Stanford University Press Blog

Eisenhower Unmasked

In Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address as president of the United States, he said of the Cold War, “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 libert y may prosper together."

According to Ira Chernus, author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (2008), the peace that Eisenhower spoke of was actually a constant state of “apocalypse management” which would involve the endless management of nuclear threats. By using discourse that assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, the author contends that Eisenhower made national insecurity a way of life in America.

The author discusses Eisenhower’s Cold War discourse in a recent article entitled “The Real Eisenhower” for History News Network (March 17, 2008) in which he utilizes a rich source of Eisenhower quotes (often juxtaposing excerpts of public speeches with private statements made within his cabinet) that reveal the former presidents’ thoughts and strategies on the threat of Communism and nuclear attacks.

He describes Eisenhower’s Cold War policy as one, “that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would 'shoot your enemy before he shoots you'; a man who believed that the U.S. could 'pick itself up from the floor' and win the war, even though 'everybody is going crazy,' as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got 'shellacked and nobody got too 'hysterical.'”

In looking at these quotes, Chernus says, “That’s how one president talked about nuclear war, a president who is now especially widely admired across the political spectrum….[I]t should remind us how easily presidents can create images that mask profoundly important truths.”

Chernus reminds us that Eisenhower’s legacy of insecurity is still with us today, and his sentiments on the presidential masking of truth is a poignant one especially upon the 5 year anniversary of the war in Iraq and the nearing end of the Bush administration.

A government report released earlier this week confirmed that the American economy will see a recession in 2008. Families across the country are facing foreclosure on their homes, and the dollar is at record lows.  In an article in The Chronicle Review, David Glenn asks why presidential candidates, especially Republicans, still propose tax cuts based on the now-debunked supply-side economic theory:

The hopes of the supply-side theorists of the 1970s, who proposed that revenue would often rise after tax cuts, have been thoroughly dashed by the last 30 years. Federal revenue fell after Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and again after George W. Bush's 2001 cuts. The vast majority of economists now say that tax cuts must be matched by spending cuts, or deficits will ensue.

For an answer, he turns to The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, released this week by Stanford University Press. Author Isaac William Martin argues that “Republican political leaders (falsely but successfully) interpreted Proposition 13's success in California in 1978 as a broad mandate for cutting income taxes as well as property taxes,” a policy that has shaped and symbolized the party every since.

Martin’s showcasing of how the Republican Party came to so deeply associate itself with tax cuts helps us understand why President Bush stands so firmly by his economic policies in the face of economic upheaval. 

Policy vs. Hope

The Texas and Ohio primaries are coming to a close and many speculate that the results could clinch the democratic presidential nomination for either Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Clinton. Both candidates have been seesawing in terms of votes in a very unpredictable year of primaries and caucuses. But Obama has been on a winning streak, sweeping the last eleven primaries straight.

Many speak of Obama’s charisma and his campaign of hope that has enthralled disillusioned citizens. Hip-hop artist Will.I.Am composed a music video featuring clips of Obama's "Yes We Can" speech and a multitude of celebrity cameos. To date, the video has received over 5.5 million hits on YouTube. In January, Caroline Kennedy Schlosser wrote an Op-ed in the New York Times, endorsing Obama and likening him to her late father, perhaps the most inspirational and hopeful president in our nation’s history.

But not everyone is swept up in Obama mania. Hillary Clinton has criticized his campaign for relying on false hope and rhetoric instead of experience and a track record of successful policy.  According to a MSNBC article, Clinton is quoted as saying, “I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change…And we don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered."

Stanford University Press author Hirokazu Miyazaki disagrees. Miyazaki, a professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (2004), has focused his research on the question, “How do we keep hope alive?” In a guest column for the Ithaca Journal, Miyazaki analyzes Obama’s campaign and contends that Clinton and others are perhaps underestimating the American people’s hunger for hope.
 
He says, “Research on hope in diverse cultures shows that one individual's hope often can replicate itself, in a specific way, in the lives of many other individuals. The rhetoric of hope may seem general, abstract and intangible; but the effect of hope is often quite specific, personal and substantive.”

“Imagine what would happen if every American who has long endured disappointment, fear and hopelessness suddenly regained hope about the future. By that very fact, the most radical change imaginable would already have happened.”

The policy vs. hope debate and the presidential primaries will continue on through the end of June.

The Democratic presidential primary is forcing the country to pay attention to its own sexism and racism, bigotries we have swept under the rug for years. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, Gloria Steinem called sexism “the most restricting force in American life,” reinforced by NYTimes columnist Bob Hubert’s statement, “if there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America.” A San Francisco Chronicle op-ed has declared that “the race is now about race,” and the question of whether we are more misogynistic or more racist suddenly becomes of the utmost importance.

In The Difference “Difference” Makes, Deborah Rhode argues that “a central problem for American women is the lack of consensus that there is a significant problem. Gender inequalities in leadership opportunities are pervasive; perceptions of inequality are not.” It will be interesting to see how Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, propelled as it is by her husband’s career, influences this balance: her candidacy is bringing attention to institutionalized and individual misogynies, but her extraordinary chance at becoming President could be used to further dismiss the real obstacles that most women face in assuming leadership.

Despite the 1990s movement, exemplified by Tiger Woods and examined in Making Multiracials by Kimberly DaCosta, to create widespread recognition of multiracial and multiethnic identities, Barack Obama is identified, and appears to self-identify, as African-American. At the same time, he is a figure of potential reconciliation, presenting himself as a symbol that we can all move beyond black and white. Like Clinton, Obama’s position as a political leader is a challenge to the way American society conceives of its minority groups (discussed by Stephen Steinberg in Race Relations).

Ailing Suharto Draws Attention to Indonesia

With former Indonesian President Suharto in unstable condition after suffering multiple organ failure earlier this month, many wonder if he will pass away without penalization for the war atrocities and financial corruption that ran rampant during his rule of Indonesia from 1967-1998. Some speculate that foreign nations—particularly the U.S.—are hesitant to bring him to justice to avoid tense international relations.

The origins of that hesitation may be found in Bradley R. Simpson’s Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968  (forthcoming March 2008), the first comprehensive history of Indonesia-U.S. relations. Simpson examines how and why the U.S. supported the military regime of General Suharto, a crucial juncture in modern Indonesian history that shaped the country's trajectory and is now reflected in the nation's current tenuous transition into democracy.

Other Stanford University Press titles dig further into modern Indonesian history. Edward Aspinall's Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia (2005) chronicles the struggles and success of everyday citizens fighting authoritarianism while M. C. Ricklefs's A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200, Third Edition (2002) looks at the nation's history with a broader perspective.

Does the Iowa Caucus Matter?

It’s not surprising that being first thrusts the Iowa Caucus onto a towering public stage with extraordinary public interest. But is all the attention warranted? Critics have argued that Iowa does not mimic the country’s demographics well. It's a small, mid-western state, which is primarily rural and predominantly white. Allowing Iowa to go first, they argue, skews results, preemptively damaging the chances of candidates who could do well at the national level.

And if you look at Iowa’s track record in making predictions about the presidential race, it does not improve the argument for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status. Iowa has a reputation for picking losers when it comes to the presidential race (with a few exceptions, Jimmy Carter in 1977 and the current president in 2000 and 2004). In particular, the caucus has been a notoriously unreliable guide to the outcome of the Democratic primary process. New Hampshire is well acknowledged to be better when it comes to the picking winners.

In this primary season the timing of the primaries became a hotly contested issue, with bigger states wanting to hold their primaries before Iowa’s, such as Florida, New Mexico and South Carolina. Yet in a nod to tradition, Iowa remains first. The state will hold its elections on January 3.
So why Iowa?

In an interview, Christopher Hull took up this question with John Miller of the National Review. In his recently released book, Grassroots Rules, Hull compares the impact of Iowa and New Hampshire on the primary nomination and the presidency. He argues that Iowa’s first state status is well deserved because of the unique format of its caucus to convention system. (For those who are not familiar with how it works: Iowa's caucus involves party sympathizers meeting in schools, homes and other locations to debate their choices, and arrive at a consensus to declare support for a candidate. After this is a statewide tally is used to determine the allocation of delegates to each candidate for the party's convention.)

Hull makes the point that the caucus encourages "retail politics" and real debate on the issues. It forces candidates to organize and build grassroots coalitions. In putting a high premium on the grassroots networks, Iowa seems to amplify the impact of the internet. Hull also finds that the caucus limits the impact of negative campaigning and the influence of advertising dollars. Perhaps the most startling conclusion in the book is that increased television spending in Iowa seems to harm candidate’s chances rather than improving them, keeping other factors constant (time spent canvassing in the state, press coverage, campaign contributions, internet spending, etc).

Even if Iowa does not pick winners, in Hull’s view, the state performs an important function by weeding out losers (Steve Forbes in 2000, for instance) and bringing the spotlight on candidates who canvass well, can get their message across, and are therefore electable. Of course, other states could mimic Iowa’s caucus, and according to Hull that would be good for democracy in America. But as long as that is not the case, it appears that Iowa has earned its right to be first.

The fight to control the internet in China

Yahoo agreed yesterday to settle the lawsuit brought against it by a Chinese dissident, Shi Tao, for giving the Chinese government about him that led directly to his imprisonment and torture.  The lawsuit has become a media nightmare for Yahoo, from congressional hearings to a corporate apology to congress to being berated by Congressman Lantos for conducting “inexcusably negligent behavior at best, and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst.”

 

Technological Empowerment by Yongnian Zheng, a new book from Stanford University Press, examines the ways in which the internet has both facilitated and repressed political dissidence in China. Zheng sees the internet as providing not a medium to bring about a rapid revolution, but a forum that is already encouraging gradual progress toward a more open society, as a facilitator both of communication and of international commerce. While these changes gradually develop, however, individuals like Shi Tao will continue to be jailed for sending emails, and the Chinese government will continue to ask American corporations to help it police its citizens.

Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq: Are Reconstruction Projects Worth it?

What is the success (or put it another way, the failure) rate of US-led efforts to export democracy and reconstruction projects in foreign countries? In his new book, After War, Christopher Coyne compares reconstruction projects from West Germany and Japan (after World War II) to more current examples in Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Coyne's analysis shows that, in general, the odds of failure in these operations have been all too high (without taking account of the obvious differences in political motivations across these projects). Of course, this comes as no surprise to even a casual political observer these days. But what is startling, as Coyne's analysis reveals, is how grim the numbers look. The US success rate is at a mere 28% after five years (roughly the length of the current operation in Iraq). The picture improves only slightly to 39 percent after 15 years (presumably long after direct US involvement in the country's affairs has ended). Tyler Cowen cites these numbers in a discussion of the book on the blog, Marginal Revolution. And writing for the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias points out that these outcomes should give us pause before we undertake armed democratization projects against countries that are labeled "dubiously democratic" by the U.S. state department.

So how does one alter expectations on the ground to make the reconstruction "game" a cooperative one and at an early stage in operations? Coyne invokes an economic argument to make the point that successful social change requires finding and establishing a set of incentives that would make citizens prefer a liberal democratic order over available alternatives. He remarks "€œoccupying regimes can increase their chances of success if they create a new set of opportunities that were not there prior to the occupation. These opportunities might include the ability to vote, open a business, worship in the church of one'€™s choice, or utilize the legal system, among other possibilities." Professor Coyne will be giving a public lecture on this book at the Cato Institute on November 26th.

 

 

 

 

An Economist Looks at the Politics of Reconstruction

It’s a common observation these days that U.S.-led reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going as well as predicted and that the mission is far from accomplished. Are efforts to export democracy by military intervention doomed to failure, i.e., economic failure? If so, should we consider other ways of fostering democratic reforms?

In After War (forthcoming in November 2007) Chris Coyne takes up these questions by bringing an economic mindset to a topic traditionally tackled by historians, policymakers and political scientists.  Economics focuses on how incentives influence human action. According to an economic point of view, successful social change require finding and establishing a set of incentives that would make citizens prefer a liberal democratic order over any available alternatives.  These opportunities might include the ability to vote, open a business, worship freely, or utilize the legal system, among other possibilities. However, in his forthcoming book, Coyne spells out that efforts to foster liberal democracy through foreign intervention--from Haiti to Somalia and Iraq-- have been unsuccessful in large part because of flaws inherent in the politics of such interventions. After War is a fascinating study of the distortions that politics introduces.

For instance, instead of giving incentives to citizens of occupying countries the political process that gets underway puts the bureaucracy (with the competing goals of its various agencies)  and special interests  in charge.   It fosters situations in which corporations that provide the most in campaign contributions receive the largest contracts (yes, think Halliburton).  As a result, ordinary citizens (and their leaders) don't perceive any advantages in cooperating with their "liberators." In a recent discussion in the Economist, Coyne discusses how conflicts between various government agencies compromised the reconstruction program.

In a review of America’s Kingdom in the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali writes that, “Critical academic works on the Saudi kleptocracy are rare. …Which is why America's Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first concessions to Standard Oil of California in 1933. Combining history with political anthropology, Vitalis sheds a bright light on the origins and less savoury aspects of the Saudi-US relationship in its first phase, when oil production was accompanied by the manufacturing of myths that prettified the US presence."

   
Robert Vitalis not only provides a historical basis (spanning more than seventy years, three continents, and an engrossing cast of characters) for understanding this “special relationship” between the United States and the Saudi monarchy, but he also argues that despite the constant media scrutiny after 9/11, the special relationship continues today. And there’s plenty of evidence going around. The Wall Street Journal reports in an article today that instead of taking explicit measures against a powerful Saudi bank in 2003 (or even earlier), which allegedly finances terrorist networks from the Middle East to Indonesia, the U.S. government has chosen to lobby the Saudi royal family quietly about its concerns, with little success so far.

The book  points to a major divergence between the official “myths” (perpetuated by both the U.S. and the Saudis) and the political and historical realities in the Middle East. It shows how the development of Saudi Arabia’s oil under a racist and unfair US-owned company generated a lingering resentment and hatred against the West. As Tariq Ali's review suggests, these feelings persist in our times, even among Saudi elite.