Theresa Bruno was a thirty-year employee of defense contractor Textron Lycoming, based in Stratford, Connecticut, when the federal government cancelled the company’s contract for the M-1 tank. With the collapse of communism abroad and pressure to reduce the federal deficit at home, in 1990 President George H. W. Bush considered the M-1 tank program outdated.

Bruno worked to inspect M-1 tanks before they left the plant, and she worried the cancellation of the M-1 would jeopardize her job. “We work and strive to give [the federal government] a good product,” she said, and she had trouble understanding “why they have to eliminate it.” Robert Koetsch, a security guard at the plant, believed the end of the M-1 tank program was representative of “a plan to get our defenses down, get our guard down. If they shut this place down, and something happens in two or three years, it’s going to take a while to start up again.” A recent retiree of Textron Lycoming, John Morrison, concluded the cuts must mean “the generals have enough tanks to play with for a while.” But Robert Miere, who made parts for M-1 engines, dismissed this logic. The Cold War was over, but the world remained unstable—it was no time for the federal government to sever its responsibility to defense workers. “Just because the Berlin Wall went down doesn’t mean there’s no threat. There are still other countries,” he said.1

Home to Sikorsky Aircraft and the Stratford Army-Engine Plant (until 1998, when it was closed) as well as Textron Lycoming, Stratford depended on defense contracts, and the Cold War that provided them for decades. The state of Connecticut received $4.9 billion from the Department of Defense—the eighth highest total in the country and third in per capita spending—even though it was twenty-eighth in overall population. The defense business was concentrated in southern and western Connecticut. Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford was the largest defense contractor in the western part of the state, while General Dynamics Eastern Boat Company in Groton, which made submarines for the U.S. Navy, was located on the southeastern coast. Like Textron, General Dynamics began to lay off workers following the reduction of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1991, General Dynamics eliminated over 25 percent of its workforce. Such cuts were necessary, executives claimed, to keep the company afloat in a time of peace. (Executives at General Dynamics received bonuses after making the cuts, since the layoffs increased the price of the company’s stock.2)

The economic situation for General Dynamics in Groton was so dire in 1991 that the company threatened to close its doors if it did not receive a new defense contract for the Seawolf submarine—which General Dynamics had built since 1983. The elected official fighting hardest to keep General Dynamics solvent was Democrat and Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd. Among the class of “Watergate babies” elected to Congress in 1974, Dodd was a liberal on most issues: he championed the interests of organized labor and the expansion of the social safety net and was pro-choice. Dodd’s liberal credentials earned him a 93 percent rating from the Committee on Political Education of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), but a 9 percent approval rating from conservative groups like the American Conservative Union and the Chamber of Commerce.3 On foreign policy and national defense, Dodd opposed the Reagan defense buildup in the 1980s, strongly criticized the administration’s Central American policies, and voted against additional funding for the missile defense program entitled Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

But on the Seawolf submarine and its importance to American foreign policy, Dodd was a defense hawk. Dodd argued the Seawolf program was not only vital to the economy of southeastern Connecticut but that it also protected the interests of national security because “stealth marine technology is critical to the country.” Lobbying for the Seawolf contract alongside Dodd was his Connecticut colleague in the House, Democrat Sam Gejdenson. Both sought to cut defense spending during the Reagan years—which led the New York Times to comment on the “paradox” of Dodd and Gejdenson’s quest to secure additional defense contracts for General Dynamics. “When the cold war was alive, Mr. Dodd and Mr. Gejdenson made careers of fighting the Reagan administration’s military buildup. Now they are warning that the country had better not cut military spending too sharply, even when peace is at hand.” In attracting support for the Seawolf, Dodd accumulated unlikely allies, maneuvering a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the Northeast to obtain more federal funds for the Seawolf along the way, earning the nickname “the wolf.”4

Thanks to Dodd and Gejdenson, General Dynamics won its contract for the Seawolf in 1992. When Dodd and Gejdenson visited Groton after news broke of the contract, both men were greeted with cheers, the union leadership telling workers, “Say hello to Chris and Sam. They’re the guys keeping us afloat. We would have lost our jobs without them.” Sue Mack, a weight estimator at the Groton plant, said that Dodd had “given us a sigh of relief,” and she and her fellow defense workers are “going to be loyal to these legislators.” On the other side of the aisle, Republican senator John McCain was quick to call Dodd a hypocrite. McCain opposed the Seawolf program but favored increased military spending and wished that Democrats like Dodd would “at some point develop an equal passion for the overall defense of our nation and weapons systems that are not made in their state.”5

The example of the Seawolf submarine (and its relationship to local, national, and international events) demonstrates how diverse interests supported the political economy of American defense—ones that collectively transformed American politics in the United States after World War II. Cold War military spending created a coalition whose major goal was to keep the military-industrial complex thriving, and this coalition—which consisted of defense workers, community boosters, executives of military contractors, labor union leaders and rank-and-file workers, current and retired members of the military, political activists, and local, state, and national politicians—became joined in their efforts to ensure America’s global fight against communism served their respective interests and ends.6

This book examines the history of this “Cold War coalition.” What follows is ultimately a national story: a story of how Cold War defense spending remade participatory politics and American democracy. For Might and Right shows how the Cold War gave rise to a new political economy; how this new political economy transformed Americans’ politics and political choices; and how these choices created strange bedfellows (ones that crossed the political aisle) in ways that made American citizens increasingly look to military spending, rather than to social welfare programs, to alleviate unemployment and economic turmoil. Cold War defense spending, I argue, transformed the nature of social democracy in the United States, altering American politics and creating a unique coalition of individuals vested in the “military-industrial complex” for personal and political gain.

Key to this history of American politics (and foreign policy) is the distribution of defense spending across the United States—the ebb and flow of defense spending throughout the Cold War. Large-scale defense appropriations provided the basis for American power abroad, but Cold War military spending also gave rise to a “warfare state” at home, one that functioned as a social welfare state for many Americans. U.S. national security policy in the twentieth century underwrote personal and financial security for many Americans, particularly veterans and defense workers. As historian James Sparrow has argued, the warfare state also satisfied the demands and expectations among Americans after World War II that the federal government protect its citizens from threats at home and abroad—and provide personal security.7

And as Cold War military spending financed both domestic welfare and national security, it transformed Americans’ connections to U.S. military power. Since the era of the New Deal, defense spending bankrolled weapons building, but also health care benefits to veterans, housing subsidies and education grants for military families, and companies that invested in scientific research and development. Defense spending supported public works projects in the 1930s, the construction of airports and highway systems during World War II, and research centers in American universities in the 1950s and ’60s. As a result, defense spending transformed industry and the labor market across the United States—from the Rust Belt, through the Sunbelt, and up and down much of the West Coast. Jobs in infrastructure, manufacturing, clerical work, and research and development followed, as did a host of businesses (both large and small) that catered to the consumerist needs of defense workers. Defense spending therefore created local economies where the proverbial coffee shop, pharmacy, or department store was just as reliant upon military spending as the workers in the plants.8

The Cold War thus created a large group of Americans who sought to capitalize on the financial incentives offered by a large defense budget. These Americans made up an important constituency within the Cold War coalition. Defense spending animated job prospects for Americans across suburban towns (Bethpage, New York on Long Island, or Newton, Massachusetts) and large cities like Detroit, Seattle, St. Louis, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C., and gave Americans a heightened sense of the role the federal government played in their lives, as federal decisions affected the next defense contract for their town, city, county, or district. As financial “captives” of the military-industrial complex, the livelihoods of those employed by—or who invested in—defense spending also inspired their political preferences and choices. When hard times inevitably fell upon defense workers and executives—and communities who depended on the military—they were reminded of how national security affected their lives in profound ways. Cuts to the defense budget entailed economic anxiety and uncertainty, which they sought to avoid at all costs.

The looming fear of defense cuts—and the inevitable job losses that followed—therefore mobilized members of the Cold War coalition to lobby elected officials to increase defense spending after 1945. As was clear from the comments made by Dodd and Connecticut defense workers, employees of the Cold War military-industrial complex possessed significant leverage over members of Congress. When General Dynamics employee Sue Mack said she and her colleagues were “going to be loyal” to Dodd and Gejdenson, she encapsulated how the national security state rested on democratic approval (or acceptance) from ordinary Americans. Defense capitalism survived by the electoral process, by the fact that defense offered jobs and financial security for many Americans who did not want to give them up and who promised to reward politicians that produced—and protected—those jobs. Politicians from both major parties were beholden to these pressures, which only increased in the Cold War as defense spending declined as a percentage of GDP. And once large donors and organizations—not just workers—lobbied for defense spending on behalf of their constituents, those pressures mounted. In addition to corporate lobbying by defense contractors, the defense industry had powerful allies within labor, including in the International Association of Machinists—represented by the AFL-CIO—as well as groups friendly to defense business, among them the National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce. Republicans and Democrats in Congress, fearing the electoral repercussions, often caved to their collective demands for more defense contracts—making them, too, part of the Cold War coalition.9

But defense spending influenced, rather than determined, the politics of the Cold War coalition—whose political behavior was riddled with contradictions, rather than consistencies—throughout the United States. Individuals within the defense industry in states like Indiana and Washington defended the military-industrial complex but opposed its role in perpetuating the Vietnam War; others in New York and South Carolina argued for the federal government to mandate better wages and benefits in the defense workforce but wanted to reduce federal benefits provided to other Americans; residents of states like Colorado and California wanted more defense contracts to build intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) but encouraged policy makers not to deploy them to resolve international crises; in places like Wyoming and North Dakota, residents vowed to defeat communism with military superiority but protested when the government built missile silos and fallout shelters in their towns and neighborhoods. And some defense workers in states like Massachusetts wanted to do away with their defense jobs altogether—and replace them with peacetime work.10

These political positions can be classified as neither “left” nor “right,” “liberal” nor “conservative.” Such cognitive dissonance within the Cold War coalition had stark implications for electoral politics in the United States. Few defense workers in the Northeast and Northwest were wedded to conservative causes—even fewer still were the ideological foot soldiers for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign or right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society.11 While the converse might be true in areas such as Southern California, states in the Northeast, particularly New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, received a significant number of individual defense contracts, even more than the Pacific region of the country after 1966, but were not hotbeds of conservative activism.12

The impact of Cold War defense spending on American politics therefore goes far beyond dollars and cents—and beyond the parochial concerns faced by members of the Cold War coalition. Indeed, the Cold War created a marriage of convenience between those who materially benefited from defense spending and groups of national political actors who backed the defense economy for ideological reasons. These national figures—like local defense workers and employers too—did not fall into simple partisan categories. The first of these groups consisted of national security elites, including policy makers and diplomats. Many of these elites were foreign policy intellectuals whose anticommunism formed the basis of their support for increased defense spending. This list includes Cold War liberals and such neoconservatives as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Dorothy Fosdick, Paul Nitze, Paul Wolfowitz, Edward Teller, and Richard Perle, many of whom had policy positions in the federal government during the Cold War and were unencumbered by the pressures of elected office. The Cold War coalition also included right-wing intellectuals and activists such as National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. and the antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly. As an advocacy group, right-wing intellectuals and activists had little influence on policy making in Washington, D.C., but policy makers and presidents (such as Richard Nixon) placated them to appease their political base. However, Cold Warriors on the Right and Left played an important role in financing institutions, events, and elections that kept the political economy of the Cold War afloat. They attracted participants for anticommunist “Cold War seminars,” attended rallies on behalf of right-wing figures like General Edwin Walker and Jerry Falwell, and supported Ronald Reagan in his runs for the presidency in 1976 and 1980. This activism made an indelible impact on Cold War politics.

Economic interests among the Cold War coalition therefore interacted with—and at times, translated to—ideological motivations among its members. Parochial politics mattered for their ability to assemble diverse constituents behind the military-industrial complex; to enlist allies who operated outside the orbit of economic self-interest; and to produce ideological justifications and rationales (anticommunism and national security, among others) for increased defense spending. Economic anxieties within the Cold War coalition often manifested as anticommunist ideologies—and right-wing activists (such as William Buckley) and politicians (such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan) often mobilized economic concerns to the benefit of their ideological interests. Indeed, elite policy makers, politicians, and business officials often depended on the parochial concerns within the Cold War coalition to defend, justify, and promulgate their ideological agendas that furthered the expansion of American military power. The interaction between economics and anticommunist ideology generated a feedback loop within the coalition, making it hard to pin down where parochial politics ended and ideological concerns began. The two relied on each other.

Members of the Cold War coalition thus collaborated in their use of makeshift, haphazard, and unofficial means, ones that invariably produced unintended ends for American politics. For whatever reason they came to support increased defense spending (personal, financial, ideological, or strategic), the various components of the Cold War coalition reinforced each other in their universal goal of continued defense spending and the growth of the military state. The collaboration among national policy makers, activists, intellectuals, and defense employers and workers was tenuous on issues outside of defense spending—considering the disagreements between union leaders and conservative activists—but was unified to increase American military might.

Moreover, members of the Cold War coalition did not always view themselves as allies, nor did they always question, or even recognize, their interrelationship. Anticommunist activists did not deliberately conceive of defense workers or labor leaders as political allies, while financial dependents of the Cold War did not always think about or question their relationship to anticommunism and American grand strategy—nor did they necessarily feel committed to it. Since its members lacked, or resisted, knowledge of a formal alliance, one that even included their political adversaries, the Cold War coalition rarely succumbed to partisan rifts, allowing the coalition to be dynamic in its influence throughout the postwar period.

In this way, the Cold War coalition had much in common with the New Deal coalition. For instance, historian Ira Katznelson has noted that the New Deal united individuals who had little in common with one another besides their commitment to a specific version of democracy, one that often excluded African Americans. There is no doubt that white members of the New Deal coalition (mostly white southerners) sought to deny African Americans the opportunity to benefit from New Deal programs.13 But as racist as many New Deal policies were, African Americans received jobs under the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, were appointed to positions in the Roosevelt administration, and voted in large numbers for the Democratic Party after 1936—and ultimately used the New Deal coalition as a vehicle to challenge white supremacy after 1945. The New Deal coalition included white working-class Americans in both the agricultural South and the industrial North; prosegregationist white southerners, as well as anti–Jim Crow activists; white and black women who profited from New Deal work programs; and employers who worked to disenfranchise women in the workplace. Such was the contradictory nature of New Deal liberalism. What tied these disparate groups together in a coalition behind the Democratic Party was the fact that the New Deal offered material subsidies and benefits to each of these groups—even on unequal terms—which manifested in electoral support for New Deal Democrats. The efficacy of the New Deal coalition lay in its ability to provide social democracy (albeit briefly and unevenly) for Americans across racial, gender, partisan, and sectional divides.14

In its makeup, the Cold War coalition also transcended class, race, and gender schisms, and many supporters of the New Deal—particularly white, working-class Americans—were a part of that coalition. A key argument of this book is that the Cold War allowed new coalitions to emerge from the New Deal order, ones that rejected rigid binaries of “liberal” and “conservative.”15 The history of the Cold War coalition is not simply a story of “the rise of the Right,” or its corollary, the “decline of liberalism.”16 Liberalism thrived in the Cold War and in a familiar form relative to the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal established the foundations of America’s modern social welfare state but also used federal power to expand American military power abroad. In doing so, New Deal Democrats relied on private companies to produce and reproduce the domestic sources of American imperialism and in the process remake the United States itself. New Deal programs marshaled defense spending—and militaristic rhetoric—to modernize the economy, provide jobs, and defeat existential threats to U.S. national security. New Deal liberalism therefore laid the groundwork for the Cold War national security state and created a precedent for the federal government to provide social protections to Americans in times of need.17

And just like the New Deal coalition, the class, racial, and gendered boundaries of the Cold War coalition defined its limitations and successes. The political economy of the Cold War had always distributed its resources asymmetrically across the country—and it is true that the defense industry primarily benefited the highly educated, affluent, and upwardly mobile.18 But defense companies employed working-class Americans too. In the early 1980s, 58 percent of the labor force in defense consisted of blue-collar workers.19 Janitors, cafeteria workers, security guards, and assorted unskilled industrial workers were yoked to defense capitalism as well. There were also the working-class Americans who provided lunches to the workers, pumped gas into their cars after they left the factory, mowed their lawns in the summer, and fixed their pipes when they froze in the winter. This work was ancillary to the Cold War economy, but working-class Americans who lived within communities where defense contractors were the major employer realized they were dependent upon defense capitalism. Many of these working-class Americans were the biggest victims of defense cuts, particularly the black working class. Black Americans were barred from many defense jobs after World War II, despite campaigns by the NAACP and CORE in the 1960s to force defense companies to hire more blacks. Racial discrimination in the defense workforce led to the ghettoization of black neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles, creating rings of housing segregation and inequality amidst affluence.20

The story of the Cold War coalition is partly one of how wealth was expropriated from working-class to wealthy Americans, and how American democracy was transformed in the process. As historian Mark Wilson has suggested, the story of the political economy of American defense spending after 1945 (at least in terms of GDP) is one of its decline, rather than its ascendance, its privatization rather than consolidation.21 Defense spending fell dramatically as a percentage of GDP after the Korean War (when it was 15 percent) and never reached its wartime numbers. As defense jobs—particularly in manufacturing—disappeared after 1945, the wealthiest and whitest members of the Cold War coalition benefited to the detriment of racial minorities and working-class Americans, resulting in greater rewards for the economic elite.

Inequality within the Cold War coalition was compounded by the politics of defense contracting—a politics that produced a zero-sum game. Federal standards that determined which company—in which area of the country—received defense contracts were regimented in their practices, but capricious in their results. Those communities that won individual contracts celebrated the job growth and economic development bestowed on them, while the losers faced plant closures and job layoffs with little hope of federal aid. And following World War II, many areas in the Northeast and Midwest began to lose out to this contracting regime, which meant more losses in defense manufacturing and unskilled defense jobs that disproportionately affected the working class and workers of color.

But while inequality proved to be the largest source of tension among members of the Cold War coalition, it was also a perverse source of unity. The complexity of the Cold War coalition was amplified by the fact that its members knew they did not equally benefit from Cold War defense spending, but they still fought for those benefits. For instance, working-class Americans had the most to lose from defense cuts. Because the Cold War prioritized development of advanced technology, unskilled or semiskilled jobs were the first ones lost to layoffs. While working-class defense workers received less material support from the Cold War economy after 1945, they nonetheless remained vocal champions of the Cold War to serve their interests and needs. Indeed, they often worked alongside their upper-class counterparts to increase defense jobs. Despite the schisms between the white and black working class, unskilled and skilled (and highly paid) defense workers, these class and racial divides temporarily melted away as the coalition fought for a common goal: to keep their jobs. In fact, when class inequality mounted in the 1950s and 1960s, and as industrial centers in the Midwest and Northeast saw defense jobs disappear (and allocated to suburbs in the South and West), the strength of the coalition only grew.

Economic distress—and economic inequality—was a persistent concern within the Cold War coalition but became a greater problem in the 1970s. The 1970s proved to be a “pivotal decade” for the Cold War. The economic crisis of the 1970s questioned the promise made by liberals to middle and working-class Americans that the federal state could save the world from communism and deliver economic growth and international stability, giving way to the resurgence of the free market as a panacea to global and domestic problems.

As the New Deal state eroded in the 1970s, increased defense spending also seemed attractive to resolve international conflicts and stimulate economic growth at home. When economic recession threatened communities dependent upon the military in the 1970s, local politicians turned to the Department of Defense for help in lowering unemployment, raising tax revenue, and eliminating local and state budgetary deficits. Even in the 1980s, the defense economy served as a proxy for economic development in areas affected by high unemployment. And in a growing period of austerity, officials in local, state, and national office sought defense contracts to relieve localities that were victims of cuts to social programs, even while promoting such cuts. Elite members of the Cold War coalition prospered the most in the context. American democracy benefited those who economically thrived in a militarized economy, but even more so in the 1970s and 1980s, as austerity led to the erosion of social programs that offered protections and security to the most precarious members of the Cold War coalition.

The 1970s gave birth to a reemergence of free-market capitalism alongside the remilitarization of American foreign policy. The fall of South Vietnam to communism in 1975, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the subsequent collapse of superpower détente between the United States and the Soviet Union weakened the legitimacy of those who supported the reduction in American defense budgets. As the country questioned America’s role at home and abroad in the 1970s, efforts to increase the defense budget were used to justify cuts to social programs, limit government regulations on business, and reduce federal expenditures unrelated to defense spending. Discussions of higher defense spending therefore served as rhetorical weapons used to make policy arguments about the need to scale back social programs to spend more on defense and national security—while using the military state as a substitute for social programs. The decline of the social welfare state (combined with job losses in defense for unskilled workers) heightened bellicose rhetoric toward the Soviet Union within the Cold War coalition, reinvigorating Cold War anticommunism in the service of economic austerity—and vice versa.22

The Cold War coalition, and a political economy supported by massive defense spending, was also a product of the American party system. Political bipartisanship supported a national security state to confront the threat of communism at the outset of the Cold War, with Democrats being the largest proponents of the national security state until the 1960s. Indeed, the enlargement of the national defense budget occurred under the stewardship of liberal Democrats like Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and John F. Kennedy, who believed the federal government could also be a force of justice for disenfranchised racial minorities and the poor. From the New Deal to the Great Society, the Cold War was a “Democratic” war, the national security state having been conceptualized, proposed, and implemented by New Deal and Cold War liberals and being an outgrowth of New Deal policies. The defense industry seemed to offer a panacea to Democrats concerned about the challenges the United States faced in both the international and domestic arenas. For Democrats, the Cold War state thwarted communist aggression, created jobs, and kept American prosperity moving forward, which Democrats argued was not only important for the economy but to blunt Soviet critiques of the capitalist West.23

The anti–Cold War Left—those individuals who rejected a warfare state codified by anticommunism—was largely relegated from the Democratic Party until the Vietnam War. The presidential candidacy of former vice president Henry Wallace in 1948 represented the first major political challenge to a permanent war economy. Wallace condemned massive defense spending in the name of anticommunism and feared American interventionism would lead to global instability. After Wallace’s defeat, remnants of the Cold War Left appeared in the antinuclear and civil rights movements of the 1950s, only to resurface in party politics during the late 1960s. When the war in Vietnam proved that military power could not defeat a well-disciplined communist insurgency, Democrats in Congress began to adopt antimilitarist positions, calling for foreign policy retrenchment and cuts in defense spending in the 1970s. By 1972, South Dakota Democrat and presidential candidate George McGovern called for an $30 billion cut to the defense budget, a substantial departure from previous Democratic candidates.

But Democrats often had to sacrifice their antimilitarism to the interests of their constituents—and to the structure of the national security state. Individuals who supported the Cold War (for economic or ideological reasons or both) would not tolerate rhetoric and policies that eliminated defense jobs without immediate replacements. Antimilitarist Democrats did not have a convincing solution to this dilemma, nor did they have good answers to the problems created by a warfare state. Most Democrats opposed to a large defense budget favored the conversion of defense jobs to nondefense work, but this position never gained traction among other members of the Cold War coalition, particularly after the American economy declined in the 1970s. When threatened by deindustrialization and federal spending cuts, defense jobs became more valuable and important to the communities who depended on them. With occupational options restrained for American defense workers during the later years of the Cold War, the possibilities for a significant drawdown on military spending drifted further from view.

Right-wing Republicans—and Americans who self-identified as “conservative”—faced a similar problem. Republican support for large defense budgets meant that their faith in the unfettered private market was often superseded by their political and ideological desire to militarize American foreign policy through defense increases, leading to a nuclear arms race and a markedly expansive military footprint. Throughout much of the postwar era, conservatives favored—or participated in—the allocation of federal spending to the Cold War economy in large numbers. Republicans appropriated funds for the expansion of military bases, the installation of ICBM silos, and experimental missile defense programs—from the anti–ballistic missile program to the SDI. Right-wing conservatives (and Democrats) argued that these programs were necessary to defeat communism and to keep America’s economy strong. The willingness of the Republican Right to use the national security state to achieve its political objectives therefore limited its ability to reduce the overall size of the federal government, a long-standing, stated goal of Republicans.

The history of the Cold War coalition thus illustrates how the antigovernment, antistatist tendencies among the Right are misleading. In fact, many members of the Right supported military Keynesianism during the Cold War. While they claimed to oppose the defense economy as a means of job creation or increasing consumers’ purchasing power (as Cold War liberals did), the Right understood that defense spending could be a stimulant for economic growth, a solution for high unemployment, and an aid in efforts to modernize and improve infrastructure in states and localities—which in turn created more jobs and growth. Few members of the Right recognized or admitted to deliberately promoting military Keynesianism, since it would belie their stated claims about the proper role of the federal state. But as the Right participated in the building of the national security state, it relied on the Cold War as an engine of job creation and economic development, which enhanced its power. As Republicans increasingly came to power in the postwar period, the Right became willing and active architects of a federal state that contradicted its traditional suspicion of big government.

By embracing the structure of the national security state as an alternative and replacement for social welfare programs, right-wing members of the Cold War coalition also relied on the New Deal state to gain access to the halls of power and policy making. With Republicans at the helm, government entities, particularly the State Department and the Department of Defense, steered federal funds to right-leaning groups that favored a hard-line approach to U.S. foreign policy; and organizations such as the American Security Council, the National Security Information Center, the Committee on the Present Danger, and the Coalition on Peace through Strength worked alongside congressmen, presidential cabinet appointees, military officers, and defense company executives to form ideological and economic partnerships. These organizations—individually and collectively—argued that the United States needed to increase its military spending to defeat the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Their actions guaranteed the profitability and perpetuity of defense companies during the Cold War, particularly after the 1970s when the military establishment came under attack in response to the quagmire of the Vietnam War. The deep-rooted and interdependent connections among right-leaning special interest groups, political action committees, federal money, and employees and benefactors of the Cold War state pressured, if not compelled, policy makers to adopt measures that enlarged American military power. By the 1970s, economic precarity provided cover for the Right to campaign for further defense increases and military interventionism that regularly gained the attention of elected officials (both Democrats and Republicans) and others responsible for carrying out U.S. national security interests.24

As it did to their counterparts on the Left, a permanent Cold War economy proved disastrous to Cold War critics on the Right. Anti-internationalists like Robert A. Taft and Kenneth Wherry worried that the United States’ entry into a global Cold War would lead to a garrison state at home, which would absorb the nation’s financial resources. Right-wing activists like Dan Smoot, John T. Flynn, and Gerald L. K. Smith of the Christian Nationalist Crusade questioned the premises that justified Cold War defense spending. In vehemently racist and anti-Semitic terms, Smith and Flynn offered a right-wing nationalist foreign policy, arguing that federal expenditures on large-scale foreign aid programs (such as the Truman Doctrine or Marshall Plan, for example), defense bureaucracies, and a standing military defied the constitutional limits of American foreign policy. These anti–Cold War, right-wing factions persisted beyond the 1950s, but largely outside or at the fringes of the Republican Party until the early twenty-first century. The libertarian wing of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, evangelicals’ support for the nuclear freeze movement, and the handful of Republicans who favored a reduction to the defense budget following the Cold War reflected the long legacy of the pro-Taft wing within the Republican Party. Once opponents of the Cold War were marginalized, fissures among the American Right on national defense policy were therefore not over whether the federal state should be enlarged to fight international communism but to what dimensions, and for what purposes.

Some clarification is necessary regarding the terms used to describe the political actors in this book, particularly national figures within the Cold War coalition. As implied above, the bipolar paradigms of left/right, liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican are inadequate to accurately characterize many members of the Cold War coalition.25 Since the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are insufficient when discussing the backers of Cold War national defense policy, I have modified them to account for their inadequacies. In denoting a liberal or Democratic proponent of the Cold War, I use the term “Cold War liberal” or “Cold War Democrat.” This term is applied to figures such as Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson, who were liberal minded on social issues, including civil rights and labor rights, but adamant that the United States must answer Soviet communism with military and nuclear superiority. The popularity of Cold War liberals was confined to a specific historical context—from 1945 to the mid-1960s. Cold War liberalism fell out of favor by the late 1960s and early 1970s as the class of “New Democrats” or “Watergate babies” came into office after 1972. I have termed these latter individuals “antimilitarist” or “antimilitarist Democrats.” Like the term “Cold War liberal,” I use the term “antimilitarist” within a specific period and context. I define an antimilitarist as an individual opposed to massive defense increases following the Vietnam War. This term was also used in the late 1960s to denote New Left activists and policy makers who sought a reduction in the defense budget. I have used the term for these reasons, rather than apply an original one that would be anachronistic.26 I also distinguish between the terms “Democrat” and “liberal.” Democrats did not have to be liberal, while liberals were not necessarily Democrats. The linguistic shuffling between the terms “Cold War liberal” and “antimilitarist Democrat” overcomes the vagueness of the term “liberal.”

The terms “conservative” or “conservatism” also need to be qualified, considering their multiple meanings and applications. For decades, historians have struggled to unite the various strains of conservative thought to explain how a conservative “movement” congealed after 1945. Most have acknowledged the theory of “fusionism” promulgated by journalist Frank Meyer and historian George H. Nash. Fusionism posits that after 1945, anticommunism among the Right made allowances for the involvement of the state in matters of national security, even while conservatives continued to uphold free market and antistatist principles. Moreover, conservatives prioritized the private market over the public sector but accepted that the federal government best handled national security policy. The prewar and postwar Right shared the belief that the state had a responsibility to ensure the security of the American people against external threats. The differences between the Old Right and the New Right were over the degree to which the state could intervene in Americans’ lives to defeat the threat of communism.

In applying the term “conservative” to certain groups and subjects in these pages, I have rejected the idea of a conservative “movement” and the notion of “fusionism.” In terms of the Cold War coalition, there was no conservative “movement”—for a movement would imply unity. Many individuals on the Right were willing to use the power of the state to confront economic and social issues, rather than market forces, if state power was deemed necessary for the purposes of national defense. Few of the conservatives in this project were antigovernment purists. Modern conservatives, with the exception of a few libertarians, sought to reduce the proportions and influence of the state on Americans’ lives but fell victim to the tensions between their anticommunism and antistatism, or better yet, relied on these tensions to further their political agendas. While members of the Right maintained coherence between antistatism and their support for an expansive military—both philosophically and intellectually—when it came to national defense policy, anticommunism (and parochial politics) often took precedence over antistatism. The limits of antistatism as the basis of their political agenda prevented the postwar Right from achieving their ultimate objective during the Cold War: ending the New Deal state.

The conservatives in this project were not “traditionalists” who wanted to conserve or preserve institutions. Through state intervention, the modern Right sought to promote policy changes that would reverse the gains made by the New Deal and Great Society during the twentieth century, but they also aimed to institute new political and cultural norms using state power. I consider this analysis when I use the term “conservative.” In a specific sense, many modern conservatives proposed policies that would lead to an even larger military than what much of the public envisioned after World War II. While Cold War Democrats expanded the size of the military and national defense regime to an unparalleled scope, had conservatives taken control of both houses of Congress and the presidency during the Cold War, the national security state’s power and reach would have been broader. Many of the individuals I label as conservative also self-described as “conservative,” further preventing the use of improper labels to a person or group of people.

My decision to discuss the Cold War coalition beyond binary and partisan frameworks also aims to capture the political contradictions and hypocrisies expressed by Americans—to show that voting against one’s interests is often in the interest of many Americans, and to demonstrate that democratic politics emerged from a variety of interests, no matter if those interests worked toward the long-term disadvantage of their proponents. In the process, this book explores how Americans understand the purpose of the federal state and how they seek to hold the state accountable—whether they be Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives—when it does not deliver on its expected responsibilities to the public. It places Cold War foreign policy and the national security state at the center of analysis, since national security interests often defined who “deserved” federal benefits and who did not: they delineated the obligations the state held toward its citizens.27

Moreover, the concept of national security unified disparate interests under a common cause and proved durable in its ability to accommodate Americans’ contradictions between anti-welfarist positions and support for an institution and a network—the American military or military-industrial complex—that was a significant generator of welfare and social protections for Americans. For these reasons, the Cold War national security state proved adept at coopting Americans’ long-standing support for social democratic policies since the New Deal. During the Cold War, Americans were often asked to choose between continued prosperity through exorbitant military spending or the (re)allocation of military funds for domestic welfare. This was a false choice that emanated from the politics of massive defense spending. The manifestation of the national security state as the basis for social democracy during the Cold War inhibited the creation of broad-based political coalitions that could champion social democratic politics, while providing opponents of the New Deal state (and proponents of austerity) a political cudgel—one that they wielded effectively and helped pull voters to right-wing policies.

Finally, while the Cold War ended in 1991, its legacy continues to remake American politics. Democrats and Republicans (albeit to much different degrees) are reluctant to trim the national defense budget, and there remains bipartisan support for massive defense spending. At the same time, the public responds favorably to antigovernment rhetoric, even while 96 percent of Americans receive aid or subsidies from the federal government—many of which are provided under the auspices of “defense”—and continue to support plans for universal health care and a job guarantee. Some of the answers to this seeming paradox are found in the history of the Cold War coalition. Indeed, Americans continue to enjoy the fiscal benefits of the Cold War defense economy—and view them, in ideological terms, as earned (necessary, even) rather than given—because of the absence of social democracy in the United States. How the political economy of Cold War defense spending shaped American democracy during and after the Cold War is the story told in the following pages.