Davenport-Lloyd Book, “How Public Policy Became War” Available May 1 April 30, 2019

Gordon Lloyd and I are publishing our third book together this week, “How Public Policy Became War” (Hoover Institution Press, 2019).

It is available through Hoover Institution Press or, like everything else in the world, through Amazon:

It recounts the story of how the making of public policy in America, which the Founders thought would be done through deliberation, has instead become war.  We begin, as all our books do, in the New Deal when Franklin Roosevelt built out the modern and powerful presidency, turning it into a tool of “action, and action now.”

The story builds as modern presidents have declared war on all manner of domestic policy problems:  poverty, war, crime, drugs, energy consumption and terror, to name a few.  We also live under 30 states of national emergency, which we describe as war’s close cousin.

In the final chapter, through reference to Plato’s “divided line,” we show how the war metaphor might be better managed.