracy? Democracy depends on citizens accepting their differences and trusting each other, at least to the extent that they understand themselves as belonging to a civic sphere as well as a private sphere. It requires investing in the common good, and holding the government accountable as the institution that represents, and acts on behalf of, the citizenry. If, in the name of security, Americans distrust one another and the government, and value private protection at the expense of the public good, then the basic social and political practices that ensure a healthy democracy cannot survive.