Free Republic

THE death of Robert McNa mara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three participants in Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth...

A century ago, Arthur Bentley wrote in The Process of Government that ideals are far less important to the political process than the collective actions and interactions of interest groups.  Oversimplifying, that means that it doesn’t matter so much what politicians profess as what their supporters and adversaries do.  According to Wikipedia, Bentley’s pluralist-behavioralist thinking was a major influence to the “Chicago School”, so named for the University of Chicago.      Well, when it comes to Chicago, there are Schools, and there are schools – as this Presidential campaign amply demonstrates.  Bentley’s thinking merely gives one a good way...