Source: Reason
by Nathan Goodman
“The United States is notorious both for mass incarceration and for militarized police forces. The U.S. Border Patrol lends unmanned drones to police around the country, who use them to surveil ordinary citizens. Intergovernmental task forces and fusion centers coordinate cooperation among law enforcement officers at all levels of government. Years after COINTELPRO, the FBI is still spying on dissenters. The United States professes a commitment to liberal values, individual rights, and equal protection, but it combines this rhetoric with a muscular security state. How did we get here? … in his new book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State, historian Anthony Gregory emphasizes how an earlier president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, built up policing, incarceration, and the modern security state. Liberalism, Gregory shows, can be used to build an apparatus of repression.” (01/25)