White supremacist constitution of the U.S. empire-state: a short conceptual look at the long first century

Author(s):  
Left Quarter Collective
Author(s):  
J. P. Clark

This article examines the U.S. military’s plans for carrying out combined joint operations across multiple theaters and domains in the twenty-first century. It summarizes the most likely strategic and operational approaches available to future adversaries, such as anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), gray zone warfare, and other asymmetric methods. The article also considers the respective challenges posed by the two likely catalysts for military operations: contested norms and persistent disorder. The U.S. military response to this strategic context is still forming, but there are common themes among the services: the recognition that future operations will entail greater risk; the need to disperse forces to survive on a more lethal battlefield; a desire to create networked forces attacking with a combination of physical and nonphysical (cyber and electronic warfare); and a rebalancing of force structure in terms of both weapon sophistication and mission type.


Author(s):  
Melani Mcalister

This chapter examines the politics of fear underlying the antipersecution discourse that revolved around evangelical Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century. A video made by the U.S.-based Christian evangelical group Voice of the Martyrs showed that Christians are being persecuted all around the world. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a passionate concern with the persecution of Christians united conservatives as well as liberal and moderate evangelicals. The chapter shows how antipersecution discourse resulted in the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It also considers the significance of spectacles of the violated body to the discourse of persecution and how intense attention to Christian persecution created a tension for evangelicals between the universalizing language of human rights and a specific commitment to the “persecuted body” of Christ. Finally, it explores how evangelicals' attention to Christian persecution intersects with Islamic concerns.


Author(s):  
Cynthia A. Kierner

The epilogue skips ahead to the Johnstown flood of 1889, the deadliest disaster to date in U.S. history, and argues that the response to this debacle—due to because of advancements in communication and photography, and the advent of the American Red Cross—was in most respects comparable to that in twenty-first-century America. The main difference was the absence of federal involvement in disaster relief at Johnstown, though the U.S. government began providing disaster relief on an ad hoc basis in the post-Civil War era. The epilogue then examines the normalization of federal involvement in disaster relief and prevention in the twentieth century and the impact of social media on contemporary disaster reporting and relief efforts.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL F. MILLS

This article examines the politics of American “doomsday” prepping during Barack Obama's presidency. It challenges claims that growing interest in prepping post-2008 arose exclusively from extreme apocalyptic, white supremacist, and anti-government reactions to Obama's electoral successes – claims that suggest prepping to be politically congruent with previous waves of extreme right-wing American “survivalism.” Drawing on ethnography, this paper argues that, while fears of Obama have been central to many preppers’ activities, much of their prepping under his presidency centred on fears that sit outside survivalist politics. Building on this, the article illuminates connections between prepping and America's twenty-first-century electoral mainstream. Engaging with discussions about the “remaking” of American conservatism during Obama's presidency, it particularly frames prepping's growth as being engaged with, and shaped by, currents of mainstream anti-Obama fear that similarly undergirded the Tea Party's rise within popular Republicanism at this time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANFORD C. GORDON ◽  
HANNAH K. SIMPSON

After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.


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