a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

The America-Wins ideology that I described in my last post is made up of a number of ingredients, and this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for those who see it, see its untruth and its deleterious effects, to mount an educational campaign. It is the elephant in the living room of our national life. And the GOP takes it as a mascot. Those “leftists” and “progressives” and “scientists” and “cosmopolitans,” who are routinely accused of being unpatriotic for not subscribing to the ideology, are having trouble getting their act together. Holding the tail of this elephant, some proclaim that it is what we must warn about; holding the trunk, others think we should focus on the secrets it contains. No, others plead, we must first address the painful consequences –for the poor, for the planet, for the cause of world peace–of our elephant’s long cold war with other elephants. “When the elephants are fighting, it is the grass that suffers,” goes an African proverb.

Before I get myself in trouble for sounding like I have a species-prejudice that permits me to extend my metaphor at the expense of elephants, let me make a tour through the cluster of America-Wins ideas and the types of people most alarmed by them. First, there is the one that stares us in the face daily, glaring with angry eyes out from the business pages. Or from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which make up most of the pages of that “serious” (non-Fox News) national voice of corporate-sponsored science and social science (a.k.a. economics). The idea is encapsulated in the title of Milton Friedman’s 1962 tract Capitalism and Freedom. Paul Krugman, Joseph Steiglitz, William Greider –the progressive economists–and company go crazy faced with this idea and its implications.

The publication date of Freidman’s book is important. It appeared in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most frightening year of the Cold War. As a 16-year-old, my high school social studies class was, for two weeks, given over to following every statement made by President Kennedy, our hero, who was standing up to the Kremlin bully, Khrushchev. Meanwhile, my family’s doctor and his family moved into the bomb shelter they had built in their basement and my father ranted about what a coward Kennedy was –did the son of a bitch think Dad’s Marine Corps buddies had died in the South Pacific for nothing! This was about Freedom! My grandfather agreed: “If only we had General MacArthur to put the fear of God in those Ruskies!” I often think of this time when I read today’s newspapers: it was “formative” (as developmental psychologists say) for Americans of my generation. One way or another.

Freidman was about Freedom, too. He had a whole cohort of European anti-communist émigré economists behind him, but he was the homegrown articulator of the proposition that freedom –freedom from Communism above all—is equivalent to capitalism. So capitalism must be free from state control and state planning, which later got the bland, general name “regulation.” Capitalism free from constraint would not suffer the booms and busts and ups and downs that had brought about the Depression and headed the whole world into war, opening the door to a terrible degree of state interference. The New Deal. Never again! No more New Deals! In 2008, still in the echo chamber of that Never Again! we did not have a new, appropriately updated New Deal. We had a “bailout.” Disaster management.

Although the Friedmanite equation of Freedom and Capitalism only became official national policy in the 1980s, when Reagan embraced it, its central idea underpinned all of the opposition to government oversight and regulation that grew and got organized through the period after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a brief moment of successful regulation. For about six years after the Crisis, Kennedy, and then Johnson, could argue that diplomacy (even of the terrifying ”brinksmanship” sort) and nuclear testing and arms control treaties were, really, a good way to deal with the Soviet Union. And, domestically, a good way to deal and be competitive was to build a stronger democracy: to enact civil rights legislation, to improve educational opportunities for American children (so we could have a corps of world-class scientists able to win in any contest). There would certainly be no New Deal, but there would be a Good Society. And it would even include the kind of environmental protection legislation that Rachel Carson had called for in 1962, when she published Silent Spring. A Wildlife Act! A Wilderness Act!

Among the many things that Richard Nixon did to compensate for how disasterously the Vietnam War went and how divided the country became over it, particularly in 1968, was to continue the very popular environmental initiatives –from the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to the passage of the Clean Air Act—while at the same time supporting the “right” kind of scientists, his kind. He dissolved oversight agencies full of the wrong kind, like the President’s Science Advisory Committee. And he started listening to economists of the right kind who recommended abandoning the gold standard, on the theory that a reconstructed monetary policy would help prevent economic crises like the “OPEC Crisis” of 1973. This was a modified version of the Freedom and Capitalism plan. And, it seems to me, it was a shift in the direction of the idea that economic war , with monetary policy as a key weapon, might be safer and, ultimately, more successful for Freedom and Capitalism, than offensive physical war. We could go and undermine the Chinese Communists by trading with them! But, on the other hand, steering away from offensive physical war would –should—require much more thorough preparation for defense. After all, the number of our enemies –and nuclearly armed enemies–was growing greater, the world was growing more hostile to America.

The vision that eventually emerged as Star Wars –the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDF)—
was a vision marking what I think of as the paranoid turn in American politics. Usually,
Joseph McCarthy wins the prize among leftists –particularly those hauled up before the House Un-American Activities Committee–for Leading American Post-War Paranoid.
But among the Sixties leftists –my generation –Nixon gets that prize, and the period of the early 1970s, his heyday, was the period of the permanent institutionalization of the paranoid style. It was the period when the country was dotted with Republican family-foundation and corporate “think tanks” in which it was not possible to think a thought that was not of the Freedom and Capitalism strand. And confusion about the nature of thinking, and of science, began to become normal in America. (This was so even among liberals in universities, many of whom avoided the ditch on one side of the road that was politicized science and ended up in a ditch on the other side of the road that was all-science-is-political or even all-thinking-is-political. Deconstruct it! )

The founder (in 1970) of the Hudson Institute was a military strategist named Herman Kahn, who became well known for a book entitled Thinking the Unthinkable. Kahn spent his time imagining nuclear war scenarios and then calculating how the human species would survive them. How many people would die, what amount of environmental devastation would be sustained, how long would it take the survivors to recover and rebuild the American economy. Kahn had two purposes: to assure his readers with statistics and probability theory that those who thought of nuclear war as unsurvivable were wrong, and to assure them that our natural resources and resources of human ingenuity (now frankly known as “human capital”) were sufficient for survivability. He set himself squarely against the greatest German philosopher of the post-War period Karl Jaspers, author of The Atom-Bomb and the Future of Mankind (translated into English in 1958 ), who had recommended not thinking the unthinkable, but searching for “a new way of thinking” to confront the novelties of the existence of nuclear weapons and to renounce their use. Not disaster management, but long-sighted disaster prevention

It is the think-tank institutionalization of the America-Wins ideology that drives scientists and thinkers of the Jaspers orientation craziest. The Hudson Institute, the Cato Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. The Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, and on and on, produce the working papers that propagandists or the wild sort –Rush Limbaugh—and the “I am the voice of reason” sort –George Will– translate into talk radio sound-bites or op-ed Big Ideas. Out of the think tanks came, year after year, strategies for fighting each new enemy of America. Herman Kahn, for example, went on to collaborate with one of the leading advocates of environmental crisis survivalism, Julian Simon, who has offered all kinds of ideas about how ingenious human beings and the bountiful earth will be able to adapt to the coming challenges of climate change (not man-made, of course). And this collaboration has had such influence that it is referenced in the current issue of The Economist (a ”serious”free market magazine of Thatcherite persuasion read all around the world). Education is to be disaster management . We should all –not just children in schools—take a test in necessary knowledge for overcoming any challenge or at least building the best bomb (or climate change) shelter. (Long ago, in The Aims of Education, the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described this kind of test-taking education as “passing along knowledge that has become inert.” He thought the transmission of dead knowledge, antithetical to new discoveries, was an English boarding school specialite!)

American Free Marketism and American Militarism cluster together with American
Isolationism, sharing assumptions and logics. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, environmentalism has become the Enemy Number One of Freeemarketeers; since, 2001, the “international terrorist network” or the civilizations (Muslim) on the other side of the “clash of civilizations” we are supposedly engaged in, galvanize the attention of Militarists. But for the Isolationists the focus is the United Nations and any idea or institution that smacks of World Government. (Herman Kahn was all for World Government, but by that he simply meant American Government globalized .) The principle to be defended is national sovereignty at all costs. So the Isolationists are against international treaties (except for Free Trade treaties) and international institutions (except those that are actually American, like the International Monetary Fund) and all UN Conventions that seem to imply relinquishing national sovereignty (especially the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which looks like the Sixties carried on by other means with its call for children having the right to participate in matters concerning themselves).

American Isolationism drives cosmopolitans crazy, and they tend to take this part of the
elephant as the most dangerous. Many of them sit in “liberal” departments of International Relations, while the environmental activists reside in science departments or science universities like MIT, which has on its faculty one of the few scientists –Noam Chomsky—who actually has a view of the whole elephant due to the fact that he has, as a scientist and as a political activist, always been concerned with universals, like “universal grammar.”

But for most critics of the America-Wins ideology it is difficult to keep the whole cluster of its ideas in mind and difficult to determine where and how to focus opposition to it. There is –as there always is in an ideology—overwhelming coherence and interlock among all its parts, great draw in its vision, great righteous fellowship amongst its true believers (even while they jostle with each other about who is the truest one of all). And the way it has evolved leaves its critics with a huge problem they have not yet been able to solve: how to oppose it without getting ferociously attacked as anti-American. Attacked, that is, as anti the very nation that once drew such admiration from freedom loving people around the world for being anti-Nazi and anti-Stalinist.

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