Basak Kus on the security state
What the left wing thinks of the right hand
As voters and politicians rally at the Democratic National Convention, we’re returning to Basak Kus’s analysis of the fissure between the party’s liberal establishment and its progressive wing. “The national securitization of the state,” Kus writes, “is so clear a pattern that even the ‘Yes We Can’ president could not evade its gravitational force.”
The Right Hand of the State and the American Left
Basak Kus
In the realm of social theory, few analogies capture the essence of state functions as vividly as Pierre Bourdieu’s portrayal of its “left hand” and “right hand”: the left hand involves provisions of health, education, and welfare, representing the state’s duty to nurture and provide, while the right hand represents austerity and discipline imposed by “the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks.”
Bourdieu observed these hands at work within France’s political space, with Leftists and Socialists on one side and Republicans and Gaullists on the other. Extending Bourdieu’s analogy across the Atlantic, another French sociologist, Loic Wacquant, depicted how these two hands operate in the United States. In Wacquant’s characterization, the right hand of the state—its “masculine” side—extends beyond fiscal and monetary discipline in the interest of finance to include the police and penal institutions. I believe this conceptualization of the state’s “right hand” can—and indeed must—be extended even further, especially in the case of the US, to include national security bureaucracies involved in gathering intelligence, safeguarding the “homeland” from perceived “terrorist” threats, and patrolling the borders. This broader view of the state’s “right hand” would more clearly reveal how shifting priorities driven by domestic and international challenges have shaped American statecraft.
The postwar period in the US has been marked by intense ideological and fiscal debates over which hand of the state to fortify, with the scale eventually tipping markedly towards the right hand, one in which national security is not only prominent in American statehood but informs how the government addresses other policy matters, international and domestic. Pearl Harbor stands out as the pivotal moment within this trajectory. As Douglas Stuart explains in his book Creating the National Security State, the realization that “America could be directly attacked from a distance of nearly 4,000 miles,” marked a significant shift in Americans’ perception of their global vulnerability, as well as the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens. This lent national security an “unchallengeable” status as a parameter for other policy-making, especially after the (bipartisan) passage of the National Security Act in 1947. “As Washington and Moscow jockeyed for dominance,” Stuart writes, “the logic of national security and the institutions created in 1947 to serve that logic sustained and legitimized each other.” Once the Soviet Union collapsed, some experts and policymakers questioned the relevance of the national security supremacy Stuart calls “the Pearl Harbor model. But the right hand of the state has not only prevailed but has also been fortified in the decades since, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.
During the War on Terror, the US government pursued a strategy aimed at preemptively thwarting terrorist attacks and neutralizing individuals suspected of terrorist affiliations, as Sameer Ahmed discusses in Yale Law Journal. New laws and policies enabled law enforcement to detain people before they could partake in or support violent acts, often leading to prolonged prison sentences for young American Muslims. Ahmed highlights how this approach mirrors the racial targeting observed in the War on Drugs, chronicled by Wacquant, Michelle Alexander, and others, which has disproportionately impacted young African American men.
The rift within the Democratic base today, between establishment liberals and the progressive Left (which constitutes 12 percent of Democratic electorate), stems not so much from disagreement over the left hand—which both sides support, albeit in varying ways and degrees—but over the excesses of the right hand. Transcending mere budgetary debates and resistant to resolution through standard compromises and amendments, the issue is now entrenched in a moral quagmire. Being critical of economic inequality and recognizing the need for action on climate change are not where the battle lines are drawn. Progressives are increasingly wary of the workings of the right hand of the state—the criminal justice system, police brutality, endless wars, and more broadly, the overall “national securitization of the state”—a pattern evident across US policy, from social welfare to immigration. Take, for instance, the transition of immigration and citizenship services from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice following Pearl Harbor, driven by rising national security concerns, and later to the Department of Homeland Security after the events of 9/11.