Politics. Today well be looking at kind of the rest of the political landscape. What people now refer to as the liberal consensus of the 1940s and 1950s and determine what actually happened in the main thoroughfare of american politics and the way people are thinking about politics. You also had free readings, all of which in every day dealing the kind of idea of political ideology and all share a set of assumptions that ideas matter. So sort of thinking today how they kind of frame those ideas, and this is the kind of transition class where we move from discussing the geopolitics of the cold war and red scare to discussing whats happening in america in the 1940s and 1950s. I assume there are very few questions about this one. Yeah . So is he essentially saying that, like, the political ideology in the imperial age are just kind of not worth it anymore, and focusing on Economic Issues and focusing on the government and just making that one country the best they could possibly be the best way to go . Basically its a nice summary of a complicated argument. Hes basically saying the big political ideologies of the 19th century in particular have kind of run their course. Theyre out of steam and really politics is about management the adjustment to things we need, a kind of general consensus. Thinking about the argument a pit, its an argument people have made at various times in history. Its an argument than keeps coming back. Bell writes this in 1960. This was bell. He was born daniel child of jewish immigrants in new york. Going back wh. And he constantly frames issues in these large sweening historical frames. So he says the big ideology of the 19th century have kind of run out of steam. Whats an ideology again . Remember the section where yeah. He could merge the ideas into social measures. What does that mean . You dont know. Thats exactly the point i have for you. I thought it was interesting where he starts to talk about how to get people moving, simplify you are ideas. And then he established a claim with the truth. Hey, its not just something its the truth, its reality. And getting a commitment to action, you know, get people to abe a get down into reality where you again get people onboard. Terrific. The way you turn ideas into action, its the kind of mechanism lever that does that. You have to simplify the kind of idea, you have to make a claim about it being truthful to the world, and then using that simplified idea provide to a pramwork and go act in the world to make decisions about what to prioritize, how to sympathize. In this framework which also says has to appeal to you in a notion. On this framework whats an example of an ideology . Any of the big isms will probably work. Communism, socialism, environmentalism, and if you think about where they are in the 1950s for most of them arent operative in the 1950s. Fascism and there were american fascists in the 1830s. The silver shirts. Theyve kind of been completely discredited in the 1940s for obvious reasons. People traditionally talk about feminism in terms of a first wave in the early 20th century and a second wave emerging in the 1950s and 1970s. Theres actually kind of a lull here in some ways. What about religion . Is religion an ideology . Its a myth. Yeah, its a myth. Some of that language there is when he gets less simple than other parts, and hes got an argument that in some ways ideology is secular and about action in the world. You take the ideas and learn how to act because of them. And whereas religion what are you you seeds to do with the ideas, what are you supposed to do with religious ideas . So who do you change . Yourself. For him religion is a kind of framework that encourages adaptation of the self to kind of Eternal Truth rather than change the world in the vision of your idea how it should be better. And then theres a kind ofliaring thats much more about changing the world. I dont think he can basically decide what to think about religion. I think the reason for that is the big framework hes got is a sort of secular one. Religion has gone away, but hes confronted with a little bit of problem in america in the 1950s and that is america is becoming more religious. Its actually an expansion in religiosity, and trying to work out what thats about is a difficult question. But it has an impact on politics. Most notably in god we trust is added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, and 1955 in god we trust had been immortalized on currency. To distinguish american liberalism from godless atheistic communism. The problem with the argument is if youre someone who believes in religion which as weve talked about before is very secular, you dont think you to a higher bar deeply felt religious belief is something very personal. Working out why that evolves historically at different times is difficult. Hes got the idea the kind of big ideologies have kind of gaup away a llt bit. And whats left is a consensus around the technical managerial kind of issues. What are those . Theres a section on 373 when we talks about the wealthiest state, the mixed economy and political pluralism. I want to spend most of todays class talking about the issue of the mixed economy. Do you know this phrase, the mixed economy . No is a fine answer. I think to understand what hes talking about you need to think how thought about economics in the aurally 19th century. Economics is interested in you even if youre not interested in economics, so ill try to give you a bit of a draw. How many of you have died microeconomics. How does the class start in micro . A chart that looks Something Like this. Supply and demand. What is the supply and demand chart measuring . How many goods there are and whats the relationship between the two. Good. And where they intersect is where the demand and supply work each other out in relation to one another and that will be the price for any good and determine how things arestributed to in an economy. The idea of it is its selfregulating, what adam smith called the invisible hand of the market. Demand and supply would kind of meet each other and that would be a way to work out how the economy should work and it should balance itself and become sustainable and optimize the economy generally for everybody. Through the 19th century thats considered liberal packs laissezfaire economics. A lot of economists who think of themselves as liberal begin to question the assumption about how the economy should work. And the most significant of them for our purposes is john maynard keens who at the war period really began serious explanations how economies work in realtimes, and he develops the disappointment of macro economics thinking about smts ms system as a whole. If you were taking the course in the 20s,60s, you wouldnt start with supply and demand. You start with how does the price of the mechanism work. The macro starts with the idea that a lot of things can be in place before a price system can work. And you sort of need to set that up before you can have capitalism operating on the traditional theory. The bigger invention is to say what matters most to the economy is aggregate demand, not how much an individual consumer decides to put on things but how much purchasing power there is in the economy overall. This is more easily understood with 1940s era political cartoons i think. The top is an economy where there are very few wages being paid to workers. People selling prulkts are taking high prauts and not taking any wages which means the focusing power is long. Theres a smaller market to sell to and the things slow down. You can put more money back into production and the entire economy can speed up and grow and everyone can get more. Does this make sense . This is similar representation for the same idea. You go to spend to kick things into operation. Once people are spending itll flow pack to the worker and become a virtual circle. Questions about this . Any questions . So the key challenge then is how do you make sure. On one hand you need to monitor the market a little bit so that enough people can spend. And a second thing you realize is the government can actually act to stimument demand when theres an economic downturn. At moments when theres less demand the government deccan ac and this will become the orthodoxy of economics so by 1965 Time Magazine will put cains on the cover. Does this make sense . So there are some reasons to think that bailee is onto something when hes focused on this idea of the mixed economy. Its a market economy in which the state intervenes. How does the state get its monday into the economy . Taxation, right . This is the chart of the amount of americans paying federal income tax every year. The top line is a percentage of the twerk pors. The ther massive spike there during what . During world war ii. 26 of the work force files its federal income tax in 1940. And it stays after the war as the kind of norm. The other thing that will be slightly surprising to you is these are the top marginal tax breaks in the period. The top earners in the 1950s are paying 90 cents on the dollar. Its not that many people but its a high tax rate to redistrict and take the wealth and put it back into circulation. The big drop that happens in two steps comes in which decade . We talk a lot about the top marginal tax rate. More important and this is hard to read. I dont want you to focus on the details is the middle. If you look at the kind of 5,000, 8,000, 10,000 range and the kind of middle income in these years spikes as well from 1942. Up to 30 or 40 tax. The middle is being taxed a lot more. So the amount of taxes being gathered and being spent is one key ipdicator they have much more of a mixed economy in the u. S. In the 1950s. The second is that in many ways weve had a lot period of second class agitation like violent strikes leading through to 1930s. In 1946 theres actually another wave of strikes at the end of the war. Something like 4 million workers go on strike in 1945, 1946. My favorite example of this is actually the tugboat workers in new york city that would strike in 1946, which just shuts the city done because no fuel can get into new york. So the subway has to get stopped and the image of new york totally dependent on tugboat workers. By the 1960s daniel bail will comment actually the working class are pretty happen. Dont go on strike one more because of the changes to labor law weve talked about already and then because a set of agreements made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The working class are offered better terms for work. The key example for this is called the treaty of detroit in 1950, which an agreement tweebl automobile workers and General Motors well aprocess engeneral sector. And the deal is basically in esh change for guarantees to go on strike less frequently to recognize the need for production, the union will get cost of living asutsments so the wages will increase with thereflation, theyll get penitentiary want plans and Health Insurance and kind of be looked at as the middle class. The workers have the kind of Consumer Power they needed in order to keep the kme rolling. The third example ill give you to show theres an emerging consensus around this idea of a mixed economy is the fact the Political Parties are really confusing to people in the 1950s. This is a cartoon from 1957. The joke is what . How are you supposed to tell what the differences are between a republican and a democrat, i c imagine this feels like its coming from outer space. But the really has an internal Division Within it. The democrats have a kind of northern wing. Urban, based on working class votes and africanamerican votes. In the south, the Democratic Party is the parto of white supremacy. So theyre very opposed on a lot of issues and dont work very well together. The republicans are also divided between what were called liberal republicans, progressive republicans in the northeast, and more conservative republicans, particularly in the south and the west. And so voting doesnt happen in the way you think it would happen in the 1950s. There are weird kind of coalitions forming. The key sign that politics is a lot closer together, the parties are a lot closer together in the period than they are today, is that in 1952, both the democrats and republicans go to eisenhower and ask him to be their president ial candidate. Which with the partial exception of bloomberg today, its hard to imagine any other candidate that both parties would be like, we thing that person is pretty good for us, no real difference here. And then eisenhower continues a lot of new deal programs around Government Spending and the economy, and gets some flack from conservatives on his right flank and he writes a famous letter back to them and says, should any Political Party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, or eliminate labor laws and form programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. The idea that the new norm is the mixed economy, we have to continue some of these programs. Make sense . Theres actually a famous american Political Science article written in 1950 that says the american political system is really falling apart because the parties are not polarized enough. And like we need to make the parties more polarized so voters have a clearing indication of which party theyre voting for, which, i guess be careful what you wish for is the answer to that report. Any questions about this . Doing all right . Yeah, jim. Does the government have a lot more money from during the war, with all these extra people working, a lot of taxes come in, a lot of that money, government money, being spent on war ships and tanks and so forth, as soon as that was over, they had a pot. So was it easier for government to intervene when they had all that money . Yeah, i mean, something i want to develop in the next part of the class, that the key question is, all we have done so far is talk about the fact that the government should intervene in the economy in various ways. We said almost nothing about in what forms it should intervene, and theres lot of different ways and places the government can spend money to stimulate the economy. In the war, for obvious reasons, it was in war time. One of the reasons that is in military purposes one of the reasons that keynesian economics is really good during a war to kind of gin up spending is you cant produce too much. I mean, the thing about producing bombs and planes is they keep getting themselves broken during the war, and you have to keep producing them. You cant have an overproduction problem. What thats going to look like in peace time is a more difficult question. Well sort of turn to that now, a good question, where is the money going . The way to do that is to turn to schlessingers piece, which is easier to make sense of, although you did well with bell. Schlessinger is writing in 1948 and arguing there is a sort of consensus forming in the middle of american politics. He calls it the vital center. Thats where we need to be, not too left, not too right. He makes a kind of helpful argument, i think. That we normally think of politics on a left right spectrum. He actually tells us in the beginning of this piece, where it comes from. Does the idea of calling more conservative parties right and more liberal right . The french parliament. Schlessinger says this doesnt work very well to make sense of politics. How come . Yeah . Its more of a circle. And you cant really define communism and fascism on a traditional left and right scale. And that the left right scale kind of works more toward the center of the noncomnist left and the nonfascist right. He actually says if you keep going too far to the left, you end up taking away Property Rights and stepping on individual liberties. And if you go too far to the right, you do the same thing. So you also end up, if you go too far to either end of the spectrum, you come back around and it forms a circle and you end up at the bottom. This make sense . This is an article you should be familiar with, like a lot of people have compared hitler and stalin, even though theyre on opposite ends of the political spectrum. He argues given this better understanding of politics, where do you need to be . Center. You need to stay in the center. If you move too far to the left or right, you create deep problems. When you read this, how many of you had heard of schlessinger before reading this piece . Those of you who hadnt heard of schlessinger, did you think he was a conservative or a liberal . Or were you not sure . Im guessing liberal. Okay. How come . Probably just because of that time period, he was conservative, he wouldnt be afraid to just claim everyone on the left is a communist. Sam. Given that hes advocating for what is essentially the theory, i dont think he was too far to either side. Somewhat liberal, but hes making a strang caong case for center as the place to be, but he fancies himself as a person of the liberal left, the noncomninonco non communist left. He actually was very involved in Democratic Politics his entire life. Set up the americans for democratic action, one of the first super pacs, one of the key lobby groups of the Democratic Party, was the Court Historian for jfk in the kennedy years. Harvard historian. Son of a harvard historian. But hes making a case that the center is actually the right place for the liberal democrats to be. And that where that is is if you go too far further to the left from there, you basically run the risk of communism and a slippery slope down the road to stepping on Property Rights. If you go too far to the right, you also have a problem. Its kind of an interestingly conservative argument in its form before we get into its details. But its assumption is, like, its one thing its one thing to say, you know, if youre here, you can go to the left or the right with experimentation. Its another thing to say that actually the circle starts going like that, the minute you move from the center, its unclear how much wiggle room s schlessinger things you have, and theres an alarmist domino theory to the piece that should remind you of some of the geopolitics we have been reading. But hes very vague about where it is, so in that sense, its kind of conservative of itself that it imagines were at the very top of the circle. The kind of the best place that you could be in the circle, and that any step you take is already beginning the slippery slope, whereas maybe the top is more like a plateau and you have more room to maneuver. But the argument i want to make in the next part of the class is actually that the key form of the mixed economy, what actually is centrist liberalism in the 1940s, is pretty conservative for very particular reasons related to the cold war. So youve got a consensus that the government should spend some money. Should be involved in regulating the economy. Schlessinger thinks this means were kind of in the realist left framework. Remind you of sydney hawk from last class, realist liberalism, and interestingly, i dont know if you noticed, dan yeiel bell article was dedicated to sydney hawk. So all these people are talking to each other in the 1940s, the 1950s. I want to argue that center is defined by the cold war in two important ways. Sort of whats seen as the left most edge of liberalism that you can really go to without risking communism, that that edge is defined by a couple of features of the cold war we have been talking about. The first is what we have spent the last four classes talking about. Which is what . The red scare. So we have just spent classes talking about the way that any left associations in the 1940s and 1950s runs the risk of having you accused of communism with huge personal costs your role in politics, and this will shape the kind of possibilities for what policies are proposable and able to be put into play in the late 1940s. Trumans Domestic Program is referred to as the fair deal. Its how he kind of packages himself in this and other ways, hes just desperately trying to inherit fdrs mantle. He had a new deal, ill have a fair deal. Some of the things he proposed in his fair deal is full employment. The government will spend money if people are unemployed to create work so everyone will have a job. What happens to that proposal. Does legislation drafted pass through the senate in 1946 and then it goes to the house, and the house is more conservative. In the house, a substitute bill is proposed, written by the chamber of commerce, that says no full employment. What we should do is encourage maximum employment, and no Government Spending but we should just do fact finding to work out what the best ways to create maximum employment in the private sector are. What is the argument of the proponents of the house bill to get rid of the Senate Version . They argue that it is, quote, not greatly distanced from neomarxian thinking and is ta t tainted by the keynes Hanson School dominant. An attack that this left intervention is too close to communism. The second example i would give you from the Domestic Program is one that is familiar to you today, which is truman proposes that there should be Government Health care. Single payer. And there is a massive lobbying campaign by the American Medical Association and the private Insurance Firms that actually they spend about 2. 5 million on propaganda, the group in favor of single payer spends about 50,000. Doesnt really have the kind of money to advertise back, and part of the Advertising Campaign against single payer is built around the idea this is worryingly communist in implication. And actually one of the pamphlets quotes lenin. The only problem is lenin never said anything like that, but its one of the ways that government funded health care is presented as being too radically communist for the u. S. And thats created a very unusual situation in the u. S. For an advanced industrial democracy in the second half of the 20th century, which is all health care has been private until the creation of medicare in the 1960s, which is very limited, and as you see today, thats an ongoing problem. Medicare insurance is tied to employment in the United States in a way its not tied necessarily in that way in other countries. Yeah, sam. I was going to bring up how almost certainly relevant, not just that, but just in terms of modern politics issues. Yeah, it definitely rhymes with contemporary concerns and the debates being held in the 1940s are the same debates today, will the American People support singlepayer health care or is it too radical a proposal and will it get you tainted as looking like a communist. In the 1940s, thats what happened. The limits of whats proposal as far as Government Intervention in the economy are defined by fears and accusations of communism. On the other hand, the type of spending as jim was suggesting that is very justifiable is military and National Defense spending. Eisenhower is attacked in the 1950s by some conservative republicans who aric loo, why arent we cutting taxes like republicans have always wanted to cut taxes . And eisenhower gives a National Television address where he justifies why its important to be a high tax rate, which is not like republican politics in our generation, but part of his case, he says, is 70 cents on the dollar that youre being taxed is being spent for National Security. So were not just doing this to make peoples lives better. Were are doing it to protect the nation and the public good, and what you then get in the period is massive expansion of federal Government Spending if it can be justified as tied to National Security in some front, not if its tied to other social benefit. Fulbrig fulbright, the senator, looks into this, and he calculates between 1945 and 1967, the federal government spent Something Like 904 billion on military related expenses and there 94 billion on all other functions or money is tied directly to military expenditure, and this actually takes on surprising forms. What it means politically is if you want to get something funded by the federal government, your case is helped massively if you can tie it to defense spending. One of the big bob. Wasnt there an accusation in there in the article that thats because people wouldnt be as inquisitive about where the money went because its National Security or its in defense, i cant tell you, you know, not going to be as much into where the money is being spent versus you say you want to put it in health care, unemployment insurance, one of the secrets. There is a secrecy element to things like particularly the defense budgets. But theres a public side of this, too, that also has a political logic that people will stand up in public and say were willing to spend taxpayer dollars on National Defense issues. Were not willing to spend taxpayer dollars on social benefit. Because actually the market should determine those things. But the market cant provide public goods of the sort of National Defense requirements. For instance, one of the big public spending projects of the 1950s is the highway act. Massive expenditure to expand the highway system. The era of the car, obviously, but this is how its defined, this is a 1970s pamphlet. The National System of interstate and defense highways. Part of the logic for highway spending is it provides for mobility of logistics. You can keep some of the nukes on the roads so, you know, you can move them around from facility to facility, and this is important to the National Defense to have a strong infrastructure of transportation. The same thing happens with university and educational spending. Theres not a lot of federal spending on high schools for a variety of reasons. One of which is directly tied to sort of segregation, which well talk about in a couple classes, but its also not the kind of thing that people want to justify in america spending money on, until the soviets lack like theyre winning the space race. Sputnik goes up. The americans equivalent doesnt go very far. The joke is its called kaputnik, not sputnik, and then you get the National Defense education act, which will put a lot of money into science sxejication in the u. S. And theres also debate about the science grant funding. The creation of a National Science foundation to try to cede money for medical and scientific advances that will benefit the nation. That never really has very much money. By 1952, its budget is about 3. 5 million a year. Meanwhile, the office of Naval Research alone is spending 120 million a year providing Research Money to universities to do weaponsrelated developments. So in all of these ways, the type of money you can spend is best justified if its tied to military or National Defense purposes. And i actually think these two factors go together to limit the range of possibilities in america in the 1940s and 1950s. On the one hand, if you propose anything thats too radical looking, you can be accused of being a communist. On the other hand, no one will question federal spend figure you say youre doing it for National Security. I want to give you one example to kind of suggest how these two things work in practice. This is leon keyserling, who i dont think any of you have probably heard of. Maybe with one exception. Hes very involved in new deal politics in the 1930s. He comes out of socialist politics in new york in the 1930s. He drafts the wagner act, the Labor Relations act in 1935. Hes very committed to increasing workingclass wages, to make for greater aggregate demand on the economy. Hes a keynesian. Hiwife, mary dublin, is very involved in Consumer Rights politics in the 1930s. Again, focused on making sure people have enough money to spend so the economy can work. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, they spend four to five years being investigated for communism in the loyalty hearings of the sort we talked about in the last few classes. What happens . They keep their jobs. She develops a series of summic ulcers as a result of the stress. They keep their jobs, but they adjust their arguments. They continue to believe that the federal government has a big role in spending to make the economy work. But they stop making the case in terms of consumer demand and workingclass rights. Keyserling would become one of the key advisers on the council for economic advisers in which heel continue to argue into the 1950s for big Government Spending, but hell make the argument in terms of National Security spending. He actually will be the Economic Consultant to nsc 68, which we read a few years ago a few weeks ago. Feels like years. A few weeks ago. Where he argues that actually to win the cold war, we need a massive defense establishment. So he keeps the same commitment to kind of keynesian economics, but trims it away from its connection to kind of workingclass radicalism and retargets it around National Security interests. This make sense . So bell has an argument which we talked about earlier, which is that the end of ideology comes about in part because the ideas have run out of steam. The big ideas have gone away. You can make a case that in some ways they just havent just gone away but actually the history of mccarthyism and the red scare and the cold war confrontation shapes what keynesianism looks like in the United States. Its focused much more around National Security than around national expenditure. When keyserly mo llykeyserly, does he have a theory that if you spend all this money on defense, some of it would go to the workers and so forth . Yeah. So hes just figured out a different way to do it . In some sense. That would be an argument. I mean, were at some level, and i have read more books, youre trying to get into the psychology of an individual. You read some books who say this is like its a cynical sell out. Others are like its the best of bad times. How you want to parse that is open to question, but the move is what matters, that you start saying the money goes through one route, not another. And then you justify that in various ways. You know, how effective the trickle down is open to question. You know, but im sure there are multiple ways that you can make your peace with that kind of move when what youre talking about is an idealogical change that happens over 12 years. He gets all his attitude to the world changes. He is like everybody else, reading news about whats happening in europe and getting concerned about communist aggression of his own. So its a complicated change in which im presenting too simply, but the shift, i think, is interesting. Its also the case that a lot of arguments about spending will say it doesnt matter where the money goes. Its just important that you put it into the economy and it will then have consequences later. I think that im not an economist, but just acting simply logically, i think it kind of matters where the money goes, too, in the first instance. If its going to have downstream consequences no matter where it goes, then what matters less is its long term consequences but what are the short term consequences of promoting Economic Activity, and this is a problem in universities today. That grant money goes to certain types of projects, not to others, which produces a certain type of social benefit. If youre just thinking about the dollar, its all going to into the economy, but it goes into pockets that have an impact. Make sense . The argument against military spending is that its a dead end. I mean, the jet that you build does nothing to grow the economy. Its great for defense, as opposed to building a house or building a car or building machinery that can then be used to build more. And that was the economists argument against all this military spending. I have one to half a century ago who argued you might as well just shovel sand. If all youre trying to do is pump money into the economy, shoveling sand is as unproductive as military spending. Leaving aside the defense, you know, protecting us. Because youre not creating productive goods. I wouldnt necessarily agree with that. You have boeing making military aircraft and then turn around and make jetliners for everybody else. And even if the products, you know, fighter planes or whatever themselves arent necessarily producing, they do contribute to companies that can then go boeing wasnt building im talking 40s and 50s. What youre talking about is a complicated set of debates that are worth having about the sort of trickle on effects and the flow on effects of where the spending goes. And working out there what the aggregate benefit is to the society versus what the political arments. For the space was, a colossal waste of money around prestige, yet there are a lot of technical benefits that come out of that that have downstream benefits overall. The flipside is to say who reaps most of the benefit of the social improvements. In the first instance, its the companies that can have the patents to deploy them in the commercial marketplace, having been underwritten by public spending. So some people talk about this as the socialization of risk but not of profit. So, you know, theres a complicated set of arguments that we could talk about more probably for the rest of the semester. Theres something i want to move on to today. Is there anything else we have, any other questions about the kind of big picture pattern that im trying to show . Moderately clear . Could you make a comment on eisenhowers warning about the military Industrial Complex . So he ends, right, by giving a warning about the military Industrial Complex, which he argues there is too much spending going into military industrial activity, and they have kind of captured the public spending process. What to me is most interesting about it is the first drafts of the speech, its called the military Industrial Complex, because hes realized actually what defense spending does is it compartmentalizes production so that every district has one part of the plane that is being made, so theres a congressperson who is invested in voting up as kind of pork barrel service to their constituents. He realizes unless you break that, Congress Wont make real decisions in the public good. It will have too many incentives to do service to industry. I think he decides im not exactly sure why, but he decides that calling it the military industrial congressional speech in his farewell dress would be too much of a shot across the bow to his fellow congresspeople, so he dropped it, but its about the intersection between military Industrial Power and congressional politics and the distorting effect it has on democracy. We could think about the senator from boeing, from washington state, and so forth. People who are seen as advocates for particular interests. Okay. So the general argument here that we have been developing is bell says theres an ideology, a move to the center. Theres some evidence for that that we talked about that feels kind of right. And then the question was, where actually is the center . In whats being called the center, is it sort of more to the left, more to the right . How should we understand it . And i have sort of argued that the cold war moves that center more along the conservative spectrum than we might have anticipated from the way someone like schlessinger understands himself, both because of idealogical pressure and the way you can justify defense spending. The one grand irony of American History, not the only grand irony, the grand irony of todays class is that the exact moment that were talking about the emergence of a fairly conservative center, right, that has purged the left from american politics under the banner of mccarthyism, William Buckley comes along and starts the National Review. And you read the kind of Mission Statement of National Review for todays class. Whats buckley so upset about in this piece . Was it that the media in his time really wasnt doing what it was supposed to do . It was kind of from what i understood, it was kind of supporting the government and it should have been from which perspective . Well, was it that from whatever opposite side of the political spectrum the government was in. He thinks theres too much of something and not enough of something else, and he wants the National Review to fill the gap. Small government, less interference in life. Smaller government, libertarian economics. Bob. He also said he wants to report whether its on one end or the other, you know, dont take the middle ground because its not taking anything. Good. On page 196, he very explicitly says the middle of the road is repugnant. Why are we all in the middle of the road . Were all too centrist. Were all kind of believe too much in big Government Spending and hes arguing the media is part of this problem as well. There are no meaningful journals of libbertarian conservative thought. Theres no way for us to get our ideas out. Its a kind of interesting how much he emphasizes in the piece small magazines and also education. The idea that through education you spread your ideas, and that gives you political power down the road. Who was William Buckley . I have seen him described as like the father of conservatism and kind of the spiritual genesis of like the later reagan era. Yeah, exactly. Most famous as he has a Television Show for a long time on pbs. Well watch a little bit later in the semester. He would have people on to debate. He emerges in 1955, as you pointed out, as kind of a godfather of an emerging conservative movement. He gets money to start this magazine, the National Review to be the central organ of conservative thinking. Before that, he had written two books. The first on the left is a book about his time at yale, which is god and man at yale, which is an attack on the secular propaganda happening in modern universities. Conservatives have been upset about Political Correctness on campus for like an awfully long time. Thats his first book. His second book he cowrites with his friend from yale. Bozzal is the guy looking a bit stunned on the left. Its called mccarthy and his enemies, and its a defense of joe mccarthy as a patriot who has been misunderstood by the American People. Okay. Bozzal, who here just looks like a joker, actually is an incredally important figure himself. Hell later be a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and will be another figure establishing the idealogical template for conservatism which will come back to the fore in the 1960s. Whats happening in this piece then is basically the rearticulation of a libertarian philosophy. He argues on 197 that the Competitive Price system is indispensable. Its a return to like 19th century ideas about the state needs to be out of the economy. In this regard, hes influenced by this guy, frederick hayek, austrian economist who formed his ideas for the need for the price mechanism to be the center of Economic Activity in vienna, where he was very upset by riots on the streets as people were trying to kind of imagine a more socialist viennese politic. He then in the 1930s leaves vienna. Is brought to the London School of economics, and at the London School of economics, really want some bigtime economists to build their Econ Department because theyre in the shadow of cambridge, which is where keynes is. In terms of institutional politic, theyre like we need to do Something Different to keynesianism. We need to hire some kind of rival. They hire hayek, who then publishes a book called the road to serfdom, and most University Presses pass on it at first, they dont want to publish it. They think keynesianism is popular, but then it get private funding, and then a businessperson gives the university enough money to hire hayek for ten years. Hes not paid for by the university, but in a private line, and these institutional politics are kind of interesting. George mason, when its rising as a university in the 70s and 80s, realizes it cant really compete with a lot of the kind of Mainstream Research universities that exist and needs to find a market niche. And will begin hiring a variety of libertarian economists, including james buchanan, and building an Economist Department around the ideas of hayek, including we have a set of hayek studies at george mason, and this will kind of position itself as a kind of institutional home for a particular vision of the economy. What i want to just briefly do is give you an overview of how hayeks book works. And i want you to compare it to keynes. So can you see . This is what keynes book kind of looks like when you flip through. Which is to say it looks a little bit like what you expect an economics textbook to look like. A lot of figures, a lot of numbers. Its the math. A fairly big, heavy, hefty book called the general theory. This is the road to serfdom. A lot smaller. And if you flip through, right, youll see there is almost no math. In fact, there is no math whatsoever. Its a work of political philosophy. I raise this as a point, not because theres anything wrong with political philosophy. I stopped doing math when i was 16, but a lot of libertarian economists will argue that after the 1970s and 1980s, that keynesian economics doesnt work mathematically. The problem is that the numbers are not right. It doesnt produce the best economy, and that actually, if you do the math properly, like milton friedman, you need a small government to have a really vibrant economic growth. Thats not what hayeks argument is about. Its not about output or economic terms at all. Its about the political consiancon consequences of federal spending. The math in the 1930s and 1940s is in the bigger book, but thats the road to serfdom. Not as big a book. But even that a little too much for 1940s americans. It gets turned into a Readers Digest version, which is this much, which is how a lot of people actually read it, but never fear. Even your colleagues in the 1940s just wanted to overheads. They didnt want to read even a short book like this. I mean, you know, this is what this is like. They wanted the cartoon version, which luckily was published in look magazine, so i can show you what the argument of the book was in basically like a dozen easy steps. So this is how the road to serfdom makes its case. First, during the war, you want to do planning. Everybody likes planning, and they want to keep planning after the war. The planners say everything is going to be great once our plan is in place. But it turns out then they cant agree with each other, and they cant agree with each other, that makes people in the citizenry disagree with each other as well. So then the planners kind of stoke up disagreement, and everyones argumeing utabout ho to plan the economy, and then they have to sell people on their plan with propaganda and a controlled press, and then the way you begin to get agreement is you get some big figure come along and make the case this is what we should all be doing and dictatorial figure will convince everyone that they are the ones who should really run the economy. Once you give that person power over the economy, that party will then take over the country, and then theyll need to justify themselves to identify someone to persecute. And as they point out very helpfully here, in germany, the negative aim was antisemitism. The experience of nazi germany is front and center on their mind. Nobody opposes the leaders plan. And then as a result, you get told what to do. You get told how much youre going to get paid. You get told what to think. You get told how to spend your recreation time. I mean, again, its really interesting. The worst possible thing you can imagine in a dictatorship. Well, the second worst thing. The worst thing is you get shot. The second worst thing is they break your golf clubs and make you do calisthenics. But that is the road to serfdom. 18 steps from you want to interphene in the economy to the jackboots of shooting dissidents. Hayek hates the cartoon. Hes just like, i have a lot of caveats in here, like im a serious political philosopher. This is just simple, simple. But it captures a key part of the argument. Which is there are political philosophical reasons not to do government planning or Government Intervention because the risks of a growing government state are too great, not to the economy but to liberty and Civil Liberties and freedom. Hayek understands himself to be a liberal. And he will call himself a liberal his entire life, and this is one of the origins of the kind of confusion im sure you all have around the term liberal, which is like what is a liberal . Is a liberal someone on the left, or a neoliberal, who is today someone on the right. In australia, the conservative party is called the liberal party because they were the liberals in the 19th century, which is how hayek understands himself. The defender of an old liberal fashion that has gone out of fashion in the era of keynes. Earlier in the class, we defined an ideology. What was an ideology . It had three steps. Its to simplify your philosophy, like simplify your idea, establish a claim to the truth. And you demand a plan to action, get people moving towards something for change. Good. This is an ideology under those terms. It simplifies a complicated issue around how much intervention a government can have in an economy. It makes a claim to truth which is look what happened in europe. Right . And then it says as a result, you need to resist the encroachment of Government Authority into the economy and protect our market as free. The seed for this will be planted in the 19 sgich50s withe like buckley and hayek making the case for the ideas, and then it will be transmuted into the Republican Party in the 1960s, particularly with the election of goldwater, but then eventually particularly with the reagan revolution. And so one of the stories to come out of the kind of cold war consensus period is that americans refer to the kind of 1940s, 1950s as a liberal consensus. As a long new deal, as a kind of centrist where liberal ideas about Big Government dominated. But actually, the cold war shapes very deeply where that consensus is, and its not that far to the left, particularly when you compare the country to the kind of welfare states and Government Interventions that occurred in other european states at around the same time. Ironically, the partisan conflict that emerges out of the 1950s and 1960s has set the template for today as well. Which is you have figures like buckley arguing that we need to reject that fairly conservative centrism in favor of true conservatism. And that they will be true ideologues of the right, which is not a critique that buckley would be offended by. Thats how he understands himself. And on the other hand, the liberals will be making a case much more similar to schlessinger. Which is the place that we need to be is in the center. If we go too far to the left, were communists. And i think that sets the template for both of the major parties from the 1960s to the present. Well see how the democratic primaries go today, but you know, thats a debate the democrats are still having, about do you go to the center or to the left . What the path to electability . The republicans havent been having that debate for a while. They have had an argument about a vision of the conservative philosophy of government that steps from hayek and buckley, so the american political spectrum is kind of skewed even though we think of the center as something that was defined in the 1950s. Make sense . Any questions before we begin to wrap up . Mention something about ayn rand being the playoffer of the quote unquote conservative Libertarian Movement . Yeah, thats something to mention about ayn rand. One of the things thats interesting about rand, i dont find her that interesting, but one of the things thats interesting about rand is the relationship between her and buckley on the issue of religion. So rand is a secularist, really dislikes religiosity. Buckley weds into the piece you talk about, weds his catholicism to liberalism. And a lot of paul ryan and these figures really like rand. I think that represents the kind of conservative emphasis in america in the late 20th century less well than the figure of buckley because its that fusion of conservative religious family values with free Market Economics that defines the kind of political agenda of the Republican Party, whereas rand is sort of so idiosyncratic in her version of the world that she has shes not a coalition builder. One of things thats interesting about buckley is his identifying political coalition. Which is what shu lchlessinger thinks hes doing. Theres that nice piece, that paragraph, where he thank god we got rid of wallace, the left and the Democratic Party. Thats proof were really good centrists now. So this is kind of a different idealogical valance on both sides of the party. Last thing before we wrap up. Theres that kind of interesting passage at the end of bell where he talks about the fact there are still these kinds of unfulfilled emotions, the kind of anxiety of modern life that people want to work out how to change the world and dont know whats going to fulfill them. I want you to bear that in mind as we shift in the second half of the course thinking about domestic politics. Because what well now do is move within the kind of politics of the quote unquote political census and look at housing, welfare spending, education, pos are on how the problems could be resolved and how the world of the 1950s makes people seek meaning and transformation. It alienates them in certain ways. So bell is writing in 1960 that theres kind of this ongoing problem of alienation, of a lack of fulfillment, and the parameters there when we move from the realm of Political Parties, political philosophy, into the world of kind of personal politics and personal experience, would also be reflected in our discussions in the second half of the semester. Sound good . All right. I look forward to those conversations in a couple weeks. Have a good spring break. Youre watching American History tv, every weekend on cspan3, explore our nations past. Cspan3, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Weeknights this month, were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight, San Diego StateUniversity Professor pierre lectures on the vietnam war. He looks at the conflict from u. S. Military escalation in 1965 to the fall of saigon ten years later, and the competing interests of the americans, chinese, and sove yiets in the region. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. American history tv on cspan3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this Labor Day Weekend, saturday, at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on the civil war, historians kevin levin and hillary green discuss how we remember the civil war and whether to remove or contextualize federal monuments, and saturday on american artificates, well preview photographs of native americans from the Smithsonian National museum of the American Indians collection which includes more than a half million images. Add 8 00 p. M. On the presidency, a look at president ial retreats including abraham lincolns summer cottage, and stories of the kennedys, clintons, and obamas in marthas vineyard, and monday night, august marked the 75th anniversary of the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki, and American History tv and washington journal look back at the events that led to the bombing and their legacy with author ian toll and president trumans grandson, Clifton Truman daniel, exploring the american story. Watch American History tv this Labor Day Weekend on cspan3. Bidens record is a shameful role call of the most catastrophic betrayals and blunders in our lifetime. He has spent his entire career on the wrong side of history. Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to the nation. Hes failed to protect us. Hes failed to protect america. And my fellow americans, that is unforgivable. The first president ial debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President joe biden is tuesday, september 29th, at 9 00 p. M. Eastern. Watch live coverage on cspan. Watch Live Streaming and on demand at cspan. Org or listen live on the free cspan radio app. Up next on lectures in history, catholic University Professor and former cia historian nicholas dujmovic, teaches a class about National Intelligence during president kennedys administration. He talks about the bay of pigs, the cuban missile crisis, and other covert operations during the cold war. His class is just over an hour. In this introductory course, were continuing our Historical Survey of american intelligence under each president ial administration. And now we have come to the presidency of john f. Kennedy. January 1961 to november 1963, kennedy was a former naval officer, so he thought he knee something about intelligence