Shinzo Abe, FDR, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union

Nationalism and Central Planning

Wikipedia entry on Shinzo Abe

He was the leader of a project team within the LDP that did a survey on "excessive sexual education and gender-free education". Among the items to which this team raised objections were anatomical dolls and other curricular materials "not taking into consideration the age of children", school policies banning traditional boys' and girls' festivals, and mixed-gender physical education. The team sought to provide contrast to the Democratic Party of Japan, which it alleged supported such policies.

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Since 1997, as the bureau chief of the 'Institute of Junior Assembly Members Who Think About the Outlook of Japan and History Education', Abe led the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. On his official homepage[36] he questions the extent to which coercion was applied toward the Comfort Women, dismissing Korean "revisionism" as foreign interference in Japanese domestic affairs. In a Diet session on 6 October 2006, Abe revised his statement regarding comfort women, and said that he accepted the report issued in 1993 by the sitting cabinet secretary, Yōhei Kōno, where the Japanese government officially acknowledged the issue. Later in the session, Abe stated his belief that Class A war criminals are not criminals under Japan's domestic law.[37]

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Abe has visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine on many occasions. While serving as Chief Cabinet Secretary in the government of Junichiro Koizumi he visited in April 2006, prompting South Korea to describe the trip as "regrettable".[54] He didn't visit while Prime Minister from September 2006 – September 2007, unlike Kouizumi, who had visited yearly while in office. Abe not visiting the shrine prompted a Japanese nationalist named Yoshihiro Tanjo to cut off his own little finger in protest and mail it to the LDP.[55] 

In 2012 Abe visited the shrine on 15 August, the anniversary of the end of the World War II. While campaigning for the presidency of the LDP, Abe said that he regretted not visiting the shrine while Prime Minister.[56] After winning the presidency, he visited it again on 17 October. He said this was in an official capacity as the president of the Liberal Democratic Party.[57]

The LPD was kicked out of power in Japan for the first time in 55 years a few years ago to the more leftwing Democrats Party of Japan. They just returned to power in a landslide with Abe voted in as Prime Minister again.

Abe was the first prime minister born after World War II.

Yglesias is typically liberal in being anti-war and feminist. But like many anti-war liberals he isn't as critical of poorer foreign authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, Iran, Baathist Iraq, etc. as he is of the Imperial Center and his government. Japan is pretty much a first world government, if one subservient to the U.S. Of course, I do believe Yglesias is concerned about high long term unemployment, the welfare state, and, technically speaking, the rising share of productivity gains captured by capital vis-a-vis labor. He goes his own way on privatization, unions, Walmart and public education reform somewhat. Still he is a progressive liberal and doesn't share priorities with rightwingers like Abe.

However, if Abe is successful with his demand management policies, that would be a good thing from Yglesias and my viewpoints.

Yglesias brings up FDR in war time here.

From time to time sheer economic desperation will give us a Junichiro Koizumi or a Franklin Roosevelent but Koizumi didn't last and FDR plunged the country back into recession in 1937 with contractionary policy. Foreign policy crisis is the main thing that drives a national establishment toward heterodoxy and growth. Nobody tried to finance either world war on a sound money basis, and in most respects Keynesian theory followed wartime practice rather than vice versa.

FDR held Indochina (Vietnam) after taking it from the Japanese until the French "could come home" and take it back as their colony.

Yglesias also posted on FDR and the planned economy:

This episode stands out precisely because the US government didn't nationalize much industry during the war, preferring instead to rely on privately owned capital. But it underscores the extent to which over and above anything that happened during the New Deal era, the country spend the years 1939-1945 operating what was for all intents and purposes a planned economy.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were centrally planned totalitarian regimes. What I understood was that the Nazi economy helped bring Germany out of depression. There was the Autobahn and Pynchon's V-2 rockets. The Soviets' "Red Plenty" launched Sputnik* into space as Krushchev said that communism would replace capitalism and "bury it."**

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* In response to Sputnik, Eisenhower created NASA and the following occurred:

1. Education programs were initiated to foster a new generation of engineers.
2. Dramatically Increased support for scientific research. For 1959, Congress increased the National Science Foundation (NSF) appropriation to $134 million, almost $100 million higher than the year before. By 1968, the NSF budget would stand at nearly $500 million.

**"I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you,"[5] a reference to the Marxist saying, "The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism", based on the concluding statement in Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable". Khrushchev repeated this Marxist thesis at a meeting with journalists in the U.S. in September 1959. However, many Americans interpreted the quote as a nuclear threat.[6]