Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.
In Fiscal Year 2025, federal outlays totaled over $7 trillion across 52 general spending categories. Within each of these categories, we trace spending at the line item and subcategory level to assign a total of $4.4 trillion in spending across three age groups: retirees; working-age adults; children and young adults. We classify the remaining $2.6 trillion as “all ages” because they finance broad public goods.
Retirees (ages 65 and older) receive $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of the $4.4 trillion in age-assignable federal outlays, driven mainly by Social Security and Medicare.
Working-age adults (ages 26–64) receive $1.2 trillion, or 28 percent of age-assignable outlays, spread across Medicaid, Social Security disability benefits, veterans benefits, and Marketplace subsidies.
Children and young adults (under age 26) receive $449 billion, or 10 percent of age-assignable outlays, concentrated in Medicaid, SNAP, child nutrition, and education programs.
The heavy expenditure share on retirees is consistent with a voting model from the field of political economy. The retiree share is predicted to increase even more with an aging population and fiscal strain.
We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.
This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.
The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.
What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.
Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. ...
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States...
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
...
[He] shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, is to and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose– and you allow him to make war at pleasure ...This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us." -- letter to William Herndon, February 15, 1848
"Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation." --letter to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864
Since January 20, 2025:
Iran
Venezuela: boat bombings and capture of Maduro):
Yemen: Air strikes against Houthi militants
Counterterrorism Strikes in Iraq, Nigeria, and Somalia.
The president has a totally unchecked power to start a nuclear war. The process exists to authenticate the president's commands, not to challenge them.
James Comey: charges of making false statements to Congress and obstruction related to his 2020 testimony. The indictment was dismissed.
John Bolton: indictment for alleged unauthorized retention and transmission of classified information.
Letitia James New York Attorney General indicted in October 2025 on bank fraud and false statements charges. Case dismissed.
Jerome H. Powell said DOJ as opened a criminal investigation into Powell; prosecutors are looking at cost overruns.Threats: Regulatory Action and Funding
Universities and funding
Law firms representing Trump adversaries: contracts
Media companies and FCC license threats
Soft Power: "Power to Persuade"
Support from congressional Republicans and One Big Beautiful Bill
Every month at the Pentagon, Hegseth hosts evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity, which is one that would dominate American life and cast those who disagree with him as God’s enemies. He has brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn’t have the right to vote.
And in recent weeks, the war with Muslim-majority Iran has only made Hegseth’s approach more stark.
On Wednesday at the Pentagon, Hegseth prayed for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” Later that day, his department announced military chaplains would no longer wear their rank on their uniform and instead would wear religious insignia.
A gentleman from Chicago has a different point of view:
This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).
Now, officials are urgently discussing whether Tomahawk missiles in other theaters, like the Indo-Pacific, may need to be shipped to the Middle East as the US continues its offensive against the Islamic Republic. Tomahawk cruise missiles have been a staple of American military might since they were first used in the Gulf War by George H W Bush. But the widespread usage of the bespoke military tech in the US war in Iran has rattled some Pentagon officials who are now sounding the alarm about the depleted Tomahawk stockpiles. The Pentagon hit back against the unnamed officials' concern in a statement to the Daily Mail.
The parallels to the present are uncomfortable. After the Cold War, the Pentagon actively encouraged the consolidation of the defense industry. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and his deputy, William Perry, hosted a now-infamous dinner with the heads of the major defense contractors and told them bluntly that the post–Cold War budget would not sustain them all. The message was clear: Merge or be left behind. The industry obliged. Dozens of firms collapsed into a handful of prime contractors. The dinner became known as “the Last Supper,” and its legacy is the narrow, concentrated industrial base the United States is now trying to surge in wartime. Then came the Budget Control Act of 2011, which imposed automatic spending caps on the federal budget, resulting in defense cuts, as part of a deficit-reduction deal in Congress. Even after the caps were partially lifted in subsequent years, the damage to procurement pipelines, production lines, and inventory depth persisted. The combination of industrial consolidation and fiscal austerity produced the same trade-off the Truman-era Pentagon had made: fewer, more expensive systems and the assumption that wars would be short enough that depth would not matter. Now, as in 1950, a real war is exposing the consequences.
The logic behind that trade-off was not irrational. Precision, stealth, networking, and cutting-edge technology give the American military decisive advantages in short campaigns. The assumption was that the United States would fight brief wars, dominate quickly, and rely on technological overmatch to compensate for smaller inventories. But high-end capability without industrial depth is a fragile foundation for fighting an actual war. When a single interceptor costs millions of dollars and requires long lead times to produce, replenishment becomes a multiyear effort. When cruise missiles are built in limited quantities optimized for peacetime budgets rather than wartime demand, stockpiles evaporate quickly under sustained fire. When the industrial base has consolidated to a handful of suppliers with narrow surge capacity, scaling production becomes an exercise in wishful thinking.
The war with Iran is demonstrating that quantity and attrition still matter. Adversaries understand this well. Iran’s strategy is not to outmatch the United States technologically. It is to impose costs, stretch supplies, and exhaust American magazines beyond our ability to reconstitute them. In a broader strategic sense, China’s military modernization emphasizes mass production of missiles and drones precisely because China understands that sustained combat favors the side that can regenerate combat power quickly. Ukraine and Russia have learned the same lesson in their own war: Modern conflict demands weapons built at the nexus of quality and quantity. The United States must internalize this reality.
