The War At Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush’s Militarism

While numerous analysts have discussed, and decried, the geopolitical ambitions of the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies, the attention to America’s imperial posture overseas has turned eyes away from a crucial dimension of belligerent foreign policy: the domestic politics of war. Frances Fox Piven, one of the most celebrated US social scientists, raises questions others have not. She examines the ways the War on Terror served to reinforce the Bush administration’s political base and analyzes the manner in which flag-waving politicians used the emotional fog of war to further their regressive social and economic agendas. Always in the past, US governments that made war sooner or later tried to reward their peoples for the blood and wealth they were forced to sacrifice. During World War II, tax rates on the wealthy rose to 90 percent; toward the end of the Vietnam War, eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote. In this war, taxes on the rich have been slashed, and democratic rights are being rolled back. Even veteran’s benefits have been sharply reduced. With an analysis of the way in which war has propped up American rulers, The War at Home makes sense of the Bush administration’s military adventures abroad in the context of current domestic policy.