The Vital Center The Niskanen Center

As Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue in their recent book, bold and sweeping policy proposals rarely come to pass and usually fail when they do. What does succeed is unsatisfactory but pragmatic compromise and gradual, sustained change.

February 24 will mark the second anniversary of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Although Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial power made the invasion possible, it’s still unclear to many observers why the Kremlin’s leader took this fateful decision.

Many Americans would agree with Henry Ford’s famous statement that “History is bunk.” Do the events of a century and a half ago really have any relevance to our daily lives in the twenty-first century? Fergus Bordewich, in his new book Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, argues that America’s critical missed turning point in the 1860s and ‘70s continues to haunt the present.

In the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War in 1865, federal forces attempted to rebuild the post-slavery South as an industrial, biracial democracy. The policy of this Reconstruction was made in Washington by a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans — members of the Republican Party who were committed to a thoroughgoing transformation of the South. Former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, elected as president on the Republican ticket in 1868, was equally committed to this revolutionary transformation. But Reconstruction increasingly was thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan – a secret paramilitary group formed in late 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee – which morphed into what Bordewich calls “the first organized terror movement in American history.” The Klan used threats, abuse, arson, rape, torture, and lynching to terrorize African Americans into servility and to destroy the Republican Party in the South.

In this podcast discussion, Bordewich discusses how Grant pushed Congress to grant him the powers he needed to combat the Klan, and how he used these powers to shatter the “Invisible Empire.” But Grant’s efforts were largely undone by members of his own party who formed the so-called Liberal Republican faction, largely because they distrusted strong central government. In the aftermath of Grant’s presidency, the Klan faded away because Democratic-controlled legislatures in the South increasingly were able to enforce white supremacy on the region through legal means. One of the lessons from this episode of history, in Bordewich’s view, is “the danger of politically crippling what is necessary for government to do to sustain what’s best in society and to sustain the rights and protections of Americans.”

In 1951, Milton Friedman received the John Bates Clark Medal, a highly prestigious prize given to an American economist under the age of 40 who has made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. As Jennifer Burns points out in her monumental new study of Friedman — the first full-length, archivally researched biography to have been published — the academic economic profession viewed Friedman as a promising young pioneer in the fields of statistics and mathematics at the time. Ironically, at that very moment, Friedman redirected his intellectual interests toward the seemingly outdated and even retrograde studies of the quantity of money, the consumption function, and other ideas outside of the mainstream. For the next two decades, many economists would regard Friedman as, at best, an eccentric and, at worst, a dangerous reactionary.

However, as Burns describes in Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, with the coming of stagflation — the combination of inflation and stagnation — that afflicted the American economy in the early 1970s, and which seemingly was impossible according to the conventional academic wisdom, Friedman came to be perceived a visionary. Over time, his views on capitalism, free markets, and limited regulation came to be adopted by both parties — but his influence was powerful in the Republican Party, where they helped define modern conservatism. In recent years, however, progressives have condemned the Friedman-influenced ideas of neoliberalism. At the same time, “National Conservatives” on the right have embraced the idea of using state power against their enemies in Big Business. 

In this podcast discussion, Burns discusses Friedman’s life and times and how her biography is also a history of economic thought and development in the twentieth century. She explains why Friedman continues to matter and why some of his more abstract theories fail to adequately explain human behavior and account for the impact of government investment. And she makes the case why the generally conservative Chicago School of Economics, of which Friedman was the most famous representative, was not as hostile to moderation as it has usually been portrayed.