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.