Recommended podcast:
The Last Day of the Soviet Union, KERA Think, Dec. 7, 2011 (“What events actually led to the 1991 dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and how did the bitter relationship between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin contribute to the superpower’s demise? We’ll talk this hour with journalist Conor O’Clery, author of the book Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union“). This podcast has become one of my favorites. I think Kris Boyd is the best interviewer I’ve ever heard. She is amazing. One riveting interview after another. Great voice, great tone, great questions, great topics, and very intelligent.
J. Edgar, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is making the news for dealing frankly with the decades old rumors concerning Hoover’s private life. But that’s not what makes the film immensely valuable. Its finest contributions are its portrait of the psycho-pathologies of the powerful and its chronicle of the step-by-step rise of the American police state from the interwar years through the first Nixon term.
The current generation might imagine that the egregious overreaching of the state in the name of security is something new, perhaps beginning after 9/11. The film shows that the roots stretch back to 1919, with Hoover’s position at the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation under attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. Here we see the onset of the preconditions that made possible the American leviathan.
Palmer had been personally targeted in a series of bomb attacks launched by communist-anarchists who were pursuing vendettas for the government’s treatment of political dissidents during the first world war. These bombings unleashed the first great “red scare” in American history and furnished the pretext for a gigantic increase in federal power in the name of providing security. In a nationwide sweep, more than 60,000 people were targeted, 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were detained, and 556 people were deported. The Washington Post editorial page approved: “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.”
Here we have the model for how the government grows. The government stirs up some extremists, who then respond, thereby providing the excuse the government needs for more gaining more power over everyone’s lives. The people in power use the language of security but what’s really going on here is all about the power, prestige, and ultimate safety of the governing elite, who rightly assume that they are ones in the cross hairs. Meanwhile, in the culture of fear that grips the country – fear of both public and private violence – official organs of opinion feel compelled to go along, while most everyone else remains quiet and lets it all happen.
The remarkable thing about the life of Hoover is his longevity in power at every step of the way. With every new frenzy, every shift in the political wind, every new high profile case, he was able to use the events of the day to successfully argue for eliminating the traditional limits on federal police power. One by one the limitations fell, allowing him to build his empire of spying, intimidation, and violence, regardless of who happened to be the president at the time.
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[The following is a revised version of a reaction paper I wrote for a graduate seminar in international conflict back in 2005.]
In Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, Bruce Russet and John Oneal mount the most thorough defense of the democratic peace thesis I have yet seen. Indeed, they go beyond the democratic peace thesis to posit a Kantian peace consisting of the interrelated and reciprocal effects of democracy, economic interdependence, and international law and organizations. I am not without criticism, however.
I have always been skeptical of the democratic peace thesis, which posits that democratic states do not go to war with one another, in part because it seemed to me to be incomplete. Russet and Oneal attempt to shore up that incompleteness by emphasizing the pacifying effects of both bilateral and global economic interdependence as well as (though not unproblematically) international law and organizations.
Despite the impossibility of discovering empirical laws via inductive and statistical methods, it may be true that (liberal) democracies rarely go to war with one another and, ceteris paribus, might be less war prone than other states. But I am not confident this trend will hold for all times and places. Moreover, democracies may still be more likely to go to war with non-democracies for ideological reasons. “We’ve” got to make the world safe for democracy, after all.
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One way of identifying a person’s ideology is by referencing that person’s “favorite war.”
If you can get your average American to admit that both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were wars against secession, the next heady notion to contemplate is that, just perhaps, the U.S. took the wrong side on at least one of them.
I’d guess that most Americans’ favorite war is World War II. Americans fought against three obvious evil empires (Nazi, Italian fascist, and the Rising Sun), and, in the end brought them down. The worst thing most people I’ve talked to will admit of the war is that “three out of four ain’t bad” — recognizing that the U.S allied itself with the worst of the four regimes then extant, and then fought a Cold War for forty-some years because of that dangerous alliance.
But surely the Civil War has nearly as many (or more) “buffs.” And the Civil War certainly exerts a great deal of influence over our (varying) sense(s) of allegiance.
For instance, I often talk up secession, refer to it as a basic right and an obvious foundational aspect to any free federal union. It may be traumatic, but it is as necessary as divorcing an abusive spouse, or as satisfying as telling a crazy boss to “Take this job and shove it.” The usual argument against secession is a knee-jerk “but the Civil War settled that” routine. How many times have I heard this? Must be dozens.
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