Why does the United States keep engaging in interventions in ways that make it impossible to succeed? By extension, why do leaders who choose to intervene abroad do such a subpar job of prosecuting it? Any convincing answer will require a framework for the analysis of US foreign policy across different cases. Here, I offer such a framework, which I anchor in wider theories of state behaviour and decision making by combining neoclassical realism (NCR), as well as the study of ideas and group decision making.

I suggest that in the face of uncertain international environments, the foreign policy executives lean on grand but diverging ideas of leadership, prudence, responsibility and technological prowess to inform their decisions. They wield these ideas to persuade others during foreign policy deliberations where they discuss what should be done and how, often without a clear outcome. The lengthy process of deliberating these ideas can become a problem for decision makers absent agreement or decisive presidential leadership, and especially if under pressure to act quickly. Decision makers may then be incentivized to opt for quick fixes: short-term, incremental policies to patch over ideational divides. They do so by considering different foreign policy instruments, the exact consequences of which are frequently unclear (or ignored). They then choose what at the onset look like easy, low-cost solutions that everyone can agree on – often precisely because the exact parameters or consequences of these solutions remain unclear to, or are not actually agreed upon by, decision makers.

This chapter highlights the causal primacy of systemic variables for the use of no-fly zones in US foreign policy, and thus rebalances the relationship between international environments and ideational competition. In the preceding chapters, I have provided an answer to the question: When and why are no-fly zones used? No-fly zones play a crucial role in overcoming pervasive ideational competition in the US foreign policy executive. Absent agreement or presidential leadership, the no-fly zone functions as a quick fix – adhesive tape on deep ideational divides. I argued that by taking on this role, the no-fly zone functions symbolically in foreign policy deliberations, disconnected from its actual strategic properties or utility and indeed from any detailed political or military planning. This ‘idealization’ process is most visible over time and across the cases discussed in previous chapters. In Iraq, the no-fly zone emerged out of the hesitancy to commit large-scale support to Kurdish refugees and Shia rebels. In Bosnia, the no-fly zone symbolized how the US could easily signal commitment yet avoid any actual responsibility and the risks of involvement. Diverging viewpoints and arguments are frequent in the US foreign policy executive, however. If the no-fly zone takes on the role of a faux compromise in the foreign policy executive, why do we not see even more no-fly zones?

First, use of the no-fly zone is connected to military-technological improvements that make aerial intervention seemingly risk-free for the US.

In literature on US policy in Iraq, the 1991 and 1992 no-fly zones are often relegated to footnotes. Some authors mention the no-fly zones within the broader sanctions regime against Iraq (Graham-Brown, 1999; Alterman, 2003) or in relation to various air operations and its later stages (Hiltermann, 1997; Gibbons, 2002; Cockayne and Malone, 2006). The northern no-fly zone is conventionally viewed as auxiliary to a mostly uncontroversial and largely successful humanitarian mission, an afterthought to the more important Gulf War (Goff, 1992; Helfont, 2023). The southern no-fly zone is even less researched, with only two scholarly contributions focused on it in some detail (Brattebo, 2006; O’Brien, 2021). This may be surprising considering that, at least per President George H.W. Bush and his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, the foreign policy executive's entire ‘planning focus’ at the time had been put on the ‘problems and opportunities which emerged in the aftermath of Desert Storm’ (Bush and Scowcroft, 1999, p 493). The focus on military-strategic and tactical aspects obfuscates insights to be gained from an analysis of the political decision-making process leading up to the instrument's use, showcasing a type of intervention that served as a blueprint for subsequent administrations.

Purely looking at America's international environment, it must remain unclear why no-fly zones were used to ostensibly protect the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Shia in the south. Faced with pervasive uncertainty around the international implications of the Soviet Union's rapid disintegration, the Bush administration (together with its allies) decided to intervene militarily when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, but after its quick victory did not pursue regime change by directly removing Saddam Hussein.

How do adults form preferences over education policy? Why do Democrats and Republicans disagree about how schools should work and what they should teach? I argue that public opinion follows a “top-down” model, in which rank-and-file voters largely adopt the positions of prominent national leaders in their parties. This causes policy preferences to become polarized. I illustrate these dynamics with four case studies: (1) public opinion toward school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) debate about Common Core education standards; (3) voting behavior on a 1978 California initiative that sought to ban gay teachers; and (4) voting behavior on a 1998 California initiative that banned bilingual education in that state.

In the final analysis, James and a cohort of literary modernists fractured the abstraction known as “the public” by showing that it is composed of individuals, each with their distinctive mental lives and social roles. The modernist ethic of radical empiricism holds that everyone has a responsibility to test their beliefs against reality and to seek multiple perspectives from sources that are accountable to the truth. James’s life’s work, along with that of later modernists who dramatized the productive varieties of dissociative experience, helped provide a scaffolding for democratic thought by exhorting readers to fortify their minds against the persuasive energy of powerful institutions and charismatic leaders. The book closes with a reflection upon our contemporary media ecology, drawing on philosopher Catherine Malabou’s concept of the brain’s “plasticity,” a term that in French encompasses both its regenerative and destructive capabilities. If we better understood these divergent mental processes and their complex neuroanatomy, we humans may be better equipped to take responsibility for our minds, and more rigorous stock of the limitations of our beliefs, our choices, and our actions.

I combine a national dataset on high-profile education culture wars – dealing with school mascots, curriculum, religion, sexuality, and evolution – with information on student achievement on standardized tests to examine how adult political conflicts impact student learning in the classroom. I show that student achievement declines after an outbreak of controversy, an effect that persists for several years and appears driven mostly by controversies involving evolution and race. In addition to a large-N, “difference in differences” analysis, the chapter provides two detailed case studies, over a controversial school mascot in California and a federal court case involving a Pennsylvania’s district policy to teach intelligent design.

This chapter surveys current doctrine concerning the scope of Congress’s regulatory, taxing, and spending powers. The Court’s historic pattern of decisions both presents a study in constitutional change and illumines factors that sometimes make change difficult. Prior to the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Court struggled uncertainly to cabin Congress’s powers under Article I. But the Court, seemingly in response to political pressures, substantially abandoned that effort in 1937, when it began to interpret the Commerce Clause as giving Congress vast powers to regulate the national economy and the Taxing and Spending Clause as allowing it to create largesse-dispensing programs that the Founding generation could not have imagined. At least since the 1980s, a strain of conservative scholarship has maintained that the modern, swollen national government finds no justification in the original Constitution and that the Court should enforce the original design. This chapter traces the Court’s limited success in implementing a course correction and identifies the considerations that have given pause to conservative justices. It also describes the Court’s more aggressive efforts to limit congressional power under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, all of which include express authorizations of Congress to “enforce” their substantive guarantees.

Against the rise of fascism, American literary modernists confronted the psychodynamics of conversion that underlie pernicious forms of conspiracism and racist public discourse. William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Jean Toomer’s unpublished writings on racial psychology, for example, reverse-engineer the psychodynamics of racism by putting readers in the uncomfortable position of seeing themselves from the point of view of the other (whether a literary text or another human being). Forcing a kind of double consciousness upon the reader, Faulkner and Toomer provoke disgust toward conspiracism’s self-appointed vigilantes. The paranoid public sphere is thus the diametrical opposite and sinister shadow of the pluralistic public sphere that James theorized. By fracturing and fragmenting the monolith of race, Faulkner and Toomer render epistemological doubt a powerful ally to critical thought.

In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

Chapter 2 locates the history of firearms litigation over the past sixty years as a progression through four distinction waves, in the context of the arc of mass tort litigation. The chapter surveys initial gun litigation in the 1960s–1970s based on conventional tort theories sounding in negligence and product defect, noting that virtually all these lawsuits failed. During the 1980s and 1990s, firearms litigation followed the mass tort pattern of attempted aggregation of claims, but courts still did not allow these suits to progress. The second wave of firearms litigation occurred in the early twentieth century, following the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. This new litigation model was based on governmental entity lawsuits seeking redress for communities harmed by gun violence. The third wave of gun litigation occurred after Congressional enactment of PLCAA in 2005. Plaintiffs in these PLCAA suits sought relief under PLCAA’s six exceptions. These suits also largely failed to gain traction. And the fourth and current wave of firearms litigation post-2019, after the successful Sandy Hook litigation, is being pursued by state attorneys general under new, targeted consumer protection and public nuisance accountability statutes.

Humor functions as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds (1947), novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or conservative, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion—religious or secular—could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

This chapter provides a preliminary sketch of the Supreme Court of the current era. It describes the distinctive political environment in which the sitting justices were appointed and in which they function. It highlights the role that a conservative legal organization, the Federalist Society, has played in vetting potential nominees and in ensuring that the sitting justices who were appointed by Republican presidents are reliably conservative in their commitments. The chapter also discusses the rise of originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation and frames issues about the relationship between originalist methodology and substantively conservative values that will be a focus of attention through the remainder of the book. Finally, it gives introductory, capsule biographies of each of the current justices. As later chapters will elaborate, it is impossible to understand the Court’s dynamics without a grasp of how the individual justices, taken one by one, approach their jobs.

Chapter Three develops the argument in favor of strong judicial review to correct malfunctions in our electoral system. The first section analyzes flaws in our current electoral system, explaining why the market for elective office is not sufficiently competitive. The next section reviews the Warren Court’s decisions in key malapportionment cases: Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynold v. Sims. Those cases provide a helpful model for strong judicial review to correct flaws in our electoral system. The chapter then presents a critique of four election law decisions since 1976 where the Supreme Court has contributed to democratic decay by engaging in antidemocratic judicial review. The final section presents several proposals for new constitutional rules that build on the principles articulated in Wesberry and Reynolds. The proposed rules are designed to enhance competition in the market for elective office and improve the quality of democratic self-government in the United States.