Talk:History of the United States (1980-present)/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

I have never read a more leftist and innacurate depiction of the Reagan presidency in my life. The author is a communist or some idiot socialist from Europe. Get your facts straight and then write about a political figure. Give me a break. Ronald Reagan single handedly caused the Soviet Union to collapse which made millions of people free for the first time in their life.

Is this User:JoeM? 172 13:59, 7 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia. Please re-write the article from a neutral point of view if you feel that it's biased - after all, the collaborative editing process is both Wikipedia's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. -- Jim Redmond 21:50, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This article is seriously flawed vis-a-vis NPOV. I put up a neutrality dispute message and will try to make the article less biased over the next week.

Hcheney 13:16, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Wow, though I'd edited bits of this article before, I hadn't noticed how atrocious it is till I just looked at it again now. Definitely make changes if you have ideas for fixing up this mess. The NPOV message will have to do for now. -- VV 01:03, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I am removing the neutrality dispute. Please present reasoned counter-arguments backed by factual evidence. You will have to explain what is wrong with the merits of the emphases and the evidence. 172 00:44, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Don't just remove a dispute notice because you don't agree with it. Other obviously do dispute it. Please work with others to fix the article. Rmhermen 01:06, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)
OK 172, let's start with Reagan being "well known to be on the intellectually lazy side". I'd sure like to see your "factual evidence" for that kind of gratuitous slam! And you can't remove dispute notices unilaterally, that is a total violation of policy, not that I'm surprised to see you doing that sort of thing rather than presenting the support for your assertions. Stan 01:45, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I agree on both points. The Reagan section, virtually all of it (even the caption!), speaks for itself, and it was not appropriate to remove the header anyway. -- VV 01:48, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hcheney, Rmhermen, Stan, and VV:

I am sorry for being a bit lengthy in my response below, but the comments that I just saw above were a telltale sign that a contentious, dead-end dispute was possible. This would be awful. We have a long-neglected, incomplete series of articles full of gaps. We finally now have some much-needed attention! Thus, I am writing the comments below with the hope that they will provide a foundation for constructive collaboration on the article series, rather than attacks and suspicions.

We have a great deal of chronological and thematic gaps to fill in the entire series. I enumerated what kinds of gaps remain on the other talk pages a while ago. I can do so again if asked and can provide relevant sources with ISBN numbers and relevant links to journal articles if anyone is in need of doing research. I can also provide some links that provide an overview of recent schools of though on American history if you need a guide to the historiography.

I am actually elated to see interest in the article series. For the most part, each of the pre-WWI articles are mere skeletons of completed articles with the exception of the Origins of the American Civil War, which I completed roughly a month ago. IMHO, the gaps (notice the caption below the heading of the section on the past 15 years says "not even close to finished!") are our most pressing concerns.

However, before we start writing new material, the users pressing for a "neutrality heading" should reorient their concerns to the incomplete nature of the series from reactions stemming from impressionistic feelings about a causal reading. Allow me to explain.

When working with general readers of history, as opposed to other users who have spent years in the discipline or its sister social sciences, I find that there is often a confusion as to the nature of historical scholarship, which is a response to the challenges posed to historical writing. Above all, the overarching challenge is the complexity of history. The job of a historian is to sort out the data and discover the different patterns that are interacting in history. If this is not accomplished, what you just have is flux, chaos of distinct phenomena, and randomly selected trivia that provides a meaningless basis of knowledge. To withstand these challenges, the field of history has been a permanent dialogue among historians regarding all the new evidence recently marshaled by scholars, the broad interpretative issues, and the insights from the sister social sciences.

However, even highly intelligent, extremely well read general readers often fail to grasp the nature of how this dialogue is structured. Often, they tend to emphasize things that reinforce their own worldview. General readers who fervently believe in a set of values, a political philosophy, or even an inchoate collection of preferences and prejudices tend to be under the perilous impression that these values-judgments are an adequate interpretative model for figuring out what patterns are interacting, rather than, say, exhausting research or insights from economics, political science, or sociology. In this sense, the dialogue is structured along the lines of competing approaches, competing methodologies, and competing interpretations. For example, you can have conflict theorists competing with functionalists; accounts centered on presidential administrations competing with the new social histories focusing on women, minorities, and poor; accounts focusing on short time horizons competing those focusing on longer ones; structural variables competing with a focus on actors, values and institutions; and so on ad so on. This is a far more effective means of reconciling all the often-contradictory evidence than looking at everything in black and white terms and from a narrow focus. This is far better than saying, "well, here's what the liberals say about Reagan, and here's what the conservatives say in response" or vice versa.

When working on Wiki, I have received a great deal of criticism for not going along with the "supporters say" and "opponents say" style of writing. Well-meaning, well-educated, and serious contributors often argue with the utmost sincerity that Wiki's policy of NPOV means balancing the "good things" and the "bad things" and giving "both sides" ("pro-" and "con") equal time. But this is not a workable approach to history. There are far more than "two sides." There are an endless array of sides, conflicts, and contradictions with often-unclear relationships to each other.

Yet, well-meaning users often react with alarm when they stumble across "bad things," at least on the surface, about historical figures that may be their heroes when you don't have that "supporters say" clutch. They cry out, charging "bias," and put up neutrality dispute headings. They often expect NPOV to entail somehow "point/counter-point" and expect that the narrative will be structured along the lines of how political pundits and commentators debate on television.

As an aside, that's why the Israeli-Palestinian articles, for example, are often battlefields, even though there is never a monopoly on reality when these kinds of issues come up. Reality there reduced to the "pro-Israeli" versus the "pro-Palestinian" side. There's no wonder why there's so much tension in these articles. I doubt that we'd want to see the US-related articles on history and politics foster so much conflict.

As this example demonstrates, the "supports say"/"opponents say," "left vs. right," and "liberal vs. conservative" approach is bad conceptualization/bad approach in the realm of history. Certainly, normative biases and implicit value judgments exist in all historical writing. Often times, debates over methodology and approach a proxies for political ends. But the debate cannot be structured as such. Otherwise, you will not have a progressive development working toward the most effective account. You would have a disjointed discipline divided into hostile enemies camps. Fortunately, scholars who reside in certain areas (political history, military and diplomatic history, neoclassical, neo-Marxist history, social history, postmodern history, etc.) can often reconcile their conflicting accounts and interpretations.

Here's another example on a seemingly unrelated topic. Last year on the Irish Potato Famine page, Wiki went through perhaps its most protracted, prolonged edit war in its history. A historian whose area of expertise is the political history of Ireland was pitted against a group of users who charged "genocide." The Irish specialist pointed out the roles of the blight, the indigenous systems of land tenure and inheritance, and the genuine belief in the laissez-faire orthodoxies of the time on the part of the British administration. To risk over-simplifying the opposing position, the users charging "genocide" attributed the famine solely to British ethnic and religious prejudices and capitalist exploitation of a traditional economy. Eventually, the specialist on Ireland was able to bring the page under control and put to rest all of the simplistic unicausal explanations of the crisis. All of the competing explanations had a basis in reality. In the end, the users charging "genocide" finally conceded the need to reconcile British policies with the complexities of Irish history in order write an article that can withstand the evidence marshaled by all the competing interpretations on the famine. Read all the volumes of Talk:Irish Potato Famine, where the flaws of a simplistic conception of history are demonstrated in exhausting detail in nearly ten volumes.

When dealing with the recent history on a subject as complex and daunting as recent US history, we have to focus on matters like the money supply, party systems, electoral bases, the balance of trade, GDP, demographic changes, institutional and coalitional constraints on leaders, presidential administrations, international markets, interests, constituencies, sectors, classes, generational cycles, race relations, organized labor, etc., etc.. In this sense, I ask for reasoned counter-arguments to any of the content on this page with respect to these kinds of concerns. A fuller, more inclusive picture of all the different interpretive issues – aided by the modeling, typologies, and analyses of the social sciences – is the way to achieve NPOV, balance, a more effective way of sorting out what was so significant about this era, and an analysis that withstands all the potentially contradictory data.

With these principles in mind, I hope that we can work on filling the gaps of the article, which are really the source of all the problems in the article series, rather than attacking the motivations of other users.

I also have a friendly suggestive for Stan in particular. It's often meaningless to pick out a few statements in historical writing, put them next to each other, and conclude that the author's line of thinking was inconsistent. You have to keep in mind how starkly one context can differ from another. Causal relationships often operate in completely different ways depending on the context! A phenomenon with miraculous effects in one context can be a disaster in another! I can come up with a steady stream of examples, and I'm sure you could as well.

Thus, while I'm elated to see a new interest in a long-neglected series of articles, I have some fears in the back of my head. I fear that users may have some valid concerns, but will be unable to express them well. Once again, I've seen intelligent users go nowhere in a debate since they articulate their concerns as a matter of a article noting being "pro-" or "con-" whatever enough for them, rather than articulating problems with evidence and the arguments.

Instead, we need users pointing out how overlooked evidence (not implicit, personal values judgments) challenges some of the observed trends. We need other users introducing another approach and perspective. For example, the article is still weak on women’s history, African American’s history, organized labor, new immigration, the growth of suburbs, etc.. Given the recent change by VV adding loaded language to the article ("free world"), I have a feeling that rightwing sentiments are behind some of the suspicions. But ironically, the article is a curiously old-fashioned, conservative and traditional narrative centered on presidential administrations while weak on the work of the new social histories, especially the focus on women, minorities, and the poor of the past two decades. If you people glanced at recently published undergrad survey texts, you'd see that this a standard account with little differences of substance where it is complete with the more respected general survey texts on US history.

In short, we'll be able to complete the article if you people can marshal some evidence of your own or analyze problems with some to the arguments. Little progress can be made, however, if you people make it into a battle over an impressionistic sense that the article somehow challenges some of your deeply held assumptions. You cannot say, "well isn't is obvious, it's common sense!" all you want. It is not. If it were, political scientists, economists, sociologists, and historians would not be going to school as long as your physicians. 172 07:06, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

BTW, we ought to remove the "neutrality heading." I respect the intensions of the user who flagged the article. But a neutrality flag posted before a basis for a neutrality dispute has even been articulated (other than "speaks for itself!") is counter-productive. It will foster mistrust, which is not the atmosphere appropriate for completing such a dauntingly difficult article series.

So in the midst of the massive verbiage lecturing me about things that I already know, I see you saying "this a standard account with little differences of substance". If that's so, then show me one mainstream published account of US history that says Reagan is "well known" to be "intellectually lazy" or that discusses Nancy's astrologer and Regan's calendar, and we'll add that book as a reference for this article. I already checked up on some of your stuff in Cold War, and what you added there is completely different from modern Cold War scholarship. Be condescending all you want, but when you don't supply references for your claims, avoid direct questions in discussion, revert people's fixes instead of improving them, and remove a neutrality dispute indicator in violation of policy, you are not being a respectable contributor. Stan 13:24, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm honestly disappointed that you don't seem ready to work cooperatively with me on filling all the gaps in this article series. Please clam down so that we can discuss your concerns and hopefully fill the gaps civilly.

Picking out a single sentence from a long article does not disprove my claim that this is a standard account (which the more general coverage ). Anyway, do you want to discuss the Reagan sentence first before we move on to other concerns? If so, I'm willing. But I'm going offline soon and will not be able to respond for another 12 hours.

You also know very well that I was not quoting any published account when I used the phase "intellectually lazy." Hence the use of no quotation marks. While this wasn't a verbatim quote, there's no shortage of material on his administration dealing with these matters.

Regardless, the wording was inappropriate. Perhaps "not a policy wonk" or "not a micromanager" work better, given that I was referring to his style of administration.

On another note, you still haven't explained why you feel the Cold War (1953-1962) article was so radically different from the accounts you were able to check out. I'd love to hear your insights, but all you do is pick out some quotations and spin them to fit any line of attack you've decided on.

BTW, I'm still not sure that it's a violation of policy to remove a neutrality heading before an adequate rationale has been provided. I'll take your word for it for now, but I was under the assumption at the time that I was acting within policy constraints. 172 16:48, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There's no "working with" someone who unilaterally reverts other people's honest attempts to make articles better - I've examined your contribution history, and there's no way I'm going to lift a finger to fix anything that you're just going to revert without previous discussion. You also say you want to discuss everything, but you're not very good at responding succinctly to specific points, nor at listening to people who disagree with you, and again, when it comes down to the actual editing, you'll revert an entire addition even if there is only one word which you don't like. Conversely, you seem to have no trouble adding your own obvious POV all over - the "intellectually lazy" crack is just one of hundreds I've seen you add. We've had all this meta-discussion a half-dozen times before, and it's like you simply don't get it. So short of mediation/arbitration (which I expect to ask for when the folks have worked through a few more cases), all I'm going to do is to clue the unsuspecting into what they're letting themselves in for. Stan 19:17, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Completely agree with Stan. 172, your actions have not been appropriate. Claiming historical scholarship is too esoteric for us mere mortals to comprehend, and therefore that we're in no position to question Reagan's supposed intellectual laziness or the neocon's supposed demand that all governments share the aims of the US, does not wash. Now I'm supposedly "rightwing" for saying that said "neocons" support the free world, a standard, widely used term, linked to an article explaining it, while there's no POV in calling Reagan's budget "hodge-podge" and "politicized" and crypto-Keynesian. And you want to claim historians-- in this case "historians" of a period less than twenty years ago about a president who is still alive-- exist outside the current raging debates about economic policy and can simply, by analyzing "patterns", declare the Reagan ideology a failure without anyone having the right of challenge. No, the text is not so sophisticated and inter-connected as all that, and includes individual claims which can be revised and fixed (and furthermore the sweeping claims are a POV, the values of the authors in play). But your policy seems to be completely undoing any would-be revision, as Stan said, based on as little as one word, which is not how a collaborative project like Wikipedia works. It is you who are not cooperating. -- VV 20:20, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

"Free world" is a loaded term. If Lancemurdoch went around and started changing "Communist bloc" to "people's democracies" I doubt that it would take other users long to revert his partisan language. You used the term "threaten" and "free world" in a context that took these assertions as matter-of-fact. You did not put quotation marks around these loaded terms either.

I did not call the Reagan Revolution a "failure" either. The article does quote David Stockman, Reagan's Budget Director, who broke with the administration over deficit spending. As for the coverage of the 1981 budget, are you claiming that political considerations play no role in federal budgets? Are you aware that Congress has to pass them? Please do a better job next time than picking out a few words here and there. 172 02:55, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)~


I removed the neutrality dispute. I'm under the assumption that my copyedits address your complaints. After all, I haven't seen counter-arguments being presented. Aside from the personal attacks, the criticism has been stylistic rather than substantive, citing only problematic wordings here and there. 172 05:25, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

BTW, a while ago a user removed the word "infamous" in reference to Carter's "malaise speech." See the page history; someone's edit description reads "remove POV 'infamous.'" So maybe I wasn't making an effort to pick on the Gipper after all, but just careless when it comes to taking into account how hypersensitive users can be around here. 172 05:37, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, there are at least four people here who have indicated that they think there are neutrality problems, and not one of them has agreed with your sunny assessment. It's simply not your prerogative to decide that the complaints are groundless. For instance, there is a bunch of POV material talking about the sad internal situation of the SU, and guess what - it's not a part of US history, any more than the internal situation of Denmark or Gambia. The unimportant astrologer and calendar BS is still there - I can't believe any educated adult person thinks that's remotely relevant to the history of the entire US. "Boosting military triumphalism" is heavily POV too. And there's the part where US interventions are characterized pejoratively as foreign policy "adventures", while the SU interventions are "at the request of the government", carefully avoiding the details of how those "requests" magically appeared. The attack on Libya and the involvement in Lebanon are put in with the anti-socialist policy, even though their reasons were completely different. Blaming the US for the 1980s cold war is just ridiculous; the Soviets were more than happy to make US citizens and government think that their forces were ten feet tall - I worked on the AGM-86 cruise missile at the time, and every week there was some new Soviet brag about how their technology was going to defeat us evil capitalists, and we would all have to go back to our desks and think hard about what we could do to counter it. I could go on, but it's bedtime. To be fair, the article is better, but it's got a long way to go, and its NPOV is still disputed. Stan 06:18, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
BTW, the "infamous" thing was somebody's hobbyhorse - they had decided (unilaterally and incorrectly) that the word "infamous" could never be used neutrally and worked to remove it everywhere, irrespective of context. Stan 06:18, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)