For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy

Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond

by Michael Brenes

How did the global Cold War influence American politics at home? For Might and Right traces the story of how Cold War defense spending remade participatory politics, producing a powerful and dynamic political coalition that reached across party lines. This "Cold War coalition" favored massive defense spending over social welfare programs, bringing together a diverse array of actors from across the nation, including defense workers, community boosters, military contractors, current and retired members of the armed services, activists, and politicians. Faced with neoliberal austerity and uncertainty surrounding America's foreign policy after the 1960s, increased military spending became a bipartisan solution to create jobs and stimulate economic growth, even in the absence of national security threats.

Using a rich array of archival sources, Michael Brenes draws important connections between economic inequality and American militarism that enhance our understanding of the Cold War's continued impact on American democracy and the resilience of the military-industrial complex, up to the age of Donald Trump.

Genres: Politics, American History, War, History, Military Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2020

Reviews

[John Feeley · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far a favorite of what I have read this year. For Might and Right by Michael Brenes is an in-depth look at just how much effect Cold War defense spending has had on the politics of the U.S. From writings on the "Senator from Boeing"(Henry "Scoop" Jackson) efforts in Washington state to Reagan's investments in "Star Wars"(SDI) in Colorado and efforts to retool the war machine for a non-Cold War world in the 1990s, Brenes provides a clear picture of this 60 or so year period war spending and politics from the Cold War to the War on Terror. ( My hometown of Glen Ellyn got a nice cameo regarding the Lockheed bailout in the 1970s)

[Robert Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tremendously useful book. Brenes provides a chronological tour through US foreign policy from the end of World War II through the early 1990s. He also includes detailed discussions of the country's political history during that time period. So far, so standard. What distinguishes this book is the focus on the defense industry specifically. He makes a great case that US foreign policy, and to a truly frightening degree, much of US domestic politics are driven by the defense industry. It's not just a question of sinister Dick Cheneys in smoke-filled rooms, it's the good union holders of good union defense jobs, and their progressive Democratic congresspeople as well.

In documenting Cold War domestic politics and economics Brenes both illustrates and explains a lot of the bone deep stupidity of US foreign policy. What could have possessed the US do Communist Russia and China the favor of hiding their imperial evils by continuing the French empire's war in Vietnam on such a ruinously expensive scale? Why did Ronald Reagan throw out fiscal stability entirely to conduct a massive arms build up against a faltering Soviet Union? The answer in both cases is the defense industry. Maximum, unnecessary aggression was what they needed to keep people employed.

I enjoyed this book, and I loved the support it provided for my own struggle against the military industrial complex. But I ultimately found it a little unsatisfying. Brenes lays out the fact that by the 1980s the "Cold War Lobby" he identifies wasn't actually much of an engine of job creation any longer. I think the book could have benefitted tremendously from more comparative context. Brenes provides long, valuable lists of the numbers of people employed by the defense industry in various jurisdictions. He occasionally provides percentages of a given workforce that were defense related as well. But I wish we had a more complete picture of this context. How reliant was the US economy on theses jobs? And how has that reliance shifted? Is it just congressional corruption that has kept defense spending so central as US employment has shifted out of the sector? All this context would require a much longer book. I'd be very OK with that.

[Ethan Hedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are too many damning quotes in this 248 page book to include without posting the entire book. Brenes argues that cold war defense spending "transformed the nature of of social democracy in the United States, altering American politics and creating a unique coalition of individuals invested in the "military industrial complex" for personal and political gain.
That "unique coalition", Brenes argues, includes defense workers in the rust belt that were slowly disappeared, 'small government' Republicans driven by rabid anti-communism, neo-liberal Democrats driven by short-term political gains in keeping their constituents' jobs (which were on the way out and only hurt those Dems in the long term - no meaningful effort given to conversion programs from defense to domestic programs), and the defense companies that were complicit in the fostering of the Cold War Coalition and financially stood to gain the most from government contracts, all at the expense of the New Deal and its coalition. "The Cold War created a marriage of convenience between those who materially benefitted from defense spending and groups of national political actors who backed the defense economy for ideological reasons". Thus, Brenes argues, this coalition is partly a story of "how wealth was expropriated from working-class to wealthy Americans, and how American democracy was transformed in the process".
This is already too long, you should read the book, but I'll close with this from Brenes. "The ultimate legacy of the Cold War therefore lies in its ability to transfigure American politics in ways that created new coalitions of Americans to keep the United States fighting the Cold War after 1991 - to align militarism and austerity with the interests of American democracy".

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scholarship is only just starting to realize how fundamental the military was to the midcentury "golden age" economy. For a sense of scale, the sector with the highest share of manufacturing employment for most of the 1950s and 60s was not automotive or steel, as popular memory may suggest, but aerospace, an industry that did the vast majority of its work for the government.
Brenes' book is decent, but tends to overemphasize foreign policy relative to economic history. More of a 3.5 stars, but I'm feeling generous. By far though the best source on this subject is Tim Barker's magnificent PhD thesis "Cold War Capitalism" (available here: https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/pub...).
Both this book and Barker's thesis offer essential reframings of traditional economic and historical narratives. Our understandings of midcentury capitalism are due for a prompt sea change

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A small fry and his small thoughts. Brenes would like to understand, but he is such a strong believer in whatever the Government is telling him, that is just just another useful idiot trying to justify whatever the people in power would do.