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February 19 - April 23, 2023
The question is charged, for the label empire is relished by the United States’ critics and abhorred by its champions.
empire lies in the eye of the beholder. By the narrowest definition, one that nearly everyone accepts—an empire is a country with colonies—the United States has been an empire and remains one today.
A distinctive feature of the early republic was its willingness to upgrade territories to states.
The reason Congress held territories back from statehood wasn’t that no one lived in them but because the wrong people did. White squatters, free Blacks, French people, Spaniards, Mexicans, and, above all, Native peoples represented threats to federal control.
Over the nineteenth century, the Indigenous population of the present-day contiguous United States likely halved, dropping from around 600,000 to around 250,000.5
“Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions,” a governmental report from the 1940s noted.
The overseas territories in 1940 made up about one-eighth of the US population. At that time the United States contained more colonized people than Black people or immigrants (although the categories overlapped).
judgments known as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they weren’t. The bulk of the new territories were possessed by the United States but not “incorporated” into it, so the Constitution didn’t fully extend to them.
Only Hawai‘i and Alaska, the territories most conducive to white settlement, counted as “incorporated.”8
The Philippines gained independence in 1946, and Hawai‘i and Alaska became states in 1959. But Puerto Rico remains an unincorporated territory, as do Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. The Northern Mariana Islands voluntarily became one in 1986, following a long US occupation of Micronesia.
In all, the United States today has five inhabited territories that contain more than 3.6 million people. Those people cannot vote for president, have no voting representatives in Congress, lack full constitutional protection, and suffer the predictable effects. All five territories are poorer, per capita, than the poorest US state.
To secure political and financial “stability” in the region, US troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), Panama (six times), Costa Rica (once), and Mexico (three times) between 1903 and 1934.
President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Yet two years later he ordered a US Marine invasion to ensure that Haiti repaid its debts to US banks—the start of a nineteen-year occupation.
that meddled widely abroad. Reporters and scholars have documented sixty-four instances during the Cold War when the United States secretly interceded to oust a government or tilt a contested election—and twenty-five times when it succeeded.
the United States’ post-1945 ability to project power has been prodigious enough that we inhabit a hierarchically ordered planet where English is the global language, the dollar is the global currency, and the US armed forces are the global police. Call that imperial or not, but the United States has been unrivaled in its ability to impose its whims on the world.
Today it controls some 750 bases in territories and abroad—far more than any other power does. The world’s other militaries, combined, control fewer than a third of that number.
The Colorado River, approximately 1,450 miles long, flows from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado south through Utah and Arizona, continues between Arizona and Nevada and California, and then crosses into Mexico at San Luis Rio Colorado, where it empties into the Gulf of California. For centuries, Mexican ranchers and farmers have depended on the river’s water in order for their cows to eat and crops to grow.
new immigration laws of 1917 and 1924 were not meant for Mexicans either. They were exempted from the 1917 law’s literacy and head-tax requirements because employers in the United States needed their labor.
the need to protect the border against the threat of Mexican immigration did not become a matter of national importance until the Great Depression, when more than a million Mexicans were deported to Mexico.
after the Depression-era deportations. Even so, more than four million Mexicans migrated to the United States as part of the Bracero Program, creating what scholars have called a revolving door of Mexican immigration; many thousands of Mexicans were deported at the same time that many thousands more were allowed to enter, only to be sent back through the revolving door once their employers were done with them.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the sweeping Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the discriminatory national-origin quotas but for the first time set a cap on immigration from Western Hemisphere countries, including Mexico. The number of Mexican immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year was smaller than the number of necessary workers.
As many as half of all undocumented migrants in the United States entered legally and overstayed their visas, entering by boat or by plane in addition to crossing by land.28
The economic interdependence of border cities is a microcosm of the interdependence of the United States and Mexico more broadly. Mexico is second only to China as our leading trading partner in terms of the dollar value of goods flowing between
Socialists, then and later, played a major role in initiating and rallying support for changes that most Americans have no desire to reverse. These include women’s right to vote, Medicare, the minimum wage, workplace safety laws, universal health insurance, and civil rights for all races and genders.
Yet conservative politicians, business executives, libertarian think tanks, and millions of ordinary Americans resist these solutions, clinging to the notion that the best way to solve our problems is through the workings of the marketplace.
Where did the belief in the magic of the marketplace come from?
The truth is that American governments have always been involved in managing and at times even directing the economic life of the nation, and economic freedom does not guarantee political freedom.
NAM sought to change the way the American people viewed business, government, and, above all, American history, by promoting a historical narrative about the centrality of “free enterprise.”
From the early twentieth-century defense of child labor to the mid-century attacks on the New Deal, American business leaders had argued that any compromise to business freedom threatened the fabric of American social
The implication was that any prominent government role in the marketplace was a departure from American history and that the founding fathers had valorized economic freedom
Slavery of course refuted the NAM claim that America had been built on free enterprise and respect for the rights of individuals.
Great Depression the “narrative of capitalist-driven growth” seemed “questionable at best, a monstrous delusion at worst.”16 It was a bit rich for the captains of industry to insist that businessmen knew what was best for the country when that argument had in living memory so conspicuously failed.
Those theorists were the neoliberal economists Mises and Hayek, famous for their defense of free markets and the belief that any compromise to economic freedom would necessarily lead to compromises to political freedom and from there to totalitarian tyranny. Hayek
Hayek was Mises’s most influential student. Hayek (like Mises) was trained as an economist, but the central argument of The Road to Serfdom is not an economic one. It is a political one: that capitalism and freedom are linked, and if we wish to preserve political freedom, we must preserve economic freedom as well.
no prominent American university wanted to hire Hayek. Therefore, as they did for Mises, they found one that would, in part by their promising to pay Hayek’s salary. Luhnow met personally with University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins and offered $150,000—$15,000 per year for ten years—to cover Hayek’s cost. Hutchins agreed, and Hayek was appointed in 1950
they would hire men who would not step out of “character as a libertarian.” One of these men was Milton Friedman. In 1962 Luhnow and Crane finally got their bible of market fundamentalism.29 It was Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.
Wealthy individuals can support whatever ideas suit them—including outlier ones—and influence society. But rather than see this as a problem requiring redress, Friedman sees this as a virtue.
rich are a good deal freer than the poor: philanthropy is not a level playing field, and free speech is not free.
Over several decades, Democrats abandoned their role as the party of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy to champion civil rights; in response, Republicans retreated from their original racial liberalism and courted white resentment.
Geographically, the political map of the 1860s largely inverted our own: Republicans ruled New England and the West Coast; Democrats dominated the South.
“The time has arrived,” Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey declared there, “for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
19 Reagan Revolution
According to the argument, in 1980 the electorate rejected the idea that a strong federal government was a positive social good. The idea of the “Reagan Revolution” extended into the realm of foreign policy as well. Following a decade when the Democratic Party had withdrawn from supporting a robust national security state as a result of Vietnam, the argument goes, Americans grew tired of their weak approach toward national security.
The trope that a “Reagan Revolution” remade American politics has remained central to the national discourse.
Positing that there had been a clear revolution positioned liberals and progressive Democrats as being far off from the mainstream of the electorate—even when polls showed that their policy preferences matched where most Americans stood.
Reagan won in an Electoral College landslide (489‒49), although his margin in the popular vote was narrower—50.7 percent to Carter’s 41 percent and independent John Anderson’s 6.6 percent.
polls showed that a large part of that vote was as much about opposition to Carter as it was an endorsement of Reagan
Reagan’s team worked hard to craft an optimistic and positive image of Reagan, and in turn the meaning of the 1980 election, that papered over the deeply divisive rhetoric that had been integral to Reagan’s appeal and history.
Reagan railed against the “minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” who he said were destroying the public universities,
Reagan went after “welfare queens” for cheating taxpayers.
