THE CONTRADICTIONS FACING 21St CENTURY HIGHER EDUCATION: THE CASE OF “CIVIC LITERACY” AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY

Harry Targ, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Purdue University

Dan Morris, Professor of English, Purdue University

“Higher education groups, faculty members, and journalists portray ongoing efforts to counter critical race theory as authoritarian, heavy-handed, unfair, and illegal. However, they fail to recognize that liberal indoctrination on college campuses has rubbed American parents the wrong way.” Accuracy in Academia  http://www.academia.org/purdue-university-count...

“The Purdue University Board of Trustees on Monday (April 19) announced its plan to adopt a civics literacy graduation requirement for undergraduates, beginning with students who enter Purdue in fall 2021. The board will vote on the requirement at its June 11 public meeting.” Purdue Today, April 19, 2021.

 

The Emergence of Educational Institutions as Critical Instrumentalities of Economic and Political Domination and Subordination

As Marx wrote, “all history is the history of class struggle.” While this is correct, it is appropriate to ask why capitalism has sustained itself and grown, from industrial, to finance, to monopoly finance capital in the twenty-first century. Marxists, and others, usually have relied on explanations of the sustenance of capitalism emphasizing the role of the police, the military, and in less-violent ways the expansion of consumerism.  But what was hinted at in Marx’s German Ideology and powerfully articulated by Antonio Gramsci, ruling classes rule by force and consent. And in the new century both the sophistication of the instrumentalities of force, weapons, and consent, educational institutions and the media have grown enormously. There has been extended discussion in recent years about the military and police, but less so about education and the media. In the current century the latter have taken on importance for system maintenance and corporations and banks.

Educational Institutions and Ideological Hegemony

It is obvious that the maintenance of any political or economic order is the education of the young in such a way as to give legitimacy to it. In the 1960s political scientists began to study what they called “political socialization:” how and what people learn about the norms, values, and procedures that govern the maintenance of society. Some studies found that children begin to accept the virtues of political institutions, the presidency, the courts, political parties, at very young ages. What they learn about politics in the home is reinforced and developed in school systems. Selective presentations of history and the arts is provided by formal content and repeated rituals, such as the pledge to the flag, competitive sports, routinized social life such as dances. In addition, as theorists such as Jim Berlin have argued, the educational system not only produces and reproduces citizenship, but it also reproduces workers, giving young people appropriate skills in language an mathematics. Educational theorists have pointed out that the character of education develops and changes as the economy changes, from competitive to industrial, to monopoly capitalism.

In addition to adding “socialization” to the lexicon of analysis political scientists began to write about “political culture,” or the values and beliefs that dominate the thinking of most members of a society. Ideas about the basic units of society, individuals or communities for example, the relative importance in the society of cooperation or conflict, the role of “human nature” or institutions as primary forces in shaping society.  Perhaps most basic in the United States is the relative acceptance of private property or public goods as prime values.

In higher education, curricula reinforce and solidify the dominant ideas of the political culture. It is seen as social science and humanities disciplines reify standard paradigms about history, what is great art and philosophy, and what values are beyond reproach. In the post-World War II in the United States the dominant political culture was tinged with virulent anticommunism, the demonic other. Ruling classes, powerful corporations, and state institutions oversaw what was defined as legitimate educational content.

Meanwhile business schools and science and engineering programs were training young people in the schools necessary to promote the political economy. The humanities and social sciences grounded student learning in the acceptable political culture while the fields, what we call STEM, trained these same students in the tools of system maintenance. The former president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, coined the term “multiversity” to describe the functions of such institutions in the late twentieth century and he made it clear that the multiversity was supposed to serve the national security interests of the United States.

As Clark Kerr was leading the California university system young people became increasingly engaged in struggles against racism and escalating war in Vietnam. While these educational institutions became more repressive, as with the shootings of students at Jackson State and Kent State Universities, increased discourse on college campuses, sometimes initiated by faculty, was critical of the dominant political culture and its normal functioning, that s training workers for the economic machine. The university, to use a workplace metaphor, became “contested terrain.” Some faculty and students began to criticize the capitalist system, the war machine, the privatization of the commons, and histories that seemed to endorse patriarchy and racism. From the vantage point of those who rule, ideological hegemony had to be reimposed in the educational system. As conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh once proclaimed, “we,’ that is conservatives, control all major institutions except for the university.

In the twenty-first century, efforts of the defenders of capitalism have sought to reimpose the traditional political culture by privatizing public schools. Not only are charter schools a profitable source of investment, but they by virtue of their existence and curriculum reify the idea of the market, private over public goods, and opposition to teachers as workers and teacher unions, and the elimination of the tradition of public education entirely.

At the university level, traditional study of history and the arts (with all their ideological contestation) are being defunded while colleges and universities define science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as the primary purpose for having education systems. And major funds for STEM education and research come from huge corporations, particularly digital, drug, and agricultural corporations, and the military. And in the spirit of Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, the Association of Trustees and Administrators (ACTA), the State Policy Network, and the Associated Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) have worked with state legislatures to the early post-World II days when Kerr spoke approvingly of the multiversity. In sum. education from kindergarten through the university is increasingly designed to instill the ideology of the dominant political culture and to create a twenty-first century work force to serve the needs of monopoly/finance/global capitalism.

The Shock Doctrine, Covid 19 and Higher Education

For those of you who see “ideas as material forces” and grew up in an environment where the university was “contested terrain,” that is, where ideas were discussed, common assumptions were challenged, and students developed intellectual as well as political solidarity.

The idea of “the shock doctrine”. Naomi Klein tells us, is that economic and political crises afford the opportunity for the dominant classes to institute changes that majorities of people in usual times would not accept. In addition, a long time ago James O’Connor wrote about “The Fiscal Crisis of the State.” In the twenty-first century that has meant steep declines in public support for higher education. Finally, Nancy MacLean has written about the agenda of radical libertarians which includes reducing the role of the state as to administering, financing, and regulating public affairs, and relying more on market forces.

As a Goldman-Sachs memo suggests we might expect efforts by powerful forces to try to institute a “Post-Corona Virus Higher Education System” very different from the higher education many of us experienced.

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/from_briefings_17-mar-2020.html?fbclid=IwAR2xGGxQ67c4LJJQ7rIrP5Xar1jg4pZqZlqq9vJWSzQ07s_aobX4xKjkAJc

Furthermore, the discussion of higher education in the context of the corona virus crisis is bringing to the foreground the profoundest of debates in society at large. The debate highlights those who celebrate individualism, the survival of the fittest, the market, and shrinking public institutions versus those who see community, solidarity, public institutions, and real democracy as our only hope for survival. Many of us learned about these two fundamentally competing worldviews in colleges and universities and we took our stand.

The Beginnings of Civic Literacy at Purdue University

“Trustee Malcolm DeKryger compared time at Purdue to an eye of a hurricane, where students were focused on the rigors of getting a degree.

‘There’s a lot stuff going on in our country and our civics going around us,’ DeKryger said. ‘But when you’re in the eye, it’s pretty quiet. … I guess that’s why I personally agree with that idea that we’ve got to make sure there is that touchpoint out there, so when you do go out into the world, you’re prepared.’”  (quoted in Dave Bangert, “Purdue Trustees, Mitch Daniels Reiterate Call for Civics Test Get A Diploma,” Lafayette Journal and Courier, June 18, 2019.

No one can dispute the value of education about the nation, the world, and the issues that have and will affect peoples’ lives in the short-and long-term future. Schools and universities, of course, have historically been primary venues for disseminating such information. However, most often politicians have preferred narratives about themselves and others that they wish to inculcate in the young. A more desirable form of information and analysis is one that is diverse, sensitive to one’s own past and present, and shows respect to narratives and experiences of other peoples and nations. This kind of “civics” education is a complicated and not achieved by learning isolated facts.

President Mitch Daniels, Purdue University, in the spring, 2019, proposed that the university require that each graduating senior at the university demonstrate a knowledge of what he called “civics.” The members of the Board of Trustees recently endorsed the idea and implicitly castigated faculty for not moving expeditiously to establish a civics certification process for graduating seniors. But faculty have questioned the need for such a certification, what civics education is, and how to provide for it. Specifically, they asked whether claims about civics ignorance at Purdue and elsewhere were true. They also asked whether taking a short-answer test really demonstrated knowledge of the United States government, its constitution, and the political process. Some faculty argued that such a need could only be satisfied by at least one course, perhaps in Political Science or History, that would provide a richer knowledge, raise competing understandings of the development of the United States government, and would allow for serious discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the American political experience. A ten or twenty item short answer test, they argued, would not reflect the more subtle and sophisticated needs of civics education.

Some faculty were puzzled by why, in the context of the existence of a set of university core requirements already in existence, this idea of a civics certification emerged. One possible source of the idea of some kind of civics education can be seen in a January 2016 report published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization founded by the State Policy Network, which is tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Charles and David Koch Foundation. The report called “A Crisis in Civic Education,” describes a survey it sponsored in 2015 that demonstrates that college graduates and the public in general lack knowledge of “our free institutions of government.” It listed examples of some basic facts about government and history that respondents failed to answer correctly. These included a lack of understanding of how the constitution could be amended, which institution has the power to declare war, and who was “the father of the constitution.”

Perhaps ACTA’s underlying concern was suggested by a quote in the preface of the document attributed to Louise Mirrer, President of the New York Historical Society, who received an ACTA award in 2014 “for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education.” She said that in the contemporary world of conflicts between religious, ethnic and racial groups, Americans need to be reminded of US history “…especially as that history conveys our nation’s stunning successful recipe, based on the documents of our founding, for an inclusive and tolerant society.” (Apparently, she forgot the limitations on the rights of Blacks, women and those without property to vote in “the documents of our founding.”)   In addition, the report takes aim at community service programs, which it asserts “…give students little insight into how our system of government works and what roles they must fill as citizens of a democratic republic.”

It is clear, therefore, that what the ACTA report (and one could reasonably assume what has motivated the recommendation of President Daniels, himself an award recipient from ACTA) and the Purdue Board of Trustees regards as civics education is a narrative that celebrates the American experience. These sources presume that specific facts about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and basic truisms about the United States as a “melting pot” constitute civics education. Although civics education is surely a desirable goal of education at every level, K through college, it requires moving beyond memorizing basic facts to more subtle examinations about the American experience, including exposing students to debates about how and why that experience has unfolded in the way that it has.

What Would a Discussion of Democracy Look Like?

Everything we Americans have learned since infancy suggests that the United States is a democracy. In fact, the United States political system, we are told repeatedly, is the gold standard for the world. Distinguished data source Freedom House claims that freedom can only exist in democratic political systems. Democratic systems are those in which governments are accountable, the rule of law exists, and associations and speech are guaranteed to all. Polity IV, another data-based source of information about governments, has a more refined definition of democracy: procedures by which citizens can express their preferences about leaders and policies and there exists both constraints on executive power and guarantees of civil liberties.

University of Iowa Political Science Professor William M. Reisinger prepared a chart summarizing the key components of democracy reflected in the writings of political philosophers (such as Aristotle), politicians (John C. Calhoun), skeptics (H. L. Mencken), and a variety of contemporary political scientists. He appends to his chart 25 quotations that illustrate variations in the understanding of the concept “democracy.” Reisinger identifies five emphases in most writings on the subject.

“1)it is a dangerous form of government; 2)it includes genuine competition for power; 3)it permits mass participation on a legally equal footing; 4)it provides civil and other liberties that restrict the sphere of state power within the society; or 5)it promotes widespread deliberation about how to make and enforce policy so as to promote the common good” (William M. Reisinger, “Selected Definitions of Democracy,” uiowa.edu).

For example, a real civics education might address questions such as:

-What is democracy? Is it just about voting or does it also include the distribution of society’s resources?

-What is power? Who has power in the United States political system? How did they get it? Is the distribution of power and influence in the United States democratic?

-How are people elected to public office? What kind of resources do they need to run for public office? What kind of people are likely to be elected to public office such as relating to their class, race, gender, nationality, and occupations?

-How do policies get introduced, discussed, debated, and passed? Who influences the policymaking process? What role do powerful interest groups play in the policy process?

-What role do political parties play in the electoral and policy process?

-In the United States have there been population groups who have not been the beneficiaries of the political system? Who are they? Why have they not enjoyed the benefits of the political system? What is gerrymandering?

To answer these questions requires that students take a course or more that addresses these issues, perhaps in Departments of Political Science and/or History. For sure, if students lack civics literacy (and that is an empirical question) it cannot be achieved by answers to a series of short answer questions but thorough study, recognizing that answers to the questions are complicated with differing possible answers. And addressing these questions in multiple ways would constitute a real civics education.

Historicizing the Drive for Civics Literacy

Histories of higher education suggest that universities have always been, as the workplace metaphor suggests, “contested terrain.” Administrators have sought to shape what and how knowledge is disseminated, to whom, by whom, and for what purposes. Higher education since the 1960s particularly has been contested. Clark Kerr, referred to above, saw education as inclusive of many strands, scientific and humanist, but always designed to serve the interests of the United States as a world power.

The campus conflicts of the sixties and beyond grew over the content of higher education, classes and programs, who the educators should be, and the influence said educators should have in the planning process; what AAUP calls “shared governance.” From the 60s until today, faculty, students, and communities were able to create programs on peace, women, race and racism, ethnic studies, the environment, and to a considerable degree programs that were interdisciplinary in character. While the popularity of these programs grew enormously from the 1960s, there have always been powerful political and economic interest groups seeking to oppose newer curricula. The relative power of the “pushback” has directly related to the strength of these forces outside the university on the one hand: from business, to politics, compared to the mobilization of students and other consumers of education on the other hand.

In this context, the rise of conservative forces, illustrated by the Koch brothers and their institutional creations, such as ALEC, the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity, ACTA, gained momentum over the last several years, particularly since the election of the first African American President Barack Obama in 2008. It is in this context that ACTA solicited the report on higher education referred to above which called for a program in civics literacy.

Since the ACTA report, the US has experienced increased police violence (from the aftermath of Ferguson to George Floyd and beyond), the rise of a new generation of Black Lives Matter Activists, Native Americans protesting the construction of oil pipelines that would destroy native lands, outrages against malfeasance of the Trump administration including the president’s endorsement of racism and the super-exploitation of women, and reversal of environmental policies designed to modestly slow the destruction predicted by climate change. At the University of North Carolina Nicole Hannah-Jones was denied tenure because an influential alum objected to her work on the 1619 Project. This project led to a New York Times magazine supplement which documented impacts of white supremacy occurring throughout U.S. history. In parallel actions, several state legislatures have moved to ban so-called “critical race theory” from classrooms. Therefore, in this social, political, and cultural environment cynicism about government has risen, the legitimacy of government has declined, and more and more young people (such as the Parkland students) have begun to challenge the system of political and economic order.

Therefore, it is in this context, the crisis of legitimacy, that significant political forces have seen the necessity of transforming the content of education back to the day when paradigms in virtually all fields celebrated American exceptionalism.   Boards of Trustees, educational administrators, and politicians believe that the deepening legitimacy crisis among the citizenry, particularly the young, can be alleviated in the aftermath of the pandemic either through creating sanitized programs of civic literacy or banning educational content that bears critically on United States history and politics. Thus, the long-term crisis of legitimacy in the country, its exacerbation in recent years, and the occasion of the pandemic have provided the opportunity for efforts to transform the educational process.

For more details on the Purdue case see Dan Morris, “Dictating Civics…” below:

https://academeblog.org/2021/06/21/dictating-civics-how-the-purdue-civics-literary-requirement-was-imposed-by-trustees-and-administrators/

 

 

 

The Grass Is Greener 2021-07-16 - Harry Targ on the Campus as Ideological Arena by WXRW riverwestradio.com 104.1fm

 https://soundcloud.com/user-240416425/2021-07-16-1800-the-grass-is-greener

THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY CONTINUES

Harry Targ

Nancy MacLean in her groundbreaking 2017 book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” addresses one of the central problems facing the American people, indeed majorities of people around the world; the contradiction between democracy and capitalism. As we look to the 2022 elections, the seemingly successful efforts of state governments, with support from the court system, to suppress voting, gerrymander districts, and in other ways to squelch the voices of the people, threatens majority rule. In addition, media consolidation, the creation of “news deserts,” restricting what is to be taught in the education system from grade one through the university, all are part of the concerted threat to fully inform publics. This too is a threat to democratic participation and majority rule. Consequently, it is useful to revisit MacLean’s main arguments.

MacLean begins by analyzing central premises of the so-called Austrian school of economics. Nineteenth and twentieth century luminaries from this tradition, particularly Van Mises and Hayek, articulated the view that the main priority of any society, but particularly democracies, is the extent to which markets are allowed to flourish, unencumbered by governments.

According to this view in a truly free society markets remain supreme. In fact, “liberty” exists in a society to the extent economic actors are unrestrained in the marketplace. Virtually all limitations on economic liberty so defined constitute a threat to “real” democracy. Governments exist only to maintain domestic order (the police power) and to defend the nation from external aggression (defense of national security). Governments provide police protection and armies. And that should be all. In sum, as President Ronald Reagan expressed the market vision: “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”

To further illustrate, MacLean describes the brutal dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende, a socialist, was elected by a plurality in the 1970 presidential election in that country and in the spring, 1973 in municipal elections held across the country, Allende’s coalition of parties drew even more votes for their candidates than did Allende in 1970. The United States, based on directives from President Nixon, had already moved to make the Chilean economy “scream” and had initiated contacts with Chilean generals who would be prepared to carry out a military coup against the popular government.  The military coup, ousting Allende from power, was launched, ironically on September 11, 1973.

As MacLean points out, in the aftermath of the coup, General Augusto Pinochet rounded up and killed thousands of Allende supporters, destroyed the long tradition of electoral politics, abolished trade unions, and began the process of ending government involvement in the economy and public institutions. Social security and education were privatized. Policies of nationalization of key industries were reversed. The shifts to what the Austrian school called economic liberty were imposed on the Chilean people with the advice of University of Chicago economists, such as Milton Friedman, and later, George Mason University economist, James Buchanan, who was instrumental in recommending “reforms” to the Chilean constitution making return to democracy more difficult. Subsequently only a few other dictatorships in Latin America showed any sympathy for the Pinochet regime with most of the world condemning its domestic brutality. But as MacLean reports, Milton Friedman and his colleagues never condemned the Chilean regime and Buchanan regarded it as a paradigmatic case of economic liberty, a model which the world should emulate. (And today, the Chilean people are rising up to rewrite the Pinochet era constitution that suppressed democracy).

Although the Chilean case represents an extreme example of dictatorship and free market capitalism, she uses it to illustrate a central point. In most societies, and the United States is no exception, majorities of people endorse government policies that can and often do serve the people. Ordinarily, citizens support public transportation, schools, highways, libraries, retirement guarantees, some publicly provided health care, and regulations to protect the environment, as well as police and military protection. The problem for Buchanan and his colleagues is that each one of these government programs. except for the police and military, constrains the “liberty” of entrepreneurs to pursue profit.

To put it simply, if citizens of the United States were asked if they support public programs, majorities would say “yes.” Although there have been extraordinary constraints on majority rule, even enshrined in the US constitution, the history of the United States can be seen as a history of struggles to improve and achieve majoritarian democracy. Demands for voting rights for women, African/Americans, non-propertied and low-income workers, released prisoners, and others have been basic to the American experience. The great anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century all across the globe were premised on the vision of individual and collective sovereignty of the people. If economic liberty is conceptualized as inversely related to majoritarian democracy, then capitalism and democracy are incompatible.

Nancy MacLean, based on this fundamental contradiction, develops a narrative of efforts by celebrants of economic liberty, the Koch brothers and their allies, to build campaigns in virtually every state and locale to disenfranchise people. ALEC affiliates in state legislatures over the last decade have promoted legislation to suppress the right to vote, eliminate the rights of workers to unionize, disempower city councils, eliminate the right of local governments to make fiscal decisions, and to enshrine in curricula in K to 12 education systems and the universities ideologies about the virtues of economic freedom. There are powerful political pressures to privatize every existing public institution. And these pressures have increased and today come from almost the entirety of the Republican Party and some of the Democratic Party as well (including efforts to defeat progressives within their ranks). Again, the best government is no government (except for the maintenance of police force to squelch demands for change and military power to protect the nation at home and abroad).

Nancy MacLean is warning us that there is a powerful drive, based on wealth and power, in the United States to destroy democracy. This democracy, while flawed, has been fought for since the founding of the United States. Its continuation, leaving aside its need for improvement, is under fundamental threat. 

LIES AND WAR: From Truman to Rumsfeld and Beyond

 Harry Targ

Post-modernists talk about “discourses,” “narratives,” “tropes,” and verbal “deconstructions.” They should be commended for suggesting how words are used to mobilize, inspire, deceive, promote self-interest, and, too often, justify killing everywhere. Former Arkansas Senator, J. William Fulbright in describing how he was tricked by his old friend President Lyndon Baines Johnson to support a resolution authorizing escalating war in Vietnam said: “A lie is a lie. There is no other way to put it.”

The story can begin any time. As World War Two was ending, the Greek government constructed by Great Britain after the Nazis were defeated sought to crush a rebellion by activists who objected to their newly imposed rulers. The Greek rebels included former anti-fascists freedom fighters, some of whom were Communists or Socialists. The British, no longer able to support the repression of the Greek Left in what was a civil war, called on the Americans for help.

In February,1947, Truman foreign policy advisers met to discuss what to do about the Greek civil war and the threat of “Communism” spreading along the Mediterranean. The Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, attending the meeting. said he would support U.S. military and economic aid for the unpopular Greek government. But, he said, tell the President he better “scare hell out of the American people.”

One month later, President Truman gave his famous Truman Doctrine speech to the Congress and the American people. He warned the American people, who until that time still had positive feelings toward the Soviet people, that the United States and the “free world” were going to be engaged in a long-term struggle against the forces of “international communism.” The Truman Doctrine was not about nations and movements with different interests and ideologies but rather a global struggle between the forces of good threatened by the forces of evil.

United States administrations ever since have justified aggressive foreign policies by lying and distorting the realities behind complex international relationships. In addition, when a politician, a journalist, a scholar, or a whole peace movement criticizes targeting nations and movements as diabolical and security threats, these critics are challenged as weak, indecisive, cowardly, and even worse, stalking horses for the vile enemy or enemies.

Campaigns of propaganda masquerading as truth have been a constant feature of international relations, particularly since World War Two. The reality of U.S. struggles against demonized enemies tells a sobering story. Deaths in wars and interventions in which the United States participated from 1945 until 1995 totaled about ten million people. These figures, extracted from the valuable research of Ruth Sivard, (World Military and Social Expenditures, 1996) do not include injuries and forced migrations of millions of people fleeing combat zones. Nor do these figures include the wasteful trillions of dollars of military expenditures and environmental damage resulting from a war system.

Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Team Continued the Tradition of Lying to Make War

 …Don Rumsfeld is, to use a phrase that is used too loosely but that certainly applies in this case – a ‘great American’ – and has been for decades. And if you want to look for a genuine model and prototype for your own careers, you could not have chosen a better role model than him. Mitch Daniels interviewed at the Rumsfeld Foundation, November 4, 2020.

https://www.rumsfeldfoundation.org/blog/detail/service-series-a-conversation-on-leadership-with-governor-mitch-daniels

Neoconservatives, celebrants of war, have had a long and growing presence in the machinery of United States foreign policy. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense in the Truman Administration, was a leading advocate for developing a militaristic response to the Soviet Union in the years after World War II. As historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out, Forrestal was one of the Truman administrators who sought to create a “permanent war economy.” He was, in Bacevich’s terms, a founding member of the post-World War II “semi-warriors.”

Subsequent to the initiation of the imperial response to the “Soviet threat” — the Marshall Plan, NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the arms race — other semi-warriors continued the crusade. These included the Dulles brothers (John and Allen), Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and prominent Kennedy advisors including McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow, architect of the “noncommunist path to development,” in Vietnam.

Key semi-warriors of our own day, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, and others who formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s, gained their first experience in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The PNAC view of how the United States should participate in world affairs is to use military superiority to achieve foreign policy goals. The key failure of Clinton foreign policy, they claimed, was his refusal to use force to transform the world. For starters, he should have overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The neoconservative policy recommendations prevailed during the eight years of the George Walker Bush administration. International organizations were belittled, allies were ignored, arms control agreements with Russia were rescinded, and discourse on the future prioritized planning for the next war.

And concretely the United States launched long, bloody, immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the US war, thousands were displaced, and violence spread throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf. And despite the 2003 Office of Management and Budget office prediction of Mitch Daniels that the war would cost $60 billion, recent estimates suggest the true cost of the Iraq war approached $3 trillion. Cost estimates, claims that the US troops would be welcomed as liberators, and the war would be over quickly all turned out to be false. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s declaration before the world that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction proved false as well.

Subsequent to the Iraq War, the United States has been engaged in overt and covert war, economic embargoes to bring down governments it does not find to its liking (Libya, Syria, Iran, the Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba), and has spent billions more on the military (over 800 military bases in 39 countries) while its domestic infrastructure declines. Now, the Biden Administration is ramping up support for confrontations with China and Russia.

Lies and War Are a Testament to Citizen Skepticism

Getting back to Senator Vandenberg’s advice to President Truman about how to gain support of the American people for moral/military crusades, leaders and media are warning about a new global terrorist threat, this time cyber attacks and space weapons, and a renewed post-Soviet threat from Russia and China, a new Cold War. The intensity of the selling job is testament to the good sense of the American people who continue to say “no more wars.”  

 

UNIVERSITIES AND POLITICAL CONFLICT (originally posted July 10, 2012)

(The post pandemic crisis has escalated the conflicts over the very character of higher education: substance, governance, employment, and specifically whether universities should address the ugliness of United States history as well as accomplishments. It does us well to revisit the issue of higher education and whose interests it serves).

Harry Targ

Since Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement almost every institution in American life--financial, corporate, political party, media, military, and religious--has appropriately become subject to scrutiny and evaluation. In each case analysts and activists have begun to raise questions about what these institutions look like, whose interests they serve, and how they contribute to the well-being of society.

Until recently colleges and universities have been largely above reproach. Research and education have been seen as the cornerstone of American democracy and economic development. 

Institutions of higher education have traditionally performed four tasks in the service of maintaining and enhancing the development of the other institutions referred to above. First, universities, particularly since World War II, have provided research resources to produce the products and technologies that have stimulated the capitalist system. Often basic research has fed into major enterprises in society, from promoting a global food system, to building sophisticated armies, to developing new high speed systems of communication that maximize control of economies and peoples. Major universities bring together talented research scholars and public and private research dollars to create inventions that promote greater control of nature and people and to expand profit.

Second, universities train work forces. Some graduates will become the research scholars who will continue the tradition of study and economic development to advance the economy and the polity further. Others will be provided the skills to work in the private and public sectors to carry out the work of institutional perpetuation. Corporate managers, computer specialists, tourism experts, and employees in the public sphere are trained at the modern university. And, increasingly universities train the soldiers who will fight the wars that the United States continues to fight.

Third, universities provide an education that in the main facilitates the transfer of legitimated knowledge to consumers of that knowledge. Particular attention is given to the promotion of a scientific worldview that reduces physical and social reality to a multiplicity of “variables” that can be studied with statistical rigor. Knowledge is primarily scientific knowledge.

Legitimated knowledge that is passed along to college students also includes highly selective portraits of how economies work, what constitutes democratic political institutions, and what constitutes standards of quality in the arts. In subtle forms, universities pass along celebratory, often uncritical, images of the society in which students live.

Finally, universities are credentialing institutions. They reward students with degrees, recommendations, and honors, which can be used as licenses to participate in the other institutions in society. Even when political and economic elites receive prestigious degrees through family connections, it is the degree that helps the accumulation of power.

The four functions --research, training, legitimizing, and credentialing--have changed concretely over time. For example, in the United States, the development of the modern university paralleled the industrial revolution. Prestigious universities, such as Harvard, initiated modern departments at the dawn of the twentieth century replacing the primacy of theology and law with economics, business administration, and industrial engineering. Training in fields such as education was designed to create a literate work force that could staff the factories of modern society. And social sciences were created to develop theories that comported with industrial development, such as Social Darwinism. These theories largely justified the distribution of wealth and power within societies and in the international system.

After World War II higher education took on vital functions in new ways. The GI Bill funded college education for veterans to train the scientists and managers of the new age. Also, higher education would credential students to be placed in higher paying jobs so that they could earn enough to buy the goods that a booming American economy was producing.

By the 1960s, higher education experienced enormous growth. For University of California President Clark Kerr, the “multiversity” was the institution critical for the development of a new global economy, scientific and technological advances, and the invention of new tools to fight the Cold War. In addition, social scientists and economists, studying development, would generate theories to guide public policy, particularly in poorer countries experiencing revolutionary ferment.

The massive growth in higher education from the 1960s to the new century led to increased university budgets, higher tuition costs, over-trained and underemployed college graduates, and a layer of overpaid administrators who had taken over the operations of most universities from the professor ranks. In addition, many non-professional workers at the university kept universities operational and were paid a living wage with justifiably secure benefits.

Now, in the midst of a deep economic crisis, political and economic elites are lobbying to create new structures of power in higher education while still supporting research, training, legitimating, and credentialing. The approach that is increasingly promoted by political leaders, educational foundations, and most important, Boards of Trustees of universities, is what Kevin Phillips labeled “market fundamentalism.”

The market fundamentalist approach emphasizes cutting public support for higher education and reducing financial support for students, particularly underrepresented students. In other words, as opposed to the era of the GI Bill, the operant vision is ultimately to reduce access to higher education which will contribute to the increasing inequality in wealth and income in the United States.

Also, market fundamentalism relies on the market to induce “competition” to reduce costs among universities. It encourages new profit-based universities that can sell college degrees cheaply, primarily by substituting on-line courses for campus experienced-based education. In addition, market fundamentalists call for forcing universities to make every academic unit in the university pay for itself.

What is new about the crisis in higher education today, what appointment of new presidents represents, is that economic and political elites wish to continue the traditional functions of the university while reducing costs in higher education.

They want to transfer continuing costs to students and workers at the university.

They are working to streamline university education to research on corporate agriculture, medicine, computer technology, military developments, and allied fields.

And they want to cut educational programs that link research, education, and community service. This may entail eliminating programs that cannot be linked to the making of profit, such as in literature, the arts, and various social sciences and cultural studies. This is probably what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce meant when it warned of “growing skepticism about whether those lucky enough to graduate have acquired the skills and knowledge necessary for success in the 21st century economy.”

And finally, since politics has never been absent from debates about higher education, in today’s context corporate elites including those in the media, wish to eliminate the enduring tradition of “academic freedom” which has celebrated the view that the university must be a venue for the pursuit of “the marketplace of ideas.”

Expect the university to be another emerging site for contestation and political struggle.

THOUGHTS ON HIGHER EDUCATION: 2021

 Harry Targ

(State legislatures, prominent politicians, special interest groups, and university administrators and boards of trustees have placed the character of higher education on the public agenda for the first time in years. Unfounded criticisms of the teaching and study of racism in US history, shifting to online education, further encroachments by university administrators on what is taught and how, all necessitate a serious reexamination of the transformation of the university in incremental and non-transparent ways. For example, even the teaching of STEM courses is being examined with a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation at one prominent university.

(https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/instruction-during-pandemic-provides-foundation-for-future-stem-education.htm

 The materials below were written a few years ago but reflect some of the issues that are currently being raised, and decided, without sufficient public discussion and without input from most educators. (Some organizations, such as the American Association of University Professors, have committed themselves to stimulating a broad-based public discussion of higher education in the 21^st century.  See for example the emerging discussion of a New Deal for Higher Education which addresses the process and content of higher education and the support for students pursuing higher education. The campaign includes the idea that higher education is a public good. https://newdealforhighered.org/)

 

REMODELING LIBERAL ARTS IN THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

Harry Targ

In the recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean traces the intellectual development of the libertarian right and its connection with the Koch Brothers and state programs to promote an ideologically-driven policy agenda.  She argues that many of the libertarian right’s policy proposals would be opposed if public discourse and majoritarian democracy prevailed. Consequently, she suggests, efforts are made to limit transparency, public discussion, and legislative and electoral participation in major public policies.

Public universities are among the institutions in which the lack of transparency is becoming the norm. The tradition of shared governance is being trampled on. Educational decisions are being made by politicians, and administrators and boards of trustees without any advice and consent from educators and taxpayers. Under the guise of a “business model” driven by metrics and profit-making, many years of educational practices are being overturned by administrators with little educational experience. Great state universities such as those in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana are being reconstructed. Programs of teaching and research are being uprooted. Sometimes ongoing programs are abolished. And new liberal arts curricula measure success by creating narrowly trained job seekers. Further, research is increasingly channeled to meet the needs of corporations or the military.

The Vision of the 21st Century University

The President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, on October 12, 2018 received the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education presented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Daniels reported with enthusiasm that Purdue University is the third “most STEM-centric school in the country,” with over 60 percent of its undergraduate students matriculating in engineering, chemistry, physics, and agricultural and biological sciences. And he implied that there is a struggle going on in great universities everywhere about what should constitute liberal arts (Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. “Re-liberalizing the Liberal Arts,” Washington, October 12, 2018, goacta.org.) From Daniels’ point of view, administrators cannot wait for liberal arts programs in the twenty-first century to transform themselves. This is so because liberal arts education today consists of “conformity of thought, intolerance of dissent and sometimes an authoritarian tendency to quash it, a rejection of the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines.”

Daniels then railed against the “one-sided view of the world” being presented in liberal arts classrooms in opposition to critical thinking. He appropriately celebrated the “clash of competing ideas,” but characterized liberal arts curricula and research as dogmatic and authoritarian. (Many liberal arts educators would argue that old ideas are always revisited bringing new, diverse, perspectives to bear on traditional disciplinary formulations in the social sciences and humanities). In other words, while most scholars and students appreciate the openness and creativity of education and scholarship that has resulted from the last fifty years of ferment, debate, and thought characteristic of the intellectual life of higher education, Daniels advocates to the contrary that the newer scholarship and education should be challenged and expunged (Daniels referred in his lecture to some of his intellectual mentors including Charles Murray and Jeb Bush).

Daniels added that the tenure system protects dogmatists rather than what he would regard as free thinkers. He characterized modern liberal arts education as “the celebration of mediocrity;” the liberal arts as the home of “illiberal viewpoints;” and as the transmitter of “conformity of thought.” He condemned what he called “shoddy scholarship” as well. “Hopelessly abstruse, jargon-laden papers from so-called ‘studies’ programs read like self-parodies.” He claimed, with no evidence, that “…fewer than half the published studies across the social sciences can be replicated.”

And the final and most damaging claim Daniels made was that practitioners of liberal arts make their subject matter boring. He asserted that histories are written without heroes, excitement, “…glory, the human elements…”

All this, Daniels suggested, requires reform of liberal arts from outside the clutches of the educators in the various fields he condemned. At Purdue University change is occurring because of a program called Cornerstone which brings STEM students to specially crafted liberal arts courses. “Enrollees will read Locke, Hobbes, and Jefferson as well as other works in the Great Books tradition.” Reading the great books, which according to Daniels are not already being taught in existing courses, and offering various dual degree and fast track three-year degrees, he said, are responses to the needs of the business community for liberal arts graduates.

And as to free speech on campus, Daniels castigated students who, he asserted were coached by faculty, made unwarranted demands on him to denounce fascist and racist flyers on campus. And without any sense of irony, Daniels quoted 1960s Chancellor of the University of California system of higher education Clark Kerr who said that a proper university “is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” He apparently did not recall that students at the University of California launched the Free Speech Movement on their campus in 1964 because Kerr’s administration banned literature tables on campus.

Discussions of Higher Education Are Held in Secret

Lastly, Daniels praised the work of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). ACTA, formed in 1995, says it works “…to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.” Henry Giroux has characterized ACTA as “…not a friend of academic freedom, nor is it comfortable with John Dewey’s notion that education should be responsive to the deepest conflicts of our time…” (Henry Giroux, The University in Chains, Paragon Publishers, 2007, p. 161).

ACTA, while claiming to be independent, is an associate member of the State Policy Network. SPN is a “think tank” with affiliates in 49 states. SPN groups are affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which was a creation of the billionaire Koch brothers and rightwing organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, to promote a radical libertarian policy agenda in virtually every state. Jane Mayer, Nancy MacLean and others have shown that ALEC, SPN, and ACTA leaders realized that public discourse and transparency in political and other institutions might lead publics, often majorities, to reject their anti-government, “free-market” agendas.

Universities historically have had public discussions about curricula and most universities, including Purdue University, have institutionalized mechanisms for decision-making on educational policy matters. Faculty Senates, curricula committees, and promotion and tenure committees, have been the lifeblood of higher education. And, appropriately enough, as a result of student movements on college campuses, students have been included in conversations about educational matters as well. And some state universities value the input of citizens and a broad representative array of alumni from their universities, not just the wealthy who become the core of boards of trustees or the small number who can afford to donate millions of dollars.

What the speech represents is a capsule summary of the Daniels vision of what liberal arts should be. It is largely a series of claims about modern liberal arts programs, diametrically opposed to the reality. It is a policy brief for his campus that Daniels presented to the non-transparent ACTA, an affiliate of a larger covert institutional network with a presence in every state. The network is committed to a radical transformation of economic, political, and educational institutions, a radical libertarian America. Since the liberal arts tradition includes a rigorous conversation about this and other visions, questions of the direction of higher education at Purdue University deserve a rich diverse public conversation among educators, students, and citizens. Private conversations within and between organizations that restrict this conversation violate the spirit of higher education.

 

21st CENTURY UNIVERSITIES: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND CORPORATE POWER

(This essay, originally posted in June,2014, reflects the continuing and growing debate about the vision and purpose of higher education. As Purdue University celebrates its 150-year anniversary, conversations about the purposes of higher education are in order).

The university is a site for intellectual excitement: debate about new theories and hypotheses; rigorous examinations of competing ideas; and research, teaching, and community service. Most men and women who pursue a career in the academy are inspired by intellectual curiosity, the prospect of educating and inspiring students, and serving diverse communities of citizens.

Moreover, the Morrill Act passed by Congress in 1862 committed the United States to construct and support state universities which would serve the people, in those days largely rural populations. Great state-funded public universities grew over the subsequent 150 years to facilitate the education of a growing population.  They enriched that population with varieties of knowledge and the tools to improve the lives of the citizenry and, as a result, helped build a more vibrant democracy.

But there are darker truths about the growth of the modern university. First, higher education is stimulated by, and financially beholden to, governments, political processes, corporations, and banks. These institutions affect what research is done and what subjects are taught in the university.

Second, and related to the first, conceptions of disciplines, bodies of knowledge, appropriate methods, ideas accepted as unchallengeable truths in various fields, and the basic principles of whole universities are shaped by economic interests and political power.

Third, professional associations, journals, forms of peer review, and general procedures for validating the quality of academic research and teaching are also affected by the same economic and political interests that dominate universities.

Fourth, therefore, in the main, the university as an institution is, and has always been, designed to serve the interests of the status quo, a status quo again that is governed by economic and political interests.

The following examples are from one university, Purdue University. Similar examples can be found at virtually every large and prestigious university in the country. David Smith and Scott Bauer (The Lafayette Journal and Courier, “Daniels: Georgia Trip Was Good for Purdue,” May 1, 2014) reported on Purdue President Mitch Daniels’ attendance at a conference of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Daniels said he attended the meeting to learn and to touch base with one of Purdue’s biggest donors.

The meeting, held every year since 1982, was populated by presidential candidates, and conservative governors from Michigan and Florida. Other attendees included former Vice-President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director David Petraeus, and former Amway President Dick DeVos, and current or former CEOs from TD Ameritrade, Apple, and Google. Karl Rove, premier Republican operative, also attended. Inadvertently highlighting the connection between corporate and political power and the university President Daniels said: “I considered this a trip of use to Purdue.”

Academic advocates for large-scale government and corporate commitments to increased space exploration, such as President Daniels, who served as co-chair of the National Research Council, can be seen as serving the economic needs of research universities. The NRC issued a 286-page report in May, 2014, suggesting that a huge and redefined commitment would be needed to land on Mars by the 2030s (Reed Sellers, “Report Calls for Increased NASA Budget,” The Exponent, June 9, 2014). Despite the document’s skepticism about the possibilities of achieving new goals in space, Daniels said “human space exploration remains vital to the national interest for inspirational and aspirational reasons that appeal to a broad range of U.S. citizens.”

The report outlined a range of steps that would be needed to achieve long-term goals in space, from a one-year mission of persons living on the international space station, to flight tests, rovers exploring Mars, and the development of new technologies involving health, transportation, robots, vehicles, and many other components of space travel. These multi-billion-dollar research-based programs could occupy the research agendas of academic departments in universities such as Purdue for decades and enrich the biggest corporations in America.

Daniels was not the only university affiliated spokesperson of note who recently made news. Board of Trustees member Don Thompson, President and CEO of the McDonald’s Corporation, weighed in on the debate about raising the minimum wage for fast food workers after a nationwide set of protests against McDonald’s on May 22, 2014.

Thompson at a shareholders’ meeting declared that “McDonald’s is often a first job for many entering the work force. About one-third of our employees are 16 to 19. We are proud that we open doors to opportunity” (Bruce Horowitz, “McDonald’s Plays Offense on Wages,” USA Today, May 23). Thompson praised his corporation for being a worker-friendly employer and added that it was the largest employer of veterans in the nation. Later he hinted at the possibility of raising the minimum wage at McDonald’s. However, protestors argued that the median age of fast-food workers was 29, most worked at today’s minimum wage, and economic survival on McDonald’s wages was virtually impossible.

Finally, the Purdue news service has announced increased collaboration of the university with the notorious Duke Energy Corporation, most recently in the news because of its responsibility for a coal ash spill in North Carolina that coated 70 miles of the Dan River along the North Carolina and Virginia border with 60,000 tons of toxic sludge. A North Carolina judge ordered Duke Energy to immediately eliminate the source of groundwater pollution from company coal ash dumps. A criminal investigation of links between the spill and Duke Energy and state government officials in North Carolina is still underway.

Purdue News (June 11, 2014) reported that the university would collaborate on the expansion of an education program to create the Duke Energy Academy at Purdue, a six-day instructional program to inspire high school students and teachers to work in STEM-related disciplines related to energy. The article erroneously claimed that “the amount of students entering the STEM fields is declining.” Other co-sponsors of the six-day educational experience include Bowen Engineering, General Electric, Kidwind Project, Siemens Energy, and Windstream Technologies Inc.  

Higher education is at a fork in the road. One path is to maintain its traditional mission to educate and inspire students while sharing knowledge with communities at home and abroad. Another path is to expand the needs of special interests, political and corporate, at the expense of the traditional role of higher education. Growing social movements should include demands that universities continue to serve the needs of the people, rather than politicians and corporations.

 

 

The Ideological Justifications for the Permanent War Economy and the Globalization of Empire Continue

Harry Targ

(President Biden reinitiated G7 collaboration and rekindled the NATO alliance while raising the specter of the spread of Russian and Chinese “authoritarianism.” And the corporate media continues the same narrative that was developed after World War II: eternal enemies, threats to our virtuous society, the need for continued military preparedness, and American exceptionalism. As Pete Seeger long ago wrote: “Oh when will they ever learn?” )

**************************************************************** 

Ideological Justifications for the Permanent War Economy and the Globalization of Empire (originally posted on February 12, 2009)

Constructing and maintaining a permanent war economy was a policy commitment made by virtually every U.S. administration and Congress since the 1940s. It meant that budget decisions would be based on the primacy of military spending. And, military spending served ever since World War II as an economic stimulus to overcome recessionary dynamics in the economy as a whole and to support secure contracts for huge corporations engaging in military production and service.

The permanent war economy paralleled and supported the fifty year development of U.S. capitalism on the world stage. During this time frame global capitalism shifted economic activity from direct investment in goods and services at home and abroad to financial speculation. Those corporations which continued to manufacture goods for domestic and international consumption shifted their productive operations to poor countries where lower wages could be paid. These changing features of the international political economy were extended by globalization, the dramatic increase in cross-national economic, political, and cultural interactions. In short, the global political economy of the last fifty years has been significantly shaped by the building of a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization.

While these processes are critical to understanding the U.S. role in the world, scholars, pundits, and most importantly politicians explained the U.S. role in the world in different ways. The American people were told that the U.S. faced diabolical enemies, that our place in world history was special, and that we had an obligation to bring the American experience to the world.

The ideological campaign for the Cold War was articulated in speeches by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1946 and President Harry Truman in 1947. The former, addressing a college audience in Fulton, Missouri warned that “…from the Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” One year later, President Truman in his famous Doctrine speech argued that there were two ways of life in the world, one based on freedom and the other tyranny. The United States, he said must defend the forces of freedom against “totalitarianism.” Of course, the threat came from the Soviet Union.

Three years later, an “in-house” document, National Security Council Document 68 (NSC 68) was drafted and circulated in the Truman administration by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. It recommended that military spending be the number one priority of every administration. And the recommendation was necessary because the Soviet Union constituted a military threat and an economic challenge. When the Korean War started, NSC 68 became publicly articulated policy and vision (even though the document itself remained classified until the 1970s).

The ideological construct, “good versus evil,” “freedom versus totalitarianism,” was rigidly imposed on a frightened public in the 1940s and 1950s as anti-communism pervaded the society. What came to be known as “McCarthyism,” imported images of domestic traitors, subversives, and foreignness into the American cultural stream. The threat was so great at home as well as abroad that state repression was justified to protect the nation.

In addition, academia contributed to the public face of this ideology through its development of “modernization theory.” Economic historian and Kennedy and Johnson foreign policy advisor Walt Rostow described what the world faced: Communism was “…a kind of disease which can befall a transitional society if it fails to organize effectively those elements within it which are prepared to get on with the job of modernization.” The disease must be expunged so that poor countries could develop market-based economies as did Europe and the United States. The ideological ground was laid for Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Central America, and Iraq and Afghanistan in our own day.

And, of course, we can reflect on the words of President Reagan who proclaimed shortly before he left office:

“We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, 'The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.’ We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.”

And finally in our own day, and when the Soviet “evil empire” was long gone, a new enemy, “international terrorism” was identified. And, like the former Soviet Union, this enemy threatened our being and necessitated a strong military response. President Bush said in 2002 (and again in a similar way just days before he left office):

“But the best way to secure the homeland is to find the enemy wherever they try to hide and bring them to justice. The best way -- make no mistake about it. You should not be confused about the nature of the people we're dealing with. They hate us, because we're free. They hate the thought that Americans welcome all religions. They can't stand that thought. They hate the thought that we educate everybody. They hate our freedoms. They hate the fact that we hold each individual -- we dignify each individual. We believe in the dignity of every person. They can't stand that.

And the only way they know to express themselves is through killing, cold- blooded killing. And so we need to treat them the way they are, as international criminals. And that's why my defense budget is the largest increase in 20 years. You know, the price of freedom is high, but for me it's never too high because we fight for freedom.”

In sum, while American imperialism has its roots in military spending, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization, it has been explained to the American people in terms of high moral principle, coupled with a sense of the special mission that American brings to the world. For Puritan America, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, America is “a city on a hill.” While peace activists need to work against military spending, oppose the speculative economy, demand worker rights at home and abroad, and oppose unbridled “free trade,” they must challenge the ideological justifications that have served to mobilize a troubled and pliant citizenry to support US policy for decades.