The State as Necessary Evil?

Ever since NATO was founded over a good half century ago under the name North Atlantic Treaty Organization, its focus has always pivoted around the “community of Western values” as a prerequisite and catalyst for the alliance. In the recent past, however — and especially after Sept. 11, 2001 — the number of incidents that give us an opportunity to question the assumption of such a consensus has risen, although so far without any dramatic consequences.

While President Obama has experienced international recognition for the implementation of a health insurance mandate, the media — particularly in Europe — could find no words (and hardly an explanation) to describe those other Americans, typically with lower incomes, who rejected “Obamacare” — those who seemingly want to advocate for a country in which even appendicitis could be the first step on the fast track to death. The equally astounding and terrifying identification of underprivileged groups with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump has likewise confounded the European media. He unifies his heterogeneous platform with only the loud, radical rejection of all professional politicians and their world in Washington. Ultimately, a dreadful series of race-motivated killings by psychologically unstable perpetrators has once again brought to the fore the fact that the legal system in America does little to regulate access to deadly weapons. This kind of mass support for guns is based on a tradition of the right to bear arms; even the president’s political future can be put in jeopardy by simply attempting to start a new discussion about the problem.

Is there a convergence point of all these American characteristics, to which Europe has reacted with misunderstanding and often indignation? A historical answer can be found in the Second and Third Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which were ratified in 1791 along with eight other Amendments. The Second Amendment provides an individual the right to bear arms: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The wording of this proclamation seems to indicate that the consolidation of Revolutionary War soldiers into a permanent national army was not part of the Founding Fathers’ original plan for the nation. In any case, tensions between the new state and the rights of individuals as militiamen and citizen soldiers were avoided. Along these same lines, the Third Amendment additionally pushed back the power of the state over the private sphere, as was customary during the Revolutionary War, even further: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner prescribed by law.”

A closer look at the Amendments helps us to acknowledge that a tendency to limit state authority pervades the entire text of the American Constitution. Alongside descriptions of the functions and rights of the different branches of government, about half of each paragraph is dedicated to drawing the limits where the powers of both the House of Representatives and the president should end. This particular gesture most likely had two closely related points of origin: the first being the founding of the American state from an independence movement against a colonial power; the second being the connection of a majority of its citizens to ancestors who, as followers of radical religious doctrines, had fled persecution by a state power. The voices of that founding period can be invoked in present day political situations. For example, the tea party movement does not want to become a political party per se, but rather aspires to be an embodiment of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, one of the now almost mythic acts of protest against the despotic rule of the colonial state.

A prerequisite and simultaneously a result of this fundamental political orientation is the peculiar meaning of the word “state” in American English, as evinced by linguists. While other languages of the Western world reserve the term “state” for institutional forms that provide societies with the tools for self-organization (and therefore also includes “society” in its meaning), most English speakers in America relate the word “state” exclusively to government (as something outside of society, and not uncommonly invoked to emphasize a tension between state and society).

In a side note to his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” an analysis of France’s transition from the revolution of 1848 to the second French monarchy under Napoleon III, Karl Marx describes exactly this peculiarity of the American understanding of state, from a different historical perspective: “In countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life — as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux… and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world of its own, has neither time nor opportunity left for abolishing the old world of ghosts.”

What the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ Signifies

If one diagnoses our present times against Marx’s classic prognosis of a proletarian revolution and a classless society, then — happily or resignedly — we can confirm that the “bourgeois society” mentioned by him in the “Eighteenth Brumaire” has today been achieved. This explains the continued growth and permanent construction of the European form of state, which in the 19th century was in its (at the time still new) “revolutionary form.” From this understanding of state, bourgeois society continues to reorganize itself; the security of citizens at home and abroad should depend on the state, and simultaneously it should protect their individual freedoms. The ongoing intense political discussion in Germany about “ethical” policies appears then as a discursive form of one such political command of the bourgeois society over itself. Here, the enlightened vision of a relationship between state and society appears to fulfill itself from day to day.

With regard to our present situation, the point is based on Karl Marx’s identification of the republic in the American context as a “conservative organism.” As such, one can recognize how — in contrast to progressive construction of the bourgeois (in the meantime bourgeois-social-democratic) state in Europe — a constantly reforming, often programmatic dynamic has in fact existed since the late 19th century in the United States. This is the dynamic that is “abolishing the old world of ghosts.” Under American conditions, this has meant — and still means — revolting against the state (as an assumedly necessary evil from the old world) and bringing about a happy ending by implementing a “libertarian” society without state violence and interference. “Libertarian” impulses strike a chord here, as now visible in present day in Silicon Valley, with the anti-state sentiment of classic anarchism a la Bakunin in the 19th century.*

Indeed, one should resist obvious attempts to fashion the omnipresent impulse to subversion in the political and intellectual history of the United States as a wholesale predecessor to present-day “neoliberalism.” Even for American readers there are authors (and actual political forms) to discover from the past, whose thinking about social living without the superstructure of the state still garners sympathy — if not mainstream regard. Randolph Bourne, who first found intellectual inspiration in the lectures of philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University, is among them. However, the opportunity of an academic life evaded him due to a physical disability.

In 1910 Bourne began to publish writings in intellectual magazines (they are still easily accessible in a collection entitled “The Radical Will”) that, according to Dewey’s conception of life as the “form of the present dependent on the conditions of the future,” wished to unfold a specific utopian vision for American society. In a polemical turn against the then new and popular image of America as a “melting pot of nations,” due to waves of European and Asian immigration, in which he saw nothing other than a self-legitimation of White-Protestant dominance, Bourne dreamed of a “spiritual vitality” as a particular opportunity for his country. This vitality should not only proceed from the mutual respect of different population groups, but directly from a positive increase of the differences among them. Social tact and careful aesthetic taste should be required to retain and foster such differences.

With the entry of the United States into World War I and the outpouring of patriotic sentiment and argumentation — in which even John Dewey participated, much to the disappointment of his student — this precarious opportunity for a new American society disappeared, at least in the perception of Randolph Bourne. His essays assume a polemical yet disappointed tone, and condense in the term “state” his various accusations against the undemocratically legitimatized decision by the governments of President Woodrow Wilson, France and England to militarily support the war. Without wishing to become a pacifist, Bourne played with the sarcastic formulation of “war is the health of the state,” before he died at the age of 30 — seven weeks after the ceasefire — from Spanish influenza, which took more lives worldwide than the war.

Bourne’s open vision of limited state influence to foster cultural differences could not be further from the superficially similar anti-government rhetoric of Donald Trump — and from his threat to build a wall to fend off Mexican immigrants. European observers these days tend to question whether the endlessly repeated public rituals of state affirmation in America don’t confirm that Trump’s vision has come to dominate all forms of the national self-image. What exactly do the American national anthem and flag represent? The song the “Star Spangled Banner” was only declared the hymn of the nation in 1931, i.e., very late, recalling — and retroactively confirming Bourne’s fears, so to speak – the last years of World War I. The text of the hymn itself was inspired in 1814 during a victorious naval battle against the British Navy, and notably celebrates the United States at the end of its first verse as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But does that not mean that the state, as government, should only in times of war involve the free and the brave citizens, as a society? To put it differently: Does one not have to conclude that American society, together with the government, only wants to project itself as a state in the European sense in its foreign policy, while domestically it continues to promote an anti-government stance?

From an outside perspective, this discovery appears, like the entire living tradition of American state ideology, ambivalent at best. But one must take this into account, whoever wants to understand the United States and its society as a point within the “community of Western values.”

*Editor’s note: Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism, and one of the principal founders of the “social anarchist” tradition.