I'm reading Frances Perkins' reflections on FDR for an article I'm working on about Mabel Byrd's stint in the New Deal. In what I just read, Perkins discusses the reactions to a 1936 FDR speech in which he suggested America had overcome the political royalists but still had a whole set of powerful economic forces ("royalists" in his sudden splurge of literary flair) to overcome. There is a historical echo here in terms of contemporary arguments about Obama trying to define "rich" as earning $250,000 a year.
"it was used against him, and almost immediately. Many rich persons, even widows who derived their income from trust funds over which they had no control and from investments in enterprises in whose conservative managemetn they could take no part, began to whimper, 'Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist.'
"People who ought to have known better jumped to the conclusion that he was declaring himself an enemy of every rich person, whether one's riches accrued from old land holdings in whose development and management one took no part or from portfolios of investments which had come to one under Grandfather's will.
"Even people who earned large incomes by intellectual or artistic activities, who actually contributed to the economic life and progress of the country, were inclined to believe that he meant them in his condemnation of 'economic royalists.' This reaction, of course, was typically American; it was not literate or urbane, but in some subtle way, I suppose, it expressed a more widely distributed guilty conscience than anyone realized [my emphasis]. I remember explaining to two rich women, personal friends of mine, that they were not economic royalists; that they had no control over anything; that they merely lived off the profits which farsighted fathers and husbands had secured for them.
"Roosevelt was both the gainer and the loser from his use of this challenging phrase--the gainer because people who were not rich reacted like those who were rich but not powerful. I told him that these two women, also friends of his, were deeply disturbed. He laughed. 'Of course, they did not know what I had in mind, but perhaps it was a lucky choice of words. Anyhow, I don't think people ought to be too rich.'
"He said 'too rich' in an emphatic tone of voice. I never knew what he meant by 'too rich' and I doubt that he did. It was probably a hark-back to the older and simpler American scene before the apperance of the multimillionaire, who was a puzzle and embarrassment to the old-fashioned 'well-to-do' and often seemed like an aggressor to the poor."1
What parallels or disimilarities do you see between Perkins' note about "Americans' guilty conscience" and contemporary discussions about taxing the "wealthy?"
1. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. (New York: The Viking Press, 1946) 123-4.
Kamis, 31 Maret 2011
"Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist."
I'm reading Frances Perkins' reflections on FDR for an article I'm working on about Mabel Byrd's stint in the New Deal. In what I just read, Perkins discusses the reactions to a 1936 FDR speech in which he suggested America had overcome the political royalists but still had a whole set of powerful economic forces ("royalists" in his sudden splurge of literary flair) to overcome. There is a historical echo here in terms of contemporary arguments about Obama trying to define "rich" as earning $250,000 a year.
"it was used against him, and almost immediately. Many rich persons, even widows who derived their income from trust funds over which they had no control and from investments in enterprises in whose conservative managemetn they could take no part, began to whimper, 'Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist.'
"People who ought to have known better jumped to the conclusion that he was declaring himself an enemy of every rich person, whether one's riches accrued from old land holdings in whose development and management one took no part or from portfolios of investments which had come to one under Grandfather's will.
"Even people who earned large incomes by intellectual or artistic activities, who actually contributed to the economic life and progress of the country, were inclined to believe that he meant them in his condemnation of 'economic royalists.' This reaction, of course, was typically American; it was not literate or urbane, but in some subtle way, I suppose, it expressed a more widely distributed guilty conscience than anyone realized [my emphasis]. I remember explaining to two rich women, personal friends of mine, that they were not economic royalists; that they had no control over anything; that they merely lived off the profits which farsighted fathers and husbands had secured for them.
"Roosevelt was both the gainer and the loser from his use of this challenging phrase--the gainer because people who were not rich reacted like those who were rich but not powerful. I told him that these two women, also friends of his, were deeply disturbed. He laughed. 'Of course, they did not know what I had in mind, but perhaps it was a lucky choice of words. Anyhow, I don't think people ought to be too rich.'
"He said 'too rich' in an emphatic tone of voice. I never knew what he meant by 'too rich' and I doubt that he did. It was probably a hark-back to the older and simpler American scene before the apperance of the multimillionaire, who was a puzzle and embarrassment to the old-fashioned 'well-to-do' and often seemed like an aggressor to the poor."1
What parallels or disimilarities do you see between Perkins' note about "Americans' guilty conscience" and contemporary discussions about taxing the "wealthy?"
1. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. (New York: The Viking Press, 1946) 123-4.
"it was used against him, and almost immediately. Many rich persons, even widows who derived their income from trust funds over which they had no control and from investments in enterprises in whose conservative managemetn they could take no part, began to whimper, 'Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist.'
"People who ought to have known better jumped to the conclusion that he was declaring himself an enemy of every rich person, whether one's riches accrued from old land holdings in whose development and management one took no part or from portfolios of investments which had come to one under Grandfather's will.
"Even people who earned large incomes by intellectual or artistic activities, who actually contributed to the economic life and progress of the country, were inclined to believe that he meant them in his condemnation of 'economic royalists.' This reaction, of course, was typically American; it was not literate or urbane, but in some subtle way, I suppose, it expressed a more widely distributed guilty conscience than anyone realized [my emphasis]. I remember explaining to two rich women, personal friends of mine, that they were not economic royalists; that they had no control over anything; that they merely lived off the profits which farsighted fathers and husbands had secured for them.
"Roosevelt was both the gainer and the loser from his use of this challenging phrase--the gainer because people who were not rich reacted like those who were rich but not powerful. I told him that these two women, also friends of his, were deeply disturbed. He laughed. 'Of course, they did not know what I had in mind, but perhaps it was a lucky choice of words. Anyhow, I don't think people ought to be too rich.'
"He said 'too rich' in an emphatic tone of voice. I never knew what he meant by 'too rich' and I doubt that he did. It was probably a hark-back to the older and simpler American scene before the apperance of the multimillionaire, who was a puzzle and embarrassment to the old-fashioned 'well-to-do' and often seemed like an aggressor to the poor."1
What parallels or disimilarities do you see between Perkins' note about "Americans' guilty conscience" and contemporary discussions about taxing the "wealthy?"
1. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. (New York: The Viking Press, 1946) 123-4.
Bleg: The (Intellectual?) History of Oil
I am teaching a course in this coming fall titled "The History of Oil"---meaning petroleum, or crude oil. The class is meant to qualify as a world or transnational history, and is aimed at second, third, and fourth-year undergraduates. With that introduction, it is needless to say that this post is slightly off-topic in relation to our overall goals at USIH. But you will see by the end of the discussion that I am seeking cross-currents.
For starters, I'm excited about the course. It will combine elements of economic, political, environmental, and socio-cultural history, as well as the history of science. But I'm a bit disappointed, however, in my ability---thus far---to incorporate intellectual history into the course plan. My closest possibilities, it seems, are in relation to globalism, both as an economic and political program, as well as general economic theory.
Helping my case for intellectual history, I ran across an article by Chris Hedges in the online magazine Truthout, titled "The Collapse of Globalization." There's no denying that the article is polemical and indicative of authorial ideology. That said, here are a few passages that speak to the possibilities of incorporating intellectual history into a course section on globalism and the history of petroleum (bolds mine):
-------------------------------------------------
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.
The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations.
But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs.
-------------------------------------------------
I pose this extreme example of approaching the intellectual history of globalism to solicit your opinions of more moderate and thoughtful critics. Ideas?
And while we establish those authorities, what are your thoughts on an intellectual history approach to any commodity?
Do I need to dig out my copy of Nature's Metropolis and think through some social science theory, particularly Von Thünen's zones in relation petroleum development and exploration, as well as use for transportation theory? Will Imagined Communities suffice in relation to my presentation on the oil states? Will Carroll Pursell's work on the social history of machines (meaning the oil-using variety) in America help me enough in relation to oil-based technologies? Do you have any historical suggestions in relation to ideology and global-warming deniers (business and anti-intellectualism)?
Thanks in advance for your help. - TL
For starters, I'm excited about the course. It will combine elements of economic, political, environmental, and socio-cultural history, as well as the history of science. But I'm a bit disappointed, however, in my ability---thus far---to incorporate intellectual history into the course plan. My closest possibilities, it seems, are in relation to globalism, both as an economic and political program, as well as general economic theory.
Helping my case for intellectual history, I ran across an article by Chris Hedges in the online magazine Truthout, titled "The Collapse of Globalization." There's no denying that the article is polemical and indicative of authorial ideology. That said, here are a few passages that speak to the possibilities of incorporating intellectual history into a course section on globalism and the history of petroleum (bolds mine):
-------------------------------------------------
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations.
But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. -------------------------------------------------
I pose this extreme example of approaching the intellectual history of globalism to solicit your opinions of more moderate and thoughtful critics. Ideas?
And while we establish those authorities, what are your thoughts on an intellectual history approach to any commodity?
Do I need to dig out my copy of Nature's Metropolis and think through some social science theory, particularly Von Thünen's zones in relation petroleum development and exploration, as well as use for transportation theory? Will Imagined Communities suffice in relation to my presentation on the oil states? Will Carroll Pursell's work on the social history of machines (meaning the oil-using variety) in America help me enough in relation to oil-based technologies? Do you have any historical suggestions in relation to ideology and global-warming deniers (business and anti-intellectualism)? Thanks in advance for your help. - TL
Bleg: The (Intellectual?) History of Oil
I am teaching a course in this coming fall titled "The History of Oil"---meaning petroleum, or crude oil. The class is meant to qualify as a world or transnational history, and is aimed at second, third, and fourth-year undergraduates. With that introduction, it is needless to say that this post is slightly off-topic in relation to our overall goals at USIH. But you will see by the end of the discussion that I am seeking cross-currents.
For starters, I'm excited about the course. It will combine elements of economic, political, environmental, and socio-cultural history, as well as the history of science. But I'm a bit disappointed, however, in my ability---thus far---to incorporate intellectual history into the course plan. My closest possibilities, it seems, are in relation to globalism, both as an economic and political program, as well as general economic theory.
Helping my case for intellectual history, I ran across an article by Chris Hedges in the online magazine Truthout, titled "The Collapse of Globalization." There's no denying that the article is polemical and indicative of authorial ideology. That said, here are a few passages that speak to the possibilities of incorporating intellectual history into a course section on globalism and the history of petroleum (bolds mine):
-------------------------------------------------
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.
The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations.But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs.
-------------------------------------------------
I pose this extreme example of approaching the intellectual history of globalism to solicit your opinions of more moderate and thoughtful critics. Ideas?
And while we establish those authorities, what are your thoughts on an intellectual history approach to any commodity? Do I need to dig out my copy of Nature's Metropolis and think through some social science theory, particularly Von Thünen's zones in relation petroleum development and exploration, as well as use for transportation theory? Will Imagined Communities suffice in relation to my presentation on the oil states? Will Carroll Pursell's work on the social history of machines (meaning the oil-using variety) in America help me enough in relation to oil-based technologies? Do you have any historical suggestions in relation to ideology and global-warming deniers (business and anti-intellectualism)?
Thanks in advance for your help. - TL
For starters, I'm excited about the course. It will combine elements of economic, political, environmental, and socio-cultural history, as well as the history of science. But I'm a bit disappointed, however, in my ability---thus far---to incorporate intellectual history into the course plan. My closest possibilities, it seems, are in relation to globalism, both as an economic and political program, as well as general economic theory.
Helping my case for intellectual history, I ran across an article by Chris Hedges in the online magazine Truthout, titled "The Collapse of Globalization." There's no denying that the article is polemical and indicative of authorial ideology. That said, here are a few passages that speak to the possibilities of incorporating intellectual history into a course section on globalism and the history of petroleum (bolds mine):
-------------------------------------------------
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations.
But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. -------------------------------------------------
I pose this extreme example of approaching the intellectual history of globalism to solicit your opinions of more moderate and thoughtful critics. Ideas?
And while we establish those authorities, what are your thoughts on an intellectual history approach to any commodity?
Do I need to dig out my copy of Nature's Metropolis and think through some social science theory, particularly Von Thünen's zones in relation petroleum development and exploration, as well as use for transportation theory? Will Imagined Communities suffice in relation to my presentation on the oil states? Will Carroll Pursell's work on the social history of machines (meaning the oil-using variety) in America help me enough in relation to oil-based technologies? Do you have any historical suggestions in relation to ideology and global-warming deniers (business and anti-intellectualism)? Thanks in advance for your help. - TL
X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"
Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:
1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.
2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.
3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.
4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?
5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:
1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.
2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.
3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.
4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?
5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.
X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"
Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:
1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.
2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.
3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.
4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?
5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:
1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.
2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.
3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.
4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?
5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.
Rabu, 30 Maret 2011
The End of American Exceptionalism? No Kidding.
On Monday night, March 28, President Obama defended American intervention in the Libyan civil war. Many pundits had anticipated the president's remarks as a signal of what might come to be called, the "Obama Doctrine." The president, though, disappointed those hopes. His speech became noteworthy for what it did not address as much for what it did. For many observers, Obama's unwillingness to exert leadership over the multi-national force taking on Moammar Gaddafi made his position and that of the United States rather, well, unexceptional. The U.S. was just like any other member of a coalition.Such action made Josef Joffe, the all-purpose pro-America European pundit, declare an end to American Exceptionalism. Joffe wrote in the New York Times that the Obama Doctrine, if there really is one, offers the world a vision of "America Lite." "There is nothing wrong with bringing ends in line with means and interest," Joffe allowed. "It’s the American way — and the way of all great powers. And yet. The Obama doctrine is to Truman et al. like chardonnay to moonshine: pleasing to the palate and easy on the blood, but without punch and power -- kind of un-American, isn't it?"
Is it? Or better, what is American about our understanding of American Exceptionalism?
We have discussed this issue before on this blog and will do so at the 2011 conference. But there was a convergence this past week that made me wonder how many times we will declare the end of American Exceptionalism.
The President delivered his "unexceptionalism" speech the same week as Rolling Stone released a special issue on "The Kill Team." For those unacquainted with this report, Rolling Stone exposed an official investigation into a particular American army platoon in Afghanistan and the vile campaign of murder some of its soldiers engaged in. These soldiers have been accused on hunting Afghanistan civilians for sport. The photographs and videos posted on Rolling Stone's website accompany the story of this crime.
While researching the American relationship to war since 1945--primarily how political and theological leaders led Americans in a debate over how war shapes their relationship to the nation--the role soldiers play in defining what America is has of course changed over time. Not surprisingly, other than the initial burst of euphoria for returning troops following World War II, there had been little effort to glorify the American soldier as a significant representative of American power and ideals.
It seems to me that perception changed most dramatically in mid-1990s. Certainly Reagan talked big about the military, and George H.W. Bush hoped the Gulf War would cleanse the nation and its military of the malaise created by Vietnam. But it was the rise of the third generation of neocons (as Justin Vaisse calls them in his book) that remade the American soldier into the symbol of American Exceptionalism--or in my terms, the medieval Jesuits of a modern American theology of exceptionalism.
In perhaps the most celebrated essay by this third generation of neocons, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," William Kristol and Robert Kagan declared:"There is no more profound responsibility than the defense of the nation and its principles." Of course, their argument was that Americans had been allowed to forget this understanding, which had led to a general fracturing American-ness, the eruption of the culture wars, and a fading sense of exceptionalism.
Their point was that throughout the 1990s, the American public had been distracted—had been allowed to grow distracted—by the lack of a coherent martial vision. Kagan and Kristol believed that the American military was not some unfortunate appendage of a peace-loving, civic polis, but an essential branch of the American system of ideals. “It is foolish to imagine" they wrote, "that the Untied States can lead the world effectively while the overwhelming majority of the population neither understands nor is involved, in any real way, with its international mission." They clearly believed that the military stood as the sole institution in American public life that should command universal admiration. Americans needed to be reminded, educated, and trained, Kagan and Kristol claimed, in “military virtues.”
Americans need moral clarity--an activist foreign policy would remoralize America itself. America need war.
I don't know if Obama reminded Americans that they are not immune to the moral catastrophes of war. Like all other presidents before him, he praised and thanked the military for, yet again, taking on the burdens of war and for doing their jobs with courage. Yet Joffe saw Obama's speech as cautious, an abdication of America's "claim to world power and responsibility." Truly, an activist foreign policy has made America an exceptional nation, but surely we should remember that such activism comes with consequences that can be considered exceptional in ways that are possibly heroic and possibly horrific. If we can claim heroism as American, must we not also claim the horror? This has indeed been a week to end American exceptionalism, again.The End of American Exceptionalism? No Kidding.
On Monday night, March 28, President Obama defended American intervention in the Libyan civil war. Many pundits had anticipated the president's remarks as a signal of what might come to be called, the "Obama Doctrine." The president, though, disappointed those hopes. His speech became noteworthy for what it did not address as much for what it did. For many observers, Obama's unwillingness to exert leadership over the multi-national force taking on Moammar Gaddafi made his position and that of the United States rather, well, unexceptional. The U.S. was just like any other member of a coalition.Such action made Josef Joffe, the all-purpose pro-America European pundit, declare an end to American Exceptionalism. Joffe wrote in the New York Times that the Obama Doctrine, if there really is one, offers the world a vision of "America Lite." "There is nothing wrong with bringing ends in line with means and interest," Joffe allowed. "It’s the American way — and the way of all great powers. And yet. The Obama doctrine is to Truman et al. like chardonnay to moonshine: pleasing to the palate and easy on the blood, but without punch and power -- kind of un-American, isn't it?"
Is it? Or better, what is American about our understanding of American Exceptionalism?
We have discussed this issue before on this blog and will do so at the 2011 conference. But there was a convergence this past week that made me wonder how many times we will declare the end of American Exceptionalism.
The President delivered his "unexceptionalism" speech the same week as Rolling Stone released a special issue on "The Kill Team." For those unacquainted with this report, Rolling Stone exposed an official investigation into a particular American army platoon in Afghanistan and the vile campaign of murder some of its soldiers engaged in. These soldiers have been accused on hunting Afghanistan civilians for sport. The photographs and videos posted on Rolling Stone's website accompany the story of this crime.
While researching the American relationship to war since 1945--primarily how political and theological leaders led Americans in a debate over how war shapes their relationship to the nation--the role soldiers play in defining what America is has of course changed over time. Not surprisingly, other than the initial burst of euphoria for returning troops following World War II, there had been little effort to glorify the American soldier as a significant representative of American power and ideals.
It seems to me that perception changed most dramatically in mid-1990s. Certainly Reagan talked big about the military, and George H.W. Bush hoped the Gulf War would cleanse the nation and its military of the malaise created by Vietnam. But it was the rise of the third generation of neocons (as Justin Vaisse calls them in his book) that remade the American soldier into the symbol of American Exceptionalism--or in my terms, the medieval Jesuits of a modern American theology of exceptionalism.
In perhaps the most celebrated essay by this third generation of neocons, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," William Kristol and Robert Kagan declared:"There is no more profound responsibility than the defense of the nation and its principles." Of course, their argument was that Americans had been allowed to forget this understanding, which had led to a general fracturing American-ness, the eruption of the culture wars, and a fading sense of exceptionalism.
Their point was that throughout the 1990s, the American public had been distracted—had been allowed to grow distracted—by the lack of a coherent martial vision. Kagan and Kristol believed that the American military was not some unfortunate appendage of a peace-loving, civic polis, but an essential branch of the American system of ideals. “It is foolish to imagine" they wrote, "that the Untied States can lead the world effectively while the overwhelming majority of the population neither understands nor is involved, in any real way, with its international mission." They clearly believed that the military stood as the sole institution in American public life that should command universal admiration. Americans needed to be reminded, educated, and trained, Kagan and Kristol claimed, in “military virtues.”
Americans need moral clarity--an activist foreign policy would remoralize America itself. America need war.
I don't know if Obama reminded Americans that they are not immune to the moral catastrophes of war. Like all other presidents before him, he praised and thanked the military for, yet again, taking on the burdens of war and for doing their jobs with courage. Yet Joffe saw Obama's speech as cautious, an abdication of America's "claim to world power and responsibility." Truly, an activist foreign policy has made America an exceptional nation, but surely we should remember that such activism comes with consequences that can be considered exceptional in ways that are possibly heroic and possibly horrific. If we can claim heroism as American, must we not also claim the horror? This has indeed been a week to end American exceptionalism, again.Selasa, 29 Maret 2011
Daniel T. Rodgers, Neo-Pragmatist
In my last post I argued that Daniel Rodgers in the Age of Fracture stands in what I called the Rortyean intellectual tradition of analyzing vocabularies. Several commentators expressed skepticism that Rodgers's orientation toward language in Age of Fracture rose to the level of method and expressed reservations that Rodgers would be called a neo-pragmatist, a claim that I had not intended to make. So I immediately backed away from the claim that Rodger was a pragmatist, while holding onto the idea that Rodgers was in the broader intellectual tradition (as Rorty was) of Wittgenstein.But I recently had a chance to reread Rodgers's second book, Contested Truths, and I now think that perhaps I backed away from the claim of Rodgers's neo-pragmatism too soon.
Daniel T. Rodgers, Neo-Pragmatist
In my last post I argued that Daniel Rodgers in the Age of Fracture stands in what I called the Rortyean intellectual tradition of analyzing vocabularies. Several commentators expressed skepticism that Rodgers's orientation toward language in Age of Fracture rose to the level of method and expressed reservations that Rodgers would be called a neo-pragmatist, a claim that I had not intended to make. So I immediately backed away from the claim that Rodger was a pragmatist, while holding onto the idea that Rodgers was in the broader intellectual tradition (as Rorty was) of Wittgenstein.But I recently had a chance to reread Rodgers's second book, Contested Truths, and I now think that perhaps I backed away from the claim of Rodgers's neo-pragmatism too soon.
Senin, 28 Maret 2011
have you seen this?
I just saw this commercial today at the gym, on CNN's sister network, Headline News. I was stunned and shocked. My jaw dropped. I was somewhat surprised that it was even allowed on the air.
After that gigantic buildup, you might very well find the advertisement unremarkable. It takes place in a Chinese college classroom in the year 2030, where a professor (of history?) compares the U.S. to other once-mighty empires: Greece, Rome and England. He says that each of them eventually failed because they "turn[ed] their backs on the principles that made them great."
What values did America abandon? Liberty? Equality? No, apparently it was something far more central to the nation's self-identity: fiscal conservatism. The founding principle of the United States was evidently that the government should not carry a heavy debt load. The professor then points out that the U.S. debt was owed to China, and that is why "now they work for us." He laughs in a not-quite-menacing way which, precisely for that reason, sounds quite menacing. The students echo his laughter.
(For the record, I don't quite understand the implied scenario. Did the U.S. sell off its private companies to pay interest on its bonds? To me, a far more likely turn of events would be one in which, as the U.S. loses the ability to make its debt payments, China does everything it can to keep the nation afloat. As John Paul Getty quipped, "If you owe the bank a hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem." I think the threat of an American default would actually be a bigger problem for China than for the United States. In that event, then, "they" would work for "us.")
The fact that I personally am not as attracted to fiscal conservatism as is the ad's sponsor, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), has little to do with my reaction. What I find so chilling about this ad is not its content, but its tone, which is one of dystopian pessimism. (Even the visual palette of this advertisement invokes a very dark and unfriendly future. Chinese students apparently learn better in the dark.) One of the hallmarks of Reagan Era conservatism, as Daniel Rodgers pointed out in Age of Fracture, has been its optimism, which can be understood apart from the movement's actual policy positions. Yet CAGW seems to be arguing that the nation's people, values, traditions, etc. are not sufficient to ensure a bright future. Instead, only a narrow set of policy prescriptions, rather than the people's indomitable spirit, can carry the day. It was that message that I found so jarring.
To be clear, I don't want to imply that I object to the ad. Perhaps the juxtaposition of seeing this dystopia at the gym, between segments on Charlie Sheen and the missing cobra at the Bronx Zoo, heightened my propensity to be disturbed. I certainly don't think that there's anything wrong with this commercial. But if it is a symptom of the age in which we live, and I think it might be, then these may be dark days, indeed.
have you seen this?
I just saw this commercial today at the gym, on CNN's sister network, Headline News. I was stunned and shocked. My jaw dropped. I was somewhat surprised that it was even allowed on the air.
After that gigantic buildup, you might very well find the advertisement unremarkable. It takes place in a Chinese college classroom in the year 2030, where a professor (of history?) compares the U.S. to other once-mighty empires: Greece, Rome and England. He says that each of them eventually failed because they "turn[ed] their backs on the principles that made them great."
What values did America abandon? Liberty? Equality? No, apparently it was something far more central to the nation's self-identity: fiscal conservatism. The founding principle of the United States was evidently that the government should not carry a heavy debt load. The professor then points out that the U.S. debt was owed to China, and that is why "now they work for us." He laughs in a not-quite-menacing way which, precisely for that reason, sounds quite menacing. The students echo his laughter.
(For the record, I don't quite understand the implied scenario. Did the U.S. sell off its private companies to pay interest on its bonds? To me, a far more likely turn of events would be one in which, as the U.S. loses the ability to make its debt payments, China does everything it can to keep the nation afloat. As John Paul Getty quipped, "If you owe the bank a hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem." I think the threat of an American default would actually be a bigger problem for China than for the United States. In that event, then, "they" would work for "us.")
The fact that I personally am not as attracted to fiscal conservatism as is the ad's sponsor, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), has little to do with my reaction. What I find so chilling about this ad is not its content, but its tone, which is one of dystopian pessimism. (Even the visual palette of this advertisement invokes a very dark and unfriendly future. Chinese students apparently learn better in the dark.) One of the hallmarks of Reagan Era conservatism, as Daniel Rodgers pointed out in Age of Fracture, has been its optimism, which can be understood apart from the movement's actual policy positions. Yet CAGW seems to be arguing that the nation's people, values, traditions, etc. are not sufficient to ensure a bright future. Instead, only a narrow set of policy prescriptions, rather than the people's indomitable spirit, can carry the day. It was that message that I found so jarring.
To be clear, I don't want to imply that I object to the ad. Perhaps the juxtaposition of seeing this dystopia at the gym, between segments on Charlie Sheen and the missing cobra at the Bronx Zoo, heightened my propensity to be disturbed. I certainly don't think that there's anything wrong with this commercial. But if it is a symptom of the age in which we live, and I think it might be, then these may be dark days, indeed.
The Cronon Affair and the Political Culture of the GOP
The executive summary: on March 15, Cronon put up a carefully researched blog post detailing the history and activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and Paul Weyrich, dedicated to drafting model right-wing laws for state legislatures around the country. In response to this post, the Wisconsin State GOP issued an incredibly broad FOIA search of Cronon's personal e-mails. When Cronon stated the plain fact that this was an attempt to intimidate him, the state Republicans, tearing a page from Lee Atwater's and Karl Rove's playbooks, accused Cronon of all the things they were doing to him. Late last week, the story went fully viral. And in the last couple days newspapers--including the New York Times--and professional organizations--including the AHA--as well as thousands of citizens have rallied to Cronon's side.
Though it should go without saying that I stand with Cronon in this matter, I'm less interested in simply adding my voice to the growing chorus of disgust at the Wisconsin Republican Party and more interested in taking a step back and asking an historical question (as is this blog's wont): how did we get here?
Throughout these events, Cronon has repeatedly pointed out that his own politics are far from radical. He's a lifelong registered independent and considers himself a moderate. And by all appearances he is an unusual sort of moderate (at least in the early 21st-century U.S.). Many self-described "centrists" today never tire of accusing those who disagree with them, on both the left and right, of being ideologues. Only their own centrist political positions deserve to be taken seriously by right-thinking Americans. Such people can even be found in our profession. In contrast to such dogmatic centrists, Cronon seems genuinely interested in being open to views on both the left and the right. This willingness to take seriously the politics of those who don't share one's own politics is an unfortunately rare virtue...but one that greatly benefits historical practice. I'm not a political moderate, but I hope that I am able to nevertheless share Cronon's willingness to take seriously the politics of others.
Driven by this desire for fairness, Cronon has repeatedly emphasized the aberrational nature of the Wisconsin Republican Party's behavior, both in their strong-arm legislative tactics that led to his initial research on ALEC and in their efforts to intimidate him. And he has repeatedly compared this latest turn of events to another era of Wisconsin Republican politics that had national implications: the rise of Joe McCarthy. For example, in his latest blog post, Cronon writes:
In my heart of hearts, I keep hoping that even Republicans who learn about my situation will respond by saying to themselves that this is not what their party should stand for. Indeed, in my own understanding of the history of the GOP, leaving aside dangerous aberrations like Joseph McCarthy, what I am experiencing is not what the Republican Party claims to stand for. It is time at last for “the angels of our better nature,” in the words of another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, to reassert themselves.Cronon is correct, I think, in comparing the latest turn of events to the career of Joe McCarthy. But McCarthyism and the tactics of today's Wisconsin GOP are less blips on the radar of "normal" Republican politics than Cronon suggests. I'm more inclined to agree with Paul Krugman's assessment that this is just business as usual in today's Republican Party:
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. . . .
The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.
But Cronon's reminders that it was not always thus in the Republican Party, especially in Wisconsin, and his desire to take seriously the views of others can nonetheless be important guideposts to historians. Because while I'm inclined to agree with Krugman that there's unfortunately nothing very surprising about the Wisconsin Republican Party's tactics in the Cronon affair, we need to take seriously the task of explaining why this is the case. The political culture of today's Republican Party is a contingent fact, not an essential quality of Republican-ness or or U.S. conservatism.
One of the tasks facing historians of American political thought and American political culture will be explaining how a party and a movement that proudly trace their roots back to "classical liberalism" and that show enormous affection for the word "libertarian" are so devoted to tactics that undermine transparency in government and free and open political debate.
I'm not going to provide anything approaching final answers in this blog post, though I will finish up with some possible competing (though not mutually exclusive) explanations. But first, I want to explore a little more the McCarthyism analogy, because I think it's particularly interesting and instructive.
Right off the bat, it's worth noting two things that seem to distinguish McCarthyism proper from the recent turn of events in Wisconsin.
First, in the early 1950s, there was a broad political consensus in the United States that communism represented a grave and present danger to this country. This consensus was, of course, far broader than was support for Joe McCarthy. Liberal anticommunists were forced to distinguish both between the presumably real dangers that concerned them and the phony dangers that McCarthy dreamed up, and between McCarthy's tactics and their own support for the Cold War at home and abroad. And McCarthy's defenders were able to appeal to the consensus around anticommunism (stronger on the right, of course) to rally others to Tailgunner Joe's cause. McCarthy's charges tended to be vicious and unwarranted, but they at least referred to what most Americans saw as an existential threat to this nation.
William Cronon's actions--even in the heated rhetoric of the Wisconsin Republicans--would seem to not so easily fit into a grand conspiracy against the American way of life.
Secondly, McCarthyism deeply divided American conservative intellectuals. [For simplicity's sake, my guide here will be Nash's Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, not so much because it's the final word on these matters, but rather because I think we can count on Nash to be fair (some might say "too fair") to the conservative point of view (for those interested in Nash's status in the field today, check out Andrew's recent post on Nash's book).] Many were lukewarm about the Senator from Wisconsin. Some, like Peter Viereck and Whittaker Chambers were openly hostile to him. The only thoroughgoing intellectual defense of McCarthy came from William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell in their co-authored book, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954).
Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as far as I can tell, today's conservative movement lacks heirs to Peter Viereck and Whittaker Chambers, who might denounce the tactics of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and rally to Bill Cronon's defense from the right.
The absence of conservative criticism of the Wisconsin GOP's behavior at least in part reflects the eventual triumph on the right of the Bozell-Buckley line on McCarthy. Though their full-throated defense of McCarthy was unusual among conservative intellectuals in the 1950s, Buckley and Bozell would, of course, come to define the mainstream of the American conservative thought over the course of the decade or so after the publication of their book.
As George Nash notes, the rise of that vision in the early-to-mid-1960s--which he calls "fusionism" (borrowing the term coined by Buckley associate Frank Meyer) as it brought together the libertarian and traditionalist strands of American conservative thought--was built in part on the centrality of an expansive understanding of the Communist threat:
[F]usionism as an attempt at theoretical harmony was immensely assisted by the cement of anti-Communism throughout the years of self-definition. It is exraordinarily noteworthy that anti-Communism, one of the three principal tributaries of the postwar conservative mainstream, was not a significant source of tension in most of these polemics at all. Instead, nearly all conservatives were bound together by consciousness of a common mortal enemy. The threat of an external foe (which included liberalism, too) was an invaluable source of cohesion. . . . Their sense of combat ("the final struggle") with a common foe helped to keep them together.Two things to note about this passage from Nash (which appears on p. 165 of the 1998 ISI edition of his book). First, the seriousness of this existential struggle convinced most self-identified libertarian conservatives to put aside many of their scruples about about state power and individual freedom for the duration (as it were). And because the struggle with liberalism was, in effect, the same struggle as the struggle with communism, even the kinds of flimsy connections to communism that Joe McCarthy provided were unnecessary for a threat from the left to be seen as existential and thus requiring extraordinary exceptions to libertarian conservatives' nominal commitments to individual liberty.
So the first potential explanation of the GOP's role in the Cronon affair is that it is simply the continuation of this attitude toward liberalism. There are of course many additional intellectual dots that need to be connected here. For example, ideas about the New Class (which USIH has frequently blogged about) might provide important intermediate steps that have apparently led so many on the right to see a politically moderate and extraordinarily distinguished U.S. historian as a threat to the republic.
Of course, that entire line of thought may be too high-minded. Perhaps the tactics of the Wisconsin Republican Party, however typical they may have become, may be less the stuff of ideas and more simply political habits. Here one might turn to Rick Perlstein's notion that, since at least the late 1960s, we've been living in "Nixonland," a place in which the right manipulates various social divisions for its own political gain. If Nixon is, in some sense, the author of the political culture of today's GOP, then the best explanation for it lies less in ideology (whatever Nixon was, he wasn't much of an ideologue), and more in a kind of ruthless political pragmatism, backed up by some sense that everybody does it, that if you don't screw the bastards on the other side, the bastards on the other side will screw you.
But one can also gesture toward a more intellectual strain of moral cynicism and illiberalism on the right. In recent years, Leo Strauss's name has frequently come up as an explanation for the political style of the contemporary GOP. The argument that Strauss is responsible for the tone of the Republican Party today has probably been most exhaustively developed by the Canadian political theorist Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right, though it's received more play through Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares.
This view is, IMO, very much overdrawn. Not that one cannot find good examples of such political cynicism among the handful of bona fide Straussians in American political life. But there are just not that many Straussians. And illiberalism and moral cynicism played a major role in American politics--and modern conservatism--well before Leo Strauss became influential in any way. Any consideration of high-minded defenses of Machiavellianism would need to grapple with a thinker like James Burnham (whose influence on the neoconservatives is probably considerably greater than Strauss's). And Willmoore Kendall's peculiar but quietly influential brand of illiberal, statist, Middle American majoritarianism would also need to be thrown into the mix. Thinkers like Burnham and Kendall did not have libertarian scruples that needed to be overcome by appeals to the communist menace. It's an interesting question how practically important such thinkers were. The tendency of their ideas to function as highminded defenses of Nixonian politics were almost certainly less significant for American political life than the actual practice of those politics by people like Nixon and his political team.
Another possible explanation to note is more social psychological. In recent years, prompted in part by the work of Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer (popularized by John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience (2006)), there has been renewed interest in the idea of authoritarianism, not as a political system but as a personality type. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, it was quite common to explain the American right in terms of political psychology. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Daniel L. Levinson's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was perhaps the key work in this line of thought. But its tendency to understand conservatism as somehow socially and psychologically pathological was also reflected in such works as the essays edited by Daniel Bell as The New American Right (1955; later expanded and republished as The Radical Right (1963)) and Richard Hofstadter's essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
This pathologizing line of thought has in more recent years often been dismissed by historians for not taking conservatives and their ideas seriously. But I suspect that there is an analytical middle ground here. One can accept that some people are more drawn to authoritarian points of view than others without entirely dismissing or pathologizing them. Political scientists like Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, for example, have tried to use the idea of authoritarian dispositions descriptively rather than pejoratively in their study of polarization in American politics.
Raising questions about the authoritarian personality (Adorno), mind (Altemeyer), or dispositions (Hetherington and Weiler) reframes the question I'm asking in this post rather than answering it. In principle, left authoritarianism is as much of a political possibility as right authoritarianism is. Yet studies seem to suggest that in the U.S. today, conservatives and Republicans are notably more authoritarian than those on the left or Democrats. Which again brings us to the question of: why?
Finally, we need to raise the possibility that something of longer standing in American political life is going on here. Is it wrong to start our story with McCarthy and post-World War II conservatism? The late political scientist Michael Paul Rogin saw a countersubversive tradition at the heart of American political culture. If Rogin is right, Krugman may unfortunately have it precisely backwards when he bemoans "how un-American one of our two great political parties has become."
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