Evil Empire 59social-welfare appropriations. After the issuance of NSC 68, debate in
Congress over appropriations taught conservatives to “decouple” the
national security state “from the economic and social policies of the New
Deal,” according to Hogan. New tax increases would cover the costs
of coercion abroad but not of health, education, and welfare at home.
The size of the budget for bombers and submarines would continue to
increase, but the size of the social wage would not follow suit. New
Dealers pushed “security” to the forefront of the national agenda in the
first place by insisting that the government could protect citizens from
unpredictable risks; now they were trapped in a cage of their own making.
The result was the military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisen-
hower called it in his 1961 farewell speech. He wanted to highlight
the entanglement of the military, arms manufacturers, and members
of Congress, which he felt was imperiling democratic decision-making
over the size of the military, its deployments, and its ever-increasing
budget. Eisenhower also worried that a tradition of individual liberty
would be difficult to reconcile with a national security state. But while
his critique and terminology were indeed useful, Eisenhower was con-
cerned only with the threat from abroad, failing entirely to see what
the security state was already accomplishing at home.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, figures in the black freedom
struggle—from W. E. B. Du Bois to Jack O’Dell—had been highlighting
how the national security state’s coercions threatened not just individual
freedoms but collective ones. As the United States increasingly accused
its own citizens of being subversives, assuming them to be guided
by a foreign power, the widely shared images of repression in Soviet
society—prisons, exile, staged trials, and the “police apparatus”—
became the preeminent security tools to protect the United States
against Soviet expansionism. The United States imprisoned communists
and black radicals such as Benjamin J. Davis after a series of highly