Are We There Yet?

Is the United States About to become a Modern Police State?

By

Thomas B. Wallace

Americans, for the most part, consider themselves a free and open people. We can, without much difficulty, move about our country at will, living and working where and when we wish without much coercive influence from government at either the local, state or national level. We come from a background of freedom and consider ourselves, as part of our birthright, free moral agents. The great majority of our people believe very much in “live and let live” and we universally accept and believe in our rights to free speech, religious liberty and those other rights of due process enumerated in our foundational document The Constitution of the United States of America. When it comes to discussing whether or not we are slipping into a Police State without even knowing it, it becomes necessary to examine whether or not any of the conditions discussed above as our birthright, has changed significantly enough to say, “ we are now a police state and not a free society”?         

There is a lot of speculation, and not a small amount of approbation, that since September 11, 2001 the United States has become, or is rapidly becoming a classic Police State in the mold of George Orwell’s seminal classic on the subject 1984. George Orwell’s fanciful speculations of the early 1950s aside, this question deserves, at the very least, a serious examination, since, if nothing else, the technology that would make both Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, real possibilities now exists and is in every day use in the United States. However, putting aside our technophobia and the Unibomber tendency to ascribe to all technology a quality of evil that constitutes a form of spiritual imprisonment, let us examine both the technology and the underlying question as to whether we are already, or well on our way to becoming a classic Police State.

First among our concerns must be to define a Police State as, from the variety and virulence of some of the blogosophistry that goes on it is apparent that the term means different things to different people. In the classic sense a Police State is by definition “A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force.” This definition comes from Dictionary.com and seems to be inclusive enough for our purposes here. Now, this definition sets forth certain conditions which define a “Police state”.

First the Government exercises rigid controls over the Social, economic and political life of the people. There are here a couple of ambiguous terms that will require a little more finesse in our understanding of them. First is the term rigid. For most the term would simply mean stiff and unbending. That would normally be good enough for this author as well, but there are those who would say that rigid could also mean unchangeable, inflexible, unresponsive to pressure, and unresponsive to electoral or legislative influence. We will herein consider these conditional definitions of rigid as well. By conditional we mean, that under certain conditions these applications of the concept of rigidity may well implicate a form of control being exercised by the “state” as an embodiment of the body politic, as well as an embodiment of a form of dictatorial repression.

Secondly, the term repressive must be defined as well. Repressive would seem, on its face, to mean to be pushed back, and would seem to imply a government that pushes the aspirations of its citizens inside themselves so that they cannot express them openly and therefore extracts a standard of behavior that conforms to what the repressive government wants. However, there are those who would say that repressive and oppressive are the same thing, which they are not exactly. Oppressive means to be putting weight from above onto something under it. In short, we can be repressed, without being oppressed, and we can be oppressed without being repressed. But, it also means that government can be oppressive without being undemocratic, or unrepresentative, if in fact government is putting the weight of the expressions of the body politic onto a person, or group who does not agree. In that sense then it becomes apparent, that aside from an explicit statement of fundamental individual rights inherent and unalienable, as expressed in the Bill of Rights, the majority in a democratic republic can be oppressive and tyrannical as well.

But for our purposes here we will accept that repression is an active principle of a police state where active pressure is put on the citizenry to conform to a certain behavioral standard, whereas oppression we can consider a passive principle of a police state wherein the weight of a conforming social standard is placed upon all those who live under it and so extracts its own forms of pressure to respond in a given manner. However, in a true police state, this oppressive expression is not mediated by any social contract extending recognition by one group, the majority, to another, the minority, that certain rights of action both internal and external, are inherent and unalienable.

Finally, the term “control” must also be defined a little more precisely if we are to arrive at an acceptable level of general understanding this article hopes to achieve. For most, control would be understood to mean the ability to determine positively, without question, the actions of any given citizen since we are here speaking politically and not trying to define “control” in any broader, ontological sense. However, there are many who believe that control could also extend to such things as “reliable influence” exerted by such things as coercive law, advertising, psychological pressures from peers, etc. For the purposes of this article we will address each of these in their turn and determine, on a case by case basis whether or not they constitute a form of “control”.

Next, the state exercises this control through the means of police forces, either openly or through the use of secret police forces. Although the definition specifies that such control is exercised primarily through the use of secret police, we will be expansive enough to stipulate that such control may also be exercised through normal, overt policing powers, the nominally legal and jurisprudential forms and expressions of the state. After all, arguably the most vivid example of a Police state in history, Nazi Germany, was ushered into power through normal, legal, constitutional means.

Among many favorite analogies the bloggers like to cite is the one of throwing a frog into a pot of boiling water and watching him immediately leap out versus setting him into a pot of cool water that is slowly heated to the boiling point, at which time the frog simply cooks, have long gotten used to the heating water until it is too late and he dies. It is the analogy of gradualism and is meant to point out that the freedoms, rights and citizenship birthright that all Americans possess is gradually being eroded away through government and that we are now rapidly sinking into, or already have become, a police state.

What is frustrating is that every time the government, and that can be at any level, exercises the authorities with which we, as citizens have invested it, those citizens against whom those authorities’ actions result in negative impacts then assume the mantle of the citizens oppressed and now legitimately rebelling against an oppressive policing force of government. The problem is, government, by definition governs. It extracts behaviors from citizens through the governing mechanisms that have been set up for it, be they free and democratic or fascist and repressive. Not all of these are coercive. And no government that functions at all can function without resort to such mechanisms, either voluntary or coercive.

However, as a nation’s population grows, the more closely citizens interact, the more likely they are to intrude upon one another’s personal sense of well being. Only with a highly refined sense of citizen responsibility, i.e. voluntary compliance with a basic “let live” attitude the question then becomes, is it really the government that has grown more intrusive or is it that life itself grows more intrusive and the citizenry now depends more and more on government to manage the intrusions at a level acceptable to a preponderance of the population as a whole.

In short, when there is no one around to intrude on your sense of privacy and agency it is highly unlikely you will feel the state intruding in areas to which it does not belong. However, as population pressures increase to the degree that in order to maintain an acceptable level of living infrastructure the government must, by citizen delegation, coordinate citizen interactions at an acceptably civilized level, the more likely more citizens will perceive intrusions on their own sense of integrity and free moral agency. Sensing these intrusions as inherently unavoidable they will demand of governance that it compel, if necessary, a civilized standard of individual response to these intrusions. Such compulsion, of course, is necessarily antithetical to the underlying free moral agency of such a society, and so a tension is created between competing citizen segments for governance to balance.

Now we have reached the point where we are going to have to define free moral agency, and what it means to the citizen of any state. Simply put, free moral agency means any being capable of examining its surroundings both internal and external, and then capable of making a decision to act in one manner or its implied opposite. That “free moral agent” is then likewise capable of accepting the responsibility (consequences) of whatever that choice of actions may result.

Now here is something key to our current discussion and it is important that everyone who reads this discussion understands how key it is. There is a fundamental philosophical argument that free moral agency is an illusion of being and does not really exist. Of course, there is also a fundamental argument that free moral agency is in the nature of being and does really exist. There are good faith adherents to either argument, but it must be understood that our constitution and the system of laws under which it operates assumes the validity and existence of free moral agency. Any argument made about either the constitution or our system of laws that does not take this into account is prima facie false on its face as it applies to either the constitution or the legal structure of our society, so must be reconsidered in the light of accepting free moral agency as a given in our constitutional system. This is a presupposition of our social structure that cannot be avoided, and the tensions that it creates in social groups who do not either accept its fundamental link to the whole of our federal system, or disagree with it creates a set of irreconcilable tensions in the body politic. It is that set of irreconcilable tensions that are currently rushing us headlong into a basic civil conflict in this nation, and if anything will be the triggering dynamic that actually propels this society, if it is want to go there, into a modern Police state.

Socialist forms operate on the opposite assumption, that free moral agency does not exist. The individual and his/her behaviors are societal expressions and these are either structural or even genetic. No socialist argument advanced about our constitution or the system of laws under which it operates, can be valid using that assumption. That would be like saying an orange is purple because an apple is red. One has essentially nothing to do with the other and drawing conclusions about one, based on the experience or forms of the other are bound to be correct only as a matter or random chance. In short the one says the individual bands together with other individuals to form states in order to assist one another in advancing civilized behavior, or to improve the common way of life; while the other says that societies are structured depending on their historical and/or economic expressions and that class structures are malleable only through violent social upheavals. The truth of course, lies somewhere between the two and it is the genius of our constitutional system that it has been able to navigate these normally shark infested mutually exclusive world views quite admirably for some two hundred years.

However, in this modern age, the question now becomes, have we reached a tipping point in the organization of civilization where the maintenance of a free moral individual is counterintuitive to the maintenance of a civilized interaction between citizens? In short, have we reached the point where the only possible state is a police state? Or are we simply seeing an increase in policing of an increasing population that has a proportionately increasing number of those whose natural inclination is criminal; i.e., open and unrepressed defiance of whatever legal structures might exist, what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariate? Ultimately, that is the question being begged by those who insist we are on a slippery slope to tyranny.

So, how do we come to a conclusion regarding this question that is valid? There are, after all, a thousand and one arguments for the proposition, and a thousand and two against it. The answer will largely reside within ones own presuppositions about society and how it does or should function. Personally, I have not seen where my own freedom of movement or personal sense of control has been significantly diminished in the last forty years. What circumspection I have noted has come from personal conclusions and not through some perceived coercion on a grand scale. However, I have noticed several things that seem a bit, shall I say disturbing…

First, we have an enormous economy with and enormous governmental structure designed specifically to perpetuate the infrastructure necessary to support such enormous production. Since, on a basic level this is devoted to the concept of “profit” I find such enormous effort devoted to essential selfishness somewhat troublesome. Without a morally defensible foundation, such economic forms can easily devolve into a degenerate, essentially materialistic form that has no purpose but to establish consumption as a way of life without spiritual or metaphysical purpose. However, I also see that competing pressures within that structure, some devoted to materialistic ends, and others devoted to ends that stand over and above the material, tends to increase all levels of social expression. And finally, this form of economy also seems to stand at the verge of defeating scarcity for the first time in history. That we can do that is now apparent. That we will have the moral wherewithal to do it is an open question.

Second, though our choices in this nation stand at historically almost absurd levels, we can see our local, state and federal governments are increasingly acting to both enhance their own governmental power as well as increasingly acting in covert ways to establish programs of action whose motivations, shrouded as they are in secrecy, may be difficult to discern. This means that citizens are left to themselves to speculate on the motives for such programs regardless of what those motives may actually be. Though this may well work to the consternation of our enemies in the world, it also tends to magnify dissent within the body politic and seemingly do little for enhancing the governmental position either to its own citizens or to the world at large. Make no mistake, I am not one of those who believes that the citizen “always” has a right to know, most especially if exercising that right would result in putting our public servants in harms way unnecessarily. However, when issues obvious have become so fundamentally apparent to the naked eye of the citizenry and the governmental structures stonewall the public about their purposes and mechanics, it does nothing to enhance the relationship between the citizen and the official she has charged with governance.

In the final analysis, though we remain a relatively free and open society, it is also clear that there are moves, both socially and governmentally, that remaining unchecked and unexamined in an open debate, may well allow the development of what we have come to understand as a Police state. As always, freedom is not free, but ever demands the vigilance of patriots, wherever they may lie in the social structure. It is apparent and necessary that vigilance, and action when it is necessary, may well be the order of the future day. We should base our judgments regarding when and where that is or should be on considerations moral and metaphysical, not material and comfortable…