THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE “THIRD WAY”

 Harry Targ

Reclaiming our Progressive Political Heritage

Our task in 2026 is to continue to build a more progressive and humane society while pursuing a peace and solidarity agenda in the international system. A central element of this task is to continue mobilizing, educating and agitating for progressive reforms and opposing the threat to democracy and well-being by corrupt, repressive, and anti-democratic governments at the local, state, and federal levels.

Discussions about the pursuit of these tasks have been part of the political landscape at least since 2016. Many of these discussions revolve around assessments of the recent elections: contexts, organizing experiences, and outcomes. There has been discussion of tactics such as organizing grassroots groups, the internet, canvassing, and calling blitzes. And substantively debates abound about working within the Democratic Party and whether to address “socialism” or representing the “center.” . And there has been discussion of the critical nature of issues that need to be addressed: health care, climate change, racism and police violence, jobs, and, of course, militarism and wars. All of these conversations are useful and important as we strategize around elections in 2026 and 2028.

Historic Changes in the Democratic Party

What seems missing from these discussions on the election outcomes is an analysis that links history and political economy to the changes that have occurred in the Democratic Party from Keynesianism and the capital/labor compromise of the late 1940s to neoliberalism, reflected in the sector of the Democratic Party that gained dominance in the 1980s, sometimes referred to as “The Third Way.”

Looking at the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential victory in 1932 and three subsequent victories presaged both a transformation of the Democratic Party and public policy from laissez faire to state-directed policies designed to address social safety needs (creating jobs, supporting farmers, investing in public works, and funding the arts (theater, murals, music, historical writing for example). It was assumed that fiscal stimuli, putting money in workers’ hands would jump start the economy. Fiscal stimuli were paralleled by increased government regulations of banking, labor/management relations, and wages and hours.

To be clear, the New Deal programs would not have occurred if millions of working-class men and women had not hit the streets to demand them. And, to be clear also, as much as the New Deal programs helped large sectors of the working class, workers of color were disgracefully excluded from many of them. But nevertheless, the thrust of public policy, mostly advocated by Democrats was for positive government.

The Democratic Party institutionalized the New Deal, the Fair Deal in the Truman years, and, in the 1960s, Great Society.

Most white workers, and increasingly Black workers, saw the Democratic Party as their home. From the 1930s until the 1980s, voter studies showed majorities of voters identified with the Democratic Party. And even mainstream Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower, embraced workers’ rights to form unions and Social Security.

However, the Democratic Party began its long decline in 1968, with candidate Richard Nixon’s appeal to “the silent majority” and his embrace of a “southern strategy.” Nixon played on growing frustration with Vietnam era protestors and the centrality of the civil rights campaigns in American life. George Wallace became a popular racist third-party candidate for president.

The last gasp of the New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society tradition was reflected in the overwhelming defeat of populist presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. Two years later, because of his criminality, President Nixon was forced out of office and his successor Gerald Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter.

These political eruptions occurred in a decade, the 1970s, when the United States was experiencing declining relative power in the world, both politically and economically. In addition, the contours of American politics were dramatically affected by the oil crises of the 1970s, the inability or refusal of government at all levels to continue to afford the supports that workers had come to expect, and the radical transformation of production, highlighted by millions of jobs lost through outsourcing and deindustrialization. The dramatic changes in the political economy of capitalism and the increased appeal of racism were reflected in a substantial change in the campaigns and policies of the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party and “The Third Way”

Jimmy Carter planted the seeds for the shift in the Democratic Party from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism and the Party’s “Third Way.”  Michael Jordan Smith succinctly summarizes in a review of the theme of the recent book “Reaganland,” by author, Rick Perlstein. Smith’s review refers to the book’s main point that Perlstein refers to “the Democrats’ fatal abandonment of economic fairness in favor of balanced budgets, deregulation, and fiscal conservatism. Carter led and presided over this transition, over the objections of traditional liberals including Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. But Carter joined with a revitalized business lobby, which gradually succeeded in persuading Democratic politicians that neoliberalism was the only way forward. To this day, the Democratic Party hasn’t fully recovered.” (Michael Jordan Smith, “When Conservatism Triumphed,” The Progressive, August 17, 2020)

President Reagan’s 1980 message, which resonated with a work force that was experiencing seven percent unemployment and double digit inflation, was “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.” Armed with theories from conservative economists, Reagan expanded dramatically the policies initiated by President Carter. These included deregulation of the economy, lobbying for the privatization of public institutions, downsizing programs of welfare and safety nets.

To secure support for programs of austerity, Reagan began the process of destroying the influence of the labor movement, criminalizing the behavior of people of color, and shifting the discourse from poverty’s connection to economic failure to blaming the victims of poverty for their own misfortunes. And, in the main, the Democratic Party either only weakly opposed the Reagan austerity agenda or cautiously supported it. What would later be called the “neoliberal agenda” became the dominant ideological framework of discourse of conventional politics.

In 1985, Washington D. C. Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The Council articulated the view that the Democratic Party was losing its grip on public support because it was “too liberal.” It developed a “Third Way” agenda that was less committed to working people, was more hostile to people of color, shifted policy advocacy from providing social safety nets to expanding law enforcement, and was less vigorously supportive of government regulation. When Bill Clinton was elected president, he enshrined the neoliberal agenda in the program of the Democratic Party. Third Way Democrats no longer even pretended to represent the interests of working people in policy even though they continued to express empathy for the vast majority of people. 

One stark optic of this was reflected in a Frontline documentary on globalization which showed candidate Bill Clinton meeting steelworkers at a plant gate during a 1992 campaign stop. He promised them that he would serve their interests, particularly by opposing the controversial North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The next scene in the documentary shows Clinton meeting with financier Robert Rubin, getting schooled on the “realities” of the modern economy (PBS, Commanding Heights). Despite labor opposition to NAFTA, including progressives in the labor movements of Mexican and Canadian workers, Clinton leaned on Democrats in the House of Representatives to support it. Clinton’s aggressive support of NAFTA was metaphorically analogous to President Reagan’s firing of the PATCO workers in 1981 after they endorsed his candidacy for president.

Thus, the “Third Way” became a central feature of Democratic Party politics, with most Democratic Party candidates running on platforms of a kinder, gentler “Third Way” neoliberalism than their adversaries. But the reality is that the New Deal tradition of government serving the needs of the people, mostly the working class (as limited as it was) was seen by majorities of Americans as vital to their lives.

And today, Third Way Democrats continue to oppose the progressive New Deal tradition of their predecessors. As one of their spokespersons, James Carville has put it: “in this century, if it wouldn’t be for the Democratic left wing, we might not have even had a Republican president. We sure wouldn’t have had one in 2000. And we sure wouldn’t have had one in 2016.”(“Carville: Far-left Democrats ‘part of the problem’ within party”, Ashleigh Fields , The Hill- 07/13/26).

In sum, given the history of US politics and the Democratic Party, Carville and his Third Way allies are a significant part of the problem, not the solution.

 

THE ISSUE OF CLASSES AND THE MATERIAL REASONS FOR THE CURRENT INTEREST IN SOCIALISM

 Harry Targ

(I repost parts of an old essay because it addresses the issues of the changing character of the class system in the United States. The changes described by authors sited below from the 1970s remain a factor in understanding today's politics. The accumulation of wealth by a few and the increased immiseration of the many, by twenty-first century standards, coupled with a system that in Harvey's words exacerbate "dispossession." constitute a salient reality of American life. Also, these dynamics are global in character as well. These changes are occurring irrespective of the kind of work people are engaged in, whether service, intellectual, computer, agricultural or manufacturing and whether the labor is domestic or "immigrant.")

Introduction

The twenty-first century economic reality has created a new class society with a dominant class of concentrated wealth at one extreme and a growing class of economically insecure in the other.  More and more of those in the latter have become political activists, particularly among the young. This new class society in the United States parallels similar economic changes in both rich and poor countries. As a result of the changes in global and domestic economies social movements have arisen over the years everywhere. From Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin, from Greece to Chile, from Syriza and Podemos to the Sanders campaign, to the No Kings rallies and mayoral, senatorial and campaigns in our own day the cry for change, often a demand for socialism, is spreading. The outcome of this new activism is unclear but for the first time in a long time, the prospects for positive social and political change look promising.

The New Class Society

In 1999, Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong published the first of four editions of a perceptive sociological analysis that identified what the authors identified as “the new class society.” They employed a Marxist and Weberian analysis of class that combined workers’ relationships to the means of production with their organizational position.

Using data reflecting their synthetic definition of class, these authors concluded that the popular portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class, a large “middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically marginalized people was, by the 1970s, no longer an accurate way to describe society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, had become a class system looking like a “double diamond.”

In the new class society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged class” composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and “professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor with the constant threat of job loss and wage stagnation, some modestly self-employed, and a large part-time labor force. This is the second diamond representing 80 percent of the population.

In short, the political economy that emerged nearly fifty years ago is one in which a shrinking ruling class that owns or controls capital has accumulated enormous wealth and dominates today’s economy. At the other end an increasingly insecure working class in terms of jobs and income has grown exponentially.

Peter Temin, an MIT economist, confirms the earlier sociological work in his new book “The Vanishing Middle Class.” This book also identifies an emerging two-class society with wealth and power concentrated at the top and poverty and powerlessness at the bottom. In what Temin calls the “dual economy,” the ruling class consists of the finance, technology, and electronics sectors (FTE), representing the top twenty percent as opposed to “the low wage sector;” clerks, assemblers, laborers, and service workers who provide the comforts and profits for the top twenty percent.

In summary, both volumes suggest that in terms of wealth and power conflicts of interest have to be seen not between the one percent and everyone else but between the twenty percent who own/control/ or administer the capitalist system and the eighty percent who constitute increasingly marginalized labor serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

The Precariat

Guy Standing, a British economist, has written about the “precariat,” a growing portion of the worldwide work force, Temin’s “ low wage sector,” who live in economic insecurity. The term, precariat, refers to a synthesis of the idea of the proletariat, workers who sell their ability to provide labor to a capitalist for a wage, and precarity, or economic existence that is unpredictable, marginal, and insecure. Job scarcity and wage stagnation increasingly is experienced by workers with professional skills and credentials as well as the traditional working class.

Standing argues that all across the globe workers, particularly young workers, live in situations of economic insecurity and unpredictability, irrespective of credentials, that in the past guaranteed jobs and living wages. Of course, the precariat do not have any of the guarantees of union membership and their skills leave them often working on a part-time contract basis and in isolation from fellow workers. In addition the precariat include workers in the “informal sector.” These are workers who often will do anything to survive from day to day: for example, day labor, street vending, drug dealing, petty crime, or prostitution.

Accumulation by Dispossession

David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, revisited Marx’s description of primitive accumulation in his book, “The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.”  Capitalism was created on the backs of slaves, the slaughter of indigenous people, and the expropriation of already occupied land. In other words, through kidnapping, forced labor, slaughter, and occupation, capitalism was born. The expropriation of resources, people, and land led to the accumulation of wealth that spurred development and growth.

Harvey then argues that the primitive accumulation of the fifteenth century is similar in outcome to the “accumulation by dispossession,” of the twenty-first century. Today workers lose their property and their personal income in a debt system that sucks their scarce earnings and property. Examples include defaults on mortgage loans and bank repossessions and governmental decisions to confiscate property for purposes of urban redevelopment. Accumulation by dispossession, while not as violent as in the era of primitive accumulation, has the same outcome: expropriating the value of the work of the many for the riches of the few.

Growing Economic Inequality and Urban Decay and Gentrification

Virtually every study of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States demonstrates a dramatic increase in inequality. Also studies sponsored by international organizations report that despite declines in worldwide absolute poverty, the trajectory of growing inequality in wealth and income is a central feature of the global economy. In addition, declining inequality between countries, such as that between China and the countries of the European Union, have occurred while inequalities within most of these countries have widened. In the United States income and wealth inequality which declined from the 1930s until the 1960s has returned to levels not seen since the 1920s.

The patterns of inequality are visible in geographic spaces as well. As more and more people are forced to migrate to cities, what Mike Davis calls “global slums,”  demarcations of areas of opulence and poverty become visible. Members of the top twenty percent are consumers of expensive living spaces, elite schools, and vibrant recreational facilities. They also lobby for public funds to create recreational attractions that entice tourists to bolster local economies. Gentrified city spaces are protected by fences and police.

On the other hand, the bottom eighty percent live in varying degrees of poverty. Housing stocks crumble, neighborhoods are overcrowded, public services are increasingly underfunded, and populations are left to lead lives of quiet desperation and intra-community violence. In the new class society different sectors of the population live in isolation from each other, except when political conflict and violence spread across communities.

Also in the new class society youth become pessimistic about their futures. Despite the fact that media and academic studies claim that upward mobility is tied to scholastic achievement, the schools they attend are underfunded. And the cost of higher education, the main source of credentialing the young, has become prohibitively expensive. And the quality of higher education in terms of stimulating critical thinking is being undermined. 

For those who accumulate massive student debt the experience feels like a modern-day variant of indentured servitude. Jobs for those who do not attend college are scarce and reside primarily in the low-wage service sector. And so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are not as plentiful as college promotional brochures suggest. Along with the precarity of the traditional working class is a rising precarity of a new working class of highly educated but unemployable young people.

Racism

Manning Marable published a perceptive essay in 2006 entitled “Globalization and Racialization.” In it he adapted, based upon the twenty-first century global political economy, the prophetic statement by W. E. B. Du Bois that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line. Marable suggested that the new global political economy was based upon capital flight, as well-paid manufacturing jobs left the United States for sweatshops in the Global South. Unemployment  increased in the United States. Downward pressures on wages and benefits paid workers in poor countries reduced the economic conditions of US workers. The decline of organized labor in the United States and the Global South weakened the bargaining position of workers everywhere.

Marable suggested that the people most vulnerable to the massive changes in the global economy were the already marginalized people of color. Unemployment rates in poor and Black communities skyrocketed, particularly among youth. The new gentrification and shift in politics from welfare state capitalism to austerity led to declining public services in poor communities. This has had particularly devastating impacts on educational institutions.

With declining economic opportunities, a growing sense of hopelessness, draconian government policies such as the wars on drugs and crime, literally millions of African Americans, and other people of color, have become victims of mass incarceration, what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” Finally, many states have laws that prevent former felons from voting. The Marable framework, which he refers to as “global apartheid” and “the New Racial Domain,” thus links globalization of production to racism; particularly growing unemployment and urban decay, criminalization, mass incarceration, and voter disenfranchisement. And the Trump Administration is criminalizing masses of immigrants and people of color generally.

Neoliberalism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism

The so-called “golden age of the US economy,” 1945 to 1968, may have been an anomaly in American history. The United States emerged from World War Two as the economic and military hegemonic power. The war led to a fourfold increase in United States trade compared with the late 1930s. In 1945 it produced about 2/3 of all the industrial goods manufactured in the world and US investments constituted about ¾ of all the world’s investments. With fears of stagnation accompanying the war’s end, the Truman Administration launched a massive program of military investment to forestall declining demand for US goods and services.

In terms of international relations, the United States played an instrumental role in establishing powerful international economic institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It helped rebuild an anti-communist Europe through a massive financial aid system. It later established foreign assistance programs for newly “independent” countries requiring their commitment to the maintenance of a global capitalist system.

At home a United States economy was created that stimulated high mass consumption. People were socialized to believe that their self-worth was determined by the quantity and quality of goods and services they consumed. The new communication medium, television, educated viewers as to the products that were available (as well as the enemies overseas who were the threat to the domestic consumer society).

However, by the late 1960s, markets were glutted and demand for goods lessened even though wages and benefits for some workers increased. Federal and state governments had been increasing services such as education, health care, and transportation. Both profit rates and consumer demand declined. Growing political protest against the Vietnam war and racism across the country added to emerging economic stagnation.

By the 1970s, the squeeze on profits and reduced demand, was exacerbated by Middle East wars and large increases in the price of oil, which made some corporations and banks richer while economic stagnation, including both high inflation and unemployment, ensued. At this point, the United States economy began a shift to what David Harvey calls “financialization.” A small number of banks and corporations, mostly US but also European and Japanese, began to shift from encouraging manufacturing growth to financial speculation. A “new” debt system was encouraged, one in which oil-poor countries borrowed more and more money from bankers to pay for continued oil imports. In exchange debtor nations would promise to carry out new economic policies at home: cut government spending, privatize public institutions, deregulate domestic economies, and shift economic activities from production for domestic use to production for sale in the world market.

Thus, the new era of “neoliberal globalization” was initiated. The new system was driven by financial speculators, declining autonomy of nation-states, and the downsizing of wages and benefits everywhere. At the same time rates of profit for speculators increased and smaller numbers of banks and other financial institutions increasingly dominated the global economy. This system was initiated in the Global South, spread to Western Europe and after the fall of the Soviet Union and its allies to Eastern Europe. In the 1980s neoliberalism was embraced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. The best way to characterize policy in the age of neoliberal globalization is “austerity,” reducing the economic opportunities of the many for the benefit of the few.

Neoliberal globalization is the systemic source of the new class society (or the dual economy), the rise of the precariat, accumulation by dispossession, growing inequality and urban gentrification, and the expansion of racism.

A Revitalized Interest in Socialism in the Twenty-First Century  

As history has shown, the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, or dominant classes, never goes unchecked. The drive for domination breeds resistance. And resistance takes many forms: traditional revolutionary practices, building alternative economic and political institutions, non-violent refusal to obey the institutions that support economic misery and political repression, and where practical, participation in electoral processes. Social change is many-sided and several strategies together are most likely to bring positive results.

History shows also that struggles for change are broadly political, require organization, mass mobilization, and education. Change requires analyses of the causes of the problems needing solution and a vision of what a better future might look like. And there is an inextricable connection between the causes of the problems, the tactics needed to change the situation, and a vision of a better society.

The analyses above highlight the changing character of the global political economy, emerging class structures, and the growing vulnerabilities of literally millions of people: young and old: Black, Brown, and White; female and male; gay and straight; and at all levels of education and training. At the root of the problem is the capitalist system, a system whose reason for being is the maximization of profit. People today are talking about a new society, a socialist society. Socialism implies a political economy in which people contribute their talents, their labors, for the public good and share equitably in the product of their labor. And socialism presumes democratic participation in workplaces, the political system, and the community.  

Trump Reverses Modest Improvements in US-Cuban Relations from the Obama Years :Now Calls US Supporters of Cuba “US Left-Wing Terrorists” in the US “

Harry Targ

"With God’s help, a free Cuba is what we will soon achieve… I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba."( President Donald Trump, New Cuba Policy in Speech in Miami’s Little Havana, 2017),

With these words, President Trump early in his first term announced the return to the almost 70-year Cold War against Cuba, a war that has cost the people on the island and their relatives in the United States dearly. He initiated efforts to resume travel restrictions, limit trade and investment on the island, and to punish US citizens who traveled to Cuba on their own. These policy changes were motivated primarily by Trump’s promises to a dwindling sector of Cuban Americans in the Republican Party (and a few Democratic politicians as well). 

In 2026 Trump escalated the economic blockade of Cuba, threatening to punish any country that continued to engage in commerce with the island.  (He had already put Cuba back on the “state sponsor of terrorism” list in January 2025). The most brutal part of the renewed policy now is the blockade of Cuba’s access to oil. The island now suffers blackouts, shortages in transportation, energy access to hospitals and schools and in the main the United States has enshrined the policy of starving Cuba, an approach to the island resembling Israel’s genocidal policy against Gaza. And during the spring of 2026 the Trump administration moved a battleship and troops to the Caribbean, threatening a US war on Cuba. 

And most recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the publication of a new 100-page State Department report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The report asserts that Cuba has engaged in subversion and has “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government.” 

The most menacing part of this document is its identification of  who it regards as supporters of Cuban terrorism in the United States, both individual politicians who oppose the administration and leading organizations that have been providing material aid to Cuba during its darkest hour of starvation. The Venceremos Brigade of volunteer farm laborers has been a favorite target for years but the new list includes the National Network on Cuba, IFCO Pastors for Peace, the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and Democratic Socialists in America. Individuals who support “terrorist” Cuba, the report suggests, include Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles, Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York, Congresspersons, Illan Omar, Maxine Waters, and Ayanna Presley, and Amy Goodman, journalist.

In short, The Trump Administration has escalated its brutal assault on Cuba and at the same time is reinventing the age of McCarthyism by defining any groups or individuals who disagree with US policy toward Cuba and/or provide material aid to its starving population as supporters of terrorists. These truly are dangerous times.

CONTEMPORARY THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Harry Targ

 In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

ALEC legislative programs included lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers' unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

 The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded $400 million to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers.

Associations which lobbied for restricting academic freedom in higher education included David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS sought to bring together scholars whose work opposed multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

 The then NAS president Peter Wood, contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, claiming that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States” is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This was a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS did not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or university.

But if education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula have contradicted the spirit of free and rigorous thought.

Teddy Roosevelt, Donald Trump and Great White Fleets

 Harry Targ

www.rhcbooks.com

Sixty-six years ago, I wrote a paper for a college class on President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet.” For some reason that assignment came to mind a few days ago, but I had to do an electronic search to recall what was the “Great White Fleet.”

It turns out that Theodore Roosevelt, former Secretary of the Navy, later President, advocated what history books call the “Spanish/American War,” occupying Cuba, and Puerto Rico and sending the US military to “liberate ” the Philippines in 1899.  As President, Roosevelt launched 16 battle ships , painted white, in international waters between 1907 and 1909. Some 14,000 sailors participated in the travels. Congress initially objected to the expenditure but TR, the booster of US military empire on the world stage ignored the legislative branch as the ships sailed the Atlantic and Pacific, stopping at various ports of call. The message was clear. The United States was the new imperial power.

During a presentation in Norway in 1910 after his presidency Roosevelt praised the U.S. for leaving Cuba as promised after the 1898 war to return only   temporarily because of “….a disaster…a revolution” such that…. we were obliged to land troops again.” The President proudly declared that: “And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state among the other nations of the earth. All that our people want is just exactly what the Cuban people themselves want—that is, a continuance of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.” (“The Colonial Policy of the United States,” An Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910).

Earlier on January 18, 1909, to the Methodist Episcopal Church (“The Expansion of the White Races”) Roosevelt applauded the increasing presence--he estimated 100 million people—of “European races” throughout the world. The indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere have been assimilated with their “intruders” with the result “that the Indian population of America is larger today than it was when Columbus discovered the continent and stands on a far higher plane of happiness and efficiency.”

And to highlight the missionary message Roosevelt added: “Of course the best that can happen to any people that has not already a high civilization of its own is to assimilate and profit by American or European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity, without submitting to alien control; but such control, in spite of all its defects, is in a very large number of cases the prerequisite condition to the moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth.” 

My remembrance of the “Great White Fleet” was sparked by a recent article about President Trump’s December 2025 proposal that the US allocate $275 billion dollars for the construction of a “Golden Fleet” of 15 nuclear powered battle ships. Trump said that the Golden Fleet would “help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America’s enemies over the world” (Brett Wilkins, “Trump’s $275 Billion Battleship Fleet Set to Be ‘Most Expensive US Warshiips Ever,” Common Dreams, August 4, 2026.). Wilkins quotes Congressional Budget Office estimates that the first ship would cost $23 billion and each subsequent ship would cost $18 billion.

Looking back 120 years, we can speculate about the possible consequences of Theodore Roosevelt’s arming and sending overseas the US navy. While no single policy can explain all of world history in the twentieth century since the fleet set sail, the world since then experienced two world wars, the United States participation in over 200 military interventions in many countries, millions killed in wars and other interventions, and the world still remains filled with violence, racism and hate. In addition, many Americans still accept the premises of an American Exceptionalism and white racism stated and exemplified by President Roosevelt and today President Trump.

And as William Appleman Williams wrote originally in a 1980 article in The Nation, August 2, 1980):

“There is no way to understand the nature of our predicament except by confronting our history as an empire. That is the only way to comprehend the Iranian demand that we acknowledge our long-term interference in their affairs, the widespread anger about our acquiescence in the progression of Israel’s settlements on the West Bank, the Russian charge that we apply one standard to them and another to ourselves and the deep resentment of us among the peoples of the poor countries. The only way we can come to terms with those matters is to look our imperial history in the eye without blinking, flinching or walking away into the wonderland of Woodrow Wilson’s saving the world for democracy.”

As the Williams quote suggests Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet” and Trump’s “Golden Fleet” are connected.

 

Image from Code Pink

REMEMBERING HOWARD ZINN (1922-2010) WHEN THE CONTENT OF EDUCATION IS UNDER THREAT

 Harry Targ 

Critics of the Israeli war on Gaza, particularly on college campuses, are being erroneously labeled as antisemitic. The campaigns in the media are designed to stifle dissent. The attack on Howard Zinn's work for years and now are regenerated by Dave Zirin’s new biography of Zinn suggesting the continuing threat to academic freedom in higher education. https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/3/dave_zirin

Conservative Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university. Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power, they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others. The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education.  In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered because of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for deciding on their own what interpretations of subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted. 

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, “A People’s History of the United States,” which has been read by millions compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions. He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:”

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

ALEC legislative programs included lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers' unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

 The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded $400 million to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers.

Associations which lobbied for restricting academic freedom in higher education included David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS  sought to bring together scholars whose work opposed multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

 The then NAS president Peter Wood, contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, claiming that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States” is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This was a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS did not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or university.

But if education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula have contradicted the spirit of free and rigorous thought.

REVISITING "AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:" HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI (an August 5, 2017 repost)

Harry Targ

Continued study and research into the origins of the folk music of various peoples in many parts of the world revealed that there is a world body-a universal body-of folk music based upon a universal pentatonic (five tone) scale. Interested as I am in the universality of (hu)mankind-in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another-this idea of a universal body of music intrigued me, and I pursed it along many fascinating paths. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, 1959.

America’s destiny required the U.S. “…to set the world its example of right and honor…We cannot retreat from any soil where providence has unfurled our banner. It is ours to save that soil, for liberty, and civilization….It is elemental...it is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth.” Senator Albert Beveridge, Indiana, Congressional Record, 56 Congress, I Session, pp.704-712, 1898).

In these early August days we reflect on the decision to drop atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. The official explanation for the use of these horrific new weapons was that they were required to end the World War in Asia. But subsequent historical research has indicated that the United States chose to drop the bombs to threaten the former Soviet Union and as a result to facilitate the United States construction of a post-war world order that would maximize its economic and political vision.

United States foreign policy over the last 150 years has been a reflection of many forces including economics, politics, militarism and the desire to control territory. The most important idea used by each presidential administration to gain support from the citizenry for the pursuit of empire is the claim that America is “exceptional”. 

Think about the view of “the city on the hill” articulated by Puritan ancestors who claimed that they were creating a social experiment that would inspire the world. Over three hundred years later President Reagan again spoke of “the city on the hill.” Or one can recall public addresses by turn of the twentieth century luminaries such as former President Theodore Roosevelt who claimed that the white race from Europe and North America was civilizing the peoples of what we would now call the Global South.  Or Indiana Senator Beveridge’s clear statement: “It is elemental….It is racial.” From the proclamation of the new nation’s special purpose in Puritan America, to Ronald Reagan’s reiteration of the idea, to similar claims by virtually all politicians of all political affiliations, Americans hear over and over that we are different, special, and a shining example of public virtue that all other peoples should use as their guide for building a better society and polity.

However, the United States has been involved in wars for 201 years from 1776 to 2011. Ten million indigenous people had been exterminated as the “new” nation moved westward between the 17th and the 20th centuries and at least 10 million people were killed, mostly from developing countries, between 1945 and 2010 in wars in which the United States had some role. In addition, world affairs was transformed by the use of the two atomic bombs; one dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 instantly killing 80,000 people and the other on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killing another 70,000.

Comparing the image of exceptionalism with the domestic reality of American life suggests stark contrasts as well: continuous and growing gaps between rich and poor, inadequate nutrition and health care for significant portions of the population, massive domestic gun violence, and inadequate access to the best education that the society has the capacity to provide to all. Of course, the United States was a slave society for over 200 years formally racially segregated for another 100, and now incarcerates 15 percent of African American men in their twenties.

Although, the United States is not the only country that has a history of imperialism, exploitation, violence, and racism US citizens should understand that its foreign policy and economic and political system are not exceptional and must be changed.

Finally, a better future and the survival of humanity require a realization, as Paul Robeson suggested, that what is precious about all people is not their differences but their commonalities. Exceptionalist thinking separates people and facilitates decisions like the dropping of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sharing what we have in common as human beings, both our troubles and our talents, is the only basis for creating a peaceful and just world.