Eisenhower

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Eisenhower’s Nightmare

As Europe stumbles through its crisis unable to lead and unwilling to be led, we should not snicker at its constant postponement of critical decisions. We in America are deft at postponement too. At this very moment we have a committee sitting behind closed doors trying to come up with a list of budget cuts to reduce the federal deficit. It’s target is to reduce that deficit by $1.2 trillion – either from cost cutting or revenue enhancement. If it fails, as I wager it will absenting a bolt of lightening striking from somewhere, a round of automatic cuts kicks in. Those automatic cuts include – gasp – reductions in American offense spending. Perhaps I should call it offensive spending to draw attention to the obscenity of its total.

Predictably the right wing in our political structure ridicules anyone who calls for cuts in our military budget. Apparently anything as trivial as one less paper clip for the Pentagon poses an immediate and radical threat to our national security. This is, of course utter nonsense. Unfortunately America has become so enthralled with its military – just watch television long enough and you will end up being bombarded with endless homages to the heroic contribution that our troops make to our good fortune – and indulgent in pseudo-patriotic flag waving, that we can no longer discuss the military budget with either honesty or clarity. Defense is important. But it should be part of a balanced policy that includes suitable attention to what is being defended. It is, in my opinion, plainly silly to end up defending a rotten and decaying infrastructure, health care system, schools, and other aspects of civilian life. After all the proper functioning of those civilian aspects of our economy are what provides the excess wealth we can pour down the military drain.

If we neglect our domestic economy, eventually our military will be weakened: we won’t be able to afford it any longer.

Given this preamble I want to note a couple of things.

First two quotes:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [‰Û?] Is there no other way the world may live?

‰ÛÒDwight David Eisenhower, ‰ÛÏThe Chance for Peace,‰Û? speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction…

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence ‰ÛÓ economic, political, even spiritual ‰ÛÓ is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government,we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

– Dwight David Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation”, January 17, 1961

Eisenhower was no fool when it came to understanding the role of the military and its potential impact on society.

His fears have been realized. America remains a highly militarized society and has built a significant dependency on the very complex that Eisenhower warned against.

Next, fast forward to this week:

Marion Blakely, the CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, gave testimony to the budget cutting committee. She presented the findings of a report commissioned by her asociation. The news was grim. Cutting defense spending along the lines set down in the automatic cuts that would kick in were the committee to fail to come up with its own, would – and I quote: “devastate the economy and the defense industrial base and undermine the national security of our country”.

A better articulation of Eisenhower’s fear could not be written.

The defense industry is threatening us with the consequences of our dependency on it. Our budget has been taken hostage. The sentiment is simple: cut defense and lose a million jobs.

In an economy mired in a jobless slump, where every job created is treated as a minor triumph, the defense industry has us by the unmentionables. Any politician seeking re-election will have to swallow hard before cutting defense and thus jobs. Not to mention the inevitable tirades about slashing at our security.

Apparently our military is so inept that it cannot defend us adequately without outspending everyone else – added together – more that two to one. It is so inefficient that is must absorb about a quarter of our budget to protect the other three quarters. Obviously our military has a major management problem. Which means we, the citizenry Eisenhower refers to, have a much larger and more urgent problem.

It boils down to the perennial question: do we run the military; or does it run us?

We know what the Aerospace Industry Association thinks.

I beg to differ.

A great defense starts with a robust domestic economy capable of producing enough wealth to set aside for defense. Right now our economy is nowhere near being robust enough to support the bloated and inefficient military we have.

Something has to give.

I hope it’s not the schools, hospitals, roads, and bridges our children will need to rely upon.

There’s no point in defending a rotten apple.

And, yes, the tradeoff between security and liberty is a crucial one. Eisenhower drew attention to it. We lost our balance because of 9/11. We became security heavy and liberty light. The point of security is to protect liberty, not to forfeit it.

I am afraid we made the wrong choice. And that has political, not just economic, consequences.

Bad consequences.

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Times and Parties Change

My son sent me a great link to the Daily Kos, where he highlighted an intriguing entry. I have copied the opening for your reading pleasure:

Please help me discover the origins of this brilliant party platform:

We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs‰ÛÓexpansion of social security‰ÛÓbroadened coverage in unemployment insurance ‰ÛÓimproved housing‰ÛÓand better health protection for all our people.

Read the rest of the entry and you will be astonished by its liberal and progressive tone.

Naturally the catch is that this platform is that of the Republican Party in 1956 under Eisenhower.

Isn’t it sad that the country has drifted so far to the right that current members of the GOP’s activist wing would eviscerate the sentiments expressed in that platform as being socialist and anti-American? Indeed judging by the actions of some of the Tea Party wing of the GOP they would go further: they would hoard weapons and start plotting to repel the expected attack of jack booted Federal troops sent specifically to take away their guns and infringe on their civil liberties.

That the Eisenhower years are often recalled by those same folks as a long lost era, when the ‘true America’ expressed itself in all its rugged individualistic glory, before the socialists started to crush the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that made America great back then, seems an irony beyond words.

Those were days of a robust social contract, explicit trade offs were made to bolster the middle class and businesses accepted lower profits in the short term by paying higher wages in order to foster consumption in the future. It was a model that produced the greatest surge in wealth ever experienced by any nation in history. The gains of the New Deal were protected and revered by both parties. The middle ground was home to both sides of the aisle and differences were more nuanced than real.

My read of history is that three events tore the consensus up.

First was civil rights. Racism ran so deep that the notion of inclusion did not, indeed could not, extend to all in major areas of the country. The white South choked on the activism and the results of the civil rights movement. As a result it began a steady, and so far unstoppable, march towards right wing extremism. That the Tea Party movement and other expressions of right wing extremism have risen to new heights this past year, the first under a black president, can be no coincidence.

The second big event was the end of American oil independence and the affront it caused to the American way of life. The American economy has never recovered from its addiction to oil and the consequences of having to rely on foreign sources. This has forced the US to engage in foreign wars and diplomacy that contorts its natural interests. Even today, more than thirty years after the first oil crisis, the American economy is less energy efficient than its main competitors – it still is based upon a ‘cheap energy’ model, which is the enduring legacy of its oil industry past. As a result of the energy crisis American industry suffered its first loss of competitiveness, and the first dent was made in the myth of greatness carried over from World War II.

Dissatisfaction with the stagflation unleashed by the oil crisis, and made worse by rising global competition, spurred the rise of militant Republicanism in the form of Ronald Reagan, whose rise to power is the third rupture in the post war consensus. His presidency marks the beginning of the sharp division in politics that exists today. His rejection of all the economics and politics upon which the ‘golden era’ had been built is ironic because his rise to power was enabled by the voters yearning to return exactly to that golden era. He used short term problems in the economy to enact long term shifts in ideology. He ignored the longer term problems of American competitiveness and threw the country into a gathering debt from which it has never escaped. His simplistic view, based upon an idyllic interpretation of individualism unattainable in a modern economy, undermined much of the basis upon which the post war middle class was constructed. Instead of adding to the patrimony of the nation he invited its erosion by avoiding infrastructure investment and long term thinking. He initiated, or at least facilitated, the short term way of thinking that has infested the country ever since. In many ways the recent crisis and our likely long term diminution of potential, are directly caused by his glossy and shallow vision with its concomitant acceptance of social divisions between the wealthy and the poor. The much discussed decline of the American middle class began when it elected to follow the extreme right wing ideology Reagan represented but masked so well.

Events subsequently have simply served to shove the country further right. The erosion of American supremacy continues not as a function of the incapacity of its workers, or the loss of invention by its businesses, but by the divisions exposed in its value system as expressed in its deeply dysfunctional political system. America lost its tolerance and diversity – so long its foundational strength.

America lost its diversity exactly at the moment that it tried to integrate itself. The trauma of that integration forced into existence self regarding and self justifying camps from which the inhabitants rarely sally forth, so at the very instance of integration the nation fragmented. A large sullen and alienated group, its ‘values’ rejected by the ‘radical whole’, sought slowly to undermine all the works of those it saw as ‘un-American’. Without the strength that diversity brings America will wallow towards further failure. It will get even more cynical. It will lose touch with then heady idealism upon which it was founded. The rise to power of Reagan and the continued attack on ‘liberalism’ that he launched has rendered America incapable of solving many of its major issues: to discuss health care reform is to advocate an un-American socialism, even though the entire world has embraced variants of such reform and largely dealt with this issue. The phrase ‘culture wars’ masks a whole array of deep divisions that will not go away. America remains the world’s most religious nation and so rejects much of modern science – teaching evolution in schools is virtually impossible despite its total dominance of biological research. Is it any wonder we need to import scientists and engineers to keep up with our foreign competitors? We have deliberately sought to dumb down our children. We used to decry the brainwashing of Chinese children or the outrages of the Taliban and their objection to education for girls. Yet we tolerate the doctoring and dumbing down of our own science books in the name of religion.

The fragmentation of the social contract reflected in that Republican platform from 1956 is the the root cause of our current inability to solve problems. The breakdown of consensus has led to a breakdown in civil discourse and in politics generally. We need reform and we need it badly. The Reagan era experiment led directly to the implosion we experienced last year and the decline of the middle class that undergirds our social cohesion. Yet we find it impossible to rally around any constructive way forward. Every move is blocked by a recalcitrantminority that wants to throw us even further back than did Reagan.

Looking back through the lens of the Vietnam and civil rights convulsions, the 1950’s look impossibly naive. But maybe much of what we accept today as sophistication is simply a cynical avoidance of reality. All we have done is to put a cheap and thin veneer over the cracks in the hope that the problems will go away. This veneer is epitomized by Palin, whose ability to get near to high office ought to shake us from that cynicism. This is not a joke. The most powerful nation on earth nearly fell into the hands of one of the least qualified people it has ever produced. How did that happen?

Look at that Republican platform and wonder at the gulf that divides us from those years, and at the extremism that has invaded our politics.

Therein is the explanation of our current national demise.