American Politics

"From the book jacket: "The Enigmatic Academy is a provocative look at the purpose and practice of education in America. Authors Christian Churchill and Gerald Levy use three case studies—a liberal arts college, a boarding school, and a Job Corps center—to illustrate how class, bureaucratic, and secular-religious dimensions of education prepare youth for participation in American foreign and domestic policy at all levels.

Exploring how youth and their educators encounter the complexities of ideology and bureaucracy in school, The Enigmatic Academy deepens our understanding of the flawed redemptive relationship between education and society in the United States. Paradoxically, these three schools studied prepare students to participate in a society whose values they oppose.""

This thesis examines the reception of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in US foreign policy debates since the end of the Cold War. It begins with a background survey of Thucydides' use in foreign policy debates up to and during the Cold War, primarily by the realist school of international relations, and the comparisons which were drawn between the Cold War and the Peloponnesian War. After the Cold War, these comparisons became less relevant to current debates, and critics of realism began to use Thucydides to support their own theories. The emphasis is on how the three key movements since the Cold War, realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism, have each saw aspects in Thucydides' writing to admire and utilise for their theories, at the same time building competing interpretations of key sections from Thucydides' History. At the same time, as well as drawing abstract theories from Thucydides, analysts have also drawn historical parallels between the present and the Peloponnesian War in a creative process which results in modern states playing different ancient roles depending upon the context. I show that Thucydides' text lends itself particularly well to such recycling due to the author's tendency to highlight complex tensions without providing explicit authorial 'answers'.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Recently, there has been much debate about the rise of an Evangelical Left in the United States. This debate has focused on the emergence of influential evangelical leaders breaking away from the Republican Party, such as Rick Warren. This debate mistakes a hegemonic crisis of (neo-)conservatism with a hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism. Instead, the evangelical movement in the United States needs to be analyzed in the context of neoliberalism and the decline of class-based forms of solidarity, which it replaced. Throughout their ascent, the evangelical institutions have inscribed themselves into and become a part of the neoliberal state. At the same time, the depth of the economic crisis, the remaining class character of the evangelical movement, the importance of evangelical churches as arenas of hegemonic struggles and, finally, the existing shift in national discourse in terms of the ecological question, the social question and the rehabilitation of the state vis-à-vis the market mark an opening of the political situation in the US that may eventually lead to a replacement of the current evangelical centrism by the actual Evangelical Left as part of a counter-hegemonic post-neoliberal historic bloc.

¿Con la reelección de Obama, será que los Estados Unidos esta girando políticamente hacia la izquierda? ¿Después de décadas de dominación por conservadores, será posible que los EEUU acepte el modelo establecido en América Latina por países como --Chile, Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil—y adopte un sendero centro-izquierda?

In Nordamerika hat sich eine Debatte über Vernunft und Unvernunft im US-Schuldenstreit entwickelt, die auch weitergehende und grundsätzliche Fragen über das Verhältnis zwischen ökonomischer Krise und politischer Krise heute und allgemein aufwirft. Einigkeit besteht darin, daß die Austeritätspolitik - aus der bürgerlichen Perspektive - durchaus rational und interessengeleitet ist, wobei Leo Panitch und Sam Gindin die These behaupten, daß sie ferner im Kontext einer privatkapitalistischen Organisation des Finanzwesens auch notwendig ist, weshalb sich heute umso mehr die Eigentumsfrage als Grundlage jedweder noch so schnöden sozialdemokratischen Reform stelle. Einigkeit besteht ferner, daß die Auseinandersetzungen im Kongreß zur Schuldenobergrenze, die 2011 und 2013 durch die Blockade der Tea-Party-Republikaner zum Regierungs-Shutdown führten, insofern irrational sind, als sie die US-Finanzhegemonie untergraben, da sie die internationale Glaubwürdigkeit der Zahlungsfähigkeit der USA gefährden. Die Frage ist jedoch, woher diese Irrationalität letztlich rührt: Während Panitch die oft lamentierte "Dysfunktionalität" des US-politischen Systems letztlich mit dem Widerspruch zwischen imperialen und nationalstaatlichen Erfordernissen, d.h. zwischen kosmopolitischen Empire-Eliten und nationalstaatlicher Grundierung des Kongresses, erklärt, wird sie von David Harvey und Doug Henwood letztlich auf Dekadenz zurückgeführt. Der neoliberale Kapitalismus habe das langfristige Gesellschafts- und Planungsdenken in den bürgerlichen Eliten zerstört. Harvey spricht vom "feral capitalism"; Henwood vom "pervasive rot" des "neoliberal self". Als Beitrag zu und Kritik dieser Debatte geht dieser Text zwar ebenfalls von der Irrationalität der Tea-Party-Akteure ausgeht, aber behauptet die These, daß die Tatsache, daß es Republikaner- und Kapitaleliten (US-Handelskammer, etc.) nicht gelang, die Tea-Party-"Rebellen" zur Räson zu bringen, nicht auf einen Mangel an langfristigem Gesellschaftsdenken und politischer Führungskapazität im herrschenden Block zurückzuführen ist, sondern auf die Tatsache, daß die Tea Party eine sich im Widerspruch zu diesem Block entwickelnde politische Kraft ist, zu deren spezifischer Eigenschaft als Rechtspopulismus es gehört, daß sie sich im Kontext der verschärften gesellschaftlichen Verteilungskämpfe in der Krise zur eigenständigen Kraft entwickeln mußte, worauf ihr Mangel an "nationaler Verantwortung", an politischer Führungskapazität zurückzuführen ist. "Feral capitalism", "neoliberal self" und "pervasive rot" sind also weder klassenübergreifend allgemein noch Ursache, sondern ein klassenspezifisches Phänomen der politischen Artikulation der Krise und Folge einer ökonomischen Krise, die zur politischen Krise ("Dysfunktionalität") führt, die wiederum das "rationale" Management der ökonomischen Krise stark erschwert, kurzum, sie zur organischen Krise macht.

While the Tea Party’s rise in 2009 prompted enormous media attention and subsequent academic inquiry, scholarship that investigates Tea Party ideology is scant. While not a social movement in the traditional sense, the Tea Party had an undeniable influence on the 2010 midterms, especially at the state level. This paper features New Hampshire, a perennial swing state and home to one of the largest legislative shifts to Republican control in recent memory. By exploring four broad issue areas, Constitutionalism, the economy, social issues, and race, the project seeks a clearer understanding of what Tea Partiers believe and what their sympathetic state legislators espouse. The first level of analysis uses opinion polling to demonstrate that while those respondents who back the Tea Party have conservative views on perceptual questions, a plurality agree with most Americans on specific policy positions. The second level of analysis compares opinion poll responses to interviews of New Hampshire state legislators, finding that the latter group is much more rigidly conservative on tangible policies, but lacks Tea Party voters’ distinctive fears of a changing America.