The Contest Over National Security: Fdr, Conservatives, and the Struggle to Claim the Most Powerful Phrase in American Politics

A new history shows how FDR developed a vision of national security focused on both defense planning and domestic welfare--and how the nascent conservative movement won the battle to redefine the issue, durably reshaping US politics.

Americans take for granted that national security comprises physical defense against attacks, enabled by military might and shrewd foreign policy. But the concept of national security once meant something else. Franklin Roosevelt's vision for national security, Peter Roady argues, promised an alternate path for American politics by devoting as much attention to economic and social policy as to war and diplomacy. The Fight for National Security traces how the nascent conservative movement, roused by the ambitions of the New Deal, successfully contested FDR's ideas and inaugurated the narrower approach to national security that has dominated ever since.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt and his advisors, hoping to save American democracy from fascism and communism, argued that national security entailed protection from both physical attack and economic want. Roosevelt's opponents responded by promoting a more limited national security state privileging military defense over domestic social and economic policy. Conservatives brought numerous concerns to bear, asserting that Roosevelt's plan would strangle free enterprise, empower the government to overspend, and provoke violations of individual liberty in the name of national security.

This contest to define the government's national security responsibilities, Roady reveals, explains why the United States developed separate and imbalanced national security and welfare states, with far-reaching consequences. Another result was a potent historical irony: it is the conservative vision of the national security state that has proven impervious to financial discipline while justifying serious domestic human and civil rights abuses, especially in the contexts of the wars on drugs and terrorism.