“We’re Not Stakeholders”: Beyond the Langue De Coton of Capitalist Environmental Management

2018 ◽  
pp. 124-147
Author(s):  
Hannah Holleman
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Management ◽  
Social Change ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
Dust Bowl ◽  
Environmental Improvement ◽  
Repeated Calls ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter examines the limitations of mainstream 1930s environmentalism. Ecological modernizationists consider environmentalism at its best when it aligns with the agenda of powerful private and public actors. For advocates of ecological modernization, questions of substantive social change explicitly don't enter the picture. Regrettably, mainstream environmentalism has moved closer toward this line of thinking over the last forty years. Incomplete and misleading stories about the New Deal and Dust Bowl conservation serve to reinforce the notion that with the right set of techniques, policies, and/or voluntary adjustments by individuals and industry, capitalism is well suited to solving ecological crises. Many see the New Deal of the 1930s as evidence that the system can be reformed and the state geared toward social and environmental improvement, even in the heart of the empire of capital. This has led to repeated calls over the years for a Green New Deal.

The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Loyalty Program ◽  
Federal Employee ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Policy Ideas ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Consumer Movements ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. Their influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. This book draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program—created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government—to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. This book finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, the book shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their “effeminate” spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day. This book demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.

The Strange Career of A. A. Ahner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Feurer
Keyword(s):  
Learning Curve ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Career Path ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

Rosemary Feurer traces the leading purveyor of anti-union services in the Midwest, A. A. Ahner, to frame employers’ antiunion strategies during the New Deal. She argues that the long learning curve that took place over decades explains why a thug agency survived and thrived instead of being eradicated during what is usually considered the heroic era of liberal intervention. Ahner became an accepted industrial relations advisor and counselor for major firms during the New Deal, with the assistance of a liberal as well as conservative forces, networks and alliances. Ahner’s career path only seems strange because historians cling to a framework of the post New Deal “Rise of the Right” with Southern origins while ignoring longer antecedents, networks, and learning

The Lessons of the New Deal: Did Obama Learn the Right Ones?

History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 97 (325) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
TONY BADGER
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

Victims of the Great Depression: Self-Blame/Non-Self-Blame, Radicalism, and Pre-1929 Experiences

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Sternsher
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Self Blame ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

scholarly journals THE RISE AND FALL(?) OF AMERICA'S NEOLIBERAL ORDER

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 241-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gerstle
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.

Constitutional Conservatives Remember the Progressive Era

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken I. Kersch
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Government ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Intellectual Movement

This chapter maps the contemporary right's nascent obsession with the Progressive era as a developmental phenomenon—as a stage in the trajectory of a political-intellectual movement advancing through time. To that end, it ventures three main claims. First, the recent conservative focus on Progressivism represents a shift on the right of understandings of the historical location or source of contemporary constitutional problems, an understanding informed by the sequence of constitutional conservatism's development through time: whereas (old) “originalist” legal conservatives adopted Progressive thinking in focusing their attention on countermajoritarian “activist judges” and criticized the New Deal for its weightless, substance-free pragmatism, recent conservatives have forged a more global critique of contemporary constitutional practice that moves beyond judges to the entire modern structure and theory of American government, finding its weighty and substantive blueprint in the Progressive era, and its extension and institutionalization in the New Deal. Second, this more foundational and comprehensive constitutional critique was forged outside legal academia in political science, particularly by Straussian political theorists. And third, the overarching character of this critique centered on the Progressive era serves a movement-building function by offering a set of understandings that can win the assent of the movement's diverse factions, including social conservatives and religious traditionalists, on the one hand, and economic conservatives and libertarians on the other.

GODLESS CAPITALISM: AYN RAND AND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER BURNS
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Ayn Rand ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The New Deal

This essay examines the relationship between the novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and the broader conservative movement in the twentieth-century United States. Although Rand was often dismissed as a lightweight popularizer, her works of radical individualism advanced bold arguments about the moral status of capitalism, and thus touched upon a core issue of conservative identity. Because Rand represented such a forthright pro-capitalist position, her career highlights the shifting fortunes of capitalism on the right. In the 1940s, she was an inspiration to those who struggled against the New Deal and hoped to bring about a new, market-friendly political order. As a second generation of conservatives built upon these sentiments and attempted to tie them to a defense of Christian tradition, Rand's status began to erode. Yet by the late 1960s, Rand's once-revolutionary defense of capitalism had become routine, although she herself remained a controversial figure. The essay traces the ways in which Rand's ideas were assimilated and modified by key intellectuals on the right, including William F. Buckley, Jr, Whittaker Chambers, and Gary Wills. It identifies the relationship between capitalism and Christianity as a fundamental dilemma for conservative and right-wing thinkers. By treating Rand as an intellectual and cultural leader of significant import, the essay broadens our understanding of the American right beyond the confines of “mainstream” conservatism, and re-establishes the primacy of the 1930s, and 1940s, to its ideological formation. Responding to a paucity of scholarship on Rand, the essay offers an analysis and summary of Rand's ideas, and argues that despite her outsider status, Rand's work both embodied and shaped fundamental themes of right-wing thought throughout the century.

Economic Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 466-484
Author(s):  
C. Melissa Snarr
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
Economic Democracy ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the history and contemporary relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work on economic justice with explicit attention to its gendered and raced dynamics. From his early focus on state socialism and Marxist theory to his later criticism of Marxist religion and eventual embrace of New Deal-style reforms, Niebuhr evolved from a tragic to ironic view of history that emphasized the interplay of freedom, liberty, and justice. While Niebuhr under-analysed the gendered and raced dynamics of the economy that could have made more complex his theorizing of the relationship between private and public morality, he still offers vital lessons for our escalating economic inequality. Attending to how wealth disparity creates unbalanced social power and undermines political democracy, understanding that power must meet power for social change, and realizing that all efforts towards justice are provisional could provide guidance in our contemporary efforts towards greater economic democracy.

Public Opinion in South and Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 35-66
Author(s):  
Devin Caughey
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Irt Model ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Right ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter examines the political attitudes of the Southern mass public in the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Taking advantage of hundreds of public opinion polls conducted beginning in the mid-1930s, the chapter documents Southern whites' collective turn against many aspects of the New Deal as well as their persistent ideological diversity on economic issues. The chapter illustrates these developments with a focus on four policy areas: old-age pensions, minimum wages, union security agreements, and income taxation. It then summarizes these patterns using a dynamic group-level item response theory (IRT) model, which estimates the economic conservatism of demographic subpopulations in each state and year. Based on this and other evidence, the chapter argues that the South's turn to the right was driven partly by the increasingly urban and union-oriented character of New Deal liberalism, which alienated rural areas throughout the nation, and partly by white Southerners' growing sense of threat to their region's system of racial hierarchy.

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