Marcus Raskin's 1976 paper "Democracy Versus the National Security State" [0] is a good backgrounder on how we've gotten to this state of affairs. If politicians want to continue with their careers in Congress, they'll either serve the national security state or have to pretend to their constituents that it doesn't exist.
"The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology.It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals. In practical terms its emergence is linked to the rise of a bureaucracy that administered things and people in interchangeable fashion without concern for ends or assumptions. This state formation matured during a period in which the office of the President be-
came supremely powerful as a broker and legitimating instrument of national
security activity."
"...The society is at a turning point. And in this regard so is the legal profession. Either we will surrender representative democracy, embracing instead
different forms of corporate fascism and bureaucratic control (military, police,
and social) which cannot be halted through citizen action and democratic pro-
cesses, or we (including the legal profession) will begin the difficult task of
dismantling the national security apparatus. It does not seem likely to me that
those who struggled in the sixties to develop a new meaning of democracy
will settle for bureaucratic or corporate fascism. And those who are neutral
on the question will be less likely to acquiesce in fascist or bonapartist deformations once it is clear that they are inefficient, and that they provide only insecurity, unemployment, imperial wars, a deepening arms race, and a pro-
cess of repressive exclusion which reduces politics to an empty game."
"The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology.It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals. In practical terms its emergence is linked to the rise of a bureaucracy that administered things and people in interchangeable fashion without concern for ends or assumptions. This state formation matured during a period in which the office of the President be- came supremely powerful as a broker and legitimating instrument of national security activity."
"...The society is at a turning point. And in this regard so is the legal profession. Either we will surrender representative democracy, embracing instead different forms of corporate fascism and bureaucratic control (military, police, and social) which cannot be halted through citizen action and democratic pro- cesses, or we (including the legal profession) will begin the difficult task of dismantling the national security apparatus. It does not seem likely to me that those who struggled in the sixties to develop a new meaning of democracy will settle for bureaucratic or corporate fascism. And those who are neutral on the question will be less likely to acquiesce in fascist or bonapartist deformations once it is clear that they are inefficient, and that they provide only insecurity, unemployment, imperial wars, a deepening arms race, and a pro- cess of repressive exclusion which reduces politics to an empty game."
[0] https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol40/iss3/7/
Plain text at:
https://archive.org/stream/democracy-versus-the-national-sec...