American ideology

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The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

And no current politicians articulate all of them. So the people shift their votes to Democrats and Republicans, depending on who comes closest to their beliefs about particular issues at a particular time. Hence, we use the term New American Ideology, even though it's not a rigid ideology per se. This New American Ideology is the mind-set of the Long Boom. The New American Ideology can best be stated this way: "It's not about left or right; it's about what works." The Long Boomers don't carry all the baggage from the political past about which side—the Left or the Right, the liberals or the conservatives—won what political battle and who needs to get back at whom.

For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at HarperCollins Publishers, 10 last S3rd Street, New York, NY 10022, or call 1-212-207-7528, Visit us on the World Wide Web at www.basjcbooks.com CONTENTS Preface: A Shared Political Vision Introduction: The Historic Moment v 1 PART I TRAck the INEviTAbls 1 The Great Enabler "Openness Wins," 30 19 2 The Millennial Transition 1980, London, 37 "Going Global," 57 37 PART II Thi Politics of The Lowq BOOM 3 The New American Ideology 1990, Tokyo, 65 "Politics Adapts," 76 "Learning Innovation," 85 65 4 The New European Renaissance "The Inclusive Community," 102 91 5 Asia Rises Again 109 6 The Global Challenges 1999, San Francisco, 142 133 PART III THE ENQINES of THE TwENTY-fiRsT CENTURY 7 Saving the Planet "Growing Together," 165 149 iv CONTENTS 8 Dawn of the Hydrogen Age "Everyone Lets Go," 181 171 9 Technology Emulates Nature 187 10 Prepare for Wild Science "Expanding into Space," 221 211 PART IV BiRih of A GlobAl CivilizAiioN 11 The New Global Middle Class 2010, Rural California, 237 229 12 The Emergence of Women 2020, Capetown, 250 241 13 The Guiding Principles Go Global, 256 Open Up, 258 Let Go, 262 Grow More, 265 Always Adapt, 267 Keep Learning, 268 Value Innovation, 270 Get Connected, 271 Be Inclusive, 272 Stay Confident, 275 2050, American Heartland, 277 255 14 The Choice 281 AflERWORd A Memo to the President-Elect The Story of the Idea Notes Selected Bibliography About the Authors Index 291 295 303 315 321 323 PREFACE A SHAREd PoliTicAl VISION the publication of the hardcover edition of this book a year s ince ago, each week seems to bring another positive story: The American economy continues its longest expansion ever.

The inner cities are rotting, and crack cocaine is spreading.The family unit is crumbling. The United States is decomposing. And then I see the Soviet Union collapsing—I have no idea what that's about. I guess the two old military superpowers are going down in flames. It probably makes sense:They've The NEW AMERICAN Ideology 67 spent gazillions of dollars arming themselves to death, and now they're both gonna sink And here's Asia with all its vitality, building things. When Mol and I move back to the States in the summer, I'm totally screwed, I will be looking for jobs all over the country just when the economy's going into recession.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

The national fear that those who are obsessed with history produce self-fulfilling prophecies does embody a great folk wisdom."74 The American Ideology, then, like classical Marxism, believes that it is possible to make a sudden "leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom." Or as Reagan used to say (quoting the polemicist of the American Revolution Thomas Paine), "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." As another illustration of the underlying pervasiveness of the American Ideology, this was also a favorite phrase of 1960s radicals.75 But Kissinger also writes of the need for America in the twenty-first century to express its power and influence as far as possible by multilateral means if it does not wish its dominance to falter.76 And here the American Creed and its attendant myths, and the kind of nationalism they support, can constitute serious problems.

Nor is this in any sense desired by the great majority of Americans, as the increasingly skeptical response to the dragged-out war in Iraq demonstrates. There are would-be Napoleonic elements among the so-called neoconservatives, but by the Spring of 2005 their influence appeared to be in decline. The realism which tempers American ideological nationalism was demonstrated between 2001 and 2004 most notably in Bush administration's policy towards China. Even before 9/11, the Bush administration was beginning to turn from what had been an extremely dangerous strategy of confronting and containing China to one of pragmatic and moderate realism, very close to that previously vi PREFACE TO THE P A P E R B A C K EDITION followed by Bill Clinton.

Today it is partly reflected in the phenomenon of "political correctness" and contributes to the limitations on thought and debate in the United States concerning both the American domestic system and the nation's role in the world. 47 Two Thesis: Splendor and Tragedy of the American Creed Even a good idea can be a little frightening when it is the only idea a man has ever had. —Louis Hartz1 Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts. —Reinhold Niebuhr2 T he American Thesis has also been called the American Creed and the American Ideology. It is the set of propositions about America which the nation presents to itself and to the outside world: "Americans of all national origins, classes, religions, Creeds, and colors, have something in common: a social ethos, a political Creed."3 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of adherence to American governing principles as a form of religious conversion.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Contents Preface to the 2015 Edition Preface to the First Edition (1986) Introduction (2002) 1. Thought Control: The Case of the Middle East 2. Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System 3. Libya in U.S. Demonology (1986) 4. The U.S. Role in the Middle East (November 15, 1986) 5. International Terrorism: Image and Reality (1989) 6. The World after September 11 (2001) 7. U.S./Israel–Palestine (May 2001) Notes About the Author © Noam Chomsky 2002 Original edition published by South End Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts This edition published in 2015 by Haymarket Books P.O.

Navy Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Dylan McCord. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. Contents Preface to the 2015 Edition vii Preface to the First Edition xiii Introduction 1 1. Thought Control: The Case of the Middle East 25 2. Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System 49 3. Libya in U.S. Demonology 105 4. The U.S. Role in the Middle East 135 5. International Terrorism: Image and Reality 155 6. The World after September 11 187 7. U.S./Israel–Palestine 207 Notes 235 Index 275 Preface to the 2015 edition As I write, the press reports that “in Iraq, Iran’s once-elusive spymaster, Maj.

The question cannot be asked, and if raised, could only be dismissed with distaste or horror. Literal censorship barely exists in the United States, but thought control is a flourishing industry, indeed an indispensable one in a free society based on the principle of elite decision, public endorsement or passivity. 2 Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System (1986) On October 17, 1985, President Reagan met in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who told him that Israel was prepared to take “bold steps” in the Middle East and extend “the hand of peace” to Jordan. “Mr. Peres’s visit comes at a moment of unusual American–Israeli harmony,” David Shipler commented in the Times, quoting a State Department official who described U.S. relations with Israel as “extraordinarily close and strong.”


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Coward, Barbara E., Joe R. Feagin, and Allen J. Williams Jr. 1974. “The Culture of Poverty Debate: Some Additional Data.” Social Problems 21:621–34. Della Fave, L. Richard. 1974. “The Culture of Poverty Revisited: A Strategy for Research.” Social Problems 21:609–21. Dunkleman, Allen J. 2000. “Our American Ideology of Success.” Unpublished senior research project, University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2001. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Farkas, George. 2003. “Cognitive Skills and Noncognitive Traits and Behaviors in Stratification Processes.”

Put quite simply, discrimination makes it more difficult for the objects of discrimination to develop merit and reduces the likelihood that their merit will be recognized and rewarded. Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in America The long history of deliberate discrimination against racial and ethnic groups in America belies the American ideology of individual freedom and equality of opportunity. From the near-genocide of Native Americans and the banishment of survivors to reservations, to the importation and enslavement of Africans, to the subsequent Jim Crow legislation that legalized racial segregation and unequal opportunity in the South, to exclusionary acts and discriminatory immigration quotas, to land displacement of Mexican Americans, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to current forms of residential, occupational, and educational discrimination against various minorities, the American experience has for many been more of an American Nightmare than an American Dream.

Of course, in Israel, there are Jews, Palestinians (Muslims), and Christians. Chapter 9 Growing Inequality in the Twenty-First Century All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. —George Orwell, Animal Farm This book has challenged widely held assertions about meritocracy in America. According to the American ideology of meritocracy, individuals get out of the system what they put into it. The system is seen as fair because everyone is assumed to have an equal, or at least “fair,” chance of getting ahead. Getting ahead is ostensibly based on merit—on being made of the right stuff. Being made of the right stuff means being talented, working hard, having the right attitude, and playing by the rules.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

For example, multi-billionaire George Soros pours enormous sums of money into radical causes and groups27; professional athletes such as Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James are vociferous vilifiers and disparagers of American society; many college and university professors are purveyors of revisionist American history and radical anti-American ideologies; college and university students from middle-class and wealthy families are increasingly militant opponents of the civil society; and, of course, various communities are ever more radicalized by racial, economic, educational, and other distinctions and disparities. Like Benda, Hoffer sees the fanatic and the mass movement as centered on an intense if not obsessive hatred.

Matthews, the Times’ foreign correspondent, “was the first American reporter to interview Fidel Castro and the last to recognize the man as a ruthless and slightly mad totalitarian murderer. He created, fell in love with, and ultimately was devoured by Castro’s mythology without ever really understanding what was happening.”62 Today, the Times gives voice to a racist, anti-American ideology built on Marxist ideas and tactics, brainwashes our children with lies, and undermines our own country. However, even before the 1619 Project, the media embraced and promoted Critical Race Theory, setting the stage for the violent riots that have engulfed numerous cities. Zack Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University, undertook what may be the most extensive examination of media reporting on race and racism in recent years.


pages: 392 words: 106,532

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

But as Wilson conceived it, such a world would not be safe for proletarian revolution, nor would the reverse be true. He quickly found himself waging two wars, one with military might against Imperial Germany and its allies, the other with words against the Bolsheviks. Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech of January, 1918, the single most influential statement of an American ideology in the 20th century, was a direct response to the ideological challenge Lenin had posed. There began at this point, then, a war of ideas—a contest among visions—that would extend through the rest of World War I, the interwar years, World War II, and most of the Cold War.7 At stake was the issue that had divided Disraeli’s two nations: how best to govern industrializing societies in such a way as to benefit all of the people who lived within them.

IF CHAINS were required to control Stalin’s proletarians, then it is hard today to see how such an arrangement could ever have attracted support elsewhere. Privation does lead to desperation, however, and when the choice is between starvation and repression it is not always easy to make. To succeed as an alternative, the American ideology could not simply show that communism suppressed freedom. It would also have to demonstrate that capitalism could sustain it. There was never a plan, worked out in advance in Washington, for how to do this. Instead there had been conflicting objectives at the end of World War II: punishing defeated enemies; cooperating with the Soviet Union; reviving democracy and capitalism; strengthening the United Nations.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They have laid down restrictions about pricing, distribution, profits, and management control.” The Indian reaction, I have already cited (this page). In such ways as these, we help India develop toward an open society, one which, in Walt Rostow’s words, has a proper understanding of “the core of the American ideology,” namely, “the sanctity of the individual in relation to the state.” And in this way, too, we refute the simpleminded view of those Asians who, to continue with Rostow’s phrasing, “believe or half-believe that the West has been driven to create and then to cling to its imperial holdings by the inevitable workings of capitalist economies.”

The important point is that the resort to a “power drive” as the explanation of imperial intervention is not false, but irrelevant, once its true character is laid bare. It is fair, I think, to suggest that this “alternative explanation” merely serves as a form of mystification, it serves to obscure the actual workings of power. The question remains: Why is American ideology and policy anti-Communist? Or a further question: Why has the United States been antifascist (though selectively)? Why was fascist Japan evil in 1940, while fascist Greece and Portugal (preserving the status quo with American arms in Africa) are quite tolerable today? And why is the United States generally anticolonialist, as in Indonesia shortly after World War II, when the conservative nationalist leadership appeared at first to favor foreign investment, but (reluctantly) not in Indochina, where the alternative to a barely disguised French colonialism was an indigenous Communist resistance?

The scale is essentially unknown, but just to give you one figure, it’s now estimated, from this period alone, that about 100,000 children have lost one or both parents. That was Guatemala. There was also military intervention in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Grenada. A twenty-year war of terrorism was waged against Cuba. Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than any other country, and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted. And now there’s a war against Nicaragua. The impact of all of this has been absolutely horrendous. There’s vast starvation throughout the region while croplands are devoted to exports to the United States.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

There are a lot of broad considerations involved. But I still suspect that domestic politics is uppermost. We can’t get out of Afghanistan without victory or we’ll be slaughtered. Is that related to the greatly expanding drone attacks on Pakistan? Yes. They’re horrible, but they’re also interesting. They tell us a lot about American ideology. The drone attacks are not a secret. There’s much we don’t know about them, but mostly they’re not a secret. The Pakistani population is overwhelmingly opposed to them, but they’re justified here on the grounds that the Pakistani leadership covertly agrees.38 Fortunately for us, Pakistan is so dictatorial that they don’t have to pay much attention to their population.39 So if the country is a brutal dictatorship, it’s great, because the leaders can secretly agree to what we’re doing and disregard their population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to it.


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The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

This advice did nothing to mend the structural inequalities that underlaid the plight of the poor. But it was an argument that seemed less callous, less obviously destructive, than it does today. Today the advice remains the same—but the options for ordinary Americans have dramatically changed. Abdicating the Imaginary Throne of the “Welfare Queen” American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control—the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach—or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall. Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy.


Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Also Homa Katouzian, Ideology and Method in Economics (New York: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 147-148; Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 189. 4. A. James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981), R. 3. 5. George C. Lodge, The New American Ideology (New York: Kn-opf, 1976), p.7. 6. North, Structure and Change, p. 49. 7. Roy C. Macridis, Contemporary Political Ideologies: Movements and Regimes (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop 1980), p. 4. Notes 283 8. David joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 3. 9.

Keller, Robert R., and Ann Mari May. "The Presidential Political Business Cycle of 1972." Journal of Economic History 44 (June 1984). 336 Select Bibliography Koistinen, Paul A. C. The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective. New York: Praeger, 1980. Lodge, George C. The New American Ideology. New York: Knopf, 1976. Navarro, Peter. The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues Are Stealing America. New York: Wiley, 1984. Palmer, John [L.], and Isabel V. Sawhill, eds. The Reagan Experiment. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1982. - - . The Reagan Record. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984.


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The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

This is the time of the American historian. All nationalist celebration tends, of course, to be put in historical terms, but the celebrators do not wish to be relevant merely to the understanding of history as past event. Their purpose is the celebration of the present. (1) One reason why the American ideology is so historically oriented is that of all the scholarly community it is the historians who are most likely to create such public assumptions. For, of all the scholarly writers, the historians have been the ones with the literate tradition. Other ‘social scientists’ are more likely to be unacquainted with English usage and moreover, they do not write about large topics of public concern. (2) The ‘good’ historians, in fulfilling the public role of the higher journalists, the historians with the public attention and the Sunday acclaim, are the historians who are the quickest to re-interpret the American past with relevance to the current mood, and in turn, the cleverest at picking out of the past, just now, those characters and events that most easily make for optimism and lyric upsurge. (3) In truth, and without nostalgia, we ought to realize that the American past is a wonderful source for myths about the American present.

Other ‘social scientists’ are more likely to be unacquainted with English usage and moreover, they do not write about large topics of public concern. (2) The ‘good’ historians, in fulfilling the public role of the higher journalists, the historians with the public attention and the Sunday acclaim, are the historians who are the quickest to re-interpret the American past with relevance to the current mood, and in turn, the cleverest at picking out of the past, just now, those characters and events that most easily make for optimism and lyric upsurge. (3) In truth, and without nostalgia, we ought to realize that the American past is a wonderful source for myths about the American present. That past, at times, did indeed embody quite a way of life; the United States has been extraordinarily fortunate in its time of origin and early development; the present is complicated, and, especially to a trained historian, quite undocumented. The general American ideology accordingly tends to be of history and by historians.4


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

According to George Lodge, the formative impact of this fusion of political, economic, and theological thought upon early American en- trepreneurs cannot be overestimated: "Much of the power of Locke derived from the contention that the rights he asserted were in and of the nature of things. They were in fact God's Law. . . . In America they were energized by the Calvinist notion that hard work repre- sented the holy life. . . . Traditional American ideology was thus fused with religion. It constituted a single, integrated, and synthetic body of belief. ,,3 The explicit linkage between the natural rights of ownership and divine grace had faded. Property rights began to develop their own independent validity. Thorstein Veblen described this shift in his dis- cussion of nineteenth-century business principles.

Chapter Six What Was Managerial Authority? 1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 172. 2. John Child, British Management Thought (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969),33. 446 Notes 3. George Cabot Lodge, The New American Ideology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975),116. 4. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scrib- ner's Sons, 1923),73. 5. As Reinhard Bendix put it: liThe doctrine of self-help proclaimed that em- ployers and workers were alike in self-dependence, and that regardless of class each man's success was a proof of himself and a contribution to the common wealth. . . .


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall,” copyright 1979 Pink Floyd Music Limited. 20. Barbara Flores, “Language Interference on Influence: Toward a Theory for Hispanic Bilingualism” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona at Tuscon, 1982), 131. 21. Cited in Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence: Now Examining American Ideology (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 234-35. 22. Zinn, Declarations of Independence. 23. Cited in Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 339-40. 24. Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War. 25. Cited in Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), 130. 26.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Speight attributes this trend to the strong culture of resistance in the black community and the belief that collective action produces results. And he’s right. Compared to whites, African Americans are much more collectively oriented and community-centered, a worldview born of the reality that survival meant banding together. As John Powell recounts in his book Racing to Justice, individualism, a key value of the American ideology, is in fact a very racialized concept, and one that conflicts with the orientation toward communitarian values that are held deeply by African Americans. The tension between these two values ricochets through all our major policy debates, and generally, though not exclusively, breaks down along partisan lines, with the Democratic Party leaning more toward communitarianism and the Republican Party leaning toward individualism.


pages: 321 words: 85,267

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The following policy proposals demand a commitment to community at every level of government. The promotion of community may seem to be an obvious role for the public sector, especially at the local level; some would suggest that it is the public sector’s primary responsibility. Yet it can become a sticky constitutional issue when brought face-to-face with the American ideology of rugged individualism. This is particularly true when it comes to property rights, people’s ability to do whatever they want with their land. In this regard, we must turn to the first question of political philosophy: Is it the role of government to promote individual rights while defending the common good, or to promote the common good while defending individual rights?


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It was the motif of his bestselling 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, a long salute to bipartisanship that is distinguished from the hundreds of other titles in that genre by the intellectual pirouettes that then-Senator Obama performed around this deeply boring topic. Americans have “a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences,” he proclaimed in Chapter One of that work, just before telling us “we need a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” Ideology, which is the opposite of consensus, cannot possibly “meet the challenges we face as a country.” And so tritely on. As president, Obama worked hard to signal continuity with Bush administration policy and then, in 2010, to lend his gravitas to the worldwide push for austerity. This was the low point of the Obama years, when the president made his “pivot” to deficit reduction even though the slump continued and unemployment was intolerably high.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

The fragmentation of American culture is real, but it is slowly resolving itself into the barbarism of the computer and the instrument that ultimately uses and shapes the computer, the corporation. Corporations are an American adaptation of a European concept. In its American form it turns into a way of life. Corporations are as fragmented as the rest of American culture. But in their diversity, they express the same self-certainty as any American ideology. SUMMING UP The United States is socially imitated and politically condemned. It sits on the ideological fault line of the international system. As populations decline due to shifts in reproductive patterns, the United States becomes the center for radically redefined modes of social life.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

For a fascinating account of this monumental shift away from our founding political principles between the 1880s and the 1920s, see “America Reverses Direction,” Chapter 14 in Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Stein & Day, 1982), pp. 279–296. 4. See Jeffrey E. Paul “The Second American Civil War: Revolution and the Roots of Counterrevolution in American Ideological History,” original paper in Social Philosophy and Policy, no. 8, Bowling Green State University. 5. See Howard Kurtz, “College Faculties a Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds,” Washington Post, March 29, 2005, p. Cl, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html. The study, conducted by professors Robert Lichter of George Mason University, Stanley Rothman of Smith College, and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, surveyed 1,643 full-time non-science faculty members at 183 four-year U.S. colleges.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

American planes and bombs, science and technology, kept the nation and the world safe, and at the same time provided a constantly increasing level of comfort to more and more Americans. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957, at a moment of economic recession, was a propaganda coup of the highest order for the Soviets. It challenged head-on two of the most basic premises of American ideology: technological superiority and the economic prosperity it supposedly fostered. As Marshall McLuhan would later observe, “The firs sputnik . . . was a witty taunting of the capitalist world by means of a new kind of technological image or icon.”16 The fact that the United States’own Vanguard satellite exploded on the launch pad two months later only deepened America’s moment of self-doubt and readied the country for a period of genuine self-criticism.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

At the end of a two-month-long trial, they found that productivity had risen 20 percent—while “work-life balance” satisfaction scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. In 2019, a similar trial at Microsoft Japan resulted in a 40 percent rise in productivity.6 Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job.7 To admit as much, though, means confronting ossified American ideologies around work: that more work is good, and less work is bad, no matter how much evidence suggests otherwise. Which is why opting out of work, at least in our current situation, doesn’t feel possible. Earlier this year, a friend took a day off for a much-needed weekend away from her job as a lawyer at a startup.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

No doubt this is in part due to a kind of social hope, a recognition that we face deep and significant problems in our world that demand resolution. While it is clear that a certain strand of utopian enthusiasm inherent in every technological development—perhaps, as Wark might argue, one closely tied to particularly American ideologies of novelty and renewal (see, e.g., Adas 1989, 2006; Marx 1964; Noble 1977)—there is also a profoundly specific character of the IT revolution that we are especially reluctant to face head-on, despite the fact that our most trenchant social critics have tried continually to bring it to the fore.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

The second was a rhetorical tool employed in this political and economic campaign, which I term the discourse of freedom. After several decades of isolationism in the first half of the twentieth century, the exigencies of the Cold War brought about a new awareness among U.S. political and economic leaders regarding the role of culture in promoting American ideology both at home and abroad. Faced with the threat of expanding Soviet influence after World War II, the United States found itself in a position where it had to prove its superiority by demonstrating the power and benefits of U.S. democracy versus Soviet communism. On the broadest level, this involved dramatic displays of economic power, military might, technological advances, and cultural achievement.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

To expect Orman to make the leap from articulating the problem—your salary is not keeping up!—to suggesting how we can solve the problem on a societal basis is to misunderstand the phenom that is Suze Orman, the self-help industry, and, yes, the personal finance industrial complex. “The power Suze Orman has comes from reinforcing the American ideology of individualism,” McGee told me, adding that by telling people they have more power than they really do, you are at least motivating them to take what action they can. And, maybe, that is the best one can expect from Suze Orman, the ultimate saleswoman who has gone from selling subpar pancakes to peddling financial platitudes.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

In 1953, Aksel’ Berg, then deputy minister of defense in charge of radar and future dean of Soviet cybernetics, asked Kitov to prepare a report on the state of computing in the West.1 Kitov’s optimistic report resulted in the creation of three large computational facilities—the Computation Center 1 (which Kitov directed until 1959), the Navy Computation Center, and the Air Force Computation Center.2 Kitov’s optimistic review of computing in the West stemmed from his 1952 discovery of a copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics that had been removed from general circulation (due to the ongoing anti-American campaign against cybernetics) and stored in a top-secret military research library. As noted above, in 1955, Kitov coauthored (with Lyapunov and Sobolev, two highly regarded Soviet mathematicians) the first Soviet article to attempt to rehabilitate cybernetics from the anti-American ideological critique that had been waged since its first mention in the Soviet press in 1948. Kitov was not alone in seeing the potential for using computers in military work. Military and computing innovations were inseparable in the early history of computing. Although those early, specialized computer innovations for the military often had no measurable defense outcomes, their technological innovations seeped into nonmilitary industries.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

As Senator Schumer said in 2007 of existing financial regulations, “We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws and make sure New York remains No. 1 for decades on into the future.”57 The New American Dream was to make tens of millions on Wall Street or as a hedge fund manager in Greenwich, Connecticut. But it was also connected to the Old American Dream—to own a house of one’s own. In the last thirty years, the Wall Street ideology borrowed heavily from the older, more deep-rooted American ideology of homeownership, which became widely accepted after World War II as government programs and economic prosperity made possible a homeowning middle class. Wall Street co-opted this ideology to justify the central place of modern finance in the economic and political system, especially as the homeownership rate climbed from 64 percent, where it sat from 1983 to 1994, to a high of 69 percent in the 2000s.58 The ideology of homeownership has its roots in two sources.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

He insisted that his children would have paying jobs when they were in high school, saying “There’s no doubt in my mind. One thousand percent.” This kind of orientation was exactly the one I had expected when I started my research. The idea of working hard on an equal playing field as the most desirable means to get ahead is the definition of the American Dream, which permeates American ideology and popular culture.2 By the same token, other scholars have shown that privileged people often explain and justify their social advantages by alluding to their hard work.3 My research both supports and challenges this idea. On the one hand, most of the people I interviewed, whether upward- or downward-oriented, echoed Paul’s emphasis on working hard as one basis for deserving wealth.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

A growing number of Canadians, however, question whether NAFTA makes their country a valued partner or a useful appendage to the United States. Many Canadians deeply oppose strengthening NAFTA, arguing that Canada is already being absorbed into the larger US economy and is losing its political sovereignty in the process. Canadians also worry that NAFTA will mean having to go along with the dominant American ideology, which is often at odds with Canada’s deeply held cultural and social values. They fear that the new “continentalism” is merely coded language for erasing the border along the forty-ninth parallel. In short, they suspect that NAFTA is a front for a twenty-first century, high-tech American colonialism designed to grab hold of Canada’s rich resources and remake its citizenry in the United States’ image.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

His friend Girkin proclaimed himself the minister of war, and asked Russia to invade the Donbas and establish military bases. * * * — The Russian intervention in the Donbas was called the “Russian Spring.” It was certainly springtime for Russian fascism. On March 7, 2014, Alexander Dugin rejoiced in “the expansion of liberational (from Americans) ideology into Europe. It is the goal of full Eurasianism—Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” The fascist commonwealth was coming into view, boasted the fascist. A few days later, Dugin proclaimed that history had been undone: “Modernity was always essentially wrong, and we are now at the terminal point of modernity.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

Washington’s anticommunist crusade had actually started well before World War II. Just after the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson chose to join the other imperial powers in helping the White forces attempt to retake control from the Bolshevik revolutionaries. For two reasons. First, the core, foundational American ideology is something like the exact opposite of communism.15 Strong emphasis is placed on the individual, not the collective, and an idea of freedom that is strongly linked to the right to own things. This had been, after all, the basis for full citizenship in the early American republic: only white men with property could vote.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Crafting it at Harvard University and his Goldman Sachs trading desk in the 1960s, Rubin looked at economic policy through the prism of probability and turned uncertainties into calculable risks and alternative scenarios through self-defeat tests.10 The complex economy could be made less complex – and a rationalist approach, with government intervention, could protect it from shocks and crises. Greenspan and Rubin, with their roots in two very different strands of American ideology, became symbols of an era. Powered by a renewed belief in market forces, infinite growth in the financial sector, and globalization, it was a time of aspirations to build a stable system for international peace, freedom, and prosperity on the back of cross-border trade, investment and capital flows.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Wilkinson, R. and M. Marmot (eds) (2003) Social Determinants of Health: The solid facts, 2nd edn, Geneva: World Health Organization. available at www.guardian.co.uk/­ environment/2008/may/06/waste.­ pollution/print, accessed 14 February 2009. Zinn, H. (1990) Declarations of Independ- ence: Cross-examining American ideology, New York: HarperCollins. — (2002) The Future of History: Interviews with David Barsamian, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. 290 Glossary Adding-up problem: if labour is paid its marginal product, will the residual amount be just enough to pay capital its marginal product? Answer: only if there are constant returns to scale!


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

On the eve of the Civil War, only 16 percent of the workforce was in manufacturing. 40 They worked in grain milling, meatpacking, lard refining, turning logs into planks and beams, iron smelting and forging, and making steam engines and steamboats, vats and piping, locomotives, reapers and mowers, carriages, stoves, cotton and woolen cloth, shoes, saddles and harnesses, and workaday tools. These were the industries in which America’s comparative advantage loomed largest and were the ones that dominated American output. It was the drive to mass scale in those industries, by a wide variety of strategies and methods, that was the real American system, or perhaps the American ideology, of manufacturing. America in 1860: On the Brink The Civil War violently disrupted economic growth, but by finally resolving the sectional conflict, and excising the cancer of slavery, it removed the last important obstacle to continental expansion and vigorous industrialization. Abraham Lincoln came out of the old Whig tradition of Henry Clay—egalitarian, pro–manufacturing and protective tariffs, pro-education, and pro–canals, roads, and interior development.


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 442–473. 15 Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 15–30. See also Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, 1919–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), xii, 3–96; and Noble, America By Design, 79–81. 16 Paul G. Agnew, “Historical Memoranda to H (for Mrs. Moffett), 9/3/48, in P. G. Agnew, Historical and Policy Papers (New York: American Standards Association, 1920–1952), 335.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

SEC, 641 F.2d 1304, 1307 (9th Cir. 1981) (“Ownership is a collection of rights to use and enjoy property including the right to sell and transmit the same” (quoting Energy Oils, Inc. v. Montana Power Co., 626 F.2d 731, 736 (9th Cir. 1980)). 124. 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries *447. 125. Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 333, 370 (1866) (argument of Mr. Johnson). 126. Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005). 127. Ibid. 128. Jim Chen, “The American Ideology,” Vanderbilt Law Review 48 (1995): 829–30. 129. Motor Vehicle Franchise Act, 815 Ill. Comp. Stat. 710/4(e)(8) et seq. 130. 815 Ill. Comp. Stat. 710/12(c). 330 Notes for Pages 171–175 131. 815 Ill. Comp. Stat. 710/12(c)(7) (emphasis added). 132. Prior of Christchurch Canterbury v. Bendysshe, 93 Selden Society 8, 9 (1503). 133.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

In the gently mocking Broadway comedy hit of an earlier era (subsequently a successful film) Tea House of the August Moon, a clever, seemingly obsequious Japanese houseboy, attached to a commanding reeducation officer in occupied Japan, uses his post to inflect with subversive Japanese elements and hence ultimately deflect the happy American ideology being inculcated. Even in defeat, Japan conditioned the American culture being imposed on it. By the 1980s, historians like Paul Kennedy were arguing that Japan was actually reacquiring its status as a dominant power, threatening to displace American hegemony,7 although by that time Japan was itself being creolized by the America for which it was becoming a dominant automobile and technology supplier.


pages: 488 words: 145,950

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner

American ideology, Anthropocene, Charles Lindbergh, fear of failure, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mass immigration, move 37, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Birket-Smith, Kaj. “Knud Rasmussen.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 25, no. 2 (1933). ———. Knud Rasmussen’s Saga. Copenhagen: Chr. Erichsens Forlag, 1936. ———. The Eskimos. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1936. Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Bobé, Louis. Hans Egede: Colonizer and Missionary of Greenland. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1952. Born, Erik W., et al. Polar Bears in Northwest Greenland: An Interview Survey About the Catch and the Climate.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

But despite the liberal Establishment’s openness and the right’s new think tanks and foundations and zillionaire donors, it seemed in the 1970s that the antigovernment diehards and libertarian freaks, the Milton Friedmanites and Ayn Randians and Wall Street Journal ideologues, would never really be allowed to run the show. The American ideological center of gravity was plainly undergoing a rightward shift, but wouldn’t the 1980s just turn out to be some kind of modest course correction, like what happened in the late 1940s and ’50s, part of the normal endless back-and-forth pendulum swing from center-left to center-right? We had no idea.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

All of this changed abruptly following what this book calls the “traumatic trifecta” of Tiananmen Square (1989), the Gulf War (1990–1991), and the Soviet collapse (1991). These three short but historic years reshaped the United States, China, and the international system, and each heightened Beijing’s anxieties about the United States. The Tiananmen Square protests reminded Beijing of the American ideological threat, the swift Gulf War victory reminded it of the American military threat, and loss of the shared Soviet adversary reminded it of the American geopolitical threat. In short order, the United States quickly replaced the Soviet Union as China’s primary security concern, that in turn led to a new grand strategy, and a thirty-year struggle to displace American power was born.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Indeed, the expensive science that often yielded transformation would increasingly come from government-funded research, which ironically could be conducted without regard to its commercial prospects. The notion that only the profit motive could lead to invention or maximize production was contradicted by the performance of America during wartime. But after victory, the paramount American ideology that emerged again was its steely pragmatism: one that could contract the principles of both democracy and capitalism in times of crisis but was rooted in its ability to revert to its traditional conceits when threats dissipated—a Darwinian mode of internal and external statecraft that adapted to shifting conditions.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

“An Incessant Search for New Approaches.” Physics Today, September, 61. Telegdi, Valentine L. 1972. “Crucial Experiments on Discrete Symmetries.” In Mehra 1973, 457. Teller, Michael E. 1988. The Tuberculosis Movement: A Public Health Campaign in the Progressive Era. New York: Greenwood Press. Tobey, Ronald C. 1971. The American Ideology of National Science 1919–1930. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Tomonaga, Shin’ichiro. 1966. “Development of Quantum Electrodynamics: Personal Recollections.” In Nobel Lectures: Physics 1963–1970. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Torretti, Roberto. 1990. Creative Understanding: Philosophical Reflections on Physics.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Indeed, the expensive science that often yielded transformation would increasingly come from government-funded research, which ironically could be conducted without regard to its commercial prospects. The notion that only the profit motive could lead to invention or maximize production was contradicted by the performance of America during wartime. But after victory, the paramount American ideology that emerged again was its steely pragmatism: one that could contract the principles of both democracy and capitalism in times of crisis but was rooted in its ability to revert to its traditional conceits when threats dissipated—a Darwinian mode of internal and external statecraft that adapted to shifting conditions.


pages: 653 words: 218,559

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

It is an odd fact which, of course, has often been noticed that Jefferson, when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, changed the current formula in which the inalienable rights were enumerated from “life, liberty and property” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is even stranger that in the debates which preceded the adoption of Jefferson’s draft this alteration was not discussed; and this curious lack of attention to a phraseology, which in the course of the following centuries has contributed to a specifically American ideology more than any other word or notion, stands almost as much in need of explanation as the phrase itself. It is quite possible that this original lack of attention was due to the high regard paid to Mr. Jefferson’s famous “felicity of the pen”; it is even more likely that the change escaped attention because the word “happiness” occupied a pre-revolutionary place in political language so that it sounded quite familiar in its context.


pages: 927 words: 236,812

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

A blackboard propped outside a mock-up of a grocer’s shop carried a message warning that Marshall Aid would end in 1952 and when it did the British government would only be able to import food for which it could pay.54 Therefore British workers needed to see themselves as producers rather than consumers and continue to work hard to manufacture export goods. If Britain did not embrace the American ideology, its economic position was nevertheless shaped by its relationship with the United States. Britain’s austerity measures were a direct result of the ending of lend-lease and of the nation’s need to earn foreign exchange to buy imports of food and pay off its debt to the United States. This in turn shaped Britain’s new post-war relationship with its empire.


pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

She bound Peikoff to her tightly, partly through a scholarly book he had been working on since the early 1960s. Called The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, its purpose was to amplify Rand’s controversial argument in “The Fascist New Frontier” that America was marching toward Fascism, by comparing postwar American ideology with German philosophical ideas he argued had given rise to the Third Reich. He became preoccupied with Nazi atrocities against thinkers and Jews, tracing them to Kant and Hegel. The book was scheduled to appear in 1969, by arrangement with Weybright and Talley, a publishing firm founded by Victor Weybright, Rand’s friend at NAL.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

In both a literal and a cultural sense, the Bin Laden family owned an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war, and yet, as was true of the relationship between the Saudi and American governments, their involvement in the United States also proved to be narrow and brittle. This made both Osama’s anti-American ideology and his family’s response to it all the more complex. The Bin Laden family’s global character owes much to the worldwide shape of the oil market and the wealth it created after 1973, but it is rooted, too, in an age before combustion engines. Osama’s generation of Bin Ladens was the first to be born on Saudi soil.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

US support for such government-centered development plans can also be explained by the Truman Administration’s realization of just how bad the situation had been all over Europe in the 1940s. If the choice was between chaos, opening up for Soviet subversion, and government-imposed order, it was not difficult to make, for Truman in Europe or for later US administrations elsewhere in the world, in spite of American ideological predilections. Many US representatives in postwar Europe (as well as in postwar Japan) had backgrounds in the United States’ own experiments with state-led initiatives during the New Deal. Granted, western European initiatives went much further toward state planning than anything implemented long-term in the United States.


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Vietnam and America were on a long and winding path—a road not previously taken, if you will—that by the twenty-first century would lead them to become de facto allies against North Vietnam’s erstwhile backer, the People’s Republic of China. Lansdale did not live long enough to see this improbable twist of fate. But he would hardly have been surprised to learn that the American ideology of freedom, in which he had believed with boundless devotion ever since as a boy he had read green leather-bound books on the American Revolution in his father’s library, had prevailed over the illiberal forces of Communism. Ed Lansdale had been serenely confident all along about the universal appeal of the Declaration of Independence and its “self-evident truths.”


Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Updated Edition) (South End Press Classics Series) by Noam Chomsky

active measures, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, centre right, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, information security, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, public intellectual, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman

Germond and Jules Witeover observe that “Israel’s supporters” hope that the Report “will help arrest ‘the waning of enthusiasm’ toward Israel” in Congress, and “make it easier for [friends of Israel in Congress] to give their support and encourage Americans to do the same.” Boston Globe, Feb. 15, 1983. It may, then, serve the same function as the demonstrations in Israel after the massacres, when filtered through the American ideological system. Classics in Politics: The Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky Aftermath 675 standards adopted by the Times with regard to U.S. aggression in Indochina, the U.S. overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala and its support for a series of neo-Nazi murderers since, and much else.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Other Books by Howard Zinn La Guardia in Congress 1959 The Southern Mystique 1964 SNCC: The New Abolitionists 1964 New Deal Thought (editor) 1965 Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal 1967 Disobedience and Democracy 1968 The Politics of History 1970 The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays 1972 (editor, with Noam Chomsky) Postwar America 1973 Justice in Everyday Life (editor) 1974 Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology 1991 Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian 1993 You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train 1994 The Zinn Reader 1997 The Future of History 1999 Marx in Soho: A Play on History 1999 On War 2001 On History 2001 Terrorism and War 2002 Emma: A Play 2002 Copyright A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

The left-wing folksinger John Prine responded, in song, upon “digesting Reader’s Digest in the back of a dirty book store,” that waving flags didn’t “get you into heaven anymore—they’re already too crowded from your dirty little war.” Five years after Lyndon Johnson was elected on a platform of consensus, every conceivable cultural expression fell to one or another side of the American ideological divide. Smart businessmen figured out ways to sell to both sides. The Christmas season’s most brilliant entrepreneur was surely the guy who invented the Spiro Agnew wristwatch. Hipsters bought it as a kitschy screw-you to his admirers. The Silent Majority bought it as a screw-you to his detractors.