Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

[Woodsman]

Gabriel Kolko died Monday at his home in Amsterdam. Kolko, author of The Triumph of Conservatism, Anatomy of a War: the United States, Vietnam and the Modern Historical Experience, and Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, was one of the pre-eminent historians of our time.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1932, Kolko attended Kent State University and received his doctorate in history from Harvard. Along with Saul Landau, Kolko was one of the circle of historians trained at University of Wisconsin by the great William Appleman Williams. Kolko taught history for many years at York University in Toronto and moved to Amsterdam soon after his retirement. Kolko’s books on the progressive era, the Cold War, Vietnam and the war on terror stand as some of the most trenchant and revealing documents of our time. Prof. Kolko's work continues to have a profound influence on my thinking and it was my privilege to read and contemplate his many influential books and monographs. If "blame" must be assigned for my understanding of how the world works, Kolko takes a significant share and for that I remain grateful.

While always an unapologetic and principled leftist, Kolko's peerless scholarship would in time transcended ideological boundaries. Never achieving the celebrity status of contemporaries like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, he nonetheless stands head and shoulders above his more well known colleagues in terms of quality and depth of scholarship. One of the most important of the so-called revisionist historians, Kolko's "The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954" set the standard for subsequent works on the Cold War and remains to this day one of the most important analytic studies of evolving U.S. policy in this period.

Kolko rightfully saw the Cold War less as a product of Soviet expansionism but rather an American attempt to promote its singular brand of free trade and corporate hegemony with the goal of restructuring the world so that big business could trade, operate, and profit without restrictions. For Kolko, the central foreign policy concern for American elites was not the publicly stated containment of communism, but rather the extension and expansion of the unique form of American capitalism oriented toward the economic power and needs of ruling class business elites. To these Brahmins, the biggest threat to this hegemony was not Soviet power - which they rightly understood as a Potemkin village - but rather a skeptical Congress and a public hungry for peace and the dividends due them after their sacrifice and personal loss in the Second World War. As plainly stated by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg during the run up to the Truman Doctrine and its nearly half billion dollar aid package to Greece, American politicians and their elite benefactors understood that the only way to get a war weary nation on board was to "scare the hell out of the American people." Fear of communism would become a well-worn technique of political mobilization at home and remain a principle feature of American life even to our own day.

Equally compelling was Kolko's study on the nature of the American political economy. In such works as "Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916," and "Main Currents in Modern American History," Kolko correctly identified America as a nation where the rich rule and the rest obey. The ruling class, according to Kolko, defines the essential preconditions and functions of the larger American social order. The central goal in the post-Civil War historical experience remains the security and continuity of business elites and their institutions of power. Kolko's work described America’s political order as one producing vast riches for a few and poverty and inequality for the majority. Over the decades Kolko's thesis has steadily moved from a once radical interpretation to the prevailing view. To Kolko, this ruling class remains the final arbiter and beneficiary of the existing structure of American society and politics at home and of United States power abroad.

Kolko's "Triumph of Conservatism" is a singular piece of scholarship upending long established notions of the so-called Progressive Era. It dispensed with comforting yet ahistorical liberal myths about benevolent reformers and equally spurious conservative myths about independent, market-loving businessmen. In it Kolko argued that big business played a major role in designing and imposing the regulations of the Progressive era as a means of containing "ruinous competition." Fearing this competition and the subsequent diffusion of their economic power, business elites turned to the federal government to "rationalize" the economy and make it safe for monopoly. In today's environment where large multinational corporations and banking interests operate with impunity this view seems obvious. But it was Kolko who first proposed that the federal government came to intervene in the economy not because there was too much monopoly, but too little of it. And while Kolko initially bristled and puzzled over the libertarian adoption of this thesis, he eventually softened his resistance and in time came to speak favorably of libertarian scholarship on such subjects as the New Deal. Much to the dismay of doctrinaire socialists and Soviet apologists, Kolko unequivocally rejected the socialist tradition in his 2006 book "After Socialism." While remaining a principled leftist to his last day, Kolko declared socialism irreversibly dead both in practice and theory.

I count Kolko, along with William A. Williams, Guenter Lewy, Gar Alperovitz, Walter LaFeber and Carl Oglesby, as one of my "intellectual fathers." Approaching their work as a young man, they instilled in me a desire for ceaseless questioning of orthodoxy guided by rigorous scholarship. I continue to be challenged and enthralled by them in my old age.

Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

[lektrode]

Re: Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

.....
Kolko's "Triumph of Conservatism" is a singular piece of scholarship upending long established notions of the so-called Progressive Era. It dispensed with comforting yet ahistorical liberal myths about benevolent reformers and equally spurious conservative myths about independent, market-loving businessmen. In it Kolko argued that big business played a major role in designing and imposing the regulations of the Progressive era as a means of containing "ruinous competition." Fearing this competition and the subsequent diffusion of their economic power, business elites turned to the federal government to "rationalize" the economy and make it safe for monopoly. In today's environment where large multinational corporations and banking interests operate with impunity this view seems obvious. But it was Kolko who first proposed that the federal government came to intervene in the economy not because there was too much monopoly, but too little of it. And while Kolko initially bristled and puzzled over the libertarian adoption of this thesis, he eventually softened his resistance and in time came to speak favorably of libertarian scholarship on such subjects as the New Deal. Much to the dismay of doctrinaire socialists and Soviet apologists, Kolko unequivocally rejected the socialist tradition in his 2006 book "After Socialism." While remaining a principled leftist to his last day, Kolko declared socialism irreversibly dead both in practice and theory.

I count Kolko, along with William A. Williams, Guenter Lewy, Gar Alperovitz, Walter LaFeber and Carl Oglesby, as one of my "intellectual fathers." Approaching their work as a young man, they instilled in me a desire for ceaseless questioning of orthodoxy guided by rigorous scholarship. I continue to be challenged and enthralled by them in my old age.

Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

one of the best obits eye ever, woody - appreciate your effort here (am assuming this is your work/words...)

and a historically illuminating piece at that - will be interesting to watch the debate on this one

[Woodsman]

Re: Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

one of the best obits eye ever, woody - appreciate your effort here (am assuming this is your work/words...)

and a historically illuminating piece at that - will be interesting to watch the debate on this one

Can't take credit for anything but the effort of compilation and those sentences starting with "I". There rest is a paraphrase/copy of goodness knows how many sources. But thanks for the encouragement.

It's an odd thing to say, but I love writing obits. In my first job as a cub reporter back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the AP wire was actually a copper wire, I wrote obits for ten cents a word. Regular folks I could do in about a minute. Accomplished people took a bit longer. Quite good training for a reporter, having to talk on the phone with someone deep in grief and getting the who what wheres in under five minutes.

[Raz]

Re: Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

Thanks for posting this, Woodsman. It raises the caliber of debate as to what's the best way to effectively deal with our country's problems.

You and I are never going to agree on everything in matters economic or political, but if we decide to focus upon equitable solutions
instead of ideological solutions we should be able to find enough common ground to conduct the nation's business.

Of course that would require the two of us having absolute power - co-emperors, if you will!


"I'm Raz the Paleoconservative, and I heartily endorse the opinions cited in the article below ."


Left Turn Ahead


by Dylan Hales



Conservatives have long taken for granted their place on the right of the political spectrum. But as the organized Right, in the form of the Republican Party, has hitched its wagon to big business and big government in the decades since World War II, some unconventional voices on the American Left have spoken up for the traditionally conservative causes of decentralism, prudent government, and foreign-policy restraint. This “left conservatism” owes its name to Norman Mailer, but it has deep roots in American history. And now that so much of the official Right has been co-opted by advocates of a materialistic consumer culture—to be maintained by a military empire—the time may be ripe for conservatives to look in a new direction.

They might begin by turning to William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko. Williams, the pre-eminent historian of American diplomacy, served as ideological godfather to the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s while teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kolko, who was influenced by Williams, has long been an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire. Both men spent their entire careers on the Left, yet their arguments more often parallel the small-town conservatism of the Old Right than the corporate ideology of conventional liberalism.


While Williams and Kolko were noninterventionists in foreign policy, they were decidedly realistic in their tone and approach. Instead of grounding their anti-imperialism on typical Leftist complaints about collateral damage, both men focused their criticisms on the consequences of military adventurism on the character of the United States. Taking a decidedly America First tack, Williams went so far as to suggest that the American imperial mindset was a greater threat to its own citizens than to the denizens of the Third World:

" The cost of empire is not properly tabulated in the dead and maimed, or in the wasted resources, but rather in the loss of our vitality as citizens. We have increasingly eased to participate in the process of self-government. … Finally we deny any responsibility; and as part of that ultimate abdication of our birthright, indignantly deny that the United States is or ever was an empire."

Williams noted that by the turn of the 20th century American culture “had been unable, after almost 300 years, to develop any conception of success—or fulfillment—except the idiom of the endless chase itself.” Imperialism, for Williams, was thus not just a matter of foreign policy. It also meant “the loss of sovereignty—control—over essential issues and decisions by a largely agricultural society to an industrial metropolis” here at home, and Williams feared it might be an ineradicable part of our modern way of life. Still, Williams distinguished between the “soft imperialism” of diplomacy and military preparedness and the “hard imperialism” of overt conquest. The prophets of “soft imperialism” were not bleeding-heart liberals or supporters of the New Deal; they were men like John Quincy Adams and the hero of Williams’s work, the realist and internationalist Herbert Hoover.


Williams saw Hoover’s statecraft as the thoughtful work of an American patriot who was interested in maintaining Americans’ standards of living without sacrificing undue amounts of blood and treasure. Believing that his countrymen understood “freedom” as an ideal inextricably linked with material abundance, Williams was at his pragmatic best when describing nonviolent approaches to securing foreign markets. Admittedly, any attempt to resurrect the legacy of Herbert Hoover would be a massive undertaking, and a lesser scholar than Williams might have been accused of contrarianism for trying to redeem the 29th president’s reputation. But Williams was undeterred.


Salvaging Hoover was not Williams’s only noble, if quixotic, project. He also advocated a return to the Articles of Confederation. Not only did he see the U.S. under the Articles as a relatively anti-imperial era, he also believed that the strong localism made possible under the Articles was the only form of governance suitable to real Americans living real lives. Williams’s belief that the Articles were “grounded in the idea and ideal of self-determined communities” is perfectly consistent both with the anti-imperial philosophy of the New Left and the Old Right’s traditional conservatism of hearth and home.


For Gabriel Kolko, the enemy has always been what sociologist Max Weber called “political capitalism”—that is, “the accumulation of private capital and fortunes via booty connected with politics.” In Kolko’s eyes, “America’s capacity and readiness to intervene virtually anywhere” pose a grave danger both to the U.S. and the world. Kolko has made it his mission to study the historical roots of how this propensity for intervention came to be. He was also one of the first historians to take on the regulatory state in a serious way. Kolko’s landmark work, The Triumph of Conservatism, is an attempt to link the Progressive Era policies of Theodore Roosevelt to the national-security state left behind in the wake of his cousin Franklin’s presidency.


Kolko’s indictment of what he calls “conservatism” is not aimed at the Southern Agrarianism of Richard Weaver or the Old Right individualism of Albert Jay Nock. In fact, Kolko’s thesis—that big government and big business consistently colluded to regulate small American artisans and farmers out of existence—has much in common with libertarian and traditionalist critiques of the corporatist state. The “national progressivism” that Kolko attacks was, in his own words, “the defense of business against the democratic ferment that was nascent in the states.” Coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s, Kolko saw firsthand the destruction of the “permanent things” as the result of the merging of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. A sense of place and rootedness lingers just beneath the surface of his work.


Kolko remains a quasi-Marxist to this day, but his writing represents a kind of fusionism—not of so much of Left and Right as of libertarianism and populism. At times he even sounds like the “Jeffersonian conservative” historian Clyde Wilson. Kolko can also bring to mind the 18th-century agrarian John Taylor of Caroline, whom Wilson once described as representing “both a conservative allegiance to local community and inherited ways and a radical-populist suspicion of capitalism, ‘progress,’ government and routine logrolling politics.”


The Triumph of Conservatism and other works of Kolko’s scholarship furnish a poignant reminder that the original progressives of Theodore Roosevelt’s time were big-city bureaucrats and elitist Republicans, and that wing of the GOP has a long history of enthusiasm for American militarism. Under the proud banner of President William McKinley, Republicans developed a foreign policy grounded firmly on the principles of empire, substituting a global Manifest Destiny in place of the Monroe Doctrine. “Progressive Republican”—John McCain notwithstanding—is a label altogether out of fashion today. But the movement conservatism that overtook the Republican Party during the Cold War now pursues a foreign policy every bit as interventionist as TR’s progressivism.


To Kolko and Williams, this Cold War mindset was just the most recent manifestation of the quest for unlimited growth that has so grossly altered the landscape of American life for so long. Foreign policy became a fulfillment of American excess, or to paraphrase the title of Williams’s most overtly political work, “empire” became “a way of life” for much of the American Right. But the real targets of left-wing scholars Kolko and Williams are not libertarians and individualists of the Old Right or even the small-town conservatism of Russell Kirk or the Nashville Agrarians. On the contrary: these varieties of Left and conservative are more in agreement with one another than not. They are de facto allies in a war against empire, bigness, and the most pernicious doctrine of them all, American Exceptionalism.


Outlining the conservative worth of Williams and Kolko is neither hard nor foolhardy for any serious man of the Right. Libertarian historian Ralph Raico has leaned heavily on the works of both men, and conservative foreign-policy scholar Andrew J. Bacevich has asked the same questions about “American freedom and American abundance” as Williams, a man who laid the groundwork for much of his analysis. The reluctance of many conservatives to find common cause with men of the Left who just happen to be right—on some of the most pressing issues of our age—is a habit of mind well worth breaking.

Nearly 30 years ago, Williams asked if it was “possible to create and sustain a democratic culture without conquering or otherwise controlling and wasting a grossly inequitable share of social space and resources?” As the Republic of old continues to crumble and the GOP descends further into corruption and authoritarianism, it may be time for those on the Right to set their prejudices aside and ask a pressing question of their own: “What is Left?”
__________________________________________
Dylan Hales is a freelance writer from Charleston, South Carolina. His blog, The Left Conservative, can be found at www.leftconservativeblog .blogspot.com.

[don]

Re: Gabriel Kolko, RIP (1932-2014)

Kolko's book Anatomy of a War is the definitive treatment of Vietnam on the level of realpolitik.