All Security, All the Time

“Security” has become the buzzword of U.S. politics. In his January State of the Union address, President Bush renamed his economic-stimulus package the “economic security plan,” billing it as the fiscal counterpart to the new Office of Homeland Security. At Harvard University recently, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out a liberal alternative to the president’s agenda, insisting that “we should also be working for homeland energy security, homeland health security, homeland environment security.” Meanwhile, a House and Senate conference committee is ironing out the details of what was once called the “Farm Security Act of 2001.”

It is tempting to dismiss such rhetoric as political opportunism, unsubtle efforts to wrap long-sought domestic priorities in the Stars and Stripes. Who wants to oppose the president’s tax cuts or Sen. Clinton’s health-care initiative if it places the homeland at risk? But the constant invocation of national security represents more than cynical stealth politics--attempts to sneak through programs little related to the war on terrorism. The obsession with security draws heavily on long-established traditions in U.S. political history, born of previous crises like the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Cold War. Like these earlier challenges, the war against terror not only offers opportunities to break through logjams and pass much-delayed legislation, it also skews priorities and reshapes policy in unexpected and often unintended directions.

In his new emphasis on security, President Bush recalls the early days of the Cold War. Then, the shadow of nuclear destruction hung low over the nation, prompting a daily routine of civil-defense drills, military buildup and efforts to purge Communists from schools and colleges, factories and Hollywood studios. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the term “Cold War” really meant something. It signified a truly dangerous state of all but war, with almost no travel, trade or cultural exchange between the two sides, a belief that negotiation was impossible, troops facing each other in hot spots across the world and actual military encounters in places like Korea.

An obsession with security overran almost everything. As Adm. Hyman Rickover put it, “If the newspapers printed a dispatch that the Soviet Union planned sending the first man to Hell, our federal agencies would appear the next day, crying, ‘We can’t let them beat us to it!’”

This Cold War climate transformed domestic politics. Policies that had been dismissed as too expensive, too radical, too whimsical--interstate highways, federal support for schools, or greenbelt towns--could sail through Congress when justified as measures to move troops and tanks, beat the Soviets into space or move industrial plants away from big-city targets. Meanwhile, other liberal policies became stigmatized. Attacked as communistic, President Harry S. Truman’s proposals for full employment and national health insurance were defeated.

The strange odyssey of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 revealed how Cold War conceptions of national security dominated and skewed domestic politics in the 1950s. For two decades, a broad coalition of legislators had pushed for federal aid to education. They hoped to enhance educational opportunities for all children, but mainly to help disadvantaged students and undeveloped regions build the schools that might lift them out of poverty. But no measure ever emerged from Capitol Hill. Federal aid to education seemed like a non-starter.

But in October of 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit. The prospect of superior enemy technology, of dangers rained down from the heavens, stoked the nation’s already acute insecurities. When asked in the early 1960s what future American astronauts would find on the moon, physicist Edward Teller, the designer of the H-bomb, answered “Russians.” Partisans of federal aid to education, like then-Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, blamed Sputnik on poor schools and rammed a federal-aid bill through Congress. The National Defense Education Act became law.

But in hiding their domestic agenda under the umbrella of national defense, Cold War politicians distorted their priorities. The National Defense Education Act chiefly channeled resources to scientific and technical education. Because it did not resolve lingering questions about racial segregation or public support for parochial schools, the law proved ineffective. It did virtually nothing to relieve educational inequalities.

The current efforts of farm-state representatives to portray agricultural subsidies as protection for the nation’s food supplies echoes almost verbatim the arguments of their 1950s forbears. When President Bush pushes his familiar recipe of tax cuts and investment incentives to ensure economic security, he calls upon that very same Cold War tradition.

In seizing the mantle of security, Bush’s Democratic opponents sometimes borrow the Cold War formulation. But they also call upon the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Security became the byword of Roosevelt’s efforts to combat the Great Depression and rebuild American democracy. He imagined a truly national safety net for all citizens. He saw no reason, he told his secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, “why everybody in the United States should not be covered” or why “it should not last from cradle to grave.”

Not only the Social Security system, the landmark achievement of the 1930s with its protections for the elderly and disabled, but the New Deal’s entire legacy promised to relieve what FDR called “the dreadful consequence of economic insecurity.” Roosevelt sought security for the hungry, the homeless and the jobless, to be sure, but also for corporations and farms, unions and homeowners and bankers.

Even Hillary Clinton’s call for environmental security possesses a New Deal pedigree. FDR’s conservation measures--huge dams, vast reservoirs and huge parks--shielded Americans from floods and drought, from pests and erosion and dust.

But justifying environmental, economic or education programs in terms of security not only misleads the public; it often flouts the very goals of their sponsors. The contributory, insurance features of Social Security ensured passage through Congress but derailed FDR’s hopes for more extensive cradle-to-grave social benefits.

Environmental security might protect property holders from natural disasters, farmers from loss and consumers from toxins, but it does little to preserve the land or the wildlife on it. And wartime economic stimulus, designed to reassure shaky financial markets and jump-start growth, threatens inflation and huge deficits without necessarily aiding those ordinary citizens most suffering the fallout from recession and war.

The constant chorus of “security” little advances public debate or national policy. It may even, in the end, make us less safe.