The Domestic Use of Military Force and Democratization in the United States

For most of American history, the state has been an active agent of oppression toward African Americans. Even as the United States democratized in other ways, it retained structures and practices of racial authoritarianism and coercion. But in two historical periods—Reconstruction after the Civil War and the “Second Reconstruction” in the middle of the twentieth century, the United States underwent a major wave of democratization—incomplete, to be sure, and still tempered by the persistence of racial oppression and inequality. For a brief while during those period, the American state transformed itself, on balance, into an agent of racial equality. This process of state-led democratization and de-democratization has often involved organized violence, whether perpetrated federal government, against the government, or 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. This paper surveys some of the entangled history of state violence and democratization in the United States based on a comprehensive data set of the domestic uses of military force by the federal government since the mid-nineteenth century. I suggest how the US 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 Reconstructions, when federal military force has been deployed as an instrument of democratization