The US government has spent about $635bn over the past decade militarising local law enforcement. That, as Stephan Salisbury has reported, includes "tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, Tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases".
In 2003, a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department could broaden its surveillance programmes in the name of public safety. The AP later revealed that the NYPD had been keeping tabs on Muslims and Islamic groups as far away as Yale University (where I teach). Weeks afterward, it became public that New York City's police force, the largest in the US, had also been monitoring the activities of Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Naturally, there have been attempts to characterise protesters as bums, deviants, criminals or whatever. This is no doubt true in some cases, but even if it were true in all cases, these are still Americans invoking the guaranteed privilege of citizenship - and their actions are being met with the full force of the militarised state. The United States seems to be the land of the free as long as you don't collectively complain about the superstructures of money and power.
But we're not just talking about the marginalised. The middle class, it's safe to say, believes in the American dream; its protests were against bailouts for banks and sacrifice for everyone else. And yet these respectable law-abiding citizens met with police violence, too. If violence is standard operating procedure, doesn't that legitimately call into question the legitimacy of the state?
Today another kind of movement is growing. What the future holds, no one knows. But in 1919, one of President Wilson's advisers said he worried about this threat to both major parties. He said: "Steadily from day to day, under our very eyes, [there is] a movement that, if it is not checked, is bound to express itself in attack on everything we hold dear. In this era of industrial and social unrest, both parties are in disrepute with the average man."
