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The process of American democratization and de-democratization has often involved organized violence, whether perpetrated by the federal government, against the government, or with the government on the sidelines. But we know little about the relationship between the state’s war-making capacity and the prospects for democracy’s advances and retreats over the course of American history. In this essay, I first briefly describe the long-run path of democracy in the United States and identify some of the key threats that have periodically undermined the prospects for successful and durable democratization. I then survey some of the entangled history of state violence and democratization in the United States and suggest how the U.S. government’s military capacity has often tended to inflame threats to democracy and undermine critical pillars of democratic governance. The main exceptions to this pattern have come during the two Reconstructions, when federal military force was deployed as an instrument of democratization.

The American administrative state existed in real and influential form from the earliest days of the republic. As in many countries, war contributed to the development of the administrative state. This essay surveys the extensive warfare actions of the United States in the long nineteenth century, from conflicts with Indigenous peoples in the Ohio Valley through U.S. engagement in the Philippines. The essay also examines developments in the administrative state that simultaneously complemented warfare and fighting during this era: namely, preparation (including recruitment, inspection, discipline, planning, logistics, and taxation) and postconflict management (including institutional reform, nation-building and governance, and pension and benefits programs). The essay pays particular attention to questions of bureaucratic autonomy and democratic accountability within the American administrative state prior to the twentieth century.

Concentration of power in the executive branch has fostered an American democracy increasingly prone to waging forever wars. Growing executive concentration and resulting executive unilateralism have been driven by a historical blend of personalities, domestic structure, changes in international regimes, and increasingly extreme legal theories. These theories of unilateral executive authority, espoused most aggressively during Donald Trump’s presidencies, cannot be squared with the Constitution’s vision that checks and balances do not stop at the water’s edge. The tumultuous start of Trump’s second term reveals that executive unilateralism has reached crisis proportions. A rule of law response will entail both short-term strategies of resistance and resilience and longer-term efforts at structural reform.

Most experts maintain that oversight, including ex post oversight, is critical to ensure that government actions are transparent and accountable to its citizens. But despite a global push for greater transparency in government, the level of transparency over national security and public spending in many countries is limited. This essay shows that since 9/11, the conduct of the United States in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider region has diminished oversight over military spending by funding operations with “emergency” appropriations and other special budgetary vehicles, financing with debt, concealing expenses through poor accounting, and integrating the private sector into core military activities. This combination of policies, which I term the Ghost Budget, has resulted in less accountability for war spending, lower civic engagement, greater corruption, higher total expenditures, and prolonged conflicts.

For a few brief years after 9/11, the U.S. Supreme Court reined in the executive branch’s most sweeping assertions of wartime power, upholding the constitutional rights of military detainees. Then the Court decided it had gone far enough. Even as the “war on terror” grew beyond spatial and temporal limits—becoming a global set of military interventions with no apparent end point—the Court regularly ruled that judges should defer to the government when it invoked national security. In cases involving everything from surveillance to immigration roundups to the “Muslim ban,” the Supreme Court asserted that courts have limited authority and expertise to review the government’s actions, even when there is no alternative means to hold government accountable for misconduct. These decisions reflect the Court’s larger agenda of expanding presidential power and empowering law enforcement and security agencies, while weakening the state’s capacity to regulate in the interest of public health, welfare, and the environment. Within and beyond “national security” contexts, attempts to insulate the carceral state from accountability draw on perceptions of nonwhite communities as threats to safety and national identity. As the second Trump administration expands the war on terror to target a still wider set of perceived foreign and domestic enemies, the same Court that has unshackled the executive will decide whether to constrain the new administration’s increasingly authoritarian and lawless policies.

Synthesizing public opinion data and existing scholarship, this essay traces four legacies in U.S. public opinion left by two decades of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. First, short-term boosts in public support and deference to executive authority at the beginning of each war created a permissive environment for institutional changes not easily reversed. Second, growing public skepticism toward these wars did not undermine support for broader internationalist policies. Third, public support for humanitarian action remained resilient. Fourth, the wars increased the gap between public confidence in the military and in elected officials, creating challenges for democratic civil-military relations. Together, the legacies demonstrate that the challenge for American democracy moving forward is not public opinion in and of itself, but how elites strategically misuse or bypass public consent.

Examining iconic media productions, this essay explores a shift from the immediate post-9/11 period characterized by uncritical support for the U.S. military as a litmus test for patriotism to an increasingly paranoid worldview in which the United States is at once the victor and victim, laying the cultural foundation for authoritarian populism. Unlike Cold War–era productions in which skill, expertise, and diplomacy come together to thwart disaster, in the murky world of the war on terror, military intervention and even torture appear inevitable, with no space for diplomacy. Even as post-9/11 mass entertainment productions collaborated with the military, they increasingly drew on a familiar feature of American culture suspicious of institutions and glorifying of vigilante “justice.” In a world where true justice and security are achieved only by going outside of political and military institutional structures and where war and the violation of international law are the only alternatives to terror, authoritarian populism resonates as an alternative to suspect institutions.

Enduring military mobilization in peacetime and long periods of war may not only weaken elements of democratic accountability and institutions, the checks and balances associated with both young and mature democratic systems, but more insidiously, over time, war may undermine the culture and values that support democratic institutions and processes. Democracies depend not only on these institutional arrangements and processes; they are moored in, motivated, and lubricated by a constellation of normative beliefs, values, capacities, and feelings: namely, empathy and respect for others, the willingness to hear and be persuaded by other’s views, willingness of the minority to cede to the majority so long as their rights are protected, and, perhaps most important, the promise that force is taken off the table because might does not make right. When war is sparked by fear, and the mobilization that sustains war amplifies fear, war and high levels of military mobilization in peacetime can undermine the manners and norms—civil discourse, participation, trust, empathy, and tolerance—that are prerequisites and characteristic of democracy.

An interview of Robert Jay Lifton by Neta C. Crawford and Matthew Evangelista.

Military spending, often a significant portion of federal budgets, can either increase or decrease inequality. It can decrease inequality by creating jobs and opportunities for advancement, or it can increase inequality by disproportionately benefiting the already well-off segments of society by diverting resources away from programs that help the less wealthy. This essay reviews various studies—covering a range of countries and time periods—that examine the “inequality-widening,” “inequality-­narrowing,” and mixed effects of military spending. Overall, the preponderance of evidence supports the theory that increased military spending leads to greater inequality.

Scholars of civil-military relations have long written of the dangers associated with politicizing the U.S. military. Efforts to draw the military into partisan politics ultimately serve to degrade civilian control of the armed forces, the military’s long-standing norm of nonpartisanship, the public’s trust and confidence in the military, and even democracy itself. In recent years, these concerns have become more pronounced and more urgent as civilian political leaders and their surrogates have sought to drag the military deeper into partisan political fights, especially during campaigns and elections. This essay explores the drivers of the politicization of the military and the role civilian political leaders, the military, and the American public play in it. It also examines the implications for democratic governance and why efforts to push back against the politicization of the military can often backfire. The essay concludes with a look at solutions to counter the politicization of the military. 

Although the post-9/11 era has been marked by scholarly angst about what many view as a distinct deterioration in civil-military relations, a review of the evidence suggests that civil-military relations during this period have been complex and sometimes contradictory, rather than unidirectional. But a narrow or formalistic focus on civil-military relations obscures the risks to democracy that stem not from the military but from newer means of coercion that have been enabled by recent technological changes. Concern over civil-military relations and civilian control of the military rests on the presumption that because it possesses the tools of large-scale physical violence, the military is the primary institution capable of subverting democracy through the exercise of raw power. If this was ever true, it is no longer the case today, as recent events have demonstrated.

The so-called global war on terror marked a pivotal moment in the intersection of gender, sexuality, military service, and U.S. warfighting. This essay explores, via paradigmatic empirical incidents, three key dimensions of gendered warfare—military service, support for the military, and protest/dissent—to reveal a central paradox in the post-9/11 U.S. gender-war system. While military service has declined overall, efforts to formally include women and LGBTQ+ people in the armed forces have coincided with the ongoing valorization of a narrow gendered ideal of soldiering and citizenship (often cisgender, heterosexual, masculine, and white). Despite (potentially temporary) increased formal equality and inclusion, the global war on terror reinforced the existing U.S. heteropatriarchal sex-gender order, characterized by a mandatory heterosexuality and binary, deterministic account of gender. This model of gendered, martial citizenship promotes civilian deference to the military and subverts the democratic oversight of the armed forces.

Policing in the United States has become increasingly militarized, partly due to the transfer of military equipment to local police departments. Many law enforcement agencies throughout the United States have also received training in population-­control tactics from Israel. Armed with these tools and tactics, police agencies often use excessive force against grassroots protesters resisting state repression. Across the country, proposals for urban warfare training centers, commonly known as Cop Cities, are on the rise. At the same time, the federal legal code for terrorism drafted to suppress domestic solidarity with Palestinian liberation has been weaponized, increasing the opportunities for police to victimize protesters. The struggle against increasingly militarized state force is intimately related to the Palestinian fight against settler colonialism. Awareness of this international connection is essential to combatting the offenses led or supported by Western imperialism.

Some decades following U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 reference to a military-industrial complex (MIC), its cognate, the prison-industrial complex (PIC), became foundational language for understanding mass incarceration in the United States. To date, scholars have generally treated the MIC and PIC as analogous but separate structures. We argue, by contrast, that they have important interdependencies. For one, there are linkages that take the form of “seeding,” through which the military and the prison each transmit resources, practices, and personnel crossinstitutionally. For another, there is a “mimetic” relationship in which both institutions develop processes and practices in parallel, with each likely gaining legitimacy from comparable developments in the adjoining institution. These cross-pollinating and mimetic connections, sometimes inflected by and reproducing racial inequalities, accentuate troubling nondemocratic practices within both military and carceral institutions.