The essay will support the view that in order to address the issue of what should the limits of the political power related with the President Lincoln case and the contemporary policies against terrorism are we should make a vital distinction between periods of peace and periods of war. The specific historical case regarding President Lincoln’s actions lies to the second category, while the contemporary situation of terrorism raises again the crucial for all liberal societies’ issue of security. In both cases, we have extraordinary situations that challenge the harmonic relation among freedom, democracy and security.
However, if we observe history we can see that many other political leaders in periods of social tensions and wars extended the limits of their power to a significantly higher level than a democratic constitution suggests. Napoleon is an illustrative case of leader that in the name of the protection of democracy and of the enlightenment values created a police state and declared his self an emperor. Similarly, Julius Cesar also became from an elected official an elected for life dictator. The striking thing in both cases is that people -in their majority- were those that gave them the power.
How can this be explained? And how the acts of President Lincoln can be justified? Firstly, the great theoretician of War, Clausewitz, supported that war is the continuation of politics with other means, thus, although war might looks like a moment of uncontrollable violence, in essence it is just another bargaining weapon in the eternal political game between opposing political actors. In these extreme circumstances though that go with war, the needs of the people and the aims of government change. Each government has to protect their people from the enemy, while the priorities of the people also change. Additionally, it should be pointed out that although the liberal democratic states promote a different set of values than the autocratic ones one of the main aims that a liberal authority has as thinkers like Foucault illustrated, is the one of security, namely the protection of the regime from any destabilizing external or internal threat. If such a threat is identified, then the liberal authority puts the other values aside and makes the protection of the regime its main aim.
President Lincoln clearly faced these kinds of challenges as he had to deal with a large part of the American society that was promoting an entire different political discourse and set of values. The American Civil War was between two sides that have considerably different perception of organizing society which was starting from the economic system and was going to the social norms and values as such. In this context, President Lincoln and any other president that could be in his position would have sooner or later to unify the American state under one system of values as this kind of diversification was a continuous security threat, or to put it differently a bomb to the very foundations of the USA. Hence, both the imposition of martial law, and the dominance over the judicial authority should be understood in the above described context.
As far as the correlation between the authoritarian acts of President Lincoln and the contemporary policies against terrorism are concerned, it is obvious that these policies fall to all the above analysis on the periods of social tensions and wars and the response of liberal authorities to them. In other words, terrorism constitutes a deadly security threat for the American society that acquires an actual as also a psychological character. Religious terrorism- the kind of terrorism that concerns the USA- wants to create an overall feeling of insecurity in all people of the western societies, and to attack the entire liberal system of values. In this context, Government again faces the challenge of protecting its citizens and its values even if in order to do that has to violate part of these values. There are many people that complain for the security measures in the airports, the advanced monitoring systems or the wars that the USA conducts in the name of terrorism. These issues are very important and the existing policies in many ways have been proved counter-productive and beyond the scope of our liberal democratic values, thus they should be discussed and re-examined. In the end, though, we should not forget that every political authority-in this case the President- in situations of social tensions, conflict and wars, might have to move beyond certain restriction and set of values.
1) Baker, Caroline. US History Uncensored. USA: iUniverse, 2006.
2) Marrin Albert. Commander in Chief: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. New York: Dutton Children’s Book, 2003.
3) Zinn Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
4) White James. Contemporary Moral Problems: War and Terrorism. California: Wadsworth Publishing, 2011.
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