A lost war can permanently disable a state’s repressive power.

Evidence

The problem with the operation — an obviously indispensable one from the conservative viewpoint — is that for whatever reason, its papermoney rhetoric does not seem to have been backed by the solid gold of state power, as was the case with McCarthyism or during the period of the Palmer raids. The failure of the Vietnam War seems, at least for the moment, to have made the naked exercise of repressive power impossible and to have endowed the sixties with a persistence in collective memory and experience that it was not given to the traditions of the thirties or the pre-World War I period to know. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 182

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the earlier discussion in chapter of how ideological crusades cannot decisively win — here the inverse: failed repression disables later repression. Also echoes the Silicon Valley/response discussion in the reader’s library about Vietnam-era distrust of institutions.