Public opinion as a driver of the national security state

An institutional cause of the rise of a national security state, one that often gets insufficient attention, is public opinion. It played an important role in supporting and inspiring—and even requiring at times—elements in the development of the extensive and excessive policing and surveillance measures that were designed to deal with Islamist terrorism within the United States after 9/11. Comparisons can be made with quests to chase other such “enemies within,” especially ones seen to be linked to foreign entities like domestic communists in the McCarthy era and witches in days past. Officials come to believe that they can defy such strong public sentiment only at their own peril while exacerbating such fears is congenial and goes unpunished. Thus, officials and elites are more nearly responding to public fear than creating it. A very few have been inclined to judge the fears to be exaggerated or the policies designed to deal with them misguided. But they have been able to do little, if anything, to reduce them—if people want to be afraid, nothing will stop them. Moreover, officials have been unwilling to take the political risks required—though they possibly exaggerate the extent of the risk. Public fears also led to support for the 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the fears seem more nearly to facilitate such foreign adventures than to cause them: Americans are not, in general, set on questing abroad for monsters to destroy. And even if fears about international terrorism decline, this does not mean that the national security state established to deal with the problem will also necessarily decline.