A Republic to Keep, an Empire to Lose

Philip Pilkington examines how “political warfare” was developed to fight the Cold War, but soon became used domestically against the bonds of the American Republic itself.

Trump’s definitive victory in the election put all doubts to rest: liberalism as we know it is dead. Liberals may have been able to brush off Trump’s victory in 2016 as an anomaly, but his definitive victory in 2024 – one that took place although American voters could predict what the establishment reaction to it would be – solidifies populism as a major force. With the pick of JD Vance for vice president it now increasingly looks like the ideology of sophisticated populism will be postliberalism. Yet postliberals should also be realists with respect to the challenges ahead, and two related problems remain thus far unaddressed in American statecraft: the problem of a police state at home, and the collapsing empire abroad.

American democracy is facing a crisis with the collapse of liberalism. This is a crisis so all-encompassing that few can discern even its outlines. Despite being unable to understand the true nature of this crisis many feel it in their bones. It is easy to point fingers at the liberal left and say that they have become authoritarian, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that something deeper is at play here. In a healthy democracy the authoritarian tendencies of one side would be contained and not allowed enter the public square. Today these authoritarian tendencies are in full control of the public square, however.

Something has gone wrong. Badly wrong. Mutual distrust, previously simmering in the United States due to the political divide, has turned into outright paranoia with one side of the political aisle accusing the other of being traitors working in the service of foreign governments. This paranoia threatens the body politic in America at every level. In a recent poll by Marist, nearly half of Americans stated that they expected to see another civil war in their lifetime. When paranoia is allowed to spread through a country as is happening in the United States over the past few years, the logical endpoint is that the coherence of the state itself starts to unwind. If mutual trust is the glue that binds a society and hence a state together, paranoia is the acetone that dissolve this glue.

Organizing Political Warfare

In the past few weeks, a fascinating lecture has gone viral online. The lecture, which was given at Hillsdale College and has 2.7 million views on Twitter at the time of writing, was given by Mike Benz, a former State Department official. In the lecture – which is entitled ‘The History of the Intelligence State’ – Benz argues that the root cause of America’s crisis of democracy is that an obscure doctrine adopted by the State Department in 1948 called ‘political warfare’. This doctrine was aimed at shoring up America’s geopolitical alliance system abroad but has started to blowback onto America itself. The result has been a growing sense of paranoia in the American body politic and an accompanying move to mass internet censorship. The censorship only reinforces the paranoia as American citizens realise what is going on and this produces a grim, downward spiral of distrust that rots American democracy from the inside out.

Benz’s stated goal is to oppose censorship in the United States, most notably internet censorship. But what he is highlighting in this lecture are the roots of a major crisis of governance in the United States – one that arguably poses an existential threat, not just to the American republic, but to the United States itself: the onshoring of the doctrine of political warfare that was designed to be deployed in the imperial periphery. The doctrine emerged, as Benz argues, out of a memorandum that was only declassified in the early 2000s entitled ‘The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare’. The memorandum was written by diplomat, historian and architect of the Cold War containment strategy George Kennan.

The problem that Kennan and his colleagues was simple enough: the Soviet Union was eagerly engaged in expansion beyond its original Russian borders. The Soviets did not typically spread communism using outright force. Rather, they would back communist parties in countries that were ideologically aligned with the Soviet Union. These parties would often work within the parliamentary system with the ideological and financial support of the Soviets until they had established full dominance. Once political dominance was established, the opposition was gradually criminalised – this was referred to by Western observers as “salami tactics”. This is what Kennan referred to as “political warfare” in its Soviet iteration.

Kennan thought that the Soviet method of political warfare was the “most refined and effective of any in history” and saw no choice but to oppose it with a counterforce of American political warfare. Here he found a useful historical example in the mode of governance practiced by the British Empire. The Empire too engaged in political warfare in its colonies. Force was only used as a last resort in the British imperial system. The preferred method of control was the utilisation of political warfare tactics and British soft power. Kennan no doubt saw the British mode of political warfare as preferable to the Soviet one in that it tended to produce relatively liberal colonies. This is what he meant when he wrote: “What is proposed here is an operation in the traditional American form: organized public support of resistance to tyranny in foreign countries.” ‘Tyranny’ being the key word and the key assumption being that liberalism would never – and, presumably, could never – produce a tyranny of its own.

To ensure the safety of America’s allies from tyranny Kennan’s memorandum sanctioned all sorts of what would colloquially become known as “dirty tricks”. Advocating for political warfare, Kennan defined it as follows:

In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures, and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.

Defence of the Realm

In his lecture on the topic, Benz points out that these tactics were never meant to be used on American soil to the American people. The relevant law here was the Schmidt-Mund Act passed the same year as Kennan’s memorandum and aimed at stopping foreign-facing propaganda from being broadcast to a domestic audience. The Schmidt-Mund Act was quietly repealed in 2013 during the Obama Administration with little public fanfare – although journals specialising in foreign policy paid close attention. The repeal of the Schmidt-Mund Act should not be thought of a single underlying cause that can explain the crisis in American democracy, but the fact that it was repealed during the Obama Administration speaks volumes. It was in the wake of the Obama Administration that the crisis started, and the repeal of the Schmidt-Mund Act is a very strong indicator that the attitudes of American legislators and government officials were subtly shifting on matters that had long been agreed upon.

This is where Benz’s argument turns to the political crisis of today: he argues that the shift to censorship and other tactics of political warfare domestically has arisen out a growing sense amongst the American elite that they are defending their own country from foreign political warfare. Where is this political warfare allegedly emerging from? Russia. And what is it allegedly aimed at? The election of Donald Trump. Yes, the Russiagate scandal – now widely viewed as fraudulent on the right and rarely talked about openly on the left anymore – is the pivotal moment when political warfare was brought onshore in the United States. It was this scandal that unleashed a wave of paranoia, censorship, and open discussions about disinformation, misinformation, and even misinformation.

The Logic of a Hoax

Russiagate is often derided on the political right today as a “hoax”. The devil here is in the details. In 2016, exotic and unbelievable claims were made against Donald Trump. These claims came out a document called the ‘Steele dossier’. It is not worth getting into the detail of what the dossier alleges – the claims relate to lurid sexual blackmail – rather it can simply be pointed out that since its release it has been established as having been paid for by the Hilary Clinton campaign as a piece of opposition research. Yet when it was discussed in the media during and after the Trump election in 2016 it was billed as “intelligence”. This is what has led to claims by those on the right that the dossier is a “hoax” – the hoax in question being the dressing up of unverified claims in a piece of opposition research as serious intelligence work.

When considering the impact of these trends on American democracy, however, we need not get involved in the details of the debate. Rather, we must simply follow the logic of the argument. Those who believed that the Steele dossier gave them the right to open the Pandora’s Box of political warfare domestically did have a logic to their argument, no matter if we think that the empirical evidence underlying their claims was thin or even fraudulent. The logic comes straight from the 1948 Kennan memorandum. First, we recognise that in the world today political warfare is operative. Second, we acknowledge that in a game such as this you can either play or be played. Third, we recognise that if we do play the game against our opponents, we are always liable to have our opponent play the game against us. And finally, we conclude that any trends in domestic politics that do not fit the mould we are used to and militate for deep changes in how the country is governed must logically be the result of political warfare being waged against us by our opponent. This is a sort of game theory pushed to the point of paranoia. But the logic is contained clearly in the premises of the argument; if we accept the premises, the conclusion emerges almost syllogistically.

If we accept this argument, then the real underlying question is: why did political warfare not blowback on the United States sooner? To some extent it did. In his lecture, Benz recalls that the political warfare machine was deployed against the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. While this may be true, it seems like the targeting of a rather small, albeit an influential group. Political warfare in this context never reached national, nation-defining levels as it has now. The real answer appears to be that the social glue was sufficiently strong in the United States to hold the system together withoutlevels of paranoia seeping in that constituted an existential threat to the country itself. The lazy way to explain this would be to state the truism that the United States was less partisan in the past. This begs the question, of course: why was the United States less partisan? The simple answer to this is that the partisanship was caused by the social and cultural revolutions that took place in the 1960s and 1970s and divided the country forever.

This is an appealing narrative, especially to conservative intellectuals whose lives have been, to a very large extent, defined by these cultural changes. But it is not remotely sufficient. The paranoia that has taken hold in America is not a phenomenon that arose from the intellectual class any more than the rise of Donald Trump is associated with this class. It is a phenomenon that comes mostly from the grassroots and signifies, as many have now admitted, that the country is no longer capable of providing a good life for many of its citizens. Looked at in this way, we see a far more interesting picture emerge: the rampant paranoia that is consuming the American body politic is the result, both in terms of where the frustrations come from and in terms of the responses generated by the state, of a late-stage empire in a state of extreme and accelerating decay.