What Must be Done: Sustaining New Political Science After America’s Decades of Decline

Abstract

This analysis provisionally outlines a critical analysis of the American presidential elections of 1912 and 2016. While the 1912 contest is not identical to 2016, Wilson’s victory introduced a Progressive politics into government after pitting the Democratic Party against strong candidates from the Progressive, Republican, and Socialist Parties. Taking ideas from his challengers, Wilson during WWI developed a more centralized administrative state grounded on professional expertise and progressive activism. By the 1930s, this state anchored a bi-partisan government more supportive of professional expert elites running the two major parties, which Hillary Clinton seemed to typify in 2016, and less interested in helping ordinary working Americans. Donald Trump in 2016 attacked this habitus of progressivism, using it against Clinton to delegitimize the administrative. By questioning the Democratic and GOP establishments, Trump won 2016 as “an outsider,” who defends forgotten silent Americans. In keeping with the radical critique made by the Caucus for a New Political Science since 1967, this analysis re-examines how progressive experts fostered these self-defeating practices for “popular government,” which have enhanced elite control over “the people” rather than enabling open democratic rule by “the people” in the twenty-first century.

Notes

¹ John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York, NY: Signet, 1968), pp. 56–88.

² H. Mark Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” PS 1:1 (Winter 1968), pp. 38–40.

³ Ibid.

⁴ For more analysis, see Clyde Barrow, “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science, New Political Science 30:2 (2008), pp. 215–244.

⁵ For example, the four most recent issues of New Political Science, 39:1 and 39:2 (2017), as well as 38:3 and 38:4 (2016) contain a rich variety of wide-ranging critical analyses of critical theory, alt-right culture, labor politics, ethnic and racial exploitation, and many other issues that the APSA still largely neglects or completely ignores in its publications.

⁶ See Matt Taibbi, Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Campaign (New York, NY: Spiegel and Grau, 2017), pp. 3–14.

⁷ For more insight, see Deckle Edge, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York, NY: Thomas Crown, 2017); and, Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution (New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Barr, 2017). For more detail on the voting figures, see The Green Papers: 2016 Presidential Primaries, Caucuses, and Conventions, available on-line at: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16d/.

⁸ For additional discussion, see Hilary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017). This historic breakthrough by Clinton did not improve her odds in the contest with Trump. In fact, many believed Trump’s frequently insulting and sexist comments would end his campaign as news outlets tracked them down in older news stories. One sensationalized spate of remarks were made in vulgar terms to Billy Bush, the one-time host of “Access Hollywood,” about how he attempted to seduce a woman in 2005, and then boasted while on a bus about Arianne Zucker, the TV soap opera star, that because he was “a star,” women “let you do anything … grab them by the pussy.You can do anything.” See “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” The New York Times (October 8, 2016), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html. After a contrite apology, and days of debate about Trump’s crude narcissism, the issue faded, particularly after FBI Director James Comey’s October 28, 2016 announcement that he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s email habits based on new evidence eleven days before the election.

⁹ See Timothy W. Luke, “Seven Days in January: The Trump Administration’s New Environmental Nationalism,” Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 178 (Spring 2017), pp. 197–201.

¹⁰ See Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and Geoffery Skelley (eds), Trumped: The 2016 Election That Broke All the Rules (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). For complete tallies on the GOP and Democratic primaries as well as the 2016 general elections, see The Green Papers https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/ and https://www.thegreenpapers.com/G16/.

¹¹ See Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York, NY: Viking, 2017), pp. xxiv–xxv. For the electoral outcomes of the 1964 general elections, see https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1964.

¹² Neil Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2008); and, Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹³ Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for “deconstruction of the administrative state,”” Washington Post (February 23, 2017), available online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html?utm_term=.0000769af308. Also see Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2017), pp. 179–197.

¹⁴ John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Powers (New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports, 2016), p. 17.

¹⁵ Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), pp. 284–320.

¹⁶ R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

¹⁷ Liping Zhu, The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot, 1880 Election, and Rise of the West (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013); and, John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

¹⁸ See Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Richard T. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992); and, Robert Banister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).

¹⁹ The growing toleration of the once persecuted population of Latter Day Saints in Mormon Deseret as well as the violent elimination and/or concentration of Native American peoples on federal reservations had taken over twenty hard-fought years as Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah joined the Union from 1876 to 1896. By 1900, the lower forty-five states lacked only the three vast territories of largely Native American Bantustans in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. These territories’ indigenous populations barely survived calculated campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Union since the Jacksonian era, and their open spaces buffered the other Western states from Mexico’s growing political unrest during the late Porfiriato. Resting contiguously between California and Texas, Oklahoma (1907), New Mexico (1912), and, finally, Arizona (1912) were granted admission to the Union under presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Their grants of statehood fulfilled “the Manifest Destiny” of Anglo-Saxon colonization for the North American continent. Imperialist emotions and energies once spent on the country’s Western plains, in the Deep South or in the Rockies, were set free to range overseas to Hawaii and Panama as well as Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

²⁰ See Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era ((Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); and, Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1976).

²¹ Christopher Lasch, True and Only Heaven (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 35–45.

²² Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2017); and, Paul Morenci, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

²³ See Lewis L. Gould, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs— The Election that Changed the Country (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005) pp. 1–2, 45–75; and, James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs—The Election that Changed the Country (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005), pp. 1–8.

²⁴ Gould, pp. 151–196; and, Chace, pp. 241–260.

²⁵ See Chace, pp.189–240.

²⁶ Chace, pp. 241–276.

²⁷ See Eric Rauchway, “How “America First” Got its Nationalistic Edge,” The Atlantic (May 6, 2016), available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/william-randolph-hearst-gave-america-first-its-nationalist-edge/481497/. The 1900s, like the 2000s, were times of political turmoil and violence abroad. Violent revolutions broke out in Russia, Mexico, Persia, and China, along with great unrest in Eastern and Southern Europe. These geopolitical conditions cannot be divorced from how Progressives began to rethink America’s trade policies and foreign diplomacy, which had whipsawed between isolationism and imperialism since President McKinley. Ironically, in seeking to dodge the foreign entanglements George Washington warned the republic to avoid, Wilson became an intense proponent of liberal international intervention when faced with Germany’s intrigues against Washington in Mexico as well as Berlin’s expansion of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. “America First” for Wilson implied good-willed American neutrality on the world stage, while Trump’s spin emphasizes economic nationalism, cultural bias, and nativist politics.

²⁸ For the root logic of Progressive internationalism, see Woodrow Wilson, “Text of the President’s Address” The New York Times (April 2, 1917), p. 1.

²⁹ On this development, see G. J. Meyer, The World Remade: America in World War I (New York, NY: Bantam, 2017), pp. 233–258. In this respect, Wilson appears to have been a Machiavellian operator through both terms. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge observed about Wilson’s cynical jump from an old-style Southern conservatism to eager progressivism, Wilson would “sacrifice any opinion at any moment for his own benefit and go back on it the next moment if he though returning to it would be profitable,” (Meyer, p.493). The Progressive Party splintered after 1912, and Theodore Roosevelt died early in 1919 at age sixty. Debs tried to win a House seat (Allan T. Benson stood for the presidency) in Indiana during 1916, but this bid failed. Most of the Socialist Party fragmented after his imprisonment for speaking out against the wartime draft (he ran for president in 1920 from prison but fell short of his 1912 vote). The Bolshevik Revolution soon led most Americans to view all Socialists with great suspicion, and the anti-anarchist, anti-communist, and anti-socialist Palmer Raids orchestrated under Wilson’s second administration only further marginalized this once-growing political party.

³⁰ See Chace, pp. 277–284.

³¹ Judis, The Populist Explosion, p. 17. Also see Peter Bachrach, Democratic Elitism (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1967); and, G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1970).

³² Timothy W. Luke, “Finding New Mainstreams: Perestroika, Phronesis, and Political Science in the United States,” in Sanford Schram (ed.), Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 252–268.

³³ Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 109–165. In being encouraged to speak, engage in discourse, deliberate over wants and needs, the ruling elites and voting publics produce “truths” that are constraining and liberating at the same time. Knowledge thus expresses power that invites such truth, and power is productive with its discipline, discourse, and direction populations and individuals. For all their flaws, such “truths” were worked into trusted constructs in the art of governing, as progressivism refined its designs and uses. Despite many flaws, this progressive power/knowledge linkage did produce specific forms of truth drawn from law and social science for democratic government. Using widely acknowledged types of “facts”.

³⁴ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage, 1994), pp. 375–406.

³⁵ See Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and, Steven Skowronek, Stephen M. Enger, and Bruce Ackerman (eds), The Progressive’s Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

³⁶ Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

³⁷ David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

³⁸ Timothy Lenoir, “The Disciplines of Nature and the Nature of Disciplines,” in E. Messer-Davidow, D.R. Shumway, and D.J. Sylvan (eds), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 72.

³⁹ Timothy W. Luke, “Stultifying Politics Today: The “Natural Science” Model in American Political Science -- How is it Natural, Science, and a Model,” New Political Science 35:3 (September, 2013), pp. 339–35; Clyde Barrow, pp. 215–244; and, Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2003), pp. 1–22.

⁴⁰ See Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weller, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009) for more discussion.

⁴¹ Joseph Dana Miller, “The Difficulties of Democracy,” International Journal of Ethics 25: 2 (1915), pp. 213–225.

⁴² Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Popular Government: Four Essays (London, England: John Murray, 1886), p. 15.

⁴³ Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France (New York, NY: Picador, 1997). With regard to the inherent instability of majorities in democratic voting systems, see Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2012). The paradoxologies of sovereignty, whether royal or popular, as “the public” casts its votes also is assayed in Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

⁴⁴ Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1984), p. 39. These dilemmas also preoccupy other thinkers, like C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1956); E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960) and Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

⁴⁵ See Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1909).

⁴⁶ See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

⁴⁷ Wilson, “Text of the President’s Address,” The New York Times (April 2, 1917), p. 1.

⁴⁸ See Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), pp. 13–14.

⁴⁹ See G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1967); Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1971); and, James K. Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (New York, NY: Free Press, 2009).

⁵⁰ On this point, consider George Will, “The Fed’s Applied Progressivism,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (September 29, 2013), available online at: https://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/george-will/george-will-the-fed-s-applied-progressivism/article_394511fe-0487–5dc5-ba7e-32701d466fc1.html.

⁵¹ Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

⁵² See Timothy W. Luke, “Caught Between Confused Critics and Careerist Co- Conspirators: Perestroika in American Political Science,” in Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.) Perestroika: Methodological Pluralism, Governance and Diversity in American Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005) pp. 468–488; as well as Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and, Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, England: Verso, 2013).

⁵³ Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 471.

⁵⁴ Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

⁵⁵ Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 141.

⁵⁶ Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”.

⁵⁷ Thomas F. Tierney, The Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of Technical Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 110–112.

⁵⁸ Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Vol. I (New York, NY: Vintage, 1980), p. 146.

⁵⁹ Lewis Saunders, “How the World Reacted to Merkel’s Pivot to Europe,” Deutsche Welle (May 29, 2017), available online at: https://p.dw.com/p/2djkp.

⁶⁰ Chace, pp. 277–283.

⁶¹ For additional discussion, see Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, 2nd Edition (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1979).

⁶² Michel Foucault, Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1982 (New York, NY: Picador, 2011), p. 38.

⁶³ Ibid., 3.

⁶⁴ See John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York, NY: Simon and Brown, 2012); Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1914); and, Charles Merriam, What is Democracy? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1941).

⁶⁵ Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth: A History of the Present, Second Edition (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 143.

⁶⁶ Timothy W. Luke, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. ix.

⁶⁷ Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertism: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017); and, Timothy W. Luke, “Blow Out, Blow Back, Blow Up, and Blow Off: The Plutonomic Politics of Economic Crisis Since 2001,” Fast Capitalism, 8.2 (August, 2011), available online at: (https://www.fastcapitalism.com).

⁶⁸ Oren, Our Enemies and US, pp. 1–22.

⁶⁹ Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory, Expanded Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 124–172.

⁷⁰ Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p. 39.

⁷¹ Ibid. At this paradoxical conjuncture, Trump ramps up the precarity for many individuals and groups, as Judith Butler argues, increasing the “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.” Yet, the onslaught of development without emancipation underscores Butler’s how “lives by definition are precarious … their persistence is in no sense guaranteed.” See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (London, England: Verso, 2009), p. 25.

⁷² Maine, 1885, p. 37.

⁷³ Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society (London, England: Sage, 1992), p. 70.

⁷⁴ C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 171; and, Maine, p. 37.

⁷⁵ Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 200–201.

⁷⁶ Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 119.

⁷⁷ Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage, 1994, p. 353.

⁷⁸ Irving Louis Horowitz, “Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: From Consensus to Crack-Up,” Modern Age: A Conservative Review 47:2 (2005), pp. 201–209.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 202.

⁸⁰ For more discussion, see Ernesto Laclau, Populist Reason (London, England: Verso, 2005). These assessments draw from Timothy W. Luke, “The Dissipation of Democracy in 2016: On the Emptiness of Elitism and the Poverty of Realism in the Trump Zone,” Fast Capitalism 13:1 (August, 2016), available online at: <https://www.fastcapitalism.com>.

⁸¹ See Francisco Panizza, (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London, England: Verso, 2005), pp. 1–31.

⁸² See Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” PS, p. 39.

⁸³ Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 95.

⁸⁴ Panizza, Populism, pp. 50–117; and, Green, pp. 199–224.