Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. He writes a weekly column for RollingStone.com.

I have a young friend I'll call Cecil. Cecil graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college on the East Coast in 2006 with a degree in political science. A lot of his friends were involved in political campaigns, and so, looking for work, he thought he'd try it, too: "You want to be involved in something that's trying to make the world a better place. Something that's mission-driven," he says. So he got a job as a field organizer for the senate campaign of John Tester, the populist Democrat. That election won, burned out, he drove to California and got a job waiting tables.

Then came Barack Obama, and Cecil fell in love. "The war thing was big," he remembers. "I had a friend who went to Iraq and died. Obama’s whole opposition to the war was very important to me." He packed up his car and drove all the way across the country to become an Obama organizer in New Hampshire, then Maine, then Vermont. Because he was good at it, he was named deputy field director in Oregon, then one of two deputies in a crucial Midwestern state. After the election, in Washington, he was one of the principles in setting up a major new national progressive activist group....

You could call Cecil a progressive. Just don't call him a Democrat. As intense as his alienation from the Republican Party is his disinclination to state any party identity at all. He says, "I feel more attached to a politics of hope and optimism than I do to the Democratic Party"

He's not alone. It's more and more the case that young people who identify with Democrats on the issues shy from labeling themselves Democrats. In 2008, members of the "Millennial" generation — demographers' term for kids born between 1981 and 1993 — identified as Democrats rather than Republicans by 60 to 32 percent. Now, those figures are 47 and 43 percent.

Stephen Tuck is a history lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford, a visiting fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard and the author of We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle From Emancipation to Obama.

...In Britain and on the American right, there were suspicions that ethnicity played into Obama's apparent snub -- the son of a Kenyan would understandably not be enamored by the daily reminder of a prime minister whose second term had overseen the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. But in their op-ed, Obama and Cameron pointedly began by quoting Churchill and celebrated the fact that the two nations "support the human rights and dignity of all people."...

Nonwhite citizens in both countries have suffered discrimination. Activists in both countries have sought to force Britain and America to live up to their creeds of human rights and dignity for all people, regardless of color. And during the era of the civil rights movement in particular, the connections between activists across the Atlantic were strong, and influential. 

This rather more grassroots version of the special relationship -- like the official version -- started in World War II. More than 100,000 American black American soldiers were stationed in Britain, swelling Britain's black population tenfold in the process.

The GIs arrived in segregated army units. Off-duty fights with their white American counterparts were common. But the British War Cabinet would not allow segregation off-base, and the British public mostly sided with the black GIs. The experience of equality abroad inspired many African-American veterans to fight Jim Crow upon their return....

Jordan J. Ballor (Dr. theol. des., University of Zurich) is a research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty and author of Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church's Social Witness (Christian's Library Press, 2010), and co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom & Wonder: Common Grace in Science & Art (Christian's Library Press, 2011).

Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.”

As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at once a strongly ideological Liberal and an entirely faithful Catholic. He considered Macaulay insufficiently liberal, and Acton, as somebody aware of the eternal law of God, felt bound to censure the historian.” It is one of the marks of Lord Acton’s historical approach that he was unwilling to bracket the question of morality from his historical judgment. As Acton contended, “Moral precepts are constant through the ages and not obedient to circumstances.” The historian could not thus proceed as if such a moral order did not exist, or was irrelevant, to the events and actions of the past. In an essay on Acton’s view of the historian, Joseph Altholtz describes Acton’s “ideal of the historian as judge, as the upholder of the moral standard.”

The biography of Macaulay at issue is by Robert E. Sullivan, who Bebbington describes as “also of liberal inclinations; and he, too, is a loyal Catholic with a firm moral outlook. The result is a biography treating Macaulay as base, contemptible, and odious.” So in one sense, argues Bebbington, what we have in Sullivan’s work is an Acton-esque biography of Macaulay, which takes into account and, indeed, passes severe moral judgment on Macaulay....

Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.

...Given the importance of geography in our politics, you’d expect political reporters and other commentators to be explaining why different regions vote in different ways. Unfortunately, you can watch many successive 24-hour cycles of political news coverage without getting any adequate analysis of political regionalism.

It’s not that America’s political commentators lack interest in demographic factors that influence politics. On the contrary, they are obsessed with a small number of demographic characteristics, chiefly race and sex. Viewers or readers are told endlessly about the gender gap and racial/ethnic differences in voting. But you would fall asleep waiting in vain for a political reporter on TV to explain differences between the Highland South and the coastal South or to describe the distinctive political culture of the states in the Midwest settled by New Englanders.

In the world of our political media, there are generic whites, generic Latinos and generic African-Americans from coast to coast. The categories are sometimes refined by class, but this still produces hopelessly vague descriptions — treating Italian-Americans in Rhode Island as though they are part of the same generic “white working class” to which many Scots-Irish Tennesseans and Norwegian-American North Dakotans also belong. These fuzzy definitions all too often harden into cartoonish stereotypes like the “Angry White Male” of a few decades ago or “NASCAR Man” more recently.

A news junkie who follows the American political media could be forgiven for thinking that the American people are divided by race and gender, and perhaps religion, but not by regional culture. And yet the evidence says otherwise. Latinos in Texas vote differently than Latinos in California. Scholars have established that members of the same religions — Protestants, Catholics and Jews — tend to be more socially conservative in the South than in other parts of the country. Regional political culture is a powerful independent force, not a mere reflection of the numbers of particular demographic groups in particular territories....

Kenneth Lipartito is a professor of history at Florida International University. His co-written history of corporate social responsibility will be published in 2012. The opinions expressed are his own.

Re-elected with 61 percent of the vote in 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told his supporters, "Now I'm going back to do what they call balance the budget." True to his word, he cut spending and promptly sent the nation into a recession -- a sharper decline than in 1929.

The orthodox wisdom in Washington in 1937 remained cutting spending, reducing taxes and balancing the budget to restore business confidence. Punitive taxes on investments and capital gains and "unreasonable restrictions" on finance had put businessmen into "a state of stagnation if not panic," critics of the New Deal argued. Uncertainty was the main reason the economy was in a slump, declared the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The conservative "Brass Hats" of the National Association of Manufacturers told Roosevelt to end social-welfare policies and get tough with labor if he wanted to reduce unemployment. Chase National Bank President Winthrop Aldrich said it was time to "dismantle the anti-business elements of the New Deal."

Many in the Roosevelt administration also believed business confidence was key. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., a close friend of the president, promoted the "Treasury view" that government spending merely crowded out private investment. The only way out of the Great Depression, Morgenthau said, "was through restoring business confidence." The liberal Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William O. Douglas believed that corporate executives were "marking time" and going on vacation rather than investing their firms' cash. Roosevelt himself never completely shook off his view that balanced budgets were a good thing. He had chastised Herbert Hoover for big deficits in the 1932 campaign and cut the wages of federal workers by 15 percent when he took office. His behavior in 1936 was completely in character....

Asher Kaufman is associate professor of history and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He is the author of "Reviving Phoenicia: The Search for Identity in Lebanon."

(CNN) -- President Barack Obama's rebuke of Republicans who are "beating the drums of war" in encouraging the United States to take military action against Iran should be targeted not just toward those critics but also, and more important, toward the Israeli government.

An attack on Iran would not only fail to achieve its stated goal of denuclearizing the country, it would unleash a devastating confrontation between Iran and Israel that would harm thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and affect those in neighboring states.

It would drag the U.S. into another Middle East quagmire, and it would launch an oil crisis that would throw the global economy into turmoil. Then, once the dust settles (or before it does), Iran would only be more motivated to pursue its nuclear ambition....

Harold James, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of “The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.” The opinions expressed are his own.

A familiar specter is haunting Europe: How to live with a powerful Germany that seems to act according to its own interests, and whose policies are driven by domestic politics.

Headlines across Europe are stoking old fantasies and fears. Yet, this time, the appropriate answer to that question is surprising, even shocking. The best way to deal with a resurgent Germany is for its partners and neighbors to imitate the institutional features, including monetary and fiscal stability, that have made that country so successful and powerful.

That will require overcoming a long history of troubled relations. The so-called German problem dominated European and world affairs from 1871 -- when the German Empire was proclaimed by Otto von Bismarck in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles -- until 1945, when the Nazi regime was defeated....

The real attraction of the modern German model shouldn’t be interpreted in terms of the occasional flourishes of Bismarckian rhetoric in parliamentary speeches. The appeal of Germany lies instead in its particular model for generating wealth and prosperity in a globalized world economy: the development of dynamic export industries, based on competitive advantage, in a world of technological progress. That is the model that is now attracting Germany’s neighbors but also reformers in southern Europe.

Those German or North and Central European initiatives are ferociously resisted by a plethora of vested interests, in Mediterranean Europe and in France. The German model involves fiscal restraint as an essential condition for private-sector initiative. That template isn’t a vehicle of German power politics in a 19th-century sense, but rather a building stone for economic success.

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent.

Conservatives are supposed to cherish tradition, to draw on customs and policies which worked well in the past to guide what office-holders ought to do in the future. So it is ironic, if not hypocritical, that they constantly peddle a notion about the separation of business and government that has no basis in American history. “The voters,” asserted Mitt Romney, after his victory in the Washington caucuses, “want a conservative businessman who understands the private sector and knows how to get the federal government out of the way, so that the economy can once again grow vigorously.”

In fact, the Republican nominee-to-be is distorting a long and bipartisan tradition of government support for big business in America. Conservatives now object to “crony capitalism,” but for much of U.S. history, businessmen have been hungry for it. Since the early nineteenth century, the government has helped fuel economic growth and corporate profit-making, and savvy businessmen and, recently, businesswomen have lobbied hard to keep those benefits coming....

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

“They” Did It (Again)!

There are no “oil men” in the White House. So the Obamites cannot, as in the past, blame Halliburton, BP, or Exxon for rigging gas prices out of the Oval Office. Which leads to the question: why then are prices now climbing when the Bush-oil company connection is no longer the narrative? The new answer? “Wall Street” (e.g., the fat-cat bankers, corporate jet owners, those who don’t know when not to profit, etc.) raised prices.

But if true, who let them get away with that? The Chinese, who are scrounging every barrel they can on the world market? The Indians, who follow suit? Maybe it’s the Obama administration Treasury that has borrowed $5 trillion in three years, not only eroding the buying power of the world-traded dollar but also sending a message to oil producers that even more debt is coming and their petrodollars will only be worth less and less?

Or perhaps it is growing world tension, as in Iran, that caused the panic? But then who snubbed the Green revolution in Iran in the spring of 2009, sought “outreach” and “reset” with the theocracy, and leveled five serial demands to stop Iranian enrichment (or else!) to the point that Iran no doubt understood 2009-2012 was a once-in-a-lifetime exempt window of opportunity to get the bomb and to control the Gulf?

To paraphrase William Tecumseh Sherman, Obama might as well rail at the wind. The administration’s current panic mode arises because we are nearing $5 a gallon. (I just filled up two miles away in West Selma, with a supposed 21% unemployment rate and a per capita income of about $14,000, and the price today was $4.27.) It is only early March. Obama may blame Wall Street, but he is savvy enough to do the following calculus: by August, people will want to drive more than they do in March; the Chinese will suddenly not wish to buy less oil this summer; he has no federal leases that he approved in January 2009 that will be coming on line after three-and-a-half years; Volts will not be going into hyper-production mode; and prices will only go up just as the campaign and the weather heat up. There is about an hour’s worth of Obama administration past quotes on gas prices that should make some interesting campaign ads....