The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism - Softcover

Piven, Frances Fox

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595580921 ISBN 13: 9781595580924

Publisher: New Press, The, 2006

Synopsis

A look at the hidden cost of the Iraq war by the preeminent social scientist.

The release of The War at Home helped turn the spotlight back to the home front, focusing attention on the domestic causes and consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The subject of much attention upon its initial release, this sharp, incisive volume reveals the extent to which ordinary Americans, as well as Iraqis and Afghanis, are the victims of the Bush administration's warmongering.

Frances Fox Piven, one of the country's most celebrated political thinkers, explores the internal fallout of America's most recent military conflicts. Her trenchant exploration puts America's latest military involvement in historical context, revealing the way in which the current wars violate the lessons of history. While previous conflicts have led governments to compensate citizens for costly sacrifices in blood and money with progressive social programs at home, the Bush administration has rolled back democratic rights and slashed taxes for the rich, even reducing some veterans' benefits.

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements, The New Class War, and The Breaking of the American Social Compact (The New Press), and co-author, with Richard A. Cloward, of Why Americans Don't Vote. She is the recipient of the American Sociological Association Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology. She lives in Manhattan and Millerton, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

The emotional fervor generated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has helped a domestic neoconservative agenda, as well as altered a historical pattern in which governments waging war wind up expanding civil rights and social programs, or so argues sociologist Piven (Why Americans Don’t Vote). The turn to preemptive war and the disregarding of international linkages, she claims, is part of a domestic strategy, just as the Cold War justified the domestic Red Scare. Piven doesn’t add original research; rather she synthesizes a wide range of reportage and commentators (Chalmers Johnson, Kevin Phillips, Naomi Klein, Garry Wills, Jonathan Schell, etc.) in sometimes bloglike fashion. She finds Bush backers in Congress invoked the need to avoid partisan bickering in wartime—thus hastening passage of corporate-friendly tax-cut legislation and deregulation. Meanwhile, cuts in federal spending increased pressure on the states to cut back their own social spending. Piven doesn’t pause much to analyze why the opposition Democrats and others let this happen, but she does argue that the fallout from the wars make the administration vulnerable in the upcoming election. "War itself cannot be an effective cover for this ruse for long," she concludes, predicting (while at the same time working to foster) an atmosphere conducive to regime change.
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Press, The
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1595580921
• ISBN 13: 9781595580924
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165