Cold War International History Conference

They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. But the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction. Frederick Jackson Turner drew historians’ what are retained earnings attention to the frontier. Progressive-era historians explained the American nation as a product of conflict “between democracy and privilege, the poor versus the rich, the farmers against the monopolists, the workers against the corporations, and, at times, the Free-Soilers against the slaveholders,” as Degler observed. And a great many association presidents, notably Woodrow Wilson, mourned what had come to be called “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.

John W. Burgess founded the Columbia School of Political Science in 1880; Johns Hopkins also developed a significant graduate program before the end of the century; Woolsey, Burgess, and Willoughby produced Political Science , Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law , and The Nature of the State . These and other studies were general, comparative, formalistic, and, in part, historical.

In focusing on the question of the Lockean character of American society, Huyler has placed on himself the burden of faithfully recreating that society. For this reason, the failure to come to grips with slavery points to a serious deficiency in his account. Although Huyler notes that some failed to share in America’s freedoms, he does not adequately confront the fact that the presence of enslaved peoples squarely contradicts the Lockean society he wishes to portray.

Cold War International History Conference: Paper By John White

The way forward is to de-leverage the federal government by defunding its nonessential proxies and relying more on full-time federal civil servants to directly administer federal policies, programs, and regulations. The failed Federal Emergency Management Agency response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 hit when FEMA had only about 2,100 employees and had recently lost many senior managers. The badly bollixed launch of Obamacare health exchanges in 2013 involved scores of contractors and was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal center with fewer than 5,000 employees. The Internal Revenue Service fails to collect more than $300 billion a year in taxes it knows are owed, in part because it lacks the necessary personnel.

Even as late as the 1980s when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed a new era of glasnost, Americans applauded even as they continued to blame communism for many of their country’s problems. A 1989 Gallup poll found 52 percent held the communists responsible “for a lot of the unrest in the United States today.”Note 19 Of course, the power of the U.S. Communist Party was never evidenced in massive numbers of proletarians rising in protest against capitalists. Rather, the fear of communism was mostly in our collective consciousness. The public hatred of anything that smacked of being labeled communist persisted during the 1950s. When the Korean War erupted in 1950, Americans were so hostile toward communism that they were willing to put their fellow citizens who might belong to the U.S. As Table 3 shows, a mere one percent stood firm by the Bill of Rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

To the extent that Americans become carried away by their political ideals, they are in danger of doing away with their political institutions. To the best of my knowledge only one recent volume had been written with this goal explicitly in mind, and that, Clinton Rossiter’s last book, The American Quest ,24 leaves one with the undeniable feeling that the concepts of modernization and the experience of America do according to political scientist louis hartz, the united states not really fit together. The reason is a familiar one which flows in part from the valid insights of the consensus theory. The United States was in many critical senses “born modern” as well as “born equal.” Consequently, it has not had to modernize in the way in which most European and Third World societies have had to, and hence the concepts and themes of modernization are not all that relevant to its history.

For while it might be appealing to believe that the United States has always been an Algeristic land of opportunity defined solely by its adherence to the tenets of classical liberalism, the truth is far messier—and far murkier. Fukuyama is correct that America has never had a fully “centralized, bureaucratic, and autonomous state”; but he is wrong to imply that America needs one. What America does need is a federal public administration workforce that relies less on proxies and more on full-time bureaucrats who are well selected, well trained, well motivated, well rewarded financially, and well respected by one and all. Washington’s proxy-government clientelism consists of state and local government officials, heads of for-profit corporations, and leaders of nonprofit organizations that incessantly advocate for federal policies, programs, and regulations that they are paid to administer or co-administer, or hope to. For instance, drug companies virtually wrote certain Obamacare provisions, and during one two-year period organizations that won federal funds to implement Obamacare spent more than $100 million on lobbying. While the post-1970 federal civilian workforce has hovered around two million full-time bureaucrats, the state and local government workforce roughly tripled, to more than eighteen million. Many subnational government workers function as de facto federal bureaucrats.

Trade unions, Orren argues, made America liberal, laying slow but steady siege to an impregnable feudal fortress. In 1999, the Yale economist Truman Bewley published a famous book called Why Wages Don’t Fall During a Recession, in which he took the revolutionary step, for an economist, of actually going out and interviewing people. It’s a fascinating book for many reasons, but the main thing Bewley was trying to learn was why, in flagrant defiance of economics textbooks, employers lay off workers in recessions, when the textbooks clearly state that they should simply cut their pay instead. He talked to hundreds of employers around Connecticut about how they decide on pay and staffing policies. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse. Optimists might hope that Trump’s demise will come about when his supporters are reminded of the merits of tolerant liberalism, the best of America’s political traditions. The truth is that depriving Trump of his political support will not be easy, and it will not be pretty.

Government Exam 1 Multiple Choice Questions Chapter 1

Of course, generations of white Southerners remembered Dixie ideology in the Ku Klux Klan and discrimination. But Thomas Jefferson keeps winning as the lowering of the Confederate flag in South Carolina showed last year. First is this idea that American liberalism speaks outloud about the defense of individual rights, but requires an unspoken solidarity among a people born equal to sustain. This is a fair comment, but it blurs the difference between a Union Army fighting Confederates and insurgent Americans of the Revolution fighting British soldiers.

Even in the the consensus theory had its critics,2 but the critics were themselves only additional evidence of its intellectual dominance. For they were in fact critics, and in scholarly debate to criticize a theory is to testify to its importance and perhaps to its persuasiveness. A paradigm is threatened not when it is criticized, but when it is ignored, when people find a different paradigm a more compelling and useful way of organizing their thoughts. In the rather turbulent latter half of the 196os, the criticism of the consensus model intensified, and there were frequent expressions of the need to move “beyond consensus” in interpreting American society and politics. Did going beyond consensus mean going back to the progressive or pluralist models? If American politics were not thought of in terms of either the one, or the two, or the many, how could they be thought of?

Huyler concludes by showing an early republic dominated by Hamiltonian fiscal policies, which, by favoring some groups at the expense of others, repudiated the Lockean commitment to ensure the equal protection due all citizens. These and other polls have been integrated into POLL, an online source for public opinion information.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was a roughly $800 billion “stimulus bill” that dedicated about $250 billion to more than 80,000 federal grants, contracts, or loans to state and local governments, for-profit businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Today, more than two dozen federal departments and agencies spend a combined total of over $600 billion a year on more than 200 intergovernmental grant programs for state and local governments. Washington also spends over $500 billion a year on contracts with for-profit firms.

Creating A State Department Office For American State And Local Diplomacy

He considered Latin America and French Canada to be fragments of feudal Europe, the United States, English Canada, and Dutch South Africa to be liberal fragments, and Australia and English South Africa to be “radical” fragments . At the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that the American experiment had ended in triumph, that the United States had become all the world. A nation founded on revolution and universal rights will forever struggle against chaos and the forces of particularism. A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, scholars such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock elaborated a new view of the American revolutionary era that stressed harmony with British opposition Whig writings and classical conceptions of virtue. In short, these “republican” theorists located a strong communitarian ethos in early American society that contrasted sharply with the previous picture of atomistic liberalism. Over the past decade, however, critics of republican scholarship have strengthened their attack and have tried to reassert the primacy of liberalism, or, increasingly, find some way to reconcile the two streams of thought. An underlying theme of the Gallup studies done during the 1950s was a widespread belief that there were many communists in the country who were well-placed in the government and in defense industries. In 1954, the Gallup Organization and the National Opinion Research Center joined forces to commission a major study on American attitudes toward basic civil liberties when communism was at issue.

• The problem with liberalism, according to Schmitt, was that it was mushy and confused when it came to friends and enemies.
• In the late 195os the distinction between constitutionalism and totalitarianism in the study of comparative politics was supplemented and, in large part, supplanted by the distinction between modern and traditional societies and developed and underdeveloped political systems.
• E. B. Du Bois would write in 1935, was “the finest effort to achieve democracy .
• The consensus interpretation of American politics was a product of the absence of social revolution in the 1930s, the success of the New Deal, and the development of the cold war.
• D. Under communism, the government manages the economy completely but does not attempt to provide for people’s basic needs; under socialism, the government does not manage the economy completely, but does attempt to provide for people’s basic needs.
• Then I chose American studies as a major at Sciences Po, further deepening my interest and affection for the country.

What the multiple tradition thesis helps to bring into focus is that American history has not proceeded—and is not currently proceeding—according to some sort of righteous pre-destined pathway. Liberalism exists in America but, to borrow from a recent headline, “there is nothing inevitable” about it.

Humanities And Social Sciences Online

First, consider Trump’s willingness to attack two of the cornerstone rights of liberal democracies—the freedom of religion and the liberty to express criticism, especially through a free press. Trump has made a series of comments on the campaign trail calling for the state to close down mosques, register Muslims in a national database, and conduct intense surveillance.

“What we mean by nationalism is the desire of nations to possess states to create the peculiar hybrid we call the nation-state,” Armitage writes, but “there’s also a beast we might call the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”—not a nation-state but a state-nation. It was the lack of these similarities that led Federalists such as Noah Webster to attempt to manufacture income summary a national character by urging Americans to adopt distinctive spelling. “Language, as well as government should be national,” Webster wrote in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world.” That got the United States “favor” instead of “favour.” It did not, however, make the United States a nation. And by 1828, when Webster published his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, he did not include the word “nationalism,” which had no meaning or currency in the United States in the 1820s.

Louis Hartz Essay Political Science Essay Examples Essayempire

But we confront some problems that do not fit into the liberal framework. The end is nowhere in sight of the disastrous error in supposing that, if Saddam were unseated, the Middle East would leap to adopt a government based on the same “truths” that we hold to be “self-evident.” At home, the specter of gross inequalities of wealth challenges liberalism. In liberalism’s race to get ahead, Hartz said, the insecurity of those who win provokes their escalating displays of wealth, but the anxieties and pain of those who fall behind cut deeper scars.

Politics was not foremost about securing rights or justice, but about clearly recognizing the existential threat enemies posed to a political community. A healthy polity was tireless in identifying its enemies, and the central role of the state was to protect and preserve its people against foes both inside and outside the country. Trump general disregard of liberal rights.Yet, the unprecedented dimensions of Trump’s own politics have upset this familiar landscape. Suddenly professors of political science will need to make controversial classifications. Many professors will be forced out of comfortable habits of mind this fall. Composing a syllabus in political science is itself a political act—which societal problems are important?

Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny. The popularity of illiberal politics in this election cycle should put paid to any lazy assumptions that either U.S. politics or society are headed in a linear, teleological direction. Despite the best wishes of some—the current occupant of the White House included, perhaps—the country is not destined to become a Accounting Periods and Methods liberal utopia. Liberalism’s influence on American politics has waxed and waned over time, just as republican expressions of nativism, xenophobia and isolationism can undergo fluctuations, and just as beliefs in ascriptive hierarchy can become more or less salient depending upon the historical context. American government is decaying mainly because it has too few federal bureaucrats chasing after too many federal proxies, monitoring too many federal grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars.

CONSERVATIVES dominate American politics because there is no conservative tradition in American political thought. Americans argue with each other so virulently because there is so little about which they disagree. They elect presidents from distinguished families because they detest aristocracies. The more isolationist their instincts, the more likely they are to view themselves as saviors of the world.

These historians had plenty of blind spots—they were especially blind to the forces of conservatism and fundamentalism—but they nevertheless offered an expansive, liberal account of the history of the American nation and the American people. Development approaches to the study of politics, precisely because they focus on movement through time, seem uniquely positioned to illuminate the logic and experience of the polity in a manner that cannot be captured by more conventional political science methods. And yet, political development has come to be seen as whatever historical change happens to a regime, neglecting the normative nature of the polity. The result is an “a-constitutional” approach to political development. This paper argues that political science can and should examine development in normative terms and that attempts to fit political development more securely within value-free social science threaten to rob it of its promise.