Fear Itself

A couple million for your thoughts

My latest has gone up on-line here:
http://broadstreetreview.com/cross-cultural/from-the-new-deal-to-citizens-united

It begins

I may have been unkind to the Supreme Court.
I had been calling Citizens United the most wereweasel-bit decision of the past 50 years in its likely social devestation. I had it bunked between Dred Scott and Korematsu in the jurisprudential Hall of Shame. By okaying corporations to dump unlimited cash sacks into the back pockets of electoral candidates, it seemed to have laid its crop against the flanks of the rich, goading them to trample our last pretensions to representative democracy.

I just finished…

…Ira Katznelson”s “Fear Itself.” It is no easy read, but I found his analysis of how the south, through its domination of New Deal and post-war legislation, shaped our country today quite the head-buzz. I also was comfortable with his view that fear – first economic, then of war, then the bomb, then communism (and now radical islam) has been a primary shaping force too, though there my sense is the south has been only of secondary import. All parts of the country are equally capable of being spooked.
Just as a side thought, Katznelson often mentions “the national security state.” Makes me wonder when and with whom that phrase originated? It’s a term, like “paradyme,” which I never used to encounter and then suddenly seemed all over the place.