Musings on Political and Economic Utopianism

 The mistake a lot of political "commentators" make is assuming that there is a perfect system, a perfect political, economic, or cultural system. There is and will never be a perfect system be it a perfect economic system--capitalism as utopia--or a perfect political system--autocracy as utopia. Given the reality that power corrupts it is essential, if a degree of freedom is to be maintained, in a bureaucratic and corporate world, to have countervailing powers checking and balancing each other.

There have been, of course, a variety of governmental forms across human history ranging from the autocratic to the more "democratic". Governments of the more republican variety, can and have served as countervailing forces against the massive power of corporate and consumer capitalism, which has dominated the US and the world since the American Gilded Age. That, however, is not and never has been their only function states or governments, particularly those of the republican variety, perform. They also provide services. The Roman state, for instance, provided its plebs with bread and circuses. The feudal state provided serfs and peasants with protection in exchange for agricultural stay in place labour. The Canadian state provides public services, including health care and retirement pensions, among other things to its citizens that are, again at least in theory, of a non-commercial character.

Economic corporations, which are clearly more powerful than corporate governments, operate in the private not the public interest. They operate for the personal enrichment of a few individuals rather than for the public good. A republican form of government, at least in theory, operates for the greatest good of the greatest number of citizens, I say citizens, by the way, since modern nations are not the product of a bunch of mythic monads but are made up of real individual citizens.

Too many on the uberindividualistic or hyperindividualistic right, embedded as they are in myths rather than realities, don't recognise, first, that corporate power, which is hierarchical and bureaucratic, far exceeds the power of governments. In fact, corporate capitalists control not only the means of production but control many if not all government functions and use these to enhance their own power and and their own profits. Second, those on the right don't recognise the difference between autocratic forms of government and republican forms of governance. Many on the right, in other words, have no conception of historical realities and that there really is a difference between electoral forms of governance and governance based on the autocratic whims of an individual.

In America's current form all the right wing utopia of downsizing government will do, will enhance the private corporate power of the wealthy and rich few, just as it has done in the past, at the expense of non-elite citizens. If you want to increase freedom, in other words, you cannot simply eliminate or downsize modern governmental bureaucratic-hierarchical forms but you must also eliminate or massively downsize economic bureaucratic-hierarchical forms. That means that you have to radically break up corporate forms of the governmental AND the economic variety. And this means that you have to not only radically downsize states and particularly the war making powers of states, since, as history shows, economic and political bureaucracies thrive and expand under such conditions, you also have to radically down size economic bureaucracies.

Personally I don't see this happening. Karl Marx's somewhat anarchistic left libertarian notion that communism will lead not only to the freedom to fish in the morning, work a few hours to meet needs in the afternoon, and then philosophise in the evening, and to the withering away of the state, seems to me like a utopian dream, as utopian a dream that corporate capitalism will bring everyone to heavenly nirvana. All corporate capitalism does is enrich the few and here in the States it is the economic few who have control of the government apparatus, such control that they are able to eliminate laws protecting citizens from casino and vulture capitalism and to put taxpayers on the hook for the results of this speculative casino, periodic economic bust. In the meantime perhaps reforms like those proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the best we can hope for in a world dominated by corporate capitalist elites.
 

The Books of My Life: From the New Deal to the New Right

Joseph Lowndes in his book From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) takes on the backlash theory, which argues that the rightward drift of the Republican Party since the 1960s was a backlash to the Great Society and the civil rights and countercultural movements of the era. Lowndes argues that the rightward drift of the Republican Party is not the product of the 1960s, but instead goes back to tentative and selective alliances between Republican conservatives and Southern Democrats or Dixiecrats in the later years of the New Deal.

Lowndes argues that between the third New Deal and today several streams of radical rightism and conservatism merged to produce the Republican Party of today. The first stream, Lowndes argues, was Southern states rights radical rightism, a Southern states rights rightism grounded in the defence of Jim Crow. The second stream, Lowdnes argues, that created the Republican Party of today was GOP conservative small government laissez-faireism. The third stream, claims Lowndes, that created the Republican Party of today, was the increasing anti-communist and anti-liberal ideologies of both.

These three streams, Lowndes argues, were woven together by three sources. The first was National Review conservative intellectuals trying to expand conservatism into the sold Dixiecrat South beginning in the 1960s. The second was Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency in 1964, which had some success in the Dixiecrat South. The third was George Wallace, who created a right populism out of the states rights keep your hands off of our Jim Crow, the big government is tyrannical discourse, and the those trying to end Jim Crow in the South are communists discourse. Wallace's rhetoric, which he toned down particularly in the North during his run for the presidency in 1964 and 1968. appealed, it turned out, not only to Southern Dixiecrats enraged about judicial and federal actions against Jim Crow segregation, but also to middle class and working class ethnic Whites in the North, fearful about the impact of affirmative action on their job security and on their and their children's ability to move up the social mobility ladder, and the impact of desegregation on their neighbourhood schools.

It was Richard Nixon, Lowndes argues, who was behind the mainstreaming of Wallace style raging populism in the Grand Old Party. Nixon, always looking for the means to the end of becoming president, selectively stole Wallace's populist thunder and Wallace's ability to talk about race without talking about race in the late 1960s and early 1970s and rode it into the White House. Eventually, Lowndes argues, Nixon took populist rightism to where it had never gone before, namely, into mainstream Republican Party policy and government policy and action, if in fits and starts. In the 1980s, Lowndes argues, Ronald Reagan rode this populist rightism to electoral victory and led a Republican Party, cleansed of most of its moderates and liberals by that time, further right.

I was impressed by Lowndes's focus on culture and the role it played in instutitonalising populist conservatism in the Republican Party and eventually into American governance itself. I liked how Lowndes tied the new conservatism not only to cultural discourses but to interactions between cultural discourse and broader economic, political, and cultural events like the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and Watergate. I found Lowndes critique of backlash theory and the role Southern states rights anti-statism played in the rise of modern conservatism quite compelling. If further proof of Lowndes's thesis is needed may I present for your consideration Republican president Donald Trump. Trump's I am not a racist or a White separatist or supremacist racist rhetoric of rage, which parallels that of the Dixiecrats, clearly shows, I think, that the modern day Republican Party has now been fully dixiefornicated.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in recent American history, New Deal and post New Deal politics, the history of the GOP, the American right, and particularly the modern American right. It offers an interesting peek into how demagogues use fear to manipulate the masses to their ends.

The Eternal Return: Musings on the American Culture Wars

Recently I heard the rumour that Julian Zelizer, who used to teach history at the University at Albany until he moved to Albany's more prestigious political science programme and from there on to even more prestigious Princeton, and Kevin Kruse, another Princetonian, had published a book entitled Fault Lines: A History of America since 1974 with Norton. Hey, I was just struck by this thought: ain't cultural capital wonderful? I haven't read the book but I did listen to their discussion of it on The Majority Report With Sam Seder. Here are a few of thoughts on the subject of American fault lines or culture wars.

America was formed in the crucible of fault lines, fault lines, for example, between Protestants and Enlightenment philosophes and fault lines between Whites and Blacks. Slavery and race, of course, has been a fault line that has characterised the United States since the beginning and continues to divide America today as the country seems to be returning to the 1930s once again. We ended up fighting a war over slavery and race, a war, which in retrospect seems more like a battle than a war to end all wars. WWII, in this context, is an anomaly, an anomaly that manufactured a kind of consensus that lasted into the 1970s when Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil crisis rent the "consensus" asunder and revived the culture wars that characterised the US even before it was the US. We have to, by the way, in order to construct the post-New Deal and WWII American consensus of Schlesinger, Bell, and Herberg, ignore the dissonant fundamentalists, evangelicals, Birchers, and Southerners lurking beneath that perceived calm of the end of ideology era.

On Watching John Cleese and Michael Palin Debate Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop...

I recently watched a debate between John Cleese and Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, and the Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, and Malcolm Muggeridge on YouTube. The debate, which took place at the height of mania over the controversy about the Python's film Life of Brian, took place on the BBC show Friday Night, Saturday Morning on 9 November 1979.

I came away from the debate reflecting on Malcolm Muggeridge and Christian ethnocentrism. Malcolm Muggeridge's reputation, it seemed to me after watching the debate, greatly exceeds him. I knew Muggeridge from his recurring role as staff doctrinalist on the Bill Buckley Show, Firing Line, and his recurring role as if you need a Christian intellectual call Mug. I really never paid much attention to what he said, however.

I was forced to pay attention to Muggeridge after watching the "debate". Forced to pay attention it became clear to me that the argument Muggeridge's made during the debate, the argument that Christianity is true because it is the zenith of global intellectual culture, is monumentally stupid. I don't know whether Muggeridge's moronicity is the stupidity of omission or the stupidity of commission. Anyone, however, who has studied, global history knows that Indian and Chinese intellectual cultures--which thanks to global economic and cultural exchange likely had an impact on Western thought and which existed well before Christianity arose--were and are easily the "equal" of Mediterranean and later European Christian intellectual culture and were and are arguably even more sophisticated and thoughtful and intellectually stimulating than Christian intellectual culture.

At least the Bishop of Southwark was somewhat humourous. He was, however, not very good at prophecy as Life is Beautiful, a comedy about the Holocaust he said that couldn't be done, shows.

The Books of My Life: The Incorporation of America

Alan Trachtenberg, in his superb interdisciplinary synthesis, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, twenty-fifth anniversary edition, 2007 [1982], argues, in the the concluding chapter of his book, that two key or central symbols, are a microcosm of what need to know, in general, about the broad contours of Gilded Age America’s economy, politics, and culture. These two key symbols that express broader economic, political, and cultural aspects of the of the Gilded Age, according to Trachtenberg, are the company town of Pullman, Illinois near Chicago and Chicago’s 1893 White City.

Pullman was a planned community built by corporate capitalist George Pullman owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company, the company that made cars for America’s railroads. It was, as Trachtenberg notes, a planned community whose function was to provide a steady work, good morals, and peaceful environment for Pullman’s labourers. Pullman was a planned community of distinctive row houses with indoor plumbing, gas, libraries, and sewers. Pullman town was also an environment that was planned in such a way to assure that Pullman’s workers would be obedient toward their corporate benefactor, George Pullman, acquiesce to the knowledgeable guidance and cultural uplift of their corporate benefactor, George Pullman, cultural uplift that included instruction in the civilised arts of thrift, cleanliness, and happiness, thrift, cleanliness, and happiness in the way that George Pullman understood them. The company town of Pullman, in other words, was a paternalistic community meant to uplift “savage” workers and turn them into “civlised” and obedient employees.

>A second key symbol of the Gilded Age Trachtenberg explores is the White City. The White City, as Trachtenberg notes, was, like Pullman, a planned community, this one built, under the watchful eye of architect Daniel Burnham, for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. The Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 500^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, was one of a number of World’s Fairs that took place during the nineteenth century.

Trachtenberg argues that as was the case with Pullman's worker town, there are a number of meanings that one can tease out of the White City that tell us a lot economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically about America's Gilded Age. On one level, Trachtenberg argues, the White City was a map of the past. The White City was built on land that was once marsh and sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. The White City, in other words, was ordered out of the chaos of the wilderness just like, at least in the American imagination, America was in the 19th century.

On another level the White City was, according to Trachtenberg, a map of the present. The White City was a private enterprise created by the state, in this case the state of Illinois, and run by a board of directors whose goal it was to serve the interests of and reward its shareholders, just like the corporations that dominated American economic life in the Gilded Age. The spatial arrangement and spatial divisions of the White City were hierarchical, as was Gilded Age America. It was segmented or fragmented into classes, upper class, middle class, and lower class. The order of the White City in contrast to the disorder outside the White City told those who visited it in visual form that America’s corporate elite had brought corporate capitalist order out of pre-Gilded Age proprietary capitalist chaos. The Midway Plaisance, which stretched form the White City west along what are today 59th and 60th avenues, was, thanks to its carnivalesque atmosphere and its exoticism, marked off as quite different from the White City. The World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which now houses the Chicago Institute of Art on Michigan Avenue at Adams Street in Grant Park north of the White City, and which was the site of a series of meetings on a variety of cultural topics including religion, was like the Plaissance, geographically and culturally or ideologically marked off from the White City core.

On still another level, Trachtenberg argues, the White city was a map of the future. The White City was constructed around iron and steel skeletons covered in staff, a substance that gave the illusion that the White City was built out of marble. The material culture of the White City was symmetrical and harmoniously laid out and it was monumental. Its buildings generally reflected the neoclassical style of the baroque era but the style of the White City’s buildings was not meant to symbolise nostalgia for a golden past. Instead the White City’s monumental architecture symbolised a utopian future for America and for the world. It was a future that, the White City told those who visited, corporate America would dominate. The Columbia pediment at the eastern entrance to the Machinery Hall, for instance, depicted Columbia at its centre, Honor was on Columbia’s left, Wealth was at Columbia’s feet along with inventors and two lions, symbols of brute force, subdued by human genius, by American genius. America, in the form of Columbia, the pediment clearly said to those who gazed upon it, represented the economic and political future of the world. The White City was divided into departments that included agricultural, mining, transportation, invention, art, and cultural departments. In the exhibit halls of the White City one found exhibits brought to the fair by corporations from all over the world, artworks, mechanical wonders, and examples of the homes of the future, including a model electric kitchen of the future. In between the monumental buildings of the White City were monuments, statues, canals, lagoons, plazas, and a wooded preserve. The White City was lit by 10,000 electrical light bulbs driven by two dynamos telling visitors that the future would be bright. All of these, the buildings, the built natural environment, the sculptures, the pediments, and the exhibits, the dynamos, and the cultural lectures, together, symbolised, in its material culture, human material progress, human spiritual progress, human evolution from savagery to civilisation, and the progressive human future to come.

The modern woman had a place in the White City. The Women’s Building, which was designed by a female architect, was guided by a Board of Lady Managers, and included exhibits on mothers as homemakers, cooks, and teachers. There were lectures on women’s history at the Congress. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, lectured on suffrage, Susan B. Anthony lectured on women and politics, and Jane Addams lectured on housework and factory work. These lectures were, however, marginalised since they were given in the World Congress Auxiliary Building rather than in the Women’s Building. The modern woman, the domestic displays in the Women’s Building argued, was a homemaker, a comforter for her harried husband, and a teacher to her children.

The meaning of the White City was not only, Trachtenberg argues, in what it clearly said but also in what it didn’t say. It was also in the White City’s silences, and in the White City’s exclusions, in other words. Blacks were excluded from the White City, save as menial labourers, and were denied permission by those who ran the White City to exhibit at the Exposition. The famous ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglas did speak at the Exposition but to a largely Black audience. America’s contemporary First Peoples were excluded but the “savage” Indians of America’s past and their “primitive” modes of life, their “primitive” customs”, and their “primitive” arts, representing lower levels of human evolution, were displayed in ethnology exhibits at the Exposition. The old world “customs” and “folklore” of Africans, Asians, and Muslims were displayed along the marginalised and exoticised Midway Plaisance. All of these "savages" were, in other words, the “others” of incorporated corporate America, “others” who would presumably be uplifted by the progress the White City promised or simply be marginalised by progress.

In its material culture the White City said, in its interpretations of the past, that chaos had been converted into order by an alliance of America’s economic and political elite. It said, in its representation of the present that incorporation or corporatisation in America had brought hierarchical order to mass chaos bringing wealth and culture to America in its wake. It told the world that America’s corporate elite had led the world to the cusp of a mechanical utopia. It told the world that in the future the bounty of consumer goods, of wealth, of harmonious order, of marvelous inventions, and of uplift could be everybody’s if they simply copied or replicated America’s economic, political, and cultural models. The monumental structure and technological and industrial exhibits of the White City said that America was ready and willing to take its place among the great powers of the world thanks to its corporate society. Soon, of course, the US would fight a war with Spain, a war from which America finally emerged, as the White City seemed to predict, with colonies in the Philippines and Cuba.

There were in the Gilded Age and there still are, as Trachtenberg notes, alternative visions of the future than that of the corporate elite who manufactured the White City. While the White City offered a monumental neoclassical and monumental future dominated by economic and political elite, architect Louis Sullivan advocated a national architectural style that was organic and represented, at least to Sullivan, democratic rather than corporate ideals. Sullivan’s skyscrapers, however, seemed to reflect the aspirations of the corporate elite they housed rather than any aspirations of a democratic society. Labour, which was not really present at the White City—those who laboured to build the White City were hidden and guarded during construction while the constructive power of labour was elided by the power of machines—also offered an alternative to the corporate culture of the White City. In 1894 unionised workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike against the company after their wages were cut by 30% to 40% while their rents in the company owned and run town where workers lived in were not cut. Eventually US Army troops and US marshals broke that strike. Farmers were not really present in the White City either. The Agriculture Building housed displays of weather stations and model farms, models of a corporate farming future, in other words. Farmers too offered an alternative to White City corporatism. Populism and its labour and farmer alliance together offered the model of another future, one that was associative rather than corporate, one that was grounded in the fellowship of farmers, workers, immigrants, and women, rather than corporate and hierarchical control. And while Sullivan’s and the Populist’s models were marginalised by corporate America they pop up now and again. They popped up, for instance, as Trachtenberg notes, in the Great Depression, in the 1930s, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There you have it, the broad contours of the Gilded Age in a nutshell…corporate…mass capitalist…mechanised…hierarchical, economically, politically, culturally…oligarchic…ordered...spectacular in its consumption…citizens as passive spectators…paternalistic...women in the home…labour in the shadows…Blacks, largely excluded…corporate-politician-industrial-science alliance…racist...imperialist...utopian...America, Inc.

The Incorporation of America is one of the best social science books I have ever read. Trachtenberg is attentive to the economics and politics of the Gilded Age and how incorporation, segmentation, or modernity, call it what you will, was woven into the new cultural forms of the Gilded Age. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how modern America came into being. I was a bit baffled by one thing, however, namely, Trachtenberg’s lack of acknowledgement of Max Weber’s theory of modernity, a perspective that places modern mass supposedly rational and efficient bureaucracies at the heart of the modern world. Weber’s approach to modernity is very similar to Trachtenberg’s exploration and analysis of the incorporation or corporatisation of America during the Gilded Age. The Incorporation of America has only a single reference to Weber’s, his exploration of the rise of the professional politician, something Trachtenberg sees as arising during the Gilded Age. Go figure?

The Books of My Life: Fear Itself

In Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Liveright, 2013) Ira Katznelson argues that fear, specifically four fears, were at the heart of the rise of the social liberal state in the United States. The first fear that fed into the rise of the social liberal state in the US, Katznelson argues, was the fear associated with the ravages of the Great Depression. This fear led many in America to fear that the free market laissez-faire ideologies and practises that had dominated America in the years before the Great Depression weren't up to the task of fixing American economic decline.

The second fear that led to the birth of the American social liberal state, argues Katznelson, was the fear of dictatorships of the right--Italy, Germany, and Japan--and of the dictatorships of the left, the Soviet Union of the 1930s. These dictatorships, Katznelson argues, seemed to many Americans to be the wave of the future thanks to their seeming ability to act quickly to solve the problems that faced them as a result of the Great Depression. The USSR, after all, seemed to have escaped the problems associated with the Great Depression entirely and its industrial growth far surpassed that of the “capitalist” West in the 1930s. The fascism, Nazism, and militarism of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and the military’s Japan, seemed to have pulled those countries out of the Great Depression and unemployment levels in each had plummeted, thanks primarily to military spending and wars or rumours of wars.

The third fear that played an important role in the birth of the American social liberal state, Katznelson argues, was the fear of the other. Many Americans, Katznelson argues, came to fear the dictators of both left and right and came to fear the threat such dictatorships supposedly posed to American “democracy”.

The final fear that played a leading role in giving birth to the American social liberal state, Katznelson argues, was the fear unleashed by America’s dropping of nuclear bombs on the largely civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This fear was exacerbated, Katznelson notes, when the Soviets successfully developed and tested their own atomic bomb in 1949 and their own hydrogen bomb in 1952, the same year the US successfully tested their first H-bomb.

These fears—the fear of economic decline, the fear of dictatorships, and the fear of the atomic bomb--led, Katznelson argues, respectively to the emergence of the social liberal voluntary planning state, the World War II central planning state, and the procedural state and centrally planned security and warfare state during the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War.

It was Dixiecrats or Southern Democrats. Katznelson argues, who played the central role in birthing the New Deal, the WWII centrally planned, and the Cold War national security and warfare states. Southern Democrat or Dixiecrat fear of the ravages of the Great Depression, led Southern populists to provide critical support for the “radical” legislation that created the New Deal state. The fear that the New Deal and the World War II central planning state would lead to the undermining of the Southern Jim Crow or White supremacist state in the South, led Dixiecrats to pull back their support for selective parts of the New Deal and World War II planning state, a pulling back that led to the rise of the fiscal procedural American state and the centrally planned national security and warfare state, a centrally planned national security and warfare state that Dixiecrats felt would help the South protect its Jim Crow “customs” and “traditions” and which is still with us today.

In the wake of World War II, argues Katznelson federal government central planning was replaced by fiscal planning in the US. The American fiscal planning state was and is, claims Katznelson, characterised by a weak public sphere and a strong private sphere. After WWII Democrats, North and South, may have occasionally cooperated to pass federal programmes, notes Katznelson, such as building hospitals and public housing for the poor, but these old style New Deal programmes were the exceptions rather than the rule. America instead was now a nation in which competition between varying interest groups dominated the American political landscape. Interest groups, like the unions and business organisations, organised, mobilsed, mobilised constituents, lobbied, propagandised, funded political candidates, influenced and staffed regulatory agencies, and created webs of influence, all in an effort to promote their own rather than any national interests. American political culture, in other words, was, not surprisingly in a society in which devotion to capitalism was once again akin to a devotion to a religion, organised like a market of competing civic, trade, and professional interests. This American market of interest groups was, however, and not surprisingly, dominated by business interest groups thanks, in part, to the successful post-World War II weakening of American labour as a countervailing force to business, and thanks to the fact that business and corporate interests in American interest group politics had and have more economic and political resources than anyone else. In 1950, for instance, 825 of America’s political lobbying groups were business groups. All of this led, in the post-WWII era, to a narrowing of American political culture to those supporting business and corporate interests and ideology and those trying to maintain the political traditions of the New Deal. It also led, somewhat ironically, the the decline of the Jim Crow state in the South because of its similarities to the dictatorships the US had fought in World War II and the Cold War.

According to Katznelson the centrally planned security and warfare state of the late 1940s, 1950s, and beyond was dominated by perpetual fears and never ending emergencies. It has led to an America in which limitations on dissent were put in place. It has led to an America in which some Americans were obsessed with treason. It has led to an America in which some Americans distrusted what other Americans were doing in private. It has led to an America in which many regarded the opposition of some to American militarism as a form of “un-Americanism”. It has led to an America in which conformity rather than individual expression was highly prized. It has led to an America dominated by a government-military-industrial-scientific-technological-paranoia complex. It has led to an America that some have argued undermined American “democracy”.
 
I highly recommend Katznelson’s important synthesis Fear Itself for anyone interested in the New Deal and post-New Deal periods of American history, in the state and in the American state in particular, in social liberalism, and in the rise of the industrial-military complex in the United States. Katznelson’s book rightly puts Congress, the state, and race at the heart of the New Deal and post-New Deal state that emerged in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, a state that is still very much with us today, particularly in its national security and warfare form even though neoliberals have, since the 1970s, been chipping away at the procedural part of the modern American state ever since and may finally be, at least for the moment, diminishing it severely if not dismantling it thanks to the Trump presidency. Finally, I also recommend Katznelson's book to anyone trying to comprehend what is going on in the world as I type. After all, what is happening in Poland, in Hungary, in Russia, in Austria, in the UK, in the Philippines, in Brasil, and in the US, seems to have quite a bit of resonance with what was going on politically, economically, and culturally in the 1930s in the US, in Italy, and in Germany.