The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

lso understood that military power, unless strictly constrained, could become an instrument of domestic tyranny.

That is why civilian control of the military, the separation of powers, due process and the protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights are not inconveniences to be discarded whenever the government declares an emergency.

They are safeguards against the abuses that emergencies make possible.

Yet what happens to those safeguards in the kind of catastrophic scenario the Pentagon is preparing for? When the infrastructure has collapsed. Communications are severely disrupted. Civilian agencies are overwhelmed. Courts may be unable to function normally. Congress may struggle to convene. Local governments may lack the resources to meet basic needs. Meanwhile, the military retains independent power, communications, supplies and operational command.

Under those conditions, who gets to make the decisions?

Who determines which communities receive assistance, which areas are secured, which movements are restricted, and which orders must be obeyed? Who decides when the emergency is over? And who has the power to say no?

The greater the crisis, the greater the temptation to abandon constitutional limits in the name of survival. And the more power the government acquires during an emergency, the less willing it tends to be to surrender that power afterward.

The government has become so consumed with preserving its power that it can plan for almost everything except its own accountability and restraint.

That is what makes the Pentagon’s doomsday planning so unsettling.

The problem is not that the military wants to keep the lights on during a national catastrophe. The problem is what happens when keeping the machinery of war functioning becomes the overriding measure of national survival.

A nation is so much more than its military installations, its command centers, its weapons systems or its political leadership. A nation is its people. It is families, neighborhoods, communities, schools, churches, hospitals and the countless institutions of civil society that make freedom possible.

It is also the constitutional principles that prevent those entrusted with power from becoming masters over those they were appointed to serve.

Without those things, there may still be a government. There may still be a military. There may even be a president issuing orders from some fortified command center. But there will be little left of the republic the Constitution was intended to establish.

So where does that leave us?

President Trump and his self-serving administration of war hawks have squandered so much of our resources, our goodwill on the world stage, and our role as a champion for liberty and justice.  Now having pushed us to the apocalyptic brink of devastation, they’re building bunkers to save their own necks while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.

Enough is enough.

“We the people” should be demanding a government that works to prevent catastrophe, protects civilian life, respects constitutional limits and remembers that its continued existence is not an end in itself. And if they won’t march in lockstep with our expectations, throw the whole lot of them out.

Because as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger comes when the government forgets that it exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

A government that survives by abandoning the people and the Constitution has not saved the country.

It has merely saved itself.

The Constitution was not written to ensure that the government would survive at any cost.

It was written to ensure that freedom would survive a tyrannical government.