Institutional Compromise: Welfare-Warfare State

New Deal Liberalism + Military Industrial Complex (“Guns and Butter”)

Creating a Government based on “Civilian-Militarism” (from the dollar-a-year men to the revolving door between defense-based industrialism and government service). (Take Secretaries of Defense as an example: Charles Wilson (1953-1957), former President of GM, Neil McElroy (1957-1959), former President of Proctor and Gamble, Robert McNamara (1961-1967), former President of Ford Motor Company, Caspar Weinberger (1981-1987), former VP of Bechtel Corporation). By 1957 200 Generals and Admirals and 1300 colonels or naval officers of similar rank worked for civilian agencies.

Defense spending linked to moderate expansions of welfare-state at home based upon the imperatives of fighting the Cold War abroad. “Military Keynesianism” in which major producers of consumer durables were also major weapons contractors: “what enhanced the home was not unrelated to what protected the homeland.

Examples: GI Bill, NSC ’68 (see excerpts on web-page), Federal Highway Act of 1956, Truman’s “Fair Deal,” Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” Johnson’s “Grea

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Preserving Nuclear Peace through Mutually Assured Destruction and Containment. Blocking “Soviet expansionism” short of war. Increasing emphasis upon covert operations, brushfire and proxy wars fought out in global peripheries and rim lands of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Some topics in this essay:
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