The State, War-Making & Democratization in the United States: A Historical Overview

The United States was not born as a full-fledged democracy. When the Constitution was adopted, more than one in six people living in the country were enslaved and entirely without political rights, although three-fifths of their number were counted toward state representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, boosting the electoral power of their enslavers. Women could not vote, nor could most Indigenous people. Over time, however, democratic rights were extended to increasingly large portions of the American people. Most states dropped property qualifications for voting in the early nineteenth century, effectively establishing universal white male suffrage. After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment banned race as a qualification for voting rights, although Southern states employed literacy tests, poll taxes, and other voting requirements to effectively disenfranchise Black voters for the next century. Women nationwide gained the vote in 1920 through the Nineteenth Amendment. In fact, it was not until the civil rights advances of the 1960s, which overcame Southern authoritarianism, that the country could be said to be fully democratic.1

But the common story that Americans tell themselves—that our history is a story of gradual, progressive expansion of democracy as our long-suppressed founding ideals flourished—is false. The story of American democratization has been one of conflict, reversals, and halting progress. Early nineteenth-century suffrage expansion was often coupled with disenfranchisement of free Black men in the North.2 Black voting rights were adopted only after a bloody and destructive civil war and were then rolled back after decades of concerted and violent challenge by Southern whites, one of the only times in human history voting rights were taken away from such a large group after being granted. Today, once again, democratic rights are in peril as the hard-won protections of the mid-late twentieth century are at risk of being reversed.3

The process of American democratization and de-democratization, moreover, has often involved organized violence, sometimes perpetrated or sponsored by the federal government, sometimes against the government, and sometimes with the government on the sidelines. But we know little about the relationship between the state’s war-making capacity and the prospects for democracy’s advances and retreats over the course of American history. To frame such an exploration, I first briefly describe the long-run path of democracy in the United States and identify some of the key threats that have periodically undermined the prospects for successful and durable democratization in American history. I then survey some of the entangled history of state violence and democratization in the United States and suggest how the U.S. government’s military capacity has often tended to inflame threats to democracy and undermine critical pillars of democratic governance. The main exceptions to this pattern have come during the two Reconstruction eras—the First Reconstruction after the Civil War and the Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement—when federal military force was deployed as an instrument of democratization.

Political scientist Adam Przeworski defines democracy succinctly as “a system in which parties lose elections.”4 The implications of this spare but useful definition are that democracies enable citizens to hold those in power accountable, primarily through regular competitive elections, and give representatives incentives to engage in collective and cooperative decision-making.5 Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell argued that thriving democratic regimes feature mechanisms of both vertical accountability, means by which voters can discipline leaders, and horizontal accountability, institutional structures that enable different parts of the government to limit each other’s power and prevent excessive concentrations of power.6

Successful democracies are marked by at least four characteristics.7 First, they hold free and fair elections whose outcomes are not predetermined or dependent on the whims or preferences of those already in power. Some theorists, notably Joseph Schumpeter, define democracy narrowly and simply as systems in which rulers are chosen by elections.8 Elections may be necessary to classify a system as democratic, but they are not sufficient. Many nations hold elections that confer power but are not freely contested. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way categorize such regimes as “competitive authoritarianism,” a hybrid form of governance in which some of the forms of democracy are preserved but other conditions create an uneven playing field that advantages incumbents over challengers. In these systems, elections do not provide vertical accountability.9

The second characteristic of successful democracies is the rule of law: the principle that laws apply equally to rulers and citizens alike and that power is to be exercised according to laws rather than rulers’ personal whims. Protection of the rule of law is essential to democratic accountability. Third, successful democracies also uphold the principle of a legitimate opposition, the idea that rivals for power are within their rights to challenge the government; they are not merely opponents to be vanquished. Finally, these democracies maintain the integrity of rights for their citizens, particularly the civil rights and liberties that are necessary for political contestation on equal terms.10

These four pillars of democracy provide a set of indicators of the health of a democratic regime at any given time. They also allow us to assess whether a regime is democratizing, moving toward becoming a more fully realized democracy, or moving away from democratic principles. Especially given the apparent rise in antidemocratic political violence in the United States in recent years—from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 to the insurrectionary assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—it is an understandably common view that such violence poses a grave threat to American democracy today.11 But democratic decline need not happen suddenly or violently, as in a coup d’état. Rather, democracies often degrade slowly, through a process known as “democratic backsliding,” in which those in power aim to lock in their power by a variety of often-­legal means, such as stacking the government with loyalists, strategically manipulating elections, and otherwise stretching the rules of political competition without breaking them outright.12 The United States has not been immune from this kind of electoral decline. American history has seen repeated democratic crises and reversals, moments when progress toward more complete democracy was stalled, or even went in reverse: from the new republic’s first decade in the 1790s, to the Civil War and the mass disenfranchisement of Black Americans after Reconstruction, through the precarity of liberal democracy in the 1930s and the Watergate debacle of the 1970s, up to the authoritarian rumblings of the current century.13

These crises of democracy have not occurred randomly. Rather, they have developed in the presence of one or more of the following specific threats: political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and growing economic inequality, and the accretion of excessive and unchecked executive power. From the comparative study of democratization (and de-democratization), we know these four threats can undermine the pillars of democracy. When these conditions are absent, democracy tends to flourish. When one or more of them are present, it tends to decay.

Some heterogeneity of attitudes and interests in a society is healthy for democracy, and not all instances of ideological divergence amount to dangerous political polarization. Democracy works well when citizens’ political opinions, interests, and group affiliations intersect in different ways, as when we associate with people of different political views in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, places of worship, and civic organizations. These kinds of crosscutting affiliations help to induce the sense that democracy is a common enterprise despite disagreements. But when citizens sort themselves so that, instead of having multiple crosscutting ties to others, their social and political identities overlap and reinforce one another, the polarization gap widens, creating a sense of deep antagonism and distrust across the partisan gulf.14 That is when politics becomes a battle of “us” against “them,” in which each side comes to believe that if the other wins, the consequences will be shattering for the nation. If polarized parties are determined to win at all costs, democracy can suffer.

Conflict over who belongs as full members of the political community intensifies political battles. For political scientist Dankwart A. Rustow, societal consensus on the boundaries of the political community was the single most important precondition for democratization.15 But when a country displays deep divisions along lines such as race, gender, religion, or ethnicity, some citizens may favor excluding certain groups or granting them subordinate status. When these divisions emanate from rifts that predate the country’s founding, they can prove particularly persistent as divisive political forces.16 In the United States, certain divisions have long characterized national politics, notably over race but also over immigration and religion—which is to say, between those who seek greater equality for all and those who aim to either preserve or restore older ethnonational hierarchies. When these disagreements map onto the party divide, polarization amplifies and results in extremely volatile and dangerous politics.17

Democratic fragility can also result from high rates of economic inequality, which threaten to undermine the institutions and practices of existing democracies. In countries where inequality is on the rise, democracy is more likely to be distorted, limited, and potentially destabilized.18 High and rising economic inequality proves dangerous because the rich fear that if the poor and middle classes gain power, the rich will face higher taxes, and they may be willing to sacrifice democracy if it protects their material interests. Economic inequality in the United States has increased since the 1970s to levels not seen since before the Great Depression, making the United States among the most unequal of nations, with the affluent possessing disproportionate political organization and influence.19

Executive aggrandizement (the gradual concentration of power in the hands of the chief executive) provides leaders who claim the mantle of popular authority with the means to disable the horizontal accountability that comes from constitutional checks and balances and the means to override democratic principles in pursuit of their own political or personal goals. Although nineteenth-century presidents already exercised ample power, the power of the American presidency in the twentieth century grew dramatically, heightening the opportunity for ambitious presidents to exploit power and erode horizontal accountability.20

These threats have appeared in different combinations at various moments of democratic fragility in American history.21 When even one was present, democracy teetered. In the republic’s earliest decades, intense polarization between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans nearly brought the American democratic experiment crashing down, as the new nation lurched from crisis to crisis: the Whiskey Rebellion, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and ultimately the election of 1800, which ended peacefully, although not without the threat of violent conflict.

Twice in the nineteenth century, during the 1850s and the 1890s, three threats combined: polarization, racial conflict, and economic inequality. The 1850s saw the culmination of a decades-long conflict over slavery, ultimately ending in secession and civil war after the South refused to accept Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1860. In the 1890s, Southern white supremacists rose up to violently overthrow democratically elected multiracial governments and eventually to disenfranchise African Americans, who had gained citizenship after the Civil War. Four million Black men were stripped of voting rights and political power in this reversal, paving the way for the rise of the Jim Crow era and the persistence of white supremacy and authoritarian rule in the South for more than six decades.

In the twentieth century, as the problems government was expected to solve grew more complex and the federal government expanded to meet them, executive power began to grow as well. During the Great Depression, when many Americans despaired about the future of liberal democracy and looked admiringly across the Atlantic to authoritarian responses in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was willing and even eager to embrace greater executive power to address first the economic crisis and then the global totalitarian threat.22 During the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to use tools of executive power that were first developed in the Roosevelt era as weapons to punish his enemies and ensure his own reelection, creating a constitutional crisis and undermining citizens’ confidence in core democratic institutions.

Today, for the first time, we face all four threats simultaneously. It is this unprecedented confluence, more than the rise to power of a single leader, that lies behind the contemporary crisis of American democracy. Each threat has been rising for decades and all have grown deeply entrenched while dangerously combining with each other. Donald Trump’s polarizing first term (2017–2021) did little to assuage these conditions as he persistently stoked white supremacy, did the bidding of the wealthy, used the powers of the presidency to further his own personal and political aims, and unleashed violent forces of nihilism and chaos that resulted in seditious insurrection. All with the approbation of his partisan enablers.

An additional thread that runs through these episodes is violence, often organized and frequently engaging the military apparatus of the state. In some instances, external wars have provoked democratizing reforms. Political scientists Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith argue that substantial progress toward racial equality and inclusion in American politics has come only after large-scale wars that entailed extensive national mobilization that included Black Americans and invoked a contrast between a racist enemy and the United States’ own inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic ideals.23 These conditions apply in particular to the Civil War and World War II, which were followed by what historian C. Vann Woodward called the “two reconstructions”: the First Reconstruction after the Civil War, which sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to remake the South as a democracy, and the Second Reconstruction of the mid-twentieth century, which characterized the civil rights revolution that brought about the demise of Jim Crow and culminated in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.24 After World War II, the Cold War also pushed the country toward democratization. Not only did the country’s treatment of racial minorities provide fodder for Soviet propaganda about liberal democracy’s deficiencies, but it also complicated American foreign policy efforts, especially in the developing world, even though the Red Scare of McCarthyism and the postwar Lavender Scare represented contrary, antidemocratic impulses.25

More routinely, however, violence at home has punctuated moments of democratic crisis in American history and these episodes have often involved the state’s war-making capabilities, ranging from state militias and the National Guard to the regular army, rooted in authority that is as old as the republic itself. These episodes have not, on the whole, been democracy-friendly.

In the 1790s, despite the founding generation’s notional antipathy to political parties, the country quickly polarized into two antagonistic groups, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, who espoused competing visions of the country’s future and viewed each other as a threat to the republic’s very existence.26 Violence often broke out between these groups, in the streets and even in the halls of Congress.27 In 1794, what had begun as a tax revolt in southwestern Pennsylvania against a federal excise tax on whiskey escalated into armed insurrection. President George Washington federalized several regional militias, authorized a draft to expand their ranks, and personally led the assembled troops in what turned out to be a bloodless operation—the only time a sitting U.S. president has led troops in the field against American citizens. During the hotly contested 1800 presidential election between Federalist John Adams and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, which was ultimately decided by the House of Representatives, both sides had assembled militias ready to contest the outcome before Alexander Hamilton’s energetic and savvy politicking helped engineer a settlement.

Again in the 1850s, the nation’s military forces were implicated in the run-up to the Civil War. In the episode known as “Bleeding Kansas,” recurring and escalating political violence between pro- and antislavery militias in the Kansas Territory necessitated the mobilization of the army several times to quell a conflict that foreshadowed the sectional war that would come in the next decade. Federal military force was also a key cog in the enforcement machinery of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, especially after U.S. Attorney General Caleb Cushing’s ruling that federal marshals (the federal government’s earliest armed law enforcement body) could deputize regular army officers into the pursuit of alleged fugitives.28 Most famously, in 1859, a detachment of U.S. marines was sent to recapture the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), which had been seized by John Brown and his abolitionist band. (The operation was commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee and his young aide, Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.)

After the horrific violence of the Civil War, violence once again characterized the period after the First Reconstruction. This time it was the absence of federal military force that was telling. Even before the U.S. Army’s occupation of much of the South ended in 1877, paramilitary violence in the region had been rising, perpetrated by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and the White League, as well as more informal localized militias. White supremacist violence continued to rise as a challenge to Black political empowerment throughout the South, culminating in episodes such as the violent overthrow of the legitimately elected biracial Republican-Populist government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in November 1898 in what can only be described as a homegrown coup d’état. Despite pleas from North Carolina Republicans, President William McKinley declined to intervene.29

One generation later, as the Great Depression reached its trough, a ragtag group of World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., determined to accelerate the payment of promised wartime service pensions. Despite their orderly encampment in the city and their peaceful assembly and march toward the Capitol, President Herbert Hoover mobilized the army to confront them after the Washington police shot two protesters, who later died. Under the command of Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur and his aide, Major Dwight Eisenhower, several army units dispersed the marchers and torched their shanties. The operation included a cavalry regiment, commanded by Major George Patton, that rode through the streets brandishing sabers, marking the last time the United States Cavalry went into combat on horseback.

The Watergate scandal of the 1970s did not directly involve the use of federal military force, although it occurred as an outgrowth of an era that saw repeated violent clashes between citizens protesting racial inequality and American involvement in Vietnam and state and local authorities: Birmingham in 1963, Chicago in 1968, Kent State in 1970, among others. Moreover, at the center of the Watergate episode was the president’s eagerness to use some of the advanced surveillance and tactical capacity that the federal government had developed since the Roosevelt administration, particularly during World War II and the Cold War.30 Incensed by the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971 and anxious about rising antiwar sentiment that could jeopardize his reelection, President Nixon set in motion a series of plans to use the tools of the new national security state to suppress dissent, damage his political enemies, and prevent leaks (hence the White House Special Operations Unit’s informal name: the Plumbers). Some of the unit’s more outlandish schemes were scrapped before they were put in motion. For example, firebombing the Brookings Institution in Washington to destroy classified material that was allegedly being kept there, or kidnapping antiwar movement leaders and spiriting them to Mexico to prevent them from disrupting the 1972 Republican National Convention. But other plans went ahead, most notably breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate office complex to plant listening devices and then, once the FBI began to connect the White House to the Watergate burglary, instructing the CIA to call off the FBI’s investigation on the grounds of “national security.”

The recurring entanglement of military capacity and force with democratic crises highlights a broader connection between the state’s war-making apparatus and the conflicted course of democratization and backsliding in the United States. Although the framers of the Constitution were understandably wary of standing armies and military government, the Constitution itself provides for domestic military intervention by the federal government to ensure order and compliance with national law. Article 1, Section 8 empowers Congress to organize, arm, and fund the militia and to deploy the militia when needed “to execute the Laws of the United States, suppress Insurrections and repel invasions.” The president, as commander in chief, directs the militia when it is called into national service. The federal government is directed to protect the states against both invasion and “domestic Violence.” Based on these provisions, Congress passed the Militia Acts of 1792, which authorized the president to call forth the militia when needed. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the lone component of the Alien and Sedition Acts that remains in force, empowered the president to detain and deport noncitizens in wartime (an important qualifier that is at the center of an ongoing legal dispute over President Trump’s invocation of the act in 2025 to hasten the deportation of certain immigrants). In 1807, following a bizarre episode in which former Vice President Aaron Burr was suspected of conspiring to form an independent country in part of the recently acquired Louisiana Territory, Congress passed the Insurrection Act, which allowed the president to deploy the regular army as well as the militia for domestic and international purposes.31

As Stephen J. Rockwell points out in his essay in this issue of Dædalus, the United States has operated on a war footing with continuous military engagement much more than is commonly recognized.32

The Insurrection Act, in turn, has provided the legal and political basis for most of the instances of domestic military intervention in American history—nearly one hundred in all—which have repeatedly shaped the course of democratization and de-democratization in the United States. I focus here on a subset of eighty-six cases of domestic military deployment between the Civil War era and the 1960s.33 These actions responded to a wide range of triggering circumstances, as Table 1 shows.

By far, the most common reason for the military to be deployed domestically­ was to intervene in labor disputes, beginning in 1877 with the Great Railroad Strike that started in West Virginia (and soon spilled over into Maryland and Pennsylvania), and continuing through a strike by Philadelphia transit workers in 1944. The majority of these interventions occurred between 1894 and 1910, mostly in mining industries in the Mountain West and the Appalachian coal region. In almost every case, the army stepped in on behalf of employers and was instrumental in repeated efforts to break strikes, acting as a key agent of labor repression.

Intervention in disputes around racial conflict constitutes the second largest category of domestic military deployment. Although fewer in number than labor disputes, these instances cover a longer time span than the labor cases: from the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850s to operations in support of integration in the 1950s and 1960s. Over time, these disputes have also fallen on both sides of the democratic ledger. In some cases, the military came down on the side of perpetuating racial oppression, as in the case of the Fugitive Slave Act or several instances of urban racial violence, particularly during and after the world wars of the twentieth century. At other times, the military has intervened significantly to protect Black Americans (and occasionally other racial and ethnic minorities) and to advance a national commitment to racial equality, particularly over the objection of recalcitrant state and local governments.34 Instances of this kind of intervention include President Ulysses S. Grant’s attempts to curb white supremacist paramilitary violence in the 1870s; the sending of federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, and Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962, to enforce court-ordered integration; as well as several deployments in Alabama to enforce school integration and protect participants in the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965.35 During the Civil War, the army was also called in to confront resistance to the draft in ten different states, most famously in New York City in 1863, where murderous violence was directed at Black New Yorkers by white mobs who resented conscription policies that favored the wealthy.36

These data, moreover, do not include the most extensive and dramatic episode of federal military intervention on behalf of racial equality: the military occupation of much of the South after the Civil War, beginning with the more than one hundred thousand troops who remained behind in the field after the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865 (although the numbers dwindled steadily over the 1860s and 1870s). The army proved to be critical to the enforcement of Reconstruction policy, particularly restructuring labor contracts, developing and building schools for formerly enslaved people, and above all enforcing rights for Black men.37 In addition to being a key weapon against domestic terrorist groups such as the Klan, the army was also called on in several cases to intervene in Southern elections in order to uphold the integrity of the democratic process in Southern states (these are the cases noted as “Election Disputes” in Table 1).

The remaining cases in Table 1 are a mixed bag. Several incidents involve violence stemming from land disputes in Western territories during the period of rapid and often confrontational territorial expansion that transpired between the 1850s and 1880s. And finally, the “Economic Unrest” category refers to the operation against the Bonus Army in 1932, when World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate payment of promised wartime service pensions.

As of October 2025, the most recent invocation of the Insurrection Act that resulted in a domestic military deployment was in 1992, when President George H. W. Bush mobilized the army to help manage unrest in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King. There are, however, other ways in which we might consider the post–World War II military to have contributed to democratizing trends in American society, from President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 order integrating the military itself, to the military’s longstanding embrace of diversity as a compelling institutional interest, the 2011 repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward LBGTQ+ service members, and the opening of combat roles to women during American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-­first century.

Much of this activity has been, on balance, harmful to the critical pillars of democracy. Intervention in labor disputes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, typically occurred on the side of management and effectively challenged workers’ attempts to organize and act collectively. They also tended to sidestep, if not weaken, the rule of law by using the state’s coercive authority to act on behalf of one interest and against another, and to undermine workers’ claims to be seen as a legitimate political opposition group. This wave of violent labor intervention also coincided in broad terms with an era in which at least three of the four threats to democracy—namely, polarization, conflict over membership, and economic inequality—were at historically high levels. Federal military intervention in urban racial unrest often had a similar character. Typically—as in a series of actions during the “Red Summer” of 1919 or in Detroit in 1943—these instances came only after unchecked violence had already resulted in extensive property damage and often the death of Black residents. In some cases, as documented in a Department of Labor report, retired or discharged white soldiers participated in organized violence against white communities that federal intervention failed to prevent.38 A later wave of similar deployments came in Detroit in 1967 and in Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

But these data about military intervention also tell a revealing story about the role of forceful state action on behalf of democratization. During the two concentrated periods of democratization in American history, when the state worked to advance racial equality and political inclusion, military intervention was a key ingredient of the federal government’s effort to establish and enforce policies of inclusion against persistent violent reaction that was often tolerated, and in some cases encouraged, by sympathetic state governments.39 During Reconstruction, the valence of national military force shifted dramatically, from largely upholding white supremacy to combating it, however intermittently and often ineffectually.40 Most of the cases of prodemocracy military intervention are concentrated during the period between the middle of the Civil War and the 1880s. Aside from the broad military occupation, interventions to enforce conscription into the Union Army during the war and to counter racial violence around Southern elections in the 1870s fall into this category. President Grant was particularly determined to suppress violence by the Klan and other terrorist groups. Between 1871 and 1874, he sent military detachments to several Southern states to counter racial violence, including a long engagement in South Carolina in 1871 and 1872, and racial massacres in Colfax, Louisiana, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. On several occasions, he also ordered federal troops to reinstate (not always successfully) legitimately elected candidates who had been ousted by white-supremacist militias. The contrast between these actions and the federal government’s indifference after the Wilmington coup a quarter-century later is instructive. It is also important to note that intervention on this side of the democracy ledger was not restricted to the South; in two instances, the army was called on to counter anti-Chinese ­violence in the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s.

Once again in the post–World War II civil rights era, military force underwrote the emerging national commitment to racial democratization. Yet the tide had truly begun to turn during the war. In 1944, the federal Fair Employment Practice Committee, a largely ineffectual body that President Roosevelt had established three years earlier, instructed Philadelphia’s transit agency to train and employ several Black streetcar operators, a job that had previously been reserved for whites. White transit workers responded by striking in protest. The transit strike disrupted the production of war matériel in Philadelphia because workers could not get to work, and the president ordered the army to take control of the agency ­under the Smith-Connally Act, a 1943 law that allowed the federal takeover of critical industries in case of labor disputes in wartime. The army backed the Black workers, arrested several of the strikers, and restored a functioning transit system—with Black motormen. The Philadelphia transit strike marked a moment of transition toward the mobilization of federal power on behalf of racial equality and democratization. Although Roosevelt’s intervention in Philadelphia was ostensibly a war production measure, and we know that Roosevelt’s commitment to racial equality was spotty at best, under the circumstances, the action did bring the national military into the dispute on the side of civil rights.

In 1957, President Eisenhower reluctantly sent troops to oversee the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, over the vocal objections of the state’s governor, Orval Faubus. The operation was hastily planned and somewhat jury-rigged, and only moderately successful: nine Black students enrolled in the school under the army’s protection, but the incident was a precursor to ongoing legal and political pushback by the state’s white political establishment. Having learned from Little Rock the value of careful planning and swift execution, the army intervened again during President John F. Kennedy’s administration to back a federal court order supporting James Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962. By the time army units arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, a riot was underway, provoked by Governor Ross Barnett’s vocal defiance and the organizing and publicity efforts of retired army general and right-wing provocateur Edwin Walker (who was allegedly the model for the deranged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove). The U.S. Marshals Service also played a key role in the federal coercive apparatus in civil rights showdowns in the 1960s, on the front lines protecting the Freedom Riders in the 1960s and at the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama in 1962 and 1963, respectively.

The course of democratization and de-democratization in the United States has long been closely entwined with the American state’s war-making capacity. During the two Reconstructions, when the central government pursued a democratizing agenda aimed at overcoming systematic political exclusion from full citizenship, military force proved to be a critical and necessary tool to push this agenda forward. But these moments have been far from the norm in American political development. At other times, military force has played a decidedly antidemocratic role, whether actively engaging in undermining the key pillars of democracy or more passively failing to stem the progress of backsliding. This pattern suggests, perhaps paradoxically, that the stark choice that Malcolm X famously posed in 1964—the ballot or the bullet—oversimplifies the matter. “I speak,” Malcolm said, “as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy—all we’ve seen is hypocrisy.”41 Four years later, at the height of the Vietnam War, social theorist Barrington Moore observed that the “moderate and responsible” forces of the American establishment, who preached for calm at home while perpetrating violence abroad, were perhaps doing more damage to American democracy than the militant voices of the antiwar and civil rights movements who were forcefully demanding change. “The real responsibility for the failures and shortcomings of democracy,” he wrote, “rests upon those who support and benefit from the policies under attack, hardly upon those who are intemperate and on occasion even violent in their efforts to dramatize the situation.”42 As we reckon with a world in which the entanglements of violence, war-making, and democracy are once again on the surface of our politics, and when multiple threats to democracy have converged and real prospects of democratic backsliding and political violence loom in the United States, mapping the intricacies of this relationship remains an urgent priority.