The Myth of US Government Benevolence

0:00I'm going to preface this by saying that it's always good to speak after Walter Block, because then it makes anyone look moderate. It's always good. When I first looked at this topic, I thought, well, I'm not sure how much is in here. Then I looked at it further and I decided there was far too much in it. You couldn't really deal with all the myths of U.S. government benevolence, so I'll do an overview. One of the nice things about being a historian is that there's a sort of license to look into anything that might shed light on a historical problem, to prove a fact, refute a proposed fact, sustain an interpretation, or to build a causal chain. An example is the famous book by Garrett Mattingly on the Spanish Armada, which came out I think in the late 1950s.

0:47Mattingly had to look at metallurgy and ballistics. He wanted to find out if the canon were available in 1588 were any good, if the Spaniards or the English had, and he found out they weren't that good. Well, this, of course, has an effect on naval tactics, whether they worked very well or what tactics could be used, and, of course, he builds this into his discussion of the Spanish Armada. So historians are always bringing in theory information from other fields, the natural sciences or the social sciences such as they are. So let's say a historian finds out there's an economic boom followed by an economic collapse. He'll want to bring in from the outside economic theory.

1:35Now if you're lucky, he'll bring in the right economic theory and try to explain what Rothbard calls the cluster of errors. Another area historians get into, of course, in the course of trying to bring some order to what has happened in the past, is the area of Elfin-Shang and worldviews, ideologies, generally speaking, history, and so on. to what has happened in the past is the area of Elf and Schengen worldviews, ideologies, generally speaking, history of ideas, and of course, myth. Now, there used to be a popular perception that myth is an untrue story. Myth is sort of a lie. Well, this isn't exactly right. I mean, the ancient Greeks didn't believe that there was actually a guy named Perseus who went around cutting heads off gorgons.

2:26But there was some point to the story. It was supposed to illustrate some moral truth. So myth is not necessarily an evil, at least maybe in the private sector. In any event, you have to be aware of worldviews, underlying ideas in civilizations and particular societies. And it may explain sometimes why people did what they did. They make assumptions that we think are wrong or doubtful or we don't share. Oswald Spengler, who's a very interesting historian, had some really, I think, some interesting insights, at least, which are at least worth thinking about. He argued, for instance, that the Egyptian worldview was such that they didn't need perspective drawing.

3:11He thinks they could have technically drawn lines converging and created the idea of perspective, but they didn't need, they didn't wanna do that. And similarly, he argues that the ancient Greeks not having, in his view, a real notion of nothingness, didn't invent zero, which kind of handicapped how far they would get in math. Whereas the Hindus, who did have a notion of nothingness, or the void, could invent zero, which then the Arabs helpfully brought to Europe. And we could do a lot more math with this idea of zero. This may be true or untrue, but it's an interesting hypothesis suggesting how worldview might affect what people do. Now there's been a controversy involving William Elfin Williams, a revisionist historian, who argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published 1959, reprinted in 1962, that by the time the Cold War was available to have, most American policy makers had turned the idea of an open door for American investments abroad and export markets into an ideology.

4:25It had become such a working assumption they hardly, they don't go around mentioning it every day at lunch. Now they do have to bring a guy in who doesn't think in these terms, so there are documents in which someone like Stemson goes to Truman and explains to Truman the importance of the open door. Okay, so other historians instead of Williams is just making this up, they don't mention the open door because that's not really anything they're that concerned about. They're really defending peace and freedom and there's a lot of other things on their minds. Well, sure, there's some other things on their minds, but nonetheless, why would someone like James Bacevich write a book just a year and a half ago, which centers on the ideological theme of openness?

5:12By the time Bacevich surveys the administrations of Bush the first and Bill Clinton, not only does American policy demand an open door for exports and investment, it demands everybody be open generally. They must be transparent, you know, they must take a fooky on the turn and adopt transparency and trust, the cowboy way, whatever it is, straightforward speaking, they've got to all adopt us or we can't trust them and then world history can't go on the scheduled path. So it seems to me that Williams had a point that even a simple or a large policy construct like the open door can take on mythic and ideological dimensions.

5:58And this brings us to myth then as a tool of power. And this brings us to the sociology of the intellectuals. This is an interest of Murray Rothbard's, particularly begins to write about this in the mid-60s. The Anatomy of the State, 1965, and then the neglected essay, The Great Society, a libertarian critique, in 1967, he discusses the role of the intellectuals, and he had been corresponding with a fellow named Dehushar, George Dehushar, about this, and Dehushar famously did a very large collection of essays, I think it's just called The Intellectuals, but we have a copy here, and wanted to understand the role. So Rothbard's interested in what the intellectuals and what the intellectuals do for the state, and he reasons like this, that, almost quoting him, that on the free market the income of the intellectuals is somewhat precarious, and they don't necessarily all want to go around with a tin cup, teaching philosophy on the street corner like some ancient Greek.

7:01So they tend to find out they can ally themselves with power and with the state and have a steady income, a predictable income, a large income, provided they do what the state wants them to do, to rationalize and justify what the state has been doing or will do next week, and so on, create mythic structures and narratives that support everything that the state has been doing. And you see this also with any new nationalist movement, anytime there's a nationalist movement developing, somebody has to invent a new history, maybe the Czechs in the mid-19th century, and you prove that the Czechs have always been wonderful and always been picked on, and no one else was very nice and any nationalist movement will do this. And of course in the United States in the 20th century, there's a little red thread that runs through a lot of the creation of myth.

7:55And this is called the Rockefeller Foundation. And really I didn't think much about this so I started looking into the background of the various social sciences. And everywhere you look, there's Carnegie, Rockefeller, a couple other foundations, consciously attempting from the 1920s forward to direct the course of social science, the structure of departments, the nature of the research, the topics, to direct those to various ends, which they, in some sense as allies of the state, will find useful. And they're particularly interested in empirical research, because empirical research You get numbers and you say, look, we've spotted a social problem, these numbers, something's wrong and there's a social problem and the state must step in and intervene in some way that accidentally helps our friends or expands the power of the state.

8:48The Rothbard had a famous exchange with, I think, George Stigler, a famous critique, I think, 1961, the Southern Economic Journal, which Rothbard denounced across the board the whole notion of statistics and statistics collecting for these purposes. Okay, now, this also leads me to the observation that this means that the state, The state, operationally, is somewhat larger than the state apparatus. It's larger than the bureaucrats and personnel actually paid formally by the state. It begins to include everyone that's subsidized, everyone that's allied to the state, everybody that's got a handout waiting for the state to adopt their corporatist project and so forth.

9:35begin to approach something like the notion that Louis Althusser head of the ideological state apparatus. And a couple of my colleagues think this is an intriguing concept that we can hijack and use even though we're not going to become structural Marxists, but the notion is intriguing. So what are some of the myths? Well, we'll come back to benevolence. It's part of the title. Well, there is benevolence. There's a lot of private charity in this country, But what's interesting is that there's a number of places on the web where you can look at indexes of private charity and I have to say the correlation interesting again we know that correlation is not necessary causation otherwise would have more respect for sociology than we do but nonetheless it's interesting that by some indexes the highest rate of private charity is in Mississippi and you go through a whole set of southern states and western states so Utah, Alabama they're all in the first Where is the lowest rate of private charity?

10:36It seems to be in the upper Midwest and Massachusetts. Places like that where they seem to take the attitude that is the function of the state to solve these problems and do charitable giving. And so it's a different worldview apparently. I just find that interesting. Again, maybe this doesn't necessarily prove anything. It raises a question. So we can say, well, yeah, the American people have a lot of merits and good qualities, and generosity is one of them. But lately, when this sort of thing is said of the American people, it's usually said by spokesmen for various state policies, kind of patting us on the back on the way to a different conclusion, which is that the benevolence in the end can be attributed to the government.

11:22and I think that is a problem. Now, in drawing up a list of these sort of justifying myths, I found there were quite a few, some are subsidiary to the other, some are small myths, some are huge ones, so I'll try to just cover some of the ground in a sort of survey-like fashion. Well, an original myth is the kind of millennial republicanism that comes out of New England during the American Revolution, so that there's a kind of synthesis of millennial Protestant themes as understood in New England with Republican politics. This could just, in practice, amount to saying, well, we should just have a freer society and develop the economy and be a good example.

12:14It doesn't necessarily mean at that point that it has to be imposed on anybody by force for those who hasn't understood these achievements. But it's sort of lying there as this millennialist theme that later on sort of metastasizes into a kind of U.S. mission of world salvation. And this seems to be a problem in eschatology. And Murray Rothbard again got interested in this, I think by the mid-1970s, and certainly produced an interesting essay on Karl Marx as an eschatologist. And it seems to be the key point to a lot of difficult books by Eric Figglin. The key point seems to be that it might be a mistake to take eschatological doctrines about final things and end things and bring those into secular politics. This could be an error.

13:09It might be misleading to do this. But this is an underlying theme that runs through a number of critical periods of American history and has come back to plague us now. Now there's the myth of the Founding Fathers. Well, why don't we just say there's 70 or so guys meeting in Philadelphia and draw up a document which worked if it worked for a few decades. In my view, it didn't work in any reasonable sense past 1860. Some would say it didn't work as soon as the first Congress met and began passing laws that were quite different than what had been sold in the ratifying conventions. But it wasn't so bad. I mean, I'm not here to pick on the Constitution. But nonetheless, the myth of the founding fathers as these sort of superhuman geniuses of the first order seems to have been created by the founders themselves.

14:04They were not above self-promotion, and there's an interesting essay by a historian named Jesse Lienisch, who's rather fonder of the anti-Federalists, that makes this point I think rather effectively. Well, the next step in this business was that the Constitution itself became the center of a kind of cult, with the Supreme Court as a berobed priesthood, going and reading the entrails and the chicken flight patterns, and the Supreme Court finding out what it really means because apparently it's not obvious on the face of it, it's all very difficult. Even when it says Congress will make no law, this is very complicated and you have to find out what it actually means, which, you know, that kind of thing. And writers as different as William F. Williams and Hannah Arendt have pointed out that the Constitution has kind of functioned as a kind of big secular myth, sort of a substitute for an established church.

15:01But unfortunately, it's not a preservative myth. Having this myth of the Constitution doesn't sort of keep the Constitution frozen in amber with only one set of interpretations because it's been transmogrified into a living Constitution. So the myth isn't even very useful in preserving the thing. It just becomes a big fallback explanation or excuse. It's sort of like some of the writers in the 1940s didn't want to deal with the concept of sovereignty, so they said, well, maybe the Constitution is sovereign. Well, I don't find that very helpful, just another odd claim. And Murray Rothbard spotted this in his essay on the anatomy of the state. He cited the book by Charles Black, and Charles Black was, of course, a modern liberal who thought everything was going on was fine and was good.

15:51Charles Black in his book on the Supreme Court gave away the game when he said the role of the Supreme Court is simply to take whatever the President and Congress have been doing lately and then sanction it and find it in the Constitution. So the role is simply to justify it. Now this leads me on to another myth, of course it's part of the Constitutional myth, it's the rule of law. From a hearing a lot lately about the rule of law, this has become a kind of neoconservative trope, figure of speech. We have the rule of law. This qualifies us to go around the world imposing it on those who are unlucky enough to not have it yet.

16:36Now if you look at the book by Paul Craig Roberts, I think it's Robert Stratton, we don't seem to have the rule of law. It's been eroded massively for decades, all through this century. The erosion is actually more rapid, but less advertised under republican administrations, which is interesting. So that book seems to belie this notion. What we've got is the Benthamite notion of instrumental law. The law should be streamlined so that people in power can accomplish whatever they have to accomplish. This is basically what we have. So the rule of law is another huge myth that needs a little reconsideration. Now this leads me on to the civic religion. Now we didn't, now again we had something like this coming out of New England and some other of the enthusiasts in the American Revolution, but it didn't get very far.

17:28I mean the nearest guy we had to Rousseau was probably Benjamin Rush. and you just couldn't put across the idea of a kind of totalitarian republican educational system at that time. This really had to wait for Lincoln and the consolidation of federal power and the closing off of certain options that people had thought were open. And then we begin to have a larger array of national holidays, and during the Cold War the holidays kind of peaked as part of the Cold War enthusiasm. The holidays were actually celebrated, but now I don't know how many people take these holidays very seriously. What's the 4th of July? Well, it's the government's birthday, it's a day off of work, it's firecrackers and hot dogs and barbecue, I don't know, sports.

18:19This doesn't seem to have the meaning that it had as part of the civic ritual and civic religion. When I say civic religion, of course, I'm referring to a notion in republican theory as expressed by Rousseau and some of the French revolutionists and occasionally some Americans that we have to consciously go around inculcating these values that involve political participation as the highest good and defining freedom as participation. This is already covered by Benjamin Constant in the 19th century pointing out that the liberty of the ancients was impossible in the modern world and I find a very good discussion of this in Ralph Reco's dissertation and some articles he wrote dealing with Constant's Evaluation of These Claims by the Republic Enthusiast During the French Revolution.

19:16In the event of participation made us free, why aren't people voting? I mean, there's an interesting prediction by Richard T. Ely, the famous progressive economist. He said that government was weak and contemptible, but when government was strong and active, better people would join the government service. We get better quality bureaucrats. And then people would be enthused and they'd go out and vote. Well, I think using empirical methods that he favored, we probably questioned whether this has worked that way, whether people are more enthused about participating, whether participation seems to them to be the key to their sense of freedom. Okay, now that got me, I have to come back to one of the myth, of course, of Lincoln and saving the Union and then dying martyred and it's all got a lot of religious overlay and this is huge.

20:08So I'll just mention that it's so huge that it takes, you have to have, when you do a book about it, as Tom did, you have to call it the real Lincoln because it's very hard to find him. You know, where is the real Lincoln? Well, he's not the guy who's become the center of the American civic cult. He's a little different than that. Okay, now World War I, you don't get a lot of myth out of that. Too many people were disillusioned, thought that hadn't worked out very well. The only work of usable myth that may have come out of World War I, at least in some circles, is the idea that, well, it's horrible, shame that the Senate didn't ratify the Treaty of Versailles and this led on to all sorts of horrible consequences and we didn't join the League of Nations and so this is sort of a negative myth of what happens when you don't do the right thing and the government isn't able to do as many benevolent things. That leads me onto two more counter myths about the

21:00in the 1920s and 30s, and by a counter myth, I mean a myth that again illustrates the absence of U.S. government benevolence and the terrible things that happen if the government isn't doing these interventions at home or abroad. So the first of these negative myths is the myth of laissez-faire, that the Republicans and Herbert Hoover were presiding over a free market economy and these don't work and that led to the depression and the New Deal saved us from all that. And in those same years, these same blind Republicans were pursuing isolationism. And that led to all sorts of horrible consequences, too. It's hard to explain on one of the interventions in Latin America in this period why we had gunboats up the rivers in China if we were literally pursuing this sort of policy at the time.

21:52But nonetheless, it's one of the myths about the consequences they're supposed to follow from the absence of benevolent intervention. And again, Murray Rothbard was a great pioneer in Hoover revisionism, showing how little Hoover was a laissez-faireist and that Hoover's a moderate corporatist, but then he was outflanked by the New Dealers who were more serious about their corporatism. Leads on to another foundational myth that the New Deal cured the Depression or the New Deal saved capitalism. You know, you've all heard this. And a fallback position, of course, is that if that doesn't sell, people will say, well, at least World War II cured the Depression, and this came up yesterday, I won't go into that. There is a very good paper by Robert Higgs, I'm sure there's others on that.

22:45Okay, then World War II, now we have the myth of the greatest generation. and the Greatest Generation. Well, I happen to like people from that generation. My parents were in that generation. But to arbitrarily single them out and call them the Greatest Generation is just an attempt to hijack these people, these actually existing people in the service of state mythology. It has very little to do with them as they actually were, okay. Now we come into the Cold War, about which there is also, I suppose, some mythology that's grown up. The Marshall Plan, again, on the surface, this is supposed to be this open-handed U.S. government benevolence and generosity. Then you find out about the role of the cotton exporters and how the grants of money to these European countries were tied to their buying American exports.

23:36And the whole thing begins to look, at least in part, like an export subsidy because, again, the policymakers were under the impression that without a certain quantity of export markets, the market was unsustainable at home. And in fact, they're looking at this open door as the solution to this again. I mean, there's nothing wrong with foreign trade. Markets are nice. But the idea that you have to go to some extra effort to find them, and it's the job of the government to go out and find your markets for you seems to me a bit odd. I had a professor of economic history at the University of Florida about 1973. He was from the north of England and he had kind of a practical outlook.

24:24And he would tell us, and this is back when this idea probably was a little bit new, hadn't gotten out. And he said that foreign aid generally, again, it tends to be just an export subsidy, but foreign aid generally does far less good, And it always does far less good than tourism. And everybody denounces tourists now, but the tourists at least are giving money to real people. It actually goes into the economy. It's not being siphoned off from one class of bureaucrats to another. Somebody wants to find foreign aid as taxing poor people in the United States to give money to rich politicians in third world countries. So again, the benevolence is somewhat in dispute.

25:10Now, I think Dr. Block alluded to this in terms of his strategy for arguing with people on the left and the right. And this has to do with the way people compartmentalize, so that they mythically believe that the welfare state and the warfare state aren't connected. It's not the same state. And Alvin W. Goldner, the left-wing sociologist, made this point in 1971, talking about the welfare and warfare state, and that it was odd that people thought these were separate categories, and so all of his friends who were sociologists didn't necessarily like the foreign policy, but they loved the welfare state at home, didn't see it as a unity. I don't know if he borrowed the phrase from Rothbard, because Rothbard has already used this language in 1967.

25:58I'm not sure the ultimate source of this terminology. Chodorov says something like this much earlier. So now we come back to the beginning, sort of a myth of the eternal return. We come back to our first myth, which is the kind of world mission that the Puritans already have in mind during the American Revolution. And now we hear this in various flavors from all the defenders of the present policy, who we can roughly call neocons. There's a kind of pagan, republican, classical variety favored by people like Mr. Ledin, Mr. Kaplan, and a number of other people The ideal role model for the United States is the Athenian Empire, somehow, because after all the Spartans were sort of narrow and bad people, didn't believe in transparency, trust, or the Roman Empire, and of course very important for many of the writers is the British Empire, this is really the ultimate role model.

27:11And I did a column on this. I don't think I've got time to go into that one. I did a column in July on Anywhere.com about the myth of the benevolent hegemon. And I thought, well, this is sort of boring. People may not really like this topic. And it was summarizing a paper by Isabel Grunberg who talks about how the whole idea of benevolent hegemon is a mythic structure. It talks about the water metaphors and the kind of religious metaphors that intrude in the international relations writers who believe in this theory. And lo and behold, a couple days ago, Cubby Owens, or what is it, McCubbin Thomas Owens, some of us call him Cubby, did an article in National Review Online in which he says, well, we are the benevolent hegemon. And then he proceeds to talk about how he was just speaking with Thucydides the other day, and the ancients told him, because the Straussians were always channeling the ancients.

28:06And you have to have a benevolent hegemon, otherwise the sun will disappear. He didn't say that, but you know, the world will just go to hell. And it took on mythic proportions. And he does induce the Athenian Empire and some other things. So we're back in mythic terrain. And I suppose that's enough myth for one talk, so I'll close.