For more than a decade, most of the world has subscribed to the idea that the rise of China is inexorable and the relative decline of the United States is inevitable. The main basis for this conviction has been China’s relentless economic growth with a population more than four times greater than the U.S. Other comparisons have buttressed the case—for instance, between China’s impressive high-speed rail system and America’s underwhelming Amtrak. Sometimes it is worry over Chinese technology, the growing number of patents, and research in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, or the awe-inspiring Belt and Road Initiative. Often this is contrasted with American social and political dysfunction, ailing public education, and lagging investments in infrastructure, science, and technology. The sense of a waning America has been compounded by our failures in Afghanistan, entanglements in the Middle East, anxieties over the future of Ukraine and NATO, and inability to resolve pressing issues such as immigration and growing federal debt. 

A few years ago, this talk aroused fear of a “Thucydides trap”—the inevitable conflict between a rapidly rising power and a declining one. As recently as 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping proclaimed that “the East is rising, the West declining.” Former President Donald Trump is still pitching to his faithful that “we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.”

But outside of Trump’s rallies, there is less and less of this sort of talk, for a simple reason: It turns out not to be true. As The Economist, Time, and other media outlets have recently reported, the United States has not been overtaken economically by China. Quite the opposite: China’s economy is struggling, while America’s is surging. But it is not just the economy. On almost every measure of national strength—from GDP to energy output to technological innovation to military alliances—America’s dominant position relative to other major countries is growing, and has been for several years.

The most fundamental element in America’s power, today and for the future, is the economy. President Joe Biden, inaugurated just as the United States faced a new strain of COVID-19, began his term with a firm plan to reverse 40 years of Republican-dominated economic policy. He called it Bidenomics—as distinguished from Reaganomics. It has indeed been different, and remarkably successful. Though most voters have not yet credited Biden himself, the percentage who think the United States is the leading economic power in the world has been rising since 2021, according to Gallup, and that perception is increasingly shared around the globe, the Pew Research Center reports.

America’s strong and resilient economy is a godsend at this moment because we are facing the most dangerous period in our history since at least World War II. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are building an alliance of convenience against the United States and our allies. Our military-industrial base, depleted over recent decades, struggles to field sufficient quantities of even the most basic weaponry, such as artillery shells (see “Why Can’t America Build Enough Weapons?” by Mike Lofgren), much less a robust nuclear deterrent. And illiberal, pro-Putin political movements threaten democracy on both sides of the Atlantic. 

These are grave challenges. But we compound them if we inaccurately estimate our own position. Were America truly a nation in decline, economically and otherwise, then those who argue for accommodating our adversaries and lessening our commitment to the global order might have a point. But American power is not declining—it is on the rise. We have the economic means and necessary alliances in place to deal with all of these challenges, and we can succeed.

The Reaganomics of the 1980s was meant to free up private enterprise in America, reduce government spending and taxes, “get government out of the way,” and increase economic growth. Coming after a decade of painful price shocks in the oil market, worrisome inflation, high interest rates, and relatively stagnant economic growth, it was welcomed by Wall Street and business leaders. Some claimed that tax cuts would spur so much economic growth that actual tax revenues would increase. Keynesian, or demand-side, economics had fallen out of favor, and instead leading economists favored using the money supply to deal with matters such as inflation and GDP growth. 

Reaganomics also called for scaling back regulatory measures implemented during the Great Depression. That included eliminating restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, with government relying on “perfect market theory” to assure free and fair competition and produce low prices. Business schools began to teach the shareholder theory of value, which prescribed that the purpose of corporations was solely to deliver profits to their shareholders—measured by dividends and share price—rather than communities and workers. Labor unions were attacked as interfering with free markets in goods, capital, and labor. 

After 40 years, the record of Reaganomics is decidedly mixed. Interest rates began as high as 21.5 percent and did fall over that period, including, after the Great Recession in 2008–09, to less than 1 percent. Inflation soon eased, and prices rose more gradually. Much private wealth was created. But instead of the benefits “trickling down,” as was promised, real wages for most Americans barely budged. Large firms swallowed smaller ones in sector after sector, from retailing to banking and finance, dampening competitive marketplaces, small business creation, and entrepreneurship. Repeated tax cuts never produced greater government revenues, despite the partisan rhetoric. Instead, during the eight years of the Reagan administration, the national debt tripled. 

After 2000, Republican administrations again cut taxes repeatedly, each time creating a larger deficit. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq brought deficits back and increased public debt alarmingly. The lack of effective regulation in derivatives and mortgage finance led to the Great Recession, which cut the stock market in half, caused millions to lose their homes, and roused great anger. Offshoring, and the wealth it created, should have been used to help retrain and reemploy the workforce, but wasn’t. Instead, real wage increases for the majority of Americans lagged far behind the growing incomes and accumulating wealth of the top 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent. Private debt increased enormously—for cars, college, and homes. Growing inequities and the shock of the recession created rising public anger, expressed in the Tea Party movement and in the election of populist politicians, including Donald Trump.

When he came to office, Biden had seen it all—from his time as senator during the era of oil price shocks and stagflation, through the Reagan years of supply-side economics, into the Third Way of the Clinton period, the wars and deregulation of President George W. Bush, the 2008–09 recession, the relatively feeble and slow recovery during the Obama administration, and the further tax cuts of President Trump. Biden was determined to make a change. And he has.

Bidenomics essentially tends to the demand side of the economy rather than the supply side, and uses the power of government to assure the very goals that Reagan himself announced some 43 years ago: “a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans with no barriers of bigotry or discrimination … putting all Americans back to work … ending inflation … all must share in the productive work of this ‘new beginning,’ and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy.” It’s ironic that it is taking a Democrat to achieve these objectives.

The pillars of Bidenomics include using public investment, empowering middle-class workers, and promoting business competition. After the dislocation of the pandemic, Biden’s aim was, in his phrase, to “Build Back Better.” His proposed legislation included the American Rescue Plan Act, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Families Plan. The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in 2021, included $1.9 trillion in economic rescue funds for businesses, individual direct stimulus payments, a fully refundable child tax credit, and eviction and foreclosure moratoriums, among other benefits. 

Many of the proposals of the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan were eventually worked into other bills, including the Infrastructure and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. In addition, in 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, to incentivize semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. Together, these bills authorized some $4 trillion in specifically targeted government spending over the next several years, designed to help the nation recover from the pandemic, provide needed funds to American families, repair and replace the nation’s infrastructure, address climate change, and improve the provision of health services. Of course, all of this was analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office; expenses were somewhat offset by managing tax receipts, helped by a sizable investment in the IRS, and other expenditures. 

But Bidenomics has also included other elements that don’t involve spending significant tax dollars but instead flex public muscles that government had almost forgotten how to use. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department reinvigorated antitrust enforcement to promote competition and reduce monopolistic power in the marketplace, including banning noncompete clauses that overpower labor mobility and limit the ability of workers to seek higher wages by offering their services to competing firms. The administration took scores of actions to reduce the bottlenecks and improve the resiliency of supply chains, which were raising costs to consumers directly and indirectly. And after decades of scant federal support for—and at times outright opposition to—organized labor, Biden put the government squarely behind strengthening the power of unions to give workers a greater voice and more power. He also was the first president to march with striking workers on a picket line.

The administration has worked tirelessly to provide relief for unfair, anticompetitive, and crushing student debt—another effort to restore spending power to the middle class and rebuild the economy from, as Biden says, “the bottom up and middle out—not the top down.” And, notably, the president respected the independence of the Federal Reserve as it raised rates to dampen inflationary tendencies.

Over the past three years, the results have been remarkable. Under Biden, the economy has added more than 15.2 million new jobs (through the first quarter of this year), including 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. The economy had added more than 5 million new small businesses by the end of 2023. Unemployment has fallen below 4 percent and stayed that way for the longest streak since the 1960s. U.S. wages are growing at the fastest rate in five decades, and outpacing inflation. Americans are saving more for retirement than ever before. U.S. GDP grew by roughly 6 percent in 2021, and above 2 percent in real terms in 2022 and 2023. 

New support for infrastructure is everywhere. Investments in renewable energy are soaring. Chip manufacturers are adding new facilities in the United States. Threatening mergers in the data and health care industries have been blocked, and unions are regaining strength, with autoworkers in Tennessee recently voting to unionize—a huge step for that state. Prices on several essential drugs, including insulin, have been reduced for those on Medicare. So much for trickle-down, supply-side economics! Biden has moved the economy a long way in the direction of helping ordinary Americans.

Although interest rate hikes had an immediate impact on the housing market, by February 2024 existing home sales had made their largest monthly gain in a year, amid expectations that the period of mortgage rate hikes is ending. Annual inflation has plummeted from its 9.1 percent peak in 2022 to a little over 3 percent, which is excellent progress (though still above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent). And while the Fed isn’t reducing interest rates fast enough to please Wall Street, the higher rates are a boon to savers, who were losing an estimated $250 billion per year under the ultralow rates during the Obama administration. Consumer spending remains high, and even Wall Street seems to shrug off the bumpy predictions. Moreover, by focusing on growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up, the president is moving to relieve the disparities and inequities that have heightened the red-blue divide in America. 

The United States is the only Western country that is growing and creating jobs at such a rate. American GDP is now 26 percent of global GDP—up from 24 percent in 2019—and increasing. Recent headlines proclaim that the eurozone is stagnating. America’s economic resurgence is sending a powerful message. Headlines in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and other business-oriented media outlets proclaim that the U.S. is growing faster than China. American allies as well as fence sitters in Asia and the Middle East have taken notice. Autocratic, state-directed economic growth looks less compelling now, a mixed-market, democratic-based economy relatively more attractive.

Even the foreign policy cognoscenti is awakening to the sea change in expectations. Some talk about China’s peak power and American resilience. Others note that the decline of U.S. power has been greatly exaggerated. The date by which China’s GDP would overtake that of the United States has been extended by several years, from the late 2020s to the mid-to-late 2030s, and according to some forecasts might not catch up until the 2040s, if then. 

But there is even greater American strength behind the headlines. This includes technology, energy, strong capital markets, personal and financial security, a growing population, and a strong private sector.

The United States is maintaining crucial leads over China in advanced technologies like AI and quantum computing. For all the worry about Huawei over the past five years, Chinese companies have been dependent on importing the most advanced chips. These are designed for and cut using extreme ultraviolet technology. China lacks the technology, the most advanced of which is Dutch, and the U.S. has taken measures to prevent China’s buying or stealing it. The American company NVDIA is also under U.S. restrictions on the selling of its most advanced chips to China. This has hobbled Chinese efforts not only in advanced cell phone telephony but also in quantum computing and AI. 

Of course, China’s industrial espionage capacities are legendary, and we can expect that the country will find ways to either evade the sanctions or gather the proprietary information it needs to build its own more advanced chips. But our lead in AI should give us the ability to better detect leaks in the sanctions and the flow of information and thereby maintain our advantage, at least for a while. 

Biotechnology is another area in which China has struggled to catch up. The COVID vaccine that they rushed to the market was relatively ineffective. The U.S. lead in RNA technology is substantial. American efforts in stem cell research and differentiation have been extremely effective and have overtaken earlier Chinese efforts in this area. 

In space, where there is fear of Chinese anti-satellite technologies, and in cyber, which could threaten our critical infrastructure systems, the U.S. has always been ahead and, so far as can be determined at the unclassified level, retains its lead in both areas. 

In energy, the United States is the world’s leading producer of oil—ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Our natural gas supplies are abundant. And while the U.S. would like to transition to green energy as rapidly as possible, these hydrocarbons currently provide an essential foundation for national economic power. In the area of renewables, China does have the lead in low-cost solar power panels, but only because of Chinese government subsidies. 

This is precisely why market-driven solutions must be supplemented by wise industrial policy. Everything from car mileage standards to rebates on U.S.-produced electric vehicles plays to renewable portfolio standards, and net metering will contribute to our catch-up in solar energy production. In areas of the most critical national needs, we cannot simply let the market decide. Another carbon-free energy source is nuclear power; the United States is gaining in the development and certification of small modular nuclear reactors, and these will become increasingly important in the future.

American capital markets are the largest and strongest in the world. Over the past three years, market indexes have risen markedly, despite the inflationary shock of 2022. From January 2021 through May 2024, the S&P index has gone up roughly 41 percent, the NASDAQ 30 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average 24 percent. Under SEC regulation, the markets have been, on the whole, remarkably free of corruption. They have been continuously modernized for faster transactions and reporting. For the 12th year in a row, the United States is the top destination for foreign direct investment. Investors here and abroad trust the U.S. regulatory and courts system, as well as the role of the Fed and Treasury in regulating the nation’s banks and money supply. There is no such trust of China, with its large state sector, state subsidies to industries, under-performing loans, jiggered financial statistics, and continuing government interference at multiple levels. 

Immigration has been one of the greatest American strengths, and it shows continuing momentum. The United States draws far more immigrants than any other country. As the prime-working-age native-born U.S. population has dropped, millions of immigrants have surged into the country to fill available positions. This one factor has enabled the economy to continue to boom and add jobs even as the Fed has raised interest rates, and at the same time has helped somewhat in holding down wage-push inflation as the economy expands. Immigrants also make up almost a quarter of the highly educated STEM talent in the U.S., and according to recent data almost 40 percent of software developers. 

The use of the dollar as a reserve currency and in international commerce is yet another advantage. Almost 60 percent of world currency reserves are held in dollars, versus a little over 2 percent in Chinese renminbi. This enables the United States to finance its national debt at a lower cost and facilitates the Fed’s regulation of the economy. Under Biden, the country has maintained the dollar’s central role despite efforts by China, Russia, and some countries in the Global South to dislodge it.

The U.S. dollar dominates trade—half of Europe’s international trade and 70 percent elsewhere in the world is conducted in dollars. The same is true in international banking, with more than 60 percent of international claims and liabilities denominated in dollars. Payments for trade usually go through the SWIFT system, which is governed by Western central banks, and although many fintech competitors have emerged, SWIFT’s large network and continuing modernization seem to assure its continuing leadership in international transfers. The dollar gives the United States great power in imposing financial sanctions as well as gaining financial intelligence. And, as I wrote in these pages last year, American companies own and control the underseas fiber optic cables through which most of the world’s financial data flows, and U.S. intelligence and financial regulatory agencies have access to that data. This gives the United States unparalleled, granular insight into international financial transactions, a form of hard power other nations understand—and fear. 

Even the supply of critical minerals necessary for modern electronics and batteries, long a concern for U.S. national security, is being addressed. China has held the lead in rare earths for decades, simply because they have accepted the environmental costs and hazards of processing the ores. In the past, American firms actually shipped rare earths to China, which then processed and hoarded them, dumping as necessary to undercut new market entrants. China has also made strides in dominating African sources of cobalt. But the U.S. is now prioritizing its access to cobalt, rare earths, and other critical minerals. Most of these key materials, including lithium, are present in the United States. With increased attention to onshoring, recycling, and developing new materials—all part of the Department of Energy’s strategy—we can greatly improve access to critical minerals. 

Joe Biden came to office determined to repair relations with American allies. He said, “America is back”—and he’s right. We’ve strengthened NATO, our most crucial alliance. European allies, with the exception of Hungary, have backed away from closer relationships with China and rebuffed recent Chinese efforts to dominate European infrastructure investments. The Biden administration has helped our two allies in northeast Asia, South Korea and Japan, to overcome their long-painful relations with each other and forge a bilateral security agreement to counter China’s rising power in the region. Elsewhere in Asia, the U.S. has strengthened our long-standing alliance with Australia, and informally joined with Japan, Australia, and India—the so-called Quad—to manage the challenges of China. The administration also has negotiated new basing agreements with the Philippines and increased diplomatic attention to the islands of Micronesia and other islands of the Pacific. 

Of course, there are challenges ahead. The American government is running an annual deficit; our national debt is now equal to our GDP. The long-term funding of Social Security and Medicare must be assured. Some tax rates will need to be adjusted to better protect the middle class. The use of electric vehicles must increase, and other measures will be necessary to get the U.S. to net zero carbon by 2050. But Biden and his economic team have put in place the critical foundation that will ensure the fiscal and monetary means to deal with these challenges, including enhanced tariffs on Chinese EVs. 

But the geostrategic environment is dynamic. The halcyon post–Cold-War era of American exceptionalism is over. The Biden team must deal with the most dangerous period in American history since at least World War II. 

Four potential adversaries—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—are increasingly working together against the United States and the international rules-based order that emerged under American leadership in the 1940s and beyond. The countries have different but complementary strategic aims. Russia wants to regain control and absorb Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic states, Georgia, and part of Poland into an enlarged imperial Russia; roll back NATO and U.S. security guarantees in Europe; secure strategic minerals in Africa and the Middle East; isolate the United States; and hobble the independence of Western European states. China seeks its historic place as the world’s most powerful nation. It wants reunification with Taiwan, control over the western Pacific, and the marginalization of the United States in international institutions. Iran aims for regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and the destruction of Israel. North Korea has recently declared South Korea its “principal enemy,” heightening tensions on the Korean peninsula. 

For now, these potential adversaries are engaged in a hybrid war against the United States: espionage; economic and military pressures; propaganda and disinformation; penetration of U.S. and Western political systems; cyber probes and minor attacks; and insertion of malware into Western infrastructure in preparation for disabling attacks on power, water, and transportation systems. 

But, as demonstrated by Russia’s war against Ukraine and Iran’s attacks on Israel, they are also willing to use force to gain their ends. They are enhancing their nuclear arsenals, threatening nuclear use, and undercutting the credibility and survivability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The outcome in Ukraine is far from certain, and should it collapse, the rest of eastern Europe will be the next target of open aggression. Russia and China have undercut the American and Western presence in Africa; blunted the effectiveness of international institutions in containing human rights abuses, war crimes, and nuclear proliferation; and managed to wriggle out from under the most comprehensive set of sanctions yet applied by the U.S. and other Western nations.

Diplomacy is, of course, the first response. But diplomacy has always rested on hard power and our record of success—and the hard power of the United States rests on our economy. The U.S. has the economic means and the alliances to deal with all of our potential competitors simultaneously, from strengthening our nuclear deterrent and reinvesting in our military-industrial base and our volunteer armed forces to winning the technology race with China and deterring further aggression abroad. 

We should face the future with optimism and confidence. President Xi and former President Trump are wrong. American power is not declining—it is on the rise. We have the ability to deal with every challenge, at home and abroad. This is a truth that American voters need to understand, so they can make an informed choice in the elections this November and summon the will to meet these challenges.

The post America Is Already Great Again appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As a TV flickered inside 13-year-old Sandra Parks’s bedroom in the heart of Milwaukee, a series of flashes from a gun muzzle lit up the area just outside. Then the gunman ran off, having missed his target. 

Sandra took the stray bullet “like a soldier,” her sister recalls. She walked into another room and simply stated, “Mama, I’m shot.” The fire department arrived within minutes to render medical aid, but Sandra—a promising writer and an old soul, known for chiding other children to settle down in class—died the same night, November 19, 2018.

The shooting made national news because of a striking coincidence. Two years prior, Sandra had won third place in the city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest for decrying the same form of violence that would claim her life. “In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost everyday,” she wrote. “Little children are victims of senseless gun violence.”

By the time Milwaukee homicide detectives sat Isaac Barnes down in Room 425C at police headquarters before sunrise the next day, they had already seen video surveillance of the fatal shots and had a witness placing him at the scene. Still, the detectives hoped to learn one thing about the shooting. He had fired blindly into a house and killed a child. Why?

Barnes pleaded the Fifth in the interview room, depriving the community of answers, at least for the moment. But after covering shootings like this one for decades, I’ve found that there is a far more important question police and policy makers are failing to ask. 

How?

Specifically, how did an AK-47-style weapon find its way into the hands of Barnes, a convicted felon who wasn’t legally allowed to own it? Behind this shooting, and thousands more across America, there is an unseen accomplice: the seller. A frequently cited study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that 90 percent of guns used in crimes can be traced to just 5 percent of firearms dealers. Often, it’s white dealers in the comparatively affluent suburbs who are illegally selling weapons to convicted felons in the so-called inner city. Police have no trouble going after those dealers when one of their own is shot. In 2015, for instance, two Milwaukee officers won a $6 million judgment against a suburban dealer who negligently sold the handgun used to wound them. It should be simple for regular citizens, like Sandra’s family, to seek accountability from the suppliers of weapons used to kill or maim their loved ones—right? 

Wrong. It used to be much easier to get information about crime guns when I was doing it in the 1990s and early 2000s. But in 2003, Republicans in Congress, pushed by National Rifle Association lobbyists, made it so that any “trace” information about crime guns could not be released to the public. They stepped up their efforts to protect the gun industry two years later, granting dealers and manufacturers blanket immunity (with a few exceptions) from civil suits. Not only do these rules prevent victims of gun crime from seeking compensation, they also leave us blind when it comes to crafting solutions. Academics can’t use this data to study how guns end up in criminals’ hands; mayors can’t obtain it to figure out how to make their cities safer. The Biden administration has taken steps in recent years to release more information about problem gun shops, and a series of lawsuits has challenged restrictions on trace information. But until Congress decides to protect the public and changes the law, weapons will continue to flow unchecked to America’s streets. 

Shortly after the shooting of Sandra Parks, I set out to answer that question of “how.” I wasn’t prepared for how much hassle would ensue, because when I cut my teeth as a crime reporter in Milwaukee, my hometown, getting information about the origin of a gun was comparatively easy. In my first big story for the Journal Sentinel, in 1996, I obtained police records showing that the AK-47 that was used in a drive-by shooting that claimed the life of another 13-year-old girl, Laquann Moore, had originally been purchased by a convicted felon at a local gun store. 

In early 2019, I asked the Milwaukee Police Department for information about the gun that took Sandra’s life. The police flatly denied the request. In order to trace a gun, local law enforcement sends a request to the ATF, which compares the firearm’s markings to a national archive of distribution and sales. Because of the laws passed in the 2000s, the federal agency must provide these trace reports to police departments confidentially, and only for criminal investigations. Giving me the report would jeopardize Milwaukee cops’ ability to trace any future guns, they told me.

It didn’t feel right that the public should be denied such basic information. So I obtained pro bono help from Godfrey & Kahn, a law firm experienced in representing journalists. When the police heard from my lawyer, Daniel Narvey, they said they had made a mistake: There was no trace report. But, as we discovered over many emails exchanged that summer, there were hundreds of pages of other records: interviews, affidavits, ballistics tests, and descriptions of evidence—including the gun. 

The weapon that claimed Sandra’s life was made by Zastava Arms, a government-owned manufacturer located in Kragujevac, Serbia, some 5,000 miles away from Milwaukee. The gun is a shrunken-down version of an AK-47 rifle, known as a PAP M92 PV. Its serial number is MA2PV060327. The cartridges it fires are 7.62 x 39 mm in caliber—about the length of an AAA battery, but a little bit thinner. 

Interestingly, Serbia does not permit its citizens to own assault weapons like this one—even though it regularly ships them here. Police records show that the gun came to the U.S. by way of Century International Arms, one of the nation’s largest importers of surplus military weapons, which was founded in Vermont and is now headquartered in Florida. Like Serbia, Vermont does not allow guns like the PAP M92 in its own jurisdiction.

But how the gun got from Vermont to the streets of Milwaukee is a government secret. That’s thanks to Congress, which—in doing the bidding of America’s powerful gun lobby—has written laws that prevent anyone from obtaining trace information except for police in the prosecution of a crime. Since 2003, lawmakers have reupped an annual rider to the Department of Justice appropriations bill called the Tiahrt Amendment, for Todd Tiahrt, the Kansas Republican who crafted it. The amendment says that gun trace data from the ATF “shall be inadmissible in evidence, and shall not be used, relied on, or disclosed in any manner” in a civil action in state or federal court. In other words, you can’t use federal gun trace data to sue gunmakers or gun dealers. 

When the bill was passed, that was a very real concern for the firearms industry. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, White House officials and the ATF began to beef up the agency’s gun tracing capabilities in response to the 1980s crime wave and Democrats’ perceived weakness on law-and-order issues. The administration launched comprehensive gun tracing efforts in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, where law enforcement began to track the origin of every crime gun. Public officials in those cities had a clearer picture of the landscape of gun violence than ever before, but they found that they couldn’t rely on the ATF to crack down on problem dealers. Because laws such as the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 shielded dealers from most federal enforcement actions, the ATF was dependent on businesses’ cooperation to uphold the law. That wasn’t enough for mayors desperate to address the violence, and they soon took matters into their own hands.

“It was out of frustration with the federal government,” Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago told The New York Times in 1999, explaining his decision to sue the firearms industry. In 1998, Chicago relied on ATF data to build a $433 million suit against 12 suburban gun stores and several wholesale dealers and gunmakers. Police identified the biggest sellers of crime guns through trace reports, then launched sting operations that caught those dealers making illegal sales to undercover officers. Detroit and at least 20 other cities followed. Accountability was finding its way to manufacturers, too: In 2000, Smith & Wesson, facing multiple federal and state lawsuits, signed a settlement brokered by Clinton under which the company agreed to institute new safety controls for its products, change its marketing practices, and cut off relationships with the biggest dealers of crime guns. 

But what communities saw as a path to safer streets, the industry saw as a threat to its bottom line. In 2005, Republican lawmakers followed up with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which says manufacturers and dealers can’t be sued when their products are used in a crime. Both of those protections remained in place when I went looking for information about the gun that killed Sandra. 

Even Isaac Barnes didn’t want to say where he got his gun. When I spoke with him while he was awaiting trial in 2019, Barnes told me he chose to honor the “street code” and not say who had supplied the weapon, which he said he bought for $400. And even though it was a crime to sell a weapon to a man with a felony conviction, Milwaukee police never investigated the gun’s origin. (According to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, only 12 states require crime guns to be traced. Wisconsin is not one of them.) 

When one of their own gets shot or killed, however, police will look into where the gun was from and sometimes set up sting operations at the store that sold it. For instance, a mere 48 hours after the Milwaukee officers Graham Kunisch and Bryan Norberg were wounded in a shooting in June 2009, police staked out Badger Guns, a store in nearby West Milwaukee where the shooter bought his gun. Over the next few months, they arrested 20 felons who visited the store. They also discovered that felons had been using the store’s shooting range for target practice.

Kunisch and Norberg were able to use information from the police investigation to win a nearly $6 million civil verdict after Badger Guns was found liable for negligence. They also called an expert witness, Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University, who had documented how the gun store behaved before and after it could enjoy the secrecy and protection afforded to dealers under the Tiahrt Amendment. When federal data in 1999 showed Badger as the nation’s top seller of crime guns, it prompted the store to clean up its act.

“It got a lot of bad press for Badger Guns and Ammo, and literally within a few days they started to change their sales practices,” Webster, a longtime researcher with JHU’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, told me. “Using the trace data, I documented that there was a dramatic reduction in the diversion of guns used in crime in Milwaukee solely by in essence shaming this gun dealer with the trace data.”

When the Tiahrt Amendment went into effect, Webster could no longer get trace data from the ATF to study Badger. But the Milwaukee Police Department continued to provide data to Webster on how many crime guns were coming from the shop. After the amendment, that number went up 200 percent.

In the case of the wounded Milwaukee police officers, the shooter had used a “straw buyer” to purchase the gun on his behalf, which should have been obvious to the Badger Guns employee handling the transaction, because the buyer needed coaching not to write the wrong name on the forms. The officers later settled for $1 million to avoid a lengthy appeal. But at least they had their day in court.

In summer 2019, around the time that Milwaukee police handed over the trove of documents, Barnes interrupted his trial to change his plea to guilty. He would later explain that he had been trying to shoot a man he had a beef with—because the man robbed him, or, in a conflicting story, because he was dating the mother of Barnes’s children.

I had about as much of the “why” and the “how” as I was going to get. At a local business in Milwaukee, I gave a presentation to community members about the gun and its path. Sandra’s family, who had supported my efforts, listened in. They broke out in tears when I played an audio recording I had made of Barnes explaining why he chose that particular gun. “It’s a lot of things going down in Milwaukee,” Barnes said. “It’s like with one of those you could just kill the whole situation. More bullets. More firepower. That’s just how I see it.”

But I wasn’t able to tell the broader story. The details about Serbia and Vermont were too remote to interest local and even national publications, and there was little prospect that the rules shielding illegal gun sellers might change. I kept an eye on the news, but for the time being, I had to let it go.

In recent months, new action in gun tracing inspired me to revisit the story. In December, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced plans to sue the ATF for trace information identifying the biggest sellers of crime guns in his city. The agency had denied his open records request, citing the Tiahrt Amendment, but Scott argues that its interpretation of the law is too narrow and that he should be given the list of dealers under an exception that allows the release of “statistical aggregate data” about gun sales. The past few years have seen several other legal efforts to make gun trace data public, including a 2023 lawsuit from an anti-trafficking activist named John Lindsay-Oliver and a 2020 lawsuit from The Trace, an outlet that reports on gun violence. Federal lawmakers have echoed the call for a wider interpretation of what information can be released under the amendment, which President Joe Biden could enact executively by issuing guidance through the ATF. 

The Biden administration recently has begun to release more information about crime guns. In response to a public records request from USA Today, the ATF in February chose to release a list of the nation’s biggest sellers of crime guns—information it hasn’t made public for 20 years because of the Tiahrt Amendment. Dealers like Mark Tosh, whose Virginia chain of Town Gun Shops appears on the list, defended their practices by noting that a higher number of crime gun sales could simply reflect a larger total volume of sales. “It’s the law of averages,” he told reporters. But Webster, the firearms expert, believes the high sales numbers are indicative of illegality. “I think all the signs pointed to that there was a small segment of licensed gun dealers that were making significant profits by diverting guns into the underground market,” he told me.  In any event, communities can now see the faces of dealers placing guns on their streets.

Last year, the ATF also for the first time began publicly listing gun shops that would be losing their licenses because of violations of federal law. Beyond that, the agency is now requiring gun shops to hold on to records of their transactions indefinitely, rather than for a limited time. Still, a stepped-up enforcement campaign has limits when the rules constrain how much information the ATF can disclose to the public—and when congressional Republicans consistently hold back funding for the agency.

The cleanest solution to the problem of untraceable crime gun sales would be for Congress to repeal the Tiahrt Amendment. If Democrats win back control of Congress and hold the White House this fall, they should consider taking up one of the repeal bills that are regularly introduced and languish without action. Another avenue would be to challenge the amendment in court—not probable, given a gun-friendly Supreme Court, but not impossible. Colin Miller, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, has long argued that the restrictions exceed Congress’s powers to regulate interstate commerce under the Constitution.

Once the floodgates are open, a new wave of lawsuits against dealers and manufacturers has the potential to change the landscape of American gun crime. Recall how the cases against Smith & Wesson forced the company in 2000 to adopt new safety measures and cut off problem dealers. Mass lawsuits have changed other U.S. industries, as well. Around the same time that cities were pursuing gun dealers in the 1990s, government officials and private plaintiffs across the country filed suit against the tobacco industry, using evidence that executives knew their products were addictive. In a 1998 settlement with 46 states, four of the largest tobacco companies agreed to stop marketing their products to children, pay eye-watering sums of money in compensation for health care costs (about $206 billion in the first 25 years), and dissolve three of the largest industry advocacy organizations.

Despite all that has happened in recent months, the enthusiasm for reforming gun tracing does not seem to have spread to Milwaukee. No public official I reached out to this year would comment on how gun tracing deficiencies factored into the death of Sandra Parks—not the mayor, the district attorney, the city council member for her district, or her U.S. representative. Meanwhile, through public records requests this winter, I learned that in the six years since Sandra died, Milwaukee has had a hundred incidents with Zastava guns alone. Only a few months after Sandra was killed, in February 2019, the Milwaukee police officer Matthew Rittner died while executing a search warrant, shot once through the chest with a similar Century Arms Zastava weapon. In the summer of 2023, Dondale Young, a beloved basketball coach, died in a family dispute that escalated into a shooting. Paramedics counted 15 bullet holes in Young’s body; doctors removed three fragments from his chest; and the autopsy found five more. His killer, who used a Zastava, was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison.

This winter, Milwaukee announced a sister city partnership with, of all places, Kragujevac, the home of Zastava Arms. When I asked Mayor Cavalier Johnson if the relationship might be an opportunity to address the flow of weapons to Milwaukee, his spokesman replied that there was no use in “chastising” officials in Serbia. 

Ironically, the streets of Milwaukee—not the halls of Congress or City Hall—were about the only place where I could find people willing to speak about what could be done.

When I pulled up in a rental car this past February outside the North 13th Street duplex where Sandra was slain, a sign on a church across the street caught my eye. “Spiritual Warfare Ministry,” the brown vinyl banner stated in white letters with a cross on either side. At the bottom was this verse from 2 Corinthians: For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds.

I took that as another kind of sign, and came back for services the next day. The sanctuary inside the church that cold Sunday morning was small, and held just over a dozen women and men. Two girls licking chocolate from Reese’s cups off their hands fell asleep on each other in one of the pews. People gave testimonies, spoke about the goodness of God, and told stories of their humble origins. The atmosphere was communal and warm, but I wasn’t hearing the answers I had come for. The pastor, who didn’t have time for a lengthy conversation, told me he hadn’t heard about the shooting, which happened during an earlier ministry. Feeling defeated, I left.

Outside the church afterward, I couldn’t help noticing an emerald-green Hennessey Camaro parked in front of Sandra’s house. Since I had on a green jogging suit, I jokingly asked a group of men who had been inside the church whose car it was that matched my outfit so well. The car’s owner was Rickie C. Weeks, who told me that whenever he steps out into the streets of Milwaukee, he prays he never has to use his gun. Given the name of the church—Spiritual Warfare Ministry—I asked Weeks how much of the community’s problem with gun violence is a matter of spiritual warfare versus the behavior of the gun industry.

He gave me the clearest answer I have heard yet. “Of course they bear responsibility. They bear a responsibility for letting these guns get into the wrong hands. Period. And they’re sending their guns over here. Congress is allowing them to do that. That’s because they’re paying off certain people in Congress so it can be hush-hush so they can keep making money off the guns.” He added: “And the white man is letting it go on, because they don’t care about our lives, period. They don’t care because nine times out of ten, we’re killing each other. We’re not killing white folks.”

I thought about Sandra Parks, who lamented the Black-on-Black violence that she saw around her. To break the cycle, she wrote in her essay, “we need to be empathetic and try to walk in each other’s shoes.” Hers were the heartfelt words of a child—calling on us to be kinder to each other, but innocent of the impersonal, hidden systems that affect our choices. The way those systems operate now, the industry that placed a weapon of war in her killer’s hands will remain shielded from oversight. And we will remain just as vulnerable as Sandra.

When Weeks offered to show me his pistol, I didn’t know what to say. Of course, as a journalist writing about guns, I wanted to see it. But I didn’t want him to do anything that could lead to trouble with the law.

Weeks assured me that he has a concealed carry permit. He retrieved the gun from his emerald-green Camaro. I asked if I could take a picture of him with it. He said yes. And then, with Sandra’s former home in the background, he pointed the weapon toward the sky.

The post Gun Without a Trace appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For most people, the lesson of pandemic schooling was that remote learning was an unmitigated disaster for America’s K–12 students, especially those from lower-income families. Learning loss at all ages was profound. Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled. The achievement gap that separates rich and poor kids widened. 

And the disaffection of that dark period is still with us: Parent satisfaction with education has plunged to a 23-year low. Donald Trump and other Republicans have sought to capitalize on the discontent by pushing for public funding of private schooling in the name of educational freedom.

But just as wars force governments to innovate—think of the GI Bill providing millions of returning World War II veterans with free college tuition—the damage done by the
COVID school shutdowns led to a grand federally funded experiment in education: a vast expansion of tutoring programs in public schools.

In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the mammoth $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to help the nation recover from the pandemic. The bill earmarked $122 billion for the nation’s schools—the largest single investment of federal education funding in the nation’s history—through a program called Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER). States and school districts spent the windfall, and earlier ESSER monies, on laptops, sanitizing materials, HVAC systems, psychologists, summer school, new textbooks, and much more. But we estimate that $7.5 billion or more went to new tutoring programs. As many as 80 percent of U.S. school districts have launched or strengthened tutoring programs since the start of the pandemic, according to the federal School Pulse Panel, bringing tutoring to millions of low-income students for the first time. 

Three years later, the impressive results of this experiment are becoming clear. Schools that simply made online help available to students who sought it out saw poor results. But schools that implemented “high-impact” tutoring—where students work in small groups during the school day with the same tutor in 30-minute sessions three times a week over several months—have been strikingly successful. Those programs are producing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and nearly 10 months of additional learning in secondary school math, says Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education economist who leads a highly regarded tutoring research center. “The effects we see for high-impact tutoring are larger than what we see for most other education interventions, including class-size reduction, extended day, and technology support for students,” Loeb says. 

When Congress unanimously passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the GI Bill in 1944, it was out of fear that the vast numbers of returning veterans would swamp the U.S. labor market and drive up unemployment. Little did lawmakers know that funneling millions of veterans onto college campuses would create the foundation for a vast expansion of the American middle class. Similarly, when Biden and congressional Democrats funded the American Rescue Plan, they saw it as a temporary measure—the program is scheduled to wind down when the funding expires in September—to avert the worst effects of the pandemic on student learning. 

But now that the value of high-impact tutoring is emerging, policy makers on both sides of the aisle have begun to embrace the strategy. The Biden administration has proposed $8 billion in its fiscal 2025 budget for grants to states and school districts to support academic recovery through tutoring and other strategies. And governors in deep-blue New Jersey and Oregon and red-running Tennessee and Florida have pledged funding to continue tutoring once the federal relief ends. The support prompts the question of whether the nascent tutoring movement could be the foundation of a new, bipartisan campaign to improve the nation’s struggling public schools.

In a sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that high-quality tutoring is effective. Affluent families have long used it to help their kids. One measure of the demand for outside support: The number of private tutoring centers—charging an average of $300 a month and out of the financial reach of many families—more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, from roughly 3,000 to nearly 10,000.

Though students from modest backgrounds didn’t get a lot of tutoring before the pandemic, what they did get helped. A review of 89 tutoring studies between 1985 and 2020 by the researcher Andre Nickow of Northwestern University and colleagues found that the average elementary school student gained four additional months of learning with tutoring. Research led by the University of Chicago found that high-impact tutoring in Chicago public high schools doubled or tripled the amount of math the students were learning. And in 2015, a research review concluded that federally funded AmeriCorps tutors using high-quality methods were “effective in promoting academic achievement, especially at the early grades and for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.” But despite the encouraging results, the public education system provided tutoring to only a smattering of its 49 million students.

That changed after COVID closed the nation’s schools. By the time the pandemic was over, students in grades three through eight had lost the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a third of a year in reading. The pandemic didn’t just cause learning loss because kids weren’t in school or were attending in remote or hybrid environments that didn’t facilitate learning as well as classrooms. It also widened the spectrum of student achievement so that when students came back into classrooms, teachers were faced with even larger differences between the highest- and lowest-performing students. Congress told school districts they had to use at least 20 percent of their share of the $122 billion in ESSER funds to reverse pandemic learning loss and gave them only three years to do so. In that environment, and with stellar research results piling up, tutoring became a watchword of the education world. New programs proliferated in public schools, and a variety of innovative tutoring models emerged.

Jackson Elementary School in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, is using one of them. The principal, Megan Phillips, calls the school “one of the poorest districts in maybe the poorest state in the country.” The big employer in the area is a state prison. Decades ago, the nonprofit Teach for America trained and placed Phillips at Jackson as a novice teacher. She’s been there ever since. When COVID struck, TFA asked Phillips whether she wanted her school to participate in the new national tutoring program they were launching, called Ignite Fellowship. The program would hire and train mostly undergraduate students to provide high-dosage virtual tutoring in reading or math, tapping into a huge reservoir of tutoring talent on college campuses. 

Phillips jumped at the chance. Soon, Jackson Elementary students in grades one through three were receiving sessions on reading fundamentals multiple times a week with their undergraduate tutors, who log in from around the country to work with the same two or three students for 10 weeks. So far, the work has paid substantial dividends. In the 2022–23 school year, Jackson Elementary saw a 56 percent increase in the number of students scoring “proficient” on their early literacy assessment. 

Meanwhile, TFA’s Ignite Fellowship program grew considerably thanks to the federal funding. Last year, more than 1,500 undergrads from 300 other colleges and universities tutored 3,500 elementary and middle school students across 100 schools in 21 states, making Ignite the nation’s largest tutoring program enlisting college students exclusively. Fifty-seven percent of the Ignite fellows were people of color, and, strikingly, 350 became public school teachers the following year.

Ector County Independent School District in oil-rich West Texas also tapped the ESSER funds, using a different model to bring tutoring to its largely Latino student population. It hired two vendors, Air Tutors and FEV Tutor, to provide remote tutoring via video links. Ector deploys a pioneering strategy called outcomes-based contracting: The district pays the providers more when students show academic growth—and less when they don’t—to incentivize results, saving public money when they fall short. The model has worked: Half the Ector students who scored below grade level on the previous year’s Texas state assessment and received at least 20 hours of tutoring climbed up to grade level, or higher, after only a year.

Great Oaks Charter School in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which primarily serves low-income students of color, tapped into another promising source of tutors: AmeriCorps members. Under the federal AmeriCorps program, some 36,000 people, many of them young adults, work at more than 9,000 schools up to 35 hours a week for a year in exchange for a stipend, health benefits, and a modest college scholarship. Great Oaks uses its nearly three dozen full-time fellows not just to help struggling students but also to assist with classroom instruction and head off the teacher shortages that plague public education.

Great Oaks designed its school day around tutoring, placing up to six fellows in each of the 304-student middle school’s English and math classes and doubling the duration of the periods. With the extra time, teachers first instruct the entire class, then tutors work with students in small groups during what’s called a workshop period, freeing up teachers to circulate and give extra help where it’s needed. As a result, students get much more individualized instruction than is possible in traditional classrooms. Great Oaks students who started the 2022–23 school year at the 25th percentile or below in math ended the year at the 43rd percentile, on average. And by supporting teachers in their classrooms—AmeriCorps tutors also prepare instructional materials, proctor exams, and grade assignments—and relieving them of many of the non-teaching duties that can make the profession so draining, the Great Oaks tutoring strategy keeps teachers teaching and sources new talent: Half the school’s teachers started as tutors.

While studies have found that a wide range of people can be effective tutors—retired teachers, stay-at-home-parents, and “professional” tutors hired by third-party vendors, among others—there’s evidence to suggest that enlisting college students might pay the biggest dividends. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s undergraduates could offer the small-group support at the heart of high-impact tutoring to 25 percent of the nation’s elementary students. The work also helps defray college costs and is far more meaningful than flipping burgers in the college cafeteria. The federal work study program provides a way to pay college students. And there’s evidence to suggest that college students who work as tutors are more inclined to enter the educator workforce. 

Not all of the new federal money is going toward well-designed tutoring programs. For example, many school districts, hoping to spread their federal pandemic funds as far as possible, purchased a low-cost online model that requires students to reach out for help, typically outside of the school day, rather than building tutoring into their school schedule the way Ector County, Great Oaks, and Ignite schools do. Few students, researchers found, reached out for help. 

But at least 10 percent of the nation’s 49 million public school students have received “high-impact” tutoring since the pandemic. At least six studies of the nascent tutoring movement have come out this year, and they found that high-impact programs yielded consistently strong results in their many permutations. In one instance, 800 Florida kindergarteners were randomly assigned to participate in a new model of reading tutoring that has students work with tutors for just 10 minutes at a time, several times a week. Almost 70 percent of tutored students reached the district’s kindergarten reading goal, compared with 32 percent of untutored students—and the program cost $375 per student.

Another innovative organization, Reading Futures, drew on dyslexia research to design a tutoring model for students with learning disabilities or those far behind in reading. In one school district testing the model, students made more than a year’s worth of reading progress in a semester. The intensive program is expensive, at $3,000 per student, but researchers reported that comparable dyslexia tutors charge upward of $5,000 annually. 

Could the early success of high-impact tutoring bring policy makers together for a renewed bipartisan push to improve America’s public schools? Such a movement has happened before. 

In the early 1980s, business leaders and governors of both parties—including two who would become president, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—joined forces to champion higher academic standards and government requirements to hold schools accountable for student results in the name of racial equity and economic competitiveness. The so-called standards movement spurred improvement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal government’s gold standard measure of student achievement, reported increases in student achievement in reading and math from 1994 to 2012, especially for Black and Hispanic students. But over time, support for the movement collapsed. Teachers’ unions objected to their members’ job security being tied to test results. Middle-class parents balked at the proliferation of tests, which they felt routinized their kids’ classroom experiences. And conservatives opposed what they saw as heavy-handed mandates from Washington. In 2015, President Barack Obama signed legislation that largely gutted federal accountability regulations.

Like the standards movement in its earlier days, right now tutoring enjoys the support of governors from both parties. But unlike the standards reforms, the federal backing for tutoring isn’t highly prescriptive and doesn’t endanger educators’ jobs if achievement lags. Not only has this encouraged schools to innovate, it has also proved popular with teachers, who view tutoring as a boon to their work. It’s no accident that the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has endorsed the tutoring movement. Tutoring represents a rare point of convergence of a national policy priority, solid research evidence, and what educators on the ground need and want. 

And at about $1,500 per student per year, high-impact programs are a relative bargain, given their results. We estimate that it would cost about $15 billion a year to tutor 20 percent of the nation’s students intensively—double the estimated percentage of the public school population that has received high-impact tutoring since the start of the pandemic. That’s a fraction of public education’s $857 billion combined federal, state, and local spending.

But it’s still a lot of money. Will political leaders rally around the nascent tutoring movement as federal pandemic school aid winds down? It’s encouraging that a few states, both red and blue, are putting their own funds into tutoring programs, but it’s not enough to fully compensate for the loss of ESSER money in the fall. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has talked up tutoring, urging colleges and universities to target work study funding at tutoring and prompting school districts to tap the department’s $18 billion program for low-income students and other federal funding streams to pay tutors. There are several other ways, however, that the federal government could put more money into tutoring to replace ESSER funds. 

First, it could increase funding for AmeriCorps’s well-regarded and road-tested tutoring efforts. Second, it could expand the federal work study program to give more students job opportunities in tutoring. Both of those options would provide schools with an increased pool of low-cost, talented tutors. But both would be heavy lifts politically. Colleges jealously guard their work study slots as a source of cheap labor for their institutions. And House Republicans would zero out work study and halve the AmeriCorps budget if they had their way.

A third avenue would be simply to put more money directly into tutoring—in effect, extending the ESSER program, as the Biden administration’s $8 billion budget request would do. Legislation providing future federal funding for high-impact tutoring has been introduced in the House and Senate.

There is scant chance of Congress passing Biden’s proposal between now and November, a Democratic House education staffer told us. But election years are ripe for politicians running for office to advance new policy ideas—especially ones on issues that voters care about, like the quality of their children’s educations, and that have a strong track record of success. 

It’s time to get the word out.

The post Public Education’s Reinforcements appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On the morning of August 1, 1943, a strike force of 178 B-24 four-engine bombers lifted off from airfields in North Africa to attack the German-controlled oil refineries in Ploiesti, Romania, Nazi Germany’s main source of petroleum. The target was defended by one of the largest and best-integrated air defense networks in Europe, consisting of two regiments of antiaircraft guns and 57 fighter aircraft. 

Of the 167 bombers that reached the objective—navigation being an inexact science before GPS—53 were destroyed and 55 damaged. By today’s standards, it was an unthinkably large loss rate, not just of human life but of advanced weaponry as well. In 1943, the B-24 was perhaps mankind’s most complex and sophisticated mechanical device in series production, containing 1.2 million parts. But a large percentage of these aircraft were now shattered hulks littering Hitler’s Fortress Europe, or damaged, barely flyable airframes that had limped back to their bases and were suitable only for scrapping.

But the material losses were barely a blip in the prosecution of the war. Consolidated Aircraft, the B-24’s original manufacturer, produced approximately 10,000 of them at two of its plants during the war. Even so, the War Department was not taking any chances: It contracted for a second source with Douglas Aircraft’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, plant, and then expanded production even further. 

At Willow Run, Michigan, the Ford Motor Company constructed a mammoth facility with an assembly line more than a mile long; it was the largest factory under one roof in the world. By mid-1944, the Michigan plant was producing one B-24 an hour, meaning that the B-24s destroyed over Ploiesti could have been made up with just over two days’ production at a single plant. Altogether, 18,482 B-24s were produced during the war, the highest-ever total for a four-engine aircraft. The Arsenal of Democracy was no mere propaganda slogan.

Eighty years later, America’s arsenal is in much the same shape as the remains of the Willow Run plant: underutilized for decades, and gone to seed. In 2010, most of it was demolished. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine administered a comprehensive shock to the post–Cold War consensus in so many respects: the idea that NATO, the EU, and other European institutions had banished the prospect of a major war on that continent; the notion that global free markets would lead to political convergence and improved behavior by countries like Russia; and even the illusion that world grain markets were resilient and self-equilibrating. Not least among the casualties of the invasion was the belief that the United States was unchallengeable militarily.

To date, the U.S. has transferred more than 3 million 155 mm artillery rounds to Ukraine. This is one of the most basic items of war—the 155 has been around in various iterations since World War I. Yet for two years, the U.S. Army has been gravely concerned about the depletion of the ammunition stockpile, and with good reason. Current annual production of the 155 round is about 12 percent of the amount that has been transferred to Ukraine. Manufacture takes place at a single complex, more than a century old, in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, though a new plant in Mesquite, Texas, that’s still under construction will soon double U.S. output. Even planned surge production, however, will require several years to rebuild the inventory because of the lead time needed to set up new manufacturing capability. With no ammunition, the Army’s M109 self-propelled howitzer would merely be 28 tons of scrap metal.

Each 155 mm round needs a propellant charge to send it out the gun tube as well as requiring a 22-pound explosive charge within the projectile. M6 propellant is no longer produced in the United States, nor does the military have a single TNT plant for the explosive; until it can reestablish domestic production, the Army will have to rely on allies like Poland and Australia.

By contrast, Russia, with a GDP at purchasing power parity of less than a tenth that of the U.S. and the EU combined, is able to produce nearly three times the number of artillery rounds as America and Europe can collectively manufacture. The democracies are learning the hard way what Joseph Stalin meant when he called artillery “the god of war.”

Replenishment time is much the same with many other munitions sent to Ukraine, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It estimated that expended units of the Javelin antitank missile will require five and a half to eight years to replenish; the HIMARS guided rocket, two and a half to three; the Stinger antiaircraft missile, six and a half to an incredible eighteen. The verdict is damning; for all the money thrown at the Pentagon, the Department of Defense cannot supply weapons for a conventional land war of moderate size and intermittently high intensity for much longer than a year without drawing down munition stocks to dangerously low levels. How, then, can it hope to deter an adversarial power of the first rank like China, which could potentially conduct a major, very high-intensity war on multiple fronts? War games demonstrate that the United States would deplete essential munitions within just eight days of engaging in a high-intensity conflict with China concerning Taiwan.

The United States has entered possibly the most complex foreign policy crisis since World War II. America must successfully aid Ukraine, or it will encourage further Kremlin adventurism and possibly collapse NATO. Simultaneously, it must deter adversarial powers in the Middle East. At the same time, it faces an unprecedentedly massive buildup of Chinese military power in East Asia. 

Those who have advocated abandoning Ukraine to concentrate on China are proffering a false and meretricious choice. Without resolute support to Ukraine, any guarantees to Taiwan or other East Asian partners would likely be seen by adversaries and allies alike as worthless and would upset the entire calculus of U.S. deterrence strategy. Yet it is also undeniable that in aiding Ukraine, America’s material deterrent power worldwide decreases by the day absent a thorough transformation of the Defense Department’s shockingly thin and fragile industrial base and a stiff jolt to the Pentagon’s complacent culture.

America’s deficit in weapon manufacturing is not limited to ground forces equipment used in Ukraine. The U.S. Navy is in a protracted, slow-motion crisis: America’s shipbuilding base has shriveled to virtually nothing, while its aging workforce diminishes as employees reach retirement. (It doesn’t matter how much money Congress pours into shipbuilding if contractors lack skilled workers; training to make welds on naval nuclear power plants takes a year and a half to two years.) Cost growth per ship is such that the Navy cannot realistically afford to build at the same rate as the Chinese. Perhaps most depressing, the Navy has apparently forgotten how to design and build ships: Two classes that were supposed to revitalize the surface fleet, the Zumwalt-class destroyer and the littoral combat ship, have been unmitigated disasters. 

U.S. shipbuilding has become so decrepit that Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said he was “floored” by South Korea’s shipbuilding capacity and skill after a recent visit there. Among other things, he was impressed by that country’s fully digitized monitoring of the production process that allows South Korean firms to predict to the day when a ship will be delivered. That capability is well beyond U.S. shipyards. 

A decline in the number of naval shipyards, the virtual extinction of commercial shipbuilding, the loss of specialized suppliers, and the drastic reduction of the Navy’s in-house design capability have all combined to produce a perfect storm. Ships worn out from two decades of extended deployment in the Middle East’s “forever wars” need repairs and service life extension overhauls, but the waiting list is years long, while new vessels are well behind schedule. President Ronald Reagan’s vaunted 600-ship fleet has become a hollow navy of 293 ships and falling.

America’s defense industrial base has coevolved with what the military historian Russell Weigley called “the American way of war.” Since the Civil War, American military operations have been marked neither by consistently brilliant generalship, daring strategy and tactics, nor even an expectation of outstanding performance at the small-unit level, although these have been on display often enough. The U.S. Army’s infantry training did not match the thoroughness of the German army’s until roughly mid-1944, when 125,000 U.S. casualties in the Normandy campaign finally led to more realistic training. 

Even American weaponry, although generally of high quality and good reliability, has not invariably proved superior to that of the enemy. Many World War II tank crews complained that the standard M4 Sherman could not fight on equal terms with the most modern German tanks, and pilots of the first generation of American fighter jets got a rude surprise when they met the Soviet MiG-15 in the skies over Korea. In Vietnam, early models of the M16 rifle, firing a cartridge containing powder that fouled the weapon, had a frequently fatal tendency to jam in combat, whereas the Soviet AK-47, cheaply made of stamped metal parts and having tolerances so loose it would not be accepted by a U.S. ordnance inspector, was supremely reliable in the dust and mud of Indochina. 

Where the United States excelled above any other nation was in the sheer quantity of war materiel that it could produce, and a superb logistics system that could get it where it was needed on time. If the Sherman wasn’t as proficient as the German Tiger one on one, the Americans could generally bring several tanks to the fight for each German tank and overwhelm it—that is, if the American airpower soaring over Europe hadn’t already taken it out. Even reaching the combat zone might have been impossible for the enemy; relentless U.S. bombing rendered the Germans so short of fuel that their tanks and other vehicles were frequently immobilized. The industrial warfare America had mastered was summarized in the poem “A Bower of Roses,” by Louis Simpson:

For every shell Krupp fired
General Motors sent back four.

This American way of war was practiced throughout the Cold War. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the U.S. government subsidized robust commercial and military shipbuilding industries, applied strict antitrust enforcement to the defense contracting industry to preserve robust competition, and maintained large stockpiles of the weaponry, ammunition, and metals needed for specialized production. Even in the mid-1980s, American war planning for a Soviet invasion of Europe called for 10 divisions to be moved to Europe in 10 days, a logistical feat of staggering complexity. 

The collapse of U.S. commercial shipping and decline in stocks of war reserve materials from the 1980s onward meant less equipment and far fewer American-flagged ships to deliver it overseas. By 2017, the Army’s logistical capabilities had deteriorated to the point that it would require more than 40 days for a brigade (no more than a third the size of a division) to unload equipment, get organized, and move to the front—not even counting the time it would take to assemble the unit stateside and cross the Atlantic. 

Is this dramatic erosion in munition stocks, production capability, and proficiency at mobilization and deployment a result of a lack of resources? The Institute for Policy Studies estimated in 2021 that beginning with the defense buildup after 9/11, the Defense Department spent a cumulative total of $16.3 trillion. Adding appropriations for the next two years, we arrive at $18 trillion. In constant-dollar terms, annual post-9/11 military funding is higher than the Cold War average, and exceeds earlier peaks of spending (the Korean War, Vietnam, and the 1980s buildup). What’s more, it has sustained itself at this high level for more than two decades, much longer than the earlier buildups. 

If lack of funding were responsible for the Defense Department’s sorry state of military and industrial readiness, then no amount of money could solve the problem. The sclerosis that set in after the end of the Cold War was a symptom of a fundamental shift in the American way of war, the role of the military in American society, and, perhaps above all, the gradual but profound transformation of the American economy in recent decades. No single decision eroded the defense industrial base, nor were the causes always confined to the Pentagon’s sphere of control. It happened in stages, over several decades, with leaders in both parties contributing to the slow-motion disaster. 

The number of books and articles analyzing the ideological movement that began around 1980 and resulted in the financialization of the U.S. economy at the expense of manufacturing would fill a good-sized library. The controlling ideas of Reaganism were, of course, an eagerness to spend big on national defense, but also an anti-government libertarianism that refused to see a healthy industrial base as necessary to the nation’s well-being. It created wealth beyond measure while spawning ruination in industrial towns like Detroit and Youngstown, and produced more than 800 American billionaires even as it helped generate the political alienation and bitterness that threaten the unity of the country. Arguably, it represents the most significant paradigm shift in American society in the country’s post–World War II history. It is impossible that the onetime arsenal of democracy could have emerged unscathed.

The defense buildup during Ronald Reagan’s presidency seemed at first glance to be a golden era for the defense industry; production of everything—tanks, ships, aircraft, every kind of defense equipment—increased at a healthy rate. Defense budgets grew so quickly that the Pentagon couldn’t spend the money fast enough: This led to the mini-scandal of the merged surplus accounts at the Department of Defense, which hoarded billions of dollars that Congress appropriated rather than either obligating the money or sending it back to the Treasury. Even so, defense companies were now flush with cash—which, as it turned out, could also be a liability, given the nature of the era’s libertarian economic fads.

In the 1980s, Milton Friedman’s holy grail of shareholder value became the received wisdom. In its wake came all the schemes that permeated business during that decade: leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, outsourcing, downsizing, and share buybacks (which had been all but prohibited as a form of stock manipulation until Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission eased regulation in 1982). The defense industry and its second-tier suppliers, their values artificially inflated by the bonanza gushing from the Pentagon, were ripe for leveraged takeovers and other financial stratagems. What had once been considered an independent and even sinister leviathan (popularly called the military-industrial complex) was now a subordinate of Wall Street’s dictates. 

In addition, the Reagan administration, under the influence of Robert Bork, turned antitrust enforcement on its head and essentially stopped enforcing antitrust law. This began an era of government waving through corporate mergers that was radically different from the previous 50 years of practice and has only been significantly curtailed under President Joe Biden. 

In a sign of what was to come, in 1982 Chrysler sold its defense business (which was profitable, as it had recently won the Abrams tank contract) to the defense conglomerate General Dynamics. Why sell a profit center? The Federal Reserve’s high interest rate policy had left the company’s auto business teetering on the brink of bankruptcy while the Reagan buildup had goosed the value of its defense operation. Fourteen years later, Detroit Arsenal, the plant where Chrysler had produced 22,000 tanks in World War II, closed, leaving the General Dynamics plant in Lima, Ohio, as the sole tank production site.

The 10 largest defense companies in the mid-1980s were McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, Rockwell, General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed, United Technologies, Hughes, Raytheon, and Grumman. By 2000, the top tier was reduced to five: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Most of these resulted from mergers with other large defense companies, reducing both capacity and competition. This has led to an oligopolistic concentration: In 2023, the top six Defense Department contractors received almost $200 billion in revenue in the defense business, with much smaller figures booked by all the rest. 

While the Reagan administration was pouring money into defense, its libertarian zeal proceeded to undermine the industrial base supporting defense. Among the first acts of the administration was to end subsidies for commercial shipbuilding and phase out operating subsidies for American-flagged commercial carriers. These subsidies were a particular bugaboo among libertarians like Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget director, David Stockman, whose fantasy budgeting made him synonymous with voodoo economics. This attitude ignored the fact that since the mid-20th century, any country that wished to be a maritime power had to provide government support. Predictably, U.S. commercial shipbuilding collapsed after 1981. 

No commercial shipbuilding means no production facilities or skilled labor that the U.S. Navy could use in a surge; no operating subsidies means no reserve of American mariners for ocean transport to overseas theaters. China, which subsidizes commercial shipbuilding, now has nearly 50 percent of the global commercial vessel market; its 20 large shipyards can produce both naval and commercial ships. U.S. commercial shipbuilding accounts for roughly a tenth of 1 percent of that market.

Another manifestation of Reagan-era libertarianism reshaping the U.S. defense base was the late-1980s effort to close what were regarded as unneeded military bases and facilities. To obviate Congress’s ability to arbitrarily pick and choose which bases to close in legislation, most proposals called for unneeded bases to be selected by an independent commission, with Congress getting only an up-or-down vote on the entire list of bases.

Dick Armey, the libertarian congressman from Texas, was the principal driver of the idea. His Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC) process was accepted by the Pentagon bureaucracy and made law. Five rounds of base closures were authorized: in 1988, 1991, 1993, 1995, and 2005. Altogether, more than 350 closures of major bases and facilities were undertaken; while many, perhaps the great majority, could be justified, the Defense Department let too many valuable facilities go while consistently underestimating costs and overestimating savings.

In particular, it closed too many maintenance facilities, with a long-term effect on equipment. The Air Force’s aircraft mission-capable rates have stagnated for years in the low 70 percent range—well below what would be needed in a crisis, particularly as the size of the aircraft fleet has steadily declined for more than 30 years. The problem is extremely acute in the Navy. According to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report, between 2011 and 2021, 10 classes of Navy ships experienced reduced steaming hours—meaning presence worldwide—while maintenance delays have increased. In the attack submarine force, the maintenance backlog has become a crisis: A 2023 Congressional Research Service report noted that 37 percent of the Navy’s attack sub force is unavailable for service, and that the problem is expected to worsen.

If the 1980s were the beginning of the decline of the defense industrial base, the 1990s kicked it into a freefall. In 1993, Secretary of Defense William Perry called together the CEOs of the major military contractors at his dining room at the Pentagon. In what became known as the “last supper,” Perry warned that pending defense budget cuts would lead to a sizable contraction of defense firms. 

John M. Deutch, then undersecretary of defense for acquisition, shifted the process into high gear by creatively construing federal acquisition regulations to permit defense companies to charge the Pentagon for the costs of these mergers and acquisitions. He claimed that he was merely clarifying existing federal acquisition regulations about allowable costs. But former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb has argued that the Defense Department had heretofore never allowed merger costs to be billed to the government, and that the Pentagon’s own career professionals disputed Deutch’s rationale. The gambit, largely worked out in secret, became a fait accompli. Critics, including tens of thousands of defense workers who were made redundant, called it “payoffs for layoffs.” 

Perry’s comments that night can be seen as the starting point for a wave of mergers and acquisitions that dramatically changed the industry landscape—in a 2005 paper, Pierre Chao, then at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted, “By the end of the 1990s, 107 firms had become five”—creating the current top-heavy defense industrial base. 

An estimated 400 mergers a year occur among defense companies, with oversight barely provided by two Pentagon employees. Partly as a result, 51 major aerospace and defense contractors in the 1990s became five. The number of airframe producers has fallen from eight to three. Ninety percent of missiles now come from three contractors. 

Following the imperatives of lean manufacturing, companies have little slack to support a production surge. Now that the Ukraine war has uncovered a serious shortage of Stinger air defense missiles, the Defense Department has second-sourced production of the missile, built by RTX (formerly Raytheon), to Lockheed Martin. But it will take five years to get a significant bump in production; no reserve of production capacity exists, and it will be difficult to find and qualify subcontractors for the various components.

Two decades after the “last supper,” Perry conceded that defense mergers had gone too far—without, however, fully owning up to his damaging role in initiating and incentivizing the process, and backing Deutch against the Pentagon’s own professional staff. At the same time, as the Pentagon was giving defense companies financial incentives to merge, Congress made its own contribution to bad policy. Hell-bent on balancing the budget by any means necessary, the Newt Gingrich–led House induced Congress to undertake sizable annual sales of the National Defense Stockpile. (Ironically, the budget came into balance by itself in 1998 owing to a flood of revenue from the tech boom; it unbalanced again due to George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001.)

The stockpile was established just before World War II to buy and store domestically unobtainable minerals and other raw materials necessary for defense production in case of an emergency. Throughout the Cold War, the Defense Department stockpiled reserves of minerals like chromium (which makes corrosion-resistant steel), cobalt (an essential additive to alloys in high-temperature environments like jet engines), and manganese (a hardener for steels that make armor plate); none of these minerals is available in commercially worthwhile quantities in the United States.

From my former position as a congressional staff member, I was an observer at the stockpile fire sale. Most of that decade was a period of depressed raw material prices before the 2000s boom in commodities driven by Chinese demand; the proponents of the sales had an uncanny genius for selling commodities like palladium precisely when prices were at their nadir. Congress also sold Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 1 at Elk Hills, California, in 1997, when a gallon of gas averaged about $1.20. The Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s shook the administration of Warren G. Harding—but Elk Hills went under the hammer with barely a ripple of adverse publicity.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the value of the stockpile was $9.6 billion in 1989 but declined to $888.1 million in 2021. Commodity reserves had dwindled to the point where the Defense Logistics Agency reported that “less than 10 percent of postulated wartime material shortfalls are estimated to be mitigated.” In 2022, Congress appropriated $125 million for the stockpile, the first infusion of money in three decades. 

Osama bin Laden’s September 11, 2001, attack on the United States ushered in the next phase of the systematic dismantling of the American way of war and the defense industrial base that sustained it. Al-Qaeda possessed no tanks, warplanes, or heavy artillery, and the Taliban who harbored bin Laden were hardly better armed. The U.S. military took control of Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, largely with the use of Special Forces. Saddam Hussein’s more heavily equipped forces in Iraq didn’t fare much better. In both countries, Washington’s goal was an ill-defined pacification rather than traditional victory, and U.S. forces adapted accordingly. There were plenty of sharp engagements, but on the whole, the military settled down to a constabulary role—the British experience in Northern Ireland, but on steroids. General officer promotions were based on perceived success dealing with insurgencies rather than large conventional conflicts, and these senior officers now dominate the military.

During this period, the Department of Defense comprehensively retooled the services—the Army in particular—for insurgency warfare. Its tactical doctrine for fighting a near-peer competitor in a conventional war languished as training concentrated on combating guerrilla forces. Funding for insurgency operations followed: The Congressional Research Service estimates that $1.55 trillion was spent on contingency operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and lesser deployments in the war on terrorism between 2001 and 2019. That represented the opportunity cost of money not spent on new-generation weapons or war reserve materials.

The Bush administration’s single-minded focus on counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors led to fateful decisions about which future weapons would equip the military. Only months after 9/11, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld canceled the planned Crusader self-propelled howitzer on the basis that heavy artillery was cumbersome and did not possess the required “transformational” capabilities for modern combat.

The Crusader would have been able to fire a conventional “dumb” (unguided) 155 mm round in excess of 40 kilometers. Rumsfeld’s solution was to tout the Excalibur rocket-assisted guided projectile, which could be fired from legacy howitzers, and which also had a range beyond 40 kilometers. These have been employed in Ukraine, but their unit cost of $100,000 makes them prohibitively expensive for general purpose use in a conflict in which artillery rounds are expended by the millions. The Excalibur also has GPS guidance that is subject to enemy jamming (dumb rounds are not), as the Ukrainians have discovered.

The Crusader, while not relevant to the type of insurgency war whose conduct Rumsfeld was busy bungling in Iraq, might have been highly applicable to the type of conventional war now being conducted in Ukraine. The Crusader could have fired vastly cheaper shells quicker than legacy systems; it could also have disengaged and changed positions more rapidly than the current Paladin self-propelled howitzer, let alone the towed M777 cannon. Rapidity of fire and quick movement are critical to the survival of artillery on a modern battlefield, where enemy surveillance drones can instantly detect artillery fire and rapidly call in counterfire. 

Barack Obama’s administration continued its predecessor’s concentration on insurgency war. In 2009, Obama’s secretary of defense, Bob Gates, initiated “deep cuts in many traditional weapon systems but new billions of dollars for others, along with more troops and new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan,” as The New York Times reported. Among the reductions was a cutoff in production of the F-22, the only fully mature fifth-generation fighter. (The fifth-generation F-35 is now in service but still experiencing problems in getting all its high-tech features working properly; the Chinese Chengdu J-20 and Russian Sukhoi Su-57 are examples of adversarial fifth-generation fighters.)

At the time, Rumsfeld’s and Gates’s decisions seemed to make sense in the context of a deemphasis of potential major conventional conflict with Russia or China in favor of counterinsurgency. They made calculated bets that the future (meaning a time span stretching from the point of their decisions through the service lives of the weapons their decisions affected) would look much the same as the world in 2002 or 2009. But the world of the 2020s appears to more closely resemble the Cold War, or even 1939. That the armed forces might have the wrong training, the wrong weapons, or not enough of the right weapons for this new era is due in part to the Bush administration’s having turned retribution against al-Qaeda into a quixotic and futile military occupation in the Middle East.

Focus on insurgencies hasn’t been the only problem. Since the early 1990s, planning for conventional wars even against large hypothetical foes was built on the model of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, whereby U.S. forces quickly overwhelm the enemy in a blitzkrieg of high-tech weaponry, electronic warfare, and rapid movement. This short-war theory was perhaps best characterized by Rumsfeld’s boastful prediction of “shock and awe” before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If that operation provided only an illusion of success until the war morphed into a guerilla insurgency quagmire, it would likely be even less effective against a Chinese adversary with a military force structure larger than that of the U.S., and one that is lavishly equipped with weapons produced by the largest manufacturing base in the world. 

Beginning with World War II, the United States has sought technological superiority over adversaries. But this doctrine was combined with a substantial force structure supported by an extensive industrial base. With the end of the Cold War, however, force size was significantly decreased while the acquisition system sought to develop a series of technological magic bullets. These wonder weapons frequently had a gestation period of well over a decade and were produced in small quantities, often by a single source—that is, when they worked at all.

The problem was compounded by the Defense Department’s typically granting only one-year contracts to makers of artillery and other simple weapon systems, reserving multi-year contracts for more advanced and expensive systems, like ships. Munitions have historically served as a billpayer—the Pentagon cuts back on purchasing them when budgets are tight to preserve money for more advanced weapons. This creates a roller coaster of munition production in which private industry struggles to maintain its workforce and keep plants operating: On the eve of the Ukraine war, the Army cut its request for 155 mm ammunition almost in half compared to the previous year’s appropriation. (The Biden administration has recently begun changing these practices: For the first time, the Defense Department is petitioning Congress to make multiyear purchases of artillery instead of awarding one-year contracts.)

The problem has become especially acute in light of the war in Ukraine, which has demonstrated that an enemy inferior in most technological areas might still prevail if it outnumbers its adversary, is casualty tolerant, and brings massive firepower to bear. In the naval arena, our admirals are now sounding the alarm over a Chinese fleet that has more combatant ships than the U.S. Navy; the last time another power possessed more vessels than our navy was during World War I. Recent efforts to match Chinese shipbuilding rates have faltered over poor design, bets on risky and immature technology, cost increases, and schedule slips. 

An infamous example of a magic bullet that became a dud when fired is the Zumwalt-class destroyer. One of its key missions was long-range shore bombardment, for which it would need a specially designed gun. After building three ships at an eye-watering total program cost of $22.5 billion, the Navy canceled the program when it stumbled on the fact that the gun—around which the entire ship had been built—used ammunition that was too expensive to use on a wide scale. The three completed hulls are still searching for a mission. The same money could have bought 10 perfectly serviceable Arleigh Burke–class destroyers at a time when the Navy’s leadership is scrambling to find enough vessels to compete with the relentlessly growing Chinese fleet.

How was such an egregious error possible? Evidence points to a decline in in-house expertise across the U.S. Navy. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Navy could design its own ships in a competent manner. But the early-1990s downsizing of the Pentagon workforce—combined with the new fad, taken from current civilian business management theories, to outsource work to private industry—led to a drastic loss of skills. The Navy reduced its organic staff of naval architects and engineers from 1,200 to 300, resulting in design and production issues not only with the Zumwalt destroyer, but with the littoral combat ship as well. Each LCS ended up costing more than twice the original estimate after slipping its schedule several years and constantly breaking down due to propulsion issues; many of them are now being retired at less than half their projected 25-year service life. 

To replace the ill-starred LCS, the Navy chose the Constellation-class frigate. It was originally supposed to have 85 percent commonality with the FREMM frigate already in service in European countries. The Navy awarded a contract in 2020 to build the lead ship, but has since issued so many change orders that there is now less than 15 percent commonality with the FREMM. It is hardly surprising that the program is running three years late.

The Navy is not the only service responsible for such disappointing outcomes. Between 1995 and 2009, the U.S. Army spent $32 billion on programs related to its Future Combat Systems program with little to show for it. FCS was supposed to create new manned and unmanned combat vehicles linked by a fast and flexible battlefield communications network. Currently, the burden of ground combat is still borne by the M1 Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, both designed in the 1970s. 

Had the Army been able to develop, produce, and field FCS (which included unmanned vehicles) in a timely and cost-effective manner, it might have provided a solution to the incredible lethality of high-intensity conventional war. For years, the general opinion has been that the Abrams tank is nearly invulnerable, but the ubiquity of both surveillance and strike drones over the battlefield has emphatically disproved that belief. Already, five of the 31 Abrams tanks sent to Ukraine have been lost to enemy action. 

Because of their prolonged development period, technical complexity, and high unit cost, each generation of a given weapon type almost invariably sees fewer numbers produced than those of its predecessor. These small production runs lead to fewer and fewer specialized suppliers who will only facilitize their plants for what are essentially craft rather than assembly line processes. The same applies to the subcontractors that produce components. Most of American commercial manufacturing is only willing and able to gear up for large production lots of a stable design—and all the services are notorious for inundating contractors with a myriad of change orders after the design is already approved for production. 

Following the imperatives of shareholder value is supposed to make for a successful company. The sad case of Boeing shows how it can destroy a business and the culture of excellence it had in the past. It was once the world’s premier aircraft manufacturer. Under the helm of the legendary Bill Allen, revolutionary projects like the 747, the world’s first jumbo jet, were a textbook lesson in managing a huge and complex project. Boeing is now the only remaining domestic manufacturer of airliners; it is also the fourth-largest defense contractor. Its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas (actually a stealth takeover of Boeing by the same financial engineers in the McDonnell Douglas C-suite who had brought that firm to ruin) was at the root of Boeing’s reputational downfall.

The ongoing fiasco of Boeing’s commercial airliner business is well known. The 787 and 737 MAX, Boeing’s only two new airliners since the merger, have been riddled with poor workmanship, substandard or ill-fitting components and subassemblies, and, in the case of the 737 MAX, faulty software generally believed to have been responsible for two horrific crashes soon after the plane’s debut. It is no surprise that Boeing has been steadily losing market share to Airbus. 

Boeing’s record with government contracts is hardly better. In 2002, Boeing attempted to lease air refueling tankers to the Air Force; the terms of the proposal (Defense Department buys major weapon systems; a lease was unprecedented) were so one-sided that it looked like a money grab. The deal fell apart, and an Air Force procurement executive landed in prison. When the Air Force ultimately put out for bid a requirement to buy (not lease) a new fleet of tankers, Airbus won, but an unchastened Boeing protested, and got the decision overturned. The resulting Boeing KC-46 tanker has been plagued with problems to this day.

It has been the same story with Boeing’s NASA projects. The Starliner crewed space capsule was years behind schedule, and more than a billion dollars over budget, before it successfully launched in June. One problem emerged this year when a mile of flammable tape in the crew compartment had to be removed, a serious safety issue that had somehow been overlooked. And the Starliner experienced helium leaks and problems with its thrusters on its journey to the International Space Station.

Did shareholder value take precedence over Boeing’s traditional safety culture? Over the past decade, the company has returned $59 billion to shareholders in buybacks and dividends. That represents $59 billion less to invest in plants and equipment, research and development, and retaining skilled production workers and engineers by rewarding them with higher pay. Without that reinvestment in infrastructure, Boeing has since its merger increasingly become a final assembler rather than builder of aircraft because it has lost the workforce and facilities to build most of an airframe in-house. It now farms out even major components all over the world to the lowest bidder.

The crowning example of how cost cutting came before any other consideration is Boeing’s move, shortly after the merger, to open a design bureau in Moscow to take advantage of the cheap labor. The operation grew to 2,000 employees. The company didn’t have second thoughts after Russia’s invasion of Georgia, its assassination campaign against dissident Russians living in NATO countries, its illegal annexation of Crimea, and even its shooting down a Boeing airliner carrying 298 passengers and crew. Boeing only pulled the plug after the invasion of Ukraine—temporarily, it said.

The acrimonious debate over the Affordable Care Act laid bare an ideological divide over the meaning of the preamble of the Constitution. Does the “general Welfare” of the American people mean that the health of the citizen is a collective responsibility for the common good, as in most developed countries, or it a business opportunity for health systems, insurance companies, and the hedge funds that control them?

National defense is no less a public good than policing or firefighting. The reasons for the number of howitzer shells to be produced, how many should be kept in inventory, and where the material inputs for the shells come from are totally different from the imperatives of free market forces driving the manufacture of washing machines or cell phones. Had the Army Industrial College in the mid-1930s recommended that Boeing outsource portions of the B-17 bomber to Imperial Japan, the idea would have met with outrage and accusations of insanity. Yet in 2022, the Defense Department suspended deliveries of the F-35 fighter—an aircraft intended to be the mainstay of the U.S. Air Force for decades—after discovering that components of the plane came from China. Layers of outsourcing to private-sector subcontractors and sub-subcontractors had masked the problem.

Clause 17 of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress authority and jurisdiction for the “Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings.” A plain reading of the text suggests an overriding governmental interest in and proprietorship over the infrastructure necessary for the common defense. The nature of modern warfare dictates that high-technology weaponry requires extensive assistance by the expertise available in the private sector, but at what point do private companies, driven by their own market imperatives, become the tail that wags the dog? 

In World War II and the Cold War, the organic logistics of the U.S. armed forces may have been the one capability, even more than technology, that set it apart from other militaries. But beginning in the 1980s, contractors began to lobby the Department of Defense and Congress for pieces of the maintenance and repair mission, claiming that outsourcing to the private sector would reap cost savings; one by one, Army depots, Air Force logistics centers, and Navy shipyards—each of which was a large manufacturing and repair facility and an integral part of the industrial base—were closed and the work outsourced. In the hands of contractors, the promised monetary windfall never materialized, and, most egregiously in the case of the Navy, the work didn’t get done.

Logistics to and in the theater of operations was also extensively privatized, to the point that the military is incapable of sustaining itself without in-theater contractors. Halliburton, the principal logistics provider in the Iraq War, became infamous for its overbilling and inadequate support of the soldiers—not to mention its political conflict of interest involving the Bush administration.

Logistics won’t function unless you have the item on hand when you need it. Once the business philosophy that holding inventory is a dead loss to the company became dominant, business inventories were slashed across the economy. Given the taxation of business inventories, it is to some extent true that they are a burden. Since the end of the Cold War, the same mentality in the civilian economy that exalted just-in-time delivery and reducing inventory to a minimum (which led to the supply chain crisis during the pandemic) infected the Defense Department, which disposed of mountains of alleged excess inventory of spare parts and other items.

It is delusional to believe that the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy over the past four decades would not exact a toll on national defense. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and other measures, the Biden administration has signaled the beginning of the end of the era of divestment from manufacturing, offshoring, and downsizing. Even the Republican Party, which enthusiastically engineered many of the features of the postindustrial economy, is now ideologically split over laissez-faire economics. As the broader economy attempts to shift to a more resilient model, so must the Pentagon—and Congress, which is supposed to oversee it—find a new way to manage the defense establishment. 

First, the Biden administration should impose on defense contracting the same vigorous renewal of antitrust enforcement that it is bringing to the wider economy. It took a good first step two years ago when the Federal Trade Commission blocked a proposed merger between Lockheed Martin and the rocket motor maker Aerojet. But curbing further consolidation isn’t enough. The maddening and disastrous inability of the Pentagon to procure sufficient quantities of even the most basic munitions, much less more complex weapon systems, can only be overcome by bringing more competition to the defense sector, and that will require a wholesale dismantling of the prime contractor oligopoly. 

Second, the Defense Department must rebuild in-house expertise, as in the case of the Naval Sea Systems Command’s ship design capability. It must also recapitalize its system of depots, air logistics centers, and shipyards in terms of plants and equipment as well as personnel, and even open new ones if necessary. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Logistics Agency need to reassess the materiel requirements of high-intensity warfare in light of the Ukraine war and develop a long-term, comprehensive plan to rebuild a war reserve inventory.

Third, the way in which the services build weapons must change. Absurd overspecification and unrealistic or outdated requirements have to be jettisoned, because they drive away potential bidders. Incessant change orders to designs already in production have to be curtailed.

The artillery shell famine is critical for the U.S. Army; for Ukraine, it is existential. Precision metal casting has greatly improved in accuracy in recent decades and would be a cheaper and quicker way to produce shell casings than the current process of forging and milling. But the Army has rejected the idea, with the excuse that it would be too onerous and prolonged to qualify the process and find a manufacturer. In that case, shouldn’t the service streamline the qualification process? 

Fourth, the Defense Department should allow more prototyping, including initiatives by industry, knowing that many of them will fail; a multiplicity of designs will offer more options and potentially breakthrough technology. The P-51 Mustang, the most successful American fighter of World War II, was a clean-sheet-of-paper initiative by the contractor, North American Aviation. In 1940, the British Purchasing Commission wanted NAA to build the Curtiss Warhawk under license, but the company’s president said he could get a superior aircraft in the air quicker than it would take to establish a production line for the Warhawk. Only 102 days after the contract was signed, the prototype Mustang rolled out of the hangar.

Fifth, Congress should make annual appropriations to rebuild and make necessary adjustments to the composition of the National Defense Stockpile. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is due for reauthorization by 2025. It needs to be rewritten to suit current conditions and the present state of American industry; one expert believes that the Defense Department should offer loan guarantees under the DPA to help gear up private suppliers, something the Pentagon has previously refused to do. Congress should consider reinstituting commercial shipbuilding subsidies to broaden the Navy’s industrial base, as a retired Marine general has proposed in a U.S. Naval Institute paper.

Finally, does it require an act of Congress to mandate what ought to be common sense? The little-noted tale of Boeing’s design bureau in Moscow might be the worst example ever of profit-driven recklessness. Did it not occur to Boeing that it was setting up an operation in the country that practically perfected mass, government-directed cyberattacks and cybertheft? That its employees would have access to company passwords and might be Russian intelligence personnel? It’s not as if those cheaply obtained engineers made the 737 MAX a stellar aircraft.

Most of these reforms would cost money up front; a few of them could reap big recurring savings. Those would only materialize in the longer term. But Americans, and the Pentagon along with it, have been eating their seed corn for four decades. In Ukraine and the South China Sea no less than in the post-pandemic supply chain crisis, the bill for that gluttonous indulgence has come due.

The post Why Can’t America Build Enough Weapons? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When most Americans look at Joe Biden, they see (according to polls) a weak old man who hasn’t gotten much done.

When European heads of state look at Joe Biden, they see an accomplished world-historic leader.

An aging world-historic leader, to be sure. Joke: How old is Joe Biden? He’s so old that when NATO leaders gather at their July summit in Washington, Biden will be the only one born before the organization was founded 75 years ago.  

But as Biden’s age has advanced, so too has his clout and respect within the alliance. It was Biden who warned European leaders in early 2022 that Vladimir Putin was going to send his military into Ukraine, a warning many of them initially refused to believe. When the invasion happened as predicted, it was Biden who rallied Western and other allied countries to Ukraine’s defense. It was also Biden who authorized a dramatic increase in U.S. natural gas exports to Europe as Russia cut off supplies. It was Biden who picked up the phone and called the heads of Finland and Sweden with a quiet suggestion that they join NATO. And it was Biden and his team who overcame the resistance of Turkey and Hungary to make NATO expansion a reality, thus turning Putin’s military quagmire into a geo-strategic disaster for Russia. 

No president since Ronald Reagan has more successfully wielded influence in the Western alliance. Yet Biden has also overturned one of Reagan’s greatest legacies, Reaganomics, and replaced that free market “neoliberal” ideology with an economic vision of his own, Bidenomics. Instead of cutting safety net programs, Biden vastly expanded them during the pandemic. Instead of encouraging corporate monopolies, his administration is charging them with antitrust violations. Instead of “letting the market decide” all matters of economic development, his government is providing hundreds of billions of dollars to encourage private investment in green energy and microchip manufacturing on American soil.  

As a result, instead of declining as an economic power, as most experts 10 years ago predicted would happen, the U.S. over the past four years has zoomed ahead, writes former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark in this issue’s cover story. American voters may not have noticed, but every NATO official visiting Washington understands that on virtually every economic measure—GDP, wages, inflation, job creation, business start-ups—the U.S. is outperforming their countries, and China, too. 

They are also aware that military and diplomatic strength depends on economic strength. So, while European leaders might protest some of Biden’s positions, like favorable treatment for American-made EVs, they mostly accommodate themselves to him. For instance, under pressure from Biden, the European Commission has taken a harder line on China’s predatory trade policies despite resistance from Germany and other countries with massive investments in China.

“America’s strong and resilient economy is a godsend at this moment, because we are facing the most dangerous period in our history since at least World War II,” warns Clark. Among other challenges, he notes, “China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are building an alliance of convenience against the United States and our allies” while “our military-industrial base, depleted over the course of recent decades, struggles to field sufficient quantities of even the most basic weaponry, such as artillery shells.” 

The latter problem also has its roots, ironically, in Reaganomics. “While the Reagan administration was pouring money into defense, its libertarian zeal proceeded to undermine the industrial base supporting defense,” observes the former Republican congressional defense staffer Mike Lofgren elsewhere in this issue. Reagan cut subsidies for commercial shipping, which the military relies on for logistics, and greenlighted defense industry mergers that led to the mothballing of weapon factories—actions future administrations continued. The Biden administration, Lofgren reports, has taken some modest first steps toward reversing this dire situation.  

Biden has started to address other destructive aspects of Reaganomics beyond the military realm. As Tamara Gilkes Borr explains in her review of Washington Monthly contributing editor Anne Kim’s new book, Poverty for Profit, the Gipper began a trend of encouraging corporations to take a lead role in delivering safety net benefits, from health services to housing. Defensible in theory, it has turned out in practice to be a disaster for taxpayers as well as recipients. For instance, low-income working families who want to receive the federal Earned Income Tax Credit often rely on for-profit tax prep companies that can take 20 percent or more of the benefit. This year, the Biden administration unveiled a new government service that allows these families to file directly to the IRS for free.

Of course, millions of Americans whose economic well-being and security have been enhanced by these and other actions have almost no idea that any of it has happened, and even those who are aware seem so far unconvinced that Biden had anything to do with it. That’s why the polls this summer have Biden neck and neck with Donald Trump, a convicted felon who has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO.

Trump scares the bejesus out of the alliance leaders gathering in Washington. And they have rising right-wing illiberalism in their own countries. So, they will greet Biden with genuine admiration and wish him well with desperate sincerity. But they will also be having side conversations with emissaries from MAGA world because most of them think Biden is going to lose in November.

And he might. But they should also keep two things in mind. First, the best way to defeat right-wing populism is to deliver economic conditions that benefit average people, and Biden has done that. Second, no American president who has presided over an improving economy has failed to be reelected. 

The post NATO Joe appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Walk down the eastern steps of the U.S. Capitol and follow Pennsylvania Avenue for several miles, and you’ll find yourself in District Heights, Maryland. Even without knowing much about the majority-Black suburb, you will quickly get the sense that District Heights is poor. Instead of shopping centers with Panera and Starbucks, you see names like Ace Cash Express, the nation’s largest check-cashing chain, and dd’s DISCOUNTS, a bargain clothing outlet. Alongside them is another class of business you might not notice, less obviously low-rent but still very much dependent on poverty. There’s Liberty Tax, a nationwide franchise operation that helps residents file for low-income tax credits; Pine Dentistry (formerly “Kool Smiles”), which serves patients on Medicaid; and Woodland Springs, an apartment complex that welcomes tenants with housing vouchers. These are private businesses, but they deliver public services using taxpayer dollars. And as the journalist Anne Kim argues in Poverty for Profit, these storefronts are more than just a signal of race and wealth. They are signposts of exploitation.

Kim, a Washington Monthly contributing editor, opens her book with a drive through District Heights, taking us inside each of these establishments to reveal how, here and across America, they serve as middlemen between government benefits and the poor. Over the past few decades, she reveals, a vast corporate ecosystem has grown to monopolize and extract enormous profits from various “markets” for social services: dentistry, dialysis, tax credits, job training, housing, and more. 

In theory, a private company could provide these services just as well as a government agency could—perhaps even better. But time and again Kim shows how these businesses cut corners, deliver poor results, and systematically abuse their clients, all in the name of profit. Both sides of the political divide have failed to police or even to comprehend this growing industry, and as a result are failing to address the issue. Liberals focus on increasing funding, not recognizing that these companies will eagerly siphon it away. Conservatives want more accountability for beneficiaries, even though such demands make the programs more complex, thereby giving private corporations opportunities to step in and drain away more taxpayer money. To truly fix the problem, Kim argues, you need to understand the poverty-for-profit industry.

Kim’s first chapter takes us to Rogers, Arkansas, where at Rogers Car-Mart you can get your taxes done and buy a used car at the same time. Businesses like this one have sprung up all over the country to take advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a broadly popular policy that lifted 7 million above the poverty line in 2022. The EITC is the primary tax benefit for low-income workers, and serves as a critical chunk of annual income for many households. But the complexity of claiming it—multiple formulas, dozens of pages of reading—is a lure for predatory practices. 

When Kim visited Rogers Car-Mart in spring 2022 and asked for an estimate for herself, the business quoted her $198 to file a federal and state return. The preparer would tack on a $93 charge if Kim received a refund, along with a $27 “check printing fee” for an advance on the money. These costs add up to about 15 percent of the average federal refund in 2022. She could then use the rest of her refund as part of a down payment on a used car. Kim could have walked into Rogers Car-Mart expecting a $2,000 refund—the average amount that EITC-claiming families receive annually—and walked out of there with every penny going to this hybrid tax preparer/car dealer. “That, of course, is the idea,” Kim writes. Tax-time retailers will sell you discount shoes, pawned jewelry, and a rent-to-own TV along with your fee-laden return—all in order to capture as much of your refund as possible.

What lures the working poor into these exploitative businesses is that they need help filing their taxes to get the EITC benefit. When policy makers devised the program in the 1970s, they were adamant that it should benefit working families who have income to report, rather than nonworking people. Over the years, lawmakers have demanded more and more layers of reporting to police that distinction, resulting in an ever more complex process for filers. The IRS instructions for the EITC are three times longer than instructions for the alternative minimum tax, a similar tax break that almost exclusively benefits the wealthy, and use eight different formulas to calculate eligibility for filers and their dependents.  

As strange as it may sound, Kim’s $318 quote at Rogers Car-Mart was a relative bargain. An investigation by a Washington, D.C., antipoverty nonprofit revealed that tax prep for EITC filers can run from $400 to as high as $1,200. To make matters worse, low-income workers often get subpar service from these largely unregulated preparers. An investigation by the Government Accountability Office in 2014 found that only two of 19 companies did a tax return correctly, and the Treasury Department found that in 2017 one-quarter of EITC dollars were issued improperly. Some outright fraudulent companies falsely inflate clients’ refunds and then pocket the difference. The IRS audits low-income filers five times as often as everyone else. When that happens, it’s the families, not the preparers they paid, who are on the hook. 

Meanwhile, the IRS is well aware that this needless complexity leads to waste and fraud and that the agency could easily solve this problem. The IRS already has all the wage and income information it needs to determine a filer’s EITC eligibility; it could automatically fill out and mail them their tax returns. (It could do the same for most middle- and lower-income Americans, who don’t have lots of complicated investments and deductions.) Democrats have long urged such reforms. Yet tax prep companies have spent millions on lobbying—up to $5 million in 2016 alone, according to a report by ProPublica—to stop the IRS from implementing this “return-free” filing, and they’ve found ready allies among Republicans in Congress. 

Next, Kim moves us to East Los Angeles, California, where 96 percent of residents are Hispanic and more than a quarter of children live in poverty. With only 11 percent of the population holding a bachelor’s degree (compared to 36 percent statewide), International College, a local job training program, would seem to offer a way up. But the for-profit school has only five courses, including a cake decoration class that promises to teach students “how to properly bake and ice a cake.” The course is online, and costs $5,100. Less than half of students who enrolled at International College in 2020 finished their classes—that is, except for cake decoration, which three students took and completed that year. 

There’s no evidence that anyone who graduated landed a job, because the school didn’t bother to fill in the job placement data required by the state, which covers the tuition for many of the students through the federally funded, state-administered Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Yet despite the school’s refusal to even try to justify its government subsidies, it remains on California’s approved list of workforce training providers. That list includes some high-performing institutions, but job seekers have no way to distinguish them from the reams of low-performing and sometimes shady options. The situation is hardly better in other states. Nationally, WIOA participants earn less per year than the typical worker who lacks a high school degree. 

A similar lack of oversight plagues Job Corps, the government’s largest education and training program for low-income people, with an annual budget of $1.7 billion. The program is mostly run by a duopoly of for-profit government contractors, with perennially poor results. A report by the inspector general in 2018 found that the program did not place students in “meaningful jobs appropriate to their training” and the majority of graduates made less than the median income for workers without high school diplomas. 

Yet money continues to flow to these programs, thanks to a combination of aggressive lobbying by the companies that profit, and good old-fashioned pork barrel politics. Job Corps participants are required to live in residences that require staff. These centers can provide quite a few jobs for some communities that desperately need employment, which makes closing the centers politically unpalatable. Job Corps contractors are not shy about reminding politicians how unpopular it would be to cut jobs in their own districts. This prevents government funding from going to better-performing programs, such as Year Up, a nonprofit that since 2000 has trained more than 29,000 people for jobs in IT, software development, and more. 

Kim credits much of the shift toward the corporate takeover of social services to Emanuel Savas, an academic and public administrator who is widely acknowledged as the father of “privatization.” His work fueled the conservative campaign in the 1980s to take government services away from unaccountable bureaucracies and entrust them to efficient, competitive entrepreneurs. Ronald Reagan embraced Savas’s ideas and appointed him as an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There, Savas championed the policy of moving public housing recipients out of government-run high-rises into private apartments by providing them with what were then called “Section 8” housing vouchers. Future presidents, including Bill Clinton, accelerated that policy. 

Kim acknowledges that many public housing projects were hellish places to live. But she also makes clear that housing vouchers haven’t lived up to their promise either. Advocates envisioned that vouchers would help the poor escape high-poverty neighborhoods. Yet the dearth of affordable housing generally, combined with the fact that landlords in most states aren’t required to rent to voucher recipients, means there is a great undersupply of apartments recipients can rent, and the vast majority that are available are in poor neighborhoods, with their attendant high crime and substandard schools. This gap between supply and demand also allows unscrupulous landlords to profit off the voucher holder’s limited options by providing substandard homes at inflated prices. An investigation by The Washington Post found that the city of D.C. was paying $2,467 per month for an apartment for an elderly resident when the market rate for a similar apartment was $1,613 per month.

In the criminal justice realm, the most infamous example of privatization is the for-profit prison industry. So tempting are the potential returns that some private companies have been known to build “speculative” prisons in rural areas with high unemployment, and then encourage local leaders to secure a contract. This works. 

But profiteering isn’t limited to for-profit incarceration. It’s rife in state-run institutions, too, which contract with outside vendors that charge inmates exorbitant fees for food, toiletries, health care, and other services. Some prison telecom vendors demand nearly $25 for a 15-minute in-state call, and companies like Western Union will charge up to $12 to transfer $25 into an inmate’s phone account. The disproportionately Black prison population performs forced labor for pennies an hour, a practice that civil rights advocates often compare to slavery. State prisons even bill inmates for their incarceration. One man in Florida was charged $50 per day for his nearly three-year stay in state prison (about $55,000 total). In Connecticut, the daily rate is $249. 

These and other exploitative arrangements continue in large part because state prison systems, at the behest of governors and legislatures, receive a cut of the profit. Essentially, state policy makers have decided to soak the families of inmates (because that’s who mostly pays these fees) to relieve themselves of having to ask taxpayers to shoulder more of the financial burden of administering public prisons.

Incentive structures are also to blame in other policy realms, like health care. Kim shows how many Medicaid programs use fee-for-service models that reward companies for performing more procedures rather than for providing better care. The average Medicaid reimbursement for child dental services is just 61 percent of the fees paid by private insurance. Most dentists refuse to take Medicaid patients for this reason. For those that do take Medicaid patients, many of them corporate-owned practices, this payment model encourages providers to cram as many bodies into a room as possible. Children get dental work with their heads barely a few feet apart. 

These providers also pressure parents to allow costly and unnecessary dental work on their children, for which reimbursements are much higher than for routine procedures like dental cleanings. Kim recounts instances of young children getting as many as 17 root canals and caps. An article published in 2022 by the Journal of the American Dental Association found that children on Medicaid were more likely to have multiple root canals than children with private insurance.

To perform these procedures on small children, many clinics have resorted to cruel tactics that are frowned upon elsewhere in commercial dentistry. A Kool Smiles clinic in Connecticut wrapped children in cocoon-like structures called “papoose boards” to keep them from squirming during long and painful procedures, according to a whistle-blower. The same whistleblower reported that the clinic kept a hair dryer for children who wet themselves from fear and pain. In Maryland, a Kool Smiles dentist propped open a patient’s mouth so painfully wide for a “baby root canal” that she vomited halfway through the procedure. The dentist turned the patient on her side and suctioned her mouth and throat so she would not choke. The Justice Department reached a $23.9 million settlement in 2018 with Benevis and its affiliated Kool Smiles dental clinics for submitting false claims and performing medically unnecessary procedures for children on Medicaid. Investigations of other Medicaid providers have revealed similarly horrifying dental practices and overtreatment. 

Kim also shows that things are no better in the private dialysis market, which is largely controlled by two companies—DaVita and Fresenius Medical Care. To maximize profits on Medicaid’s low reimbursement rates for blood transfusions, these firms rush patients through dialysis in their factory-line centers, where people are regularly carted away with extreme exhaustion and sometimes heart failure after having the blood pumped through their bodies at dizzying speeds. Simply raising reimbursement rates is not the answer, Kim notes. Only months after Connecticut raised fees for Medicaid dentists in 2008, it saw a spike in expensive dental work as profiteers capitalized on the higher rates. 

As the Connecticut experience shows, these can be thorny issues to solve, but Kim outlines several steps that the government can take. To start off, she calls for the federal government to conduct a comprehensive “census” of privatized social services, which operate largely in the dark. With more information, policy makers can craft wiser solutions and conduct more effective oversight, which is badly needed, given the billions wasted and defrauded across the industry each year. Governments should follow up by exercising their policing powers—for instance, by kicking poorly performing colleges off their list of approved workforce training providers. 

Changing the incentive structure could also help. Kim laments how fee-for-service medical care leads to abuse, but she does not mention by name the leading alternative, value-based care, which rewards providers for delivering better health outcomes. Medicare, a handful of states, and countries like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have adopted variants of this model, also known as “pay for performance,” with moderate success. The government could also leverage its huge buying power to improve what’s available to low-income families, similar to how big public health programs like the VA negotiate lower prices for prescriptions and medical care. 

More fundamentally, state and federal authorities should consider clawing back some of the responsibilities they have handed to private corporations. In many cases, government bureaucracies are better at delivering public services—for example, the most successful Job Corps programs, Kim notes, are run by the U.S. Forest Service. If the IRS can eliminate the need for EITC recipients and other Americans to rely on a predatory tax prep industry, why not empower it to do so? The Biden administration took a big step forward this year with a pilot project that allowed taxpayers in 12 states to file electronically for free with the IRS. In late May, the IRS announced that it would make the program permanent and expand it to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. State governments, too, can be more assertive—for instance, by narrowing their contracts with the managed care companies that handle Medicaid plans, taking decisions about granting care out of their hands. In all, Kim argues that America needs more governance, not less.

Kim concludes that the privatization experiment of the past 40 years has failed. For decades the federal government’s antipoverty programs have enabled corporations to profit off the backs of the poor and the taxpayers who support them. Yet politics on both sides prevents improvement because it misses the real problem. Politicians, especially conservatives, focus their accountability on the recipients of the services (by ensuring that welfare recipients are working, for example) rather than on the people doling out those services. Liberals and progressives tend to throw more money into these programs rather than evaluating them, out of fear that such evaluations might result in budget cuts or more privatization. And so the process continues, with government programs benefiting the people who need government help the least. Transparency is the first big step, and in exposing the inner workings of these private industries profiting from public money, Kim’s book is an important move toward reform.

The post Poverty, Inc. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On a dreary afternoon in 1949, Judith Jones perched at her typewriter in Doubleday’s Paris office. As she composed rejection letters for unsolicited manuscripts, a slim volume buried in the slush pile caught the 25-year-old secretary’s eye. The cover photo was a haunting image of a young girl with a searching gaze and dark, wavy hair. The book, an advance copy slated for a limited print run in France, was a diary by a 13-year-old German Jewish girl named Anne Frank who had spent years hiding in an Amsterdam attic before her death in a Nazi concentration camp. Jones read the entire book in one sitting, transfixed by the intimacy of the diary entries and the author’s singular voice.

Stunned that the book had been relegated to the reject pile, Jones pleaded with a senior editor to buy the English-language rights and publish the diary for the American market. As Jones later recalled, he asked, “What, that book by that kid?” Jones persisted, urging him to reconsider. It was a tough sell: In the postwar environment, publishers were reluctant to revisit the dark days of the Holocaust. But it was good—and lucrative—advice. When Doubleday finally published the U.S. version of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, it was an overnight phenomenon, soon dubbed a “classic” by The New York Times. Anne Frank became one of the best-selling books in history and, in 2000, was ranked number two on the Boston Public Library’s “100 Most Influential Books of the Century.”

One might assume that it was Jones’s discovery of Anne Frank that launched her luminous, era-defining career. But as the historian Sara B. Franklin writes in The Editor, the first book-length biography of Jones, that’s not what happened. Indeed, Jones’s pivotal role in Anne Frank’s U.S. publication remained publicly unacknowledged for decades. In the almost uniformly male world of 1950s book publishing, Jones was still treated as little more than a secretary for years after the memoir’s publication, without standing to acquire her own authors or attend editorial meetings.

It would take her improbable discovery of a second overlooked manuscript to later appear on the “100 Most Influential Books” list to finally change that. Nearly a decade after the U.S. publication of Anne Frank, Jones was back in her hometown of New York City and working at Alfred A. Knopf when she came across the manuscript of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a 750-page tome of authentic recipes written by an unknown American expat named Julia Child and two French colleagues. 

The story of her discovery of Mastering, and her four-decade partnership with Child, provides the spine of this delightful biography that explores Jones’s instrumental role in fostering a literature dedicated to the celebration and culture of food in America, while simultaneously contributing to the American canon of literary fiction and poetry. Franklin convincingly argues that Jones’s impact was expansive, shaping “what we cook and eat, the stories we read and the ones we tell.” And yet Jones remains relatively unknown to the public. This biography, Franklin writes, “is my attempt to give the editor, the woman, her due.”

By the time Mastering’s massive manuscript arrived at Knopf, it had been rejected by multiple publishers. It was perceived to be too long, too technical, too expensive to print, and, in 1950s America, where postwar cooking was characterized by canned ingredients and prepackaged foods, too old-fashioned. And yet Jones, by then a junior editor, was instantly charmed. During her years in Paris, she had become a proficient home cook, even briefly cohosting a pop-up restaurant. Back in New York, she struggled to re-create beloved French dishes. Jones took the manuscript home, and over the course of months, tested dozens of recipes. 

At the time, cookbooks were little more than dull manuals. Mastering seemed a marvel—exquisitely detailed, with step-by-step instructions, tailored to home cooks lacking professional skills, and with an eye to ingredients available in American supermarkets. “Reading and studying this book seems to me as good as taking a basic course at the Cordon Bleu,” Jones told her fellow editors. And the cookbook was more than a how-to book—it teemed with discussion of French culture and history, and practical, even cheeky, advice. A section on making quenelles, for example, was labeled “In Case of Disaster,” and counseled the reader that if a prepared cream paste turned out to be too soft, “it will taste every bit as good if you declare it to be a mousse.” 

Still, there were formidable hurdles to publication, beginning with Jones herself. While she had edited some of Knopf’s most promising authors, including John Updike and Elizabeth Bowen, she did so anonymously, rarely working directly with the writers. With limited standing at the publisher, Jones worried that her own reputation might suffer—that she might be “pigeonholed as unserious and unduly interested in ‘women’s stuff,’ ” Franklin writes. Equally important, cookbooks were well outside Knopf’s usual literary wheelhouse and of little interest to the predominantly male editorial team.

Without a seat at the editorial table, Jones worked behind the scenes, trumpeting the manuscript to her colleagues. To her delight, a senior editor greenlit the manuscript and it was assigned to Jones. With no house style for cookbooks, Jones created her own.

Editing Mastering took two years. Jones helped the authors “organize, clarify, and finesse” their manuscript, and gave substantive advice, like adding a chapter on hearty peasant dishes. Julia Child “used me as a guinea pig,” Jones recalled, sending her to scout American grocery stores for “obscure” ingredients, including, astonishingly, mushrooms. Jones tested hundreds of recipes in her own home kitchen.

When First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hired a French chef for the White House, the timing for Mastering’s release in October 1961 seemed propitious. After Craig Claiborne at The New York Times praised the cookbook as “the most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work on the subject,” Jones booked an appearance on NBC’s Today Show, where Child and coauthor Simone Beck prepared a French omelet live on the air. Jones scheduled a book signing and demonstration at Bloomingdale’s for the next morning; the authors were mobbed by crowds. By the end of the first week, Knopf had doubled the initial press run of 10,000 books and arranged for a third. Jones hurriedly organized a West Coast tour with live demonstrations and book signings. In an era in which virtually all the publicity done for a new release consisted of courting book reviewers, Jones was an early innovator in using promotional campaigns to market books.

Jones continued to build on Mastering’s momentum. That winter, a guest spot on the Boston public television station, WGBH, to promote the book led to an invitation for Child to pilot a live cooking show, The French Chef. National syndication followed, along with surging book sales. Jones capitalized on the synergy between Child’s cookbook and her television program, with the show driving book sales and the book attracting viewers. She wrote to Child, “I am flabbergasted at the way you seem to have catapulted into fame overnight.” Buoyed by the success of the TV show, Knopf published a follow-up called The French Chef Cookbook; it sold 200,000 copies.

The extraordinary, unprecedented success of Mastering ignited Jones’s interest in cookbooks of all kinds, and bolstered Knopf’s confidence in their marketability. Following Mastering’s blueprint, Jones innovated a whole new genre, elevating cookbooks to a literary form. 

Jones ambitiously aimed to expand the nation’s palate. In an age in which the most outré “ethnic” dish Americans were comfortable with was chicken chow mein, she published Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking. Jones was drawn to each author not merely for their culinary expertise, but also for their ability to write. Kuo “had a gift with language,” Jones recalled. “She talked about ‘velveting’ little pieces of chicken, ‘slippery coating’ them. You could practically eat the words, they were so seductive.”

Jones actively sought out many of her cookbook authors, ignoring celebrity chefs in favor of authentic regional and ethnic cooks like Edna Lewis, the granddaughter of an emancipated slave raised in a town in Tidewater Virginia founded by freedmen. Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking was as genuinely vernacular as American jazz, Franklin notes, blending local ingredients like catfish with the French haute cuisine enslaved cooks had prepared for the planter elite. Lewis’s book, which combined recipes with memoirs and history, marked a turning point for Jones, who embarked on a sort of culinary anthropology tour with her husband, traveling across the U.S. and sampling regional foods. Jones published previously unknown American cooks like Bill Neal (Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie) and Himilce Novas (Latin American Cooking Across the U.S.A.), as well as more established names, like Joan Nathan (Jewish Cooking in America) under a new imprint, “Knopf Cooks American.” The series helped popularize the idea of food as culture. The elevation of diverse voices contributed to a celebration of a rich multicultural American identity that today seems self-evident. 

Jones was as responsible for the culinary transformation of 20th-century America as anyone. “Food started getting serious respect largely because of her,” Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet magazine, once commented. “When you talk about the cookbook revolution, she was the revolution.” But while Jones’s legacy rests primarily on her work with cookbooks, her career was equally notable for its extraordinary breadth. She spent more than 50 years at Knopf, the apogee of literary publishing, working well into her 80s, and her impeccable taste made her a legend in her industry. She shared in Knopf’s erudite, prodigious talent pool, working with authors like Updike, Anne Tyler, John Hersey, and Peter Mayle, whose A Year in Provence sold 6 million copies and bridged the gap between literary memoir and food writing. Jones’s true love was poetry, and she edited collections by Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Sharon Olds.

Part of Jones’s success was her ability to identify large cultural shifts and take advantage of emerging markets. She did so in the world of literature, editing Updike’s Couples, an early literary exploration of sexual freedom published after the “summer of love,” and in the world of cooking, capitalizing on the back-to-the-land movement and vegetarianism, with Kit Foster’s The Organic Gardener and Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure.

Jones was a hands-on editor, beloved by her authors. Those who required constant attention—like Updike, who “knew everything that he wanted,” Jones said—received daily calls and letters. The food writer Phyllis Richman praised Jones’s restrained editorial style, saying, “The gentle handling that a soufflé requires is nothing compared to the handling of an author.” With no budget for recipe testing, Jones joined her food writers in their busy kitchens, taking copious notes and sampling unfamiliar ingredients. Jones was “there all the time,” Madhur Jaffrey recalled, and grew to “know the book intimately, just as intimately as I know the book. How rare is that?” 

Jones nurtured collegial, collaborative relationships among her authors, encouraging them to share publicity strategies and contacts, and to host events for one another. She gathered her cookbook authors together in her own kitchen and joined them as they prepared meals. And she distributed copies of their books among her other writers. Updike remarked in one letter that the newly published Anne Tyler was “not merely good, but wickedly good.” 

“The work of editors,” Franklin notes, is “inconspicuous by design.” To read Jones’s authors is to encounter “the invisible hand of an extraordinary editor,” as Julia Child’s own biographer, Laura Shapiro, put it. “Of course you don’t see her. That’s why she was great.” But while invisibility might be a desirable trait in an editor, it can be befuddling for a biographer. Reading The Editor, it can be hard to discern the exact nature of Jones’s contributions to the novels and collections she edited. Franklin endeavors to meet the challenge, thanks to a rich archive comprising oral histories and decades of personal and professional correspondence. The result is a joyful feast for students of literary history. Still, the more serious reader of Updike or Tyler might be stymied in their desire to understand more explicitly how Jones’s invisible hand shaped beloved characters or specific themes.

Franklin links Jones’s editorial invisibility to a second kind of invisibility—her virtual absence from popular recognition. She argues that Jones’s “veiled historical import owes much to the fact that she is a woman; misogyny shaped the arc of her life and career and continues to diminish her legacy today.” Indeed, as Franklin illustrates, Jones’s professional colleagues at Knopf—unlike those in the culinary world, who lauded Jones as a visionary—were slower to recognize her legacy. Throughout her career, she was woefully underpaid and underappreciated, a fact Franklin attributes to her gender. 

Most significantly, Franklin asserts, “Judith’s impact on American culture and literature has been further muted due to the genre with which, to the extent she is known at all, she is associated: cookbooks.” Perhaps no longer. With Franklin’s sterling new biography, Judith Jones finally takes the seat of honor at the head of the table.

The post The Tastemaker appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One evening in December 2003, a colleague and I were sitting in our suite in the Hamra hotel in Baghdad. We were part of a small team of Newsweek reporters dispatched to cover the rising insurgency in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

We were always on the alert, wondering when the insurgents might come after the hotel, which was lightly protected and filled with a whole population of desirable targets: journalists, aid workers, security consultants. So there we were, trying to wind down after a long day, when we heard a gunshot. A pause, and then another. And another, and more. Soon we were surrounded by the cacophony of what seemed to be a major firefight. Were the insurgents finally storming the hotel, as we had feared? As we were putting on our flak jackets, our bureau chief called to inform us that bullets were hitting the walls of the hotel. He advised us to seek shelter in the most interior room we could get to—in our case, the bathroom.

Soon we learned the embarrassing reality: The hotel wasn’t under attack. (That would come a few years later, when it was badly damaged by a series of car bombs.) The Iraqi soccer team had just beaten the North Koreans in a World Cup qualifying match, and what we had just experienced was that distinctly Iraqi phenomenon known as “celebratory gunfire.” Still, we had good reason to be scared, I guess, since you can get killed just as dead by a bullet fired in joy as one fired in anger.

This episode recently came to mind as I was reading Rod Nordland’s Waiting for the Monsoon—since Rod was the bureau chief who warned us to retreat to an interior space. (I felt a warm glow of nostalgia as I came across the same advice in a story in the book.) I haven’t seen Rod for years, so I welcomed the chance to take up his acquaintance again—even if only through this daunting account of his encounter with glioblastoma, the same aggressive brain cancer that killed Beau Biden, John McCain, and a host of other well-known victims. This struggle strikes me as a grim denouement for a man who had perfected the art of survival during decades as one of the world’s leading foreign correspondents. Rod wasn’t just an exemplary reporter, a great writer, and a supportive teacher. He was also a logistical genius, a man who could sneak across a border and somehow set up a news-gathering operation under the most daunting conditions.

But you can’t out-organize cancer. You can only place your hope in your doctors and fight. Spoiler alert: Rod is still alive—five years after his first diagnosis. As he notes, that’s an incredible achievement when you’re talking about this particular illness.

The cancer memoir has become a cottage industry, and I confess to a certain aversion to the genre. I generally don’t find ranting about health that interesting—and the bar is even higher when someone is writing about it. Like any other literary category, the cancer memoir hinges on a certain set of conventions: the near brush with death, the triumphant recovery, the reconciliation with estranged loved ones, the emergence of a new appreciation for life, and (sometimes) a new spiritual sensibility.

All of those elements are present in this book. Yet Rod (as I would expect) has managed to give the brand a new lease on life (pun fully intended). Part of it might be the crisp, lapidary prose style developed over long years of telling stories as economically as possible. Part of it might be that he just has such good stories to tell. (My favorite might be one he told us in Kabul, which was repeated in the book. He was nearly kidnapped in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war by a group of armed men as he left the bureau one day. His interpreter, realizing that the men didn’t belong to the faction that controlled the area they were in, gambled that they wouldn’t dare to shoot; he told Rod to run back to the bureau and lock himself in. When he realized that he’d been betrayed by a dodgy office manager, Rod arranged for the man to be shipped off to Paris as an ostensible reward for good behavior—then fired him and changed the bureau locks as soon as he was gone.) 

For me, Rod’s book has an added resonance: This particular tale of triumph against daunting odds is set against the background of another dramatic story of decline—the slow death of the profession of foreign correspondent. I spent nearly 10 years in that role at Newsweek, until I was finally forced out of it by the magazine’s ignominious collapse. It was the best job I ever had—but almost as soon as I joined the magazine, in 2000, it was clear that no one at the headquarters in New York had any clue how to manage the transition to the internet. We could feel our bosses steadily and palpably losing interest in foreign coverage as the magazine’s crisis deepened. 

One of Newsweek’s veterans told me how a welcoming committee greeted the Saigon bureau chief at the airport at the end of the 1960s; no expense was considered too great when it came to coverage of the Vietnam War. To me and my cohort, such accounts were the stuff of quaint and distant legend. When our Baghdad bureau chief showed up at the home office a few years into the Iraq War, his ostensible boss mistook him for someone else.

As he recounts here, Rod joined the profession in a healthier era. Starting with The Philadelphia Inquirer in the late 1970s (yes, even the Inquirer had a foreign correspondent), he managed to move over to Newsweek a few years later. Soon he became what is known—or used to be known—as the magazine’s “fireman,” a roving reporter who dropped into whichever part of the world the editors considered the most urgent. He dodged snipers in Sarajevo, outfoxed the secret police in Zimbabwe, and reported on Islamist militias in Somalia. By the peak of his career, he had filed stories from 150 countries. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, has rightly called Rod “the foreign correspondent’s foreign correspondent.”

Some will object, I am sure, that I am romanticizing a profession that was, for many years, overwhelmingly male and white. But I am happy to say that this was already changing by the time I joined the group (though perhaps not quite enough). The reporter pool steadily diversified over the years, and, as Rod explains, locally hired fixers and interpreters—often facing the same dangers and material challenges as they helped their charges from abroad—gradually, and justly, acquired bylines of their own. 

A growing number of women, in particular, had to find their way in an environment permeated by machismo. But many eventually rose to the highest ranks—like the marvelous New York Times veteran Alissa Rubin, who figures in this story as one of Rod’s closest friends. He helped to organize an effort to save her life after she was badly injured in a helicopter accident in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014. She then returned the favor after he was struck down by his cancer in India in 2019, ensuring that he quickly got the medical attention he needed. 

In any case, the profession as Rod knew it has been transformed beyond recognition. The world is more interconnected now, and few news organizations have the inclination or the wherewithal to put correspondents into the field.

Rod’s account doesn’t leave the reader in a romantic haze about the good old days. This has much to do with Rod’s unsentimental storytelling, but even more with his uniquely traumatic youth. His father was a serial abuser who regularly beat his wife and children and ended his life in prison as a convicted pedophile. Rod doesn’t draw any direct connection between these horrifying origins and his subsequent urge to chronicle collective trauma in places far away from home—though he notes that he always had a particular sympathy for victims of domestic abuse, a concern that now traces a luminous line through his lifetime of stories.

Those of us who have known Rod Nordland often sensed this deeper undercurrent of darkness in him, and I now feel strangely relieved that I know why. I am glad that he seems to have found his peace.

The post A War Correspondent’s Inner Struggle appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined an alternate history in which the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh captured the Republican nomination at a stalemated convention in Philadelphia in July 1940 and went on to win a surprise victory against Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The terror of the unforeseen,” Roth wrote, “is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” Roth’s Lindbergh allies America with the Axis powers, ponders war with Canada, and launches an anti-Jewish campaign. 

This unsettling “what if” scenario succeeds in part because it wasn’t all that iffy. On the eve of World War II, a powerful strain of autocratic thinking and sympathy for foreign dictators had captured the American right, just as it has in recent years. Its views—praise for Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco as decisive leaders who knew how to deal with decadent liberals, anti-immigrant sentiment, hostility to free trade, and an aversion to intervention abroad—often sound eerily familiar. It should not come as a surprise, then, that the resurgence of those views has prompted a bevy of journalists and scholars to attempt to explore and explain the right’s long-standing antipathy toward democracy and the rule of law.

In the run-up to Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh, as Paul M. Sparrow reminds us in Awakening the Spirit of America, was Roosevelt’s foremost public antagonist in leading the America First Committee to oppose any American aid to Great Britain, let alone entry into World War II. The Lone Eagle, as Lindbergh was known, hardly had to go it alone. Instead, he commanded not only the support of numerous wealthy industrialists but also members of Congress in his crusade to stymie Roosevelt and to bolster the Third Reich. Lindbergh had visited Germany several times, including in October 1938, when Luftwaffe head Hermann Goering presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Lindbergh never repudiated the medal. 

Far from simply being an isolationist, Lindbergh, a devotee of Nordic racial theory (he secretly fathered numerous children with a variety of German women after World War II), admired the Nazis, whom he saw as a vital force in opposing a Bolshevik takeover of Europe. After one Lindbergh radio broadcast that dismissed “hysterical chatter” about the perils of a Nazi victory in Europe, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.” 

Lindbergh’s expressions of support for Nazi Germany have a familiar ring to them. Just as contemporary opponents of assistance to Ukraine deny that there is any real difference between it and Russia, or even take the side of the latter, so Lindbergh, under the badge of foreign policy “realism,” dismissed the notion that there was any real difference between the combatants, with one side representing democracy and the other totalitarianism. Lindbergh knew better. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, he explained that “the Germans … claim the right of an able and virile nation to expand—to conquer territory and influence by force of arms as other nations have done at one time or another throughout history.” Sparrow ably brings out the role that Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, played in fortifying these sentiments in her best-selling book The Wave of the Future. It claimed that fascism was inevitable and democracy a relic of the past.

Indeed, as David Austin Walsh underscores in Taking America Back, his comprehensive and provocative study of the historical intertwining of mainstream American conservatism and the far right, it was democracy itself that the political right objected to from the 1930s onward in its perfervid opposition to the New Deal. For reactionary American business elites, the term democracy itself became synonymous with a communist plot to destroy America. It was authoritarians such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco whom America should support and emulate. Walsh seeks to demonstrate that a kind of right-wing “popular front” emerged a century ago in opposition to socialism, communism, and liberalism. He dismisses the notion that there were significant differences between the mainstream and radical right. Rather, he suggests that much more consanguinity existed than has commonly been appreciated. Walsh is part of a cohort of younger historians who believe that the extent of the native radicalism of the right, then and now, has often been downplayed or ignored by the media and scholars, with its tribunes often dismissed as crackpots when, in fact, they have exercised a good deal of influence on its direction. 

Walsh thus devotes much attention to colorful figures such as Elizabeth Dilling, an anti-Semitic agitator, and Merwin K. Hart, a reactionary New York businessman. Both played an important role in the 1930s in promoting support for Franco and in denouncing Roosevelt’s New Deal as tantamount to a communist conspiracy. “The ‘kooks’ and the sober anti-communist conservatives,” Walsh writes, “found themselves agreeing on most of the pressing issues of the day, including the most significant international issue after 1936, the Spanish Civil War.” Hart was also an enthusiastic backer of Lindbergh, whom he wrote to support after the latter delivered a notorious denunciation of Jewish influence in America during a speech in Des Moines on behalf of the America First Committee. 

But as Walsh cogently observes, Lindbergh and Hart were not outliers: 

Political anti-Semitism—the belief that Jews had an undue influence in the Roosevelt administration and, through this influence, were subverting America’s traditions and replacing them with the socialism and communism of the New Deal state—was commonplace on the American right in the 1930s and 1940s.

After World War II, Hart became a mentor to William F. Buckley Jr. (the author of God and Man at Yale, a defense of free market capitalism and religion, and the founder in 1955 of the National Review magazine) as well as the head of the New York chapter of the John Birch Society. 

What explains the persistence of this reactionary spirit down to today? In his lively and compelling Rebellion, Robert Kagan, who served in the State Department during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and has become a leading Never Trumper, suggests that American history consists of two forces vying for supremacy, the first one liberalism (good) and the second one anti-liberalism (bad). He sees the origins of America’s difficulties in what he describes as the split between the colonists who supported slavery and those who championed universal rights. “The new, radically liberal tradition in America,” he writes, “would from the beginning be accompanied by an anti-liberal tradition every bit as potent.”

Kagan sees this baleful tradition as reemerging after World War I, when internationalism took it on the chin as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and others denounced the League of Nations. According to Kagan, “with shameless hypocrisy, these two leading internationalist Republicans now openly equated ‘internationalism’ with Bolshevism and pointedly, and absurdly, singled out the Jewish Leon Trotsky as the evil genius behind it all.” Kagan believes that these impulses linger on down to the present. “Rather remarkably,” Kagan writes, “even a century later, Republicans are still warning of ‘globalists’ and ‘cosmopolitans.’ ”

But is it remarkable? Or do reactionary sentiments in fact form the essence of the right? Dividing up American history between liberalism and anti-liberalism may be a nifty organizing device, but it does run the risk of simplifying a complex past, not to mention branding anyone who disagrees with Kagan as retrograde and anti-liberal. Kagan forthrightly acknowledges that “many of the institutions that would later play a role in the takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 were hatched and nurtured during the Reagan years.” But there is something a little pat about his suggestion that in 1980 Reagan’s election owed less to the rise of anti-liberal conservatism than to the decline of liberalism during the late 1960s and ’70s, when issues such as school busing, welfare, abortion, affirmative action, and anti-communism became potent issues, leading to the rise of both the neoliberal and neoconservative movements.

It was the neoconservative movement, mostly made up of former liberals (much as Reagan himself had been a former fan of the New Deal), that provided a higher-toned gloss for the long-standing desire on the right to roll back not only the civil rights movement but also communism. Hostility to international organizations such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court was part and parcel of the desire to ensure that America had the freedom to intervene unilaterally, whenever and wherever it chose. What is missing in Kagan’s account is any reckoning with the second Iraq War, which he championed and which helped fuel Donald Trump’s high-octane rise to power in 2016, when he promised to revert to America First and put an end to foreign adventurism.

Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. provides a trenchant account that indicates that Trump, for all his bluster about America First, is part of a global phenomenon—namely, the rise of an international kleptocracy that often works in tandem. Applebaum, who has written extensively on Russia and Ukraine, believes that a new group of autocrats has arisen which operates not like an ideological bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, welded together “by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power.” They see NATO, the European Union, and their own dissidents as adversaries. Above all, their enmity toward the West, Applebaum indicates, is not rooted in some form of old-fashioned geopolitical competition, stemming from 19th-century Europe; rather, they see democracy, the rule of law, political opposition, and independent journalism as representing direct threats to their own rule.

For Applebaum, a brave new world of international finance has emerged, ensuring that kleptocracy and autocracy operate together seamlessly to shore up the rule of the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. According to Applebaum, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.” She notes that one in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings was purchased anonymously. In London, Russian oligarchs had a field day procuring expensive mansions, some of which they never even inhabited, to launder their ill-gotten gains. Applebaum also points to the Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of properties in midwestern America as part of a money-laundering operation connected to his defrauding of the Ukrainian PrivatBank. U.S. businessmen and lawyers, she observes, were just as culpable as Ukrainians in making it all happen.

One of Applebaum’s most intriguing insights is that anti-democratic forces can resemble start-ups. She notes that the first investors in the original Russian Wagner Group now appear to be contemplating the creation of franchises. Russia is, in essence, creating regime survival packages that can include personal protection for a dictator, assaults on political enemies, and social media campaigns. In her view, “a world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia.” It already exists. Applebaum is right that the opportunities have multiplied, but it is also the case that dictators such as the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe were no slouches when it came to enriching themselves, either. The history of plunder is itself a rich one that she might have alluded to in dilating on the latest generation of gangsters masquerading as international statesmen.

What can be done? Applebaum points to the need to undermine the disinformation campaigns that foreign countries such as Russia are waging against America, extolling the work of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which has exposed Russian tactics and campaigns even before they are launched. She calls for joint efforts with foreign governments to bolster democratic media and civic organizations in Africa or Latin America. And she points to the risks of the democratic world’s dependence on China, Russia, and other countries for minerals or energy supplies. “Those business relationships,” she writes, “are corrupting our own societies.” Here Applebaum might have alluded to the efforts that Joe Biden’s administration has embarked on to stymie foreign corruption. In December 2023, for example, Biden signed into law the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The law renders it a crime for a foreign official in any capacity to extort or provide a bribe from an American or American company. Until now, it was only Americans who were subject to punishment; the new law opens up foreign officials to prosecution.

It would be easy to despair about the state of what was once proudly referred to as the free world, but Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit offers a valuable antidote to excessive hand-wringing about the plight of Western democracy. “Predictions of its imminent doom, of its obsolescence in the face of an authoritarian challenge have been proven wrong,” he writes, “repeatedly for the last two hundred years.” Today’s authoritarians, he notes, drape themselves in the garb of democracy, whether it is Putin or Orbán or Trump. Exposing them is a necessary step. Another is remembering that surrender is not an option. The determined championing of democracy by its true friends and advocates can help ensure that the forces of reaction remain no more than that.

The post How the Right’s Illiberal Past Became Present appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Student protesters at college campuses nationwide, united by their outrage at Israel’s actions in Gaza, can rightly be described as diverse. Despite the masks, it’s clear that they come from different racial backgrounds, and their views range from the belief that Israel should give up on its war effort to the conviction that Israel should be destroyed entirely.

But one thing is not especially diverse about the protests: the campuses on which they’ve been happening.

Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.  

We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.

By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools. 

Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students. You can see these findings in the chart below.

When you separate out private and public colleges, the difference becomes even more stark, as the next chart demonstrates. At private colleges, protests have been rare, encampments have been rarer, and both have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuition and fees are exorbitantly high.

Out of the hundreds of private colleges where more than 25 percent of the students receive Pell Grants, only five colleges have had encampments.

Protests and encampments have been more common at public colleges. This is in part because these colleges just have more students, and only a few students are needed for a protest. Even at public colleges, though, there is a clear relationship between having fewer Pell students and having had a protest or encampment, as the chart below illustrates.

Why is it that protests are so concentrated at more elite colleges and rare at those with larger percentages of working-class students? One possible explanation is that the more selective and wealthier colleges attract and encourage students who are more public minded and socially active.

To test that hypothesis, we compared the list of schools that have had protests and encampments to our 2023 rankings of national universities, where the lion’s share of protest activity has happened, based on a set of “service” metrics we use to gauge democratic engagement. These include the number of students at a college who serve—before, during, or after attending the school—in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, ROTC, and local community nonprofits through work study; the percentage of students registered to vote and the degree to which the school makes student voting easier; and whether a school is listed on the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, which recognizes colleges that document their broader public engagement efforts.

As you can see in the chart below, schools that have high scores on the Washington Monthly service rankings (the bottom of the Y axis) are a bit more likely to also have had protests and encampments. But in general, the distribution looks more random, especially compared with the previous three charts. In other words, having high levels of student democratic engagement—at least according to the Monthly’s metrics, which are the most extensive we know of—is far less correlated with protests and encampments than admitting low percentages of poor and working-class students.

What, then, does explain why colleges with large numbers of students of modest means are far less likely to have had protests and encampments? Our best guess is that poorer students are just focused on other concerns. They may have off-campus jobs and nearby family members to see and take care of. They might sympathize with the protesters—a nationwide poll of college students in May found that 45 percent support the encampments, 24 percent oppose them, and 30 percent are neutral. But in the same poll, only 13 percent rated conflict in the Middle East as the issue most important to them. That was well behind health care reform (40 percent), educational funding and access (38 percent), and economic fairness and opportunity (37 percent). Students burdened with multiple responsibilities—like having to work a low-paying job to pay for college to get a better-paying job—are unlikely to devote what little free time they have to protesting about an issue they don’t see as a high priority.

There could be other reasons. Some colleges have more of a history and culture of campus protesting, and while colleges are generally left-leaning, some are more so than others. At Columbia, for example, there are 5.6 liberal students for every one conservative student, whereas at the University of Texas at El Paso (where there have been no pro-Palestinian protests or encampments, and 58 percent of students receive Pell Grants), there are only 2.3 liberal students for every conservative student. Many public universities, especially in red states, are also under political pressure to keep a lid on campus protests. Students there and at other institutions, such as evangelical colleges, may fear retaliation for expressing their views on the war.

Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.

The post Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges? appeared first on Washington Monthly.