THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMERICAN WARFARE, PART ONE

Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares Into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606-1865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996) ("This volume constitutes the first of a five-volume study of the political economy of warfare in America--the means the nation has employed to mobilize its economic resources for defense and hostilities." Id. at xi. "I demonstrate the impact of the political economy of warfare upon domestic life and what economic mobilization for defense and war reveals about he nature and operations of society." Id. at xiii. "Four factors are essential in determining the method of mobilization. The first is economic--the level of maturity of the economy; the second is political--the size, strength, and scope of the federal government; the third, military--the character and structure of the military services and the relationship between them and civilian society and authority; and the fourth is the state of military technology." Id. at 1. "Economic mobilization has been carried out largely by political, economic, and, ultimately, military elites. Economic and political elites are closely related and comprise the nation's upper classes." Id. at 5. "Harnessing the economy for war has generated a great deal of political controversy in America. Much of the conflict grows from the fact that economic mobilization highlights the nation's most basic contradiction: an elitist reality in the context of a democratic ideology. During years of peace that dynamic contradiction tends to be obscured, during years of war it is magnified by elitist economic mobilization patterns. Excluded interest groups and classes inevitably challenge the legitimacy of mobilization systems run by the few as unrepresentative and as failing to protect larger public interests. This resentment is exaggerated by the widespread aversion to and fear of government at the national level. Moreover, economic mobilization for war elevates the armed services to positions of central importance, which intensifies the strong antimilitary strains in American thought. Opposition to war among nonelites also often leads to adverse critiques of economic mobilization policies. There is a close correlation between antiwar and antielite attitudes." Id. at 5-6. "Political parties, democratization, and elite interacted dynamically during the antebellum period.  Richard L. McCormick designates the years from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century as the 'party period in American history.' During those years, in contrast to the periods before and after, parties dominated the political process in terms of mobilizing voters and shaping government policy. Political parties, therefore, acted as a bridge between the electorate and government." Id. at 74. "Mass-based political parties acted to maintain rather than to threaten elite rule--no mean feat. The so-called Age of the Common Man saw sharpening class lines and probably the most extreme economic stratification the nation has ever experienced. [Blogger Note: Remember this book was published in 1996. It could not anticipate the growing stratification America is experiencing in the early twenty-first century.] Under these more challenging circumstances, the party system kept viable America's elitist-democratic duality by co-opting or marginalizing parties of dissent and allowing the two major parties to obscure basic issues, position themselves in the ideological center, and uphold the status quo. As a result, between 1815 and 1860 political parties and government from the local to the national level generally continued to be dominated by the wealthy and by individuals in prestigious occupation." Id. at 75. "Unlike the pattern unfolding in the states, at the federal level economic elites did not serve simultaneously in public and private capacities. [] The mixing of elites so common at the state level would not be duplicated at the national level during wartime until World Wars I and II." Id. at 132. "The way a nation mobilizes for war reflects the state of its society, and the Lincoln administration's mobilization methods mirrored the essentially decentralized nature of mid-nineteenth-century America almost perfectly." Id. at 188. "Without massive state relief and welfare programs, the Confederate home front would have collapsed long before it did. Besides extending a helping hand to the needy and desperate, state aid muted mounting class antagonism. The Southern population watched the elite benefit from the conscription laws; ignore the palpable wants around them; resist lending or hiring out their slaves, equipment, and tools for the war; place undue emphasis upon cotton and what it represented; and suffer at most the loss of luxuries. This gulf inevitably caused resentment among the common people toward a social system that tolerated such unequal sacrifice. Harsh deprivation and smoldering class resentments weakened enormously, perhaps fatally, the Confederate war effort despite the attempts of the states and communities to alleviate suffering." Id. at 213. "[T]here is a special irony in the fact that Lee's troops, who were fighting to preserve the prerogatives of an agrarian society, ended up with guns and ammunition but not always with enough food." Id. at 245. And, as a reminder of the value of dissent: "The lack of a two-party system badly weakened the Confederacy. [] Though parties would not have ensured victory, they would doubtless have checked the terrible fragmentation that occurred after mid-1863, by maintaining discipline within Congress and helping ameliorate the troubled relations between a temperamental president and the legislative branch. They would also have given the growing opposition the opportunity to advocate alternative wartime strategies and the leaders to implement them--whether dedicated to a more vigorous prosecution of the war or to a quicker and better peace. Political parties would furthermore have sanctioned and protected minority opinions, including not only advocates of ending slavery, seeking peace, and other unpopular causes but also talented former Yankees...., who did so much for their adopted homeland and yet were viewed with suspicion by Southerners who often did much less. In short, political parties would have legitimized, and thereby probably tempered, criticism of he war effort and the administration conducting it, making critiques less destructive and channeling them into more productive paths. Such creative tension would have acted to maintain Southern unity and sustain morale and commitment to the war. It is sobering, yet uplifting, to remember that a few months before the presidential election of 1864, Abraham Lincoln was preparing for defeat by Democrat George B. McClellan. That reality stands as a rare tribute to the high but necessary costs of an open political system." Id. at 275.).

MEMORIES OF BEING PART OF AN INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY

I received at letter yesterday, from the Development Office of the law school where I had been a student, thanking me for my gift to the annual law school fund.  I found myself a bit saddened, not by the letter but by the memory of loss. Law school was the last time I was part of a fiercely intellectual community, a community committed to the value and the importance of ideas--some of those ideas, I admit, misguided. Law school was hard work, some times physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting, yet more frequently intellectually exhilarating. I miss those law-student days. I miss the younger me that was a part of such a community. I wonder why I have never been able to find such a community again. Was it real, or just a dream? Are the memories true, or am I only deceiving myself into thinking things were better back then? To a large extent, that is what this blog is about: my trying to find or create an intellectual community for myself. I have not been able to find one for myself, an intellectual community where I have actual contact with people. [Oftentimes, when I go to workshops or lectures, I find the speakers and the audiences more concerned with self-promotion and less concerned with ideas, and almost never concerned with seeking truth. The result is a very non-intellectual encounter; or, if intellectual, not a very intellectually honest encounter.] So, I have attempted to create it for myself through intensive reading. Engaging myself with the ideas offered by the numerous and varied authors whose writings appear on the posts and pages of this blog. It is not as satisfying as being a member of an actual intellectual community, but it is the best I can do for myself these days. I have not yet given up the belief that ideas really matter.

WHAT DOES DISPLAYING CHILDREN FROM SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AT THE SUPER BOWL SAY ABOUT AMERICA?

* That even 'tragedy' is entertainment.
* That 'tragedy' is just another marketing opportunity.
* That the National Football League knows no shame.
* That the parents lack good judgment about the interest and welfare of their children.
* That the parents (who probably accompanied thechildren to the game) probably valued being at the game more than they valued their children's well-being.
* That Americans are sentimental saps, and not very deep and reflective.
* That Andy Warhol may well turn out to be America's most influential philosopher.

WHERE LIES A WOMAN'S BEAUTY?

Jorge Amado, The Discovery of America by the Turks, foreword by Jose Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Penguin Books, 1994, 2012) (From the backcover: "Two Arab immigrants--'Turks,' as Brazilians call them--arrive in the rough Brazilian frontier on the same ship in 1903, hoping to find a future. They rub shoulders with gunslingers and plantation owners, and also tangle with merchants, one of whom is desperate marry off his impossible daughter. Thus ensues a farcical drama that produces, in a humorous twist, the unlikeliest of suitors in this whimsical Brazilian take on The Taming of the Shrew.").

FOR THOSE WHO CONSIDER THEMSELVES SMALL 'd' DEMOCRATS

"[I]F THERE IS ANY PRINCIPLE OF THE CONSTITUTION THAT MORE IMPERATIVELY CALLS FOR ATTACHMENT THAN ANY OTHER IT IS THE PRINCIPLE OF FREE THOUGHT--NOT FREE THOUGHT FOR THOSE WHO AGREE WITH US BUT FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE." Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting in United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644 (1929).

Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("[H]ousewife activists based their political claims on women's position within the community and characterized their enemies as outsider elitists who aimed to exploit that community for the purposes of fortifying the power of their office. Housewife activists introduced a new populist outlook to female politics that endured into the twenty-first century." Id. at xv. "Florence Fowler Lyons, a middle-aged freelance writer and activist, led the campaign against UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization]. [] Lyons cultivated her reputation as a 'real fighter' through distinctive take-no-prisoners anticommunist rhetoric accented with hellfire-and-brimstone cadences. Her anti-UNESCO crusade started with a lecture to the conservative Southern California Republican Women's Club in October of 1951. 'Children,' she warned listeners, 'are daily being fed doses of Communism, Socialism, New Dealism and other isms . . .' though UNESCO teaching materials.' UNESCO quickly and thoroughly consumed her life. One month later she gave a dark but rousing speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Encinitas, near San Diego. 'Stalking through every phrase of American life today,' she declared, 'is a stark, grinning, crimson-clad Pied Piper called UNESCO.' 'He's piping a tune he calls 'peace' and the children and some of he adults are following him, dancing in the streets and singing--dancing and singing on their way to total destruction of both themselves and this nation.'" Id. at 91. "Housewife populism continues to shape conservative beliefs about women's importance to society and American politics, as the career of Alaska's former governor, Sarah Palin, illustrates. The self-professed 'hockey mom' ... spoke in a thick provincial accent on behalf of 'Joe Six Pack.' Palin wielded her familiarity to attack Presidential candidate Barack Obama as a dangerous elitist-outsider. Dressed impeccably, with a captivating smile, she called him a socialist and warned that he was 'palling around with terrorists.' [] Palin could attack Obama aggressively, wearing hunting credentials as a badge of honor, and joke bout lipstick on a pig without compromising her femininity because gender ideology on the right had long been reinforcing displays of folksiness and antielitist tough talk as appropriate female political behavior, especially on behalf of the family and community, since the 1940s." Id. at 173. "From the bookjacket: "Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party." "Female activists formed study groups, gave lecture, published newsletters, hosted public events, and opened conservative bookstores, bringing Cold War geopolitics into their local communities. Frightened that communism was infecting the minds of their children through the public education system, these women took it upon themselves to address potential threats. The sense of duty, ironically, removed many of them from the house for numerous hours of the week to perform political work, and their activities contributed to a feminine ideal that Nickerson calls the 'populist housewife'--a political model of womanhood that emphasized common sense, lack of pretension, and spirituality." A unique history of American conservative movement, Mother of Conservatism shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital.").

Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In the mid-1960s, the FBI was secretly involved with three iconic figures: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Subversives traces these converging narratives, creating a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists--all centered on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley." "In this griping account, ... Seth Rosenfeld reveals how the FBI's covert operations--led by Reagan's ally J. Edgar Hoover--helped ignite an era of protest, undermine the Democrats, and benefit Reagan personally and politically. At the same time, he vividly evokes the Berkeley of that era--the rising counterculture animated by the civil rights movement; antiwar protests; literary lights such as Normal Mailer, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg; rock 'n' roll; and LSD. He shows how the nation's leading public university became a battleground in an epic struggle over politics and culture." "The FBI spent more than $1 million trying to block the release of the secret files on which Subversives is based, but Rosenfeld compelled the bureau to disclose more than 250,000 pages, providing an extraordinary view of what the government was up to during a turning point in our nation's history." "Part history, part biography, and part police procedural, Subversives reads like a true-crime mystery as it provides a fresh look at the legacy of the sixties, sheds new light on one of America's most popular president, and tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of secrecy and unchecked power.").

Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("Many decades ago the preeminent historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the 'real function' of the Second Red Scare was 'not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.' Hofstadter argued that nativism, religious fundamentalism, and hatred of the welfare state and the United Nations were the 'deeper historical sources of the Great inquisition.' In his view, these attitudes added up to an antimodern, reactionary populism. Regional and local studies built on Hofstadter's insight by showing that Red scares were most virulent where rapid change threatened old regimes. Political fundamentalists everywhere feared the trend toward a 'pluralistic order and a secular, bureaucratizing state.' In Detroit, though, they defended class prerogatives above all, whereas in Boston religious conflict was key, and in Atlanta maintenance of white supremacy was paramount. In other words, the intensity of Red scare politics was not simply a function of the strength of the Communist threat. Red scares erupted at various places and moments in defense of class, religious, and racial hierarchies." Id. at 6. From the bookjacket: "The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. The influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. Landon Storrs draws on newly declassified records of the federal loyalty program--created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government--to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies." "Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. Storrs finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, she shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their 'effeminate' spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social-democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day." "Through a gripping narrative based on remarkable new sources, Storrs demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.").

Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2012) ("As this book makes clear, presidents have generally not played the leading role in defending the principles of freedom of speech and press, the right to due process, equal protection, and individual privacy. In several tragic episodes, in fact, presidents have authorized gross violations of those rights." Id. at 3. "Why has presidential performance been so poor in this area? Several themes emerge from this examination of the records of the seventeen presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama. The first is that in a democratic society, presidents inevitably shy away form unpopular issues that are likely to cost them votes. This melancholy fact is inherent in the very nature of democracy itself, and is why the generation that fashioned the Constitution added a Bill of Rights to remove certain issues from the passions of conventional politics." "A second theme is that the failure to defend American liberties has been decidedly bipartisan. Democratic presidents have as poor a record as do Republicans." "A third theme is that the record of may presidents on civil liberties is filled with contradictions, with a good or even outstanding record on one issue but a terrible one on another. Roosevelt order the evacuation of the Japanese Americans, but his Supreme Court appointments established the first significant body of civil liberties case law in American history in the 1930s and 1940s, laying the groundwork for the more famous Warren Court of the 1960s." "A fourth theme involves national security. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1930s, as the world headed for another global conflict, national security considerations repeatedly trumped constitutional considerations. From FDR to the present, national security has been a rationale for military adventure overseas, excessive government secrecy, illegal spying on Americans, and violations of law and human rights overseas. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have been guilty of these abuses." Id. at 4-5. "In the end, while this book examines in detail the performance  of seventeen presidents with regard to civil liberties, it ultimately becomes a dialogue about American democracy." Id. at 6. "Wilson also had a character flaw that hurt him in other important moments in his career. The Wilson scholar Arthur Link found a 'temperamental inability to cooperate with men who were not willing to follow his lead completely,' compounded by a habit of 'making his political opponents also his personal enemies.' [] Most important, however, Wilson's vision of progressive reform did not include tolerance of dissent." Id. at 20-21. As a reminder that labels can be deceptive, consider the term "progressive" and the experience of the progress Roger Baldwin subsequently who went on to help found the American Civil Liberties Union. "Two events jarred Baldwin loose form his progressive moorings. The European war in 1914 shattered his faith in progress, as it did for many other people in the United States and around the world. Then, in 1916 St. Louis voters passed a referendum permitting racial segregation in residential housing. Baldwin fought it and was devastated when it passed, particularly because he had helped create the referendum process as an instrument of democracy. The experience shattered his easy optimism about progressive reform and forced him to reflect on the dangers of majoritarian democracy." Id. at 26. "It has long been a truism that democracy in America is the great enemy of civil liberties." Id. at 506.).

WALKING AWAY FROM THE HYPOCRISY OF MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES

Jorge Amado, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray, introduction by Rivka Galchen, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Penguin Books, 2008, 2012) ("It was the corpse of Quincas Water-Bray, drunkard, scoffer, and gambler, with no family or home, no flowers or prayers. It wasn't Joaquim Soares da Cunha, a proper civil servant at the State Bureau of Revenue, retired after twenty-five years of good and loyal service; a model husband whom everybody tipped his hat to and whose hand everybody shook. How could a man at the age of fifty abandon his family, his home, the habits of a lifetime, his circle of friends, to wander the streets, get drunk in cheap bars, frequent houses of prostitution, go about filthy and unshaven, live in a disgraceful hovel, sleep on a miserable cot? Vanda could find no valid explanation. [] It wasn't insanity, at least not insanity of the asylum kind--the doctors were unanimous in that. How could it be explained, then?" Id. at 14. From the backcover: "Here is the story of Joaquin Soares da Cunha, A Falstaff-like character who abandons his life of upstanding citizenship to assume the identity of Quincas Water-Bray, king of the Bagia lowlife and a 'champion  drunk.' After a decade of revelry among the bums, pimps, and prostitutes, he drops dead, and his prim family gathers for a proper burial. But when Quincas's unsavory friends show up with a bottle of rum, they whisk him along on a postmodern journey to enjoy one last party--his own wake.").

HAYEK ON BUSINESS CYCLES AND TRADE

F. A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 7: Business Cycles, Part I , edited by Hansjoerg Klausinger (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In the years following its publication, F. A. Hayek's pioneering work on business cycles was regarded as an important challenge to what was later known as Keynesian macroeconomics. Today, as debates rage on over the monetary origins of the current economic and financial crisis, economists are once again paying heed to Hayek's thoughts on the repercussions of excessive central bank intervention." "[This volume] contains Hayek's two major contributions on the topic: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and Prices and Production. Moving away from the classical emphasis on equilibrium analysis, Hayek demonstrates that business cycles are generated by the adaption of the structure of production to changes in relative demand. Thus, when central banks artificially lower interest rates, the result is a misallocation of capital and the creation of asset bubbles and additional instability.").

F. A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 8: Business Cycles, Part II , edited by Hansjoerg Klausinger (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "[This volume] builds on Hayek's argument that money is the crucial element for explaining movements away from equilibrium, assembling a series of Hayek's shorter papers on the topic, ranging from the 1920s to 1981.").