New Books in American Politics: Recent Episodes
New Books Network
How can we challenge and change inequalities? In Seeing Others: How Recognition Works— and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Atria, 2023), Michele Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, at Harvard University, explores this question by empirically substantiating the concept of recognition. Using a huge range of case studies, interview data, as well as wealth of cross-disciplinary research, the book shows the problems of our unequal societies and the people, and ideas, that can contribute to solving them. It looks at art, politics, media and culture, as well as social policy and generational conflicts, all of which show how individuals and social groups need and can give recognition to each other. An accessible as well as detailed analysis, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone who wants to make a better world. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Western analysts and media often assess the prospect that Moscow might use nuclear weapons as the war in Ukraine grinds on, possibly to a flailing Russia’s disadvantage. George Beebe, though, injects a less-familiar element into this grim dynamic: What are the chances that Washington might resort to nukes, should the direction in the war turn sharply against U.S.-backed Ukraine? Or enter the conflict directly with NATO air support for beleaguered Ukrainian foot soldiers? These are awkward questions but Beebe is well equipped to parse them. He is the Director of Grand Strategy for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington and in an earlier career in government he served as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis. The springboard for our discussion is his 2019 book, The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe (St. Martins Press, 2019). It’s a sober and an incisive look at a vital topic—and as characterizes Beebe’s assessments generally, his take is unsparing of prevailing U.S. foreign policy establishment wisdoms. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Filmer to Alexander Dugin and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even the more moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right’s critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. While there are a lot of competing explanations for the contemporary rise of right-wing forces, Matt McManus’ new book suggests that it is hostility to equality that actually unites the right. Zeroing in on key intellectuals and writers, McManus, in a sharply written text, offers a compelling explanation for the disproportionate intensity of right-wing grievance politics Matthew McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is a contributor to Jacobin and Quillette online magazines.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and free exercise of religion, plus a handful of others. However, we do not need to enumerate every liberty because there is another way to protect them: an "etcetera clause." It states that there are other rights beyond those specifically listed: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Yet scholars are divided on whether the Ninth Amendment itself actually does protect unenumerated rights, and the Supreme Court has almost entirely ignored it. Regardless of what the Ninth Amendment means, two-thirds of state constitutions have equivalent provisions, or "Baby Ninth Amendments," worded similarly to the Ninth Amendment. Anthony B. Sanders' book Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters (U Michigan Press, 2023) is the story of how the "Baby Ninths" came to be and what they mean. Unlike the controversy surrounding the Ninth Amendment, the meaning of the Baby Ninths is straightforward: they protect individual rights that are not otherwise enumerated. They are an "etcetera, etcetera" at the end of a bill of rights. This book argues that state judges should do their duty and live up to their own constitutions to protect the rights "retained by the people" that these "etcetera clauses" are designed to guarantee. The fact that Americans have adopted these provisions so many times in so many states demonstrates that unenumerated rights are not only protected by state constitutions, but that they are popular. Unenumerated rights are not a weird exception to American constitutional law. They are at the center of it. We should start treating constitutions accordingly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States and Mexico. In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of our border crisis and currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States. Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on migration—and the massacre in El Paso. Rosas draws on poignant stories and compelling testimonies from workers in immigrant justice organizations, federal public defenders, immigration attorneys, and human rights activists to document the cruelties and indignities inflicted on border crossers. Borders, as sites of crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how the Trump administration amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by frequent and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides—and with more humane immigration policies, it could become that once again. Gilberto Rosas is an associate professor of anthropology and Latina/o studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban life, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (U California Press, 2023) gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars--members of the Reparations Planning Committee--who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward. The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the immense black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming question of how to extract the United States from its disastrous war in Vietnam. It was on a beach that summer that Nixon disclosed to his chief aide, H. R. Haldeman, one of his most notorious, risky gambits: the madman theory. In On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Zachary Jonathan Jacobson examines the enigmatic president through this theory of Nixon’s own invention. With strategic force and nuclear bluffing, Nixon attempted to coerce his foreign adversaries through sheer unpredictability. As his national security advisor Henry Kissinger noted, Nixon’s strategy resembled a poker game in which he “push[ed] so many chips into the pot” that the United States’ foes would think the president had gone “crazy.” From Vietnam, Pakistan, and India to the greater Middle East, Nixon applied this madman theory. Foreign relations were not a steady march toward peaceful coexistence but rather an ongoing test of mettle. Nixon saw the Cold War as he saw his life, as a series of ordeals that demanded great risk and grand gestures. For decades, journalists, critics, and scholars have searched for the real Nixon behind these acts. Was he a Red-baiter, a worldly statesman, a war criminal or, in the end, a punchline? Jacobson combines biography and intellectual and cultural history to understand the emotional life of Richard Nixon, exploring how the former president struggled between great effusions of feeling and great inhibition, how he winced at the notion of his reputation for rage, and how he used that ill repute to his advantage. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Knopf Doubleday, 2023) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power. Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by the stern maxim that order is prior to justice in the affairs of an ever-perilous world. Our talk closes with Gewen’s assessment of Kissinger’s thinking on the present-day foreign-policy challenges for the U.S. of China and the Russia-Ukraine war. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania (Temple UP, 2021), Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania traces this movement from its beginning to the years immediately following the American Civil War. Discussions of the complexities of the state’s antislavery movement illustrate how different groups of Pennsylvanians followed different paths in an effort to achieve their goal. Tomek also examines the backlash abolitionists and Black Americans faced. In addition, she considers the civil rights movement from the period of state reconstruction through the national reconstruction that occurred after the Civil War. While the past few decades have shed light on enslavement and slavery in the South, much of the story of northern slavery remains hidden. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania tells the full and inclusive story of this history, bringing the realities of slavery, abolition, and Pennsylvania's attempt to reconstruct its post-emancipation society. Beverly C. Tomek is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monroe County Community College. She is the author of Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Hall: A "Legal Lynching" in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell, as well as the coeditor of New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn. Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. She teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this 2014 episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Betty Medsger. Medsger was a Washington Post reporter in March 1971, and received a cache of stolen FBI files that detailed the elaborate surveillance activities the bureau was using against Vietnam war protesters and others whom J. Edgar Hoover deemed “subversive.“ All Medsger knew about the documents was that they had been stolen by a group of anonymous individuals who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 2014, she revisited the story in her book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI (Vintage, 2014). In it, she tells the story of an unlikely group of academics and ordinary citizens who broke into a suburban FBI office and shed light on the way the intelligence community was spying on its own citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I am joined on “America and Beyond” by historian Peter Fritzsche for an appreciation of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books), the landmark book published by the late Svetlana Boym in 2001. I do not use the word “landmark” lightly. The Future of Nostalgia is, first, impressively prescient. Pages, as in Boym’s chapter on “Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return to Origins,” sound eerily present day. But even more than that, Boym, who died in 2015 from cancer, at the age of 56, bequeathed a rich vocabulary for plumbing the contemporary meanings of nostalgia. Her essential distinction between restorative nostalgia, the politically-toxic desire to “rebuild the lost home,” and reflective nostalgia, the often-sentimental longing for shards of the personal past, endures. In these terms, nostalgia can be a poison—or a cure. My conversation with Peter Fritzsche, author of the 2004 book Stranded in the Present, revisits Boym’s wonderful work and meanders its way into topics like nostalgia as a frame for grasping Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Enjoy. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice. Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good. The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the history of American education--one that already has changed the future of public schooling. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Two blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially expanded Second Amendment rights and limited the power of states to regulate concealed carry of firearms. Bruen affected thousands of Americans who have had their laws overturned and radically changed the method by which federal judges evaluate firearms law. Two remarkable scholars of the Second Amendment and firearms law explain how law makers, law enforcers, and federal courts have responded. They discuss differences among the conservative justices that produced this fragile holding, the growing dependence on history but disdain for historians, how the Bruen approach hurts laws involving domestic violence or controlled substances, the problem of overreading historical silences, and the ways violence may be addressed through community violence intervention, free markets, etc. – in ways SCOTUS cannot control. Jacob Charles is an Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law – a constitutional law scholar focusing on the Second Amendment and firearms law. Before joining the faculty Pepperdine, he served as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law. He has a terrific new piece coming out in the Duke Law Journal called “The Dead Hand of a Silent Past: Bruen, Gun Rights, and the Shackles of History.” Jake combines ambitious academic scholarship in law journals with public facing work for outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Hill, Bloomberg Law, and other outlets. Besides being a great friend to this podcast, he has been quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and NPR. Dru Stevenson is the Wayne Fischer Research Professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. Professor Stevenson joined the faculty in 2003 after a law career that included practicing as a Legal Aid lawyer in Connecticut and serving as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Connecticut. His publications cover topics ranging from criminal law to civil procedure, with an emphasis on the intersection of law with economics and linguistic theory. His articles have been cited in leading academic journals and treatises, by federal and state appellate courts, and in recent briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Stevenson’s current research focus is firearm law and policy. His “Revisiting the Original Congressional Debates About the Second Amendment” provides a missing analyses of the debates, situating each statement in Congress within the context of the speaker’s background and political stances on issues overlapping with the right to keep and bear arms. Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant. The result is a sprawling yet arbitrary and inadequate mess. It has left 30 million Americans without formal insurance. Many of the rest live in constant danger of losing their coverage if they lose their job, give birth, get older, get healthier, get richer, or move. It's time to tear it all down and rebuild, sensibly and deliberately. Marshaling original research, striking insights from American history, and comparative analysis of what works and what doesn’t from systems around the world, Einav and Finkelstein argue for automatic, basic, and free universal coverage for everyone, along with the option to buy additional, supplemental coverage. Their wholly original argument and comprehensive blueprint for an American universal health insurance system will surprise and provoke. We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care (Penguin, 2023) is an erudite yet lively and accessible prescription we cannot afford to ignore. John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Does it matter if judges are nice to each other? The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary (Oxford UP, 2023)argues that how judges interact with each other has an important effect at every stage of their judicial process. Previously, scholars have explained judicial behavior in terms of the law, the ideological attitudes of the judges, external and internal constraints, and the background characteristics of the judges, such as gender, race, or prior professional experiences. The Elevator Effect builds on previous research in political science, political psychology, and linguistics to present the first comprehensive examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among the judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Hazelton, Hinkle, and Nelson argue that collegiality affects nearly every aspect of judicial behavior. More frequent interpersonal contact among judges diminishes the role of ideology to the point where it is both “substantively and statistically imperceptible.” The book also shows that collegiality affects both the language judges use when they disagree with each other and the precedents that they choose to support their arguments. The podcast covers the rich findings of the book – and also provides some interesting insights for graduate students who are thinking about collaborative research
Dr. Morgan L.W. Hazelton, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Law (by courtesy) at Saint Louis University. She studies how features of court systems influence the decisions that both litigants and judges make.
Dr. Rachael K. Hinkle, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo. Her research agenda focuses on judicial politics with particular attention to gleaning insights into legal development from the content of judicial opinions through the use of computational text analytic techniques.
Dr. Michael J. Nelson, PhD, is a professor of Political Science at Penn State University. Michael Nelson is Professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He studies judicial politics, especially public attitudes toward law and courts, judicial behavior, and the politics of court reform.
Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Season 8 of Slow Burn, titled, Becoming Justice Thomas. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down--and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America. Peter Moore's Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776) (FSG, 2023) tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the "American dream." Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States is currently home to six generations of people:
-the Silents, born 1925-1945
-Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964
-Gen X, born 1965-1979
-Millennials, born 1980-1994
-Gen Z, born 1995-2012
-and the still-to-be-named cohorts born after 2012.
They have had vastly different life experiences and thus, one assumes, they must have vastly diverging beliefs and behaviors. But what are those differences, what causes them, and how deep do they actually run? Professor of psychology and "reigning expert on generational change" (Lisa Wade, PhD, author of American Hookup), Jean Twenge does a deep dive into a treasure trove of long-running, government-funded surveys and databases to answer these questions. Are we truly defined by major historical events, such as the Great Depression for the Silents and September 11 for Millennials? Or, as Twenge argues, is it the rapid evolution of technology that differentiates the generations? With her clear-eyed and insightful voice, Twenge explores what the Silents and Boomers want out of the rest of their lives; how Gen X-ers are facing middle age; the ideals of Millennials as parents and in the workplace; and how Gen Z has been changed by COVID, among other fascinating topics. Surprising, engaging, and informative, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future (Atria, 2023) will forever change the way you view your parents, peers, coworkers, and children, no matter which generation you call your own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Twenty years ago, it seemed Traditionalism was an esoteric and irrelevant set of beliefs. Since then, powerful people sympathetic to its ideas have overturned that perception. In the US, Russia, and Brazil powerful presidential advisers have drawn on traditionalism to disastrous effect – the Trump presidency and the war in Ukraine both owe something to traditionalism. Mark Sedgwick has written Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Oxford UP, 2023) and he has been thinking where Traditionalism – or post Traditionalism - goes now. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Smith re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives. Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system. Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the (usually negative) effects of neoliberal capitalism, writing about NGOs, labor leaders, and health care. Quick Fixes expands this examination into the world of drugs, examining nine different kinds of intoxicants, and five “orienting claims” that place their use within in larger capitalist histories. A bit about the book... Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics--across the board, consumption has shot up in the 21st century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here? Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love and intense hatred for drugs has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century. Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses. By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American? Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Midcentury America was governed from the center, a bipartisan consensus of politicians and public opinion that supported government spending on education, the construction of a vast network of interstate highways, healthcare for senior citizens, and environmental protection. These projects were paid for by a steeply progressive tax code, with a top tax rate at one point during the Republican Eisenhower administration of 91 percent. Today, a similar agenda of government action (and progressive taxation) would be portrayed as dangerously left wing. At the same time, radically anti-government and anti-tax opinions (with no evidence to support them) are considered part of the mainstream. In Take Back the Center, Peter Wenz makes the case for a sane, reality-based politics that reclaims the center for progressive policies. The key, he argues, is taxing the wealthy at higher rates. The tax rate for the wealthiest Americans has declined from the mid-twentieth-century high of 91 percent to a twenty-first-century low of 36 percent—even as social programs are gutted and the gap between rich and poor widens dramatically. Ever since Ronald Reagan famously declared that government was the problem and not the solution, conservatives have had an all-purpose answer to any question: smaller government and lower taxes. Wenz offers an impassioned counterargument. He explains the justice of raising the top tax rates significantly, making a case for less income inequality (and countering society's worship of the wealthy), and he offers suggestions for how to spend the increased tax revenues: K-12 education, tuition relief, transportation and energy infrastructure, and universal health care. Armed with Wenz's evidence-driven arguments, progressives can position themselves where they belong: in the mainstream of American politics and at the center of American political conversations, helping their country address a precipitous decline in equality and quality of life. Peter S. Wenz is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield and University Scholar at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Beyond Red and Blue: How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates (MIT Press) and other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Katie Wells, a Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow with Georgetown University's Tech and Society Initiative, and Kafui Attoh, Associate Professor of Urban Studies in the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, talk about their new book, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of a City (co-authored with Declan Cullen) (Princeton UP, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Disrupting D.C. examines how various actors took on a "let Uber deal with it" mindset about social problems, not so much because they had great faith in Uber but because they have profound distrust in city government. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free. Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America (Oxford UP, 2023) explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the Sixties and Seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the Eighties. How did rock 'n' roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise-and the limits-of rock music as a political force in postwar America? Nicholas Tochka writes about the politics of postwar music-making in Eastern Europe and the Americas. In 2016, Oxford University Press published his first book, Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Socialist Albania. He is currently completing one project on citizenship in postsocialist Europe, and another about the invention of the Sixties in the United States. He works at the Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne in Australia, and plays both bass and guitar. Nicholas on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This book examines the Pan-Africanism of Mary McLeod Bethune through her work, which internationalized the scope of Black women's organizations to create solidarity among Africans throughout the diaspora. Broadening the familiar view of Bethune as an advocate for racial and gender equality within the United States, Ashley Preston argues that Bethune consistently sought to unify African descendants around the world with her writings, through travel, and as an advisor. Preston shows how Bethune's early involvement with Black women's organizations created personal connections across Cuba, Haiti, India, and Africa and shaped her global vision. Bethune founded and led the National Council of Negro Women, which strengthened coalitions with women across the diaspora to address issues in their local communities. Bethune served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs for the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and later as associate consultant for the United Nations alongside W.E.B. DuBois and Walter White, using her influence to address diversity in the military, decolonization, suffrage, and imperialism. Ashley Robertson Preston's book Mary Mcleod Bethune the Pan-Africanist (UP of Florida, 2023) provides a fuller, more accurate understanding of Bethune's work, illustrating the perspective and activism behind Bethune's much-quoted words: "For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart." Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen. Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG)) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). Her work has appeared recently in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feminist Anthropology, and Transforming Anthropology. She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religious Dispatches, and the Conversation among others. She is a senior fellow with the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right and a fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and a board member for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.
Joseph Gaines can be reached at jgaines1091@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Michael J. Diamond's book Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times (Phoenix Publishing, 2022) describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he continues to hold cult-like status, exerting a strong influence not only on many individuals but also on numerous elected officials, despite his defeat in 2020? Why does his character continue to be an object of fascination even among anti-Trumpists, and why will Trumpism continue to play a major role in the American sociopolitical landscape even now he has left the presidential stage? Diamond ponders these questions through the lenses of American history and culture, political theory, social phenomena, group dynamics, and psychoanalysis. In exploring the relationship between large-group regression, cultism, destructive populism, delusional thinking, conspiratorial beliefs, authoritarianism, and leadership characterised by narcissism and paranoia, psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to group dynamics, malignant regression, and leadership are brought into play. Prominent psychoanalytic thinkers who have addressed these topics and whose work usefully contributes to the discussion include Bion, Freud, Fromm, Bollas, Kernberg, Lifton, Rosenfeld, and Volkan, as well as Bleger, Jaques, and several more recent Kleinian/Bionian-influenced analysts. Most important, the book makes use of these understandings to reestablish a sufficiently containing frame that strengthens the body politics' nonpathological elements in order to come to grips with these disturbing factors. Whatever their political beliefs, psychoanalysts in the US and worldwide will find much to think about in reading this book's application of their discipline to today's sociopolitical environment. In addition, the book's insights extend beyond arguments targeting a strictly psychoanalytic audience in order to reach social and political thinkers, as well as activists, who are deeply concerned about dangers threatening the very foundations of democracy in the US and worldwide. And finally, the thoughtful lay person will appreciate the accessibility to all these fields that the book provides, and will come away with a much deeper understanding of just what motivates us to take a stand for or against a given political figure. In short, conceptual tools are provided that lead to greater understanding as well as effective strategies and tactics for containment of destructive forces - largely unconscious ones - that imperil our society. Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why do we protect free speech? What values does it serve? How has the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment? What has the Court gotten right and wrong? Why are current debates over free expression often so divisive? How can we do better? In this succinct but comprehensive and scholarly book, authors Len Niehoff and Thomas Sullivan tackle these pressing questions. Free Speech: From Core Values to Current Debates (Cambridge UP, 2022) traces the development and evolution of the free speech doctrine in the Supreme Court and explores how the Court - with varying levels of success - has applied that doctrinal framework to “hard cases” and current controversies, such as those involving hate speech, speech on the internet, speech on campus, and campaign finance regulation. This is the perfect volume for anyone - student, general reader, or scholar - looking for an accessible overview of this critical topic. Len Niehoff is a professor from practice at University of Michigan Thomas Sullivan President Emeritus and Professor of Political Science at Vermont University Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Postscript invites scholars to react to contemporary political events and today’s podcast welcomes an expert on domestic violence and firearms law to analyze a controversial Second Amendment case that the United States Supreme Court will hear this Fall, United States v. Rahimi. Kelly Roskam, JD is the Director of Law and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. She studies the constitutional implications of, advocates for, and works to improve the implementation of firearms laws. She has been writing about the practical implications of the Rahimi case since it came up through the 5th circuit (for example, “The Fifth Circuit’s Rahimi decision protects abusers’ access to guns. The Supreme Court must act to protect survivors of domestic violence” and “A Texas Judge Is Using Originalism to Justify Arming Domestic Abusers” (co-authored with Spencer Cantrell and Natalie Nanasi). In the podcast, we discuss the specifics of this strange case (a man who assaulted a woman, shot in the air, and later threatened to kill her claims that his constitutional rights have been violated – and the 5th circuit agrees that Congress is the threat to liberty). Ms. Roskam explains how the legal regime Congress created in 1994 to protect survivors of intimate violence also protects the safety of the public at large. She presents some of the data (e.g., that the presence of a firearm increases the likelihood that domestic violence will escalate into a homicide). She explains what is at stake, the possible ways the Supreme Court might approach the case, and ways to combat firearm violence beyond the courts. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa. By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is assistant professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University, where he holds the William Dawson Chair. He also goes by Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantse of Atrekor We. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In examining how the veterans' movement inscribed martial citizenship onto American law, politics, and culture, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a new history of the U.S. welfare state that highlights its longstanding connection with warfare. It shows how a predominantly white and male group such as military veterans was at the center of social policy debates in the interwar and postwar period and how women and veterans of color were often discriminated against or denied access to their benefits. It moves beyond the traditional focus on the 1944 G.I. Bill to examine other important benefits like pensions, civil service preference, and hospitals. The book also examines multiple generations of veterans, by shedding light on how former service members from both World Wars as well as Korea and the Cold War interacted with each other. Olivier Burtin is Associate Professor of U.S. History and Civilization at the University of Amiens, France. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A sweeping history of the American health care state that reveals the public has been intentionally misled about the true role of government. The US government has always invested federal, state and local dollars in public health protection and prevention. Despite this public funding, however, Americans typically believe the current system is predominantly comprised of private actors with little government interference. In Grow and Hide: The History of America's Health Care State (Oxford UP, 2023), Colleen M. Grogan details the history of the American health care state and argues that the public has been intentionally misled about the true role of government. The US created a publicly financed system while framing it as the opposite in what Grogan terms the "grow-and-hide regime." Today, the state's role is larger than ever, yet it remains largely hidden because stakeholders-namely, private actors and their allies in government-have repeatedly, and successfully, presented the illusion of minimal government involvement. The consequences of this narrative are scarce accountability and a highly unequal distribution of benefits. In the wake of a pandemic that has killed over one million Americans--with the highest death rates among minorities and lower-income people--the time has come for an honest discussion about the health care system. As Grogan reveals, America has never had a system that resembles a competitive, free-market model. Given how much the government already invests in the health care system, means how these funds are distributed and administered are fundamental political questions for the American public, not questions that should be decided by the private sector. If we want to fix care in America, we need to reimagine the way it is organized, prioritized, funded, and, perhaps most importantly, discussed. Grow & Hide is an important contribution to this reimagining. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hoped to use this economic strength to build on FDR's achievements with new liberal reforms. But then, in just ten months between September 1949 and June 1950, the president's ambitions were overtaken by events that left the country gripped by rage and fear. The Soviets tested an atomic bomb, Mao's army swept through China, and at home Truman faced labor unrest and a Republican Party desperate for power. In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World In 1950 (Basic Books, 2023) is an innovative and gripping history of this pivotal moment. Recounting the launch of Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, the defeat of Truman's liberal program, and the start of the Korean War, prizewinning historian Nick Bunker shows us a polarized nation facing crises at home and abroad--a story with deep resonances today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits and divided and distracted Americans by feeding their appetite for entertainment--frequently at the expense of fostering responsible citizenship. In this timely and provocative book, Kathryn Cramer Brownell argues that cable television itself is not to blame for today's rampant polarization and scandal politics--the intentional restructuring of television as a political institution is. She describes how cable innovations--from C-SPAN coverage of congressional debates in the 1980s to MTV's foray into presidential politics in the 1990s--took on network broadcasting using market forces, giving rise to a more decentralized media world. Brownell shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval. 24/7 Politics reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of common ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community. In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves. Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book. Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century. Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to his persistent concern with the relationship between democracy and empire and illustrating the divergent inflections of this theme in the context of a shifting geopolitical terrain; unprecedented political crises, especially during the two world wars; and new opportunities for transnational solidarity. With a critical introduction and extensive editorial notes, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022) conveys both the coherence and continuity of Du Bois's international thought across his long life and the tremendous range and variety of his preoccupations, intellectual sources, and interlocutors. Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Anchored in the principles of free-market economics, neoliberalism emerged in the 1990s as the world's most dominant economic paradigm. It has been associated with political leaders from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton, to Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh. Neoliberalism even penetrated deeply into communist China's powerful economic system. However, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the related European Sovereign Debt Crisis triggered a decade of economic volatility and insecurity that boosted the fortunes of the 1 per cent while saddling the 99 per cent with stagnant wages and precarious work. As a result of this Great Recession, neoliberalism fortunes have waned considerably. This downward trend further accelerated with the recent surge of national populism around the world that brought to power outspoken critics of neoliberalism like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi. Is neoliberalism doomed or will it regain its former glory? And what are the major types of neoliberalism, and how did they evolve over the decades? Responding to these crucial questions, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the considerable variations of neoliberalism around the world, and discusses the origins, evolution, and core ideas of neoliberalism. This new edition brings the story of neoliberalism up to date, and asks whether new versions of neoliberalism might succeed in drowning out the rising tide of national populism and its nostalgic longing for a return to territorial sovereignty and national greatness. Manfred B. Steger is a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences--for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war--from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens? Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed. This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (Penguin, 2022), Phil Klay's powerful series of reckonings with some of our country's thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past ten years. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in these pages, those two questions have a great deal to do with each another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Throughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far beyond the archipelago. It invested significant energy, members, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric connections between supporters of Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the island's ultimate failure in its quest for independence, but they were nonetheless at the vanguard of the postcolonial revolutions that swept the world after the Cuban revolution. Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR, Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) focuses on how it built a broad movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and New York City. This hemispheric view introduces a sprawling transnational network, nurtured by the PNPR from its founding in 1922 to its dissolution in 1965, that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas, and it resituates the Puerto Rican nationalist movement as a transnational revolutionary influence. Margaret M. Power is professor emerita of history at Illinois Institute of Technology. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today I talked to Benjamin Studebaker about his new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other. The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it. Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios. Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.
The equality/equity meme
The 1619 Project
No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America (University Press of Mississippi, 2023), Penelope Ingram examines the role played by media in the resurgence of white nationalism and neo-Nazi movements in the Obama-to-Trump era. As politicians on the right stoked anxieties about whites “losing ground” and “being left behind,” media platforms turned whiteness into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace. Reading popular film and television franchises (Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and The Walking Dead) through political flashpoints, such as debates over immigration reform, gun control, and Black Lives Matter protests, Ingram reveals how media cultivated feelings of white vulnerability and loss among white consumers. By exploring the convergence of entertainment, news, and social media in a digital networked environment, Ingram demonstrates how media’s renewed attention to “imperiled whiteness” enabled and sanctioned the return of overt white supremacy exhibited by alt-right groups in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the Capitol riots in 2021. Anna E. Lindner received her doctorate in Communication from Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How much do we need to worry about the global state of democracy? And what do we need to do to better understand what is happening in different parts of the world? Join Petra Alderman and Nic Cheeseman in this opening episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast to learn more about these questions and the newly established Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) at the University of Birmingham. Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR. Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR. If you would like to learn more about the issues discussed by Nic and Petra in this episode, please read our CEDAR blog post. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After being forgotten for nearly 130 years, the “Mother of Suffrage in Missouri” and her husband are finally taking their rightful place in history. St. Louisans Virginia and Francis Minor forever changed the direction of women’s rights by taking the issue to the Supreme Court for the first and only time in 1875, a feat never eclipsed even by their better-known peers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet despite a myriad of accomplishments and gaining notoriety in their own time, the Minors’ names have largely faded from memory. In 1867, Virginia founded the nation’s first organization solely dedicated to women’s suffrage—two years before Anthony formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA). Virginia and Francis were also the brains behind the groundbreaking idea that women were given the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, a philosophy the NWSA adopted for nearly a decade. And their story doesn’t end there. After the court case, Francis went on to become a prolific writer on women’s rights and one of the first and strongest male allies of the suffrage movement. Virginia instigated tax revolts across the country and campaigned side-by-side with Anthony for women’s rights in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. America's Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor (Two Dot Books, 2023) is the first biography of these suffrage celebrities who were unique for their time in being jointly dedicated to the cause of female enfranchisement. This book follows their lives from slave-holding Virginians through their highly-lauded civilian work during the Civil War, and into the height of the early suffrage movement to show how two ordinary people of like mind, dedicated to a cause, can change the course of history. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Told through the eyes of witnesses to the fall of Kabul, Walkley award-winning journalist Andrew Quilty's debut publication offers a remarkable record of this historic moment. August in Kabul: America's Last Days in Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of how America's longest mission came to an abrupt and humiliating end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives have been turned upside down: a young woman who harbors dreams of a university education; a presidential staffer who works desperately to hold things together as the government collapses around him; a prisoner in the notorious Bagram Prison who suddenly finds himself free when prison guards abandon their post. Andrew Quilty was one of a handful of Western journalists who stayed in Kabul as the city fell. This is his first-hand account of those dramatic final days. Andrew Quilty’s photography career began in Sydney, in the year 2000, on the day his application to a university photo elective was rejected. He quit, and set off around Australia with a surfboard and a Nikon F3 that his uncle—also a photographer—had passed down. His work in Afghanistan has been published worldwide and garnered accolades including, in 2019, a World Press Photo, a Picture of the Year International award of excellence in the category of Photographer of the Year (POYI), and prior to that, a George Polk Award, three POYI awards, a Sony World Photography award and six Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, the highest honor in Australian journalism. In 2016, a selection of his work from Afghanistan was exhibited at the Visa pour L'Image Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. He has travelled to two thirds of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and continues to document the country through pictures and, increasingly, the written word. Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His work focuses on the reintegration process of veterans of the military and non-state armed groups in contexts spanning the US, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and beyond. He is a staff writer for the Chicago Policy Review, director of projects and programs at Corioli Institute, and a contributing researcher at Trust After Betrayal. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, ctchristensen@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Supreme Court recently wrapped up their term – and announced that they will hear a very controversial case about domestic abuse, the power of Congress, and the right to keep and bear arms called United States v. Rahimi. The Court will decide whether a Texas man who assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone has been deprived of his Second Amendment rights. When the assaulted woman later obtained a restraining order against Mr. Zackey Rahimi, federal law made illegal for him to possess a firearm or ammunition while under that order. In 2019, Mr. Zackey Rahimi had an argument with his girlfriend in a parking lot. Mr. Rahimi knocked the woman to the ground. As he dragged her back to his car, she hit her head on the car’s dashboard. Later, in a telephone call. Mr. Rahimi threatened the woman that he would shoot her if she told anyone about the assault. Later, a Texas state court entered a domestic violence restraining order against Rahimi. The order also barred Rahimi from possessing a gun based on a part of a federal statute: the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Mr. Rahimi claims that the statute violates his Second Amendment rights. Postscript invites authors to react to contemporary events that engage their scholarship and we have two experts on the Second Amendment to unpack the case. Joseph Blocher, Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law co-authored The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Darrell Miller and has a forthcoming article in the Yale Law Review (co-authored with Eric Ruben) entitled Originalism-by-Analogy and Second Amendment Adjudication. In addition to his numerous influential law review articles and nuanced public facing scholarship in print, radio, and tv, he was one of the attorneys who helped write the brief for the District of C in Heller and he contributed an important brief to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. She shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—indelibly shape the post-cold war era. When Western triumphalism moved into the global South and former Eastern bloc spaces, many articulated a powerful sense of loss and a longing for stability. Innovatively bringing together diplomatic archives, museums, films, and video games, Dr. Von Eschen shows that as the United States continuously sought new enemies for its unipolar world, cold war triumphalism fueled the ascendancy of xenophobic right-wing nationalism and the embrace of authoritarian sensibilities in the United States and beyond. Ultimately, she demonstrates that triumphalist claims that capitalism and military might won the cold war distort the past and disfigure the present, undermining democratic values and institutions. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals (Princeton UP, 2021), political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality. Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals. Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, where she previously directed the LSE Gender Institute. Her books include Engendering Democracy; The Politics of Presence; Which Equalities Matter?; Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton); Our Body, Whose Property? (Princeton); and The Politics of the Human. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nobody who sits in traffic on Sedona, Arizona's main stretch or stands shoulder-to-shoulder in its many souvenir shops would call it a ghost town. Neither would anyone renting a room for $2,000 a month or buying a house for a half-million dollars. And yet, the people who built the small town and made it a community are being pushed further and further out. Their home is being sold out from under their feet. In studying the impact of short-term rentals, Brendan O'Brien saw something similar happening in places ranging from Bend, Oregon, to Bar Harbor, Maine. But it isn't just short-term rentals, and it's not just tourism towns. Neighborhoods in Austin and Atlanta have become rows of investment properties. Longtime residents in Spokane and Boston have been replaced by new, high-salaried remote workers. Across the country, a level of unaffordable housing which once seemed unique to global cities like New York and San Francisco has become the norm, with nearly a third of all US households considered housing cost-burdened. This situation has been aided by the direct actions of developers, politicians, and existing homeowners who have sought to drive up the cost of housing. But it's mostly happened due to a societal-wide refusal to see housing as anything more than real estate, another product available to the highest bidder. This trend of putting local housing on a global market has worsened in recent years but is nothing new. Housing in the United States has always been marred by racial and income inequality that mocks the country's highest ideals. Deeply researched and deeply felt, Homesick: Why Housing Is Unaffordable and How We Can Change It (Chicago Review Press, 2023) argues that we can be so much better. And we can start where we live. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Violent America: The Dynamics of Identity Politics in a Multiracial Society (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia counterintuitively analyses why and how various ethnoracial groups proactively and instrumentally use different forms of violence to achieve their goals. Combining a historical analysis spanning the centuries with an examination of contemporary problems, she considers how and why ethnoracial groups can be both perpetrators and victims of violence, why some minority groups react differently to violence in comparable situations, and what the consequences are today for politics in both America and Europe. Violent America thus explores the effects of physical and discursive violence on the ways in which ethnoracial groups define themselves. Dr. Chebel d'Appollonia argues that the use of ethnoracial violence has been and remains an effective identity strategy by which all ethnoracial groups are able to integrate themselves into the mainstream of American society. She provides an alternative way of understanding the complex relationship between migrant phobia, multiethnic grievances, and intergroup conflicts in America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The 2016 election of Donald Trump focused people's minds on populism, and most of the attention paid to the subject since has been on the threat it poses to wealthy democracies. In Democracy Unmoored, Samuel Issacharoff takes a far wider-angle view of the phenomenon, covering countries from across the globe: Brazil, Poland, Argentina, Turkey, India, Hungary, Venezuela, and more. Just as importantly, he focuses on populism's attack on the institutions of governance. Democracy requires two critical features: first, a commitment to repeat play such that political actors understand that what goes around comes around; and, second, institutional constraints so that the majority can prevail, albeit not by too much. Democracies must avoid the doomsday scenario in which the contending parties see the next election as the final choice between salvation and perdition. Issacharoff shows how populist governance undermines each of these two critical underpinnings of stable democracy, first by compressing the time horizon to the immediate, and second by eroding institutional constraints on strongman rule. At the same time, Issacharoff highlights the fact that ascendent populists were pushing in an open door as they found democracies in states of disrepair in the post-2008 world. Electorates around the world had come to see institutional democratic party systems as cabals of elites working against "the people," which anti-institutionalist populists took advantage of in country after country. Global in coverage and featuring a powerful explanation of the true threat populism represents to democracy, this book will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the survival of democratic institutions. Samuel Issacharoff is the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. He is a leading figure in the study of democracy, constitutions, and the courts, and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts. He is a leading figure in the law of democracy in the U.S. and has written scores of articles on democratic challenges around the world. He served as a senior legal advisor to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and is long experienced as an appellate advocate in American courts. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How should we understand contemporary migration policy? In Radical Hospitality: American Policy, Media, and Immigration (Rutgers UP, 2022), Nour Halabi, an Interdisciplinary Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, explores this question by blending history, media studies, and a range of critical theory to introduce the idea of radical hospitality. Using detailed historical and contemporary case studies- from the 1880s and the Chinese Exclusion Act, through the 1920s and the National Origins Act, up to the 2000s and the Muslim travel ban- the book offers both a rethink of the history of immigration as well as a radical call for a new approach. Rich in detail and broad in scope, the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to see a better world for migrants everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Each June in the United States, scholars, journalists, law makers, law enforcers, lawyers, and members of the public wait for the announcement of major decisions from the Supreme Court. Justices often read a summary of their decision from the bench dressed in their robes. Paper copies are available in a special office – and more recently on the Supreme Court website. This year, the Supreme Court opinions have shaped policy on affirmative action, public accommodation for LGBTQ+ people, voting rights, student loans, and the power of states to control election procedure. Before these cases are decided, the parties, outside individuals, and interest groups invest an estimated $25 to $50 million dollars a year to produce roughly one thousand amicus briefs. These briefs strategically provide information to the justices to convince them to vote in a particular way. How are these briefs produced? Who pays for their research and writing? What impact do they have on the ultimate decisions of the Supreme Court? In Persuading the Supreme Court: The Significance of Briefs in Judicial Decision-Making (UP of Kansas, 2022), Drs. Hazelton and Hinkle draw on political science research on the effects of information on policy making, their original dataset of more than 25,000 party and amicus briefs filed between 1984 and 2015, their interviews with former Supreme Court clerks and attorneys, and the text of the related court opinions to argue that the briefs matter – and they matter more when parties hire experienced attorneys known to the justices to craft excellent information-rich briefs. Hazelton and Hinkle interrogate both the causes and the consequences of providing that information to the justices. They demonstrate how that information operates differently in terms of influencing who wins and what policy is announced. Dr. Rachael K. Hinkle, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo. Her research agenda focuses on judicial politics with particular attention to gleaning insights into legal development from the content of judicial opinions through the use of computational text analytic techniques. Dr. Morgan L.W. Hazelton, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Law (by courtesy) at Saint Louis University. She studies how features of court systems influence the decisions that both litigants and judges make. In the podcast, Drs. Hazelton and Hinkle mention their piece in their Monkey Cage on predicting the outcome in the 2023 Voting Rights Case and their new collaboration with Dr. Michael J. Nelson, The Elevator Effect. Their data set is available to the public and can be found on either of their websites (linked above). Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today, the word "neoliberal" is used to describe an epochal shift toward market-oriented governance begun in the 1970s. Yet the roots of many of neoliberalism's policy tools can be traced to the ideas and practices of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he terms "supply-side liberalism," a powerful and enduring orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and economists, and urban and rural economic planners. Beginning in the late 1930s, New Dealers tied expansive aspirations for social and, later, racial progress to a variety of economic development initiatives. In communities across the country, otherwise conservative business elites administered liberal public works, urban redevelopment, and housing programs. But by binding national visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity they imagined their programs solving. When President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty--which prioritized direct partnerships with poor and racially marginalized citizens--businesspeople, Republicans, and soon, a rising generation of New Democrats sought to rein in its seeming excesses by reinventing and redeploying many of the policy tools and commitments pioneered on liberalism's supply side: public-private partnerships, market-oriented solutions, fiscal "realism," and, above all, subsidies for business-led growth now promised to blunt, and perhaps ultimately replace, programs for poor and marginalized Americans. In this wide-ranging book, Brent Cebul illuminates the often-overlooked structures of governance, markets, and public debt through which America's warring political ideologies have been expressed and transformed. From Washington, D.C. to the declining Rustbelt and emerging Sunbelt and back again, Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) reveals the centrality of public and private forms of profit that have defined the enduring boundaries of American politics, opportunity, and inequality-- in an era of liberal ascendence and an age of neoliberal retrenchment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When we teach about how women go into politics, how are we looking for the places and ways that women get involved? Are we giving enough consideration to small towns, and to grassroots work? Heather Lende joins us to share what it was like to run for office in her Alaskan town. This episode considers:
How she ended up in Alaska.
What led her to run for office.
Why she was subjected to a recall.
How she rebuilt relationships with neighbors who voted against her, and what happened when she couldn’t.
A discussion of the book Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small Town Politics.
Today’s book is: Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small Town Politics, by Heather Lende. Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines—a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane—isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be. From a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor, to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street, to the recall campaign that targeted three assembly members, Lende’s book reveals that small town politics aren’t so small. In her book, we witness up close the nitty-gritty of passing legislation, trying to uphold the lofty ideals of our republic, and just how the polarizing national politics of our era played out in one small town. Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics considers what living in a community really means, and what we owe one another. Our guest is: Heather Lende , who has contributed essays and commentary to NPR, the New York Times, and National Geographic Traveler, among other newspapers and magazines, and is a former contributing editor at Woman’s Day. A columnist for the Alaska Dispatch News, she is the obituary writer for the Chilkat Valley News in Haines and the recipient of the Suzan Nightingale McKay Best Columnist Award from the Alaska Press Club. Her previous bestselling books include Find the Good; Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs; and If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name. Her website is heatherlende.com. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
This episode on feminist communication strategies
This episode on overcoming public-speaking anxieties
This episode on belonging and the science of bridging divides
This episode on dealing with rejections
This episode on the fight to save the town
This episode discussing the anniversary of the 19th amendment with two curators from the Smithsonian
Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re busy in the studio preparing new episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson have each worked on and researched questions of gender, leadership, executive positions, and popular culture. In Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture, Horn Sheeler and Vasby Anderson examine the experiences of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin as both women ran for office in 2008, at the presidential and vice-presidential level respectively. Woman President digs into the question of gendered presidentiality, and how this contributes to voters’ expectations and to the double bind that most female candidates face, especially those running for executive positions. The requirement that women must demonstrate capacity and capability and ambition, but at the same time not appear to be threatening, overly ambitious, or unfeminine is particularly complicated for presidential or vice-presidential candidates in the United States. Horn Sheeler and Vasby Anderson dive into the issue of feminism as it has swirled around politics for decades, but particularly in the ways that feminism and postfeminism framed the 2008 election cycle and has come to frame and contribute to more discussions of gender and politics in subsequent election cycles. They also integrate popular culture narratives around women and the presidency and explore the interaction between imaginary narratives and real life and how each influences the other, while providing a space for citizens and voters to see non-white/male/Christian/straight individuals occupying the Oval Office. In Women, Feminism, and Pop Politics, Vasby Anderson brings together a diversity of voices and scholars to explore the connection between popular culture narratives, women, and feminism, particularly as seen within the context of American politics. This edited volume integrates analysis of a variety of sites where politics, gender, and popular culture interact. The first section of the book explores iconic embodiments of real women and feminism, and how these embodiments communicate ideas about women, and questions of gender equality. The second section of the book interrogates parody and satire in the late-night television zone, where different shows and different comedic formats present differing views of feminism, gender, and politics. Finally, the last section of the book explores the scripted narratives of dramas and comedies (The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Scandal, Veep, and Parks and Rec) and what these imaginaries provide for audiences as we consider both fictional and real women in power. Both books are important explorations of the complexities of women, gender, and power within the U.S. political system, with particular attention to the issues that surround the American presidency and the idea of presidentiality. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind (Twelve, 2023) investigates how Washington works, and how different kinds of people try to make it work for them. Ben Terris presents an inside history of this crucial moment in Washington, reporting from exclusive parties, poker nights, fundraisers, secluded farms outside town, and the halls of Congress; among the oddballs and opportunists and true believers. This book is about the people who see the current interlude as an opportunity to build something -- for their country, for themselves -- amid the wreckage. Ben Terris is a writer in The Washington Post's Style section with a focus on national politics. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many experts believe that we are at a fulcrum moment in history, a time that demands radical shifts in thinking and policymaking. Calls for bold change are everywhere these days, particularly on social media, but is this actually the best way to make the world a better place? In Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age (Oxford UP, 2023), Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue that, contrary to the aspirations of activists on both the right and the left, incremental reform is the best path forward. They begin by emphasizing that the very structure of American government explicitly and implicitly favors incrementalism. Particularly in a time of intense polarization, any effort to advance radical change will inevitably engender significant backlash. As Berman and Fox make clear, polling shows little public support for bold change. The public is, however, willing to endorse a broad range of incremental reforms that, if implemented, would reduce suffering and improve fairness. To illustrate how incremental changes can add up to significant change over time, Berman and Fox provide portraits of "heroic incrementalists" who have produced meaningful reforms in a variety of areas, from the expansion of Social Security to more recent efforts to reduce crime and incarceration. Gradual is a bracing call for a "radical realism" that prioritizes honesty, humility, nuance, and respect in an effort to transcend political polarization and reduce the conflict produced by social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It has been a momentous few weeks for the Supreme Court. What better time to discuss the Court's history and future? We are therefore launching our "Summer of Law" series to shed light on the legal world . Kicking the series off is John Yoo, the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has written 8 books and over 100 academic articles, and is a regular contributor at a wide variety of publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and National Review. This episode discusses his latest book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (Regnery Publishing, 2023). Along the way, it unpacks legal thought on issues such as affirmative action, abortion, court-packing, the administrative state, and the unique position of the Supreme Court as an unelected institution. We have not forgotten, however, that tomorrow is our nation's birthday. At the end of the discussion, our Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar Allen Guelzo will recite Patrick Henry's famous speech "Give Me Liberty." While this episode covers the court more broadly, here are some of Prof. Yoo's recent writings and appearances on these hot-button issues:
Newsweek, "Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Was Always a Sham"
National Review, "The Supreme Court Corrects a Grievous Error"
His interview on Fox News, "Supreme Court says Congress, not the president, controls power of the purse"
His interview on Fox Business, "Employers should rethink race-based hiring, programs after SCOTUS affirmative action decision"
His interview on Fox News, "The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution is colorblind"
Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For nearly two decades the renowned legal historian G. Edward White has been writing a multi-volume history of law in America. In his third and concluding volume, Law in American History, Volume III: 1930-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2019), he surveys the many developments in American law from the middle of the 20th century to the case of Bush v. Gore. One of the most important of these developments was the emergence of American jurisprudence, a philosophy of how judges should apply the law. As White demonstrates, this new interpretation of judges as individual actors in the shaping of legal interpretation emerged while federal agencies moved toward agency governance, which was underpinned by the notion of a factual, scientific basis towards decision-making. At the same time, lawmakers pursued what White terms the “statutorification” of common law, while all branches wrestled with the need to establish the legal framework for the developments in mass communications that characterized the era. Throughout all of this the Supreme Court played a dominant role in shaping American law and White analyzes their decisions in a half-dozen fields, including the often controversial rulings dealing with the nation’s political process, culminating with their decisive intervention in the presidential election of 2000. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The recent conclusion to the war in Afghanistan — America’s longest and one of its most frustrating — serves as a vivid reminder of the unpredictability and tragedy of war. In Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars Since 1861 (Brookings, 2023), esteemed military expert Michael O’Hanlon examines America’s major conflicts since the mid-1800s: the Civil War, the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. O’Hanlon addresses profound questions. How successful has the United States been when it waged these wars? Were the wars avoidable? Did America’s leaders know what they were getting into when they committed to war? And what lessons does history offer for future leaders contemplating war?—including the prospects for avoiding war in the first place. Certainly, Vladimir Putin should have thought harder about some of these questions before invading Ukraine. O’Hanlon looks for overarching trends and themes, along with the lessons for the military strategists and political leaders of today and tomorrow. His main lessons include the observations that war is usually far more difficult than expected, and that its outcomes are rarely predictable. O’Hanlon’s unique book — combining brevity and clarity with a broad conceptual approach —is an important for students of security studies at universities and war colleges as well as generalists. Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology, as well as the Defense Industrial Base working group, and is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He also serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense. Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. He previously served on active-duty as both an Infantry and Military Intelligence officer, and as a civil-servant at the White House. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists and practitioners. The thought is that a democratic deficit lies at the root of any political and social problem that a democracy might confront. Accordingly, a good deal of work in democratic theory aims at designing new practices and institutions that can erase the deficit. But this raises a problem: The civic task of democratic citizenship must be manageable for ordinary citizens. And ordinary citizens are differentially busy with other pursuits, many of which are independently valuable and socially beneficial. Thus, proposals for “more democracy” tend to be exclusionary. In Democracy for Busy People (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin J. Elliott addresses this difficulty head on. He devises a conception of the civic responsibilities of citizenship that is authentically democratic without being overly demanding. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that explores the foundational understanding of how humans best flourish, in particular in regard to the governmental system under which they live. Allen, author of many books that focus on questions of democracy and justice, also works on democratic reform and renovation at Partners in Democracy. Thus, Dr. Allen integrates both scholarship and democratic activism into her work as an academic and as an activist. Justice by Means of Democracy examines these different threads as well; what is justice, and how does democracy work towards achieving justice? And what is the role of the citizen in these pursuits? Allen opens up her discussion weaving together a number of threads, since politics, economics, civic engagement, and citizenship are all part of the whole when we consider both justice and democracy. Growing out of the ideal that democracy is a very good system for individuals to move forward together, and to achieve their full flourishing, complexities arise from issues like inequality, inequity, and how liberty is structured within the governmental system. Part of Allen’s framing comes from John Rawl’s Theory of Justice and his connection of justice and democracy—but she is pushing further in terms of the role of power and thinking about power and power sharing within democracies and democratic institutions. Justice by Means of Democracy also wrestles with the abstract ideas of negative and positive liberty, and what this actually means in practice, particularly in the United States. In fact, the book thinks about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and what that requires from each individual. Allen explained in our conversation that while we often discuss “work/life balance” in terms of our personal and professional lives, what we should be discussing and focusing on is our “work-life civic balance” – since being civically involved takes time, takes effort, but is required for democracy to function and to remain intact. We are living through some of the breakages within our democratic systems of government, not just in the United States, but in other democracies as well. And part of the reason for these breakages is the failure of democratic practice by the people themselves. Allen’s own activism is focused on restoring and reinvigorating democratic practice, so that citizens become more used to the “habit” of democracy and civic engagement. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book,Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eileen V. Wallis' book California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the political, legal, medical, and social battles that led to the widespread institutionalization of Californians with disabilities from the gold rush to the 1970s. By the early twentieth century, most American states had specialized facilities dedicated to both the care and the control of individuals with disabilities. Institutions reflect the lived historical experience of many Americans with disabilities in this era. Yet we know relatively little about how such state institutions fit into specific regional, state, or local contexts west of the Mississippi River; how those contexts shaped how institutions evolved over time; or how regional institutions fit into the USA's contentious history of care and control of Americans with mental and developmental disabilities. This book examines how medical, social, and political arguments that individuals with disabilities needed to be institutionalized became enshrined in state law in California through the creation of a "bureaucracy of disability." Using Los Angeles County as a case study, the book also considers how the friction between state and county policy in turn influenced the treatment of individuals within such facilities. Furthermore, the book tracks how the mission and methods of such institutions evolved over time, culminating in the 1960s with the birth of the disability rights movement and the complete rewriting of California's laws on the treatment and rights of Californians with disabilities. This book is a must-read for those interested in the history of California and the American West and for anyone interested in how the intersections of disability, politics, and activism shaped our historical understanding of life for Americans with disabilities. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Across the U.S., state legislatures-often under the cover of darkness, and usually in spite of public opposition-are passing bills that channel public dollars to private schools. These voucher schemes promise to transfer billions from state treasuries to upper-income families. But that's just the start. Opponents of public schools want to dismantle the public education system entirely. Outrageous and unfounded attacks on the schools-about Critical Race Theory, "gender ideology," and "grooming"-are all part of a broader strategy to sow doubt and distrust. This is the end game. Education historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire trace the war on public education to its origins, offering the deep backstory necessary to understand the threat presently posed to America's schools. The book also looks forward to imagine how current policy efforts will reshape the educational landscape and remake America's future. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, 2023) offers readers a lively, accessible, yet scholarly view of a decades-long conservative cause: unmaking the system that serves over 90% of students in the U.S. Presenting a clear view of the ideology motivating this assault, the book also maps the future-outlining how current policy efforts will reshape the educational landscape and remake American democracy. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Shaming State: How the U.S. Treats Citizens in Need (NYU Press, 2023) argues that Americans have been abandoned by a government that has relinquished its duties of care toward its citizens. Sara Salman describes a government that withholds care in times of need and instead shames the very citizens it claims to serve, both poor and middle class. She argues that the state does so by emphasizing personal responsibility, thus tacitly blaming the needy for relying on state programs. This blame is pervasive in the American cultural imagination, existing in political discourse and internalized by Americans. This book explores how shaming is exhibited by state and political institutions by showing the ways in which the state withholds care, and how people who need that care are humiliated for failing to be self-sufficient. The Shaming State investigates the vanishing horizon of social rights in the United States and the dwindling of government support to both lower- and middle-class people. Focusing on Iraqi refugees and white home-owning New Yorkers, Salman demonstrates how both groups were faced with immense difficulty and humiliation when searching for access to assistance programs maintained by the government. Looking at the long-range trends, she argues that the last forty years have made the United States a market fundamentalist country, where the government does not offer unified aid and increasingly asks citizens to assume personal responsibility in the face of uncontrollable disasters. Whether it was Hurricane Katrina almost two decades ago or the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the indifferent and stagnant response by the American government not only amplified the consequences of these disasters but also increased hostility towards the vulnerable groups who needed help. Ultimately, The Shaming State tells stories of abandonment, loss, shame, and rage experienced by Americans and how the government has let them down time and time again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (U Chicago Press, 2023), our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy--all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions through a process of conflict and accommodation. Why Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023) demonstrates the value of this activity by showing the legislature's distinctive contributions in two crucial moments in the mid-twentieth century: during World War II, when congressional deliberation contributed to national cohesion by balancing interests and ensuring fairness, and during the push to end racial segregation, when a prolonged debate in Congress focused the nation's attention and delivered a decisive victory for the broad coalition united around civil rights. The second part of the book traces the evolution of Congress, which first experimented with radical decentralization in the 1970s and then, beginning in the 1980s, embraced powerful leadership and ideological caucuses that prioritized partisan unity and electoral confrontation. This transformed institution has been unable to work through the country's deep divisions on contemporary issues like immigration or the COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary policymaking often circumvents Congress entirely. In other instances, Congress is engaged, but it proceeds without any bipartisan cooperation or through leader-broken compromises generated by crises. Each of these patterns creates serious difficulties for legitimating American policy. The book concludes with three scenarios for Congress's future. Without significant change, the institution will sink into decrepitude. But it could still be transformed, either by progressive constitutional reform empowering the president at the legislature's expense, or by a revival of meaningful deliberation and debate facilitated by the renewal of the committee system. Philip A. Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies America's separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many people are familiar with the United States Supreme Court’s merit docket. Each case follows detailed and professional proceedings that include formal written and oral arguments. The justices’ decisions provide lengthy arguments and citations. They are freely available to the public, press, policy-makers, law makers, judges, and scholars. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, they ruled publicly – and the press covered it extensively. But Professor Stephen Vladeck’s new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic (Basic Books, 2023), highlights that 99% of the Court’s decisions are “unseen, unsigned, and almost always unexplained” on the “shadow docket.” State and federal policies – and constitutional rights – are affected by decisions that the Supreme Court makes behind closed doors. There are no opinions, no citations, and often observers have little idea which justices supported the action. The term ‘shadow docket’ was coined by law professor William Baude in 2015 – and Professor Vladeck sees a recent, radical, and concerning shift in how the shadow docket has been deployed in recent years. His remarkable book traces the shadow docket’s longer history to explain what is the shadow docket, where did it come from, and how the Court has radically departed from past practice to decide more and more cases out of the public eye. Professor Vladeck argues that the shadow docket has become a norm rather than an exception – and that procedural change impacts constitutional rights and public policy on a large scale including asylum eligibility, abortion, marriage equality, voting rights, and building a border wall. Professor Vladeck insists that, regardless of your individual political leanings, the Court’s increasing manipulation of the shadow docket threatens our shared constitutional system, and should alarm any American who believes in the value of the Supreme Court as an independent and legitimate institution. Professor Vladeck’s impressively researched (and remarkably accessible) book employs historical analysis and case studies in clear and precise prose. This is a book for scholars, students, – and anyone interested in policy and politics. The podcast ends with Professor Vladeck’s suggestions for how we can all change how we talk about the Court and how Congress can make the Court more accountable. Professor Stephen Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair at the University of Texas School of Law. In addition to his extensive legal scholarship, Vladeck, has argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, co-hosts the National Security Law Podcast, and is editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly Substack newsletter about the Supreme Court. John Sebastiani served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. In Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (U Illinois Press, 2023), Josh Shepperd looks at the people, institutions, and influences behind the media reform movement and clearinghouse the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the drive to create what became the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. Founded in 1934, the NAEB began as a disorganized collection of undersupported university broadcasters. Shepperd traces the setbacks, small victories, and trial-and-error experiments that took place as thousands of advocates built a media coalition premised on the belief that technology could ease social inequality through equal access to education and information. The bottom-up, decentralized network they created implemented a different economy of scale and a vision of a mass media divorced from commercial concerns. At the same time, they transformed advice, criticism, and methods adopted from other sectors into an infrastructure that supported public broadcasting in the 1960s and beyond. Connor Kenaston is an Assistant Professor of History and Ainsworth Scholar in American Culture at Randolph College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession identified progressivism for what it was and continues to be: a fundamental rupture with the roots of American order.” So writes the political scientist and theorist Bradley C. S. Watson in his 2020 book Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea (U Notre Dame Press). Watson provides an intellectual history of how historians such as Richard Hofstadter tended to underplay what a radical break the Progressive Movement was from American constitutionalism. The book shows that only in recent decades have political theorists entered the fray and rendered clear how dire the ramifications for American society and culture the views on the Constitution of such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were and what a massive break they were from the legacy of the founders and such advocates of natural rights as Abraham Lincoln. Anyone interested in how American political history was written in the period of roughly 1940-1980 should read this book. So should anyone interested in the differences between the views of historians and political scientists on the same developments. And this is not just a matter of the mindsets of various fields of scholarship. These debates shaped public policy and affected a host of issues such as the rise of the administrative state and the role of expertise in governance, the place of religion (Christianity first and foremost) in American life and the ideology-dependent staffing of the ranks of college social science departments, government entities and other key institutions. All of these developments filtered out to the rest of society. Watson helps us understand what the Progressives (including politicians, academics and theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch) of the period of roughly 1900-1930 actually said and wrote versus what historians in the decades shortly thereafter said they said. Let’s hear from Professor Watson himself. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Do experts perform better than generalists? In the midst of the fraught 2016 Brexit campaign one of the most British senior British politicians arguing that the UK should leave the EU said “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts “– and was widely derided for doing so. Amanda Goodall thinks he was wrong, as she explains to Owen Bennett-Jones. Goodall is the author of Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders (PublicAffairs, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe, America’s military was unprepared, too small, and poorly supplied. The Nazis were supported by robust German factories that created a seemingly endless flow of arms, trucks, tanks, airplanes, and submarines. The United States, emerging from the Great Depression, was skeptical of American involvement in Europe and not ready to wage war. Hardened isolationists predicted disaster if the country went to war. In V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II (Scribner, 2023), Craig Nelson traces how Franklin D. Roosevelt steadily and sometimes secretively put America on a war footing by convincing America’s top industrialists such as Henry Ford Jr. to retool their factories, by diverting the country’s supplies of raw materials to the war effort, and above all by convincing the American people to endure shortages, to work in wartime factories, and to send their sons into harm’s way. Within a few years, the nation’s workers were producing thousands of airplanes and tanks, hundreds of warships and submarines. Under FDR’s resolute leadership, victory at land and sea and air across the globe began at home in America—a powerful and essential narrative largely overlooked in conventional histories of the war but which, in Nelson’s skilled, authoritative hands, becomes an illuminating and important work destined to become an American history classic. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project became the subject of a public hearing in a small town near the proposed site. But this time, local politicians and union leaders praised the mine proposal as an asset that would strengthen working-class communities in Minnesota. In many rural American communities, there is profound tension around the preservation and protection of wilderness and the need to promote and profit from natural resources. In Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range (NYU Press, 2023), Erik Kojola looks at both sides of these populist movements and presents a thoughtful account of how such political struggles play out. Drawing on over a hundred ethnographic interviews with people of the region, from members of labor unions to local residents to scientists, Kojola is able to bring this complex struggle over mining to life. Focusing on both pro- and anti-mining groups, he expands upon what this conflict reveals about the way whiteness and masculinity operate among urban and rural residents, and the different ways in which class, race, and gender shape how people relate to the land. Mining the Heartland shows the negotiation and conflict between two central aspects of the state's culture and economy: outdoor recreation in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and the lucrative mining of the Iron Range. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who played a key part in the greatest social movement of the 20th century. During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president -the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate -but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to keep a bloc of Southern segregationists-the so-called Dixiecrats-in the New Deal coalition. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, just 37 and the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium. Defying Truman's own desire to occupy the middle ground, Humphrey urged the delegates to "get out of the shadow of state's rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." Humphrey's speech put everything on the line, rhetorically and politically, to move the party, and the country, forward. To the surprise of many, including Humphrey himself, the delegates voted to adopt a meaningful civil-rights plank. With no choice but to run on it, Truman seized the opportunity it offered, desegregating the armed forces and in November upsetting the frontrunner Thomas Dewey, a victory due in part to an unprecedented surge of Black voters. The outcome of that week in July 1948-which marks its 75th anniversary as this book is published-shapes American politics to this day. And it was in turned shaped by Humphrey. His journey to that pivotal speech runs from a remote, all-white hamlet in South Dakota to the mayoralty of Minneapolis as he tackles its notorious racism and anti-Semitism to his role as a national champion of multiracial democracy. His allies in that struggle include a Black newspaper publisher, a Jewish attorney, and a professor who had fled Nazi Germany. And his adversaries are the white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and America Firsters of mid-century America - one of whom tries to assassinate him. Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (Oxford UP, 2023) is a book that celebrates one of the overlooked landmarks of civil rights history, and illuminates the early life and enduring legacy of the man who helped bring it about. Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor, columnist, and author of nine acclaimed books. Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper's "On Education" column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association's annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the "On Religion" column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years. As a professor of journalism at Columbia University, Freedman has been named the nation's outstanding journalism educator by the Society of Professional Journalists and received Columbia's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, ctchristensen@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America on aggression, beginning with the Declaration of Independence up to 2020, covering the four years of the Trump Administration. The decision of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court to activate the Court's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression in 2018 has added further value to a book concerning the position and practice of one of the most influential states, a global military power and permanent member of the UN Security Council. Organized along chronological lines, the work examines whether, or to what extent, the US position has evolved over time. The book explores how the definition of the crime can impact upon the US, notwithstanding its failure to ratify the Rome Statute. It also shows that the US practice and opinio iuris about the law applicable to the use of force might influence, as it has done in the past, the law itself. The work will be a valuable guide for students, academics and professionals with an interest in International Criminal Law. Jeff Bachman is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When the Soviet K-129 submarine sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1968, the CIA saw a possible treasure trove of intelligence information on Soviet military codes. The race was on to devise how exactly to retrieve this potential information from the bottom of the ocean. After years of careful planning, the result was one of the most audacious espionage missions of the Cold War. The wreck of the K-129 would be recovered intact under the cover of a deep-sea mining operation, funded by business tycoon Howard Hughes. Unfortunately for the CIA, the winds of public opinion about its secret operations were changing in wake of the Watergate scandals that helped expose the operation to a wider audience. Out of the attempt to maintain secrecy that the so-called "Glomar response" of "neither confirm nor deny" was used for the first time in a legal setting. This story and its Cold War context is the subject of M. Todd Bennett's Neither Confirm Nor Deny: How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency (Columbia University Press, 2023). M. Todd Bennett is associate professor of history at East Carolina University. He is the author of One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (2012). Bennett was formerly a historian at the U.S. Department of State; there, he edited the Foreign Relations of the United States volume that includes declassified records documenting the Glomar incident. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia. Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin's tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds (Princeton UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about--one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The word "narrative" is now so frequently heard that some think it over used. Perhaps its ubiquity results from it being so relevant – what used to be thought of as the mundane area of misinformation has become one of the most powerful elements of political practice. Andreas Krieg discusses the latest trends in the world of story-telling with Owen Bennett-Jones. Krieg is the author of Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives (Georgetown UP, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of High Theory, Jed Esty talks about the Rhetoric of Decline. Declinism names the contradictory political narrative that America will always be the greatest country in the world, yet is in constant danger of losing its place in the global pecking order. Studying this rhetorical log-jam reveals its prominence on both the left and the right, and its toxic effects on our national discourse. But comparing the end of America’s empire to Britain's imperial decline in the twentieth century can help us muddle out of this mess. The basis of our conversation is Jed’s recent book The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022). It’s a cool short book with an x-ray spaceman on the cover. You should read it, even if this isn’t usually your cup of tea. Jed Esty is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and writes about Anglophone literature after 1850, with special interests in modernism, critical theory, history and theory of the novel, colonial and postcolonial studies, the Victorian novel, and post-45 U.S. culture. He is the author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford 2012) and A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton 2004). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift? Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, pinpointing the role of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Gun rights advocates including the National Rifle Association had lobbied legislators for decades, but they had cast firearms control as a local issue. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 spurred congressional proposals to regulate firearms, gun rights advocates found common cause with states' rights proponents opposed to civil rights legislation. Following the enactment of the Gun Control Act, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle began to stake out firm positions. Politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan recognized the potential of gun control as a wedge issue, and gun rights became increasingly tied to the Republican Party. Drawing on a vast range of archival evidence, Charles offers new insight into the evolution of the gun rights movement and how politicians responded to anti-gun control hardliners. He examines in detail how the National Rifle Association reinvented itself as well as how other advocacy groups challenged the NRA's political monopoly. Offering a deep dive into the politicization of gun rights, Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023) reveals the origins of the acrimonious divisions that persist to this day. Patrick J. Charles is senior historian and archivist for the United States Air Force. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt (Harvard UP, 2021), Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable.The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would undermine segregation, Catholic colleges objected to state support of secular institutions, professors worried that federal dollars would come with regulations hindering academic freedom, and elite-university presidents recoiled at the idea of mass higher education. Cold War congressional fights eventually made access more important than affordability. Rather than freeing colleges from their dependence on tuition, the government created a loan instrument that made college accessible in the short term but even costlier in the long term by charging an interest penalty only to needy students. In the mid-1960s, as bankers wavered over the prospect of uncollected debt, Congress backstopped the loans, provoking runaway inflation in college tuition and resulting in immense lender profits.Today 45 million Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt, with the burdens falling disproportionately on borrowers of color, particularly women. Reformers, meanwhile, have been frustrated by colleges and lenders too rich and powerful to contain. Indentured Students makes clear that these are not unforeseen consequences. The federal student loan system is working as designed.Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has written about labor, politics, and education for the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Dissent. Author of Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, she is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction throughout its many neighborhoods. For the whiter, wealthier, parts of the city, the flood was an inconvenient detriment to business. For the Latinx West Side, it was a devastating tragedy. In West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Miller (Maverick Books, 2021), Pomona College professor Char Miller explains why this flood happened, what made it so devastating, and how it galvanized a community activist movement that remade San Antonio politics. Miller uses never-before analyzed sources to explain how flood control and urban redevelopment left the city's most vulnerable population behind in the disaster's aftermath, and how this blatant environmental racism formed the nuclear of several generations of environmental activist organizations. By taking the story of 1921 into the twenty-first century, Miller argues that a story that could be told as simple tragedy in fact represents the best in the human spirit, as people band together to aid one another and seize power for themselves.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The idea of legitimate political opposition is familiar. A decent political order permits citizens, parties, and coalitions to challenge those in power. Under such conditions, there is an ongoing nonviolent contest for power. Typically, the value of legitimate opposition is understood in terms of democracy. Here, the idea is that democracy is damaged or subverted when practices of legitimate opposition are suppressed. However, this familiar account opens questions about the value of legitimate opposition under conditions that are not satisfactorily democratic. It also obscures real-world practices of legitimate opposition that are themselves not allied with democratic norms of equality.In Legitimate Opposition (Yale 2022), Alexander Kirshner develops and defends a conception of legitimate opposition that’s not so tightly tethered to democracy. On this view, the value of legitimate opposition lies with the value of political agency.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests. Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China. Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world. Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ammon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and daughters, and then his job. For protesting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was hounded by the IRS and driven to migrant labor in the fields of the West. He had a romance with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, who called him a “prophet and a peasant.” He helped the homeless on the Bowery, founded the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, and protested the US development of nuclear missiles, becoming in the process one of the most celebrated anarchists of the twentieth century. To our era, when so much “protest” happens on social media, his actual sacrifices seem unworldly. Ammon Hennacy was a forerunner of contemporary progressive thought, and he remains a beacon for challenges that confront the world and especially the US today. In this exceptional biography, William Marling tells the story of this fascinating figure, who remains particularly important for the Catholic Left. In addition to establishing Hennacy as an exemplar of vegetarianism, ecology, and pacificism, Marling illuminates a broader history of political ideas now largely lost: the late nineteenth-century utopian movements, the grassroots socialist movements before World War I, and the antinuclear protests of the 1960s. A nuanced study of when religion and anarchist theory overlap, Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left (NYU Press, 2022) shows how Hennacy’s life at the heart of radical libertarian and anarchist interventions in American politics not only galvanized the public then, but offers us new insight for today. William Marling is Professor of English and World Literature at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s (Oxford UP, 2016), which won the Nancy Dasher Prize and was the subject of an international conference in Hannover, Germany. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about the life-threatening nature of this virus as it spread around the globe. At the same time, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas B. Pepinsky ask us to reflect on our experiences and the responses to COVID-19 in the United States in their new book, Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton UP, 2022). Kushner Gadarian, Wallace Goodman, and Pepinsky were able to put sizeable surveys into the field starting as early as March 2020, as the pandemic was taking hold in the United States and as our daily lives started to “shut down.” The three authors continued to send out the same survey to the same individuals over the course of the next two years, eventually pulling together data from six waves of surveys of some 3000 Americans. The center of the research design was to try to examine individual attitudes towards COVID-19 itself, and how people responded to the pandemic threat and the mitigation efforts. Because of the capacity to survey the same individuals over time, the authors were able to see the way that people changed their thinking as COVID itself mutated and re-situated itself in different parts of the country. The conclusion from all of this data and information is that, in the United States, partisanship swamped everything else in terms of how individuals thought about, reacted to, and responded to COVID-19. Pandemic Politics explores the way that citizens were picking up on different signals from partisan leadership because there were differing approaches to how to handle and respond to COVID-19. This was unique in the United States in comparison to other countries. Because of competing messages coming from different authoritative individuals (like the president of the United States, governors, state and local level health authorities, CDC and NIH experts, etc.) and, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a significant knowledge gap as to what to do and how to keep ourselves safe, many Americans found themselves confused and concerned. As a result, the data indicates that Republicans and Democrats were hearing and seeing different information, different advice, and this continued and became more entrenched as the pandemic continued. The authors also note that the structural foundation for these partisan differences were already present before the pandemic—there were pre-existing conditions within the body politic that subsequently led to the sclerotic partisan reactions to the pandemic itself and to the efforts to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of the new book, The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Throughout its history, the U.S. military has worked in close connection to market-based institutions and structures. It has run systems of free and unfree labor, taken over private sector firms, and both spurred and snuffed out economic development. It has created new markets―for consumer products, for sex work, and for new technologies. It has operated as a regulator of industries and firms and an arbitrator of labor practices. And in recent decades it has gone so far as to refashion itself from the inside, so as to become more similar to a for-profit corporation. The Military and the Market (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) covers two centuries of history of the U.S. military’s vast and varied economic operations, including its often tense relationships with capitalist markets. Collecting new scholarship at the intersection of the fields of military history, business history, policy history, and the history of capitalism, the nine chapters feature important new research on subjects ranging from Civil War soldier-entrepreneurs, to the business of the construction of housing and overseas bases for the Cold War, to the U.S. military’s troubled relationships with markets for sex. The volume enriches scholars’ understandings of the depth and complexity of military-market relations in U.S. history and offers today’s military policymakers novel insights about the origins of current arrangements and how they might be reimagined. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State. Mark R. Wilson is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and author of Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Alex Beckstrand is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut, a lecturer at Central Connecticut State University, and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves. He works in the aerospace industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should There be Minority Rights? (Oxford UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance. Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson's life and legacy as a respectable activist – a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics. It's a book about the past, but it's also a book about the present that nods to the future. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women's Representation in Congress (Oxford UP, 2022), Catherine N. Wineinger argues that to truly understand the evolution of women's congressional representation, it is necessary to move beyond an analysis of legislative behavior and toward an analysis of intraparty gender dynamics. Unlike previous research on women in Congress, Wineinger focuses exclusively on the experiences of Republican congresswomen to uncover some of the gendered implications of congressional polarization. Developing a novel theory of partisan-gender identity, defined as a categorical identity that sits at the intersection of one's partisan affiliation and gender identity, Gendering the GOP argues that Republican women in Congress are not merely gender-blind partisans. In fact, polarization and party competition have incentivized Republican women to organize around their partisan-gender identity and distinguish themselves from both Democratic women and Republican men. In so doing, Republican congresswomen have increased their visibility as party messengers, while simultaneously upholding a party culture that limits women's presence and power in the institution. Through extensive interviews with women members of Congress and in-depth analyses of House floor speeches, Wineinger details how women have both navigated and shaped existing gender dynamics within the House GOP conference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2015) is the definitive political biography of Rosa Parks and the basis for a 2022 documentary, Theoharis's book examines Park's six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement. This interview revisits the original book, as well as Dr. Theoharis's involvement as a consulting producer and participant in the documentary. The film premiered in 2022 at the Tribeca Film Festival and is currently streaming on Peacock Presenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who with a single act birthed the modern civil rights movement, scholar Jeanne Theoharis excavates Parks’s political philosophy and six decades of activism. Theoharis masterfully details the political depth of a national heroine who dedicated her life to fighting American inequality and, in the process, resurrects a civil rights movement radical who has been hidden in plain sight far too long. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The liberalism that is defended here is therefore itself an object of political contestation, and not just the background against which such contestation takes place. If we can look to the past achievements of liberal polities – the widespread (but still imperfect) acceptance of religious toleration and free inquiry, the relative (but still woefully incomplete) deconstruction of class, gender, and racial hierarchies, the (possibly temporary) defeat of totalitarianisms, left and right – to remind ourselves of the promise of a liberal politics, we can look to our many remaining failings, and to the fact that even our achievements are preserved only through our own vigilance, to remind ourselves how fallible our ideals, and the institutions that we have built upon them, actually are. Liberal freedom is, in short, both a richer and a more fragile ideal than many of its supporters – and critics – realize. – Eric MacGilvray, Liberal Freedom (2022) Professor MacGilvray has been studying the concept of freedom for over 15 years culminating in his latest Cambridge University Press publication: Liberal Freedom: Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics. For anyone interested in the importance of freedom and liberalism and the key concepts and thinkers written as intellectual history from the discerning eye of a political theorist and analytic philosopher you will find this book most engaging. His explanation of its relevant issues are well worth your time in this interview. Here is the publisher’s description which provides a nice synopsis of the book’s main focus: "We seem to be losing the ability to talk to each other about – and despite – our political differences. The liberal tradition, with its emphasis on open-mindedness, toleration, and inclusion, is ideally suited to respond to this challenge. Yet liberalism is often seen today as a barrier to constructive dialogue: narrowly focused on individual rights, indifferent to the communal sources of human well-being, and deeply implicated in structures of economic and social domination. This book provides a novel defense of liberalism that weaves together a commitment to republican self-government, an emphasis on the value of unregulated choice, and an appreciation of how hard it is to strike a balance between them. By treating freedom rather than justice as the central liberal value this important book, critical to the times, provides an indispensable resource for constructive dialogue in a time of political polarization." Eric’s thoughtful book recommendation pairings from this interview for interested listeners:
Political philosophy – 1) Philip Pettit’s Just Freedom; 2) Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government
Political thought – 1) Mill’s Considerations of Representative Government; 2) L.T. Hobhouse’s Liberalism
Popular political – 1) Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities; 2) Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism
Also, as discussed, The Atlantic article based on Packer’s book: Last Best Hope - America in Crisis and Renewal
Eric MacGilvray is a political theorist at Ohio State University whose research and teaching interests focus on liberal, republican, and democratic theory as well as the pragmatic philosophical tradition. He is a pragmatist whose scholarly journal articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and Social Philosophy and Policy, among others. Liberal Freedom is his third book and builds on his second, The Invention of Market Freedom. Keith Krueger lectures part-time in the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Modern Presidency: Sex Debates That Define the Institution (Columbia University Press, 2022) is a concisely written book that helps makes sense of the most powerful office in America. Michael frames each chapter through a key conundrum about the nature of the presidency. He presents the strongest cases for the sides of every major debate, along with his own view. In addition to providing insight into the modern American presidency, Michael demonstrates how to think about tough issues with remarkable clarity. Michael A. Genovese is professor of political science and president of the global policy institute at Loyola Marymount University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Should everyone have privacy in their personal lives? Can privacy exist in a public place? Is there a right to be left alone, even in the United States? The battle between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know has been fought for centuries. You may be surprised to realize that the original framers were sensitive to the importance of privacy interests relating to sexuality and intimate life, but mostly just for the powerful and the privileged. The founders demanded privacy for all the wrong press-quashing reasons. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously promoted First Amendment freedoms but argued strongly for privacy too; and presidents from Thomas Jefferson through Donald Trump confidently hid behind privacy despite the public interest in their lives. Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging. And that’s doubly dangerous, as author Amy Gajda argues. Too little privacy leaves ordinary people vulnerable to those who deal in and publish soul-crushing secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy and dodge accountability. Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking, 2022) carries us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law allows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today’s full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet had erased privacy completely. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous communities along the way. Old-growth trees are invaluable and irreplaceable for both humans and wildlife, and are the oldest living things on earth. But the morality of tree poaching is not as simple as we might think: stealing trees is a form of deeply rooted protest, and a side effect of environmental preservation and protection that doesn't include communities that have been uprooted or marginalized when park boundaries are drawn. As Bourgon discovers, failing to include working class and rural communities in the preservation of these awe-inducing ecosystems can lead to catastrophic results. Featuring excellent investigative reporting, fascinating characters, logging history, political analysis, and cutting-edge tree science, Tree Thieves takes readers on a thrilling journey into the intrigue, crime, and incredible complexity sheltered under the forest canopy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The world's wealthier countries have in recent years faced challenges from right-wing populist parties and movements that may rejuvenate origins from relatively far in the past, such as in the case of Italy, or they may constitute new formations disturbingly reminiscent of earlier movements of their kinds. So, for example, the Alternative for Germany, in Germany. So where does populism go from here? This week on International Horizons, Umut Korkut from Glasgow Caledonian University discusses the goals and findings of the D.Rad De-Radicalization project in Europe and why and how people become radicalized from being alienated from the rest of society. Korkut also delves into other causes of radicalization, such as educational policies and political literacy gap and the manipulation by the elites. He goes on to discuss the nuances of populism in Europe and its variations in the imaginary of people. Finally, he argues that, because of trauma of recent events, voters are paralyzed and cannot see different political alternatives, which is applicable to the American, European, and Turkish cases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently. They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized? Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity. Discussed in this episode:
The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail
A Republic, Not an Empire and The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan
Dune, Frank Herbert
“Living on a Lifeboat,” Garrett Hardin
The Lobster Gangs of Maine, James M. Acheson
The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome
Libra, dir. Patty Newman
“Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Jason W. Moore
The Wall, John Lanchester
Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi
Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks, Douglas R. Holmes
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin
Read here: RTB Slobodian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffery Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny (Amsterdam UP, 2021) asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with 'hauntographs' of five Age of 'Discovery' shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How could an artist and former social worker from small-town Minnesota become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Camilla Hall was a pastor's daughter who eventually joined the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. In Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman's Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Rachael Hanel traces Hall’s path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family—through welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, and a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla's bewildering transformation from a "gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy" young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. As Hanel writes, contemporary reporters “struggled to find an easy narrative for her life and when they couldn’t find one, they made one up.” Moving past these thin, often salacious narratives that paint Camilla as a duped ex-girlfriend or a militant radical, this book recovers both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall's life. At a time of mounting unrest and violence, Hall’s story is a reminder of how the forces of radicalization can operate in an individual life Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
During the early twentieth century New York State, with its settlement houses, muckraking journalists, labor unions and national political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, was central to the political ferment of the Progressive Era. And in that time, the New York State Court of Appeals—the state’ highest court--made vitally important decisions on the constitutional legitimacy of laws relating to public health, personal liberty, privacy, the regulation of businesses, working hours for women, and compensation for workers injured on the job. The Court of Appeals, Bruce Dearstyne argues in his new book, was in these years a crucible where new and complex public issues were debated and decided. New York State was large in population (and thus spoke loudly in Congress and the Electoral College) and was at the center of fierce debates over topics such as corporate power, labor rights, public health. In The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era (SUNY Press, 2022), Dearstyne argues that the court’s pathbreaking decisions in the Progressive Era echo into our own times. Indeed, he concludes, it was second in importance only to the United States Supreme Court. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots in Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--And What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023). Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country--communities of which Onishi was once a part--to ignite a cold civil war? Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture that birthed a movement and has taken a dangerous turn. In taut and unsparing prose, Onishi traces the migration of many White Christians to Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in what is known as the American Redoubt. Learning the troubling history of the New Religious Right and the longings and logic of White Christian nationalism is deeply alarming. It is also critical for preserving the shape of our democracy for years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The census isn't just a data-collection process; it's a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of messy, human stories--you just have to know how to read them. In Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (MCD, 2022), the data historian Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both condense and cleverly abstract: a universe of meaning and uncertainty, of cultural negotiation and political struggle. He introduces us to the men and women employed as census takers, bringing us with them as they go door to door, recording the lives of their neighbors. He takes us into the makeshift halls of the Census Bureau, where hundreds of civil servants, not to mention machines, labored with pencil and paper to divide and conquer the nation's data. And he uses these little points to paint bigger pictures, such as of the ruling hand of white supremacy, the place of queer people in straight systems, and the struggle of ordinary people to be seen by the state as they see themselves. The 1940 census is a crucial entry in American history, a controversial dataset that enabled the creation of New Deal era social programs, but that also, with the advent of World War Two, would be weaponized against many of the citizens whom it was supposed to serve. In our age of quantification, Democracy's Data not only teaches us how to read between the lines but gives us a new perspective on the relationship between representation, identity, and governance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net. In Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America (Oxford UP, 2022), Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the COVID-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performed during the pandemic. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The story of the Constitution of the United States began long before the American Revolutionary War. This document was influenced by centuries old English law, and the final product was the result of months of debate, arguing, and compromises from representatives of 12 states, including its essential recognition of slavery, leading to further debates and conflict after the document was signed. Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution remains a fundamental part of U.S. politics. We ask ourselves: Do we move forward, or must we return to our roots? How can we remember the origins of the Constitution while we live in a society that would have been unimaginable when it was written? Jonathan Gienapp is an assistant professor of History at Stanford University. He specializes in Revolutionary and early republican America, and he is the author of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration (Princeton UP, 2022) challenges this notion, revealing how racial inequality persists in global migration despite the end of formally racist laws.
In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rosenberg argues that while today’s leaders claim that their policies are objective and seek only to restrict obviously dangerous migrants, these policies are still correlated with race. He traces how colonialism and White supremacy catalyzed violence and sabotaged institutions around the world, and how this historical legacy has produced migrants that the former imperial powers and their allies now deem unfit to enter. Rosenberg shows how postcolonial states remain embedded in a Western culture that requires them to continuously perform their statehood, and how the closing and policing of international borders has become an important symbol of sovereignty, one that imposes harsher restrictions on non-White migrants.
Drawing on a wealth of original quantitative evidence, Undesirable Immigrants demonstrates that we cannot address the challenges of international migration without coming to terms with the brutal history of colonialism. Andrew Rosenberg is an assistant of political science at the University of Florida. His research examines racial inequality in the international system, the politics of migration, and global inequality. His current projects empirically break down the ideologies that maintain racial inequality in international migration. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and Security Dialogue. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Ohio State University and is originally from Des Moines, Iowa. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin. Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug's safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust (MIT Press, 2022), Mikkael Sekeres--a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA's cancer drug advisory committee--tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world. It took a series of tragedies and health crises, as well as patient advocacy, for the government to take responsibility for ensuring the efficacy and safety of drugs and medical devices. Before the FDA existed, drug makers could hawk any potion, claim treatment of any ailment, and make any promise on a label. But then, throughout the twentieth century, the government was forced to take action when children were poisoned by contaminated diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, an early antibiotic contained antifreeze, a drug prescribed for morning sickness in pregnancy caused babies to be born disfigured, and access to AIDS drugs was limited to a few clinical trials while thousands died. Sekeres describes all these events against the backdrop of the contentious 2011 hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin, in which he participated as a panel member. The Avastin hearings, he says, put to the test a century of the FDA's evolution, demonstrating how its system of checks and balances works--or doesn't work. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words." The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing." Mentioned in this episode:
"Code Words and Crumbs," Brandeis Magazine
"Crybabies and Snowflakes," Download from Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth.
Hofstadter, Richard The paranoid style in American politics." 1964.
Lepselter, Susan, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan, 2016
Trollope, Anthony. Marion Fay: a Novel. Vol. 29. Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883.
Silverstein, Michael. "Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology." In Semiotic mediation, pp. 219-259. Academic Press, 1985.
Listen to the episode here Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There are few thinkers who engender as much debate about their legacy as Leo Strauss (1899 –1973). His critics and biographers often don’t even agree about what scholarly discipline he practiced. Political theory or philosophy? Was he a proto-neoconservative or a middle-of-the-road Cold War defender of liberal democracy? He is often depicted as a major intellectual influence on sections of the national security state right, especially during the presidency of George W. Bush when he was portrayed as a puppeteer pulling from the grave the strings of such notable hawks as Paul Wolfowitz. But the writings of Strauss often go unexamined. That is partly because they lean towards the abstruse. Strauss was not a general-audience-friendly public intellectual in his day and much of the homage to and attacks on him at this point are to be found in the pages of academic journals and in the halls of think tanks. We are fortunate, therefore, that we can turn to the 2021 book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education by Timothy W. Burns for elucidation of Strauss's thinking about how we can preserve liberal democracy in the face of apathy from moderates, classical liberals and traditional conservatives flummoxed by the rise of an aggressive left that questions whether the United States is a democracy at all and an alienated alt-right that regards liberal democracy as now practiced as a character-sapping anachronism leading to civilizational decline. We learn from Burns of Strauss's admiration for Winston Churchill and touting of him as an exemplar of greatness within democracy. In one of the most absorbing sections of the book we learn of a 1941 lecture by Strauss entitled, “German Nihilism” in which he examined the arguments of such groups as rightist German students in the 1920s that liberal democracy fostered moral mediocrity. Burns contrasts in detail the ideas of Strauss and Martin Heidegger and shows that Strauss foresaw that the other man’s emphasis on resoluteness would metastasize into Heidegger’s support for Nazism. Burns tells us that Strauss can speak to us today via his call to defend democratic constitutionalism and its spiritual and religious traditions. That call can lead to charges of elitism against Strauss because it entailed his championing of the idea of an “aristocracy within democracy,” a cadre of cultivated, well-educated leaders who would help maintain the intellectual and cultural moorings of democracies. Let’s hear now from Professor Burns about who Leo Strauss was and what he actually wrote and thought. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America, The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power & Credit in America (Princeton UP, 2022) by Northwestern University Professor Bruce Carruthers is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitched together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental question: why does the lender trust the borrower? The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending and economic activity on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1865, the Confederacy was defeated, but the military victory did not end the tensions of the war or signal acceptance of a new, more equal nation. In Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy (PublicAffairs, 2022), Jeremi Suri argues that, instead, efforts to bolster white supremacy began immediately. The big questions and conflicts of the Civil War lingered, continuing to cause other types of conflict among Americans. From conflicting interpretations of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth to postwar riots to contested elections and stymied presidential agendas, Suri shows how the battles of the Civil War continued in other forms in the decades after the military conflict ended. Suri argues that, in fact, competing visions of democracy, freedom, and race still evident today have their roots in this period. In this episode of the podcast, Suri, who is the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses this historical moment, what led him to research and write about it, and what it means for understanding the current challenges facing American democracy. Christine Lamberson, PhD, is a historian. Her research focuses on 20th century U.S. legal, political, and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
While significant attention in political science is devoted to national level elections, a comprehensive look at state level political dynamics in the United States is so far sorely missing, and state level electoral developments and shifts are treated as mere reflections of national-level dynamics and patterns. Regina L. Wagner's book Electoral Patterns in Alabama: Local Change and Continuity Amid National Trends (Palgrave MacmIllan, 2022) argues that this significantly impacts our ability to understand macro-level electoral shifts in the United States in general. The book analyzes gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential election results in the state of Alabama from 1945 through 2020. Comprehensive maps of county-level partisan shifts over time and comparisons between trends for different offices make it possible to isolate pivotal elections and compare state-level and national trends over time. When and where did Alabama’s electorate break with the Democratic Party, and were these breaks uniform across the state? Which counties shifted the most over time, and was this shift gradual or characterized by change elections? Comprehensive electoral data, on the county- and precinct-level, make it possible to answer these questions and place state-level electoral behavior in its regional and national context. Detailed county level demographic and economic data is used to provide local context for electoral patterns, shifts, and continuities. Regina L. Wagner is assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture’ actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination’ is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk’ in contemporary political culture. Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line (U of Illinois Press, 2020), Hudson argues that despite its reputation as a land of opportunity and freedom, California's deeply racist past extended well into the twentieth century. As one Black Californian put it, the only difference between California and Mississippi was the way they were spelled. Yet, African Americans in the state nonetheless resisted Jim Crow in the West at every turn, from founding all Black communities to struggling to integrate public facilities such as swimming pools. West of Jim Crow is a fascinating look at how the myths about where Jim Crow segregation began and ended hide important truth's about segregation and discrimination's extent. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Remember Khrushchev-Nixon Kitchen Debate? America recognized its consumer culture was a Cold War weapon. By the early 80s, the home computer in the hands of teenagers further demonstrated American dominance on the economic and cultural fronts. But what happens when teenagers check out of real life and responsibilities too much? We look at films that can be taken as cautionary tales about the dangers of teenagers (or young adults) who don’t take the Cold War seriously. The focus is on the seemingly apolitical, irresponsible and anti-social nature of the modern, video game playing white, affluent American youth. Our more serious films are Wargames, from 1983, and The Falcon and the Snowman, from 1985. But we also throw in a little bit of The Last Starfighter (1984) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) just to spice things up. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seventy-five years ago, the Hollywood blacklist ruined lives, stifled creativity, and sent waves of proscription and censorship throughout United States culture. When the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their membership in the Communist Party, they were sentenced to prison, the five who were under contract were fired by their studios, and all were blacklisted from reemployment until they "purged themselves of their communist taint." By the 1950s, this blacklist publicly stigmatized nearly three hundred other Americans in the entertainment industry who invoked the First and Fifth Amendments in their refusal to apologize for their Communist ties or provide the names of other members. Dozens of others were graylisted as the result of rumors. In The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five Years Later (University Press of Kentucky, 2022), Larry Ceplair offers new insights on the origins of the blacklist, the characteristics of those blacklisted, and the probability of future proscriptions of the blacklist type. Larry Ceplair is professor emeritus of history at Santa Monica College, California. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) tells the surprising story of unexpected connections between the English Civil Wars and the literary drumbeats for a holy war in late antebellum America. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign. Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by industrial capitalism the promise of a better world. But its growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution and driven by uncompromising militancy, was seen by powerful capitalists and government officials as an existential threat that had to be eliminated. In Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers (U California Press, 2022), Ahmed White documents the torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, lays bare the origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know today, and uncovers disturbing truths about the law, political repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class society. Ahmed White teaches labor and criminal law at the University of Colorado Boulder and is author of The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, Sara Wallace Goodman shows that citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpreting civic obligation through a partisan lens that is shaped by their country's political institutions. This divided, partisan citizenship makes democratic problems worse by eroding the national unity required for democratic stability. Employing novel survey experiments in a cross-national research design, this book presents the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of citizenship norms in the face of democratic threat. In showing partisan citizens are not a reliable bulwark against democratic backsliding, Goodman identifies a key vulnerability in the mass politics of democratic order. In times of democratic crisis, defenders of democracy must work to fortify the shared foundations of democratic citizenship. Sara Wallace Goodman is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her research examines citizenship and the shaping of political identity through immigrant integration. She is the co-author of Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton University Press, 2022), and author of Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Goodman’s research has been cited in major news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Vox. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn’t just a movie led by and starring Black artists. It grappled with ideas and conflicts central to Black life in America and helped redress the racial dynamics of the Hollywood blockbuster. Scott Bukatman, one of the foremost scholars of superheroes and cinematic spectacle, brings his impeccable pedigree to this lively and accessible study, finding in the utopianism of Black Panther (University of Texas Press, 2022) a way of re-envisioning what a superhero movie can and should be while centering the Black creators, performers, and issues behind it. He considers the superheroic Black body; the Pan-African fantasy, feminism, and Afrofuturism of Wakanda; the African American relationship to Africa; the political influence of director Ryan Coogler’s earlier movies; and the entwined performances of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger. Bukatman argues that Black Panther is escapism of the best kind, offering a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis's book Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility (Rutgers UP, 2020) focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This episode and the next look back at films that came out in the 1980s, a decade when Hollywood seemed to cater to teenage audiences like never before. So it makes sense that the geo-political structure that shaped and influenced so much of global political action - the Cold War - would show up in movies targeting teen audiences. In the broader media landscape, the question was being asked: Could these post-Vietnam teenagers hack the reality of conflict like their dads and granddads had to? We break down two films about teenagers as soldiers - Taps, released in 1981, and Red Dawn, released in 1984. In both cases, what we see is a conversation about American military culture, whether it can still be counted on when times get tough. And if it can’t, if America’s youth reject it, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The squatter—defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"—had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered the nation. With one eye on Washington and the other on flashpoints across the West, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2022) tracks squatters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush-era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas. The sweeping narrative reveals how claiming western domains became stubbornly intertwined with partisan politics and fights over the extension of slavery. While previous generations of statesmen had maligned and sought to contain illegal settlers, Democrats celebrated squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraged their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party's power grew. The US-Mexican War led many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion. Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery's spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic leaders allowed territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from agents of Manifest Destiny into foot soldiers in battles that ruptured the party and the country. Deeply researched and vividly written, Dangerous Ground illuminates the overlooked role of squatters in the United States' growth into a continent-spanning juggernaut and in the onset of the Civil War, casting crucial light on the promises and vulnerabilities of American democracy. John Suval holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a former editor of the Papers of Andrew Jackson and Research Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He lives in West Virginia. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For many, the Beatles offered a delightful alternative to the dull and the staid, while for others, the mop-top haircuts, the unsettling music, and the hysterical girls that greeted the British imports wherever they went were a symbol of unwelcome social and cultural change. This opposition to the group--more widespread and deeper rooted in Chicago than in any other major American city--increased as the decade wore on, especially when the Beatles adopted more extreme countercultural values. At the center of this book is a cast of characters engulfed by the whirlwind of Beatlemania, including the unyielding figure of Mayor Richard J. Daley who deemed the Beatles a threat to the well-being of his city; the Chicago Tribune editor who first warned the nation about the Beatle menace; George Harrison's sister, Louise, who became a regular presence on Chicago radio; the socialist revolutionary who staged all of the Beatles' concerts in the city and used much of the profits from the shows to fund left-wing causes; the African-American girl who braved an intimidating environment to see the Beatles in concert; a fan club founder who disbelievingly found herself occupying a room opposite her heroes when they stayed at her father's hotel; the University of Chicago medical student who spent his summer vacation playing in a group that opened for the Beatles' on their last tour; and the suburban record store owner who opened a teen club modeled on the Cavern in Liverpool that hosted some of the biggest bands in the world. Drawing on historical and contemporary accounts, Joy and Fear: The Beatles, Chicago and the 1960s (Permuted Press, 2020) brings to life the frenzied excitement of Beatlemania in 1960s Chicago, while also illustrating the deep-seated hostility from the establishment toward the Beatles. John F. Lyons is a Professor of History at Joliet Junior College in Illinois where he teaches classes in British and American history. John on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen's existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names-"enemies of the people;" the "missing," the "disappeared," "ghost" detainees in "black sites"-but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure. Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life "unbearable," unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the "life" of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997. Peter Bond is a retired physicist who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory for 43 years in a wide variety of roles, including interim laboratory director during much of the period covered by this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Barack Obama and his family have been the objects of rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories unprecedented in US politics. Outbreaks of anti-Obama lore have occurred in every national election cycle since 2004 and continue to the present day--two elections after his presidency ended. In Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century (U California Press, 2022), folklorist Patricia A. Turner examines how these thought patterns have grown ever more vitriolic and persistent and what this means for American political culture. Through the lens of attacks on Obama, Trash Talk explores how racist tropes circulate and gain currency. As internet communications expand in reach, rumors and conspiracy theories have become powerful political tools, and new types of lore like the hoax and fake news have taken root. The mainstream press and political establishment dismissed anti-Obama mythology for years, registering concern only when it became difficult to deny how much power those who circulated it could command. Trash Talk demonstrates that the ascendancy of Barack Obama was never a signal of a postracial America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism (Cornell UP, 2022), David Weinfeld presents the biography of an idea, cultural pluralism, the intellectual precursor to modern multiculturalism. He roots its origins in the friendship between two philosophers, Jewish immigrant Horace Kallen and African American Alain Locke, who advanced cultural pluralism in opposition to both racist nativism and the assimilationist "melting pot." It is a simple idea—different ethnic groups can and should coexist in the United States, perpetuating their cultures for the betterment of the country as whole—and it grew out of the lived experience of this friendship between two remarkable individuals. Kallen, a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, became a leading American Zionist. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, taught at Howard University and is best known as the intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of The New Negro in 1925. Their friendship began at Harvard and Oxford during the years 1906 through 1908 and was rekindled during the Great Depression, growing stronger until Locke's death in 1954. To Locke and Kallen, friendship itself was a metaphor for cultural pluralism, exemplified by people who found common ground while appreciating each other's differences. Weinfeld demonstrates how this understanding of cultural pluralism offers a new vision for diverse societies across the globe. An American Friendship provides critical background for understanding the conflicts over identity politics that polarize US society today. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today’s episode focuses on the new book by Lydia Moland, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her book, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a powerful window into questions of humility and its relationship to racism and other forms of discrimination in American history. We talk about Child’s ideas, particularly as they relate to many of the issue facing contemporary American society. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The existence of minorities has been an unavoidable reality of the creation of nation states that almost always have a dominant national group inscribed in their names. From this perspective, Germany is a country for Germans and Australia is a country for Australians. But there are invariably others who don't fit the heritage or the stereotype of German or Italian, or Australian, or whatever the country might be. So how do we deal with the reality that minorities are a normal feature of basically all countries of the world? In this episode of International Horizons, UN Special Rapporteur for Minority Issues Fernand de Varennes discusses the job of special rapporteurs on the field, the conceptual evolution of the word minority, how the existence of minority groups in a state can provoke both political turmoil and peaceful coexistence. de Varennes also explains the role of international organizations in the protection of minorities and the new surge in populist nationalism in which minorities are targeted as the enemies of the society. Finally, he presents cases of countries that have embraced diversity and became stable and just societies. International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the U.S.–China relationship? For the global economy and international security? In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Maria Adele Carrai from New York University Shanghai. Maria Adele Carrai is co-creator of a website called Mapping Global China. She recently co-edited “The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations” (Harvard University Press, 2022) with Jennifer Rudolph and Michzel Szonyi to offer essential insights into the many dimensions of the world’s most important bilateral relationship between the US and China. The voices included in The China Questions 2 recognize that the U.S.–China relationship has changed, and that the policy of engagement needs to change too. But they argue that zero-sum thinking is not the answer. Much that is good for one society is good for both—we are facing not another Cold War but rather a complex and contextually rooted mixture of conflict, competition, and cooperation that needs to be understood on its own terms. One unique feature of this book is that it even includes discussion of Chinese literature. In this episode, Maria Adele Carrai read a short passage from Xudong Zhang’s chapter, illuminating how Chinese writers, with “their freedom, irreverence, and subversiveness undermine the suffocating (self-)censorship, stifling conformism and the formulaic media coverage. Like a spinning gyro rotating on an invisible axis, their work points to an aesthetically determined North Star, constant and free-standing, all the while attentive to and capable of absorbing the sound and fury, sighs, and laughter around this single-minded movement (Zhang, page 393). Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” —Title IX’s first thirty-seven words By prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, the 1972 legislation popularly known as Title IX profoundly changed the lives of women and girls in the United States, accelerating a movement for equal education in classrooms, on sports fields, and in all of campus life. Sherry Boschert's book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (New Press, 2022) is the story of Title IX. Filled with rich characters—from Bernice Resnick Sandler, an early organizer for the law, to her trans grandchild—the story of Title IX is a legislative and legal drama with conflicts over regulations and challenges to the law. It’s also a human story about women denied opportunities, students struggling for an education free from sexual harassment, and activists defying sexist discrimination. These intersecting narratives of women seeking an education, playing sports, and wanting protection from sexual harassment and assault map gains and setbacks for feminism in the last fifty years and show how some women benefit more than others. Award-winning journalist Sherry Boschert beautifully explores the gripping history of Title IX through the gutsy people behind it. In the tradition of the acclaimed documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 37 Words offers a crucial playbook for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and who is horrified by current attacks on women’s rights. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. In Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 2022), Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture – for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth – can in the end never be separated from human politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2020), Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history since the mid-1800s and presents a realistic vision for its future. With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ramzi Fawaz, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that weaves together the more contemporary history of feminism and women’s liberation, the gay liberation movement, feminist and queer theory, and iconic popular culture artifacts in order to understand gendered and sexual forms in context of gender and sexual fluidity. This is a brilliant book, interdisciplinary in scope and approach, taking the reader on a journey through theoretical frameworks and interpretive understandings of where we often see queer forms, and what we think about those forms. Fawaz notes that he is working to tell a story, interpreting cultural artifacts to forefront the ideas from feminist and queer theory, knitting these approaches together to guide us through a fascinating understanding of what we see when we watch films, or television, or read comics, or enjoy Broadway performances. These interpretations provide us with ways of seeing identity and shape within narrative forms and creative storytelling. But Fawaz is also pushing against an excess of thinking that all identities and forms are fluid—instead, Queer Forms (NYU Press, 2022) examines the capacity of identity and forms to, essentially, shapeshift, which is not the same as being fluid, since shapeshifting is an adaption, and thus is not without form itself. Form has little meaning until or unless they are/it is interpreted by others. The thrust of the work that Fawaz is doing in Queer Forms ultimately is about freedom and how we can each exist as free individuals, especially when there are often social and legal rules that constrain us as individuals with distinct identities that traverse a host of markers and qualities. Popular culture artifacts can provide the room and opportunity to imagine identities in different forms and contexts. Queer Forms provides the reader with an archive of culture forms as a kind of gift, helping us to see and understand how we might interpret or reinterpret the queer and feminist past so that we approach our daily contemporary life with that understanding. Fawaz explains the variegated theories that frame these interpretations and gets at this historical foundation—especially of the liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s—in order to engage in a valuable consideration of freedom. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Black Disability Politics (Duke UP, 2022) Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Dr. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Dr. Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Dr. Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements. Dr. Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of Bodymind Reimagined: Disability, Race, Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018). Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable. In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil. In Sawyer’s analysis, chemistry proves crucial. Analytically, it affords a grammar for appreciating how molecular, technical, and legal agencies catalyzed distinct jurisdictional renderings. Empirically, the chemistry of hydrocarbons (its complexity, unfathomability, and misattribution) significantly shaped competing judicial determinations. Ultimately, chemical, scientific, contractual, and litigating techniques precipitated this legal saga’s metamorphic transformation, transmuting a contamination claim into an environmental liability, then a racketeering scheme, and then a breach of treaty. Holding the paradoxes of complicity in suspension, Dr. Sawyer deftly demonstrates how crude matters, technoscience, and liberal legality configure how risk and reward, deprivation and disavowal, suffering and surfeit become legally and unevenly distributed. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama (Henry Holt, 2022) New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Delving far deeper than the simplistic “bromance” narrative that’s long held the public eye, The Long Alliance reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development, its twists and turns, its ruptures and reunions, and its path to this pivotal moment for each man’s legacy. The true story of this relationship, from 2003 into 2022, is significantly more layered and consequential than is widely understood. The original mismatch between the veteran Washington traditionalist and the once-in-a-generation outsider has transformed repeatedly in ways that have molded not just four different presidential campaigns and two different political parties, but also wars, a devastating near-depression, movements for social equality, and the fight for the future of American democracy. The bond between them has been, at various times over the past two decades, tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad — but it has always been surprising. Now it is shaping a second presidential administration, and the future of the world as we know it. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Told with great intimacy and compassion, Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925-1942 (PM Press, 2022) uncovers a long-buried history of resistance and resilience among depression-era miners in Pennsylvania, who sunk their own mines on company grounds and fought police, bankers, coal companies and courts to form a union that would safeguard not just their livelihoods, but protect their collective autonomy as citizens and workers for decades. Community and Labor organizer Mitch Troutman brings this explosive and accessible American tale to life through the bootleggers' own words. Scholars, historians, organizers and activists will celebrate this story of the people who literally seized mountains and stood their ground to create the Equalization movement, the miners' union democracy movement, and the Communist-led Unemployed Councils of the anthracite region. This epic story of work, love, and community stands as a testament to the power of collective action; a story that is sorely needed as communities today rise to confront neoliberal policies ravaging our planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
America is on the brink of disaster. You've seen it -- on television, social media, at work, and even in your personal life. We're in the midst of a cold civil war, and the tension is mounting. We've lost friends and damaged relationships over opposing political views, and many of us now struggle with anxiety, anger, media addiction, or depression as we cope with the toxic weapons of cancel culture, unfriending, shunning, doxing, intimidation, and even threats of violence. The Second Civil War: A Citizen's Guide to Healing Our Fractured Nation (RH Press, 2021) is a guidebook for every American troubled by our growing national divide. Peter Montoya provides meaningful tools and practical strategies you can implement to end political bigotry, repair broken relationships, recognize misinformation and resist fearmongering, use social media in a way that it doesn't use you, coexist with those who hold opposing views, embrace positive patriotism, and help reunify the United States of America. While the wars of the 20th century were waged by countries or institutions, the rise of unethical media, combined with the accessible power of technology, has placed us, as individuals, both on the front lines and within the command bunkers. We're not just fighting this war; we're running it -- and it's up to each and every one of us to end it. The Second Civil War shows you how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-presidential nominee, as a target of impeachment proceedings, and for his tenure as the longest-serving justice from 1939 to 1975. His most enduring legacy, however, is perhaps his advocacy for the environment. Douglas was the spiritual heir to early twentieth-century conservation pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. His personal spiritual mantra embraced nature as a place of solitude, sanctuary, and refuge. Caught in the giant expansion of America's urban and transportation infrastructure after World War II, Douglas became a powerful leader in forging the ambitious goals of today's environmental movement. And, in doing so, Douglas became a true citizen justice. In a way unthinkable today, Douglas ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, bringing him admiration from allies in conservation groups but raising ethical issues with his colleagues. He became a national figure through his books, articles, and speeches warning against environmental dangers. Douglas organized protest hikes to leverage his position as a national icon, he lobbied politicians and policymakers privately about everything from logging to highway construction and pollution, and he protested at the Supreme Court through his voluminous and passionate dissents. Douglas made a lasting contribution to both the physical environment and environmental law--with trees still standing, dams unbuilt, and beaches protected as a result of his work. His merged roles as citizen advocate and justice also put him squarely in the center of ethical dilemmas that he never fully resolved. M. Margaret McKeown's Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas (Potomac Books, 2022) elucidates the why and how of these tensions and their contemporary lessons against the backdrop of Douglas's unparalleled commitment to the environment. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Though relatively short, the 2022 book The Prophet of Harvard Law: James Bradley Thayer and His Legal Legacy (UP of Kansas, 2022) by Andrew Porwancher, Austin Coffey, Taylor Jipp, and Jake Mazeitis, is jam-packed with information about late 19th and early 20th Century legal history and the professionalization of American legal education. This is a moving tale of a professor whose acolytes included some of the giants of American jurisprudence (e.g., the judges and justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand and the legal scholars John Henry Wigmore and Roscoe Pound). Even those not directly taught by Thayer, such as Felix Frankfurter, lauded him as an intellectual influence. You may be thinking, “Why should I take the time to read a book about a long-dead Harvard law professor?” Well, because many of the issues that James Bradley Thayer (1831-1902) and his students grappled with have shaped almost every encounter Americans have with the law and affect our rights from the workplace to the schoolroom to the courtroom. Thayer and Wigmore, for example, did pioneering work on the laws of evidence. Hand did the same on the topic of expert testimony. Holmes and Thayer thrashed out the meaning of the word “presumption” as it was used in trials. And on a grander scale, Holmes, Brandeis, and Hand were trained as thinkers on Constitutional law by Thayer. We could all do with a primer on what “living constitutionalism” is, for example. The book is also valuable for its contributions to the field of the history of education and will benefit those researching the development of professional associations and the transformation of universities like Harvard from small liberal arts institutions into major research universities. This is social history at its best. We read about how Thayer attracted bright young men from across the country who applied what they learned under their beloved mentor once they left Harvard and took up posts elsewhere (as Wigmore did as dean at Northwestern Law School) and/or played key roles in major legal cases in the Progressive Era and beyond. Economics. Labor Law. Free speech. They’re all here. And “beloved” is not too strong a word for the way these titans of American law regarded Thayer. Early career academics in any field who need a role model of a dedicated teacher could do worse than study the life of James Bradley Thayer. He was the subject of admiration and gratitude decades later by influential men who credited him with providing moral support and practical help when they were first starting out and for setting a standard of learning and hard work that they applied in their judicial and academic careers. Thayer was a networker and mentor par excellence. The book is interesting in itself apart from its subject in that it is a joint work by a professor (Andrew Porwancher) and three of his former students. That is a project worthy of note and something Thayer would almost certainly have endorsed, given how closely he worked with his students when they were at Harvard and, in many cases, for years afterward. It is no exaggeration to say that our lives today were affected by the active law-related personal correspondence between Thayer and his men. Let’s hear from Professor Porwancher about what might be called the Thayer Effect and what co-authorship with students entails. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Western coalition supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia has so far been thought to be solid and reliable, but there may be vulnerabilities in that support. Even as Russia seems to be in disarray on the battlefield and elsewhere, it's been believed all along that Vladimir Putin would use his control over oil and gas resources on which Europe depends to assert leverage over the West in the conflict and heating costs are indeed rising just as the cold weather is descending. The US is less affected by the vicissitudes of energy supplies, but it is hardly immune to these concerns either. This week on International Horizons, Marcus Stanley from Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft discusses the attitudes of Americans towards the war on Ukraine and how they seem to be more concerned with inflation than the war. Stanley also delves into the challenges of reaching an agreement between Russia and Ukraine and the possible solutions where mediation seems the only way out. He also warns about the need for intervention before an escalation with devastating consequences for Ukrainians and effects on the US and NATO, the prospects of winter without gas in Europe, and the consequences for Russia of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX. "Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent-including Michelle and myself-who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink."-President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 Patsy Takemoto Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Fierce and Fearless is the first biography of this remarkable woman, who first won election to Congress in 1964 and went on to serve in the House for twenty-four years, her final term ending with her death in 2002. Mink was an advocate for girls and women, best known for her work shepherding and defending Title IX, the legislation that changed the face of education in America, making it possible for girls and women to participate in school sports, and in education more broadly, at the same level as boys and men. Mink's life is wonderfully chronicled by eminent historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, Patsy's daughter, a noted political science scholar and first-hand witness to the many political struggles that her mother had to overcome. Featuring family anecdotes, vignettes, and photographs, Fierce and Fearless offers new insight into who Mink was, and the progressive principles that fueled her mission. Wu and Mink provide readers with an up-close understanding of her life as a third-generation Japanese American from Hawaii-from her childhood on Maui to her decades-long career in the House, working with noted legislators like Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Nancy Pelosi. They follow the evolution of her politics, including her advocacy for race, gender, and class equality and her work to promote peace and environmental justice. Fierce and Fearless provides vivid details of how Patsy Takemoto Mink changed the future of American politics. Celebrating the life and legacy of a woman, activist, and politician ahead of her time, this book illuminates the life of a trailblazing icon who made history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexander Kirshner’s book Legitimate Opposition (Yale UP, 2022) can be seen as a reaction to the politics of Donald Trump and the questions he has raised about the nature of modern democracy. Advocates of western democracy have traditionally pointed to the role of the opposition in holding government to account. The deal has been that oppositions can criticise those in power without going to jail or worse but, in return, they have to offer loser’s consent – if they don’t win an election, they accept someone else governs. What happens when that consent is withdrawn? Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the 1770s, the American colonies were working up to a revolution. But while the colonists were increasingly dissatisfied with British rule, there was no general consensus on what to do about it. Thomas Paine saw a clear solution. In 1776, he published Common Sense. Caroline Winterer discusses Common Sense, a pamphlet that uses the language of the people to denounce monarchical rule and advocate for a new, independent government. Caroline Winterer is a professor of History at Stanford where she teaches early American history, particularly the history of ideas, political theory, and the history of science. She co-edited Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era and is the author of American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Join the conversation on the Lyceum app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To understand the limited impact of this aid and the decision of authoritarian regimes to allow democracy programs whose ultimate aim is to challenge the power of such regimes, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the construction and practice of democracy aid in Washington DC and in Egypt and Morocco, two of the highest recipients of US democracy aid in the region. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, novel new data on the professional histories of democracy promoters, archival research and recently declassified government documents, Erin A. Snider focuses on the voices and practices of those engaged in democracy work over the last three decades to offer a new framework for understanding the political economy of democracy aid. Her research shows how democracy aid can work to strengthen rather than challenge authoritarian regimes. Marketing Democracy fundamentally challenges scholars to rethink how we study democracy aid and how the ideas of democracy that underlie democracy programs come to reflect the views of donors and recipient regimes rather than indigenous demand. Erin A. Snider is an assistant professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. She was a Carnegie Fellow with the New America Foundation, a Fulbright Fellow in Egypt, and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Her research focuses on the political economy of development in the Middle East, democratization, and foreign aid. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Middle East Policy, among other outlets. She holds a PhD in politics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the Founding Fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive--and racist--domestic forces. Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment (U Virginia Press, 2020) begins and ends with the statement that the Second Amendment no longer makes sense. Noah Shusterman then sets about proving this point with a chronological journey to the Second Amendment. While that might seem a clear and straight-froward path, it starts in an unexpected place and time: Italy over 2,000 years ago with stops in France and England, but it gets to what will become the United States of America. In many ways this is an Atlantic history of the Second Amendment. Armed Citizens works in several different genres of history, including intellectual and political. The book also engages the history of race, racism, and white supremacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There's a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn't working for us anymore--what's more, it's not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality. We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story (U Chicago Press, 2022), Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we're not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America. America today is not the Founders' America, but it can be Lincoln's America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country's history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We could do a whole season on Vietnam war films, but in this episode we chose three films that highlight the Cold War’s omnipresence in daily life. You wouldn’t associate any of these films with how Vietnam figured into the Cold War dynamic because they are about the homefront. The Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978), and Da Five Bloods (2020) are reminders (or are they revelations?) that the Vietnam War deeply wounded American society from top to bottom. Whether it’s working class immigrants in rural Pennsylvania, severely wounded veterans and their caretakers, or Black and Brown soldiers contending with racism and shattered lives decades removed from the war, our three films depict the Cold War homefront in vivid detail. We often think of the Cold War as an impersonal contest between global powers that nearly ended the world, but the Vietnam War was incredibly personal for millions of Americans and Vietnamese. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism. The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing (Verso, 2022) brings together three decades of Black Communist women’s political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century. Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton. In this interview, I spoke with the editors of this collection, Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean. Charisse Burden-Stelly (@blackleftaf) is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Wayne State University. She is the author, with Gerald Horne, of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. Jodi Dean (@Jodi7768) is a professor in the Political Science Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited thirteen books, including recent Verso title Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging.
Catriona Gold (@cat__gold) is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often explain success and failure. How does the history of U.S. foreign relations appear differently when viewed through the lens of ideology? Christopher Nichols and David Milne's Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the ideological landscape of international relations from the colonial era to the present. Contributors examine ideologies developed to justify—or resist—white settler colonialism and free-trade imperialism, and they discuss the role of nationalism in immigration policy. The book reveals new insights on the role of ideas at the intersection of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and politics. It shows how the ideals coded as “civilization,” “freedom,” and “democracy” legitimized U.S. military interventions and enabled foreign leaders to turn American power to their benefit. The book traces the ideological struggle over competing visions of democracy and of American democracy’s place in the world and in history. It highlights sources beyond the realm of traditional diplomatic history, including nonstate actors and historically marginalized voices. Featuring the foremost specialists as well as rising stars, this book offers a foundational statement on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy. Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching. 1980: America's Pivotal Year (Rutgers UP, 2022) puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot JR, cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s. Jim Cullen is the author of numerous books, including The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Those Were the Days: Why ‘All in the Family’ Still Matters, and From Memory to History: Television Versions of the Twentieth Century. He teaches history at the newly-founded upper division of Greenwich Country Day School. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Democratic Socialists of America have exploded in the last few years, going from just a couple thousand members to close to a hundred thousand. This was from a combination of factors; two insurgent presidential campaigns by Bernie Sanders, a proto-fascistic movement coalescing around Donald Trump, the specter of climate change, a worldwide pandemic, general increasing economic inequality and a general sense that this world is bad but a better one might be possible. But what exactly is the underlying political philosophy of this organization? Is it actually for socialism, or capitalism with a stronger safety net? Is it a subsection of the Democratic party, or an independent movement? And how does it see political and historical change actually happening? In order to answer these questions, my guest Doug Greene has written a biography of the organizations founder, Michael Harrington. Starting with his early life in Jesuit education, Greene tracks Harrington’s political development through the 1950’s all the way up to 1982 when he founded DSA. Along the way, Harrington developed a conception of political change that would happen within the Democratic party, a conception that still clearly animates the approach of many on the left today. Written as a comradely critique, Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Zero Books, 2022) manages to give a genealogy of many of the tensions that still run through the contemporary left, and offers a sobering assessment of what can actually be accomplished when playing by realism’s rules. Doug Greene is a freelance writer and historian in Boston. He is also the author of Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution. His writing has also appeared in a number of outlets, including Left Voice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
President Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution of Indigenous people in American history, following the 1862 uprising of hungry Dakota in Minnesota and suspiciously speedy trials. He also issued the largest commutation of executions in American history for the same act. But there is much more to the story of Lincoln’s interactions and involvement, personal and political, with Native Americans, as Michael S. Green shows. Lincoln and Native Americans (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) explains how Lincoln thought about Native Americans, interacted with them, and was affected by them. Although ignorant of Native customs, Lincoln revealed none of the hatred or single-minded opposition to Native culture that animated other leaders and some of his own political and military officials. Lincoln did far too little to ease the problems afflicting Indigenous people at the time, but he also expressed more sympathy for their situation than most other politicians of the day. Still, he was not what those who wanted legitimate improvements in the lives of Native Americans would have liked him to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings." Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2022) elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860-2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system - a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Last episode we discussed films about how a nuclear war would start, particularly the insane logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In this episode we explore how American, British, and Australian filmmakers imagined the unimaginable - Armageddon and the literal and figurative fallout. We look at On the Beach (1959), The Day After (1983), and Threads (1984). We challenge the conventional wisdom that the West only seriously worried about nuclear after the Cuban Missile Crisis, provide some background on the history of anti-nuclear social movements, and compare how these three unforgettable films chose to depict nuclear destruction. How accurate were they? Did they make a difference? And, how many of us are still traumatized by seeing them? Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (FSG, 2022), Wall Street Journal national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon reveals the strategy debates, diplomatic gambits, and military operations that shaped the struggle against the Islamic State. With extraordinary access to top U.S. officials and military commanders and to the forces on the battlefield, Gordon offers a riveting narrative that ferrets out some of the war's most guarded secrets. Degrade and Destroy takes us inside National Security Council meetings at which Obama and his top aides grapple with early setbacks and discuss whether the war can be won. It also offers the most detailed account to date of how President Donald Trump waged war--delegating greater authority to the Pentagon but jeopardizing the outcome with a rush for the exit. Drawing on his reporting in Iraq and Syria, Gordon documents the closed-door deliberations of U.S. generals with their Iraqi and Syrian counterparts and describes some of the toughest urban battles since World War II. As Americans debate the future of using force abroad, Gordon's book offers vital insights into how our wars today are fought against militant foes, and the enduring lessons we can draw from them. Michael R. Gordon is the national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and former chief military correspondent for The New York Times. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his acclaimed #1 bestseller Dark Towers, David Enrich presented the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality. Now Enrich turns his eye towards the world of "Big Law" and the nearly unchecked influence these firms wield to shield the wealthy and powerful--and bury their secrets. To tell this story, Enrich focuses on Jones Day, one of the world's largest law firms. Jones Day's narrative arc--founded in Cleveland in 1893, it became the first law firm to expand nationally and is now a global juggernaut with deep ties to corporate interests and conservative politics--is a powerful encapsulation of the changes that have swept the legal industry in recent decades. Since 2016, Jones Day has been in the spotlight for representing Donald Trump and his campaigns (and now his PACs)--and for the fleet of Jones Day attorneys who joined his administration, including White House Counsel Don McGahn. Jones Day helped Trump fend off the Mueller investigation and challenged Obamacare. Its once and future lawyers defended Trump's Muslim ban and border policies and handled his judicial nominations. Jones Day even laid some of the legal groundwork for Trump to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election. But the Trump work is but one chapter in the firm's checkered history. Jones Day, like many of its peers, have become highly effective enablers of the business world's worst misbehavior. The firm has for decades represented Big Tobacco in its fight to avoid liability for its products. Jones Day worked tirelessly for the Catholic Church as it tried to minimize its sexual-abuse scandals. And for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, as it sought to protect its right to make and market its dangerously addictive drug. And for Fox News as it waged war against employees who were the victims of sexual harassment and retaliation. And for Russian oligarchs as their companies sought to expand internationally. In Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice (Mariner Books, 2022), Enrich makes the compelling central argument that law firms like Jones Day play a crucial yet largely hidden role in enabling and protecting powerful bad actors in our society, housing their darkest secrets, and earning billions in revenue for themselves. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022), leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death. Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, and co-author of Capitalism: A Conversation and Feminism for the 99%. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the 1974 school year began, Wayne Woodward was a beloved high school teacher in a rural Texas town. By the following spring, he was embroiled in a local political firestorm that would ultimately cost him his job. Woodward's sin was, in his own words, naively trying to found a chapter of the ACLU in his Hereford, Texas community. In You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, A Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022) West Texas A&M Professor Timothy Bowman tells the remarkable story of Woodward's teaching career, his fight over the ACLU chapter, and the nationally-covered wrongful termination trial that followed. Woodward's story casts shifts the story of American conservatism away from the suburbs and toward rural places like Hereford, where local frontier identities helped create distrust of outsiders and a strong streak of libertarianism. The central question of the book is one of human behavior: why otherwise average Americans would work so hard to run an idealistic young person and beloved teacher out of town? The answer has everything to do with Mexican immigration, labor unrest, and the roiling culture wars, and speaks directly to our present political moment. Timothy Paul Bowman is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at West Texas A&M University in Canyon and the author of Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Tod Gitlin. Gitlin was president of the Students for a Democratic Society, and went on to become a sociologist, political activist, and journalist, teaching at Berkeley, NYU and Columbia. He wrote sixteen books, and spoke at the Institute in 2007 about his book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals. Gitlin died in February 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The world lived under the shadow of the acronym MAD for forty years. Mutually Assured Destruction was no laughing matter, but Stanley Kubrick thought dark comedy was the only way to approach a topic as ridiculous as MAD. In this episode we compare and contrast Dr. Strangelove (1964) with Failsafe, a serious film about the same subject that came out the same year. We reveal just how spot on Dr. Strangelove was about MAD versus Failsafe’s unwarranted optimism that limited nuclear war was possible. An army of political scientists and bureaucrats game theoried fighting and winning a nuclear war like it was just another social science problem. Civilians are the warmongers in our MAD films. Dr. Strangelove may be a deranged Nazi freak, but everything he said was seriously considered by real life MAD Men. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The conventional wisdom about Felix Frankfurter--Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice--is that he struggled to fill the seat once held by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scholars have portrayed Frankfurter as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and the Warren Court's principal villain. And yet none of these characterizations rings true. A pro-government, pro-civil rights liberal who rejected shifting political labels, Frankfurter advocated for judicial restraint--he believed that people should seek change not from the courts but through the democratic political process. Indeed, he knew American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, advised Franklin Roosevelt, and inspired his students and law clerks to enter government service. Organized around presidential administrations and major political and world events, this definitive biography chronicles Frankfurter's impact on American life. As a young government lawyer, he befriended Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and Holmes. As a Harvard law professor, he earned fame as a civil libertarian, Zionist, and New Deal power broker. As a justice, he hired the first African American law clerk and helped the Court achieve unanimity in outlawing racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (Norton, 2022), Brad Snyder offers a full and fascinating portrait of the remarkable life and legacy of a long misunderstood American figure. This is the biography of an Austrian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States at age eleven speaking not a word of English, who by age twenty-six befriended former president Theodore Roosevelt, and who by age fifty was one of Franklin Roosevelt's most trusted advisers. It is the story of a man devoted to democratic ideals, a natural orator and often overbearing justice, whose passion allowed him to amass highly influential friends and helped create the liberal establishment. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The UK spent decades in its the post imperial phase trying to work out how it should think of itself and align itself in the world - a debate that Brexit showed is far from over. Will the US find it as hard? The debate about American decline rests on a widespread assumption in the country that global supremacy is the US’s national purpose. How difficult will it be to get beyond that? Owen Bennett Jones speaks to Professor Jed Esty of the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Science plays a substantial, though under-acknowledged, role in shaping popular understandings of rape. Statistical figures like “1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape” are central for raising awareness. Yet such scientific facts often become points of controversy, particularly as conservative scholars and public figures attempt to discredit feminist activists. Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2021) by Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences. Scientific projects may determine who counts as a potential victim/survivor or aggressor in a range of contexts, shaping research agendas as well as state policy, anti-violence programming and services, and public perceptions. Social processes within the study of rape determine which knowledges count as credible science, and thus who may count as an expert in academic and public contexts. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You’ve seen hilarious videos of the evangelicals for Trump. You might be inclined to ignore them, mock their excesses, or dismiss their threat. But the evangelical right is a force to be reckoned with, even with Trump on his way out. So, who are these evangelicals? What do they believe? For years, evangelicals have been plotting a political course, a far-right “theology” that includes Christian nationalism and spiritual warfare. It’s paying off. And we need to understand why it works, and for whom. This is one of the first-ever episodes of Darts and Letters, originally released in late 2020. In it, you’ll hear the beginnings of one of our main subjects of study:the political philosophies of radical right-wing movements. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today I talked to Eric Posner about his book How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford UP, 2021). When anti-trust cases are brought forward, typically they involve monopolies exercising undue power in regards to products or services. Rarely do labor issues get the same treatment. Reasons vary from the previous power of unions, to the expense and risk of going to trial, to whether the potential for unfair, uncompetitive practices get scrutinized at all. Posner points in this episode to why the laws may need strengthening. Issues include stagnant wages, and the use and abuse of non-poaching, non-complete and arbitration clauses in the contracts that workers sign. Add in the practice of gig workers and rising inequality issues related to household wealth, and you can’t find a more timely topic than this one. Eric Posner is a professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He’s currently on leave and working for the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Justice Department. (Note that his views do not necessarily reflect those of the Justice Department.) Two previous books by Posner were each separately chosen as a book of the year in 2018, one by The Economist and the other by The Financial Times. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint (Yale University Press, 2021) Dr. Michael O’Hanlon presents an informed modern plan for post-2020 American foreign policy that avoids the opposing dangers of retrenchment and overextension. Russia and China are both believed to have “grand strategies”—detailed sets of national security goals backed by means, and plans, to pursue them. In the United States, policymakers have tried to articulate similar concepts but have failed to reach a widespread consensus since the Cold War ended. While the United States has been the world’s prominent superpower for over a generation, much American thinking has oscillated between the extremes of isolationist agendas versus interventionist and overly assertive ones. Drawing on historical precedents and weighing issues such as Russia’s resurgence, China’s great rise, North Korea’s nuclear machinations, and Middle East turmoil, Dr. O’Hanlon presents a well-researched, ethically sound, and politically viable vision for American national security policy. He also proposes complementing the Pentagon’s set of “4+1” pre-existing threats with a new “4+1”: biological, nuclear, digital, climatic, and internal dangers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Can you imagine living in a society that is ostensibly a democracy but secret forces are working behind the scenes to manipulate events? What if our intelligence agencies run amok with no oversight? What if the president is a criminal and would do anything to stay in power? These sound like current events, but they were major preoccupations during the 1970s in the wake of Watergate and congressional hearings about CIA and FBI abuses. Hollywood responded by dramatizing the unfettered power of what some like to call “the deep state” in three films we cover this episode - The Parallax View (1974), The Three Days of the Condor (1975), and All The President’s Men (1976). Each features protagonists unraveling conspiracies at the heart of our national security state, but is exposing the truth enough?
Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Before the craft beer revolution, Coors was a hot commodity. Impossible to find outside a few states in the West, the beer had a level of "cool" that only comes from scarcity. However, this veneer of desirability masked all manner of unfair and discriminatory labor practices within the Coors Brewing Company itself. In Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (UNC Press, 2021), La Verne University professor Allyson Brantley describes how labor activists built a coalition that punctured the aura surrounding the iconic beer brand and created lasting change within the company. Chicano activists, union organizers, and LGBTQ protesters found common ground in aligning against Coors, and the story of their boycott movement - its failures as well as its successes - shows that activism and coalition building were vibrant and viable strategies, even during the depths of Reagan era conservatism. The story of Coors is the story of corporate union busting, New Right conservatism, and grassroots activism, all poured into one can. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The pickup truck is the symbol of rural conservative masculinity. So, it often takes centre stage in the tired culture wars between reactionary neo-populists and liberal moralists. Like today, with Canada’s right crudely embracing the truck–and tweeting furiously about those ‘Laurentian elites,‘ and ‘Toronto columnists‘ who thumb their nose at it. But, if you really want to piss off the libs: don’t just post about it. Why not hang some big veiny nuts from your truck? Today on the show, we talk about the political history of trucks and trucking. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The national anthem of the United States is familiar around the world from Olympic medal ceremonies and American patriotic celebrations. Like anything that is over 200 years old, the meaning of The Star-Spangled Banner has changed over time and the song has been the focus of controversy at different times in its history. What many people think they know about the anthem is as much myth and legend as it is fact. Mark Clague explores many aspects of the song in his book, O Say Can you Hear? : A Cultural Biography of The Star-Spangled Banner (Norton, 2022). Francis Scott Key wrote the lyric to what would become the American national anthem around the time of a battle he witnessed during the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. As was the custom at the time, he intended for the words to be sung to a pre-existent tune that potential performers would have known. By the time Congress officially named the song the US’s anthem in 1931, it was merely ratifying what had already become a cultural tradition. The Star Spangled Banner has its detractors: the melody is difficult to sing, the words are hard to remember and militaristic. Francis Scott Key was a slaveholder and the word “slave” appears in the third verse. Clague takes on this seemingly straightforward history and more recent controversy by busting myths about the anthem, delving deep into the history of the song from its composition until the present, and highlighting some key performances that have helped to shape Americans’ understanding of their country and themselves. The book is just one aspect of a larger public humanities project. The website for the Star Spangled Music Foundation contains even more information on the anthem and its history including content suitable for educators working from Kindergarten to the college level and continues to be updated. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about "bad" speech, hate speech, disinformation, propaganda campaigns, incitement of violence on the internet, and, in particular, speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022), Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors--including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow, Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others--to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of "bad" speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote "the public interest." Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America's leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era. Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University's 19th president in 2002 and is the longest-serving Ivy League president. He is also Columbia's first Seth Low Professor of the University, and a member of the Law School faculty. Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We are back for a third season! The Russian invasion of Ukraine reminded us all that “everything old is new again” and that includes Cold War tensions, nuclear fears, and paranoia about “unseen enemies.” With our organizing principle of the Cold War and Hollywood representation, we begin with the Red Scare. We discuss Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and The Way We Were (1973). Together these films reveal how the Red Scare cast a wide and enduring shadow on our culture. We highlight three themes. First, Cold War paranoia was a bipartisan issue. Second, the Korean War cast doubt on the relative strength of the military and our institutions long before Vietnam did. And finally, we dispute the comforting lie that progress is inevitable, that we are always on a path towards improvement, advancement, an expansion of rights, and a greater equality among people. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers. This critical biography—the first in-depth study of Bennett’s life—travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett’s previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment was commemorated in 2020, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were often the focus of museum exhibits, teach-outs, and scholarly works. Highlighting the queerness of the movement was rarely the narrative. But Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022) insists that a narrow focus on cisgender heterosexual woman erases the existence and importance of queer suffragists – and how their transgressive notions of gender and sexuality impacted the suffrage movement. Hiding queerness reinforced a “patriarchal, cisheteronormative standard of ideal womanhood and manhood in order to make suffragists and women’s suffrage more palatable to voters.” Yet queerness was central to the history of the suffrage movement. Dr. Wendy L. Rouse not only recovers the lives of individual queer suffragists, she queers the history of the women’s suffrage movement as a whole. Her work emphasizes the complex ways in which suffragists balanced their principled beliefs in wider social reforms with a form of strategic, respectability politics. In order to contribute to a process of recovery, her book forcefully examines the manner in which historical processes have led to the erasure of queerness in the history of the suffrage movement and the consequences of that erasure. Dr. Wendy L. Rouse is a historian whose research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality in the Progressive Era. She is presently Professor of History at San Jose State University where she is the program coordinator for the History/Social Science Teacher Preparation Program. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Paul Adler's No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is a history of the hardworking but understudied public interest progressives who waged a war from within the system against neoliberal globalization during the last decades of the twentieth century. At a time of Cold War polarization and increasing rejection of social and economic rights as motivating discourses by the left and the right, these activists mobilized around a project of fairness and economic equality. Faced with an increasingly globalized economy and political system, US-based public interest progressives built new models for transnational activism in coalition with activist groups around the globe. From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the end of the twentieth century. Of interest to scholars of transnational activism, neoliberalism, and public policy, this book offers important insights into the political struggles that helped shape the conflicts and political visions of the twenty-first century. Paul Adler is Assistant Professor of History at Colorado College. Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Nobody Wants to Talk About It: Race, Identity, and the Difficulties in Forging Meaningful Conversations (Incognito, 2020), Michael Sidney Fosberg draws on twenty years of experience leading conversations about race to encourage readers to share their story, get comfortable with discomfort, and disagree without being disagreeable. Fosberg's one-man play Incognito is always followed by an open and honest conversation about race and identity. Fosberg provides time-tested strategies for bridging racial and partisan divides in order to celebrate both our shared humanity and our unique perspectives. Maybe "nobody wants to talk about" race, but Fosberg's book is an argument for why we should -- and a blueprint for how we can. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The 2020 presidential election has cast a long shadow over American politics. Much of the decorum, propriety, and cordiality of the political world was replaced by even more polarization, and violent aggression as demonstrated by the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in support of President Donald Trump. Partisan polarization continues to plague daily life, and unfortunately, as it increases, so does inter-party polarization. The Democratic Party, divided between more establishment candidates and those on the more progressive wing of the party, saw an increasing gap between these ideologies as represented by the 2020 candidates for the presidential nomination. The Republican Party has a somewhat similar dynamic, divided between moderates and conservatives within the party, but also, in 2020, between those willing to criticize President Trump and those who were loyally supporting him. Polarization and Political Party Factions in the 2020 Election (Lexington, 2022) sheds light on the major changes seen during the 2020 campaign and election, while also exploring the longer-term implications of these shifts and changes. This edited volume breaks down key understandings of the American political landscape in order to paint a full picture of the dynamics during the course of the entire 2020 election season. Each chapter examines specific conditions connected to presidential and congressional primaries, polling, activism in online spaces, essential voting rights, ideologies, and more. The focus of the chapters looks at two forms of factionalism: the first and rather obvious form of factionalism is between the Democratic and Republican parties, which leads to our current polarization; the second is the internal and asymmetric dynamic in each party, where tension between different factions push and pull the workings of the parties themselves and the candidates running as members and representatives of these parties. The contributing authors help make sense of a fragile and, at times, frightening era in politics, while also teasing apart the broader implications for national electoral politics. Editors Jennifer C. Lucas, Christopher J. Galdieri, and Tauna S. Sisco (all of whom are members of the faculty at St. Anselm College) have brought together an insightful and illuminating collection of chapters from some of the most respected authors in the field. This is an engaging and accessible book that will appeal to students, scholars, and citizens. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ben Rhodes visited dozens of countries, meeting with politicians and activists confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that are tearing America apart. Along the way, he discusses the growing authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin, and his aggression towards Ukraine, with the foremost opposition leader in Russia, who was subsequently poisoned and imprisoned; he profiled Hong Kong protesters who saw their movement snuffed out by China under Xi Jinping, and America itself reached the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a fragile second chance. The characters and issues that Rhodes illuminates in After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We've Made (Random House, 2021) paint a picture that shows us where we are today—from Barack Obama to a rising generation of international leaders; from the authoritarian playbook endangering democracy to the flood of disinformation enabling authoritarianism. Ultimately, Rhodes writes personally and powerfully about finding hope in the belief that looking squarely at where America has gone wrong can make clear how essential it is to fight for what America is supposed to be, for our own country and the entire world. Ben Rhodes is the author of the New York Times bestseller The World as It Is, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and an adviser to former president Barack Obama. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Philip Nash's book Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman (Routledge, 2022) is a concise and highly readable political biography that examines the life of one of the most accomplished American women of the 20th century. Wife and mother, author, editor, playwright, political activist, war journalist, Congresswoman, ambassador, pundit, and feminist—Luce did it all. Carefully placing Luce in a series of shifting historical contexts, this book offers the reader an insight into mid-century American political, cultural, gender, and foreign relations history. Eleven primary sources follow the text, including excerpts from Luce’s diary, letters, speeches, and published works, as well as a TV talk-show appearance and a critic’s diary entry describing an evening with her, helping readers to understand her fascinating life. Together, the narrative and documents afford readers a brief yet in-depth look at Luce with all her complications: glamorous intellectual, acid-tongued diplomat, and feminist conservative, she was a deeply flawed high-achiever who repeatedly challenged the entrenched sexism of her age to become a significant actor in the rise of the “American Century.” Addressing the neglect suffered by women in foreign relations history, this will be of interest to students and scholars of US foreign relations, 20th-century US history, and US women’s history. Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Conspiracy theories are not new – but with globalisation and digital media they are perhaps more powerful than ever – and one of the most absurd and yet important is Q Anon – it has so many adherents in the US, including some members of Congress, that it is impossible to ignore. And more than that, to wonder where it might lead. In Pastels and Paedophiles: Inside the Mind of Q Anon (Redwood Press, 2021), Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko address these questions. Today I talked to Moskalenko. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To Know the Soul of a People: Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk (Oxford UP, 2022) is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South. From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk" reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today’s Postscript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) focuses on the US Supreme Court and the Second Amendment. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the most recent term of the U.S. Supreme Court changed the substance of the laws Americans live by and the method by which the Court determines whether a law is unconstitutional. The Court upended 50 years of abortion jurisprudence, challenged laws that govern tribal sovereignty, and undercut the power of Congress to make and implement laws regarding climate change. The abortion ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson consumed much of the press coverage and public outrage but our podcast conversation focuses New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The Supreme Court not only overturned a century-old statute regulating the concealed carrying of guns in public – it changed the rules for determining what is or is not protected by the US Constitution under the Second Amendment. The podcast engages the relationship between state gun policy and this new originalist methodology, the origins of so-called originalism in the 1980s, the role of secondary scholarship, Duke Center for Firearms Law searchable database’s role in providing evidence for legal claims, and whether analogical reasoning (or politics) have triumphed at the SCOTUS – and how to teach that to law students. Joseph Blocher, Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law and one of the attorneys who helped write the brief for the District of C in Heller. He co-authored The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Darrell Miller and his numerous influential law review articles are complemented by nuanced public facing scholarship. Andrew Willinger is the Executive Director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law at Duke University Law School – and now writes commentary for the Center’s Second Thoughts blog. He joined the Center in June 2022, after practicing as a litigation associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in New York. At Patterson, Willinger litigated complex commercial disputes and false advertising and defamation cases. He previously clerked for Judge William L. Osteen, Jr. of the Middle District of North Carolina. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, Tiffany speaks with Professor Cynthia Orozco about her new book, Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales, published with Arte Público Press in 2020. Alonso S. Perales is a leading Latino lawyer of the twentieth century. Though he has remained overlooked in the historical record until now. In Orozco’s newest publication, she argues that Perales was a significant player in civil rights politics and made a profound impact by founding the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and organized many Latinos to engage in political and educational reform. From primary and rich secondary sources across Texas, Orozco masterfully crafted an intriguing life story of Perales. Chapters include Perales upbringing in south Texas, pursuing an education in Washington, D.C., organizing Latinos in San Antonio, the founding of LULAC, familial influence in his personal and political decisions, the rivalries and solidarities he formed over time, and the events leading up to his death. There are not enough political biographies on Latina/o peoples in the U.S. But Orozco’s work continues to pave a path for opening discussions about the need for biography writing. And more people should take notice. Tiffany González is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is a historian of Chicana/Latinx history, American politics, and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Expo 1967 was the centrepiece of Canada’s 100th birthday. Amid the crowds and the pageantry, one building stood out: The Indians of Canada Pavilion. This was more than a tall glass tipi. It revealed (at least partly) Canada's sordid colonial history, and it challenged the myth of Canada being a peace-loving and tolerant society. We tell the surprising story of the historical experts who put this thing together, and the public's reaction to their work This episode was produced in May 2020 as part of Darts and Letters predecessor, Cited. Polly Leger is the co-host alongside regular host and editor Gordon Katic. This was before the wave of discoveries of unmarked graves across Canada as horrific as the descriptions of residential schools are in this episode… the reality is worse, and we made this show before all that additional evidence had been discovered. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Of all the concepts that form the constellation of modern political thought, surely “solidarity” is a strong candidate for the most challenging. At once influential and undertheorized, the concept of solidarity appears to function across a startling range of discourses. – Max Pensky, The Ends of Solidarity (2008) This book is intended to serve as a contemporary response to the pessimism about contemporary political life that is both overwhelming and demotivating. Far from giving in to that dire picture of our collective lives, it challenges readers to see themselves as potential members of solidarity organizations, to build society when forces attempt to undermine it, and to take the critical but hopeful stance that, though things may not end well, we must continue hoping that they might. Taking this stance seriously requires that we spend much more time focusing on those who actually attempt to realize democratic nonexclusion through conflict, agitation, and the collective project of building and sustaining our world. – Rochelle Duford, Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory (2022) Democracy has become disentangled from our ordinary lives. Mere cooperation or ethical consumption now often stands in for a robust concept of solidarity that structures the entirety of sociality and forms the basis of democratic culture. How did democracy become something that is done only at ballot boxes and what role can solidarity play in reviving it? In Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory (Stanford UP, 2022), Rochelle DuFord presents a theory of solidarity fit for developing democratic life and a complementary theory of democracy that emerges from a society typified by solidarity. DuFord argues that solidarity is best understood as a set of relations, one agonistic and one antagonistic: the solidarity groups' internal organization and its interactions with the broader world. Such a picture of solidarity develops through careful consideration of the conflicts endemic to social relations and solidarity organizations. Examining men's rights groups, labor organizing's role in recognitional protections for LGBTQ members of society, and the debate over trans inclusion in feminist praxis, DuFord explores how conflict, in these contexts, becomes the locus of solidarity's democratic functions and thereby critiques democratic theorizing for having become either overly idealized or overly focused on building and maintaining stability. Working in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, DuFord makes a provocative case that the conflict generated by solidarity organizations can address a variety of forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation while building a democratic society. Nathan Rochelle Duford is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hartford, and is currently working on an essay on political epistemology as well as a book proposal investigating the idea of sex, gender and sexuality in the early Frankfurt School. Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. In his book Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern America (Yale UP, 2021), economic historian Samuel Milner provides a context for contemporary efforts to resolve these anxieties by examining the contest to control the distribution of corporate income during the mid‑twentieth century. During this “Golden Age of American Capitalism,” apprehension about the debilitating consequences of industrial concentration fueled efforts to ensure that management would share the fruits of progress with workers, consumers, and society as a whole (“stakeholders”). Focusing on wage and price determination in steel, automobiles, and electrical equipment, Milner reveals how the management of concentrated industries understood its ability to distribute income to its stakeholders as well as why economists, courts, and public policymakers struggled to curtail the exercise of that market power at its source. The book could not be timelier, given the recent rise of inflation, wage price pressure, and supply shocks, as well as renewed interest in labor organization and anti-trust legislation. John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation. In Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press, 2022), Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production. Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Canada’s intellectual culture is now like a barren soil that struggles to give life to even the simplest flora. They’re just not that smart. We make too many right wing cranks, self-help charlatans, blood-thirsty reactionaries, insipid centrists, and third-rate Hayekians. But which are our worst? In this episode, originally broadcast in November 2021, we invite our new from the Harbinger Media Network to help scour the national intellectual wasteland to find Canada’s dumbest public intellectual. The idea is simple: each guest makes the case for why their pick is the best at being the worst. Plus, Andre Goulet talks about the Harbinger Network and the state and future of left podcasting in Canada. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Has the pandemic taught us anything? As we look forward and imagine what the future might look like, we like to think ‘next time will be different.’ But, if we don’t take a serious look back, it won’t. Not as long as the people who made this pandemic so bad face zero consequences. In this episode of Darts and Letters, John Nichols says it’s time for a COVID reckoning. His new book is Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis. Nichols, who is also national affairs correspondent of the Nation, retraces his reporting – revealing how so many suffered while others made out like gangbusters. Plus, we ask: could it have been different? —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation (Verso, 2022), Paris Marx identifies two convergent forces in the 20th century: the growth of the climate killing automobile industry and the rise of Silicon Valley with its California Ideology (a hypocritical self-rationalization). Their narrative shows how these two forces merged in the early 21st century with less-than-ideal, even deadly, results. Marx challenges many of the tech industry’s myths, misrepresentations, and lies and offers some suggestions for how we can build a better world. While Road to Nowhere is a book about our current crisis it situates our this mess in its historical context. Marx illustrates how many of the most problematic aspects of automobility are the consequences of specific policy decisions, often made in the interest of capital and not the social good. Marx is not shy about naming names, specifically calling out Elon Musk and Über. Paris Marx is Canadian tech critic and host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. Their work has been published in Business Insider, NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, and Tribune. And just this week, they published a piece in Time Magazine on Elon Musk. Paris earned a Master’s degree in urban geography from McGill University, researching Silicon Valley’s efforts to transform how we move. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do competing interests shape public policy? Why are the economic interests and priorities of lower-, working-, and middle-class Americans often neglected while the interests and priorities of wealthier Americans are often front and center for the U.S. Congress? Previous work in political science has highlighted income disparity or the importance of agenda setting but Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021) unpacks HOW business interests and wealthy individuals shape public policy to their benefit by “hijacking the agenda” away from the interests of average Americans. Witko, Morgan, Kelly, and Enns focus on the speech of elected representatives as recorded in the Congressional Record. Their remarkable Congressional Rhetoric Database codes speech from 1995 to 2016. Using an integrated, multi-method research design, they conclude that the interplay between two types of power – structural and kinetic – give wealthy interests considerable influence over the issues that receive congressional attention and explaining these patterns of issue attention over time is crucial for understanding disparate policy outcomes. In addition to a sophisticated quantitative analysis, the book provides three astute case studies (financial deregulation, re-regulation, and the minimum wage) and a general theory of politics and economic power. Hijacking the Agenda details how money – especially in the form of campaign contributions – affects which economic problems Congress believes to be important – and acts upon. Hijacking the Agenda is winner of the 2022 Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association. Dr. Christopher Witko is professor of public policy and associate director of the School of Public Policy at Penn State, Drs. Jana Morgan and Nathan J. Kelly are professors of political science at the University of Tennessee, and Dr. Peter K. Enns is professor of public policy and political science at Cornell University. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why does the democratic establishment always avoid turning left, even when it might mean a political win? Gordon asks David Sirota. Sirota is behind the smash-hit Netflix movie Don’t Look Up! Even if you weren’t a fan of that movie this is worth a listen, because David is more than just a screenwriter. He’s a journalist who doesn’t limit his journalism to one kind of storytelling. David has written for The Guardian and for Jacobin, but he is also host and co-writer of investigative podcast series Meltdown, which documented how Obama’s lacklustre response to the financial crisis set the stage for Trump. He’s also worked as a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. We cover a range of topics: from the limits of technocracy, the political co-option of science and expertise, the critical reaction to Don’t Look Up, and whether or not Ideocracy (2006) has bad politics. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Single Payer Healthcare Reform: Grassroots Mobilization and the Turn Against Establishment Politics in the Medicare for All Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Lindy Hern provides a comprehensive history of the grassroots Movement for Health Care Reform in the United States from within the Single Payer Movement. Hern discusses the role that narrative (constructions of opportunity) plays in grassroots mobilization, which builds on existing social movement theory. She examines the turn against “politics as usual” and establishment politicians that began in progressive social movements long before the election of Donald Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Slavery and its lingering remnants remain a plague on the United States, continuing to foster animosity between races that hinders the understanding and connection conducive to dismantling the remains of such systems. Personal relationships and connection can provide a path towards reconciling differences and overcoming the racial divisiveness that is America’s original sin. In his fascinating new book, Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama (Oxford UP, 2022), Saladin Ambar, professor of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, constructs a comprehensive overview of interracial friendships throughout U.S. history, detailing how friendship can be an invaluable and often overlooked tool when advocating for equality. Because political leaders, celebrities, and other cultural figures have such an influence on the general public, they can play a particular role in shaping public opinion. Thus, analyzing significant interracial friendships between well-known individuals throughout different historical moments can serve as windows into the state of race relations as they developed through time, and what that can mean for our future. Ambar meditates on the power of friendship in general, and interracial friendship in particular, through ten different, iconic cases, examining these relationships in both their personal and political capacity. The specific focus of each friendship duet is to explore the public consequences of relationships across race. Each duo has unique experiences that are particular to their historical moments and the political constraints of the time. Through these stories, Ambar develops a theory rejecting the notion that we must separate the personal from the political, detailing how, in an interracial democracy predicated on equality, the two must and do intertwine in order to overcome racial differences. Stars and Shadows examines, among others, Benjamin Banneker and Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem, Marlon Brando and James Baldwin, and ends with Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s iconic bond. The analysis wrestles with the American political structure, which is not based on connecting individuals to each other in any kind of personal way, and yet friendship is what connects us all as human beings. Ambar’s theory challenges citizens to look inward and outward when interacting with one another, to engage intentionally with our differences, and not to run away from our past but to critically analyze it and incorporate it going forward. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Everything in law and politics, including individual rights, comes back to divisions of power and the evergreen question: Who decides? Who wins the disputes of the day often turns on who decides them. And our acceptance of the resolution of those disputes often turns on who the decision maker is-because it reveals who governs us. In Who Decides?: States As Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation (Oxford UP, 2021), the influential US Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton focuses on the constitutional structure of the American states to answer the question of who should decide the key questions of public policy today. By concentrating on the role of governmental structure in shaping power across the 50 American states, Sutton develops a powerful explanation of American constitutional law, in all of its variety, as opposed to just federal constitutional law. As in his earlier book, 51 Imperfect Solutions, which looked at how American federalism allowed the states to serve as laboratories of innovation for protecting individual liberty and property rights, Sutton compares state-level governments with the federal government and draws numerous insights from the comparisons. Instead of focusing on individual rights, however, he focuses on structure, while continuing to develop some of the core themes of his previous book. An illuminating and essential sequel to his earlier work on the nature of American federalism, Who Decides makes the case that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in assessing the right balance of power among all branches of government. Taken together, both books reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has the answers to our vexing constitutional questions. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is the role of the press in a democracy? For nearly a century, scholars, media critics, and politicians have debated this question—in a large part thanks to Walter Lippmann. Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion, changed the conversation about how to educate voters and who should be able to vote at all. In this episode, University of British Columbia professor Heidi Tworek discusses the timeless questions and the man who asked them. Heidi Tworek is assistant professor of international history at the University of British Columbia. She is an editor of The Journal of Global History and the author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Compiled by New York Times bestselling author Andrew Bacevich and retired army officer Danny A. Sjursen, Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars (Metropolitan Books, 2022) collects provocative essays from American military veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, offering firsthand testimony that illuminates why the Forever Wars lasted so long while producing so little of value. In the wake of 9/11, the United States embarked upon a Global War on Terrorism aimed at using American military power to transform the Greater Middle East. Twenty years later, the ensuing forever wars have produced little tangible success while exacting enormous harm. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has sustained tens of thousands of casualties while expending trillions of dollars and inflicting massive suffering on populations that we sought to “liberate.” In Washington and across the nation at large, the inclination to forget these wars and move on is palpable. In fact, there is much to be learned and those who served and fought in these wars are best positioned to teach. The first book of its kind since the Vietnam era, Paths of Dissent gathers original essays from American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, drawn from all services, ranks, and walks of life, who have come out in opposition to these conflicts. Selected for their honesty and eloquence by fellow veterans Andrew Bacevich and Danny A. Sjursen, these outspoken critics describe not only their motivations for serving, but also for taking the path of dissent—disappointment and disillusionment; the dehumanizing impact of combat; the loss of comrades to friendly fire; the persistence of xenophobia and racism—all of these together exposing the mendacity that has pervaded the Global War on Terrorism from its very outset. Combining diverse, critical perspectives with powerful personal testimony, Paths of Dissent sheds light on the myriad factors that have made America’s post-9/11 wars costly and misguided exercises in futility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Trump’s voters. The yellow jackets in France. Putin’s base in Russia. The Brexiteers. One thing all these groups have in common is anger – anger at being left behind, anger about de industrialization, anger at the arrogance and wealth of the elite. But what more can be said about the nature of that anger and the different aspects of it? In Angrynomics (Agenda Publishing, 2020) Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan address this question. Today I talked to Blyth, a professor of political economy at Brown University. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week, we’re showcasing some of our favourite past episodes of Darts and Letters themed around “Activism & Academia”. Today’s episode originally aired a little earlier this summer. In the US, the January 6th hearings were continuing - and discourse about the factors that led to the insurrection was rampant. You might notice that when these kinds of events take place, similar descriptors are used: groupthink, mob mentality, deindividuation…and all of these ideas can be traced back to one bigoted, reactionary bigot: 19th-century French physician Gustave Le Bon. Why does academia always fear the masses? Our host Gordon Katic takes us through the story of Le Bon and beyond to analyze the academic stereotype of the public. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (UNC Press, 2022) tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregationist opposition. Congressional efforts to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be received. Though Coretta Scott King's mission to honor her husband's commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed, nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King's life and thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes, how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the arc of King's legacy toward something he never would have expected, and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own. Daniel T. Fleming is lecturer at the University of New South Wales and an Honorary Post-Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University. E. James West is a UK-based historian and writer. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020), A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (Illinois, 2022) and Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (UMass, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. In our last episode, you heard about the nuclear plant's largely-forgotten history--how it poisoned the people living downwind. On our season finale: a nuclear safety auditor tries to get it shut down, the downwinders struggle for justice, and we take you into the plant itself. This is part two, if you haven’t heard part one yet go check out yesterday’s episode. The story of Hanford reveals that expertise is always a political battle, and never as straightforward as simply collecting facts--whether it’s executives putting profit over a safety auditor’s well-documented warnings, a community-based research pitted against government-backed studies, or turning a world-changing nuclear reactor into a scientific lecture. This episode is from the pre-Darts and Letters era when we produced a documentary series called Cited. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer. Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up almost overnight in the desert of southeastern Washington. Its employer is the federal government, and its product is plutonium. The Hanford nuclear site was one of the Manhattan Project sites, and it made the plutonium for the bomb that devastated Nagasaki. The official history is one of scientific achievement, comfortable houses, and good-paying jobs. But it doesn’t include the story of what happened after the bomb was dropped -- neither in Japan, nor right there in Washington State. In part one of this Cited two-parter we tell the largely-forgotten story of the most toxic place in America. This episode was produced before Darts and Letters existed, when Cited Media was all about a documentary series called Cited.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don't know: Until Thomas went to law school, he was a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Metropolitan Books, 2019), Corey Robin--one of the foremost analysts of the right--delves deeply into both Thomas's biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas's conservative views, Robin argues, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by this racism, and that the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There's a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn't speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they'd hear a racial pessimism that sounds shockingly similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today's political stalemate. Corey Robin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education (Teachers College Press, 2021) examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses, reinforced by ideologies of white supremacy, have affected the educational experiences of our most vulnerable students. This volume situates the rhetoric of the Trump presidency within a broader historical narrative and provides recommendations for those who seek to advocate for anti-racism and social justice. As we enter the uncharted waters of a global pandemic and national racial reckoning, this will be invaluable reading for scholars, educators, and administrators who want to be part of the solution. Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber is a professor of education at California State University-Long Beach as well as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies. Her research analyzes racial inequities in education, the impact on marginalized urban students of color, and how students and their communities respond to those inequities through strategies of resistance. Dr. Susana Muñoz is an associate professor of education at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on issues of access, equity, and college persistence for undocumented Latina/o students. Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and is also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Utilizing a breadth of archival sources from activists, artists, and policymakers, Charlie Jeffries' Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines the race- and class-inflected battles over adolescent women’s sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Charlie Jeffries finds that most adults in this period hesitated to advocate for adolescent sexual and reproductive rights, revealing a new culture war altogether--one between adults of various political stripes in the cultural mainstream who prioritized the desire to delay girlhood sexual experience at all costs, and adults who remained culturally underground in their support for teenagers’ access to frank sexual information, and who would dare to advocate for this in public. The book tells the story of how the latter group of adults fought alongside teenagers themselves, who constituted a large and increasingly visible part of this activism. The history of the debates over teenage sexual behavior reveals unexpected alliances in American political battles, and sheds new light on the resurgence of the right in the US in recent years. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today's bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller's study will only grow more relevant as time passes. "An engaging call to arms," (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy. Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It was billed as “the biggest event in the history of the terminally online.” A debate: socialism vs. capitalism. On your left side, the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff. On your right, a StarCraft player-turned-online intellectual: Steven Bonnel II, better known as Destiny. But this debate didn’t take place on TV, or in a university debate club… it was on Twitch.tv. The online streaming platform that is mainly used for watching other people play video games. We dissect the debate, and its limitations. But more broadly, we ask, why are gamers becoming an emerging political commentariat, and what does that mean for the rest of us? Twitch is reshaping political and intellectual discourse, whether we like it or not; is it making that discourse more vibrant and more inclusive, or more phoney and more bro-y? —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Citizens of the World: U.S. Women and Global Government (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Megan Threlkeld profiles nine American women in the first half of the 20th century who invoked world citizenship as they promoted world government. These women agreed neither on the best form for such a government nor on the best means to achieve it, and they had different definitions of peace and different levels of commitment to genuine equality. But they all saw themselves as part of a global effort to end war that required their participation in the international body politic. This book argues that the phrase “citizen of the world” was not simply a rhetorical flourish; it represented a demand to participate in shaping the global polity and an expression of women's obligation to work for peace and equality. It gave them a language with which to advocate for international cooperation. Citizens of the World not only provides a more complete understanding of the kind of world these women envisioned, it also draws attention to the ways in which they were excluded from international institution-building and to the critiques many of them leveled at those institutions. Women's arguments for world government and their practices of world citizenship represented an alternative reaction to the crises of the first half of the twentieth century, one predicated on cooperation and equality rather than competition and force. Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places. So why does one company get so much control over a vital service… the internet? This is the story in the USA as well as Canada, so at Darts and Letters we wanted to look for a different way. We also don’t necessarily believe the market is the solution… so what is? How do we make a more democratic, socially driven internet? Gordon Katic interviews Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People, to help us answer these questions - and most importantly, we ask whether the internet is indeed a series of tubes. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Who runs American politics? In Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (Beacon Press, 2022), Daniel Laurison, an associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explores the hidden world of campaign professionals to offer a new sociological perspective on how contemporary politics works. The book explores how ‘politicos’ get their jobs, how they judge work and worth, and the importance of their actions to political campaigns, showing the inequalities at the heart of the profession. Alongside new theorisations of campaigning and of politics itself, the book offers essential reading across social sciences and arts and humanities, as well as to anyone interested in politics today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (or more recently “X”) depends on what state you live in, what jurisdiction you were born in, and what government agency you’re dealing with. In Sex Is as Sex Does, noted transgender advocate and scholar Paisley Currah explores this deeply flawed system, showing why it fails transgender and non-binary people. Providing examples from different states, government agencies, and court cases, Prof. Currah explains how transgender people struggle to navigate this confusing and contradictory web of legal rules, definitions, and classifications. Unlike most gender scholars, who are concerned with what the concepts of sex and gender really mean, Prof. Currah is more interested in what the category of “sex” does for governments. What does “sex” do on our driver’s licenses, in how we play sports, in how we access health care, or in the bathroom we use? Why do prisons have very different rules than social service agencies? Why is there such resistance to people changing their sex designation? Or to dropping it from identity documents altogether? In this thought-provoking and original volume, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (NYU Press, 2022) reveals the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States and shows what the regulation of transgender identity can tell us about society’s approach to sex and gender writ large. Ultimately, Paisley Currah demonstrates that, because the difficulties transgender people face are not just the result of transphobia but also stem from larger injustices, an identity-based transgender rights movement will not, by itself, be up to the task of resolving them. Paisley Currah is Professor of Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the Act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South. During the civil rights movement, it enabled the protection of black students who attended previously segregated educational institutions. Most recently, the Insurrection Act has been the vehicle for presidents to call upon federal troops to suppress so-called “race riots” like those in Los Angeles in 1992, and for them to threaten to do so in other cases of racial justice activism. Yet when the US Capitol was stormed in January 2021, the impulse to restore law and order and counter insurrectionary threats to the republic lay dormant. Allan’s distinctly literary voice underscores her paradigm-shifting reflections on the presence of fear and silence in history and their shadowy impact on the law. Throughout, she draws revealing insight from her own experiences as one of the only black girls in her leafy Long Island suburb, as a black lawyer at a predominantly white firm during a visit from presidential candidate Barack Obama, and as a thinker about the use and misuse of appeals to law and order. Elegant and profound, deeply researched and intensely felt, Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship (Norton, 2022) is necessary reading in our reckoning with structural racism, government power, and protest in the United States. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be taken nor granted, a sacred concept upon which the nation was established. The concept and actualization of freedom are also to be defended by the state. However, when such a concept has been arrogated, litigated, and delegitimized by a state that ignores its very definition, the concept of freedom comes under critical examination. Political theorist Elisabeth R. Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University, has a new book dissecting the core of this conception of freedom. Ugly Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) explores who defined and continues to define freedom, she also examines freedom’s rhetorical capacity, and thus its potential for weaponization. Anker illuminates how the tainted gestation of freedom birthed a status quo based on the individualistic and conditional conception of ‘freedom’ that has long been tangoing with white supremacy, colonialism, climate destruction, capitalism, and exploitation. Such a dance is by design and has been constant throughout U.S. history. Anker establishes that for democratic government to take hold in the United States, racial domination and violence transpired, limiting the freedoms of some individuals in order to establish a governmental system that is based, in theory, on protecting liberty and freedom. This is the kind of tension that Anker explains as “ugly freedom.” Thus, American freedom, our freedom, has embedded in it the role of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, and land theft. The shocking stains of slavery produced freedom of prosperity and leisure for white people through direct dehumanization of Black and Brown people—this is what Anker is talking about within the concept of ugly freedom. This has also been manifested through more contemporary rhetoric regarding imperial wars like those in the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, destroying infrastructure and lives in those countries for the capital prosperity of the imperial core. These ugly freedoms legitimize the economic exploitation of the masses in the name of individual success for the few. Thus, ugly freedom examines the acts of freedom that rely on violence and brutality—this challenges how we often imagine freedom to be. Ugly Freedom explores the connection between politics and aesthetics as well, taking up an array of historical events, political theories and concepts, different forms of art, televisual productions, poetry, music, and biology to illustrate the compounding violence of the few in the name of freedom. The cultural artifacts interrogated were controversial in their own right, and Anker explores them to help understand which kinds of freedom are worth fighting for and which kinds of freedom must be fought against. Through a critical lens, Anker shifts the perception of freedom to help restore justice to its foundational value—one that is less dependent on the individual or individual heroics, and more enveloping of the community and shared collaboration. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!) Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration with 99% Invisible. It tells a vivid story of science, politics, nature, and a heated battle over a small town’s beloved lighthouse. The forces of nature versus the forces of human willpower has been an eternal struggle. This is an evocative short documentary, melding history with salient reminders: in the face of climate change, the struggle is becoming more and more intense. We’ve got one more episode for this week, and then we’ll be moving on to a different theme! Stay tuned for more of our classic content, and get ready for new episodes of Darts and Letters right here on the New Books Network starting on September 16th. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. ———-CREDITS———- Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by 99% Invisible’s Delaney Hall and Cited's Sam Fenn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why is so much right-wing money being funnelled at such a furious pace into universities across the US? Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. The money shows us that the right spends it because they care about education, for their own ideological reasons - and universities are all too happy to sell out. For today’s episode on the politics of education, we look at how big money seeks to corrupt academic freedom and integrity - and how campus activists are fighting to un-Koch their schools. This is another instalment of our Darts and Letters summer programming here on the New Books Network. We’ll be launching brand-new episodes starting on September 18th. Until then, tune in to our favourite past episodes - each week is a new theme! ——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————
Visit UnKoch My Campus to learn about the organization and their work, including groundbreaking reports and their campaigns. Plus, read more from Jasmine Banks in The Nation, including “The Radical Capitalist Behind the Critical Race Theory Furor.”
Visit James L. Turk’s academic page at the Centre for Free Expression. And check out his edited 2014 book Academic Freedom in Conflict: The Struggle Over Free Speech Rights in the University.
Read the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ report on the relationships between Canadian universities and corporations Open for Business on What Terms? An Analysis of 12 Collaborations Between Canadian Universities and Corporations, Donors, and Governments.
Dig into related works from the episode, and more on the Koch’s and their influence, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy Maclean and Jane Meyer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Plus, read more of Jane’s work on dark money in the New Yorker.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. ———-CREDITS———- Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic. Our lead producer is Jay Cockburn and our assistant producer this week was Jason Cohanim. Our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. David Moscrop is our research assistant and wrote the show notes. This episode had research and advising from Franklynn Bartol and Professor Marc Spooner. Our theme song and music was created by Mike Barber, our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop, and our marketing was done by Ian Sowden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto, Safe Enough Spaces (Yale UP, 2021) on the crises confronting higher education In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas. Countering the increasing cynical dismissal--from both liberals and conservatives--of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University and a historian, curator, and teacher. His previous books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an important instance of military learning in which the United States military systematically examined the lessons of Israel's decisive victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and applied those lessons towards major doctrinal and equipment changes. The book relies heavily on Paul Senge’s model of learning organizations outlined in his seminal work, The Fifth Dimension. Using Senge’s model, the book examines the Departments of the Army, Air Force, and Navy’s reactions to the Yom Kippur War and how they organizationally incorporated—or ignored—the lessons of the conflict within their force. Using source documents, including personal memoirs, doctrinal publications, and individual reflections, the book offers a vital examination of how militaries can use foreign conflicts to make substantive and necessary organizational changes. The Yom Kippur War, particularly the Israeli experience in that conflict, provided the American military a battle laboratory in which to develop new warfighting concepts and assess new weapons acquisitions. In its conclusion, the book offers a cautionary tale that suggests learning and change do not come automatically to military organizations. If they are to be successful in the future, military organizations must embrace learning structures. Dr. Robert W. Tomlinson is an associate dean at the Naval War College. The views expressed in this podcast by both participants are their own, and do not reflect the official position of any organization with which they are affiliated. Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The protests of summer 2020 led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors? It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech. In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Michael Bérubé (interviewed here) is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University; Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film at Portland State University. Both have served in various roles within the American Association of University Professors, and also coauthored The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (2015). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to week two of our Darts and Letters summer showcase! Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas. We’re celebrating joining the New Books Network by bringing you some of our favourite past episodes of the show. Each week, we’re following a different theme. Last week’s was “ideas in strange places” - and today, we’re kicking off a week of episodes about the politics of education. This episode asks a big and nefarious question: have intellectuals enabled the US empire? Our host Gordon Katic looks at the RAND corporation (famously lampooned in Dr. Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation), and the broader defence-intellectual industrial complex. Get ready to meet some of the boring calculator men who are partially responsible for our permanent state of war. We’ll be launching brand-new episodes of Darts and Letters here on the New Books Network starting on September 18th - until then, stay tuned for more of our greatest hits. ——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————
Have a look at Daniel’s book Democracy in Exile and check out his other books and articles on his academic homepage, including his co-authored volume The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science and Democracy in the 20th Century.
Listen to his podcast, American Prestige, including the latest episode special “Auf Wiedersehen, Merkel.”
Read more of his popular writing in The Nation, including “Can We Live Without Twitter,” The New Republic, including “The Case Against Humane War,” and Jacobin, including “Everything You Need to Know About What’s Happening in Afghanistan — An Interview with Derek Davison.”
For some further reading on the national security state, dig into Top Secret America: The Rise of the American Security State by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin.
For more from Daniel, visit his personal homepage.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. ———-CREDITS———- Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic. Our lead producer is Jay Cockburn. Our assistant producer for this episode was Ren Bangert. Our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. David Moscrop wrote the show notes and is a research assistant. Our theme song and music was created by Mike Barber, our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop, and our marketing was done by Ian Sowden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undertaking. And the challenges don't end on the other side. At once enlightening and devastating, The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear (U Chicago Press, 2021) examines the costs and ends of America's interior enforcement--the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing immigrants already living in the country. Economist Tara Watson and journalist Kalee Thompson pair rigorous analysis with deeply personal stories from immigrants and their families to assess immigration's effects on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. What emerges is a critical, utterly complete examination of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native-born.d News coverage has prompted many to question the humanity of American immigration policies; The Border Within opens a conversation of whether it is effective. The United States spends billions each year on detention and deportation, all without economic gain and at a great human cost. With depth and discipline, the authors dissect the shock-and-awe policies that make up a broken, often cruel system, while illuminating the lives caught in the chaos. It is an essential work with far-reaching implications for immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is unfeeling? According to today’s guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes “a broad range of affective modes, including withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care, opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability.” In short, Xine argues in a new book from Duke University Press, titled Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, “people who are disaffected break from affectability and present themselves as unaffected” (11). Xine is a Lecturer of English before 1900 at University College London. Xine is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of the PhDivas Podcast which focuses on social justice and academia across the STEM/Humanities divide. Disaffected is an urgent book that examines how sentimentality was (and is) a part of the political architecture of white supremacy and governmentality—and the forms of unfeeling that writers of color used (and continue to use) to roil that architecture. John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas, and this week we’re searching for progressive politics in strange places… such as pro-wrestling. There have been 37 Wrestlemanias. That’s a lot of wrestling. And a lot of entertainment for the millions of people who enjoy watching wrestling, including our host, Gordon Katic. Maybe you’re a fan, maybe not. Fans and non-fans alike have often dismissed wrestling as frivolous. But there’s more to wrestling than meets the tombstone piledriver. Pro wrestling is like a Rosetta Stone for our politics; It brought us one President, and a recent poll suggests it might give us another. On this episode, we jump from the top rope into the wild, layered, complex world of pro wrestling and the folks who love it. This is part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places”. Darts and Letters is doing a different theme each week until we launch the new season on September 18.
First (@10:46), Steve and Larson are the hosts of Going in Raw: A Pro Wrestling Podcast. They break down the history of Vince McMahon as a boss, character, and more — including what happens when the lines between the two become blurred inside and outside of the ring. PLUS: the full unedited interview is available on our Patreon. Subscribe today.
Next (@37:15), Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maine who writes on professional wrestling and labour. Wrestlers are workers, and as workers, face challenges shared by other workers — and some unique to their profession. And their fans, it turns out, are more progressive than you might think.
Then (@53:06), the Spider Baby, Terrance Griep, is the world’s first openly gay wrestler. He wrestles in the Midwest Independent Wrestling Scene. He takes us into the world of wrestling, the building and presentation of a character, the immersive theatricality that is part of the experience for both wrestlers and their fans, and the “civil war” between the profession’s old and new guard.
Finally (@1:09:30), Heather Levi is an anthropologist at Temple University who wrote her dissertation on lucha libre in Mexico. She even trained in lucha libre. She explores the fascinating world of a sport that is closely bound up with the country in which it thrives and finds a way of making meaning that brings together writers, wrestlers, and the public.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. —————————-CREDITS—————————- Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic. Our lead producer is Jay Cockburn, This episode’s assistant producer is Polly Leger, and our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. The research coordinator was David Moscrop. Our theme song was created by Mike Barber. Our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical-in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States' bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven't yet been fully understood or appreciated. Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hi! This is Darts and Letters. We’ve just become a part of New Books Network, so we want to introduce ourselves. Fundamentally, This is a show about the politics of ideas. Another way to say that would be “intellectuals”, but we don’t really gel with this classic idea of intellectuals being white guys at Harvard. We’re more populist than that, and we have a whole segment in this episode about what we really mean by populism. This is our first episode, and we made it in 2020 in the run up to Biden’s election. We’ve had 60 episodes since then and our production is tighter and we have a much clearer idea of who we are as a show, but we wanted to start by playing you this because I think we have stayed pretty true to our original goal of democratising ideas, and looking for them in unusual places. We’re taking a bit of a production break right now for summer, so until September we’re going to catch you up with our favourite episodes from the catalogue, then on September 18th we launch the new season of Darts and Letters. Until then we’re doing a different theme each week and our theme for this week is what I said before - ideas in strange places. Starting with episode 1, and the owner of the Pigeon Shit Bookstore. An intellectual of the street, who the show’s host Gordon found selling books in downtown Toronto.
First, host Gordon Katic asks: what is an intellectual? Hard to say, but to quote the Supreme Court justice who tried to define pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
Next (@10:48), we meet Daniel—the homeless bookseller of Bloor St, who might just be one of the most well-read people you’ve ever met.
Then (@21:26), journalist and historian Thomas Frank rights the distorted historical record and redefines “populism.” We discuss his most recent book “The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.”
Finally (@47:32), critical educational scholar and dissident Henry Giroux celebrates academics who are true ‘public intellectuals,’ and he attacks the neoliberal educational reforms that have made that kind of work so difficult.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. —————————-CREDITS—————————- This week, Darts and Letters was produced by Jay Cockburn and Gordon Katic. Research and support from Addye Susnick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Wirls, Professor of Politics at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has a new book that continues his research stream on the United States’ Senate. Wirls’ previous book on the Senate, The Invention of the United States Senate (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), written with his brother, Stephen Wirls, explains the historical basis for the Senate, especially in context of the broader American constitutional system as established in 1787. This new book, The Senate: From White Supremacy to Governmental Gridlock (U Virginia Press, 2021), interrogates the general understanding of the U.S. Senate within the constitutional system and the way that we have come to consider the role of the Senate. Wirls explains what he has dubbed “Senate exceptionalism” which is connected to the more expansive notion of American exceptionalism—this is the notion that the U.S. Senate was a unique and special creation within the constitutional system, and that it reflects the greatest ideals of democratic governance. Wirls’ analysis might suggest otherwise, since the book explores the structure of the Senate and how it actually undermines the democratic conception of “one person=one vote.” The idea of the Senate, and its role in preventing the tyranny of the majority—one of the goals ascribed to the new system established in 1787—is more problematic than the violation of democratic norms. One of the fascinating threads woven through The Senate: From White Supremacy to Governmental Gridlock is the concept of the Senate and how this concept has become embedded in our understanding of the role of this half of the U.S. Congress. Wirls’ argument with regard to Senate exceptionalism is connected to the narrative about the Senate itself, as the “world’s greatest deliberative body” when it sits in a murky position between the states and the people within the federal system. Senators understand, some of the time, that they represent the people of their respective states, but in so doing, they represent those voters in a dramatic violation of the notion of equal representation, since the states themselves have vastly different population totals and demographics, whereas each state has the same number of U.S. senators. Senators also see themselves, at times, as representing the states as distinct entities. Senators selectively determine if they want to represent the people or the state in different instances. The peculiarity of the filibuster only contributes to the heroic narrative about the Senate, since the filibuster was a creation of the Senate itself (it is not in the Constitution), and the changes in the filibuster and the evolution of those reforms have only made the inequality of representation in the Senate more acute. In a sense, the filibuster or the threat of a filibuster has essentially given a few members of the U.S. Senate a very powerful veto over legislation and reform. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Please use the code 10WIRLS if purchasing the book from the University of Virginia Press for 30% any format of the book until 30 September 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far removed from the centers of power in Europe. Today, it is the world's most powerful country, with its largest economy and most powerful military. How did America achieve this status? In The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), Michael Mandelbaum offers a new framework for understanding the evolution of the foreign policy of the United States. He divides that evolution into four distinct periods, with each defined by the consistent increase in American power relative to other countries. His history of the four periods features engaging accounts of the major events and important personalities in the foreign policy of each era. Throughout, Mandelbaum highlights fundamental continuities in the goals of American foreign policy and in the way that policy was adopted and implemented. Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a "united action" coalition. In the event, Winston Churchill's Conservative government refused to back the plan. Fearing that US-led intervention could trigger a wider war in which the United Kingdom would be the first target for Soviet nuclear attack, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was determined to act as Indochina peacemaker - even at the cost of damage to the Anglo-American "special relationship". In Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2019), Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones revisit a Cold War episode in which British diplomacy played a vital role in settling a crucial question of international war and peace. Eden's diplomatic triumph at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina is often overshadowed by the 1956 Suez Crisis which led to his political downfall. This book, however, recalls an earlier Eden: a skilled and experienced international diplomatist at the height of his powers who may well have prevented a localised Cold War crisis escalating into a general Third World War. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel (Purdue UP, 2021) details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt's partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the victims of Nazi persecution yet defended a visa process that failed both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. After the war, as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt slowly came to the conclusion that the partition of Palestine was the only solution both for the Jews in the displaced persons camps in Europe, and for the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. When Israel became a state, she became deeply involved in supporting the work of Youth Aliyah and Hadassah, its American sponsor, in bringing Jewish refugee children to Israel and training them to become productive citizens. Her devotion to Israel reflected some of her deepest beliefs about education, citizenship, and community building. Her excitement about Israel's accomplishments and her cultural biases, however, blinded her to the impact of Israel's founding on the Arabs. Visiting the new nation four times and advocating on Israel's behalf created a warm bond not only between her and the people of Israel, but between her and the American Jewish community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand. Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019, and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. He has fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge and currently lives in London. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Approximately half the population menstruates for a large portion of their lives, but the law is mostly silent about the topic. Until recently, most people would have said that periods are private matters not to be discussed in public. But the last few years have seen a new willingness among advocates and allies of all ages to speak openly about periods. Slowly around the globe, people are recognizing the basic fundamental human right to address menstruation in a safe and affordable way, free of stigma, shame, or barriers to access. In Menstruation Matters: Challenging the Law’s Silence on Periods (NYU Press, 2022), Dr. Bridget Crawford and Dr. Emily Gold Waldman explore the role of law in this movement. They ask what the law currently says about menstruation (spoiler alert: not much) and provides a roadmap for legal reform that can move society closer to a world where no one is held back or disadvantaged by menstruation. The book examines these issues in a wide range of contexts, from schools to workplaces to prisons to tax policies and more. Ultimately, they seek to transform both law and society so that menstruation is no longer an obstacle to full participation in all aspects of public and private life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion (Cornell UP, 2021), Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in fact, the result of a strategic campaign of religious propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the resultant "Christian nationalism" of today were crafted by secular elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of the national motto, "In God We Trust," revises the very meaning of the contemporary American nation. Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising executives, and military public relations experts, exploited denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant support for free economic markets, local control of education and housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of right-wing positions including anti-communism, the Jim Crow status quo, and limited taxation and regulation. Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides that describe the American polity today. Andrew R. Polk is Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These "ugly freedoms" legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker's sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism's violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The ongoing debate surrounding who gets to determine the subjects of public commemoration, particularly in the form of statues, has become more heated over the past few years. In his timely book, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues (Aurum Press, 2021), Peter Hughes examines the long history of statues being used to articulate the values of rulers, governments, organizations, and average citizens. Of course, that also means statues are often targets of people who want to challenge those values. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss whether the motivation for public commemorations, as well as the opposition to them, can be found first and foremost in a society’s emotional relationship to the person (or god, for that matter) being commemorated, as is suggested in the book’s title; or, if the timeless debate over who does and doesn’t get commemorated is really about power. Lia Paradis is a professor of History at Slippery Rock University and co-host of the NBN partner podcast, Lies Agreed Upon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism (NYU Press, 2021) uncovers the largely overlooked role that liberal Protestants played in fostering cultural diversity in America and pushing for new immigration laws during the forty years following the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. These efforts resulted in the complete reshaping of the US cultural and religious landscape. During this period, mainline Protestants contributed to the national debate over immigration policy and joined the charge for immigration reform, advocating for a more diverse pool of newcomers. They were successful in their efforts, and in 1965 the quota system based on race and national origin was abolished. But their activism had unintended consequences, because the liberal immigration policies they supported helped to end over three centuries of white Protestant dominance in American society. Yet, Pruitt argues, in losing their cultural supremacy, mainline Protestants were able to reassess their mission. They rolled back more strident forms of xenophobia, substantively altering the face of mainline Protestantism and laying foundations for their responses to today’s immigration debates. More than just a historical portrait, this volume is a timely reminder of the power of religious influence in political matters. Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How much does the average person know about Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 1757 – 1804)? Would we have guessed that this hero of many fiscal conservatives wrote, “A national debt, if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing; it will be a powerful cement of our union…?” Most of us know that he was killed by his political enemy Aaron Burr in a duel. But long before that fatal encounter, Hamilton had engaged in major rows with several of his fellow founding fathers, notably Thomas Jefferson but also James Madison and John Adams. Because he cared so deeply about the fate of the newly established United States and its foreign relations, he dipped his pen in rhetorical vitriol when describing many of his rivals and former close allies in private letters and in public writings detailing where he felt they had gone wrong and were, in his view, harming the country. The angrier side of this brilliant man is on full view in the compendious 2017 two-volume set, The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton: Volume 1, 1769-1789 and The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton: Volume 2, 1789-1804, edited by Bradford P. Wilson and Carson Holloway. We are also afforded glimpses of the ambitious 14-year-old clerk Hamilton vowing to better himself and longing for a war that might afford him the opportunity for just such advancement. We read the letters he wrote during the War of Independence, which brought him into the circle of George Washington. In that war, Hamilton served bravely and bitterly criticized the brand new Congress that oversaw and, in Hamilton’s view, mismanaged the conflict. We are able to read the letter Hamilton wrote his wife to be read in the event of his death in the duel and follow the public and behind the scenes campaign that Hamilton led against Burr which precipitated the fateful encounter. This collection of writings is probably best perused with a search engine at the ready so as to look up the members of the sprawling cast of characters in it, such as the many recipients of Hamilton’s extensive correspondence and to read about the origins of the many pseudonyms he employed (e.g., Lucius Crassus). The documents are presented with little annotation, so some work is required by readers who possess little knowledge of the period. But because so much of the material encompassed is relevant to our day, the investment of time is well worth it. Hamilton laid the groundwork for the legal and political environment we live in and his influence is felt in everything from banking and government finance to libel and bankruptcy law to the structure and scope of powers of the judiciary. As a serving and former soldier, Hamilton took an active interest in the organization of the military and in veterans’ affairs and played a vital role in preventing unrest in the ranks in the unsettled days immediately following the cessation of active hostilities with Britain in the Revolutionary War. He was deeply involved in the Citizen Genet affair and helped his young nation traverse tricky diplomatic terrain as France and Britain battled for supremacy. All of this is offered up in the book we are discussing today. The tone of the many letters, partisan policy papers, proto op-eds and governmental reports featured in the book runs the gamut from ruthless ridicule to the coolly analytic to bitter despair to fury and contempt at what Hamilton saw as behavior damaging to the infant republic he loved. Hamilton took offense easily and wrote both voluminously and hot-bloodedly in his own defense. No spin doctors for him. Today, we will talk to Mr. Wilson about this important collection of the political writings of that rare combination of man of action and world-shaping public intellectual that was Alexander Hamilton. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With me on today’s show is Professor Elizabeth Anker, whose most recent book, Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), works to understand how the idea of freedom, seemingly so fundamental to our understanding of the American experience, is often the very concept that allows for the brutal deprivation of the freedom of others. As she writes, “ugly freedom entails a dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom.” Today we will be discussing Professor Anker’s theory of ugly freedom in the context of our unending crisis of gun violence in the United States. This show’s topic feels as essential as any that I have offered thus far. I hope you will find something hopeful in our conversation. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Unmasked: Covid, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town. The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, is a native of Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected government guidance and public health knowledge, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities. Sharonee Dasgupta is currently a graduate student in the department of anthropology at UMass Amherst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminated and exacerbated since 2020, with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) and the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on historically disadvantaged groups within the U.S. Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, explores and unpacks the public health crisis that is racism in her new book Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America (NYU Press, 2022). She describes how structural inequality undermines the interests of a thriving nation and the steps we can take to undo the pervasive nature of inequality to create more equitable and just systems. Dr. Bowen Matthew describes her personal relationship with the concepts of structural inequality and racism in the public health system, opening with a heart-wrenching ode to her father’s experience with poverty and prejudice, which ultimately led to his premature death. Through her family’s story, she explains how structural inequality is perpetuated on a large-enough scale and with a powerful-enough scope so as to virtually guarantee social outcomes that reflect predetermined hierarchies based on race and/or class, hierarchies that remain consistent across generations. These disproportionate outcomes are often dismissed as due to comorbidities without the attention paid to social factors are the primary cause of comorbidities, because oppression in its many forms blocks equitable access to the social determinants of health. These social determinants include, but are not limited to, clean and safe housing, adequate education, nutritious food and fresh water, access to recreational spaces, and mental health services. Individuals who lack these, through no fault of their own, are then obligated to accept disproportionate care, illness, and disturbingly shorter life spans then are the norm for many Americans and are much closer to life spans in impoverished countries. Dr. Bowen Matthew presents evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, detailing how law has played a central role in erecting disproportionate access to the social determinants of health, and therefore is a requisite tool for dismantling it. She provides a clear path to undoing structural racism and providing an equitable society to all, encouraging health providers, law makers, and citizens all to fight to dismantle the hurdles that many patients face because of the zip code in which they live. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2021) provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions—and university responses to them—expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education. Plantation politics are embedded in the everyday workings of universities—in not only the physical structures and spaces of academic institutions, but in its recruitment and attainment strategies, hiring practices, curriculum, and notions of sociality, safety, and community. The book is comprised of three sections that highlight how white supremacy shapes campus communities and classrooms; how current diversity and inclusion initiatives perpetuate inequality; and how students, staff, and faculty practice resistance in the face of institutional and legislative repression. Each chapter interrogates a connection between the academy and the plantation, exploring how Black people and their labor are viewed as simultaneously essential and disruptive to university cultures and economies. The volume is an indispensable read for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators invested in learning more about how power operates within education and imagining emancipatory futures. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The history of small political parties and the history of the American left are closely intertwined, especially in the book Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2021) by Daniel Soyer, professor of history at Fordham University. From its founding in 1944 until its fall in 2002, the Liberal Party played a strategic role in New York State politics. Founded by anti-communist labor activists, social democrats and liberals, the party brought a social democratic dimension to New York politics in its early years. In addition to running its own candidates, it made strategic use of New York State law that allows candidates to run on more than one party line. This enabled the Liberal Party to endorse a Democrat or a Republican who then ran as the candidate of a major party and the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party used this practice, called cross-endorsement, to tip the balance of votes by offering or withholding support. Although the Liberal Party is gone—and some critics say that in its final years it was little more than a patronage mill--it set a blueprint followed on the right by New York’s Conservative Party, and on the left by the state’s Working Families Party. The Liberal Party’s history illuminates the awkward relationship between principles and pragmatism, but it also helps us understand the role of third parties in American politics and the electoral fortunes of the more moderate end of the American left. Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York (Cornell, paperback, 2019) and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia, 2019). He can be reached at rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a new view of U.S. social movement history across the twentieth century by examining how movement organizations were covered in major national newspapers. The book analyzes U.S. social movements--ranging from temperance to women's suffrage to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street--in a broad comparative fashion. Drawing on the full set of digitized newspapers from the twentieth-century (a task that as little as twenty years ago was considered impossible for researchers), the book offers both an institutional history of news--why the media covered what they covered, and to what effect--and also shows the influence of news coverage on a range of social movements, from the well-known to the obscure. Media coverage is a crucial component of movement visibility; news can draw the general public into battles over new issues but also shapes how movements are perceived. The authors show how a movement's structure--its organization, as well as the protest and non-protests activities it undertakes--influence its coverage, and consider too how macro-political conditions shape movement coverage. They reveal surprising gaps between contemporaneous coverage and current scholarly focus; for instance, the labor movement received the most journalistic attention of any movement of the twentieth century, but it is greatly understudied in comparison to how much it dominated the public sphere. Taking stock of news coverage across a century of movements thus illuminates movements that were influential in public discourse but have been neglected by scholars. Edwin Amenta is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. His books include When Movements Matter and Bold Relief (both Princeton). Twitter @EdwinAmenta Neal Caren is associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Twitter @HaphazardSoc Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Politicians and corporations cannot only measure public opinion but also manipulate and create it. And they have been doing so since the 1930s when serious polling began. And as Professor Susan Herbst, author of Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics, explains early public opinion research raised hopes for better democratic practice but also led to fears for the future. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers--a previously unseen trove--and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe: An American Story (W. W. Norton, 2021) presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest--Baby Roe--now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations--not only about Norma and her children but about the broader "family" connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just recently, the Supreme Court rejected an argument by plaintiffs that police officers should no longer be protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity when they shoot or brutalize an innocent civilian. Qualified immunity is but one of several judicial inventions that shields state violence and thwarts the vindication of our rights. But aren't courts supposed to be protectors of individual rights? As Aziz Huq shows in The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (Oxford UP, 2021), history reveals a much more tangled relationship between the Constitution's system of independent courts and the protection of constitutional rights. While doctrines such as qualified immunity may seem abstract, their real-world harms are anything but. A highway patrol officer stops a person's car in violation of the Fourth Amendment, violently yanked the person out and threw him to the ground, causing brain damage. A municipal agency fires a person for testifying in a legal proceeding involving her boss's family-and then laughed in her face when she demanded her job back. In all these cases, state defendants walked away with the most minor of penalties (if any at all). Ultimately, we may have rights when challenging the state, but no remedies. In fact, federal courts have long been fickle and unreliable guardians of individual rights. To be sure, through the mid-twentieth century, the courts positioned themselves as the ultimate protector of citizens suffering the state's infringement of their rights. But they have more recently abandoned, and even aggressively repudiated, a role as the protector of individual rights in the face of abuses by the state. Ironically, this collapse highlights the position that the Framers took when setting up federal courts in the first place. A powerful historical account of the how the expansion of the immunity principle generated yawning gap between rights and remedies in contemporary America, The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies will reshape our understanding of why it has become so difficult to effectively challenge crimes committed by the state. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political action by citizens, and how we interpret and discuss that action in context of political structures. The title In the Street is a reference to the seminal French poster from May of 1968 that read “beauty is in the street,” and was adapted by the demonstrators in Turkey decades later, providing one of the many examples of street politics that illustrate the discussion of activism throughout the book. Street politics has many forms, such as protests, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience. Often such actions are confined to the binary analysis of successes and failures, only examining how likely an action is to bring about change. The origins of this understanding stem from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of popular sovereignty, rejection of theatricality, and the idealization of immediacy. Çidam argues that this Rousseauian framework dilutes the value of these actions, forcing them into a reductive duality and failing to acknowledge that movements can fail simply because of the class positions their members are forced to assume. Regardless of their failures, there is an inherent and aesthetic value to these political actions that can last beyond the actions themselves. Çidam’s alternative framework, developed through dissecting the viewpoints of political theorists Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antonio Negri, Jurgen Habermas, and Jacques Ranciere, redefines our understanding of the value of political action. In The Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship provides new perspectives and understandings of events like Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi uprising in Turkey, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Çidam explains that “intermediating practices” are opportunities for encounter and engagement among those who are involved in these street actions. This concept is applied to the ways that individuals might find unity with each other within these political actions. Through intermediating practices, individuals become “political friends,” an Aristotelian concept that builds a relationship of unity and equity between people despite their differences as a result of their shared experiences of political action. These concepts must lead us to the conclusion that the driving forces of political action—anger, rage, joy—cannot be reduced to the binary of either success or failure, as Rousseau would have it. In The Streets re-centers the on-the-ground efforts of individuals, focusing on these communal actions rather than their particular outcomes. Çidam concludes that while these moments of political friendship are fleeting, their transience does not denote failure because the rich and creative practices of political actors are naturally valuable. Tune in to hear about Çigdem Çidam’s interpretations of Negri’s, Habermas’, and Ranciere’s unique political conceptions, how a focus on political friendship in the Gezi protests of 2013 helped to formulate her theoretical lenses for this analysis, and how remembrance of these movements can help us struggle against the powers that be for the next historical moment. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (Routledge, 2019) turns a fresh interpretive lens on the past, drawing on a wide range of new histories of environmental activism to analyze the actions of those who created the movement and those who tried to thwart them. Concentrating on the decades since World War II, environmental historian Ellen Griffith Spears explores environmentalism as a "field of movements" rooted in broader social justice activism. Noting major legislative accomplishments, strengths, and contributions, as well as the divisions within the ranks, the book reveals how new scientific developments, the nuclear threat, and pollution, as well as changes in urban living spurred activism among diverse populations. The book outlines the key precursors, events, participants, and strategies of the environmental movement, and contextualizes the story in the dramatic trajectory of U.S. history after World War II. The result is a synthesis of American environmental politics that one reader called both "ambitious in its scope and concise in its presentation." This book provides a succinct overview of the American environmental movement and is the perfect introduction for students or scholars seeking to understand one of the largest social movements of the twentieth century up through the robust climate movement of today. Ellen Griffith Spears is a professor in the interdisciplinary New College and the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945 (2019/20) and the award-winning Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (2014). Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators. Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways. Rhetoric and Guns (Utah State UP, 2022) advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to 21st-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. Separating Church and State: A History (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the development of the concept of separation of church and state and the Supreme Court's application of it in the law. Steven K. Green finds that conservative criticisms of a separation of church and state overlook the strong historical and jurisprudential pedigree of the idea. Yet, arguing with liberal advocates of the doctrine, he notes that the idea remains fundamentally vague and thus open to loose interpretation in the courts. As such, the history of a wall of separation is more a variable index of American attitudes toward the forces of religion and state. Indeed, Green argues that the Supreme Court's use of the wall metaphor has never been essential to its rulings. The contemporary battle over the idea of a wall of separation has thus been a distraction from the real jurisprudential issues animating the contemporary courts. Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Long before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant. We see this play in pink slime local news sites and in the proliferation of truthers claiming to do their own research because of a deep distrust in the mainstream media. In Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia UP, 2022) Tucher argues that the creation of outward forms of factuality unleashed new opportunities for falsehood: News doesn’t have to be true as long as it looks true. Propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy—whether in print, on the radio, on television, or online—could be crafted to resemble the real thing. Dressed up in legitimate journalistic conventions, this “fake journalism” became inextricably bound up with right-wing politics, to the point where it has become an essential driver of political polarization. In the book and in this conversation, Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy. Andie Tucher the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor and the director of the Communications Ph.D. Program at the Columbia Journalism School. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Trayvon Generation (Grand Central, 2022) expands upon Elizabeth Alexander’s gripping essay — under the same name — originally published in The New Yorker amid the 2020 summer social unrest. This collection is a mediation on race by recounting the pervasiveness of racial violence in American culture. The Trayvon Generation weaves prose, poetry, and art to cast historical and cultural resonances to understand the human experience while also humanizing the Black dead and living. This slender and exquisite book is a profound assertation that even though Black pain has become normalized, African Americans have always sought to memorialize their people to keep their spirits, memories, and joy alive. N’Kosi Oates earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Most existing literature regarding civil-military relations in the United States references either the Cold War or post-Cold War era, leaving a significant gap in understanding as our political landscape rapidly changes. Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War (Oxford UP, 2020) builds upon our current perception of civil-military relations, filling in this gap and providing contemporary understanding of these concepts. The authors examine modern factors such as increasing partisanship and political division, evolving technology, new dynamics of armed conflict, and the breakdown of conventional democratic and civil-military norms, focusing on the multifaceted ways they affect civil-military relations and American society as a whole. Lionel Beehner, Risa Brooks, and Daniel Maurer, serving as both editors of the volume and authors themselves, recruited contributing authors who come from a diversity of backgrounds, many of whom have served in the military, or in the foreign service, have worked as policy makers, and many who have held academic appointments in security studies, war studies, and at the military academies as well as at civilian institutions. Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations helps to define and examine the roles and responsibilities of the military, civilian leadership, and the public, centering the sections of the book around these definitions, then delving deeper into the intricacies of their relations within the chapters in each section of the book. The first section of the book analyzes the military’s roles and responsibilities, focusing on limits of the military’s political activity as well as long-standing conventions and norms of professionalism that are part of the old Cold War structures. The second section explores the civilian side of the civil-military equation, particularly the role of the soldier, both as a member of society and a member of the military. This section also explores the marginalization of civilian voices in military policy making and factors that may contribute to that marginalization. The third section focuses on the relationship between society and the military, exploring societal attitudes toward the military and identifying how trends in partisanship and polarization are challenging civil-military relations. The fourth and final section of this volume examines the fragility and erratically fluid nature of our current historical moment, and how challenges in civil-military relations can arise from the changing realities of war, armed conflict, and domestic political dynamics. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The history of revolutionary politics is rich enough that it includes the full spectrum of inspiration and tragedy. Those with revolutionary aspirations have a number of rocks in their shoes to deal with, perhaps most famously the failure of the Soviet Union and the shadow of Stalinism. Those looking to remain faithful to the spirit of revolutionary Marxism while still seriously reckoning with the tragedies of the past will need to develop new routes, and for that to happen, alternative figures and histories will need to be turned to. One such figure many have found inspiration in is James P. Cannon, the American activist and agitator, most famous as the leading founder of American Trotskyism, and no one knows his life and times better than Bryan D. Palmer, here to discuss the first entry in his multi-volume biography of Cannon. The volume discussed in this episode, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (U Illinois Press, 2010), covers Cannon’s life from his birth in a small town in Kansas to his expulsion in 1928 from the Communist Party. It’s a story of a small-town local agitator who ends up mired in international controversy, surrounded by factional infighting in his own country but also deeply rooted in the revolutionary degeneration happening in Moscow as Stalin took over the party. In the face of this, Cannon slowly became depressed and disillusioned, in a political fog that wouldn’t be cleared until he stumbled upon a document in 1928 by Leon Trotsky that would point the way towards a revolutionary alternative that neither succumbed to Stalinism or capitalist-capitulation. It’s for this reason that Palmer’s account of Cannon’s life allows him to tell a very different history of communism in the 20th century, one that has been banished and dismissed for too long, and that will no doubt provide inspiration for many in the 21st century. Originally published in 2007 as part of the Illinois University Press series The Working Class in American History, it won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. Its sequel, the much longer James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38, was published much more recently and will be discussed in a later episode. In both works Palmer’s command of the vast archives of material are combined with an incredible capacity for storytelling, hitting a sweet spot of rigorous research and compelling historical reading. Anyone interested in the history of Marxism, American labor, class struggle, or simply looking for an alternative to the rot and decay of our current order will find in this book richly rewarding. Bryan D. Palmer is professor emeritus of history at Trent University. He is the former editor of Labour/Le Travail, and is the author of numerous books on radical social movements and labor history including Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers Strike of 1934, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression, and Marxism and Historical Practice (2 volumes). He was also a coeditor with Paul Le Blanc and Thomas Bias of the 3-volume document collection US Trotskyism 1928-1965. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this stunning debut collection, Catapult editor-in-chief and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn't always follow through. These nine daring essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that discord. Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service (Atria/One Signal, 2022) takes on the cartoon industry's pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law's refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems, and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire. In the spirit of Zadie Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Jia Tolentino, Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her lived experience to explore the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, what we value and what we demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. In Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (U Chicago Press, 2022), Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression (Southern Illinois UP, 2022) examines how African American working-class women, many of whom had just migrated to “the promised land” only to find hunger, cold, and unemployment, forged a region of revolutionary potential. A Brick and a Bible theorizes a tradition of Midwestern Black radicalism, a praxis-based ideology informed by but divergent from American Communism. Midwestern Black radicalism that contests that interlocking systems of oppression directly relates the distinct racial, political, geographic, economic, and gendered characteristics that make up the American heartland. This volume illustrates how, at the risk of their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, African American working-class women in the Midwest used their position to shape a unique form of social activism. Case studies of Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cleveland—hotbeds of radical activism—follow African American women across the Midwest as they participated in the Ford Hunger March, organized the Funsten Nut Pickers’ strike, led the Sopkin Dressmakers’ strike, and supported the Unemployed Councils and the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. Ford profoundly reimagines how we remember and interpret these “ordinary” women doing extraordinary things across the heartland. Once overlooked, their activism shaped a radical tradition in midwestern cities that continues to be seen in cities like Ferguson and Minneapolis today. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his sparkling and politically urgent new book Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Elfenbein shows with precision and panache the discursive, institutional, and political conditions and processes that have normalized anti-Muslim hate in the United States, especially over the last two decades. How does fear for a caricatured and dehumanized religious minority become an entrenched part of public discourse? Elfenbein engages and answers this question through a painstaking analysis of a range of actors and discourses across the political spectrum that have contributed to establishing Islamophobia as a formidably pernicious form of violence. In our conversation, we discuss the key themes and arguments of this book that is ideally suited to be taught in various undergraduate courses, especially the introductory Islam course and Islam in North America. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Award-winning journalist and editor Garrett Graff has produced a fascinating, propulsive, and captivating narrative about the Watergate scandal that rocked the United States and ultimately brought down a president. The idea of Watergate has long roots in American culture and politics, but Graff dives into this historical era, knitting together the actual reality of Watergate, and correcting, or at least interrogating the mythology that surrounds the scandal itself, the Nixon Administration, and this period in American politics. Watergate: A New History (Simon and Schuster, 2022) positions the Watergate burglary and cover-up within the broader “way of life” within the Nixon Administration, which was marked by a variety of different kinds of scandals, some of which are only now fully coming to light, others had been obscured at the time by the attention focused on Watergate. Graff outlines the dark criminal and conspiratorial mindset that dominated the Nixon Administration—and not simply the paranoia that is often associated with Nixon himself. Watergate: A New History delineates twelve different scandals, with overlapping actors and characters, executing wild schemes and crimes—and Graff notes that it was rarely clear where one scandal ended, and another began. Watergate was only one of the many scandals that entangled the Nixon Administration. Even so, the fallout from the Watergate scandal included 69 individuals who were criminally charged in association with the machinations around the break in and subsequent cover-up. Graff notes that Watergate was such a spectacle because it was such a Washington, D.C. story, integrating power, ambition, the media, and politics, and all wrapped around the way things happen or work in D.C. He also notes that the myth of Watergate and the role of journalists in uncovering the scandal and reporting it out is more real than apocryphal, but that there were more reporters than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein involved in following the story; Jack Nelson of the L.A. Times, and Seymour Hersh and Walter Rugaber at the New York Times all spent 1972 and 1973 covering the break-in and the evolving scandal. The way that elected officials approached the scandal and their role in uncovering its details is also a significant part of the story itself. Graff explained the distinction between how members of the Republican Party in the House and the Senate operated in the face of the Watergate scandal, how their behavior reflected a duty to carry out the work of a co-equal branch of government, the U.S. Congress, and how this is in contrast to the current Republican members of the House and Senate, who suppress their responsibilities as members of the legislature and elevate their role as members of the GOP. For those who already know much about Watergate and Nixon, this book will provide more insight, context, and understanding of the scandal that brought down the president. For those who might know little about the scandal, Watergate: A New History guides the reader through the history, politics, people, and events of a ceaselessly fascinating period in American political history. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society and a place apart from human ideas and institutions. But as environmental historian—and thru-hiker—Sarah Mittlefehldt argues, the trail is also a conduit for community engagement and a model for public-private cooperation and environmental stewardship. In Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics (U Washington Press, 2013), Mittlefehldt tells the story of the trail’s creation. The project was one of the first in which the National Park Service attempted to create public wilderness space within heavily populated, privately owned lands. Originally a regional grassroots endeavor, under federal leadership the trail project retained unprecedented levels of community involvement. As citizen volunteers came together and entered into conversation with the National Parks Service, boundaries between “local” and “nonlocal,” “public” and “private,” “amateur” and “expert” frequently broke down. Today, as Mittlefehldt tells us, the Appalachian Trail remains an unusual hybrid of public and private efforts and an inspiring success story of environmental protection. Sarah Mittlefehldt is an environmental historian and Professor of Earth, Environmental & Geographical Sciences at Northern Michigan University. Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is the first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Mario Daniels and Dr. John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. They argue that every single day beginning in the 1940s, US export controls have intervened in the global sharing of scientific-technological knowledge. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign (Fortress Academic, 2021), Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King’s political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today. Colleen Wessel-McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Justice Studies and the Director of the Master of Arts in Peace and Social Transformation program at the Earlham School of Religion. Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequality has been supplanted by a fast-evolving set of reflections on group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and identity, and economic conditions and culture. These assumptions are fodder for the culture wars. In The Identity Myth: Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality (Constable & Robinson, 2022), David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to rhetorical and cultural manipulation – class, race, sex, and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more ‘complex’ than they appear. Rather, there are commonalities more important to the creation of solidarity. David Swift speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the crisis of class and the deceptive allure of identity politics. We talk about the divisive nature of the contested claims of identity and about strategies for regaining control of the narrative. In a powerful call to arms, Swift argues that we must unite against these identity myths and embrace our differences to beat inequality. David Swift is a historian and writer who specialises in the history and contemporary politics of the British Left. He has written on the state of the Left for The Times, Fabian Review, Progress Online, Jewish Chronicle, and The Critic. He is the author of A Left for Itself, 2019.
The Emily Thornberry white van tweet story,
Gordon Brown's 'bigotgate',
Keir Starmer and 'beergate',
Tomiwa Owolade's essay on Anglican social conservatism in London, 'rooted' in David's work,
Rachel Dolezal is now an artist,
San Francisco school board recall,
White narcissism at a BLM protest.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the connections between the past and modern politics? In Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (UCL Press, 2022), Chiara Bonacchi, a Chancellor's Fellow in Heritage, Text and Data Mining and Senior Lecturer in Heritage at History, Classics & Archaeology and Edinburgh Futures Institute at University of Edinburgh, explores the uses of heritage by contemporary populist politics. Drawing on ‘big data’ sources, including Facebook and Twitter, along with a deep theoretical engagement with digital humanities and heritage, the book compares and contrasts key political events in Italy, USA, and the UK to show how the ancient world is deployed by both politicians and audiences. The book is essential reading for both humanities and political science scholars, along with anyone interested in understanding the current populist moment. The book is available open access here. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ronald Reagan’s hagiography has created an entire mythology around the 40th president of the US; anticommunism and the fight against the ‘Evil Empire’ are the central tropes of the Reagan story to this day. The culmination of this narrative arc is the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event which is still routinely attributed to Reagan and, particularly in conservative circles, and hailed as the ultimate validation of American political models and of American values. But the historical reality of the 1980s was far from ideologically monolithic. Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) paints a nuanced picture of the complex social and cultural landscape of the United States during Reagan’s two terms. The country was in turmoil, bitterly divided over the meaning of its recent past (from nostalgia for the 1950s to the trauma of the Vietnam War) and over the direction of its future. It was rocked by street protests fueled by a rebirth of activism comparable to that of the 1960s. It witnessed the rise of fringe conspiracy theories, of popular opposition to U.S. involvement in Central America, and of widespread anxieties over nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Hunt’s book captures, in fascinating detail, the enormous pushback to the anticommunist rhetoric of the Reagan regime from citizens, activists, and artists, and the role that American popular culture—from music, to television, to film— played in reflecting, and sometimes influencing, the dynamics of the age. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Christopher Gilbert, Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, has a new book that examines the understanding of American national character and culture through the works of caricature and comic representations. Gilbert specifically focuses on this kind of work that is produced during moments of crisis, particularly during wartime. Wartime often prompts self-understanding for a nation, since there is a demand that the reason for war is made clear, and the role of the nation is seen in this context. Gilbert notes that in the early days of the republic, Benjamin Franklin turned to caricature to help define or start to clarify an American national character, particularly in distinction from British colonial power. And this concept of national character is different than either patriotism or nationalism, since it reflects how citizens, individually and as a whole, understand themselves as a nation, and as separate from other nations. Unique histories, characteristics, and “belonging” all contribute to this broader sense of self for a nation. Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) examines the various symbols and images that have become part of the American national identity, noting, often, how those images shift and change with time and context. Gilbert notes that these recursive themes and images are distinct in different historical moments, providing a kind of complexity to the images and how and what they communicate. Consider the image of the bald eagle, which has been integrated into American national character for some time, but has been drawn and redrawn to represent imperialism, laziness, or cultural power at different points in U.S. history. Gilbert explains that humor itself is situational and situated, a sign or signal of the time, and that caricature and comic artists and political and editorial cartoonists are commenting on and positioning their work within a particular historical point, and in so doing, also reflecting American cultural politics. Caricature and National Character brings a variety of artists together in a way that intertwines their work without silo-ing them within chronological periods. Their work is made, in a certain way, to be in conversation, and to help to understand the United States as a warring nation, even if there is no shooting war transpiring at times. The artists and cartoonists are using their own membership within the national character to present ideas and commentary on what it means, in time of war, to protect national character and what it is that needs protecting. These images, which can be explored across history, carry significant weight because they are reflecting on the notion of national character, which is often more clearly on display during times of war. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Berry, Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies on American scapegoating, Chinese censorship and the sad story of Fang Fang's brave and influential COVID-19 memoir, Wuhan Diary. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Howard Mortman's book When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill (Cherry Orchard, 2020) is about the rabbis. It’s an unprecedented examination of 160 years of Jewish prayers delivered in the literal and figurative center of American democracy. With exhaustive research written in approachable prose, it uniquely tells the story of over 400 rabbis giving over 600 prayers since the Civil War days―who they are and what they say. Few written works examine the tradition of prayers in government. This new angle will appeal to students and lovers of American history, Congress, American Jewish history, and religion. It’s a welcome, important addition to our understanding of Congress and Jewish contribution to America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The word neoliberalism is often used more as an insult than a description of a set of beliefs. And people can be rather hazy about the beliefs it refers to – although the mix generally includes free markets, privatisation and globalisation and high levels of inequality. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford UP, 2022), Professor Gary Gerstle of Cambridge University charts how both rightists and leftists embraced neo liberal ideas which prevailed for some three decades until they were challenged by the populist ethno nationalism of Trump and his imitators. But can ethnonationalism prevail? Professor Gerstle argues its too soon to say whether ethnonationalism will become the new post neoliberal orthodoxy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon—kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries, and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people’s demands for better ethics in art. But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power? With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Farah Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race. By asking questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age (Astra Publishing, 2022) provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world. Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students. The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day. Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Big No (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is an edited volume, assembled and overseen by political theorist Kennan Ferguson, who also provides the Introduction. This group of essays came out of a conference at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The theme of the conference, also created and managed by Kennan Ferguson, and of the book, is the concept of “no” in terms of our understanding of thought, politics, and philosophy. The contributors to the book come mostly from philosophic backgrounds – and thus the emphasis in these articles is on pushing against established theoretical conceptions. But the concept of The Big No is confronting not just saying “no” to something but to decline to work towards solutions, to resolve to say no and not to determine other options. As Ferguson notes in the Introduction, No, in contrast to Yes, “stands against consensus, against assumption, against presumption, against the easy passage…it disturbs order and propriety, forcing power to act nakedly and bringing to the forefront the implicit and accepted.” The essays in The Big No trace three different kinds of No. The first is the no of resistance—which may, at its most radical, become the no of revolution. The second no is the no of forking paths—an entire grouping of different possibilities and results—this no includes the challenge to reconsider philosophy, to instead take up the idea of non-philosophy, or to completely undercut the very basis of philosophy. The third no is of absolute refusal, of abolition. This third no “looks elsewhere,” denying the basis for whatever request is being made. This no also refuses “the presumptions of unity, of communal experience, and of collective purpose.” These essays take the reader through a variety of schools of thought and modes of thinking, as we are considering what it is to refuse, to deny, to say no to structures, power, demands, expectations, processes, and ways of thinking. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politics.” Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe. This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one—and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia UP, 2020) offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle. Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. He is also cohost of the Why Theory podcast, which brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the present that might bring into being a more just future. In Whose Ruins could easily be categorized as Environmental History or Native Studies. But Puglionesi forges a book that is more than either field could accomplish alone. The “power” of the book’s subtitle has a double meeting: political power and the energy sources of a capitalist economy (oil, hydropower, and nuclear energy). The book is organized into four sections, or “sites,” that visit four evocative land features: a hulking, conical earth mound in present-day West Virginia adjacent to a decommissioned state prison; wells dug into the ground in smalltown Pennsylvania; rocks that tell stories (they’re etched with petroglyphs) along the Susquehanna River with kin fragmented elsewhere; the Sonoran Desert rich with pottery, uranium, and physicists, both white and Native. In each of these sites, people with different political projects—some announced, some implicit—have generated multiple accounts of the landscapes and ideas of value. Within a context of shifting political power, white-settler stories about each site displaced empirical knowledge of Native labor, skill, presence, and endurance with harmful fables of white origins and of Native communities’ need for white “rescue.” Into the present day, the effect has been to justify white theft of Native land and deadly violence against tribal communities for the purposes of resource extraction. In the end, even the false white origin stories became a resource to commodify. Puglionesi is a writer of poetry, fiction, academic scholarship, and, now, In Whose Ruins, a mass-market trade publication. She holds a PhD in History of Medicine and is a lecturer in Medicine, Science and Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. On the page, Puglionesi has a friendly, funny, quiet presence—an affable Where’s Waldo that centers the relationships of historical actors (including spirits) and the work of scholars such as Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Eve Tuck. This conversation explores ways of living in good relation via writing; the status of truth; the relevance of singer-songwriter Prince for labor studies; and many other themes. It discusses the important book by Chadwick Allen, Earthworks Rising (Minnesota, 2022). In an unrecorded snippet, we also swap names of our favorite local indie bookstores. So check out Red Emma’s the next time you’re in Baltimore, MD (or on Bookshop.org) and Symposium, Riff Raff, and Paper Nautilus when your compass points to Providence, RI. Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies. Disinformation explains:
How human psychology—the very way our brains work—can leave us vulnerable to disinformation.
How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture.
The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories.
How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think.
The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture.
Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the "affective infrastructures" emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire--crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era's immense environmental struggles. Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century (U Minnesota Press, 2022) reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal describes how narratives of 9/11 and the war on terror have been constructed over the last twenty years and the various ways in which they have justified state violence against Muslims. Hilal offers answers to many questions, including and especially how the war on terror started, what its impact on American Muslims and Muslims abroad has been, and how to work to dismantle it. Hilal holds a PhD in Justice, Law, and Society from American University and has received many awards, including the Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, and a Reebok Human Rights Fellowship. The book is written accessibly, making difficult concepts and themes easy to follow and understand. It is easily assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses and makes for an essential read for policymakers and for anyone interested in the Muslim American experience post-9/11, and perhaps anyone who denies the existence of institutional Islamophobia and naively thinks the U.S. is the beacon of light and justice in the world—because this book shows with ample evidence that it’s not. In our conversation today, Hilal tells us the story of the origins of the book, what its contributions are, what makes it different from other books on Islamophobia, the roles that U.S. presidents since 9/11 have played in reinforcing and exacerbating Islamophobic rhetoric in the U.S. We also talk about the many U.S. policies, domestic as well as international, that legitimate the existence of Islamophobic state violence, the ways in which the FBI uses informants to entrap Muslims, the legal and narrative strategies that allow for the U.S. to commit extreme forms of torture against Muslims. We end with a discussion on internalized Islamophobia and, among other things, its harmful impact on Muslim Americans. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today’s Postscript uniquely engages abortion politics by addressing structural political issues (voter suppression, gerrymandering, dilutions of minority voting, obstacles to women registering their positions politically), inconsistencies in Justice Samuel Alito’s majority draft, the ascent of the medical profession, the intersection of race, gender, and religion, narratives of morality, the genesis of white evangelical opposition, myths created by popular culture and abortion stereotypes, and more. Dr. Lilly J. Goren (Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University), Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer (Associate Professor of Public Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dr. Andrew R. Lewis (Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati), Dr. Candis Watts Smith (Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and co-host of the Democracy Works Podcast) and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson (Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver). Some of the books and articles mentioned in the podcast:
Diana Greene Foster, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having – or Being Denied – an Abortion
Rebecca Kreitzer’s amazing slide deck of abortion facts and recommended reading list.
Rebecca Kreitzer and Candis Watts Smith in the Monkey Cage, “What Alito’s draft gets wrong about women and political power”
Andrew Lewis, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars
Ziad Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists:How Social Movement Mobilization WorksJosh Wilson, Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right’s Radical Struggle to Transform Law & Legal Culture
Mary Ziegler, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present
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Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative practices (e.g. cancelling relationship to "dissing"), celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture (especially around consumer nationalist cancellings), and national politics (U.S. conservative criticisms of cancelling, and nationalist cancelling events in mainland China). Her analysis moves beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, and underscores the different configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in specific cultural and political contexts. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books, 2018), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of socialist writers and organizers, providing a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism. Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University–Newark and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin magazine. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mark V. Tushnet's book The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941 (Cambridge UP, 2022) describes the closing of one era in constitutional jurisprudence and the opening of another. This comprehensive study of the Supreme Court from 1930 to 1941 – when Charles Evans Hughes was Chief Justice – shows how nearly all justices, even the most conservative, accepted the broad premises of a Progressive theory of government and the Constitution. The Progressive view gradually increased its hold throughout the decade, but at its end, interest group pluralism began to influence the law. By 1941, constitutional and public law was discernibly different from what it had been in 1930, but there was no sharp or instantaneous Constitutional Revolution in 1937 despite claims to the contrary. This study supports its conclusions by examining the Court's work in constitutional law, administrative law, the law of justiciability, civil rights and civil liberties, and statutory interpretation. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and unreliability fly around and yet everyone seriously engaged in the political process studies polls closely because they think they contain important truths. So are polls becoming more reliable because of improved techniques or less so because of the increasingly fractured and perhaps, increasingly difficult to measure nature of western democracies. British polling expert Mark Pak – author of Polls Unpacked - discusses the future of opinion polls. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity. Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding one another is hurting our relationships and our society. In I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times (BenBella Books, 2022), Mónica takes us to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt—broken conversations among confounded people. Drawing from cross-partisan conversations she’s had, organized, or witnessed everywhere from the echo chambers on social media to the wheat fields in Oregon to raw, unfiltered fights with her own family on election night, Mónica shows how you can put your natural sense of wonder to work for you immediately, finding the answers you need by talking with people—rather than about them—and asking the questions you want, curiously. This podcast episode is a recording of a live event co-hosted by Gather, an initiative of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon that focuses on community-centered journalism. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Does protest influence political representation? If so, which groups are most likely to benefit from collective action? The Advantage of Disadvantage: Costly Protest and Political Representation for Marginalized Groups (Cambridge UP, 2022) makes a provocative claim: protests are most effective for disadvantaged groups. According to author LaGina Gause, legislators are more responsive to protesters than non-protesters, and after protesting, racial and ethnic minorities, people with low incomes, and other low-resource groups are more likely than white and affluent protesters to gain representation. Gause also demonstrates that online protests are less effective than in-person protests. Drawing on literature from across the social sciences as well as formal theory, a survey of policymakers, quantitative data, and vivid examples of protests throughout U.S. history, The Advantage of Disadvantage provides invaluable insights for scholars and activists seeking to understand how groups gain representation through protesting. LaGina Gause is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are at the intersection of U.S. political institutions and political behavior with a focus on racial and ethnic politics, inequality, protest, and representation. Before joining the department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego as an assistant professor, she was a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. She tweets @LaGina_Gause. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò’s book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (U Chicago Press, 2019), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Aaron Cohen covers the arts for numerous publications and teaches English, journalism, and humanities at City Colleges of Chicago. He is the author of Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace." Aaron Cohen on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Robert E. Gutsche Jr. examines the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on journalistic practices, rhetoric, and discourses. Rooted in critical theory and cultural studies, it asks what life may be like without Trump, not only for journalism but also for American society more broadly. The book places perspectives and tensions around the Trump presidency in one spot, focusing on the underlying ideological forces in tensions around media trust, Trumpism, and the role of journalism in it all. It explores how journalists dealt with racist rhetoric from the White House, relationships between the Office of the President and social media companies, citizens, and journalists themselves, while questioning whether journalism has learned the right lessons for the future. More importantly, chapters on liberal media "bias," the First 100 Days of the Biden Presidency, gender, and race, and how journalists should adopt measures to "reduce harm" hint as to where politics and journalism may go next. Reshaping the scholarly and public discourse about where we are headed in terms of the presidency and publics, social media, and journalism, this book will be an important resource for scholars and graduate students of journalism, media studies, communication studies, political science, race and ethnic studies and sociology. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton University Press, 2022) presents a first draft of history by offering needed perspective on one of the nation's most divisive presidencies. Acclaimed political historian Julian Zelizer brings together many of today's top scholars to provide balanced and strikingly original assessments of the major issues that shaped the Trump presidency. When Trump took office in 2017, he quickly carved out a loyal base within an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, dominated the news cycle with an endless stream of controversies, and presided over one of the most contentious one-term presidencies in American history. These essays cover the crucial aspects of Trump's time in office, including his administration's close relationship with conservative media, his war on feminism, the solidification of a conservative women's movement, his response to COVID-19, the border wall, growing tensions with China and NATO allies, white nationalism in an era of Black Lives Matter, and how the high-tech sector flourished. The Presidency of Donald J. Trump reveals how Trump was not the cause of the political divisions that defined his term in office but rather was a product of long-term trends in Republican politics and American polarization more broadly. With contributions by Kathleen Belew, Angus Burgin, Geraldo Cadava, Merlin Chowkwanyun, Bathsheba Demuth, Gregory Downs, Jeffrey Engel, Beverly Gage, Nicole Hemmer, Michael Kazin, Daniel C. Kurtzer, James Mann, Mae Ngai, Margaret O'Mara, Jason Scott Smith, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Leandra Zarnow. Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. A CNN political analyst and a regular guest on NPR, he is the author of many books, including Burning Down the House, The Fierce Urgency of Now, and Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement. Twitter @julianzelizer Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the rights and wrongs of toppling statues? Sometimes everyone agrees it’s a good idea. After the second world war, for example, the defeat of fascism meant that all over Europe Hitler statues were toppled and destroyed. After the collapse of communism some statues of Stalin actually survived. Just a couple of years ago Black Lives Matter protests led to the hauling down statues of slaveholders and imperialists – for example in the UK a statue of slaver – and philanthropist, Edward Colston was hurled into a harbour. Some argued Colston should be left alone because he was just a man of his time. So, when is it right to tear down a statue and do you need a democratically elected committee to make the decision? A discussion with screenwriter and historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why has the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office proved so persistent in American politics? In Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Christian Dyogi Phillips argues that any analysis must contend with multiple dimensions of identity, context, and the simultaneous dynamism of opportunity and constraint. Complementing previous studies with her original datasets and rich interviews, Phillips demonstrates how two simultaneous and interactive processes shape electoral opportunity across groups. At the national level, majority-white districts sharply limit realistic opportunities for Latinx and Asian Americans of either gender to get on the ballot – and partisan politics further narrows prospects for women from these groups. At the local and group level, within districts and among Asian American and Latinx political elites and activists, the scarcity of viable opportunities exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push Latinas and Asian American women further from the pipeline. Phillips’s integration of national and local-level processes reveals that the pathways to getting on the ballot are few and far between for Latinx and Asian Americans – and especially fraught with prospects for exclusion of Latinas and Asian American women. Race and gender simultaneously constrain and facilitate electoral opportunities for Asian American women and men, Latinas, and Latinos. These sharp differences in opportunities across groups help explain persistent underrepresentation among elected officials. Dr. Christian Dyogi Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. Her research addresses political behavior, electoral institutions, and political incorporation, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, gender and immigrant communities in American politics. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Race is the subject of passionate and increasingly angry debate. But amidst all the talk of unconscious bias it’s an area into which many fear to tread. In this podcast Professor McWhorter of Colombia University outlines his sometimes controversial views on these issues and explains why he wants to debate them in public. His latest book is Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do social movements intersect with the agendas of mainstream political parties? When they are integrated with parties, are they coopted? Or are they more radically transformative? Examining major episodes of contention in American politics – from the Civil War era to the women's rights and civil rights movements to the Tea Party and Trumpism today – Sidney Tarrow tackles these questions and provides a new account of how the interactions between movements and parties have been transformed over the course of American history. In Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development (Cambridge UP, 2021), he shows that the relationships between movements and parties have been central to American democratization – at times expanding it and at times threatening its future. Today, movement politics have become more widespread as the parties have become weaker. The future of American democracy hangs in the balance. Professor Sidney Tarrow is Emeritus Maxwell Upson Professor of Government and Adjunct Professor at Cornell Law School. He is a leading expert on social movements and contentious behaviour. He has published more than sixteen books and numerous articles on the movements' political opportunities, social networks, cultural frames, and forms of collective action. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion. McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state. This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era. Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Read more by Charles McCrary:
"The Supreme Court and the Strange Politics of the 'Sincere Believer,'" Religion & Politics, Apr. 2022
"The Antisocial Strain of Sincere Religious Beliefs Is on the Rise," The New Republic, Apr. 2022
"The Baffling Legal Standard Fueling Religious Objections to Vaccine Mandates," The New Republic, Sept. 2021
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Political Scientist Stacy Ulbig has a new book that dives into the political attitudes and behaviors of college students to assess how polarization and partisan antipathy in the general public have some genesis on college campuses. Angry Politics: Partisan Hatred and Political Polarization Among College Students (UP of Kansas, 2020) explores affective polarization, and elicited responses from students who have noted that they are experiencing self-censorship, across the political spectrum. The study measured levels of political animosity based on different kinds of news media consumption, with those who consumed social media as the source of their news demonstrating the most animosity towards opposition partisans. Students tend to be nervous when faced with having to deal with conflict, and this inclination also leads them to self-sort and isolate from those who hold different political views. At the same time, the research indicates that students are feeling more vocal in articulating their opinions and beliefs. Part of the experience at college is to learn how to listen to different perspectives and opinions, and to assess diverse input and information. This study is fascinating, examining the layers of student behavior around politics in an atmosphere that is characterized as fraught by a variety of news outlets. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The events of January 6th 2021 are contested in the US. For some supporters of Donald Trump it was, and remains, a case of a legitimate protest against a rigged election. For opponents of Mr. Trump, it was an attempt to bully Congress through physical intimidation into refusing to validate the correct election result. That so many Americans believe the election was rigged raises questions about the nature of right wing politics in the US. This podcast covers these issues with Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Donald Trump shocked the nation in 2016 by winning the presidency through an ultraconservative, anti-immigrant platform, but, despite the electoral surprise, Trump's far-right views were not an aberration, nor even a recent phenomenon. In Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), John Huntington shows how, for almost a century, the far right has forced so-called "respectable" conservatives to grapple with their concerns, thereby intensifying right-wing thought and forecasting the trajectory of American politics. Ultraconservatives of the twentieth century were the vanguard of modern conservatism as it exists in the Republican Party of today. Far-Right Vanguard chronicles the history of the ultraconservative movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century. Often marginalized as outliers, the far right grew out of the same ideological seedbed that nourished mainstream conservatism. Ultraconservatives were true reactionaries, dissenters seeking to peel back the advance of the liberal state, hoping to turn one of the major parties, if not a third party, into a bastion of true conservatism. In the process, ultraconservatives left a deep imprint upon the cultural and philosophical bedrock of American politics. Far-right leaders built their movement through grassroots institutions, like the John Birch Society and Christian Crusade, each one a critical node in the ultraconservative network, a point of convergence for activists, politicians, and businessmen. This vibrant, interconnected web formed the movement's connective tissue and pushed far-right ideas into the political mainstream. Conspiracy theories, nativism, white supremacy, and radical libertarianism permeated far-right organizations, producing an uncompromising mindset and a hyper-partisanship that consumed conservatism and, eventually, the Republican Party. Ultimately, the far right's politics of dissent—against racial progress, federal power, and political moderation—laid the groundwork for the aggrieved, vitriolic conservatism of the twenty-first century. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his fascinating and riveting new book Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (NYU Press, 2021), historian Richard Brent Turner tells a moving though rarely discussed narrative of the intersection and cross-pollination between Jazz and African American Islam from the 1940s to the 1970s. How did Islam and conversion to Islam inform the lives, careers, and musical productions of prominent jazz musicians in this period? And how did jazz spaces and culture provide the fodder for important African American Muslim movements and figures, such as the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Turner addresses these and other questions with profound historical depth and analytical ingenuity. Over the course of this book, the reader learns about such enormously interesting themes as the landscape of African American politics during the interwar period and beyond in major Northeastern cities (especially Boston), the intimate relationship between Jazz and the Ahmadiyya, the relationship between John Coltrane and Malcolm X, and the encounter of Jazz with Black internationalism. This lucidly written book will also animate great discussions in the classroom. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Since its establishment, Social Security has become the financial linchpin of American retirement. Yet demographic trends—longer lifespans and declining birthrates—mean that this popular program now pays more in benefits than it collects in revenue. Without reforms, 83 million Americans will face an immediate benefit cut of 20 percent in 2034. How did we get here and what is the solution? In Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age (Princeton University Press, 2022), R. Douglas Arnold explores the historical role that Social Security has played in American politics, why Congress has done nothing to fix its insolvency problem for three decades, and what legislators can do to save it. What options do legislators have as the program nears the precipice? They can raise taxes, as they did in 1977, cut benefits, as they did in 1983, or reinvent the program, as they attempted in 2005. Unfortunately, every option would impose costs, and legislators are reluctant to act, fearing electoral retribution. Arnold investigates why politicians designed the system as they did and how between 1935 and 1983 they allocated—and reallocated—costs and benefits among workers, employers, and beneficiaries. He also examines public support for the program, and why Democratic and Republican representatives, once political allies in expanding Social Security, have become so deeply polarized about fixing it. As Social Security edges closer to crisis, Fixing Social Security offers a comprehensive analysis of the political fault lines and a fresh look at what can be done—before it is too late. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest mass political organization. Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, it has played a central role in defining American society, whether it was exercising power or contesting it. But what has the party stood for through the centuries, and how has it managed to succeed in elections and govern? In What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the party’s long-running commitment to creating “moral capitalism”―a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. As the party evolved towards a more inclusive egalitarian vision, it won durable victories for Americans of all backgrounds. But it also struggled to hold together a majority coalition and advance a persuasive agenda for the use of government. Kazin traces the party’s fortunes through vivid character sketches of its key thinkers and doers, from Martin Van Buren and William Jennings Bryan to the financier August Belmont and reformers such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Sidney Hillman, and Jesse Jackson. He also explores the records of presidents from Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Throughout, Kazin reveals the rich interplay of personality, belief, strategy, and policy that defines the life of the party―and outlines the core components of a political endeavor that may allow President Biden and his co-partisans to renew the American experiment. Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and editor emeritus of Dissent. His books include American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, The Populist Persuasion, and A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of the University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2022) is a bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth. In this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, Dr. Joseph Fishkin and Dr. William Forbath show that a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought. Dr. Fishkin and Dr. Forbath argue that “The constitutional order does rest and depend on a political-economic order. That political-economic order does not maintain itself. It requires action (as well as forbearance from action) from each part of the government. The content of what is required changes radically over time in a dynamic way in response to changes in the economy and in politics. But we believe the basic principles of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition remain affirmative constitutional obligations of government today: to prevent an oligarchy from emerging and amassing too much power; to preserve a broad and open middle class as a counterweight against oligarchy and a bulwark of democratic life; and to include everyone, not just those privileged by race or sex, in a democracy of op- portunity that is broad enough to unite us all.” Dr. Fishkin and Dr. Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy-of-opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of the Slave Power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the “economic royalists” and “industrial despots.” The book argues that our current understanding of what counts as a constitutional argument is anachronistic and limiting. In fact, the authors argue that “advocates of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition and their opponents throughout the long period from the founding through the New Deal disagreed about many things, but they agreed that part of arguing about the Constitution is making claims about what it requires of our political economy. “ This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Steven J. Brady places slavery at the centre of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Dr. Brady argues that “slavery was defined by policymakers and laypeople alike as central to US interactions with four continents—whether for good or bad. America’s security, prosperity, and geographical and political reach were all connected, in one way or another, with bonded labour. It is no surprise, then, that Americans looked on, and conducted, their relations with the world with a conviction that slavery was central to the nation’s international role.” He argues that this mindset around the centrality of American slavery therefore “forced the United States to act in the international sphere in ways that it otherwise would not have, and to interact with the Atlantic world in a more dynamic way than its leaders might have preferred.” Dr. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable. The book argues that the “proclivity of slavery to enmesh the nation with the wider world in unwanted ways was manifested again and again throughout the time period up to 1865. From vainly seeking the return of escaped slaves under President George Washington to the failed attempts of President Abraham Lincoln to settle their freed brethren somewhere—anywhere—else, one sees the real limits placed on the nation’s ability to shape and implement a consistent foreign policy…. Slavery was not the only factor that contributed to this frustration of American aims to conduct a largely unilateralist foreign policy in its early years. Nor was it the only reason why America frequently found itself unable to achieve its foreign relations goals. But it was among the most significant reasons.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Rudalevige, the Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College, has a new book that examines the processes that transpires in the generation of executive orders—noting that the process itself is not simply done with the stroke of a pen. Rudalevige, an expert on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Executive Branch, started to pursue this particular research project as a result of some archival work he was doing at OMB. Because executive orders go through OMB, Rudalevige came upon decades of files of different proposed executive orders in his work on the Office of Management and Budget; and what seemed like a kind of side project became an extensive, quantitative, and qualitative study of the process that gives birth to an executive order or that may eventually kill an executive order. By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power (Princeton UP, 2021) traces the process that brings together different voices from within the Executive Branch on the substance that becomes the executive order itself. The research is also situated in the context of a more and more gridlocked Congress, with one president after another finding themselves frustrated in their efforts to implement their agendas. One in five executive orders are not issued. Those that are not issued are generally not random. But the process of advocating or pushing back on a potential order is complex and often involves a host of different agencies bargaining with teach other and with OMB and the president. This window into the process gives us significant insight into bureaucratic politics at the national level. This is also a reflection on how the White House and the bureaucracy work—can a president get something done from his perch in the Oval Office, or do particular agencies have jurisdiction and the capacity to move policy and ideas forward within the scope of established law and regulation? This is all explored in By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power, which is a fascinating look behind the scenes at how presidents and the bureaucracy interact. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The study of the religious right has in many ways overshadowed other strands of U.S. religious history in the 20th century. This is owed in no small part to the powerful political role played by evangelical Christians in the Republican Party today, where they have helped set party positions for the past several decades. However, to focus on this dimension of religious history exclusively misses several other trends. Until the 1960s, the largest and most politically significant churches were mainline Protestant denominations such as the Methodist Church, and these bodies carved out a very different set of politics. In his new book Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Gene Zubovich demonstrates the role these churches played in issues like the Great Depression, New Deal, the Cold War, and ultimately Jim Crow. These churches were politically powerful, large, and in many cases counted many adherents in the halls of political power in the United States. Zubovich notes the role of theologians whom he terms “ecumenical Protestants” that helped to create a framework of human rights, but also notes the ways that anti-racist discourses and other ideas taken up by these churches encountered backlash and resistance in the United States. Ultimately, Zubovich’s book is a reminder that even given the religious right’s political power, there are several different strands of religious history in the United States. Zeb Larson is a writer and historian based in Columbus, Ohio. He received his PhD at The Ohio State University in 2019. To suggest a book or contact him, please e-mail him at zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his major work, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue (Vintage, 2017), acclaimed historian and judicial authority Melvin Urofsky examines the great dissents throughout the Court's long history. Constitutional dialogue is one of the ways in which we as a people reinvent and reinvigorate our democratic society. The Supreme Court has interpreted the meaning of the Constitution, acknowledged that the Court's majority opinions have not always been right, and initiated a critical discourse about what a particular decision should mean before fashioning subsequent decisions--largely through the power of dissent. Urofsky shows how the practice grew slowly but steadily, beginning with the infamous and now overturned case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) during which Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion upheld slavery and ending with the present age of incivility, in which reasoned dialogue seems less and less possible. Dissent on the court and off, Urofsky argues in this major work, has been a crucial ingredient in keeping the Constitution alive and must continue to be so. Melvin I. Urofsky is an American historian and professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the modernist-fundamentalist controversy came to a head in the early twentieth century, an image of the “fighting fundamentalist” was imprinted on the American cultural consciousness. To this day, the word “fundamentalist” often conjures the image of a fire-breathing preacher―strident, unyielding in conviction . . . and almost always white. But did this major religious perspective really stop cold in its tracks at the color line? Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (NYU Press, 2021) challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith―doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth―against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements. Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression. Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the US constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. In The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Randy Barnett and Dr. Evan Bernick argue that the Supreme Court has long misunderstood or ignored the original meaning of the amendment’s key clauses, covering the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process of law, and the equal protection of the laws. In fact, they argue that “it is simply not the case that the Court’s current Fourteenth Amendment doctrine gives us everything that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment promises.” Dr. Barnett and Dr. Bernick contend that the Fourteenth Amendment was the culmination of decades of debates about the meaning of the antebellum constitution. Antislavery advocates advanced arguments informed by natural rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the common law. They also utilised what is today called public-meaning originalism. Although their arguments lost in the courts, the Republican Party was formed to advance an antislavery political agenda, eventually bringing about abolition. Then, when abolition alone proved insufficient to thwart Southern repression and provide for civil equality, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. It went beyond abolition to enshrine in the Constitution the concept of Republican citizenship and granted Congress power to protect fundamental rights and ensure equality before the law. Finally, Congress used its powers to pass Reconstruction-era civil rights laws that tell us much about the original scope of the amendment. In this book, the authors identified the original meaning of the phrase “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” by examining the evidence from the Founding, from the antebellum period, from the drafting and ratification of the clause, and from the post-ratification interpretations in Congress and by courts and academic commentators. They argue that this mass of evidence shows that “privileges or immunities” encompassed civil rights, as distinguishes from “political” or “social” rights, and included the civil right to impartial treatment by civic institutions.” With attention to primary sources, the book shows how the principles of the Declaration eventually came to modify the Constitution and proposes workable doctrines for implementing the key provisions of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How did Steve Bannon come to believe the strange things he believes? The influential, former Trump aid, began as a Democrat-supporting Naval officer with an interest in Buddhism and transcendental meditation. He is now an anti-globalist, sympathizer of “Traditionalists” who look forward to a cataclysmic moment which will lead to a golden age of elitist, hierarchical, spiritual rule promoting long-lost essential truths. He uses the pseudonym "Alec Guinness." And Bannon believes in something akin to “the force” in Star Wars. How did Bannon undergo this transformation? In this episode, Owen Bennett-Jones sits down with Benjamin Teitelbaum, author of War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (Dey Street Books, 2020) to find out how Bannon became Bannon. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Pundits, politicians, and scholars often use words like "liberalism" and "populism" uncritically. Dr. Gregg Cantrell, professor of history at Texas Christian University, argues that not only do these terms have specifically, historically contingent meanings, but also that one can draw a direct link from one to the other. In The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism (Yale UP, 2020), Cantrell explains how the populists weren't simply racist rural men, but instead had complicated ideologies and policy views, and an expansive worldview that serves as a forbearer to 20th and early 21st century liberalism. The Texas Revolt is driven by people - Lyndon Johnson's grandfather Sam Johnson, Black activist and avowed populist JB Rayner, the Texas judge and gubernatorial candidate Tom Nugent - and Cantrell uses their stories to paint a complicated, and remarkably modern, picture of the populists and the Texas People's Party at the end of the nineteenth century. Although their political party fell apart after the 1896 election, their ideas lingered in American politics, eventually becoming the core of the mid-twentieth century Democratic Party platform. The People's Revolt convincingly shows that the populist are not what you think, and that while it's easy to kill a political party, quashing ideas is much more difficult. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We tend to associate Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion in 1973, with the choice not to have children. But Roe was equally transformative for Americans' understanding of family--having and raising children also came to be thought of as a choice. In Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), Sara Matthiesen highlights the distance between this idea of choice and worsening forms of inequality that have forced far too many to work harder simply to create and maintain a family. In this new and timely work, Matthiesen shows how the effects of incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, disease, and poverty have been worsened by state neglect. At its core, Reproduction Reconceived is an urgent historical account: of the myriad labors that families have been made to perform simply to survive, and of the inevitable costs that pile up when family making is seen as a private responsibility rather than a public good. Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. Twitter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Max Krochmal and Todd Moye’s Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2021) is a critical contribution that uncovers histories of activism in the lone state. From El Paso, Dallas, and to the Rio Grande Valley, social justice initiatives were critical for fighting Jim Crow and Juan Crow. The contributors make the case that various towns and cities across the state developed coalitions across Black and Brown racial lines. In this episode, Tiffany speaks with Drs. Max Krochmal, Katherine Bynum, and Todd Moye about the process for collecting histories of the long liberation struggles in Texas. Moye, Krochmal, and other Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex joined forces to create a coalition of professionals to spearhead the creation of Civil Rights in Black and Brown, a digital oral history project that holds over a hundred oral interviews. As a graduate student at Texas Christian University, Bynum worked alongside Krochmal to document and preserve the oral records of activists and traveled with other peers to learn more about the hidden history of Jim Crow discrimination in the state. Tiffany González is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is a historian of Chicana/Latinx history, American politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford UP, 2021) is part of the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics book series, and it makes an important contribution to the literature on the American presidency and the understanding of presidential rhetoric. There are decades of literature on the concept of the rhetorical presidency, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. This area of study of executive politics focuses on public communication by the president, which is distinct from examining the powers and norms of the presidency itself. The media environment in which the president operates and in which the presidency exists has shifted and changed rather dramatically over the past century, moving the presidency to a position that is often or regularly the focus of news media, however consumed or delivered. Josh Scacco and Kevin Coe’s new book examines this changed and continuing to change media landscape and to re-assess the capacity of presidential rhetoric, but they have also expanded and reconceptualized the idea of presidential communication, positioning it within important political contexts and goals that presidents often pursue. The Ubiquitous Presidency posits that accessibility, personalization, and pluralism (read as either exclusion or inclusion, depending on the president) are the dominant contexts in which to examine presidential communication. And that the goals that most presidents pursue within these contexts include visibility, adaptability, and control. Thus, Scacco and Coe have written about what has changed about the contemporary presidency, how it has adapted to changing circumstances, evolving digital spaces, and the need to seek audiences in these new spaces. They have also explained, within the research, how the president’s words may have more of an impact than is often considered to be the case. Given the changing environment in which presidential communication transpires, and the results that we have observed as individuals and group make choices and engage in activities based on communication from the president, there may, indeed, be significant effects connected to presidential rhetoric and communication. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Barbara Trish, professor of political science at Grinnell College, about her new book (co-authored with William Menner) Inside the Bubble: Campaigns, Caucuses, and the Future of the Presidential Nomination Process (Routledge, 2021). The book is a behind-the-scenes look at the 2020 Democratic nomination process focusing on the Iowa caucuses and the campaign workers who located there. For decades, Iowa held the first contest in the presidential nomination process and individuals interested in campaign work considered it a holy grail. But in 2020, a record number of Democrats seeking to unseat President Trump - and the hundreds of young campaign workers who located to Iowa - created a political event unmatched in scope and scale. Those workers, embedded in the caucus bubble, focused for months on finding supporters for their candidate and ensuring they attended their precinct event - the first step in selecting delegates to the national convention. And then Caucus Day came, and with it a technology-driven fiasco that seemed to foreshadow a year of pandemic and protest. The lessons learned in 2020 underscored the importance of local staff who organize and mobilize supporters for a candidate in whom they believe. And those lessons are applicable to any race of any party in any state. For students of US politics as well as aspiring candidates, political journalists, and campaign professionals, this book captures the drama and human perspective of campaigns and elections in America. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Stephanie (Sam) A. Martin’s new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (U Alabama Press, 2021), is a fascinating exploration of the way that sermons, particularly those delivered by white evangelical pastors with sizeable congregations, link together storytelling, patriotism, conservative and Republican politics, and American exceptionalism. Martin’s work is a rich and deep textual and rhetorical analysis of sermons that are delivered both in person and online. These sermons—delivered over the course of more than a decade—reach many listeners and believers since they are given by pastors who preside over churches with congregations of at least 2000 members. And Martin teases out the focus of so many of these sermons, which are not always directly discussing or addressing politics, but have and continue to create an understanding of the white evangelical individual within American society. Decoding the Digital Church explains that part of the thrust of this understanding is to position white Evangelicals as both insiders and outsiders simultaneously. Part of this context, as explained via these sermons, is that the American Founders were the original evangelicals, thus contemporary evangelicals have an original claim to the benefits of being the first true Americans. This is also combined with the nostalgic rendering of America’s past—building on the concept of American exceptionalism as well. At the same time, the content of these sermons opens the pathway for Evangelicals to disavow the ill-effects of their political choices, absolving them of the responsibility for their votes or those they support for elected office. Martin provides a “digital rhetorical ethnography” to understand the narratives that are coming through the white evangelical megachurches. To unpack the threads of these narratives, Martin uses a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives for her research, including approaches from political science, rhetoric and communication, sociology and ethnography, and religious studies. This is an accessible and important study of the connection between evangelical storytelling and the evangelical community’s understanding of its place and role in American society. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
At the end of the Supreme Court's 2019-20 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the court would move irrevocably to the far right hadn't come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions in cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could respond to the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020-21 term, much about the nation's highest court has changed. The right-wing supermajority had completed its first term on the bench, cementing Donald Trump's legacy on American jurisprudence. This is the story of that term. From the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Coney Barrett, from the pandemic to the election, from the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in American life, the Supreme Court has been at the center of many of the biggest events of the year. Throughout Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court (Random House, 2021), legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her Supreme Court coverage, gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect. Ultimately, Greenhouse asks a fundamental question relevant to all Americans: Is this still John Roberts's Supreme Court, or does it now belong to Donald Trump? William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This Postscript engages two of the country’s most celebrated legal scholars to discuss the criminalization of abortion and miscarriage, the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest, the political and legal repercussions of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Texas SB-8, and yesterday’s news from the FDA making medication abortions more accessible to some women in the United States. Michele Goodwin is a chancellors’ Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine Law School. She recently authored Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press 2020) and you can hear her interview with New Books in Law. Her widely New York Times essay, “I was Raped by My Father and an Abortion Saved My Life,” interrogates the impact of abortion on girls who are raped by family members. The episode of her podcast with Renee Bracey Sherman mentioned in the conversation is On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, “Supreme Court Rundown: Will Roe Survive?. Mary Ziegler is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law and visiting professor at Harvard Law School Spring 2022. Her most recent book is Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2022. Dr. Ziegler’s public facing scholarship includes her recent piece in The Atlantic exploring the constitutional chaos that may be created as other states deploy Texas’s anti-abortion bounty system. Their coauthored “Whatever Happened to the Exceptions for Rape and Incest” in The Atlantic is mentioned in the podcast – as well as forthcoming scholarship on medication abortion by Allison Whelan, Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School is also mentioned. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Historically, how have marginalized and minority groups pushed the boundaries of representative government to pass legislation that benefits them? Political Scientist Shamira Gelbman, the Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Wabash College, answers this question in her new book, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple UP, 2021). Gelbman examines the history of The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) throughout the 1950s and 60s, teasing out the individuals who engaged in lobbying, advocacy, training, and other capacities to push civil rights legislation forward while also helping to block segregationist and white supremacy advocacy in Congress. Gelbman’s case study of the LCCR uses archival and scholarly resources to paint a picture of the Civil Rights Movement’s policy achievements by evaluating the role of lobbying and coalitional building. The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Second Reconstruction begins by exploring what it takes to create coalitional groups and the uniqueness of the political climate of the 20th century. The arguments about coalitional interest groups are presented alongside the informative history of the LCCR and the policy achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. Gelbman uses interest group theory to explain many of the teachings from this case study. Coalitional groups can often function as a “weapon for the weak,” and Gelbman takes notice of both the benefits of interest group lobbying as well as the setbacks of in-fighting between lobbyists in a broad coalition like the LCCR. The work of structuring the coalition, of working through different goals and approaches, is key in understanding the complicated process for moving forward with civil rights policy creation and implementation. The LCCR was made up of a wide array of groups and members, including a diversity of religious organizations, labor unions, and a constellation of civil rights organizations. Gelbman showcases the LCCR as an organization that mobilized professional and grassroots lobbying by distinguishing commonalities among the members to develop broad-based supports for legislators to pursue civil rights legislation. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape. In True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as “contentious institutions,” Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a wholly new kind of party—an advocacy party—which institutionalized greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the presidency for the satisfaction of its symbolic and substantive demands. Consequently, while the long conflict between party reformers and counter-reformers successfully opened the Democratic Party to new voices and identities, it also facilitated the growth of presidential power, rising inequality, and deepening partisan polarization. Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly. Adam Hilton is Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He earned his PhD from the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. His current research focuses on the relationship between movements, interest groups, and political parties, and the agency of political entrepreneurs in transforming them. In addition to True Blues, he is also working on an edited book with Jessica Hejny, tentatively titled Placing Parties in American Political Development. Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
All nations make rules -- through their constitutions, legislatures, bureaucratic practices – about who counts as a citizen. American by Birth examines the role of the Supreme Court – particularly a ruling from 1898 that is still precedent today. Wong Kim Ark v. United States interpreted the language of the 14th Amendment to answer whether a man born in the United States was a citizen. The Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark and held that the 14th Amendment extends to children of immigrants who were born in the United States. Using the work of legal scholars, political scientists, and historians, Drs. Julie L. Novkov and Carol Nackenoff provide an extended biography of Wong Kim Ark and the historic 1898 landmark case – but also a biography of US Citizenship from the colonies to the present. American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship (UP of Kansas, 2021) concludes with an impressive chapter that contextualizes birthright citizenship globally and within the context of American politics and scholarly debates – with an emphasis on the vulnerability of birthright citizenship to indirect and direct change. Dr. Julie L. Novkov is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and interim dean of Rockefeller college at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954 (UMichigan, 2008). Dr. Carol Nackenoff is Richter Professor emeritus of Political Science at Swarthmore College. She is the author of The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (Oxford, 1994). They are also co-editors of Stating the Family: New Directions in the Study of American Politics (University Press of Kansas, 2020) and Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Two resources mentioned in the podcast: Tian Atlas Xu’s “Immigration Attorneys and Chinese Exclusion Law Enforcement: The Case of San Francisco, 1882–1930” and the symposium on American by Birth. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Rebecca L. Davis's book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics (UNC Press, 2021) reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public. Unconventional religious choices charted new ways of declaring an authentic identity amid escalating Cold War fears of brainwashing and coercion. Facing pressure to celebrate a specific vision of Americanism, these converts variously attracted and repelled members of the American public. Whether the act of changing religions was viewed as selfish, reckless, or even unpatriotic, it provoked controversies that ultimately transformed American politics. Public Confessions takes intimate history to its widest relevance, and in so doing, makes you see yourself in both the private and public stories it tells. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this Postscript, Susan Liebell and Lilly Goren review this morning’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Texas SB-8, the oral arguments in last week’s Mississippi abortion case, and the wider issues of the Court’s legitimacy, electoral backlash, ripple effects beyond abortion to marriage equality or protection of sexuality, the effect of a ruling on electoral politics, and the effectiveness of grassroots organizing. We are joined by Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer (Associate Professor of Public Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dr. Andrew R. Lewis (Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati) and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson (Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver). Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the role of human rights concerns in US foreign policy during the 1980s, focusing on the struggle among the Reagan administration and members of Congress. It demonstrates how congressional pressure led the administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and craft a conservative human rights policy centered on democracy promotion and anti-communism - a decision which would have profound implications for American attention to human rights. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard combines a comprehensive overview of human rights in American foreign relations with in-depth case studies of how human rights shaped US foreign policy toward Soviet Jewry, South African apartheid, and Nicaragua. Tracing the motivations behind human rights activism, this book demonstrates how liberals, moderates, and conservatives selectively invoked human rights to further their agendas, ultimately contributing to the establishment of human rights as a core moral language in US foreign policy. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that must be kept out of the market. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other. The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press, 2021), by the founder of In the Public Interest, an organization dedicated to shared prosperity and the common good, chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers. The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a broad spectrum of issues and raises larger questions about who controls the public things we all rely on, exposing the hidden crisis of privatization that has been slowly unfolding over the last fifty years and giving us a road map for taking our country back. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton UP, 2021) examines the “contemporary population politics of national Latino civil rights advocacy.” The book challenges readers to generally understand democratic projections as problematic, political, and manufactured -- and specifically consider the case of how prominent Latino civil rights groups used such projections during the Obama and Trump administrations to “accelerate the when of Latino political power.” Groups like UnidosUS, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Voto Latino believed that they could mobilize demographic data about the growing Latino population to increase political recognition and respect -- hoping to unify and inspire. But Figures of the Future urges us to be attentive to the manner in which projected demographics can be “objects of aspiration” but also weaponized and sources of frustration. Deploying three main sources of data (participation observation, interviewing, and the collection of primary material) Dr. Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz asks us to see that “it is politics -- not demography -- that governs what we think and feel about ethnoracial demographic change.” We don’t need better data -- we need a more critical and vigilant eye to the political phenomenon. Dr. Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an assistant professor of sociology and Latina/Latino studies at Northwestern University. Daniella Campos assisted with and helped inspire this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientists Amy Fried (University of Maine) and Douglas B. Harris (Loyola University Maryland) have a new book, At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia UP, 2021), that looks at the question of distrust within American politics and how that distrust has moved from healthy skepticism to a weapon to be used to divide citizens and undermine the entire governmental system in the United States. Part of this is an historical examination, starting with the basic skepticism about power that was present in North America even before the Founding period. But the thrust of the book traces this distrust of government over the past half century, and highlights how it has become more overt, and more of a rhetorical tool used, in particular, by members of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Fried and Harris explain how this narrative of distrust in government has been used as an organizing umbrella for the contemporary Republican Party, as the strategic glue that holds together social conservatives, economic conservatives and libertarians, and national security hawks. This is the same organizing umbrella that was also implemented by politicians, especially in the use of the Southern Strategy, to pull the southern states into the Republican coalition over the past half century. This weaponization of distrust has been used, as the authors, note, in four different areas that can be seen again and again across historical periods during the last fifty years; these four areas include building organization, winning elections, securing policy gains, and moving functional power into the political institutions when they are controlled by the GOP. This use of distrust has also been woven into the conservative political identity, pulling in racial components and advocacy against the government itself to continue to build this political coalition. Fried and Harris make use of a lot of different archival sources to examine and explain how conservative elites have used this distrust strategically to help turn out voters, build the political organization, and construct a rhetorical narrative that indicts the American political system. At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump helps to explain not only the rise of Donald Trump, but also the asymmetrical polarization in which voters now find themselves in the U.S. system, and how Trump and those who preceded him capitalized on American distrust of and skepticism towards government. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford University Press, 2021) powerfully dissects one of the fundamental problems in American governance today: the clash between presidents determined to redirect the nation through ever-tighter control of administration and an executive branch still organized to promote shared interests in steady hands, due deliberation, and expertise. As the nation's chief executive, Donald Trump pitted himself repeatedly against the institutions and personnel of the executive branch. In the process, two once-obscure concepts came center stage in an eerie faceoff. On one side was the specter of a Deep State conspiracy-administrators threatening to thwart the will of the people and undercut the constitutional authority of the president they elected to lead them. On the other side was a raw personalization of presidential power, one that a theory of the unitary executive gussied up and allowed to run roughshod over reason and the rule of law. The Deep State and the unitary executive framed every major contest of the Trump presidency. Like phantom twins, they drew each other out and wrestled to light basic issues of governance long suppressed. Though this conflict reached a fever pitch during the Trump presidency, it is not new. Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King trace the tensions between presidential power and the depth of the American state back through the decades and forward through the various settlements arrived at in previous eras. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic is about the breakdown of settlements and the abiding vulnerabilities of a Constitution that gave scant attention to administrative power. Rather than simply dump on Trump, the authors provide a richly historical perspective on the conflicts that rocked his presidency, and they explain why, if left untamed, the phantom twins will continue to pull the American government apart. Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. John A. Dearborn is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Dean's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Desmond King is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of Government at the University of Oxford. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steven P. Brown, professor of political science at Auburn University, has written a history of notable U.S. Supreme Cases and justices that hailed from Alabama. In Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation (U Alabama Press, 2020), Brown reviews eight landmark cases which originated in Alabama and were eventually reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although most of these cases were reflective of the civil rights issues endemic to Alabama and other states in the American South of the mid-twentieth century, not all are race related. For example, a notable gender equity case, Frontiero v. Richardson, which was concerned with benefits discrimination based on gender, was an important decision in the history of women’s rights. Brown also reviews the lives and times of three Supreme Court justices, John McKinley, John Archibald Campbell, and Hugo Black. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An earlier Postscript explained what was at stake for concealed carry laws in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court – and guessed at what the oral arguments might reveal. Now that arguments have been heard in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, three legal scholars join the podcast to analyze the oral argument. Even if you are not a SCOTUS junky -- this conversation is important because 80 million (or 25% of) Americans may have their democratically crafted gun laws overturned by the decision of 9 justices. Jacob D. Charles is the Executive Director & Lecturing Fellow at the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law. His work on the Second Amendment has appeared in numerous law journals and “Securing Gun Rights By Statute: The Right To Keep and Bear Arms Outside the Constitution,” (forthcoming, University of Michigan Law Review) interrogates the non-constitutional gun rights that create broad powers for gun owners beyond the Second Amendment. His extensive public-facing scholarship includes a new piece in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, “Supreme Court justices sounded suspicious of New York’s gun law. Here’s what might come next.” Eric Ruben is an assistant professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law and a Brennan Center fellow. Working at the intersection of criminal law, legal ethics, and the Second Amendment, his scholarship has been published in law reviews such as California, Duke and Georgetown as well as public facing outlets like The Atlantic, New York Times, Vox, Jurist, The Conversation, and Scotusblog. He organized -- and contributed scholarship to the 2021 Brennan Center Report, Protests, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment. Joseph Blocher is the Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law and one of the attorneys who helped write the brief for DC in Heller. He co-authored The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Darrell Miller in 2018 (New Books interview here). Among his numerous law review articles is “When Guns Threaten the Public Sphere: A New Account of Public Safety Regulation Under Heller” (Northwestern University Law Review, Vol 116, 2021) in which he and Reva Siegel interrogate the impact of gun rights on free speech. Recently, he has been a guest on the podcast Strict Scrutiny, contributed to the New York Times and NPR reporting of the case. Joseph and Eric’s recent op ed, “No, courts don’t treat the Second Amendment as a ‘second-class right’: The latest gun-rights case may hinge on some conservatives’ sense of victimhood” just appeared in the Washington Post. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When Americans conjure the image of the signing of the Constitution of the United States, they often think about the various paintings that depict the Founders looking to George Washington on the dais at the convention. It is this snapshot of history that embodies Americans’ perceptions of the Founders and their conviction in the creation of the great nation. What Americans fail to understand about America’s Founding is the overwhelming anxieties that many of the Founders experienced, especially as they lived in the new republic that they had created. Not only did they find themselves anxious about the future of the new country, but many were also explicitly pessimistic about the future that they noted in so much of their later writings and letters. Dennis C. Rasmussen, in his new book Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of American Founders, addresses this gap in research on the American Founding, and on the Founders themselves. Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison all wondered whether the system they had worked to establish, build, and defend would live beyond their own generation. In Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders (Princeton UP, 2021), Rasmussen explores the enduring arguments made by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams that convinced them of America’s inevitable demise. Modern Americans conceptualize the founding of the United States as an isolated moment in time, and rarely consider the reality of how the Founders spent the remainder of their lives putting the Constitution to work. Rasmussen places the founders’ fears in context of the ongoing chaos of the late 1700’s where other countries were facing revolution, treason, and anarchy. Fear of a Setting Sun’s purpose is not to disregard the founders’ optimism in the system they created, and in fact the book heralds James Madison’s lifelong optimism and belief that the American experiment would prevail—though he is at odds with the other major Founders in this regard. Fear of a Setting Sun explores the Founders’ disillusionment in order to provide a fuller meaning of American constitutionalism and the value that is formed in its implementation. Rasmussen provides a perspective that changes what scholars and the general public believe and know about the founding of the republic, the historical stakes at the time of the founding, and how the Founders generally grew more pessimistic over time about the potential for the new republic to achieve its great potential. This book will be of interest to political scientists, historians, students and scholars of the founding period and the ideas and personalities that dominated the early days of the American republic. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity. Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (Princeton, 2021) explores the scope and power of one of America’s most influential interest groups. Despite widespread public support for stricter gun control laws, the National Rifle Association has consistently managed to defeat or weaken proposed regulations. Firepower provides an unprecedented look at how this controversial organization built its political power and how it has deployed it on behalf of its pro-gun agenda.
Taking readers from the 1930s to the age of Donald Trump, Matthew Lacombe traces how the NRA’s immense influence on national politics arises from its ability to shape the political outlooks and actions of its followers. He draws on nearly a century of archival records and surveys to show how the organization has fashioned a distinct worldview around gun ownership and used it to mobilize its supporters. Lacombe reveals how the NRA’s cultivation of a large, unified, and active base has enabled it to build a resilient alliance with the Republican Party, and he examines why the NRA and its members formed an important constituency that helped fuel Trump’s unlikely political rise. Firepower sheds vital new light on how the NRA has grown powerful by mobilizing average Americans and how it uses its GOP alliance to advance its objectives and shape the national agenda. Matthew Lacombe is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. He studies American politics, with a broad focus on understanding and explaining political power in the U.S. His research and teaching interests engage with interest groups and political parties, social identity and political ideology, inequality and representation, and American political development. In addition to Firepower, he is the co-author of Billionaires and Stealth Politics, a book that details the political preferences and behavior of U.S. billionaires. Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Robert J. Spitzer’s classic text, The Politics of Gun Control: 8th Edition (Routledge, 2020), has been revised based on new data on gun ownership and use. Dr. Spitzer insightfully interrogates the impact of gun politics on the 2018 elections, new research on the history of American gun laws, and controversies over the geography of guns -- where and when they can be carried and whether they can be concealed. The podcast conversation digs into new findings on elections, public opinion, single-issue voting, the parallel histories of gun rights/regulations, and the changing profiles and strategies of gun safety groups. Dr. Spitzer provides insights on the upcoming midterm elections, forecasts what is at stake in the upcoming Supreme Court case, NYS Gun & Pistol v. Bruen, and provides a reminder that federalism can never be far from any case analysis in American politics. Dr. Robert J. Spitzer is a Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Cortland. Trained by Theodore Lowi, Dr, Spitzer has published books on the presidency, the right to life mov, and the constitution -- with several works focused on the right to bear arms, gun control, and gun rights. The Supreme Court will hear its first Second Amendment case since 2010 and Robert’s article “Gun Law History in the United States and Second Amendment Rights” is cited by the Solicitor General of the US in his amicus brief. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientist John Dearborn’s new book, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (U Chicago Press, 2021), weaves together three connected threads in the course of his analysis: the role and capacity of ideas to make political change, the evolution of the position and understanding of the President of the United States as a representative of the citizens of the United States, and the way in which congressional legislation also works to shift the constitutional or institutional relationship between Congress and the President. This is a propulsive book, which is not necessarily the norm for academic publications, and Dearborn keeps the reader engaged through fascinating details about legislation that Congress passes in the midst of the 20th century that not only sets up policy outcomes but also provides the president with the power to create those outcomes. Dearborn then traces the ways, in the latter part of the 20th century, in which Congress attempts to wrangle some of that power back from the president, or to develop its own power to rival or parallel the president’s power. Power Shifts focuses on this concept of the president as a national representative, which was not necessarily the idea that the Founders had for the president at the time of the Constitutional Convention. Some thought was given to how this national office would operate, but because of the way that the president is elected, at a remove from the people, the idea that the president was the voice or tribune of the people was not the key concept in the design of the presidency. Dearborn takes the reader through the evolution of this concept during the 19th and 20th century, highlighting how the presidents made claim to this particular role, while noting that it became clear that the veto power was not sufficient to reflect the voice of the people. During a number of decades in the midst of the 20th century, Congress builds up the presidency as an institution, formalizing presidential agenda-setting capacities and giving the presidency the organizational capacity to function as the center of the governmental structure and as the representative of all of the people. In examining several congressional acts, including the Budget Act of 1921, the Reorganization Act of 1939, and other particular constructions by Congress, Power Shifts examines how these creations centered presidential representation as the key to the design for these legislative moves. In the second part of the book, Dearborn explores the period of congressional resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s, and how Congress created connected legislation that sought to pull some of these powers away from the president, or at least provide Congress with sufficient capacity to challenge the president in a number of different arenas. And again, the arguments around the legislation dive into the question of whether the president is operating as a national representative, with a focus on the best interests of the people and the country. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Political Science, we are very familiar with the work of scholars who try to unpack why the ERA failed to get the required states. But Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963 published by the University of Nebraska in 2021 interrogates how earlier debates on the ERA transcended traditional political divides and ultimately redefined the concept of citizenship in the United States. By using a rich collection of public and private sources, Dr. Rebecca DeWolf shows that support for and opposition to the ERA was not tied to either conservatism or liberalism. Instead unusual allies coalesced around two competing views of citizenship – what DeWolf calls the emancipatory and the protectionist. Gendered Citizenship argues that the early conflict over the ERA changed the definition of rights -- and the catalyst for that change was the 19th amendment. Those opposing the ERA provided a modern justification for separate and distinct standards of rights for men and women citizens -- and that formulation still haunts 21st century politics. Dr. Rebecca DeWolf is a historian focused on gender and women’s history, politics, and United States' constitutional culture. She has received the Dirksen Center Congressional Research Grant as well as grants from American University to do her archival research on the ERA. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, History News Network, New America Weekly, and Frontiers. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
History is told, it is said, by the victors. And so it is in regard to Richard Nixon. We all know how his presidency ended. What too few of us recall or bother to learn is how it started. In his new The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider's Perspective on Nixon's Surprising Social Policy (UP of Kansas, 2021), John Roy Price details how in Nixon's first few years in office, the President ardently tried to lead from the middle to eradicate the widespread poverty that had so characterized his own upbringing. It is a view of Nixon and a big-tent, policy-driven Republican Party that few of us would recognize today. Part policy history, part political history, part memoir, John Roy Price's account of his time in the White House from 1969 to 1971 is an important corrective to simplistic views of Richard Nixon and the current Republican Party. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What’s a “progressive?” We hear constantly about the rift in the Democratic Party between its “progressive” wing and its “moderate” one. But what exactly was “Progressivism?” And why do we hear the word “progressive” but not much about “Progressivism?” The answer may lie in the fact that modern day progressive Democrats or those who ally with them (such as Bernie Sanders) don’t want to dwell on the fact that much of their political program descends from political leaders they now disown (such as Woodrow Wilson) or who were, at various times, Republicans (like Theodore Roosevelt). Additionally, progressives are probably not eager to be so openly opposed to the basic principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the U.S. Constitution as their political and intellectual forebears were because that might hurt their poll numbers among average Americans. Moreover, the progressives really do not need to embrace the idea of the rule of the elites and the need for an administrative state and to fight for those things because that is the world we live in thanks to the Progressive thinkers and leaders profiled in the 2021 book America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism by Ronald J. Pestritto. The book is must reading for everyone who wants to understand why unelected people such as the personnel of federal agencies, city managers, federal judges at many levels and so forth wield so much power and are so unanswerable to the bulk of the population. Pestritto reveals the dual legacy of Progressivism. To wit, via illuminating and meticulous examination of the writings and speeches of well-known figures such as Wilson and Roosevelt and lesser known but influential thinkers such as the theorists and academics Richard Ely, Frank Goodnow and James Landis, Pestritto documents how the Progressives disempowered average Americans even as those figures harped on the theme of accountability in government and dismissed the safeguards for individual liberty that the Constitution provides. Pestritto traces the intellectual incoherence of much of progressive thinking and policy c. 1880-1945 and demonstrates how the conflict between the oft-stated concern of the progressive left for the common man and the reality of bureaucratization has its roots in the Progressive Era and why so many Americans are frustrated by the fact that Congress has willingly signed over to the administrative state the right to write its own rules, to determine if those rules are fair and to implement those rules and regulations. It is not for nothing that Pestritto uses the word “transformed” given the curtailment of involvement by everyday Americans in their own governing processes that the Progressives ensured. A particular strength of his book is his exposure of the way that progressives from Wilson down to Obama and since have disingenuously claimed that Abraham Lincoln was a proto-progressive even though Lincoln was one of the most ardent, eloquent proponents of the Declaration of Independence and natural rights. We often hear from progressives that we need to be on the “right side of history.” In this valuable book, Ronald J. Pestritto explains to us the intellectual background of such platitudes. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey's edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021) is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. While Black-led activism in this era is often overshadowed by the attention paid to the abolition movement, this collection centers Black activist networks, influence, and institution building. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism. Explore accompanying exhibits and historical records at The Colored Conventions Project website. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The discussion of factions in American politics is as old as the republic itself. But there is more to consider, particularly in terms of the way that contemporary factions operate within our current political landscape. Political Scientist Rachel Blum, in her new book, How The How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics (U Chicago Press, 2020), focuses on the Tea Party’s rise, as a new faction within a long line of factions, and how the Tea Party infiltrated the Republican Party—impacting the disposition of the party itself and how it now operates. Blum’s personal background and political interests contributed to her capacity to analyze and evaluate the strategies and approaches used by the Tea Party, helping her to understand the structure and the sometimes-confusing tactics that these activists used to pursue their goals. Blum’s book also examines the Republican Party as an organization that, at its core, is aimed at getting Republicans elected to office, and how the Tea Party was able to take advantage of the structure and organization of the GOP at the most local levels, as well as at state and national levels, to aid in the drive to activate the Tea Party agenda within the Republican Party itself. Ultimately, the Tea Party would push against the GOP like a party within a party. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics is a multi-method investigation into the Tea Party and the Republican Party, constructed out of an elaborate collection of evidence including network analysis, the use of text-as-data, and long-form interviews with Tea Party activists. Blum started her research as a result of a conversation with a Tea Party activist in 2012 where, rather than discussing President Obama’s re-election, Obamacare, or government spending, Blum was surprised to find the activist preferred to discuss their distrust of the Republican Party. Why would this lifelong Republican choose to be upset with his own party, rather than with the Democrats? This is the question that drove Blum’s investigation of political polarization within the Republican party itself, and this led to a complex matrix of approaches to weave together the analysis of what was going on between the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Blum’s understanding of factions within factions presents a new way to understand the Tea Party’s political strategies, but it also helps us to understand the more expansive polarization across the political spectrum in the United States. Blum’s work also outlines how candidate Donald Trump picked up on the topics and the rhetoric of the Tea Party, and how the Trump/MAGA faction has also been able to take over the current Republican Party. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics is an elegant and articulate exploration of the Tea Party, including an analysis of the Tea Party strategies, message, and its insurgent approach to politics. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP also formulates a lesson that guides the reader to better understand party dynamics, both inside the parties themselves and in competition with each other. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With years of experience as the Representative of the Fourth District in North Carolina, as an educator, a writer, and a political scientist, David Price examines the last 45 years of politics in the United States Congress, in North Carolina, and in his life as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Representative Price currently serves as Chairman of the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, and he is also the Chair of the House Democracy Partnership, which we discuss during the podcast interview. The Congressional Experience begins with Price’s personal anecdote of the progression of his career as a politician so as to provide a fuller look into the life of a member of Congress. Following the subtitle of the book, “an institution transformed,” Price opens the conversation about how the U.S. Congress has developed over time, through the Cold War, the economic successes of the 1990’s, international terrorism, recession, the Obama and Trump administrations, and through a global pandemic. Price also brings into focus the changes in the ways that Congress functions because of the increased political polarization in the United States. The Congressional Experience: An Institution Transformed (Routledge, 2020) outlines the complex issues that the U.S. Congress, and the American government in general, regularly faces, in both the domestic and the international sphere. But Price’s approach to explaining these policy processes and complexities is through an intimate picture of how Congress works. Price unpacks the political polarization between executive and legislative government—especially during periods of divided government, and how that has drastically changed citizens’ opinion of the U.S. governmental system from admiration to contempt. In his efforts as a member of Congress, as a representative of the people in North Carolina’s 4th District, and as a political scientist, Price works to alter the perceptions of government in The Congressional Experience. His hope is that readers will have a better understanding of the fundamentals of government, the way that the institutions function, and how those who are elected to public office work within these political institutions. Given the shifts over the years, members have become more entrepreneurial, pursuing different goals and outcomes, some tied to the original roles and responsibilities of elected office holders, others tied to opportunities that might be pursued after leaving public office. Price stresses the need for citizens to understand how political institutions were designed to work, and to hold their elected official responsible for making decisions on their behalf while in Washington, D.C. This is a truly fascinating textbook about the U.S. Congress, since it weaves together Price’s decades of experiences in the U.S. House, as well as his expertise not only as a member of the House, but also as a political scientist. The Congressional Experience: An Institution Transformed provides a unique perspective on the U.S. Congress, especially during this period of institutional transition while also magnifying the importance of local government. Shaina Boldt assisted with the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity ofpast eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom. In The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (U Chicago Press, 2020), James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas. Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill. Frances E. Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. James Curry is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Their book, The Limits of Party, won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of US national policy. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robinson Woodward-Burns is the author of Hidden Laws: How the State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, published by Yale University Press in 2021. Hidden Laws explores the relationship between both state and national constitutional development, debates, and reform. A sprawling study of American constitutional history, Woodward-Burns’s book shows how the federal government often deferred to state constitutional reform as a mechanism for dealing with national constitutional controversies. From banking to slavery, women’s suffrage to welfare, Woodward-Burns explores the myriad of ways constitutional controversies were debated and resolved in the United States. Woodward-Burns is an Assistant Professor at Howard University. Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hamilton: An American Musical made its record-breaking Broadway debut in 2015—but the musical has reached far beyond typical Broadway audiences to pave a path into political discourse, pop culture, classroom curriculums, and the broader conversation about contemporary American politics. What led to this chain reaction of popularity, and how does it continue to influence these cultural and political dynamics? Jeffery and Sara Mehltretter Drury work to answer these questions using the tools of rhetorical criticism by bringing together a collection of essays in their book, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: an American Musical (Peter Lang, 2021). This volume is part of the Frontiers in Political Communication series at Peter Lang Publishers—a book series that aims to produce timely scholarship at the very cutting edge of political communication, emphasizing “how citizens, governments, and the media interact is the communication process.” Dr. Sara Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, and the Director of Democracy & Public Discourse at Wabash College. Dr. Jeffery Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Wabash College. Their combined expertise has helped to produce an edited volume that invites the reader to join the deep analysis of the musical Hamilton. The book is structured around three major themes in the realm of rhetorical criticism: public memory, rhetoric and social identity, rhetoric of democracy and social change. Each section of the book presents multiple interpretations of the musical in order to present new perspectives in understanding Hamilton’s relevance to politics and culture. Public memory centers on the narrative concepts of Hamilton and how it addresses American myths regarding the American Dream and the foundation of America. Rhetoric and Social Identity approaches race and gender within Hamilton, including the juxtaposition of portraying the nation’s white founders as people of color on stage. This section examines the musical’s accessibility to communities across America to discuss both historical and modern-day political conflicts. Rhetoric of Democracy and Social Change evaluates Hamilton’s influence in contemporary politics in how it normalizes political debate by humanizing historical political figures. By utilizing academic theories and analyzing multifaceted aspects of the musical, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: An American Musical welcomes a variety of arguments to encourage its readers to engage in the ideas, arguments, and representation of American history in a contemporary context. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U. S. Territorial Expansion (Cornell UP, 2020) explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start. By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of U.S. leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. U.S. presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country. These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, U.S. leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained. In addition to offering an updated history of the foundations of U.S. territorial expansion, The Picky Eagle adds important nuance to previous theories of great-power expansion, with implications for our understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today’s Postscript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) engages the latest chapter in American abortion politics as the United States Supreme Court has just allowed a Texas statute banning abortions after 6 weeks to go into effect. Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell have assembled a panel of experts in political science and law to interrogate the construction of the Texas law, the Supreme Court ruling, and how these cases map onto the wider political landscape. Dr. Renée Ann Cramer is a Professor of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University -- and the author of Birthing a Movement: Midwives, Law, and the Politics of Reproductive Care from Stanford University Press, 2021. Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- and the author of some of the most downloaded articles in political science on the abortion policy environment such as “Anti-Abortion Policymaking and Women’s Representation” (co-authored with Reingold, Beth, Tracy L. Osborn, and Michele Swers) in Political Research Quarterly. See her Monkey Cage piece on SB-8 from last week. Dr. Andrew R. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati and the author of The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge, 2017). He writes at the intersection of politics, religion, and law in America with expertise in Evangelicals and politics, conservative legal activism, and rights politics. Dr. Joshua C. Wilson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver -- and the . author of The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, & America’s Culture Wars and The New States of Abortion Politics both from Stanford University Press 2013 and 2016. His article “Striving to Rollback or Protect Roe: State Legislation and the Trump-Era Politics of Abortion appeared in Publius last summer. Dr. Mary Ziegler is a Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law. She is the author of Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and has a forthcoming book Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment expected from Yale University Press, 2022). Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Public disenchantment with and distrust of American government is at an all-time high and who can blame them? In the face of widespread challenges--everything from record levels of personal and national debt and the sky high cost of education, to gun violence, racial discrimination, an immigration crisis, overpriced pharmaceuticals, and much more--the government seems paralyzed and unable to act, the most recent example being Covid-19. It's the deadliest pandemic in over a century. In addition to an unimaginable sick and death toll, it has left more than thirty million Americans unemployed. Despite this, Washington let the first round of supplemental unemployment benefits run out and for more than a month were unable to agree on a bill to help those suffering. Jeanne Sheehan's book American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government (Palgrave Macmillian, 2021) explains why we are in this situation, why the government is unable to respond to key challenges, and what we can do to right the ship. It requires that readers "upstream," stop blaming the individuals in office and instead look at the root cause of the problem. The real culprit is the system; it was designed to protect liberty and structured accordingly. As a result, however, it has left us with a government that is not responsive, largely unaccountable, and often ineffective. This is not an accident; it is by design. Changing the way our government operates requires rethinking its primary goal(s) and then restructuring to meet them. To this end, this book offers specific reform proposals to restructure the government and in the process make it more accountable, effective, and responsive. Jeanne Sheehan is a Carol S. Russett Award winning Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College School of Arts & Science. She is also Bloomberg News Political Contributor and the author of several books and articles Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gender, and regulations of and discourses on it, have historically been a cornerstone of the conservative Christian belief system. The stance of the Catholic Church on feminism, for instance, has often been criticized for being reductive and exclusionary. As Christianity has exerted a profound influence on the government and principles of the United States from the time of its founding, in this modern age, it is natural to examine the extent of its influence on LGBTQ-related, and particularly trans-related legislation. In the fourth episode of our themed series Across the Rainbow, Dr. SJ Crasnow, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, and author of the article “The Legacy of ‘Gender Ideology.” Dr. Crasnow talks to us about the current state of anti-trans legislation in the U.S., and the role played by conservative Christianity in shaping it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Herbert “Bert” Kritzer, the Marvin J. Sonosky Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, has a new book that explores the process for reform of judicial selection across the fifty states. This is a fascinating examination of the different approaches that state legislatures, governors, partisans, and citizens have pursued in reforming the process, within each state, of judicial selection at all levels. With a brief historical overview of how this process was initially pursued in the early days of the republic, Kritzer moves to the central time period of the book, which is examining the state systems that were in place in the mid-20th century and the moves across the country to modernize court systems and how those moves unfolded. The main period that Kritzer focuses on is between 1980 and 2020, and he carefully reviews the reform efforts that succeeded as well as those that failed Judicial Selection in the States: Politics and the Struggle for Reform (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines the legal and democratic subcultures as a way to frame and understand the reasons behind the move towards reforms. But the heart of the book is diving into various states to see what they tried to change, who tried to change it, and if they were at all successful in these reform efforts. One of the more popular plans for state-level judicial selection is the “Missouri Plan”, which was designed to improve the quality of judges by establishing a kind of review board/nominating commission that made recommendations to the governor of the state. Many states, between 1960 and 1980, moved towards adopting the Missouri plan as the method for judicial selection. But following this, states continued to reform with an eye towards more legal professionalism as the guiding tenet behind judicial selection. According to Kritzer’s research, this was very much the case between 1980 and 1999, and this was in concert with the overhauling of state constitutions as well. Around 2000 there is a bit of a shift, as partisan politics now starts to be more of the driver behind the moves to reform or change the selection of state judges. Judicial Selection in the States is an interesting exploration of the various forms of judicial selection, the moves towards reform over the decades, the shifting role of partisanship as well as the impetus towards more professional and merit-based outcomes. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens’ movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance’s secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government’s ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why is there such a deep partisan division within the United States regarding how health care should be organized and financed and how can we encourage politicians to band together again for the good of everyone? For decades, Democratic and Republican political leaders have disagreed about the fundamental goals of American health policy. The modern-day consequences of this disagreement, particularly in the Republicans' campaign to erode the coverage and equity gains of the Affordable Care Act, can be seen in the tragic and disparate impact of COVID-19 on the country. In Crossing the American Health Care Chasm: Finding the Path to Bipartisan Collaboration in National Health Care Policy (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Donald A. Barr, MD, PhD, details the breakdown in political relations in the United States. Why, he asks, has health policy, which used to be a place where the two sides could find common ground, become the nexus of fiery political conflict? Ultimately, Barr argues, this divide is more dangerous than ever at a time when health care costs continue to skyrocket, the number of uninsured Americans is rising, many state governments are chipping away at Medicaid, and the GOP has not let up in its efforts to dismantle the ACA. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics (U Chicago Press, 2020), LaFleur Stephens-Dougan argues that we focus on the use of negative racial appeals by the Republican Party, while ignoring the incentives that exist for some Democratic candidates to use race as much as, if not more than Republican candidates. The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic candidate would never be incentivized to invoke race and activate negative racial predispositions. Yet, according to the author, Democratic politicians regularly invoke negative stereotypes about African Americans. On numerous occasions President Obama, for example, publicly chastised black audiences. And, while it might seem surprising that a Democratic politician would use rhetoric that disparages their most loyal constituency, Obama is just one of many Democratic politicians who have been criticized for invoking negative stereotypes about African Americans for political gain. Stephens-Dougan explores when and why politicians of both parties will use negative racial appeals. LaFleur Stephens-Dougan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Princeton University. Her book Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics won the 2021 David O. Sears Best Book on Mass Politics Award from the International Society for Political Psychology, and the 2021 Ralph J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Religious liberty” is a phrase that we often hear, particularly in news stories revolving around Supreme Court decisions. But what is religious liberty and why is it often referred to as “the first liberty?” These are among the questions addressed in Kenneth Starr’s 2021 book, Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty (Encounter, 2021) Although Judge Starr possesses impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is intended for general readers. It is an informative blend of American legal and constitutional history and a primer for all of us about a crucial component of our set of rights as citizens. Even if you are not religious, the book will endow you with a greater understanding of an issue that frequently roils the body politic and that is both timeless and of ongoing concern. Think Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—decided by the Supreme Court in 2018. Luckily, we have with us today one of America’s leading lawyers to walk us through the fascinating history of religious liberty and give us the lowdown on what we need to know should we find ourselves facing a choice between honoring our sabbath day and keeping our jobs. Kenneth Starr has been a figure of great note on the American legal landscape for decades. He is perhaps best known for his role in the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton administration and as a key member of Donald Trump’s defense team in the latter’s first impeachment trial. He has been among other things, a federal judge at the highest levels, a law school dean and a university president. Most significantly in terms of the subject matter of his new book and thus the main focus of our interview, he is a long-time champion of religious liberty and, as solicitor general under George HW Bush, argued before the Supreme Court such notable religious liberty and freedom of speech cases as Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, in which the Supreme Court found that a Bible club has the same right of equal access on school grounds as any other student-led organization. Judge Starr employs that famous case to illustrate one of the concepts discussed in book, equality. It is a cause dear to his heart and probably even more so given own quite humble origins in his home state of Texas. The common man aspects of Starr’s background have enabled him to make this book approachable to its intended broad-ranging audience. Most of us at one time or another have found ourselves in school, work or business environments or simply driving along a highway and it is surprising how often questions involving religious liberty pop up for average people in such settings. Starr guides the reader engagingly and expertly through such questions as: What is the Lemon Test? What do you need to know about religious liberty as a parent, public school or college student, teacher, small business owner or employee? How have wedding cakes, monuments in the shape of Christian crosses, public displays of the Ten Commandments on government property, and government-subsidized school bus rides played into all of this? What is “accommodation” in this context and when might you need to seek one and what should you do if you are denied it? What is the relationship between free speech and religious liberty? We welcome Judge Starr, a Christian gentleman of the first order. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why did the United States invade Iraq, setting off a chain of events that profoundly changed the Middle East and the US global position? In The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Joseph Stieb offers a compelling look at how the United States pivoted from a policy of containment to regime change in Iraq after September 11, 2001. Starting with the Persian Gulf War, the book traces how a coalition of political actors argued with increasing success that the totalitarian nature of Saddam Hussein's regime and the untrustworthy behavior of the international coalition behind sanctions meant that containment was a doomed policy. By the end of the 1990s, a consensus belief emerged that only regime change and democratization could fully address the Iraqi threat. Through careful examination, Stieb expands our understanding of the origins of the Iraq War while also explaining why so many politicians and policymakers rejected containment after 9/11 and embraced regime change. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
American society is rapidly secularizing – a radical departure from its historically high level of religiosity–and politics is a big part of the reason. Just as, forty years ago, the Religious Right arose as a new political movement, today secularism is gaining traction as a distinct and politically energized identity. Secular Surge: A New Faultline in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the political causes and political consequences of this secular surge, drawing on a wealth of original data. The authors show that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right. However, while the political impact of secularism is profound, there may not yet be a Secular Left to counterbalance the Religious Right. Secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while adding oxygen to political polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Still there may be opportunities to reach common ground if politicians seek to forge coalitions that encompass both secular and religious Americans. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the former chairperson of the political science department. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with a particular focus on religion (and secularism) and young people. Geoff Layman serves as the chair of the Department of Political Science and is the co-editor of the journal Political Behavior. His research focuses on political behavior, political parties, and religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on long-term changes in the parties and their electoral coalitions. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on American Political Development (APD), federalism, education, and religion and politics. Her award-winning book America's Voucher Politics is out now with Cambridge University Press, and her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In considering how legislation moves forward in the American political system, we often think about elected representatives sitting in committee hearings or Senators speaking from the floor of the Senate to make a particular point. Woven into all of these ideas, which are not misguided, is the role (often behind the scenes) that congressional leaders play in trying to wrangle their caucuses to vote for or against legislation. In The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail (U Michigan Press, 2021), Political Scientist John Lovett leads us into these processes and assumptions and unpacks the ways that congressional leaders are far less able to exert control over their caucuses because of the ways that individual members are able to pursue attention through the changing media landscape. While Lovett provides a coda at the end of the book indicating that social media, especially Twitter, has an outsized role in the ways that individual members can capture attention, the focus of the book is to look more closely at heritage media, especially The Washington Post, and trace the ways that members are able to work outside and around party and congressional leaders. By accessing media attention on their own, individual members can exercise power and have the capacity to essentially ignore the demands and requests of the party leadership within Congress. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a brief time) enabled Black Americans to vote, sit on juries, and exercise other civil rights. Using a rich collection of data, the book documents how the Republican coalitions that passed and enforced civil rights weakened because of GOP political weakness in the South, shifts in the political preferences of Northern voters, and lack of GOP unity over core assumptions. Jenkins and Peck offer a Congress-centered American political development perspective to understand how Republicans built civil rights yet subsequently undermined the nascent multiracial democracy that their civil rights agenda helped make possible. The book focuses on the conflict within the Republican Party and electoral trends to argue that “policy enactments are a consequence of, and a window into, evolving attitudes about civil rights.” The book’s granular political history demonstrates how legal institutions -- created by majoritarian bodies like Congress -- liberated and protected an oppressed class of citizens but also reasserted the power of the white majority. Dr. Jeffery A. Jenkins is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. Dr. Justin Peck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. In addition to his work on Congress and Civil Rights, he is engaged in a project that seeks to understand how the United States’ role in international affairs leads to the production of new political ideas and to the reform of domestic political institutions. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “BLM versus #BLM:The Dangers of the New Armed Rebellion Narrative” was recently published as part of the Brennan Center for Justice’s series on Protest, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” appeared in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is sometimes described as “the most important governmental office no one has ever heard of” and it certainly occupies a very important position and role in the functioning of the American presidency and the way that the Executive branch operates. Political Scientists Meena Bose (Hofstra University) and Andrew Rudalevige (Bowdoin College) have edited an excellent primer on OMB, not just in terms of exploring what it does and how it works, but also integrating a host of perspectives examining the history, function, and details of OMB. The book begins with a Forward and an introductory chapter by the Honorable Jacob J. Lew, who served as OMB Director during both the Clinton and Obama Administrations. Lew’s chapter sets up the rest of the work in Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), since he discusses OMB as an insider and a leader of the agency, as well as from the position as a cabinet secretary who also needed to work with OMB and as President Obama’s chief of staff, a position that requires a similar kind of broad understanding of the functioning and structure of the entire Executive branch. The rest of the chapters in Executive Policymaking follow Lew’s lead, with analysis from academics who study and research the presidency and the Executive branch and bureaucracy along with co-authored chapters that bring in the perspectives from other current and former OMB employees. The Office of Management and Budget has evolved from the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) that was put into place in 1921, a century ago. Over time, the BOB was moved to the Department of Treasury, but OMB was given more the responsibilities that provide it with the capacity to essentially manage the workings of the Executive branch, which is no small undertaking. The president’s budget is the way that the Executive branch can broadly manage the priorities of the bureaucracy, and OMB is the centralizing actor in the way that this essentially operates. Bose and Rudalevige, both experts on the presidency and the bureaucracy, have brought together authors who examine OMB from important and distinct perspectives. The first section of Executive Policymaking explains the role that OMB plays in the federal budget process. This section also includes a chapter that specifically looks at the president’s budget powers during the Trump Era, since abuse of these powers also led to the first of President Donald Trump’s two impeachments. The next part of the book explores Executive Orders, Central Clearance, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), all of which are key components of the role that OMB plays in regard to the Executive branch agencies and departments. The final section of the book shifts the focus a bit from the budget to management, looking at the role that OMB plays in terms of managing the entirety of the Executive branch and also managing itself. The authors in this section also include OMB employees, who speak to their own experiences working inside this complex and important agency and the role and position that OMB holds in relation to the president, the presidency, and the Executive branch. This is a fascinating and useful examination of the many dimensions of the Office of Management and Budget, placing the agency in historical, political, and institutional context. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientist Nathan Kalmoe has written a fascinating historical and political exploration of the connections between violence and partisanship before, during, and after the American Civil War. This book brings together work by historians and political scientists and straddles both disciplines in the examination of the way that partisan politics at the time of the Civil War also contributed to the rise and use of violence, and how this violence then fed back into partisan politics during this period. Kalmoe engaged a multi-method approach to the research, examining election returns, especially county-level returns during this time; he also integrated the census data from the time to map where voters lived and where soldiers were coming from when they became part of the military. Kalmoe dug deeply into the records about the soldiers (which have been digitized), learning about what happened to them, where they fought, and where they called home. Finally, in order to get a clear sense of the partisan divisions and the action and rhetoric of the party elite, he integrated content from local newspapers—these newspapers were often the media arms of particular political parties in cities and localities, and thus they directly reflected the thinking of the party leaders in those same cities and localities. Kalmoe noted that literacy rates were quite high during this time, which also makes the case for the usefulness of what these partisan newspapers were writing about and reflecting to their readership. With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines this violent period of American history, and Kalmoe is able to essentially measure how casualties effected voting and mass political behavior by using all of these historical sources to discern this data. By tracing these related behaviors, Kalmoe highlights some of the changes in attitude and approach that takes place in the two main political parties at the time. He finds that the northern Democrats shifted markedly from a pro-war stance earlier in the war to, in 1864, every northern Democratic newspaper taking an anti-war position. This is a rather dynamic change that takes place over a short time. During this same period, the northern Republican partisans were suffering significantly more losses, and they were even more committed to the war, as reflected in the newspapers and in the public events where speakers addressed the topic of the war. This pattern of war memory also continues in Reconstruction, as Republican states built monuments to remember the fallen, and as the regiments also wrote up their own histories, delineating the heroic deeds of those who were members of the respective regiments. This is a sophisticated and complex analysis of the connection between violence and partisan in an earlier era in the United States, when the Union and the Confederacy were moved to take up arms and to commit to violence in ways that were also directly related to the active political parties and partisan affiliation with those parties. In reading through With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War it hard not to see echoes and images of more recent political violence and the way that this more contemporary violence is also tied to partisanship. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (UNC Press, 2021), Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship. Jessica Georges is a third year history PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Michael McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University Law School and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has written an examination of the power that the president has in the U.S. constitutional system. The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power under the Constitution (Princeton UP, 2020) presents a unique analysis of the powers that were allocated to the executive in Article II of the Constitution, as well as an exploration of the origin of many of the executive powers that are outlined in the Constitution but allocated to other branches of government within the new constitutional system. Thus, while McConnell’s focus is on the executive in the American constitutional system, the framing of this focus is in delineating the prerogative powers that Blackstone had noted belong to the monarch or the individual head of state, but that the Founders in 1787 split up. The argument in the book also clarifies the structure of Article II, explaining in important detail the sections of Article II and how they are connected to each other. McConnell’s deep dive into the discussions not only in Philadelphia in 1787, but also in the state ratifying conventions and among the different founders provide the historical context for the explicit and implied powers distributed throughout the Constitution. McConnell’s historical analysis pays particular attention to the committees that were established during the Constitutional Convention, like the Committee on Detail, that had to flesh out how the powers that were being invested in the document would manifest in operation. Thus, The President Who Would Not Be King is an historical examination of the competing ideas that were part of the conversation that ultimately became the U.S. Constitution. But McConnell does not stop at the founding period. He provides much more contemporary examples and case studies of some of the tensions around these prerogative powers that were not all given to the president in Article II. This takes up Justice Robert Jackson’s important decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer in terms of how that decision shaped expectations around executive use of power and authority, and has also positioned those expectations within, intentionally or not, our highly partisan political environment. McConnell’s work provides a path to understanding constitutional meaning from before the constitution itself was written, which is distinct from constitutional theories like originalism. The President Who Would Not Be King also wrestles with the Founders’ ideas around the complexity of separation of powers, given the executive powers that Congress holds and can use, as well as the executive powers vested in the presidency. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From the New York Times bestselling author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses, a revelatory glimpse into the mind and soul of our sixteenth president through his private notes to himself, explored together here for the first time. A deeply private man, shut off even to those who worked closely with him, Abraham Lincoln often captured “his best thoughts,” as he called them, in short notes to himself. He would work out his personal stances on the biggest issues of the day, never expecting anyone to see these frank, unpolished pieces of writing, which he’d then keep close at hand, in desk drawers and even in his top hat. The profound importance of these notes has been overlooked, because the originals are scattered across several different archives and have never before been brought together and examined as a coherent whole. In Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President (Random House, 2021), Ronald C. White walks readers through twelve of Lincoln’s most important private notes, showcasing our greatest president’s brilliance and empathy, but also his very human anxieties and ambitions. We look over Lincoln’s shoulder as he grapples with the problem of slavery, attempting to find convincing rebuttals to those who supported the evil institution (“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”); prepares for his historic debates with Stephen Douglas; expresses his private feelings after a defeated bid for a Senate seat (“With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure”); voices his concerns about the new Republican Party’s long-term prospects; develops an argument for national unity amidst a secession crisis that would ultimately rend the nation in two; and, for a president many have viewed as not religious, develops a sophisticated theological reflection in the midst of the Civil War (“it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party”). Additionally, in a historic first, all 111 Lincoln notes are transcribed in the appendix, a gift to scholars and Lincoln buffs alike. These are notes Lincoln never expected anyone to read, put into context by a writer who has spent his career studying Lincoln’s life and words. The result is a rare glimpse into the mind and soul of one of our nation’s most important figures. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
All political candidates make strategic choices about how to present themselves to voters but not all candidates have to “weigh decisions about their self-presentation alongside stereotypical tropes, culture norms that denigrate Blackness, and European beauty standards, in addition to the historical legacies of racism, colorism, sexism, and heteropatriarchy.” Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (Oxford UP, 2021) interrogates the “everyday politicization of Black women’s bodies and its ramifications for politics.” Hair is not simply hair. Drs. Brown and Lemi use a wide-range of qualitative and quantitative methods, including focus groups with Black women candidates and elected officials to argue that “Black women's political experience and the way that voters evaluate them is shaped overtly by their skin tone and hair texture, with hair being a particular point of scrutiny.” Sister Style explores “what the politics of appearance for Black women means for Black women politicians and Black voters, and how expectations about self-presentation differ for Black women versus Black men, White men, and White women.” For many black women in politics, racist and sexist cultural ideas have been used to “demean and fetishize” them based on their physical appearance. They are oftentimes pressured into changing their appearance to look more like their white female counterparts. But Brown and Lemi highlight the agency of Black women candidates and the book reconceptualizes how “Black women political elites are thought about, assessed, measured, and evaluated.” The book is organized around several questions. What are the origins of the contemporary focus on Black women’s bodies in public life? How do Black women politicians make sense of the politics of appearance? Is there a phenotypic profile in who which most Black women politicians fit? How do voters process the appearances of Black women candidates? Dr. Nadia Brown is an Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University. Beginning in July 2021, Dr. Brown will be a professor of Government and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Georgetown University. Dr. Brown is also the author of Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford, 2014) and editor of three books: Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics (Routledge, 2016), Body Politics (Routledge, 2019), and Me Too Political Science (Routledge, 2019). She edits Politics, Groups, and Identities and is a founding board member of @WomenAlsoKnowStuff. Her most recent public facing publication is “Here’s how to teach Black Lives Matter: We’ve developed a short course” Washington Post’s Monkey Cage with Ray Block, Jr. and Christopher Stout. Dr. Danielle Casarez Lemi is a Tower Center Fellow at the John G. Tower Center for Political Science at Southern Methodist University. Her specialization is representation in American politics with a focus on gender, race, and identity. Her research has appeared in Politics, Groups, and Identities, Du Bois Review, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Perspectives on Politics. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” can be found in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why do so many conservative Christians continue to support Donald Trump despite his many overt moral failings? Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico? Why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Why do a sizeable proportion of Americans continue to oppose women's equality in the workplace and in the home? Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry seek to answer these questions in Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores the phenomenon of "Christian nationalism," the belief that the United States is-and should be-a Christian nation. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in American public life, but Christian nationalism is about far more than whether the phrase "under God" belongs in the pledge of allegiance. At its heart, Christian nationalism demands that we must preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone--Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women recognizes their "proper" place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the influence of Christian nationalism on today's most contentious social and political issues. Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data as well as in-depth interviews, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry document how Christian nationalism shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Americans' stance toward Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Islam, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues-very much including who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God is a guide to one of the most important-and least understood-forces shaping American politics. Andrew Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Clemson University and Assistant Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cristina Beltrán has written a thoughtful and interrogating analysis of the concept of citizenship, particularly in the United States, and how the history of the United States as a country has shaped an understanding of who gets to be “belong” as a member of this society. The book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy is part of the Forerunners book series published by the University of Minnesota Press—this series, as we discuss in our conversation, publishes shorter works that dig into ideas across a broad and interdisciplinary spectrum. And this is precisely what Beltrán has done in this book, in terms of engaging historiography, Cultural Studies, LatinX Studies, political theory, American Studies, and other disciplines to aid her unwrapping of our understanding of immigrants and migrants, and why there is an interest in seeing these groups as “others” and, among certain segments of the population, wanting to make sure they suffer in this exclusionary position. Beltrán takes the reader through both imagined and real spaces in terms of the place of the immigrant and the migrant in the United States, weaving the role of the American frontier, the way that settler-colonialism operated inside the U.S., and an understanding of white identity within all of these contexts. Cruelty as Citizenship is an accessible exploration of the tensions within the United States that surround our reactions to those coming to this country (forcibly, or by choice) and how racial identity has shaped the varied experiences and responses of those who come to the United States and those who have proceeded them here. As Beltrán noted in our discussion, she had come to this work in an effort to tease out the different political affiliations within the LatinX population in the U.S. What she found was that in order to understand the political responses by LatinX voters, the entire dynamic between different racial groups and the role of racial domination needs to be explored. Thus, Cruelty as Citizenship is the result of digging into the political dynamics within different racial groups in the United States, and getting at the role of white identity, and thus white democracy, within American cultural concepts and expectations of political and state power. Cruelty as Citizenship guides the reader through multiple facets of American history, politics, culture, and ideas about what it is to be American and who has the right to claim this identity as their own. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Other Side of the Coin: Public Opinion toward Social Tax Expenditures (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021), political scientists Christopher Ellis and Christopher Faricy examine public opinion towards social tax expenditures—the other side of the American social welfare state—and their potential to expand support for such social investment. Tax expenditures seek to accomplish many of the goals of direct government expenditures, but they distribute money indirectly, through tax refunds or reductions in taxable income, rather than direct payments on goods and services or benefits. They tend to privilege market-based solutions to social problems such as employer-based tax subsidies for purchasing health insurance versus government-provided health insurance. Drawing on nationally representative surveys and survey experiments, Ellis and Faricy show that social welfare policies designed as tax expenditures, as opposed to direct spending on social welfare programs, are widely popular with the general public. Contrary to previous research suggesting that recipients of these subsidies are often unaware of indirect government aid—sometimes called “the hidden welfare state”—Ellis and Faricy find that citizens are well aware of them and act in their economic self-interest in supporting tax breaks for social welfare purposes. The authors find that many people view the beneficiaries of social tax expenditures to be more deserving of government aid than recipients of direct public social programs, indicating that how government benefits are delivered affects people’s views of recipients’ worthiness. Importantly, tax expenditures are more likely to appeal to citizens with anti-government attitudes, low levels of trust in government, or racial prejudices. As a result, social spending conducted through the tax code is likely to be far more popular than direct government spending on public programs that have the same goals. The first empirical examination of the broad popularity of tax expenditures, The Other Side of the Coin provides compelling insights into constructing a politically feasible—and potentially bipartisan—way to expand the scope of the American welfare state. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton University Press, 2021) presents an inspiring look at how US women and their global allies pushed the nation and the world toward justice and greater equality for all. Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of twentieth-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics. Cobble follows egalitarian women’s activism from the explosion of democracy movements before World War I to the establishment of the New Deal, through the upheavals in rights and social citizenship at midcentury, to the reassertion of conservatism and the revival of female-led movements today. Cobble brings to life the women who crossed borders of class, race, and nation to build grassroots campaigns, found international institutions, and enact policies dedicated to raising standards of life for everyone. Readers encounter famous figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Mary McLeod Bethune, together with less well-known leaders, such as Rose Schneiderman, Maida Springer Kemp, and Esther Peterson. Multiple generations partnered to expand social and economic rights, and despite setbacks, the fight for the many persists, as twenty-first-century activists urgently demand a more caring, inclusive world. Putting women at the center of US political history, For the Many reveals the powerful currents of democratic equality that spurred American feminists to seek a better life for all. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Growing Up America: Youth and Politics Since 1945 (U Georgia Press, 2019) is a fascinating book that weaves together the burgeoning field of Childhood History, the post-World War II history of the United States, and the familiar concepts of political advocacy by younger citizens. Eckelmann Berghel, Fieldston, and Renfro, all historians, have brought together a rigorous and engaging work by other historians, legal scholars, and ethnic and indigenous studies experts, to which they have also contributed their own expertise. This book brings in the actual voices of children in the United States in the postwar period, highlighting their roles as political actors in their own right, and examining so many aspects of politics and culture as seen through the eyes of young people. The contributing authors of Growing Up America are knitting together, in their respective chapters of the book, children as agents, as actively engaged members of the society, and children as symbols, used in a whole host of different ways by different political actors and organizations. The book is divided into three sections that follow the chronological direction of recent American history, but that also focus on conceptual frameworks for each era under examination. The first part of the book is focused on the Cold War period and how children were integrated into both the symbolic and the political constructions of life during the Cold War. This section integrates the book’s first discussion of young people and science, as well as exploring the role that groups like the Boy Scouts played in building America’s Cold War empire. There is also research about the ways in which American girls and women, in particular, were supposed to look and act and how they were taught these qualities in school and how they were to shape the projected image of Americans. The second part of Growing Up America follows the arc of history through the Rights revolution that comes to dominate the political and cultural landscape in the U.S. (and elsewhere) in the 1960s and 1970s. This part of the book examines expected areas of youth involvement, but perhaps in unexpected ways, such as the many pre-adolescents who wrote to President Lyndon Johnson supporting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The final section of the book examines the late 20th century political turn towards conservativism in American politics, and how this shift impacted and was experienced by children. Growing Up America brings in another chapter focusing on young people and science in this section, with a chapter on young women and STEM. The final chapter in this section evaluates the real and perceived vulnerability of childhood, especially in the racially segregated symbolism that was the milk carton campaign for missing children in the mid-1980s. Growing up America will be of great interest to scholars and students across a range of disciplines and areas of expertise, especially in the ways it draws on different arenas of politics and culture to explore youth engagement in the United States since 1945. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which granted women the right to vote nationwide, was the culmination of a long and oftentimes contentious campaign that had its origins in the beginnings of the nation itself. In American Women’s Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote, 1776-1965 (Library of America, 2020) Susan Ware provides readers with a sampling of the letters, articles, speeches, and other contemporary documents that reflect both the ideas of the movement and the arguments deployed against it. Her selections demonstrate how the battle of women’s suffrage was itself a part of a broader campaign for women’s rights in the early 19th century. Though it was galvanized by the activism of women from the abolitionist movement, the solidarity born of common oppression was shattered after the Civil War, when many suffragists expressed frustration with their exclusion from the voting rights being granted to Blacks. While a corps of dedicated activists continued their campaign into the 20th century, it was only in the 1910s that momentum shifted decisively in their direction. As Ware demonstrates, their success in gaining ratification in 1920 was less the conclusion of women’s efforts for political quality than it was the end of one stage and the beginning of a new effort to turn the newly-won franchise into political power – an effort that continues down to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Much has long been made of the bold legislative action that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt marshalled forward in his first 100 days in office in the midst of the Great Depression. To take stock of the Biden presidency, Lilly and Susan asked three thoughtful political scientists—Dr. Jonathan Bernstein (Bloomberg Media), Dr. Nadia E. Brown (Purdue University), and Dr. Jane Junn (University of Southern California) to interrogate the early days of the Biden Administration. They not only provided keen observations about the Executive Branch, but also about Congress and state governments. The lively discussion shifted quickly from the arbitrary marker of the first 100 days to what is necessary to move policy forward in the closely divided U.S. House and Senate, and what the legislative agenda may look like going forward. We chat about the apparent pause in the swift swirling of our politics—though we debate whether the new administration is a return to normalcy and if it is possible, post Trump, to return to normalcy. In this context, there was a discussion of competence, expertise, intelligence, rationality, preparation, and integrity. We pay close attention to the political parties, with specific focus on the internal tensions in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Our guests also spend time framing the political landscape with an understanding of the role and place of news media and social media. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, a perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, innovative book, Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (University of Chicago Press, 2020), rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this “mean-spirited turn” in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion in our common culture, on a continuum with infantile and “gotcha” forms of entertainment meant to engender provocation and sadistic enjoyment. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Joshua Gunn (h) about lots of things other than Trump, from horror shows to sexting to Pee-Wee Herman, structural perversion, and, yes, some Trump. We are recording this episode as the second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump begins and the Trump fatigue is real. But this is not exactly a book about Trump. As Gunn puts it, “labeling Trump and his ilk as ‘fascist’ displaces our collective responsibility for their ascent to national power.” In Political Perversion, Gunn argues that “Trump’s rhetoric and person are better understood as replicating a style and genre of political discourse” that has a long history, but Gunn has eloquently re-imagined as what he calls “structural perversion.” Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead of proposing legislation that would never pass Congress, the author provides an insider's look at politically plausible, high-impact financial policy fixes that will radically shift the equality balance. Offering an innovative, powerful, and highly practical solution for immediately turning around the enormous nationwide problem of economic inequality, this groundbreaking book:
Presents practical ways America can and should tackle economic inequality with fast-acting results;
Provides revealing examples of exactly how bad economic inequality in America has become no matter how hard we all work;
Demonstrates that increasing inequality is disastrous for long-term economic growth, political action, and even personal happiness;
Explains why your bank's interest rates are still only a fraction of what they were even though the rich are getting richer than ever, faster than ever;
Reveals the dangers of FinTech and BigTech companies taking over banking; Shows how Facebook wants to control even the dollars in your wallet; and
Discusses who shares the blame for our economic inequality, including the Fed, regulators, Congress, and even economists.
Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America (Wiley, 2021) should be required reading for leaders, policymakers, regulators, media professionals, and all Americans wanting to ensure that the nation’s financial policy will be a force for promoting economic equality. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down. As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy. Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her medp16@gwu.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Community Relations Service (CRS) came into being alongside the Voting Rights Act—as part of the Act itself. And this organization was integrated into the Voting Rights Act in 1964 because President Lyndon Johnson wanted it to be included in that landmark legislation, in part because Johnson, as an adept politician and negotiator, saw the importance of establishing a means for mediation and negotiation on the local level in many places throughout the United States. The initial portfolio of the CRS was focused solely on issues around race and racial disputes, though it has since been formally extended to include issues around ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The CRS is housed in the Department of Justice, but operates as an independent entity, and does not work as part of the FBI or the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. Grande Lum, who is currently provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Menlo College, had served as the Director of the CRS from 2012-2016, and he has taken the original edition of America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights (U Missouri Press, 2020), written by Bertram Levine, and updated it with another twenty years of the history of the CRS. This is a fascinating history of this often- overlooked governmental institution, and in our podcast conversation, Grande and I also discuss the process of updating the book itself, since he had made such great use of the original edition when he first became Director of the CRS. In taking the original text and adding in another two decades of history, Grande Lum worked with Bertram Levine’s children to make sure his work was also in the spirit of their father’s work, since Levine had written the original edition of the book. This podcast is an engaging discussion about the history of the Community Relations Service itself, the book that incorporates that history, highlighting the many successes of these domestic mediators and peacemakers, and the process for collaboratively updating this kind of a book. Lum also discusses some of the projects that have come out of the CRS, including the Divided Community Project at the Moritz School of Law at the Ohio State University (https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/dividedcommunityproject/), and other community mediation centers in different states and localities around the United States. These local and national organizations, along with the CRS, have been pursuing many of the ideas that are currently being discussed about law enforcement reform. America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, co-authored by Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, is a fascinating history of the organization that has, for more than fifty years, been working to bring divided communities together, in peaceful dialogue, in an effort to defuse situations without violence or indictments. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On the face of things, the Constitution is concerned with individual and collective rights - to free speech, assembly, religion and that part about guns. Supreme Court cases serve as public tests of its core precepts, and lightning rods for current political argument. The focus tends to be on the Bill of Rights. Between ‘We the People’ and the end of the 7th Article is everything else, of which the text of the Presidential Oath of Office is the most recognisable. The document’s concern with the architecture of government, combined with disputes between originalists and loose constructionists obscures the fact that the Constitution is not merely a mechanism of domestic law. In Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution (Oxford UP, 2020), Max Edling offers a very different account of the creation of the Constitution. It appeared at a juncture when a loose federation of states seized control of a large segment of the American Continent from Britain and sought to establish a lasting republic in a political landscape dominated by Indigenous and European imperial formations. This was an international as opposed to purely national context. Edling’s book reminds us that the founding was not a neat intellectual exercise of drawing up a new government, but part of a messy, protracted and always violent process of carving states out of Indigenous spaces and assuming a position among the powers of the earth. Max M Edling is Reader in Early American History at King's College, London. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country (Cambridge University Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals (University of Virginia Press, 2020) dives into the discussion and debate surrounding the 2016 primary and how Donald Trump was ultimately nominated by the Republican Party to be their standard bearer and then elected president. But this is not the center of the book—though it is a very important data point. Christopher Stout, Associate Professor of Political Science at Oregon State University, came to this question about identity politics and how this understanding of rhetorical and political levers is at play with different groups of voters in the United States, through the work of Charles Hamilton and considerations of the idea of deracialized strategies in American politics. Hamilton, who has written a forward to The Case for Identity Politics, co-authored, with Kwame Toure, the 1967 text Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, bringing forward this deracialization thesis that provides the jumping off point for Stout’s research and analysis. Stout discusses this concept of the deracialization of political rhetoric and campaigns, especially by Democratic presidential candidates over the past thirty or forty years. The Case for Identity Politics explores the nuances of policy appeals that center on race and policy appeals that deracialize the policy itself. Stout, in examining these different paths over the past decades, also traces some of the changes within American political parties, most particularly within the parties themselves and whom the parties see and respond to as their base supporters. This is a rich, detailed, and methodologically diverse study of identity politics, and how identity, particularly racial identity, has worked within politics in the United States, operating differently at state/local levels and national levels. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Calhoun: American Heretic (Basic Books, 2021), historian Robert Elder documents the life and thought of one of America's most controversial statesman, John C. Calhoun. A congressman, a vice president, and a senator, Calhoun represented Jeffersonian republicanism during a time of national expansion and imperialism. He became the nation's most ardent defender of slavery and one of its most complex thinkers on the issue of state sovereignty. Elder's book reconsiders the legacy of this consequential political figure and what it means for America's past and present. Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Melvin Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. You can follow Melvin on Twitter at @MRogers097. Professor Rogers specializes in democratic theory, with special focus on the traditions of American and African-American politics. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lori Cox Han and Caroline Heldman, both scholars of gender and politics as well as scholars of the American Presidency, have assembled a wide array of essays[] to revisit the question about whether “we” are ready for the first female president of the United States, and what the path might look like to arrive at that glass-ceiling shattering event. Cox Han and Heldman had edited a previous version of this concept in 2007 (Rethinking Madam President: Are We Ready for the First Woman in the White House? Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007) and they and their contributing authors had concluded that, in 2007, the United States was not yet ready to give “female presidential candidates a fair run.” But much has shifted and changed over the years since the publication of that previous interrogation of this perennial consideration and Madam President? Gender and Politics on the Road to the White House (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) revisits this consideration having seen Hillary Clinton as the standard bearer for the Democratic Party in 2016, even while she lost the Electoral College vote to Donald Trump. Cox Han and Heldman, and the contributing authors to Madam President? are evaluating the political landscape following Clinton’s loss and exploring what changed as a result of the presidential race in 2016, including the Women’s Movement/March that came together following Trump’s Inauguration and the rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements as well. The chapters that make up Madam President? Gender and Politics on the Road to the White House cover quite a few different dimensions of presidential politics and gender politics, including examining where female candidates have been able to compete on a more equal playing field with male candidates, such as in their capacity to fundraise, as Victoria Farrar-Myers explains in her chapter on “Money and Candidate Viability.” Other chapters explore the masculine nature of the presidency itself and the difficulty this poses for candidates and for voters. Authors approach this complicated foundation of the American presidency from a variety of perspectives, including Meredith Conroy’s chapter on masculinity and media coverage during the course of the campaign, and Karen Hult’s and Meena Bose’s respective chapters on sex, gender, and leadership within the Executive Branch, and key areas of presidential responsibility. Madam President? helps us think about the newly elected female Vice President, Kamala Harris, and her husband’s role as first spouse. As Cox Han and Heldman explain during the course of our conversation, there is some cause of optimism that we may already be seeing the first woman president of the United States, it just may be a few years before she takes office. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. [] Full disclosure: I am a contributing co-author, with Linda Beail, of one of these essays. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do we understand the nuances of efforts by Christian conservatives to affect American law – and evaluate their success? What lessons do they hold for other social movements? Dr. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, associate professor of politics at Pomona College and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson, professor of Political Science at the University of Denver join the podcast to discuss Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right's Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture (Oxford UP, 2020) The book evaluates whether activists pushing for lawyers and judges with a Christian Worldview have been able to achieve their goals and transform American legal culture. This impressive book contributes to our general understanding of social movements, legal mobilization, and constitutional development – but also the specifics of how the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (CCLM) has attempted to transform American law from secular and liberal to Christian and natural. While many people know of The Federalist Society’s attempts to influence scholarship, they may be less familiar with the push to create separate law schools and legal institutions that teach from a Christian worldview such as Regent University Law School, Liberty University Law School, and Ave Maria School of Law. This thoughtfully written and well-researched book uses a modified version of Support Structure Theory and extensive data collected by the authors to interrogate why the New Christian Right rejected the lower-cost, lower risk infiltration approach to support structure building in favor of “a mix of parallel alternative and supplemental approaches.” The book includes a helpful model (the Support Structure Pyramid) for conceptualizing litigation-based movement support structures, institutions, and their relationship to legal change. The podcast includes a conversation about the evolution of that particular conception (and what the authors might change). Their analysis of different forms of capital (human, social, cultural, and intellectual) allows Hollis-Brusky and Wilson to assess the actual and potential capital outputs of each institution and the extent to which the Christian Conservative Legal Movement achieved their goals. The Christian Right has struggled to influence the legal and political mainstream but it has succeeded in creating a space of resistance to unify and connect those who seek to challenge “a dominant legal culture” seen as “incorrigibly liberal.” In the podcast, the authors discuss how they brought together Hollis-Brusky’s scholarship on the Federalist Society (Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Oxford, 2019) and Wilson’s earlier research on The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and American’s Culture Wars (Stanford, 2013) to create this nuanced, collaborative book. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the impeachment trial ends, Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell explore the future of the GOP with two media-savvy political scientists. Dr. Jonathan Bernstein is familiar to many as the Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy -- also doing Bloomberg television and radio. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and his most recent book is The Making of the Presidential Candidates (Roman & Littlefield 2020 -- Lilly interviewed him and his co-editor, Casey Dominguez, for the New Books in Political Science). Dr. Christopher Galdieri, Associate Professor at Saint Anselm College is the author of Stranger in a Strange State: The Politics of Carpetbagging from RFK to Scott Brown (SUNY Press, 2019 -- and Lilly interviewed him for New Books in Political Science) as well as Donald Trump & New Hampshire Politics (Palgrave, 2019). He often does interviews for CBC news, AP Radio, and others. In this spirited conversation, we interrogate the consequences of Trump and Trumpism for the Republican Party, the success of the Trump presidency in terms of policy and party politics, the level of dysfunctionality in the Republican Party, the tension between what is good for the party and what is good for individual office holders, and the ultimate effect on the American political system. The conversation dives into Trump’s second impeachment and the role of the GOP in both the House and the Senate around this most recent impeachment and trial. Galdieri and Bernstein also discuss the presidential nominating process over the past few decades, focusing on more recent nomination cycles and how these processes, and the functioning of both the Democratic and Republican parties, shape the outcomes and the winners. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin. In Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina "Nina" Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Journalists, scholars, politicians, and citizens often assume that calls for secession are political or historical aberrations. Our founding myth is that the Civil War divided an otherwise united nation and we soon reconstructed the United States to form a more perfect union. But Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020), argues that “disunion” is the hidden thread in the history of the United States. Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation who has also published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Raritan, and The Baffler. American politics from colonial times to the present, Break it Up argues, has always included “forces that have conspired to divide it” and Kreitner insists that we get a more nuanced and comprehensive “understanding of both our contentious past and our uncertain future” if we confront that history. Drawing on rich scholarship from multiple disciplines Break It Up argues that the United States has “always been riven by race and religion, cleaved by class and culture, sundered by section, and fragmented by geography.” The United States was always a “tentative proposition” – an “experiment that might fail at any time.” The book insists that asking questions about unity is the “prerequisite for serious discussion about what we Americans want the future to hold for ourselves and this perennially divided union.” Moreover, facing disunion assists in the work of building an inclusive, multiracial democracy capable of combating climate change or racial equality. As the book starkly puts it, the U.S. should either finish the work of Reconstruction or give up on the idea of the “united” states as currently conceived. Break It Up uses four eras to trace the theme of disunion. “A Vast, Unwieldy Machine” deals with the colonial and Revolutionary periods with Kreitner arguing that resisting a common enemy in the British should not be mistaken for unity. For example, the process of unification was characterized by bitter disagreements over representation and the protection of enslavement in the proposed Constitution. Here, Kreitner reviews some of what is well known in the literature but also smaller (and heated) controversies that may surprise those who think they know the period well. The second era highlights the disagreements in the early Republic over the increase in land (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase) and Aaron Burr’s attempt to break off parts of the country to form an independent Empire. For Hamilton: An American Musical buffs, Kreitner challenges some of Chernow’s assumptions to create a more nuanced understanding of the first Secretary of the Treasury. Kreitner’s third era documents the increasing appetite for disunion in the years before the American Civil War – and the ultimate schism. The fourth period is less defined by chronology. “Return of the Repressed” ranges from Reconstruction to 21st century plans for secession. Kreitner argues that Reconstruction’s failure to resolve fundamental conflicts leave us with a nation perpetually split over race and class. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As we enter the first month of the new presidential administration, Dr. Meena Bose, Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, at Hofstra University, and Dr. Daniel E. Ponder, the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University joined the team at New Books in Political Science to discuss the institution of the presidency as the U.S. transitions from one administration to another. Ponder joined Lilly to talk about Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State on an earlier podcast and Bose’s new book, Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency will be featured on an upcoming podcast. Bose and Ponder, experts on the U.S. Presidency and American political institutions, began by identifying what defines the first few weeks of the Biden Administration in contrast to Trump. Focusing on the office of the presidency itself, the group discussed how the Executive Office is positioned in regard to the American Congress, U.S. political parties, and the limited windows of opportunities that presidents often have at the beginning of their administrations. As Ponder and Bose considered the resiliency of the American presidency, they highlighted scholarship that contributed to their thinking including Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith’s new book, After Trump, Steve Knott’s recent book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, and Julia Azari and Jennifer Smith’s “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies.” Ponder and Bose explained how foundational works like James Pfiffner’s The Strategic Presidency and James MacGregor Burns’ The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America framed their analyses of how the president and the presidency function (or do not) with the American political system. Join us for this broad and fascinating conversation about the American presidency and contemporary political pressures and tensions that shape how that institution functions and operates. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today.” Among the respected members who once walked the Senate floor, admired for their expertise and with a stature that went beyond party, Milbank counted Sam Nunn (D-GA). Nunn served in the Senate for four terms beginning in 1972, at a moment when domestic politics and foreign policy were undergoing far-reaching changes. As a member and then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had a vital impact on most of the crucial national security and defense issues of the Cold War era and the “new world order” that followed—issues that included the revitalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military capability, US-Soviet relations, national defense reorganization and reform, the Persian Gulf conflict, and nuclear arms control. In this first full account of Nunn’s senatorial career, Frank Leith Jones reveals how, as a congressional leader and “shadow secretary of defense,” Nunn helped win the Cold War, constructing the foundation for the defense and foreign policies of the 1970s and 1980s that secured the United States and its allies from the Soviet threat. At a time of bitter political polarization and partisanship, Nunn’s reputation remains that of a statesman with a record of bipartisanship and a dedication to US national interests above all. His career, as recounted in Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age (University Press of Kansas, 2020), provides both a valuable lesson in the relationships among the US government, foreign powers, and societies and a welcome reminder of the capacity of Congress, even a lone senator, to promote and enact policies that can make the country, and the world, a better and safer place. Frank Leith Jones is professor of security studies and the General C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work includes Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A core duty of government is keeping those it governs safe. However, in modern democratic states, government is structured by a Constitution, which establishes constraints and checks on the power of any one office. But emergencies – from natural disasters to terrorist attacks – often call for a swift response that presses against those constraints and checks. In the United States, the President has claimed the authority to do what’s necessary to secure and protect the American people. Can such claims be squared with a commitment to the Constitution? In Overcoming Necessity: Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism (Yale 2021), Thomas Crocker argues for a conception of American constitutionalism that can address the need for government to respond to emergencies without losing its normative bearings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeff Broxmeyer has written a fascinating and insightful book about the party system in New York during the Gilded Age, but this is really only the foundation of the analysis. Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York's Gilded Age (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) unwraps the many layers that contribute to our understanding of the party system not only in New York during this period after the Civil War, but throughout much of American politics during this time. As Broxmeyer notes throughout the book, this concept of electoral capitalism organized the party system in Gilded Age New York—and helps us think about how struggles over unequal wealth, or wealth gaps, shape democracy in America and the evolution of the party system in the U.S. Electoral Capitalism essentially examines these ideas from the top down and from the bottom up, spending the first half of the book examining the different political machines that became the power and wealth brokers in New York (William “Boss” Tweed and Tammany Hall, and Roscoe Conkling and the Stalwart machine), and the second half of the book exploring the “spoilsmen” and the individuals who were desperate for these very precarious positions that would possibly help them through a difficult economic situation or keep them from losing their homes. Broxmeyer focuses particular attention on the interweaving of wealth and power that came together in politics during this time, and that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle wealth and power from each other and from politics during the Gilded Age. Electoral Capitalism braids together historical and cultural contexts to better understand American political parties and their development, the evolution of democracy in the United States, and the role of money and politics. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The relationship between American Protestant Evangelicals and the candidacy, presidency, and legacy of Donald Trump arrests the attention of journalists and pundits alike. But few have probed the implication that the rally cry "Make America Great Again" contains within it a certain historiographical claim. Protestant Christian leaders in America have responded in polarized ways to this slogan. In Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again (Routledge, 2021), Dr Matthew Rowley offers something of a study partisan historiography, exploring three different responses to the approach to history as suggested by Donald Trump. Some embrace the call to "Make America Great Again," others respond with a counter call to "Make America Lament," while still others prefer to "Make America Better." This accessible and timely study utilizes empathy as a means of understanding and critique, and contributes much needed perspective and balm for the current state of fracture within American religion and politics. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Journalists, politicians, scholars, and citizens often talk about election interference – for example, the interference of the Russians in the 2016 United States elections – as an aberration. But Dr. Dov H. Levin’s new book Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions (Oxford UP, 2020) argues that they are a common form of intervention in the modern world, a “tool of great power politics” that are used by both liberal democratic and non-democratic great powers. Although work has been done in diplomatic history and intelligence studies, Levin claims that that electoral interventions have received very little attention from political scientists and he has created the first quantitative, book-length study treating partisan electoral interventions as a “discrete, stand-alone phenomenon.” Levin (an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Hong Kong) aims to answer two important and relevant questions. First, when and where does such meddling occur? Second, what effects do meddling attempts have on the targeted election? Are they successful? Using a combination of methodological approaches – including multiple case studies, the creation of an original database, and multiple quantitative analyses -- Levin finds that interventions by great powers have significant impact in the desired direction in most cases when two concurrent conditions exist: the “great power perceives its interests as being greatly endangered by a significant candidate or party within the target” and another significant domestic actor within the country “wants or is willing to” collude with the intervention. Only when both of these conditions are present will partisan elector interventions occur. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop's famous phrase, "We shall be as a city upon a hill," has become political creed and rallying cry for American exceptionalism. But for over three centuries the text of Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity" was largely forgotten in the American textual canon. In a charming book of textual history, the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Daniel T. Rodgers, tells a fascinating tale with surprising twists and turns about how an obscure Puritan treatise became indispensable political rhetoric for late-twentieth-century American politics and into the new millennium. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton University Press, 2018) traces Winthrop's model from its seventeenth-century context, through centuries of neglect and forgetfulness, to its unlikely and meteoric rise as a foundational text of the American idea. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by right-wing ideologies. The need to understand the nature and danger of far-right violence is greater than ever. In American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism by Arie Perliger (Columbia University Press, 2020), Arie Perliger provides a wide-ranging and rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. He analyzes its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right. Perliger draws on a comprehensive dataset of more than 5,000 attacks and their perpetrators from 1990 through 2017 in order to explore key trends in American right-wing terrorism. He describes the entire ideological spectrum of the American far right, including today’s white supremacists, antigovernment groups, and antiabortion fundamentalists, as well as the histories of the KKK, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. Based on these findings, Perliger suggests counterterrorism policies that can respond effectively to the far-right threat. A groundbreaking examination of violence spawned from right-wing ideologies, American Zealots is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the transformation of domestic terrorism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
High drama at the high court. Grandstanding at Senate hearings. Distrust on all sides. Nominations made by presidents and ignored or voted down by the Senate or withdrawn due to scandal, calumny or nominee intellectual nullity or professional capacity issues. The personal character of nominees assailed. Questions asked of nominees; detailed answers politely refused. Cries of illegitimacy and calls for reform. All of this and more is on offer in Ilya Shapiro’s 2020 book, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court (Gateway, 2020) Everyone who cares about the law and the history and the future of the United States should read this book. It offers something to every sort of reader. First, it is a serious work of scholarship that examines such questions as: Is the Court, as progressives claim, really in some sort of crisis and merely a tool of a cabal involving the rather unlikely combination of corporate America and the supposedly evil religious right? Or, as many on the right argue, has the legislative branch, for expediency’s sake and in a cowardly and self-serving fashion, abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, thereby ceding far too much power to both the administrative state and the courts? Shapiro parses these questions with authority, weighing the pros and cons of the various reform measures of recent years with shrewdness, fairness and wit. Second, for general readers it is an entertaining yet substantive tour of the American political and legal landscape since the Founding Era and abounds in fascinating facts (e.g., when the first public Senate hearings on a Supreme Court nominee were held, the first time such a nominee testified in person before the Senate, the first time such hearings were televised). We learn about everything from the famous “Midnight Judges” to the fiascos of the nomination of Harriet Miers and those of Haysworth and Carswell. The book provides succinct profiles of such people that present them as distinct individuals and not as punchlines. The book is perfectly timed given that it was published just before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Senate hearings on the confirmation of now Justice Amy Coney Barrett. This is the book to turn to in coming years for solid analysis as the left pushes for “reform” of not only the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary—which Shapiro also discusses in depth. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It is often assumed that American politics is dominated by financial elites and the 1%, who use their massive wealth to gain power and influence, pushing for legislation that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. The actual mechanics of how this works, however, are often difficult to see and understand, obscured by distortion via the media, politicians, and the stories we often tell ourselves about how political change happens. These narratives often tell us about noble figures who come forward with powerful speeches and pieces of legislation that pushes us forward, as well as figures who sell out and cave to the powers that be. What these narratives often leave out is the broader context that those leaders were in the middle of, not only shaping but being shaped by the organizing that was happening around them. Filling in this gap are my guests today, Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz (cowriter Tarun Banerjee was unable to join us), here to discuss their book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (Verso, 2020). A work of political theory, sociology and history, this book covers a lot of different areas, but underlying it all is a belief in the importance of mass organizing to resist the power of capital. The first half of the book delivers an insightful and critical look at the Obama presidency, looking at his failures and limitations when it came to healthcare reform, Wall Street regulation and environmental protection, looking to understand the underlying mechanics of his political orientation and how they were insufficient for the tasks at hand. The later chapters of the book then look at various political successes, such as the labor movements during the depression of the 1930's and the struggles for civil rights in the 1960's, analyzing the ways massive organizing efforts were made to apply political and financial pressure and force capital to the bargaining table. Written with a brilliant combination of academic rigor and accessibility, this is a how-to guide for how to organize movements and challenge power, and will be of interest not just to people who want to understand the world, but who want to change it as well. Kevin Young is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017). Michael Schwartz is a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at Stony Brook University, and is also the author of The War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (2008). Tarun Banerjee is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2020) argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, two attorneys who have worked, respectively, in the Barack Obama and the George W. Bush Administrations, have written a blueprint of considerations to reform and revise aspects of the Executive Branch and the presidency. After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (Lawfair Press, 2020) joins a number of recent books—among them Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes’ Unmaking the Presidency, Stephen F. Knott’s The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, Lara M. Brown’s Amateur Hour—that assess the American Presidency, pointing out weaknesses in the structure of the office and the means to hold presidents accountable for their actions and decisions while in office. Bauer and Goldsmith come to their analysis from their perspectives and experiences working as attorneys at the highest levels of the Executive Branch and the presidency. They use these experiences to examine what they have seen transpire over the past four years of the Trump Administration, and the abuses of the office itself and aspects of the Executive Branch, particularly with regard to the Justice Department. This book looks at the institution of the presidency, while also exploring the way that Congress and the Courts work in relation to the Executive, providing a fairly comprehensive road map for reforms that can be done by a number of different political actors, including the next president. After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency really is a map or blueprint, outlining particular problems or controversial behavior by President Donald Trump and members of the Administration and/or Executive Office of the President staff, examining previous examples of the same kind of problems or behaviors, and then offering proposals for reform or revision that would address the problems or behaviors. After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency is divided into three sections, each section has particular focal points with regard to the presidency. Part one of the book focuses specifically on the president and advances proposals that, in many cases, would institutionalize and legalize norms that had been in place and adhered to by previous presidents, but not by President Trump. The second section, which is quite extensive, spotlights the relationship between the president and the Department of Justice. This part of the book proposes reforms that aim to keep the Justice Department independent of presidential interference and allows the Department to function and use its extraordinary tools and law enforcement capacities in a way that is free from corruption or inappropriate influence. The third part of the book is also the most difficult part in terms of reforms, since this section of the book treads into the area of presidential power that is long standing, and historically the realm of the Executive in the constitutional system. Bauer and Goldsmith note that they are committed to the idea of a powerful president, in line with Alexander Hamilton’s argument for an energetic executive in Federalist #70. But they also note that the president needs to be constitutionally accountable, thus their book aims at reforms that will institutionalize some of the guardrails that would contribute to more accountability without weakening the president or the presidency. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award-winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today I talked to Steven W. Webster about his book American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020). We discuss the behavioral implications of anger in American politics, from increased intolerance, blame, and aggression, to an ever-deepening lack of trust in government’s efficacy. Among the topics addressed was the role of the media and internet in stoking anger, and how democratic norms are threatened by partisan taunting and the way anger invites narrow loyalty to party over country. Steven W. Webster is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research and writings focus on the role of anger in American politics, including the growth of “negative partisanship” in our country, and the ever greater polarization separating Democrats and Republicans. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the United States, gun violence is in a state of national crisis, yet efforts to reform gun regulation face significant political and constitutional barriers. In this innovative book, Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars put forward creative and practical solutions, proposing legislative reform which will reduce gun deaths. Theirs is a libertarian 'bottom-up' approach which seeks to empower those most at risk by allowing individuals a choice to opt in to common-sense gun regulation for themselves. At the same time, the genius of Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights (Harvard University Press, 2020) is that the proposals do not infringe the individual freedoms of gun ownership protected by the second amendment. Ayres and Vars put forward practical solutions which, where adopted, will cause an immediate reduction in lives lost as a result of gun violence. Their work is empirically grounded and provides a roadmap for legislators and policy makers who wish to keep people safe by reducing gun deaths. Ian Ayres is the William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller Super Crunchers. He is a contributor to Forbes, NPR's Marketplace, and the New York Times. Fredrick E. Vars is the Ira Drayton Pruitt, Sr., Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in mental health law. He works with numerous suicide-prevention organizations and is a member of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Gun Violence. Jane Richards is in the final stages of completing her doctoral thesis on the application of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the insanity defence and its disposition orders at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power-and how it transformed America In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic Books, 2020), acclaimed historian Dr. Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women-Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more-who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ronald Reagan is regarded today as one of the most consequential presidents of the postwar era, yet many aspects of his legacy are largely unappreciated. In Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans and the Road to Trump (Beacon Press, 2020), Daniel Lucks looks at Reagan’s approach to racial issues over the course of his political career and details how his policies on race impacted Black and Hispanic populations in the United States. Though he was raised in a racially tolerant household, as he embraced conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s Reagan echoed much of the rhetoric of the opponents of the civil rights movement that was then transforming the country. When Reagan ran for political office in the mid-1960s he benefited politically from the white backlash against racial unrest and often took public stances on controversial issues that aligned with their views. While undoing the civil rights revolution was not a priority of his as president, Reagan nonetheless presided over an administration whose policies challenged many of its achievements, culminating in a racially-focused “war on drugs” that contributed to the problems facing African Americans down to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is the status of Muslim Americans in American democracy? Dr. Nazita Lajevardi’s superb new study concludes they are ‘outsiders at home.’ In Outsiders at Homes: The Politics of American Islamophobia published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, Dr. Lajevardi uses a combination of quantitative methods – including survey experiments, field experiments, and textual analysis of media transcripts – to find that the citizenship and inclusion of American Muslims is inhibited because Muslim Americans are viewed negatively by the public, portrayed negatively by the media, and treated negatively by political elites. The book portrays Muslim American citizenship as grudgingly bestowed and remarkably insecure – and highlights the extent to which American Muslims are aware of their exclusion and precarity and how that awareness affects their political behavior. Dr. Nazita Lajevardi is an attorney and assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and the Huffington Post. The book combines sophisticated quantitative methods with forceful prose accessible to all. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Her Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and her “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics since 1920 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) is a wonderful and sweeping exploration of the way that women and their access to the ballot have contributed to politics and life in the United States for the past century. Editors Stacie Taranto, professor of history at Ramapo College in New Jersey, and Leandra Zarnow, professor of history at the University of Houston, have compiled a broad and deep group of contributing authors, all of whom have written chapters that examine women, politics, power, activism, and citizenship in the United States. This is an intersectional history of American feminism and an analysis of women in politics and as citizens. The book is split into three sections, that follow the historical contours of social movements and political engagement, starting with the period before the 19th Amendment but spanning the period of suffrage through post-World War II America. The next section of the book pays close attention to the wave of advocacy and activism from the 1960s through the 1980s. The final section of the book focuses on more contemporary history and politics, examining the period that straddles the new century, from the 1990s up to the Trump era. By centering biography in many of these chapters, the authors and editors explore political history through those who actively participated in politics. Taranto and Zarnow have assembled a book that looks at where women have been, in terms of achieving voting power, to where women have moved, as citizens and in elected and appointed office, in terms of acquiring and using political power. The full sweep of the book weaves together women’s history and political history, moving away from thinking about politics through the lens of constitutionally regulated election cycles, especially presidential election cycles, and instead focuses on engagement with politics, activism, and policy change. The editors set up the framework for the broader analysis and research in the book, examining the ways that citizenship and power are gendered male in the United States, and how this constructed perspective and expectation has impacted women, especially as they were granted more of the rights of citizenship. These constraints also affected different women in different ways, benefiting white women, while excluding black women, Asian women, and others until later in the century. At the same time, the role and impact of republican motherhood is also examined within the pages of Suffrage at 100. In this anniversary year, Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics since 1920 is a great companion to Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder’s A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections since Suffrage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which concentrates specifically on the role that women have played as voters in American elections over the past century. Suffrage at 100 takes the same sweep of time, with a similar focus on women, but in this case, the thrust is biographical, in examining particular women who engaged in politics over the course of the last century, and historical, centering women as political actors within the scope of social and political history. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made by politicians, and it also confounds expectations about where one might expect the Democrats’ priorities to lay. How did it get to be this way, with Democrats and Republicans supporting high military spending? Michael Brenes’ For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy explains this contradictory history. Brenes argues that after the beginning of the Cold War, defense spending became an important part of the federal social safety net, winning over adherents from both parties who sought guaranteed employment. This blurred lines between Republicans and Democrats, instead creating a “Cold War Coalition” that was propped up by anticommunists and liberals. While occasionally challenged by progressives and the left or by libertarian-minded conservatives, this coalition has persisted to the present and explains why bipartisan support for the military-industrial complex remains so strong. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (Oxford University Press, 2020), Charles A. Kupchan traces the history of the concept in American politics and considers its future influence on American foreign policy. As he demonstrates, isolationism was long dominant in shaping American foreign policy, as for decades political leaders heeded George Washington’s advice to steer clear of entangling alliances. By the end of the 19th century, however, America’s growing engagement with the world sparked policy shifts as various forms of internationalism were introduced. Though isolationism remained a powerful influence on foreign policy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 publicly discredited isolationism for millions of Americans, paving the way for the adoption of Franklin Roosevelt’s approach of “liberal internationalism.” While this remained the consensus approach through the Cold War, Kupchan shows how the post-Cold War overreach of American foreign policy offered new life to isolationist concepts, giving it a renewed influence shaping America’s relationship with the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When did Black Americans move from stalwart party of Lincoln Republicans to dedicated New Deal Democrats? How did a group of self-organized Black economists, lawyers, sociologists, and journalists call out inequality in the New Deal and push President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to consider the relief of Black Americans? Dr. Jill Watt’s The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (Grove Press, 2020) traces the origins of a group of self-organized Black men led by a remarkable Black woman to answer these questions and help readers reflect on parties, policy, data, and diversity in American politics. The book is divided into three periods – tracing two versions of the Black Cabinet. Early in the century, a group of African-American office holders who had come to Washington, DC as appointees of President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt) began meeting regularly for “talkfests” at an upscale black-owned DC restaurant. When they started meeting in 1908, most Black Americans lived in the South: disenfranchised and denied equal access to the criminal justice system. Despite the power and violence of White supremacy, a group of highly educated men had secured positions in the federal government. They included Ralph W. Tyler (auditor of the Department of the Navy), James A. Cobb (special assistant to Washington, DC’s district attorney); Robert H. Terrell, Washington’s first Black judge), John C. Dancy (DC’s recorder of deeds), Calvin Chase (newspaper editor), and Kelly Miller (Howard University professor. As men who had come of age during Reconstruction, they were Republicans who associated Democrats with blocking access to the polls and vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Although Republicans abandoned Black voters and Reconstruction, President Rutherford B. Hayes nevertheless appointed Frederick Douglas and other Black men federal positions and President Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House (the first Black American ever to be a dinner guest). Washington subsequently provided Roosevelt with recommendations for appointments to federal posts. But these appointments were often without sufficient power and national conflicts demonstrated that Republican presidents would not protect Black citizens (e.g., in Atlanta, Teddy Roosevelt refused to send in troops to protect the black population from white mobs and Brownsville, Texas Roosevelt dishonorably discharged Black veterans after false, racially-motivated charges). Although widely covered by the Black press throughout the country, the Black Cabinet was unable to thwart the segregation of federal employees (particularly once Woodrow Wilson became president) and, by 1915, the Black Cabinet folded – even as individuals fought the virulent racism in the GOP and Democratic parties. By 1932, many of the original members of the Black Cabinet were dead but a new group of leaders – Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Vann, Robert Weaver, Alfred Edgar Smith, Bill Hastie – ambitiously moved to ask Black voters to turn the picture of Lincoln to the wall. In the election of 1932, a small minority of voters moved from the GOP to the Democratic party to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, a significant number of Black voters (many who consider themselves Republicans) vote for Roosevelt. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States experienced race-baiting, polarization, executive overreach, and inequality before the presidency of Donald Trump. Does that political history demonstrate resilience – or vulnerability? Suzanne Mettler (John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government department, Cornell University) and Robert C. Lieberman (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University) use insights gleaned from comparative politics (particularly the study of liberal democratic and authoritarian regimes) and American politics to interrogate five periods in American political history to argue that there are four central threats to American liberal democracy: political polarization, racism and nativism (issues of who belongs), economic inequality, and excessive executive power. The United States has faced these political threats (even combinations of them) in the past. But those periods of political conflict have had serious, long-term consequences for the robustness of American political institutions and practices. At the beginning of the 21st century, Mettler and Lieberman observe all four: a unique and serious state of affairs. Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy (St. Martin's Press, 2020) highlights five political moments that span three centuries. “Polarization Wreaks Havoc in the 1790s” unpacks the emergence of factions and proto-parties emerging over the Alien and Sedition Acts – and highlights how the rhetoric of John Adams (targeting of immigrants, the press, and demonizing his political opponents) parallels that of Donald Trump. “Democratic Disintegration in the 1850s” charts the breakup of the Union and Civil War. “Backsliding in the 1890s” interrogates debates over voting rights, identity, and citizenship – and the remarkable violence that enforced white supremacy as states stripped Black Americans of the voting rights that helped protect their civil and political rights. The national government failed to effectively uphold those rights, leaving most Black Americans without effective voting power for over 60 years. In “Executive Aggrandizement in the 1930s,” Mettler and Lieberman demonstrate how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s forceful use of executive power to thwart fascism in Europe and respond to broad public needs in the United States opened the door for the use of power for other purposes. In “The Weaponized Presidency in the 1970s,” they show how Richard Nixon deployed that power to punish political enemies but also how each branch played their constitutional roles to force a president from power. Designed for students and all readers interested in American history and politics – trying to make sense of the 2016 election and contemporary American politics, the book provides clear and concise definitions of any political science terms or theories. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There are so many Abraham Lincolns. There is the ruthless Lincoln willing to suspend habeas corpus and who, as president, presided over record levels of bloodshed on American soil. There is the political opportunist Lincoln who declined to take the bold stand against the Know Nothings that some of his contemporaries did, Lincoln preferring to let the movement implode without much action on Lincoln’s part. Lincoln also famously hung back from outright abolitionism for decades, believing that the time was not yet ripe for freeing the slaves. There is the Lincoln who exercised presidential power to an extent that made Andrew Jackson look meek by comparison. There is the Progressives’ Lincoln who saw in him a pioneering backer-in-chief of big government programs such as the creation of land grant colleges and big infrastructure spending such as on a Pacific railroad. There is the Lincoln who supposedly lorded it over Congress like some mafia kingpin demanding fealty and no questions asked. There is Lincoln as the leader of the so-called Second American Revolution who, by destroying the quasi-feudal southern social system and passing landmark economic legislation, drastically reshaped America. Not so fast, says Jon D. Schaff in his book Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (SIU Press, 2019). Rather than smashing societal structures willy-nilly and wielding presidential power like a bludgeon, Schaff’s Lincoln was far more deferential to Congress than many of us realized. Schaff fascinatingly shows how Lincoln’s Whig allegiances and distrust of autocratic figures like Jackson and Lincoln’s own background as a legislator at the state and national levels shaped his presidency and governing preferences. And, far from being a proto-New Dealer, Schaff’s Lincoln was very much preoccupied with sound money, making him seem more like a McKinley or a Hamilton than an FDR. Anyone interested in American government, the presidency, Congress and the mainly domestic aspects of Lincoln’s presidency should read this book. There is even an intriguing comparison of Lincoln’s ideas with those of the Catholic-associated economic theory of distributism. And those who long for an account of a harmony-seeking governing style will find this a congenial read. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the grand-son of Woodrow Wilson’s senatorial antagonist, did. In the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Cabot Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that influence under presidents of both parties. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and as ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and presidential envoy to the Vatican. Cabot Lodge’s political influence was at times immense. He was the first person, in 1943, to see Eisenhower as a potential presidential material; he entered Eisenhower in the 1952 New Hampshire primary without the candidate’s knowledge, crafted his political positions, and managed his campaign. As UN ambassador in the 1950s, Cabot Lodge was effectively at times a second secretary of state. In the 1960s, he was called twice, by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Johnson, to serve in the toughest position in the State Department’s portfolio, as ambassador to South Vietnam. In the 1970s, he paved the way for permanent American ties with the Holy See. Over his career, beginning with his arrival in the U.S. Senate at age thirty-four in 1937, when there were just seventeen Republican senators, he did more than anyone else to transform the Republican Party from a regional, isolationist party into the nation’s dominant force in foreign policy, a position it held from Eisenhower’s time until the twenty-first century. In this book, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2020) historian Luke A. Nichter professor of history at Texas A & M University–Central Texas, coeditor (with Douglas Brinkley) of the New York Times bestselling book The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972, gives us a outstanding narrative of Cabot Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life. Cabot Lodge was among the last of the well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Unlike many who reach his position, Cabot Lodge took his secrets to the grave—including some that, revealed here for the first time, will force historians to rethink their understanding of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture—during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement—but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump. Arguing that the contemporary Republican Party is waging a counterrevolution against the core beliefs of the nation, journalist and scholar Kevin C. O’Leary cracks open American history to reveal the essence of America’s liberal heritage by critiquing the reactionary illiberal currents that periodically threaten American democracy. American politics is no longer an ongoing debate between liberals and conservatives because the new Republican Party embraces the feudal values of the Old World. While there are millions of conservatives in the population, the elected leadership of the GOP is deeply reactionary. Today’s marriage of white-identity Southerners and their northern allies to moneyed libertarians is no run-of-the-mill political partnership. Instead, it is extraordinarily dangerous. Clearly, conservatives have lost their party. And without conservatives debating liberals in an intellectual, respectful manner to address the nation’s problems, Madisonian democracy breaks down. A stimulating reinterpretation of the American experience, Madison’s Sorrow: Today's War on the Founders and America's Liberal Ideal (Pegasus Books) exposes the intellectual and moral deficiencies of the illiberal right while offering a robust defense of the liberal tradition. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Historians often portray the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as a conservative force in debates over free enterprise, battles against unions and government regulation, and the rise of capitalism in the United States. In The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020), Jennifer Delton (Professor of History at Skidmore College) provides a comprehensive and nuanced political history. Delton focuses on the conservative policy goals of the organization but also its surprisingly progressive tactics and internal conflicts such as welcoming women and workers with disabilities, supporting the UN, embracing aspects of cosmopolitanism, and supporting the ERA, Civil Rights Act, and aspects of affirmative action. Delton deftly identifies the wider economic, ideological, and institutional concerns that drove NAM actors. As the book interrogates how the National Association of Manufacturing did – and did not – work, NAM emerges as a capitalist modernizer. She examines 125 years of massive change in American economic policy with the NAM at its center in order to interrogate manufacturing’s role in the development of capitalism at home and abroad – with implications for how we understand neoliberalism – especially liberal internationalist tendencies. Delton argues that liberal internationalism (associated often with Woodrow Wilson) can be seen as a crucial step toward the international institutions favored by post World War II European neoliberals. The book is divided into three parts. Part one traces the ascent and reorganization of industrial manufacturing from the 1890s to 1940. Part two highlights manufacturing’s dominance in US society and the world (1941-1980) as the US lowered tariffs and pursued free trade. The share of GDP peaked in 1953 when manufacturing represented 25.8% of domestic production. Part three treats the decline in manufacturing (beginning in 1960) and emphasizes deindustrialization, globalization, and the disintegration of the large multidivisional corporations in the 1990s. The book investigates how the globalizing impulse of neoliberalism played out historically in 20th century US politics – more specifically, how liberal internationalist ideas that were promoted by Democrats and antithetical to traditional political conservativism came to be espoused by the Republican party. Delton writes that “this is especially relevant now, as the current head of the Republican party [President Donald Trump, Republican] seems to be undoing the work of neoliberalism and liberal internationalists alike.” NAM’s history helps explain the bipartisan support for economic internationalism, freer trade, and what would later be called neoliberalism, even before the Cold War and Reagan, and even as voters (and Congress) remain extremely divided about these issues. The story of the NAM is full of contradictions, but The Industrialists deftly tracks them all, contextualizing the impacts on the national and global economy. In the podcast, Dr. Delton describes how the NAM archive was shaped by professional staff members – particularly one woman – whose views departed from NAM leaders. The referenced article, “Who Tells Your Story: Contested History at the NAM” is here. Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.
Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Francis Buckley, who is Foundation Professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, has written a fast-moving and provocative new book about the opportunities and possibilities of a second American secession. The publication of this book couldn't be more timely, as the conclusion of an election cycle highlights both the diversity and the tribalisation of American voters. What holds the nation together? To what extent is the Constitution the source of the nation's historic and current difficulties? If small is beautiful, and smaller nations tend to be happier, why shouldn't a state like California secede and put its savings from national defence into a scheme for national health? Tune in to hear how Professor Buckley explores these and other ideas in his new book, American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Break-Up (Encounter Books, 2020) Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of Survival and Resistance in evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (Twelve, 2020), tells the delightful story of the history of American diplomacy since 1776. Recounting in a superb fashion the leading actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy White House chief of Staff, identifies the five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future of American diplomacy. Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation and change. All by one of the leading practitioners of American diplomacy of our era. Perfect reading for the lay educated reader who has an interest in either American history or contemporary events. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read, “You ain’t the boss of me.” Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. In Liberty From All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People (St. Martin's Press, 2020), Barry C. Lynn argues that the result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want. The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Yoo, the Emanual S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, has written what he terms a surprising defense of the actions of Donald Trump as president. In his new book Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power (All Points Book, 2020), Yoo, who did not support Trump in 2016, argues that Trump has performed in a manner that the Constitution’s Framers would applaud. Trump has defended the constitutional functions of the Executive from congressional interference or encroachment, including in his use of the appointment power to the federal judiciary and his role as commander-in-chief of the military. He also defends President Trump’s actions regarding the statutory powers used to designate and fund a wall along the U.S. southern border, the administration’s efforts to reverse Obama’s immigration orders, popularly known as DACA and DAPA, and Trump’s exercising of the removal power for Executive branch officials. However, this work is more than a defense of Trump; it is a historical inquiry into the powers of the Executive as intended by the Founders and how that power has been used and threatened by other branches over the course of American history. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale UP, 2020), Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old‑fashioned and new‑fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans. Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined. This is an indispensable analysis, from the nation’s leading election-law expert, of the key threats to the 2020 American presidential election. Professor Hasen’s election law blog can be found here. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In my old age, I try to argue more quietly, though I still believe that sharp disagreement is a sign of political seriousness. What engaged citizens think and say matters; we should aim to get it right and to defeat those who get it wrong. I understand the very limited impact of what I write, but I continue to believe that the stakes are high. – Michael Walzer (2018) These thoughts, from the preface of A Foreign Policy for the Left (Yale University Press, 2018), reflect the understated wisdom of a highly regarded 85-year old political theorist, Michael Walzer. His many books include the influential Just and Unjust Wars, and others mentioned in this interview including: Thick and Thin – Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Spheres of Justice – A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, and Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship – the last one being published in 1970 at the height of the divisive Vietnam War era when Walzer was teaching at Harvard. Much of the material for Michael’s books derives from his long affiliation with Dissent magazine – he apprenticed as a young leftist partisan under the prolific Irving Howe whose writing, social role and politics helped shape the young Walzer. Evidence of Michael’s current and ongoing political engagement, as well as the clarity of his thought and seriousness of his message can be seen here: ‘A Note on Racial Capitalism’ from Dissent in July 2020. In his note Michael references K. Sabeel Rahman’s Dissent article ‘Dismantle Racial Capitalism’ in his first paragraph; a month later two scholars write ‘A Reply to Michael Walzer’ from which comes: ‘A Reply to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright’. Professor Walzer published his first Dissent article in 1956 which provides some timeline context for one of the first questions in this interview about whether the Hiss-Chambers testimonies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1948) might represent the opening confrontation of our polarizing culture wars. As you will hear, Michael thinks it could date back further; and shares a few thoughts on teaching at Harvard in the sixties, and pivotal moments in his career as a young leftist partisan. He comments about scholars like Rawls, Nozick and Geertz; and offers opinions related to our current polarization including a recent Rolling Stone article, the origins of resentment, engaged citizenship and voting, 9/11 and its aftermath, justice, ‘complex equality’, ‘formative’ books and a poet. An overview of Michael’s life and work, Justice is Steady Work – A Conversation on Political Theory (Polity Press 2020) with Astrid von Busekist at SciencesPo (originally published in French) out soon. Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
America is in a Cold Civil War, between people who see each other as threats to the country — but themselves as patriots. How can that be? They are patriots of two nations. In Patriots of Two Nations: Why Trump Was Inevitable and What Happens Next (McDavid Media), national media commentator and presidential campaigns veteran Spencer Critchley shows why our current hyper-partisan division has been inevitable since the founding of the United States, as has the election of Donald Trump or someone like him. That's because America is actually two nations occupying the same territory. The two nations have different worldviews: cultures, values, and ways of understanding reality itself. One nation — the dominant one — is descended from the Enlightenment, and the establishment of reason as the ultimate source of authority. But the other is nation is descended from the Counter-Enlightenment, and it has never stopped believing in the primacy of faith, tradition, culture, ties to the land, and ethnic identity. Because the Enlightenment worldview is so dominant, the Counter-Enlightenment largely has been forgotten by history. But as Critchley reveals, in many ways it's more active now than ever — and the failure of many of us to understand it is a crucial source of our division. Uniting the two nations will require that they finally do see and understand their different realities. This book shows how we might still be able to make that happen — and why we must, if democracy is to survive. Spencer Critchley is a writer, producer, and communications consultant with experience in journalism, film, digital media, public relations, advertising, and music. He is the Managing Partner of communications consulting agency Boots Road Group. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why are Americans, and American politicians more specifically, obsessed with sex? Why, in the words of Janet Jakobsen, are gender and sexuality such riveting public policy concerns the United States? In The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press, 2020), Jakobsen answers this question by breaking apart the standard narrative that religion is primarily responsible for the moral regulation of sexuality. Instead of viewing religion as the devil of the story, Jakobsen proposes taking a kaleidoscopic approach to better understand the dynamics of sexual politics. Using this approach, Jakobsen analyzes sex when it is the focus of the discussion and demonstrates how sex remains consequential even when it appears to be on the periphery. Jakobsen’s kaleidoscopic approach allows the reader to see the complex dynamics of sexual politics and challenges the assumption that religion is the basis for sexual values. Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, Siobhan talks with Charles L. Zelden about the new expanded edition of his book, Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Growing Crisis in American Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Zelden is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Nova Southeastern University's Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches courses in history, government and legal studies. Who could forget the Supreme Court’s controversial 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore or the 2000 presidential campaign and election that preceded it? Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, endless recounts, raucous allegations, and a constitutional crisis were all roiled into a confusing and potentially dangerous mix—until the Supreme Court decision allowed George W. Bush to become the 43rd President of the United States, despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore. Praised by scholars and political pundits alike, the original edition of Charles Zelden’s book set a new standard for our understanding of that monumental decision. A probing chronicle and critique of the vexing and acrimonious affair, it offered the most accurate and up-to-date analysis of a remarkable episode in American politics. Highly readable, its comprehensive coverage, depth of documentation and detail, and analytic insights remain unrivaled on the subject. In this third expanded edition Zelden offers a powerful history of voting rights and elections in America since 2000. Bush v. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing the numerous ways in which the unlearned and wrongly learned “lessons of 2000” have impacted American election law through the growth of voter suppression via legislation and administrative rulings, and, provides a clear warning of how unchecked partisanship arising out of Bush v. Gore threatens to undermine American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores legal history at Princeton University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seth Masket’s new book, Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020 (Cambridge UP, 2020) takes the outcome of the 2016 presidential race and Donald Trump’s unexpected winning of the presidency as the jumping off point to examine not only what the Democratic Party came to understand about this outcome, but also how it shaped the nomination battle in 2020. Masket, a political scientist and the Director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, spent the past four years examining the many narratives that have shaped the various understandings of what happened in 2016, and, in this exploration, he has also threaded together the thinking that led to the nomination of Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic standard bearer. At the outset of the book, it is clear that the original conception in 2015 was that this book would be about the Republican Party, but then Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College on election night in 2016. And the direction and subject matter for the book shifted. In this shift, the often-perennial tension within the Democratic Party between the elusive idea of electability and the ideological commitments of the party and party members became the focus of the research. Masket notes both in the book and in our conversation that his analysis builds on and interrogates recent political science literature that examines each of the many threads woven together in the book. Scholars who analyze the nomination process, like Cohen, Noel, Karol, and Zaller in The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, provided one framework to examine whether the thesis as to the role of the party in determining the nominee was actually true in the 2020 process as compared to the experiences of both the Democrats and the Republicans in 2016. Political Scientists Julia Azari (author of Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate) and Philip Klinkner (author of The Losing Parties: Out-Parties National Committees, 1956-1993) also provided frameworks for aspects of Learning from Loss, as their respective work dives into the theorizing about narratives and political outcomes, and how these come to influence and often guide future political activity—both by elites and by grassroots party activists. Masket does impressive work in combining a host of theoretical threads, multiple different kinds of research methodology, and an historical perspective to produce a lively analysis of the four-year process that the Democrats undertook to try to understand Hillary Clinton’s disorienting loss and to move forward in a political world that they weren’t always sure worked as they had once understood it to work. Masket spent time with political activists and organizers in the early primary states and in Washington, D.C., interviewing them about their experiences during the 2016 election cycle and how that was contributing to the kind of work and decision-making procedures that surrounded the 2020 nomination process. The research also examines campaign finance patterns to determine which of the candidates were receiving donations from traditional, big doners, and which were getting funds in small amounts from broader, more grassroots contributions. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats—a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020) answers this question with a pathbreaking new theory that foregrounds the specificity of the black American experience and illuminates social pressure as the key element of black Americans’ unwavering support for the Democratic Party. Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird argue that the roots of black political unity were established through the adversities of slavery and segregation, when black Americans forged uniquely strong social bonds for survival and resistance. White and Laird explain how these tight communities have continued to produce and enforce political norms—including Democratic Party identification in the post–Civil Rights era. The social experience of race for black Americans is thus fundamental to their political choices. Black voters are uniquely influenced by the social expectations of other black Americans to prioritize the group’s ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. When navigating the choice of supporting a political party, this social expectation translates into affiliation with the Democratic Party. Through fresh analysis of survey data and original experiments, White and Laird explore where and how black political norms are enforced, what this means for the future of black politics, and how this framework can be used to understand the electoral behavior of other communities. An innovative explanation for why black Americans continue in political lockstep, Steadfast Democrats sheds light on the motivations consolidating an influential portion of the American electoral population. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Greedy elites are purposefully stoking racial division and laughing all the way to the bank. That is the bottom line of Ian Haney López’s Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (The New Press, 2019), an essential read for the upcoming election as the Left tries to rescue democracy from the modern Right’s campaign of fear, racial division, and corporate interests. On this episode of the New Books Network, join your hosts Dr. Lee M Pierce (she/they) and Mary Whiteside, J.D. (she/hers) as they interview Dr. Haney López (he/his) about this important follow-up work to his 2014 Dog Whistle Politics and his digital project, Race Class Academy, a free 12-video introduction teaching us to work together to beat dog whistle politics by building cross-racial and cross-class solidarity. Check it out at https://race-class-academy.com/ “When we come together to reject racism as a weapon of the rich, we can make sure that the government works for all of us, of every race and color.” ~ Ian Haney López The country is headed toward what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever, with the Right gearing up to exploit racial fear-mongering to divide and distract, and the Left splintered over the next step forward. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach—race-forward or colorblind—build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country’s direction? For the past two years, Haney López has been collaborating with a research team of union activists, racial justice leaders, communications specialists, and pollsters. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward. By merging the fights for racial justice and for shared economic prosperity, they were able to build greater enthusiasm for both goals—and for the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections. What does this mean? It means that neutralizing the Right’s political strategy of racial division is possible, today. And that’s the key to everything progressives want to achieve. A work of deep research, nuanced argument, and urgent insight, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America is an indispensable tool for the upcoming political season and in the larger fight to build racial justice and shared economic prosperity for all of us. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Who truly controls immigration law in the United States? Though common sense might suggest the U.S. Congress, legal scholars Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez argue that the president is in fact the immigration policymaker-in-chief. In this interview, we speak with co-author Rodríguez about their new book The President and Immigration Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), which shifts our attention away from court-based immigration regulation and toward the power dynamic between Congress and presidential administrations. The book details the historical construction of the “shadow immigration system” that has enabled the executive branch to fundamentally shape immigration policy through its discretionary enforcement of the law. Rodríguez walks us through the three constitutive elements of this system: a deportation legal regime, state capacity and bureaucracy, and a boom of unauthorized immigration in the latter half of the twentieth century. This interview also delves into the role of local and state police, different visions of immigration enforcement between the Obama and Trump administrations, and the potential for reform of the current immigration system. With the continued push and pull forces of global migration spurred by humanitarian crises and economic incentives, this work sheds new light on who holds the reins of power in this ongoing policy debate. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States. The fusion between these two academic disciplines, and the focus of their respective studies in this area, answers some questions that are often omitted or passed over by the individual disciplines given the kinds of questions posed by each discipline. Thus, the topics and issues explored in Mobilized by Injustice focuses on political mobilization, advocacy, and activism, often beyond the issue of voting, to tease out how individuals who have been incarcerated or their friends and relatives are involved in the political system. The American criminal justice system is often seen as imposing the “prison beyond the prison” in how formerly incarcerated individuals are constrained and limited in their lives after they leave prison, including limits on voting rights in many states, limits on access to federal policies, and the myriad other ways in which these citizens are essentially marginalized with our society. Walker’s research digs into these constraints and also the stigmatization that individuals experience because of incarceration. At the same time that she is trying to discern how these individuals respond within the political system itself, Walker is also trying to get at how communities are impacted by the criminal justice system, exploring the ways in which this system can be particularly corrosive in certain communities. The research explores political participation by a number of different and often intersecting groups, specifically the individuals who have been incarcerated or directly experienced the criminal justice system, and those who have proximate contact with that system, through their family member’s direct experience. Within these two umbrella groups, Walker also digs into distinctions across racial groups (white, black, Latinx) and across socio-economic categories (examining class distinctions in this context). Mobilized by Injustice finds interesting results in the multi-method research approach, discerning different kinds of political involvement that is not captured by questions about whether an individual does vote or can vote. Rather, the research highlights that those with proximal contact with the criminal justice system have lower barriers to political engagement, which may lead them more naturally into politics because these individuals find themselves working as advocates for their family member who is incarcerated. Those who have been incarcerated face a variety of higher barriers, both structural and psychological, and they often need more support to engage in politics, because of the “dignity deficit” they may suffer because of societal stigmatization. Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race will likely be of interest to those who study political science, criminal justice, sociology, public policy, social science methodology, and race and class. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, Americans often present increased polarization as the result of Trumpian extremism or America’s complex racial history but David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (Oxford UP, 2020) cautions Americans to look back to the 1970s with an eye to class to better understand our political tribalism. On May 8, 1970, just four days after the killings at Kent State, New York construction workers brutally attacked peaceful protestors in Manhattan’s financial district. Though the police had advanced knowledge of the attack, they provided little protection to the protestors and over 100 were severely injured. The Hardhat Riot recalls this often forgotten violent attack to illuminate the nuances of the current polarization in the U.S. – asking us to shift the lens from race to class, especially white working class men. For Kuhn, the riot occurred at a turning point for two distinct groups: “hardhats” and “hippies.” The anti-war protestors were mostly the college-educated children of affluent, suburban, middle-class families. The blue-collar construction workers and tradesmen increasingly felt the effects of the economic and social realities of a post-industrial nation. A strange confluence of events – especially the concentration of construction workers at the World Trade Center site juxtaposed with the student protests near Wall Street – sparked the attack. Kuhn highlights the bitterness and anger held by the workers towards an intellectual middle class distanced from the draft and consequences of the war in Vietnam. In Kuhn’s telling, the hardhats become the stand-ins for the white-working-class voters who were part of FDR’s Democratic Party but became the members of Nixon’s Silent Majority. The protestors are “hippies” and liberal elites disconnected from the dangers of serving in Vietnam. New York City also stands in for what would soon happen to the rest of the country as a result of deindustrialization. The book’s larger claim is that the “two tribes” of the Hardhat riot contextualize Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – and the continuing resentment from white, working-class voters in the United States. In the podcast, Kuhn details how the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s ineffective and self-serving “investigation” of themselves ironically enabled this carefully researched book based on their own squashed information. In a 40-page document, the NYPD acquitted itself but ACLU affidavits meant that the documents used to create the report were preserved and provided Kuhn with remarkable contemporary accounts. Kuhn was able to compare those accounts to his contemporary interviews of these same witnesses and participants. David Paul Kuhn is an author, reporter, and political analyst who has served as a senior and chief political writer for Politico, RealClearPolitics, CBS and other outlets. Many listeners may be familiar with his articles in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times – as well has his work as a political analyst on networks ranging from the BBC to Fox News. He has two previous books – “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma” (St. Martin’s, 2007) and a novel, What Makes It Worthy published in 2015 that addressed the tabloidization of American politics and the power dynamics between the press and public officials. Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The title of Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar,’s new book poses the question that comes up every presidential election cycle: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Harvard University Press, 2020). Keyssar presents the reader with a deep, layered, and complex analysis not only of the institution of the Electoral College itself, drawing out how it came about at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of the many attempts over more than two centuries to reform it or get rid of it. This is an historical subject with keenly contemporary relevance, as we move into the final stretch of the 2020 election cycle, and we consider how the political landscape, party platforms, and the shape of the presidential race all look the way they do because of the Electoral College. Keyssar unpacks the discussions and debates at the Constitutional Convention about how to elect a president, and then dives into the immediate response to the Electoral College as it was implemented in the new system. In going through the history of the Electoral College itself, and the points of contention between the popular vote tallies and the Electoral College results, as well as the many, many attempts to reform or eliminate the Electoral College, Keyssar highlights the two points in American political history when we came closest to doing away with this means of electing the president. The Era of Good Feeling (1815-1825)—when there was really only one functioning party, and the party system itself was in flux as party competition shifted—saw a significant effort to revise the Electoral College and the contingent election system that had been used when no candidate received a majority of the votes and the House of Representatives must designate a winner. Keyssar also maps out the efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s to pass an amendment to the Constitution to replace the Electoral College with direct popular vote. This legislation was filibustered in the Senate by senior Southern Democratic and Dixiecrat senators who saw the disproportional voice that the Electoral College gave to the Southern states—states where the Black vote had been significantly diminished because of regulations and threats that made it extraordinarily difficult and dangerous for African Americans to vote. Keyssar explains that this was known as the “5/5 rule”—in contrast to the 3/5th rule in the Constitution—whereas the southern states were able to count all Black citizens are part of their populations and preclude all of them from voting. Why Do We Still Have The Electoral College also traces the internal shifts within the states as they moved from their initial approach to the distribution of electoral college votes to the establishment of the “unit rule” or “general ticket” that allocates all of a state’s electoral college votes to the winner in that particular state. Not only have there been attempts to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, but there is a long history of the efforts to reform or eliminate the general ticket/unit rule. Keyssar brings the reader forward to the contemporary period through a number of different threads as he outlines multiple dimensions of reform attempts and their failure, all while providing the reader with a deep history of debate about the structure and function of the Electoral College. This unique aspect of the American constitutional system also reflects the continuing impact of the role of race in American politics and political institutions. For those interested, curious, or confused, this book is truly a tour de force on the Electoral College. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorrect assumptions that it is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm. Yet, government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. "Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, this book shows that "hate speech" are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Therefore, prominent social justice advocates worldwide maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism. New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen, the immediate past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her via email or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell), three scholars engage in a nuanced and fearless discussion grounded in history, data, and theory. There is no way to summarize this hour of engaged and enraged conversation about racism in the United States. The scholars present overlapping narratives with regards to racial violence and unequal citizenship – but they also openly challenge each other on first assumptions, definitions, and the contours of racism in the United States. Dr. Davin Phoenix (Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of California, Irvine ) focuses on anger and black politics as the “politics of bloodshed”– in which all forms of violence are used to destroy the political standing, well-being, and equal citizenship of Black Americans. Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III (professor and chair of the African American Studies Program, University of California, Irvine) thoughtfully challenges the assumption that citizenship can be equal for Black Americans – even with radical reform. Dr. Cristina Beltrán (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU) interrogates whether American ideals rely upon uninterrogated violence and oppression. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Despite her nearly two decades as the publisher of the largest newspaper in a politically pivotal state, the role of Nackey Scripps Loeb in American political and media history has been unjustly forgotten. In Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party (Potomac Books, 2020), Meg Heckman describes the ways in which she shaped both journalism in New Hampshire and presidential politics in America. An heiress to the Scripps publishing empire, Nackey enjoyed a childhood that was privileged yet unorthodox After a first marriage ended acrimoniously, she married William Loeb, the right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader, and together they ran the newspaper from their ranch in Nevada. After the twin tragedies of a crippling car accident and the death of her husband from cancer, Nackey took over the newspaper and maintained both its independence and its stridently conservative voice. As Heckman explains, the newspaper’s location in the state hosting the nation’s first presidential primary gave Nackey an outsized political influence, one which she used to promote conservative Republican presidential candidates, most notable Pat Buchanan in his disruptive primary challenge to President George H. W. Bush in 1992. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the role of the Republican Party in the Southern states following the Civil War, and they find some interesting dynamics at play across the next hundred years. Heersink and Jenkins argue that the overly simplified view of the “solid Democratic South” creates an incomplete narrative. Outlining the role of the Republican Party in the former states of the Confederacy, they explain how Southern Republicans had meaningful roles in selecting Republican presidential candidates even if few of those candidates carried any electoral college votes from Southern states. Heersink and Jenkins describe how Southern Republicans, despite their unpopularity in the South, remained nationally important through their regular participation at the Republican national conventions. They explain that Southern delegates made up a sizable portion of the conventions, and candidates often vied for support from these delegates. Southern delegates were so valuable that candidates often turned to corrupt practices, including bribery, to win over these delegates. As a result, many GOP delegates were able to leverage their support for candidates for patronage appointments back home, even if they couldn’t produce broad-based state support for Republican presidential candidates. Heersink and Jenkins created a complex data set that came from census records, delegate rosters, local newspaper articles from the time, and information about patronage appointments. This is a fascinating multi-methods analysis, and they are continuing to expand the analysis to look more closely at these questions of patronage appointments. Additionally, Heersink and Jenkins discuss electoral strategies of the Republican Party over the century that followed the Civil War. They recount the different ways that the GOP, in different states, approached party building and political engagement. This dimension of the research and the book is particularly rich since it dives into how the parties operated at the state level and how the approach of those operations also changed and shifted over time. As Reconstruction ended and as Southern states began to institute laws and regulations that would come to form the Jim Crow era, the various state-level Republican parties (and Democratic Parties) pursued support among voters, especially white voters as Black voters were pushed out of active political participation in the South. This hundred-year span is both nuanced and complex, and Heersink and Jenkins guide the reader through the evolution of the Republican Party, how this paved the way for Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and partisan realignment of the South in the latter part of the 20th century. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. “I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency What is the political and intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm? Recent coverage of Chisholm – especially after the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s choice of Vice-Present – emphasizes ‘trailblazer talk.’ Chisholm’s extraordinary career included being both the first African-American woman elected to the United States congress and the first to run for the U.S. presidency. But emphasizing these “firsts” obscures Shirley Chisholm’s political and intellectual significance. She was a brilliant political strategist who deftly cultivated relationships that allowed her to accomplish her principled and wide-ranging political agenda. Shirley Chisholm said of herself that her achievement was having the "audacity and nerve" to run for the presidency of the United States: "I want history to remember me not as the first black woman to have be elected to the Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the united states, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself." Chisholm spoke and acted forcefully throughout her long career – Her slogan was “unbought and unbossed” – and she defined empowerment in the second half of the 20th century. She is better understood in the context of #BLM and than Kamala Harris. POSTSCRIPT, a new series from New Books in Political Science, invites authors to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. Dr. Anastasia Curwood and Dr. Zinga A. Fraser – imminent scholars of Shirley Chisholm’s political strategies and ideals – engage in a remarkable dialogue. Shirley Chisholm is often “disremembered” and Drs. Curwood and Fraser emphasize the importance of evaluating her work in the context of the Black Power movement of the 1970s, Black Women’s history, and Black feminism. Chisholm’s feminism was central to both her principles and her practice. She spoke the language of intersectionality – emphasizing the overlapping identities of gender, race, and class – decades before it was a popular term in Critical Race Theory. She had a majority woman staff with a woman as her top legislative aid. Political Science often equates political strategy with masculinity – failing to adequately explore Chisholm’s brilliant strategy of cultivating relationships that allowed her to deftly construct cross-cutting alliances. Her understanding of power was complex. She did not care who got credit and artfully created unlikely coalitions that allowed her to accomplish her political goals – always her priority. Dr. Anastasia Curwood is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and the Director of African-American and Africana Studies in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Zinga A. Fraser is an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. In addition to her academic responsibilities she is also the Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism at Brooklyn College. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
America's Inequality Trap (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and American politics. Nathan J. Kelly, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, argues that the increasing concentration of economic power effects political power, thus allowing the gap between the rich and everyone else to become more acute and more rigid. The increasing level of inequality, according to Kelly, also tends to be reinforced by public policies. This then creates a self-perpetuating plutocracy because those with more economic resources will have more political power or the capacity to influence those with political power and the kinds of policies that are being made. Thus, we have the theory of the inequality trap. Kelly’s analysis is fairly specific to the United States, since the inequality trap itself combines aspects of the American political system that are rather unique, but he notes that the trip is not exclusive to the U.S., it is part of a “more general phenomenon.” In order to understand this inequality trap, Kelly’s research links politics, policy, and income inequality. He then explores different pathways that contribute to establishing and perpetuating this system, which concentrates more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Each chapter assesses a different pathway: public opinion, elections, inegalitarian policy convergence, and policy stagnation, all of which contribute to economic inequality in the United States and how it operates within the political system. Public opinion and elections center around political attitudes and behavior while inegalitarian policy convergence and policy stagnation focus on policy-making institutions and processes. Each pathway shares the same outcome that they contribute to the inequality trap in which only those who are wealthy benefit from it. In analyzing the effects of high inequality on each of the pathways, Kelly exposes the pattern of political response, or non-response, to the problem of inequality and the role of partisan politics within these dynamics. Kelly also emphasizes that racial bias and economic inequality play a substantial role in political decision making, especially in public opinion and elections. These distinct areas often have some overlap in terms of voter engagement and political behavior and choices and, according to the research, this also helps us understand the outcome in the 2016 presidential election. America’s Inequality Trap concludes with a discussion about economic inequality before the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Both events occurred during times of high economic inequality but there were distinct differences in the political response to that inequality and the economic collapses that followed. Kelly explains how and why the political responses differed, and by comparing the two, he suggests possible strategies for escaping the ongoing inequality trap. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. Many works of American film history only skim the surface of the 1941 investigation of Hollywood. In Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures (University of Mississippi, 2020), author Chris Yogerst examines the years leading up to and through the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda, detailing the isolationist senators’ relationship with the America First movement. Chris Yogerst is assistant professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Joel Tscherne is an adjunct professor of history at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nearly everyone in the United States is aware of the fiery rhetoric and divisive political stratagems of Donald Trump and the contemporary Republican party. What many people forget, however, is that Trump is not the first Republican to rise to power by pushing incendiary policies and destroying opponents. Julian E. Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, traces many of these tactics back to Newt Gingrich, the former representative from Georgia and Speaker of the House of Representatives. Zelizer argues that Gingrich’s success with such tactics paved the way for Trump’s rise and his path to power. Burning Down the House examines Gingrich’s ascent within the Republican Party and to the Speakership, and the long-lasting effects of this approach to partisan politics. Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party(Penguin, 2020) follows Gingrich through his controversial political career in the House of Representatives. Originally, he was dismissed by many within the Republican establishment as an angry newcomer who would, with time, mellow. Many of the party elites never suspected that he would transform their party’s approach to politics. His first conquest as a junior member of the House was a takedown of long-standing congressman, Charles Diggs, whose expulsion he called for over alleged ethics violations in the House of Representatives. Gingrich pushed hard for Diggs to be punished, and Diggs was officially censured in 1979. This bold success brought Gingrich attention within the Republican Party, and he continued to hammer away at the Democratic majority with personal accusations and media manipulation that catapulted into the national spotlight. These methods would lead to Gingrich’s famous showdown with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, and Wright’s ultimate resignation from his seat, representing the 12th congressional district in Texas, and the speakership. Zelizer’s deep dive into this historical event highlights how Newt Gingrich fundamentally changed partisan politics, directly attacking political opponents, using the media to his advantage, and doggedly pursuing partisan power instead of legislative outcomes. This template, as he demonstrated the capacity for success, leading the Republicans to their first majority in the House of Representatives since the 1950s, has reshaped the GOP and has pushed a generation of Republican leaders to adopt his approach. Gingrich and his approach to politics has upended the Madisonian ideal of compromise—replacing it with a form of zero-sum partisan battle. And the former Speaker is still involved in politics in many ways, but especially as a media advocate for the GOP and Trump. This podcast was assisted by Benjamin Warren Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference to human rights, complicity in the pointless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese lives, and reliance on deception and intrigue. Was he a brilliant master strategist--"the 20th century's greatest 19th century statesman"--or a cold-blooded monster who eroded America's moral standing for the sake of self-promotion? In Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (Hill and Wang, 2020), the renowned diplomatic historian Thomas A. Schwartz offers an authoritative, and fair-minded, answer to this question. While other biographers have engaged in hagiography or demonology, Schwartz takes a measured view of his subject. He recognizes Kissinger's successes and acknowledges that Kissinger thought seriously and with great insight about the foreign policy issues of his time, while also recognizing his failures, his penchant for backbiting, and his reliance on ingratiating and fawning praise of the president as a source of power. Throughout, Schwartz stresses Kissinger's artful invention of himself as a celebrity diplomat and his domination of the medium of television news. He also notes Kissinger's sensitivity to domestic and partisan politics, complicating--and undermining--the image of the far-seeing statesman who stands above the squabbles of popular strife. Rounded and textured, and rich with new insights into key dilemmas of American power, Henry Kissinger and American Power stands as an essential guide to a man whose legacy is as complex as the last sixty years of US history itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How did the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns affect other elections in 2016? How did the use of gender stereotypes and insulting references to women in the presidential campaign influence the way House and Senate candidates campaigned? The 2016 American elections forced scholars and candidates to reassess the role that gender plays in elections. In Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (Oxford UP, 2019), Robert G. Boatright and Valerie Sperling (professors of political science, Clark University) focus on how gender norms are used to frame – both positively and negatively – the people who run for office. The book interrogates gender and sexism in campaigns (the “gender issue”) and what happens when the media, electorate, and candidates expect to have a clear winner and loser(the “loser” issue). Boatright and Sperling distinguish between the top of the ticket and down ballot elections to tell a story about the impact of the 2016 presidential race on competitive congressional races. They demonstrate how Donald Trump’s candidacy radically altered the nature of the congressional campaigns by making competitive races more consequential for both parties and changing the issues of contention – towards sexism and misogyny – in many congressional races. It is unusual to see a collaboration of this kind – a comparativist who specializes in Russian politics and wrote an award winning book on political legitimacy in Russia (Sperling) and an Americanist usually focused on campaign finance reform and congressional redistricting (Boatright). The book is a tribute to how crossing disciplinary boundaries in political science yields a more compelling and nuanced qualitative and quantitative analysis – one that is more relevant to contemporary politics. The podcast was recorded the day after Democrat Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate. Sperling and Boatright discuss how stereotyping has already affected the 2020 race. Their trenchant analysis of the code already being deployed by the Trump campaign against Harris in terms of both gender and race should not be missed. Both authors are veterans of the New Books Network and you can hear their earlier interviews with Heath Brown (Boatright, The Deregulatory Moment?) and Amanda Jeanne Swain (Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin). Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the policy implications due to a fundamental distrust and dislike of “outsiders”? Today I talked to political scientist John R. Hibbing about his new book The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era (Oxford UP, 2020) Hibbing teaches political science at the University of Nebraska and has been both a NATO fellow in Science and a Guggenheim Fellow. Media appearances have included Star Talk, The Hidden Brain, and The Daily Show. Topics covered in this episode include: • What are the biggest misconceptions, among the media and others, about Trump’s staunchest supporters? • In what ways are Trump’s fans different from the Republican party’s traditional base? • In a battle over the soul of whether America might be a democracy or an oligarchy in the future, where do securitarians land and what are the implications for the country? Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Benjamin Talton is a transnational history that explores the influence of African American leaders on US foreign policy towards Africa in the 1980s. By examining the life and labors of the political activist turned Texas congressman, Mickey Leland, Talton traces the afterlives of 1960s-era Black radicalism in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) after Leland’s election in 1978. Leland shaped the CBC’s outlook on famine in Ethiopia and established the Committee on Hunger where he developed a broad transformative vision for ending world hunger. Talton analyzes Leland’s career alongside contemporaneous political developments in Ethiopia and apartheid South Africa, an issue which ultimately became the focal point of CBC endeavors. Talton investigates the ways that anti-apartheid limited Black Congressional action on other African-related foreign policy issues throughout the decade. Talton paints a portrait of Leland as an activist, statesman, and visionary who lived out his politics of humanitarian solidarity from Houston to Addis Ababa. Benjamin Talton is Professor of History at Temple University. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Four score and seven years ago…” Those are some of the most famous words in American history. Most of us know that President Abraham Lincoln spoke them in what is now known as the Gettysburg Address in 1863, at the official dedication of a cemetery for men who had fallen during the Battle of Gettysburg. And most of us know that Lincoln was referring to 1776 and the Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But why did Lincoln mention that year and that event in the very first line of his speech that day? That is one of the questions that Lucas E. Morel answers in his short but illuminating book, Lincoln and the American Founding (SIUP, 2020). In a time when some Americans are vandalizing statues and other artistic representations of the Founding Fathers and even some of Lincoln and going so far as portraying the men of the founding generation as villains, Morel’s book is vital reading. Morel tells us which of the founders Lincoln particularly admired, why the Declaration was of greater import to Lincoln’s political thinking than the Constitution and how Lincoln turned to the Declaration again and again throughout his adult life as ammunition in his argumentation and as a source of personal inspiration and aspiration for the nation as a whole. Morel also brings into focus long-ago debates such as that over the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 and explains why Lincoln was so reluctant to declare himself an abolitionist but also why he was adamant that as the newly elected president and head of the quite new Republican party, he could not make any concessions to the Secessionists. Morel makes the case for Lincoln as master logician in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 as Lincoln tried to persuade his fellow white Americans that not only was slavery unjust but that it was a unsustainable foundation on which to base governance in any part of the growing nation. This is a gem of a book by a scholar for a general audience in need of an understanding of how the founders influenced Lincoln and, thereby, all of us. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How does the United States use immigration to suppress free speech? Should interests of “national security” take priority over individual liberties? What happens to democracy when the most vulnerable are denied their right to speak and exchange ideas? In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian and lawyer Dr. Julia Rose Kraut argues that ideological exclusions and deportations are rooted in political fear of subversion – and the United States has used these exclusions and deportations continuously from the 18th to 21st centuries to suppress free speech. The book explores the constitutionality of ideological restrictions and exclusions as interpreted by American courts – as well as the specific intersection of American immigration and First Amendment law – through a political, historical, legal and personal lens by following the lives of real people as well as key court decisions. The book chronicles the actions of those we know (e.g. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, Charlie Chaplin, Carlos Fuentes, and J. Edgar Hoover) as well as some that we may have forgotten (e.g. Ernest Mandel, Leonard Boudin, Carol King, and Frank Murphy). At issue for Kraut is the essence of American liberal democracy and the rule of law. She fears a national identity rooted in fear of the threat of dissent and political repression rather than J.S. Mill’s marketplace of ideas and free exchange of ideas. The actions of the Trump administration on immigration have put a recent spotlight on this issue – and Kraut’s book concludes with the Travel Ban – but she details how immigration law has been used throughout American history to suppress dissent and radical change. Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, immigrants in America have always had their First Amendment rights violated on the basis of their values, ideas, and associations. These violations are often backed by the Supreme Court as immigrants are judged more greatly on their immigrant status than in accordance with first amendment rights. Threat of Dissent systematically reveals the ways immigration law is used by officials to intimidate, threaten, and repress foreigners. Kraut unveils this, criticizing not only the damaging effect this has on immigrants’ lives themselves, but additionally the overall damage this does to the idea of American liberal democracy and the overstep of executive power. The podcast includes a discussion of the recent SCOTUS decisions on DACA and the recent passage of the NOBAN Act by the House of Representatives on July 22, 2020. Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Over the course of three decades of public service, Herbert Lehman dedicated himself tirelessly to advances the causes in which he believed. In Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (SUNY Press, 2017), Duane Tananbaum describes his livelong public activism and the role Lehman’s relationships with key individuals played in shaping his political career. Tananbaum identifies the first of these as relationships as the lifelong friendship Lehman established with the social reformer Lilian Wald, with whom Lehman worked in a settlement house on New York’s Lower East Side. It was Lehman’s partnership with Al Smith, however that led to a career in elected office, as Smith was key in convincing Lehman to run for the lieutenant governorship of New York in 1928. As lieutenant governor, Lehman labored closely with Franklin Roosevelt throughout the latter man’s tenure as governor. When Roosevelt became president Lehman succeeded him as governor, and for the rest of the decade worked with his predecessor to implement the New Deal in his state. Lehman was also concerned about the threat posed by Nazi Germany, and his efforts on behalf of Jewish refugees led to roles administering relief aid in the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War. While he left public office soon after the end of the war, Lehman’s election to the United States Senate in 1949 gave him a new opportunity to fight for the causes of civil rights and immigration. Though frustrated by the seniority enjoyed by the body’s more conservative members, Lehman’s efforts kept the issues at the forefront of the national political scene, with the legislative solutions he advocated passed soon after his death in 1963. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What explains voting behavior in local elections? More specifically, what explains how ethnic and racial blocs vote in local elections, especially when the candidate may be of a different race or ethnicity? These are the main question animating the research in Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Political Scientist Andrea Benjamin examines the coalitions that form in local elections and the roles that they play in those elections. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections outlines not only the most successful form of coalitions between different groups of people, but also tries to get at what might prompt the elite members of those groups to advocate to voters to cast their ballots for a candidate, especially a candidate from a different ethnic or racial group. Using a variety of complex data sets, including experimental surveys to try to tease out distinctions within racial and ethnic groups in terms of mayoral candidate selections, Benjamin’s research focuses on how Black and Latinx voting coalitions in major cities are open to shifting their support for mayoral candidates. Benjamin was most interested in examining the impact of cross-ethnic voting cues and how elite endorsements within the Black and Latinx communities might move voters to vote across racial and ethnic lines. Often coalitions are formed when candidates need to reach across interest areas in order to build a large enough bloc to elect a candidate. As Benjamin points out in the book, mayoral elections often cut across expected partisan lines, which is why these coalitions are fascinating to explore. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections examines the reasons why groups of people shift or support one candidate more than others. The data includes 20 years of mayoral races in the largest cities in the United States and traces out voting shifts in mayoral elections in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Houston. This is supplemented by experimental surveys that mirrored voter data from these races while building on some of the conclusions about endorsements, candidate preferences, and racial coalitions. Andrea Benjamin also discusses how co-ethnic cues provide the theoretical framework for her analysis. The co-ethnic cue theory notes that “[w]hen partisan cues are absent and race/ethnicity is salient in an election, co-ethnic endorsements should prompt minority group members to vote for that candidate, even if that candidate is from another ethnic group.” (Benjamin, 8). Benjamin explains that if there is a race between a black candidate and a Latino candidate, the expectation is that each ethnic group will support the candidate with whom they share ethnicity; but, for example, if there is a race between a white candidate and a Latinx candidate, Black voters will likely support the candidate supported by most Black leaders in that community. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections explains why this is the coalition dynamic, then unpacks what coalitions may be most effective and why, contextualized within the political dynamics in the cities themselves. Eli Levitas-Goren assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, American nuclear policy continues to be influenced by the legacies of the Cold War. Nuclear policies remain focused on easily identifiable threats, including China or Russia, and how the United States would respond in the event of a first strike against the homeland. In their new book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (BenBella Books, 2020), Tom Z. Collina, Policy Director at Ploughshares Fund, and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry argue that American nuclear policy overemphasizes the first-strike threat, while ignoring other, more likely nuclear scenarios. The Button outlines the hazards in current American nuclear policy and argues for realistic improvements in nuclear defense policy and processes. Collina and Perry identify two main problems of American nuclear defense policy. First, American policy incorrectly focuses on a first strike by China or Russia as the major threat. The two authors refute this and describe such a scenario as unlikely because China and Russia know that any nuclear attack by them will be met with retaliation from the United States. A nuclear attack and response would undoubtedly cripple both sides and provide little if any benefit to anyone. The second problem defined in The Button is that in the United States, since the advent of nuclear weapons, has placed sole authority to use the weapons in this first-strike capacity in the hands of the president and the president alone. This process and structure continue to be based in a holdover of Cold War mentality and have always been at odds with the constitutional requirements around war declarations. Drawing on historical examples and Secretary Perry’s own experiences in a number of positions within the national security structure in the United States, The Button describes instances of false alarms, moments where presidents had faulty intelligence, and times when presidents were not necessarily thinking clearly. In each of these examples, the president could mistakenly or accidently launch a nuclear attack and set off World War III. Recognizing these gaps in nuclear defense policy, Collina and Perry recommend a number of changes that start with changing the thrust of the policy itself and moving away from the first-strike capability. Instead, they advocate for policy that is more clearly focused on cyber attacks, noting that in the 21st century, cyber warfare is a more clear and present threat than is nuclear war. Additionally, Collina and Perry argue that the president should not have sole authority over the capacity to launch the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While there have been recent congressional hearings on this dimension of American national security, The Button sketches out how various approaches that will maintain national security while also minimizing the potential for accidental use of nuclear weapons. Collina and Perry advocate for a rethinking of the structure of nuclear defense policy in the United States and for installing greater protections against nuclear war. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why did the DREAM Act (for the Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) never pass Congress – even though it was popular with Republicans and Democrats? What does the political and legal history tell us about American federalism? How is the legal history of the DREAM ACT and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) tied to the legal bureaucracy of residence? In Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of the DREAM Act and DACA (NYU Press, 2020), Michael A. Olivas marshals his experiences as both attorney and teacher to unpack the overlapping laws, politics, and politics of immigration – demonstrating how the financial aid laws, age of majority requirements, and rules for establishing domicile establish carrots and sticks that lead to inept and unjust immigration policy. The book provides a much needed legal and political history of the DREAM Act that spans over two decades from its introduction in Congress (2001) to the Trump Administration challenge of legality in the Supreme Court (2017). Olivas uses Plyler v. Doe (1982) as an entry point. A revision to Texas law in 1975 allowed the state to withhold funds from local school districts for educating the children of undocumented people. The Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteen and recognized the right of undocumented to attend public schools. Olivas sees SCOTUS’s ruling as the beginning of immigration reform, particularly for undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children. Twenty-First century immigration reform has included racist narratives, fearmongering, and misinformation. Perchance to DREAM pulls the lens back to reveal the many times that immigration reform has been less polarized and expose the lack of traction. Despite covering the law and wider institutional struggles, the book highlights the pain that individual DREAMers that have suffered. Towards the end of the book, Olivas highlights poems including Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s La Vida es sueño and Langston Hughes’s Harlem to capture the yearning and disappointments of the DREAMers. Yet Olivas insists “I do not approve. And I am not resigned” noting that the fight for immigration reform is far from over. In the podcast, Olivas offers insights on the June 18, 2020 Supreme Court decision in. Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of California in which the Court ruled 5-4 to overturn. The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end the DACA policy on narrow, procedural grounds. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky traces the origins of the President’s cabinet in American government. Chervinsky combines the history of the American Revolution with studies of early American political institutions to illustrate how the cabinet developed. Exploring the cabinet’s inception, Chervinsky argues that traditional narratives about the cabinet don’t tell the whole story and, in fact, that the cabinet itself is a rather under-researched aspect of the American presidency. While George Washington did build the cabinet and, even more importantly, made use of the cabinet in developing policy and seeking input and advice, Chervinsky reveals that it was not until well into Washington’s first term that the cabinet really came into full usage, and this was only after Washington had experimented with other options. The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution traces how the cabinet evolved in a kind of organic fashion, as Washington needed more input and, in an interesting comparative context, as the Senate provided less engaged advice and consent than had been anticipated at the Constitutional Convention. Chervinsky highlights how Washington’s inaugural cabinet established and protected executive authority setting a precedent for future cabinets and helping to define the scope of executive power in the new constitutional system. Chervinsky’s book takes a chronological approach, starting in the revolutionary period and working forward through Washington’s two administrations. She begins by exploring Washington’s military experience, especially his leadership of the military, and explains how this experience informed his decisions around creating and using the cabinet while president. Chervinsky describes how, during the American Revolution, Washington relied on councils of war to provide advice and help him to make key decisions. He designed the cabinet to advise him in a similar fashion. Chervinsky also discusses the first cabinet secretaries—figures who were themselves quite well known, like Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Knox—and how their individual experiences shaped the offices they held. The Cabinet notes that the way in which the first ministers debated issues created a model for the president’s cabinet as an enduring institution. Chervinsky concludes her chronological study looking at how the cabinet became permanent in response to crises including the Neutrality Crisis of 1793, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, and Jay Treaties of 1795-1796 (which also involved the development of executive privilege). Finally, Chervinsky considers the ramifications of Washington’s creation and use of the cabinet. She explains how the public came to think about Washington’s cabinet and his secretaries, while also comparing Washington’s cabinet practices to more contemporary ones. The Cabinet weaves together a fascinating history of the institution itself while providing an understanding of how it evolved as an institution within the new constitutional system and, in particular, how it operates with the president, carving out a space for a more authoritative executive. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
National concern about income inequalities. Race relations at a boiling point. Riots in the streets. Cries on the left for massive allocations of federal money for housing and poverty reduction programs. Social scientists and professional activists touting theories and pet proposals for projects that will supposedly eradicate poverty if only enough money is thrown at them. Tensions between local and state officials and the White House and between bureaucrats and the poor people they claim to be helping. Factionalism roiling the left as new players challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Concerns about the independence of the Federal Reserve. Economic uncertainty and balance of trade issues leading to tensions with our supposed allies. The once iconic General Electric facing public image problems. Big industrial unions like the United Automobile Workers losing clout to unions representing white-collar government workers. The perennial debate about what we now call the universal basic income (UBI). The rise of the expert class—and the backlash against it. St. Louis as the poster child of racial and class tensions. Acrimony between presidential appointees and the president himself. A naïve, self-serving belief among progressives that all we need to do to solve every problem is to hearken back to the New Deal and outdo it by going big, big, big on social spending. Outright cries for socialism in America. Debates on the right and within the GOP about which political path to follow—surrendering to the administrative state or remaining committed to the free market and personal liberty. Sound familiar? But wait—this isn’t 2020. It is the period of roughly 1964-1972 that journalist and historian Amity Shlaes chronicles in her 2019 book, Great Society: A New History (Harper, 2019) Given the unprecedented, gargantuan levels of federal spending we are seeing these days designed to deal with the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing debate revolving around the Black Lives Matter movement, Shlaes’ book is exquisitely well-timed. Now is the time to revisit the Great Society era and consider what worked and what ended up destroying poor neighborhoods and the lives of those in them. Shlaes also introduces us to many of the now standard public policy types whose latter-day incarnations we all live with today. There is the influential gadfly author who alerts Americans to this or that social problem (Michael Harrington). The charismatic super-bureaucrat who oversells his federal programs and rides roughshod over those at the local level (Sargent Shriver). The memo-producing social scientist for-hire who loves government more than life itself (Daniel Patrick Moynihan). The young activist who rides the wave of social upheaval only to be sidelined by those more ruthless, effective and radical than he (Tom Hayden). The union leader who revels in conferring with American presidents and cultivating allies on the left even as his industry is being gutted by foreign competitors (Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers). We know these types by now and Shlaes reminds us how we got used to such figures. Never was a better time to look back at a key period in the history of big government and to consider how we can avoid replicating the counterproductive policies that helped create the very conditions that are generating the current outcry about income disparities and racial injustice. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Before Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race? In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (Vice Dean and a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego) demonstrate how highly (and often overly) qualified woman are shortlisted by presidents -- from Herbert Hoover to Donald Trump -- to create the appearance of diversity before a (white) man is selected to preserve the status quo. Short-listing isn’t success but symptom of a problem. Jefferson and Johnson’s research in presidential libraries, private papers, oral histories, the Nixon tapes, and biographies reveals that presidents as early as Herbert Hoover began discussing female candidates – though presidents set aside overly qualified women for decades. The first half of this nuanced book explores the first woman considered (Florence Allen), five judges who were on the short lists of JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and female judges who were short-listed alongside Sandra Day O’Connor (including the first Black female judge, Amalya Lyle Kearse). The histories of each candidate map onto the waves of feminism, reflect on the role of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, and allow the authors to identify the harms of short-listing. The details are revealing about both past and present and the second half of the book addresses how to apply the lessons learned from these decades of paying lip-service to diversity. How can candidates transition from shortlisting to selection? Jefferson and Johnson discuss tokenism, the burdens of being a gender spokesperson, racism, ageism, and the binds of femininity and “respectability.” The authors demonstrate how the selection of women for the Supreme Court impacts other aspects of the legal system and beyond. Although the number of men and women entering law school and entry-level legal positions are equal, the rate at which men reach leadership positions is considerably faster than women. This phenomenon can be seen in many fields where there is a pursuit of professional advancement. The authors conclude with strategies such as “collaborating to compete” to reform the American legal system. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the United States, each election cycle reminds us that younger voters vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This discrepancy is often chalked up to apathy or lack of interest in politics among younger voters. In their new book, John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus analyze this conventional explanation along with the political science literature about voting behavior among different age cohorts. What they find is a more complex picture of contemporary young voters, and this complex picture is the focus of their new book, Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Action (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Holbein and Hillygus find that younger citizens (18-29 year old) are quite interested in politics and engaged in various dimensions of politics, but that voting, because of the complex process for registering and voting in the United States, makes it more difficult for younger voters to develop this habit and pursue it. Holbein and Hillygus’ analysis of the data refutes the oft-repeated commentary that younger voters are apathetic. In fact, Making Young Voters demonstrates that today, young voters are more concerned with politics than young voters of the past. But despite this greater interest, youth voting remains low. Making Young Voters argues that the true obstacles to youth voting are lack of experience, and less fully formed noncognitive skills, coupled with the high hurdles of the voting process itself, including the requirements to register to vote, and the differing requirements for actual voting, as well as the many elections that Americans face every year. Thus, some of disconnect between interest and follow through is on the voters themselves, but a sizeable issue, according to wealth and diversity of data that Holbein and Hillygus explore, is the complexity of the voting process in the United States. Holbein and Hillygus explain that younger voters are not accustomed to the act of voting and therefore struggle to follow through on their intention to vote. This can be seen in voter registration. Younger voters either forget to register or they are hesitant to register because they have never done it before, and therefore it is not a habit for them the way it is for older voters. Additionally, Holbein and Hillygus note that previous scholarship on youth voting focused on cognitive skills. Instead, Making Young Voters emphasizes the link between voting and noncognitive skills. Holbein and Hillygus assert that younger voters’ noncognitive skills are less developed. This also contributes to lower turnout among younger voters. Finally, Making Young Voters considers what could be done to increase youth voter turnout. The latter part of the book includes ideas to rethink civics classes and education to highlight how to register and how to vote so as to familiarize younger voters to the process itself. Holbein and Hillygus also suggest creating more pathways to registration such as same-day registration which allows voters to register at their polling place on the day of an election. Making Young Voters brings together approaches from political science, education, and psychology to explain what is standing in the way of more young people actually casting ballots in American elections. And what can be changed to make this process less daunting. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sex scandals are ubiquitous in American politics. In Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Leslie Dorrough Smith examines the dynamics of political sex scandals and the rhetorical strategies employed by politicians that enable them to successfully withstand a public sex scandal. Through an examination of some of the most sensational sex scandals throughout the last several decades, Leslie Dorrough Smith demonstrates that sex scandals are about much more than sex. Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Avila University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States takes pride in its democratic model and the idea that citizens deliberate in a process to form political opinions. However, in recent years, division and partisanship have increased while deliberation and the actual discussion of competing ideas have decreased. More and more, citizens are siloed, interacting only with those with whom they agree, and there is more negative animus directed at the opposition. In his new book, A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America (Oxford University Press, 2020), Political Scientist Brian F. Harrison critiques many of the current methods of communicating and explores the growing divide within political discourse. He demonstrates how, in our contemporary environment, political debate includes more name-calling and far less of a desire to understand political opponents. But hope is not lost. Looking at recent history, Harrison argues that conversations about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights successfully changed public opinion in a civil manner and did so rather quickly. Drawing on this example, Harrison proposes a model for how the citizens in the United States can overcome increased partisanship and dissent in favor of more civil and productive conversation. A Change is Gonna Come contextualizes both the advice and suggestions provided in the book by tracing out a great deal of the literature about political psychology and identity politics, since Harrison argues that part of the difficulty is the way that partisanship has become more of an identity marker for many voters. Harrison offers the discourse about LGBTQ+ rights as a model for how engagement should occur. This is also an area of research that Harrison has previously explored in other works, specifically his co-authored book with Melissa Michelson, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Changes Attitudes about LGBT Rights. He notes that change in public opinion typically takes a long time. But in the last 15 years alone, public opinion around LGBTQ+ rights has significantly shifted. Harrison contends that change in public opinion regarding LGBTQ+ rights was supported by people of differing backgrounds engaging in uncomfortable conversations about the issue. He extrapolates that by talking to people with whom we disagree, we develop a dialogue which helps people on all sides of the issue to understand other viewpoints. In A Change is Gonna Come, Harrison outlines how to approach these conversations, including how to avoid a combative approach and how to engage, respectfully, across political and cultural divides. Combining social psychology, communication studies, and political science, Harrison concludes that if citizens in the United States wants to regain a sense of civility in politics, they should follow the model presented by LGBTQ+ discussions and encourage people to have difficult conversations across policy and partisan lines. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polarized due to the biased or intentionally manipulated ways they are presented to the public? In Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Melissa K. Merry (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville) applies these questions to gun policy highlighting the ways both sides warp the gun policy narrative to fit and further their separate agendas. Noticing the way gun control advocates highlight white victims’ of mass shootings, while gun rights advocates stress self-defense rights, Merry concludes this type of framing serves to further polarize the public leaving policy makers less able to form coalitions and agree to compromise. In this way, warping has consequences for both policy and politics. Employing a social science lens and employing three distinct theoretical frameworks, Merry seeks to understand how and why actors, specifically interest groups, distort narratives. By analyzing “67,000 communications by 15 national gun policy groups between 2000 and 2017 collected from blogs, emails, Facebook posts, and press releases” Merry documents the ways both sides over emphasize and omit crucial aspects of the gun policy debate, ironically resulting in negative consequences and failure for both sides. She combines three powerful theoretical lenses – Narrative Policy Framework, Social Construction of Target Populations, and Critical Race Theory – to reveal the structure and strategy of narratives of gun rights and safety. Both sides focus on atypical characters and settings – and both manipulate racial stereotypes. Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy is a systematic analysis of the gun policy debate providing important groundwork for understanding how specific actors distort and polarize public debate as well as a reflection on the greater implications this has for the future of public policy. Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her nuanced case study of postemanciaption Virginia, Nicole Myers Turner, (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University) challenges assumptions regarding the intersection between black religion and politics in this “signal moment of political and cultural transformation in the African-American experience.” Using traditional archival records from churches, political institutions and personal documents -- as well as ArcGIS to create layered maps of black religious and political participation -- Turner interrogates the integral role black churches played in postbellum Virginia politics. Black political engagement is an understudied facet of the postemancipation period but Turner explores developing relationships between two realms of life and how politics were shaped by the racial positioning of the denominations and of black people within those denominations. In her new book Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (UNC Press, 2020), Turner argues that the relationship between black religious institutions and political institutions drastically shifted as the Reconstruction amendments established rights for black citizens. That shift, and the myriad challenges black citizens encountered in their newfound citizenship, necessitated that they pursue a means for education and political power. Soul Liberty focuses on the political involvement and bargaining through which black communities achieved these goals. The term “soul liberty” captures the “combination of religious freedom, righteousness, equity and justice” that fueled remarkable institution building in the period. For example, she highlights the interracial coalitions forged with the Republican and Readjuster parties and political magnates, such as William Mahone: one of the first white politicians to recognize the political power of black churches. Turner trenchantly investigates how women in the church were pushed away from ministerial positions, and thus, often ignored as religious and political leaders. She identifies several aspects of churches and their political connections in which women demonstrated agency, such as voting on ministerial positions and tenure, leading discussions, and fundraising. She also diagnoses theological education and its male focus as the main reason that women were held out of leadership positions in the ministry. She provides a nuanced account of the election of John Mercer Langston, the first African-American congressman elected in 1890. Soul Liberty uses the powerful tools of archival research and GIS to illustrate the transformation of black churches, explicitly and implicitly, into centers of political organization. It is currently available in three forms: print book, verbatim open access e-book, and enhanced open-access e-book, which allows the reader to manipulate some of the layered maps that Turner created with her research. A website based on her research is available at mappingblackreligion.com. Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After working on two presidential campaigns (for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), MSNBC political analyst and SiriusXM host Zerlina Maxwell gained first-hand knowledge of everything liberals have been doing right over the past few elections–and everything they are still doing wrong. Ultimately, these errors worked in President Donald Trump’s favor in 2016; he effectively ran a campaign on white identity politics, successfully tapping into white male angst and resistance. In 2020, after the Democratic Party’s most historically diverse pool of presidential candidates finally dwindled down to Joe Biden, once again an older white man, Maxwell has posed the ultimate question: what now, liberals? Fueled by Maxwell’s trademark wit and candor, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide (Hachette, 2020) dismantles the past and present problems of the Left, challenging everyone from scrappy, young “Bernie Bros” to seasoned power players in the “Billionaire Boys’ Club.” No topic is taboo; whether tackling the white privilege that enabled Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential run, the controversial #HashtagActivism of the Millennial generation, the massive individual donations that sway politicians toward maintaining the status quo of income inequality, or the lingering racism that debilitated some Democratic presidential contenders and cut their promising campaigns short, Maxwell pulls no punches in her fierce critique. However, underlying all of these individual issues, Maxwell argues that it’s the “liberal-minded” party’s struggle to engage women and communities of color–and its preoccupation with catering to the white, male working class–that threatens to be its most lethal shortfall. The times–and the demographics-are changing, and in order for progressive politics to prevail, we must acknowledge our shortcomings, take ownership of our flaws, and do everything in our power to level the playing field for all Americans. The End of White Politics shows exactly how and why progressives can lean into identity politics, empowering marginalized groups, and uniting under a common vision that will benefit us all. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many of us know that immigrants have been deported from the United States for well over a century, but has anyone ever asked how? In The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020), author Adam Goodman brings together new archival evidence to write an expansive history of deportation from the United States that threads the late-nineteenth century through to the present. Goodman, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies as well as history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that the “deportation machine” operated through three main mechanisms: formal deportations, voluntary departures, and self-deportations. But contrary to mainstream assumptions about the U.S. immigration system, the overwhelming majority of deportations throughout the 1900s have not been formal proceedings in immigration court, but instead administrative processes and informal fear campaigns that pushed immigrants out of the country. Our interview with Goodman will cover how the history of deportation is linked with the development of federal power, state coercion, and activist resistance for due process. We also discuss the connections between the deportation machine and the contemporary debate on the prison-industrial complex, anti-immigrant prejudice, and demands for police reform. Far beyond the harsh realities of deportation, this book shows us how the politics of expulsion sought to define who truly belonged in America. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true—Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide,” Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection, and, four years earlier, the Democratic ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket by a margin of more than two to one. But those numbers belie a more complicated picture. Because of decades of investment and political courtship, as well as a nuanced and varied cultural identity, the Republican party has had a much longer and stronger bond with Hispanics. How is this possible for a party so associated with draconian immigration and racial policies? In The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (Ecco, 2020), historian and political commentator Geraldo Cadava illuminates the history of the millions of Hispanic Republicans who, since the 1960s, have had a significant impact on national politics. Intertwining the little understood history of Hispanic Americans with a cultural study of how post–World War II Republican politicians actively courted the Hispanic vote during the Cold War (especially Cuban émigrés) and during periods of major strife in Central America (especially during Iran-Contra), Cadava offers insight into the complicated dynamic between Latino liberalism and conservatism, which, when studied together, shine a crucial light on a rapidly changing demographic that will impact American elections for years to come. Tiffany Jasmin González is an AAUW Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th-century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region. In The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford UP, 2020), Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the US. A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over the course of the last century. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020) comes out of a broader collaboration between social scientists at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, Gallup, Inc. This collaboration, which is on-going, has a number of foci, and this book project came out of work that combined expertise from political scientists, computer scientists, and data experts, concentrating specifically on social media, traditional media, and new Gallup survey data acquired over the course of the 2016 election cycle. The eight authors of Words that Matter brought distinct areas of expertise to analyze and explain not only the data that Gallup amassed through open-ended questions asked over the course of a number of months leading up to the general election in 2016, but also to pull together media analysis to use as contextual framing to examine and understand the responses provided to the Gallup surveys. Ceren Budak, Jonathan Ladd, and Michael Traugott spoke with me on behalf of the rest of the book’s authors as well, explaining this extended and unique ongoing collaboration while diving into the book’s particular research schema. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Making of the Presidential Candidates 2020 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) is the most recent entrant within a long-established, well-respected series that surveys the nomination process in the United States every four years. Political Scientists Jonathan Bernstein and Casey Dominguez have pulled together a diverse assemblage of authors and perspectives to help readers think about how the nomination process works, what may be changing in the 2020 process, and the role and influence of parties, money, rules, and media on the current political dynamic on the road to the party conventions and the general election. This volume updates the substance of the previous volumes by including a focus on who the candidates are themselves, how they are allowed to be candidates, and how this may contribute to the shape of the nomination race. The Making of the Presidential Candidates 2020 also adds quite a lot to the discussion about American political parties, with an array of chapters that take up different aspects of the role and function of the parties in American politics. These chapters, which make up about half of the book, dive into questions about how the parties worked in the 2016 election cycle and how they have responded to that nomination process. In this regard, the parties do not necessarily operate as mirror images of each other, and the various authors examine the different coalitions within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and how those coalitions function at local, state, and national levels. The parties are also examined as long-standing institutions, and how that context and position contributes to how they operate in a political environment that is both quite polarized, and in flux. The book concludes with an historical analysis of the nomination and election process from the early days of the American republic, providing readers with a comparison between the current and evolving process and the process that came into being as the Founding generation worked to accommodate the presidential election structure established in the new Constitution while integrating the political parties as they became more fully entrenched in American politics. Bernstein and Dominguez have produced a book that is accessible and engaging, providing substantial information and analysis of the myriad dynamics and institutions that are contributing to the 2020 nomination process. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections (Georgetown University Press, 2020), Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore how election officials work, how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process. Using original data gathered from state and local election officials and policymakers across the United States, Hale and Brown analyze innovations in voter registration, voting options, voter convenience, support for voting in languages other than English, the integrity of the voting process, and voting system technology. The result is a fascinating picture of how we vote now and will vote in the future. Join us to hear them talk about the book and its implications for the 2020 election. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Good Reason to Run: Women and Political Candidacy (Temple University Press, 2020) is an excellent text that provides a wealth of information and analysis of the reasons why women (and men) choose to run for public office and what that path looks like in terms of training, support, obstacles, and advantages. This is a wonderfully accessible text, great for use in the classroom, for those who work in politics and campaigns, and for scholars of electoral politics, particularly those who study women and politics. Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, Dawn Langan Teele have assembled an impressive group of contributing authors, focusing mostly but not exclusively on American politics and the particular experiences and issues that women in the United States face in considering a run for public office. Good Reason to Run came out of a collaborative effort between scholars/academics and practitioners, thus the data, information, and analysis in the book weaves together both scholarship on women running for office and the experience of those who work with and for women running for office or in elected office. A standout section of the book harnesses this collaborative information in discussing the role of non-profit organizations in providing a variety of support for female candidates; this section also includes a global comparative analysis of the role of these organizations. The book focuses on the theory of political ambition and how a static understanding of this concept has often shaped the thinking and analysis of electoral politics. Good Reason to Run: Women and Political Candidacy provides a diversity of methodological approaches across the chapters, from field experiments and survey data to deep interviews and descriptive analysis—which makes the text accessible to a broad array of readers. Beyond answering questions about which women choose to run and why they make that choice, Good Reason to Run also includes a section on the role of money in politics, especially as it figures into that decision matrix – and the differences across parties, and countries. Shames, Bernhard, Holman, and Teele have organized and marshaled an engaging text that responds to the literature about women running for office, integrating the established theories and exploring current data, information, and experiences from those in the field. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in their communities, a critical chapter of American cultural history explored in depth for the first time in his book In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. Lappas' work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership. Lappas’s book places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century. David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientist Daniel Q. Gillion’s new book, The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an incredibly topical and important analysis of the connection between protests and the influence this public activism has on the voting electorate. Tracing the idea of the “silent majority” from Richard Nixon’s characterization of his supporters in the 1960s through to contemporary uses of the term in the 2016 campaign by then-candidate Donald Trump, Gillion examines the construction of this binary framework, that there is a silent majority at home and a vocal minority in the streets, making noise; he also argues that the idea of the silent majority might not apply in our current polarized political world. The Loud Minority brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives to examine protests—weaving together research and analysis from sociology, history, and political science to more fully understand the protests themselves, but to also get at the impacts that protests have, on politicians and elected officials, on donations to campaigns and candidates, on voting behavior, and on policy implementation and shifts in policy directions. Gillion finds that voters are influenced by protests and activism, especially when it happens in close proximity to them. In a way that may be more useful than other information streams, protests provide the electorate with a kind of shorthand that they can then use to connect policy and political actors. Because of the acute partisan polarization within the American political system, protests fit into ideological bends, as Gillion notes in the interview, the protests themselves are linked to one another through the emphasis or policy thrust of the individual protest and the overarching umbrella under which it may be classified. This linkage then becomes a broader scope for voters to use to assess the records of candidates and elected officials on specific concerns. Gillion is exploring the question, throughout the book, of whether protests work and if so, how do they work? The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy also explains that the answer to the question is not a simple one, necessarily, that the outcome of the protest may not be singular or even initially assessible. This research helps us to understand the potential impact of the many protests we are seeing all around us in the United States (and beyond), while guiding us through the myriad ways that protests act—they are not simple the hours of marching or demonstrating, but the ripples and ramifications of those marches, as the electorate observes and responds, by donating, by voting, by becoming involved in the community, by joining in subsequent protests. Protests are, according to Gillion, “the canaries in the coal mines that warn of future political and electoral change.” Understanding the connection between protests and their influence on the electorate helps us to better understand democracy. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In today’s ultra-polarized and highly partisan political environment, Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets―And What You Can Do About It (Post Hill Press, 2020) is one of the rare books written to appeal to engaged and open-minded citizens from across the political spectrum. Welfare for the Rich is the first book to describe and analyze the many ways that federal and state governments provide handouts—subsidies, grants, tax credits, loan guarantees, price supports, and many other payouts—to millionaires, billionaires, and the companies they own and run. Welfare for millionaire farmers comes to more than $50 billion annually. Subsidies to giant corporations exceeds $100 billion. This shocking waste of taxpayer money is rigorously documented in Welfare for the Rich, along with the political action committees, and special interest groups that keep this distorted system going. Many journalists, scholars, and activists have focused on one or more of these dysfunctional programs. A few of the most egregious examples have even become famous. But Welfare for the Rich is the first attempt to paint a comprehensive, easily accessible picture of a system largely designed by the richest Americans—through lobbyists, lawyers, political action committees, special interest groups, and other powerful influencers—with the specific goal of making sure the government keeps wealth and power flowing from the many to the few. Phil Harvey is an entrepreneur who has founded a thriving business, a philanthropist who has created several important nonprofit organizations, and the author of five books. Lisa Conyers is director of policy studies for the DKT Liberty Project. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, history, oral history, and democratic theory to illuminate a 21st century, premediated legal strategy to disenfranchise voters of color. In Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression (NYU Press, 2020), Daniels establishes the context of 21st-century voter suppression then focuses on the importance of the Voting Rights Act in discouraging voter suppression – and the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). She elucidates the types – and impacts – of voter deception with attention to possible impacts on the presidential election in 2020. Throughout the work, she connects past and present to demonstrate the radical impact of voter suppression on voting and this is particularly apparent in the chapters on voter purging and felon disenfranchisement. The podcast includes a fascinating discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on voter suppression – particularly regarding absentee voting. Daniels complements her nuanced analysis of the cycles of voter suppression in America with concrete steps for combatting it urging people to educate, legislate, litigate, and participate. This timely book offers an analysis that is both deep and highly accessible. It is simultaneously a work of scholarship and a practical call to action. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When we think of democracy, we typically think of voting; and when we think of voting, we ordinarily have elections and campaigns in minds. In this intuitive sense, voting is a matter of casting a ballot. After Election Day, votes are counted, and, typically, the majority rules. But things really aren’t so simple. For one thing, citizens bring differing levels of information and ignorance into the voting booth. What’s more, famous mathematical analyses cast doubt on the very idea of a majority will. Given this, what are we to make of democracy? In Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2020), Ilya Somin defends the idea that foot voting is an essential element of political freedom and democratic governance. Foot voting is the capacity of individuals to move to the jurisdiction or nation whose government most suits their preferences, or to select their favoured providers of various services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientist Mary-Kate Lizotte’s new book, Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences (Temple University Press, 2020) helps us to understand the concept of the gender gap in American politics and how this gap looks across a host of different policy areas. Lizotte examines four different policy umbrellas: the use of force, environmental policy, social welfare policy, and policy around issues of equality. Making use of American National Election Studies (ANES) data, the research in Gender Differences in Public Opinion digs into these policy umbrellas to tease out distinctions within these policy areas, examining where the gender gap is broader and where it narrows, both in comparison to other issue areas and in context of the issues themselves. While the gender gap is often discussed during election cycles, particularly around presidential vote preferences and the different choices men and women make, Lizotte’s work is much broader and theoretically encompassing, arguing that there is a values gap between men and women and their thinking about policy, and this is connected, then, to their political choices. There is a need to better and more comprehensively explain the gaps (which do range in size) across policy areas and not analyze each particular distinction independently. Lizotte posits that “values offer a novel and comprehensive approach to understanding gender differences in policy preferences.” Values, as such, reflect how an individual conceives of the proper role of the government in society. And thinking about different perspectives on values in this context, according to Lizotte’s thesis, helps to explain the gender gap and the way that it traces through different policy areas. Gender Differences in Public Opinion teaches us how men and women approach policy and political decisions from different perspectives and how that surfaces in specific policy choices. Lizotte also explains that these policy choices are important for candidates and parties to consider—since they need to recruit both male and female voters in order to win elections, and they have to understand the basis for choices made by these voters. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump? What forces moved American politics from the first African-American president and an all-Democratic Congress (2008) to ethno-nationalist rhetoric and GOP control of Congress (2016)? What do the reactions to these political events – the rise of the Tea Party and the Anti-Trump resistance – tell us about these, and future, presidential elections? In there new book Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2019), Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo focus on changing organizational configurations – such as voluntary local citizens’ groups, elite advocacy organizations, consortia of wealthy donors (e.g., Koch’s Americans For Prosperity), and candidate-led political campaigns – to explain these radical shifts. The book has a unique methodology: a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative data analyzed by a collaborative team of authors from political science, sociology, and history. The range is extraordinary, combining what is best about both field work and big data in the social sciences. The authors document the changing organizational configurations – at both the national and state levels – with an emphasis on the states that were pivotal in the 2016 election: Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The book offer insights about national trends while capturing the importance of federalism – and attending to unique factors in swing states. The authors excavate how top-down efforts (ultra-free market fundamentalism funded by groups like Americans For Prosperity) combined with bottom-up organizations (popular, local, and diverse groups who often channeled ethno-nationalist resentment) to push Republican politics to the right. Their analysis of progressive groups reacting to the Trump presidency reveals grassroots organizing that is both similar and different to the Tea Party movement. Rather than pushing the Democratic party to the left, the resisters work within the Democratic party (often energizing moribund organizations). Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon K. Winford's John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners. Today I talked to Brandon K. Winford Dr. Brandon K. Winford is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and African American history with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business history. Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in colonial and revolutionary-era Black women’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Americans are living through a social crisis, contends Yuval Levin in his 2020 book A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020) In Levin’s view, acrimony reigns in the media, both social and traditional. Public discussion of crucial policy matters has degenerated into finger-pointing. Congress is more of a platform for demagogues than a workplace for serious legislators who put the national interest above their own personal brands. Donald Trump embodies this performative style of politics. Church attendance and other forms of worship are in decline. Academia is awash in identity politics. Even questions of what constitutes a family are in dispute. Meanwhile, our major social institutions, in past decades the bulwarks of comity and social progress, from universities to government at every level, from the Boy Scouts to the Catholic Church to National Public Radio to Hollywood, have been tarnished by scandals from admissions ones to those related to sexual abuse or harassment. The federal courts have been politicized by both sides. And, as if things were not bleak enough, we are in the midst of a pandemic and consequent economic catastrophe. Depressed yet? Take heart, readers! Levin’s book charts a way out of this mess—as the title suggests. Or do you even agree that things are as bad as Levin paints them or that a renewal of American institutions is the way forward? Let’s hear from the man himself on the moral state of the nation and let’s get the lowdown on why he thinks institutions, troubled as many of them are, can rise from the ashes and why we, as a people, desperately need them to do so. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2014, the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy entered the national spotlight after a showdown against federal officials over grazing rights on public lands. Two years later, his sons seized the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and occupied it for forty days with militia and sovereign citizen groups. As journalists rushed to the scene, trying to make sense of the motivations behind their anti-government politics, Betsy Gaines Quammen, a historian working on her history Ph.D., knew something was amiss. She had spent hours at the Bundy home, interviewing them for her dissertation on Mormon settlement in the West. She knew the Bundy’s rooted their politics in their Mormon faith, but their religious attitudes made few popular headlines. In her new book, American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West (Torrey House Press, 2020), Quammen situates the Bundy standoff within the long and convoluted history of Mormon migration into the American West—and provides an exciting new take on religion in modern American politics. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in United States history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. Twitter: @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), Jia Lynn Yang recounts the personalities and debates that brought about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which forms the foundation for modern U.S. immigration policy. Undoing the xenophobic national origins quotas enshrined in the 1924 Immigration Act required an epic, forty-year struggle against nativist concerns about the economy and national security, as well as racist and anti-Semitic impulses that continue to plague American society today. Drawing on key scholarly monographs as well as her own research in archives like the LBJ Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, Yang’s narrative is full of larger-than-life characters. Some, like Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, will be familiar with readers. Others, like Congressman Emmanuel Celler of New York and Japanese American Citizens League national secretary Mike Masaoka, are well-known but less well understood. By following their negotiations through the halls of Congress and the White House, Yang captures the contingency that shows how difficult and improbable immigration reform was to achieve. Yang concludes by issuing a call for immigrants and their descendants to “articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots.”. Jia Lynn Yang is the deputy national editor at The New York Times. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What do you think about these days when you hear the words, “Supreme Court?” Salacious news coverage of the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh? Gushing profiles of feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg? High school and vaguely recalled lectures about cases the details of which you dutifully read (or didn’t and flunked the test on) like McCulloch v. Maryland or Marbury v. Madison? Or, in this age on the Coronavirus and the sudden need to determine as a citizen what the respective powers of governors and presidents are in times of crisis, are you suddenly aware that a grasp of seemingly arcane terms like “enumerated powers” is imperative for each and every one of us and not just constitutional scholars? Are you suddenly out of a job and thinking now of attending law school and are not sure you could master the material? Have you suddenly found yourself homeschooling a bright late adolescent in need of a text and an associated online resource about the key legal cases that have determined our destiny as a nation and affect virtually every aspect of our individual lives? Do you simply want a solid but approachable book that provides vignettes of crucial moments of American legal, social and political history? Want to know under what pretexts a local government can seize your house? Have I got the book and online study guide for you: An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know (Wolter Kluwer, 2019) by Josh Blackman and Randy E. Barnett—published in 2019. Randy Barnett is one of the leading constitutional scholars of our time. He and his co-author Blackman have boiled down to a handy hundred what they believe are the cases that most matter—some of which are notorious (or what they term, “anti-canonical”). Let’s see if you agree with their picks. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kenesha N. Grant, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University, at the beginning of her new book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Temple University Press, 2020), poses a question to consider in context of trying to understand the realignment of voters within American political parties. This question is about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, and how this changed the political dynamics in many of the places where African Americans settled and built new lives. Grant’s examination focuses specifically on the impact in terms of politics, how and where African American individuals engaged in politics, as voters, and in running for and being elected to office. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party concentrates on three cities where the population changed and shifted given the influx of black citizens; and the political dynamics in Detroit, Chicago, and in New York City all came to reflect, in different ways, the influx of new voters and politically active citizens. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party focuses on the local, state, and national Democratic Party, since these voters were not only politically engaged at the local level, they were also able to contribute to voting blocs within states, at times making the difference in terms of the Electoral College and presidential candidacies. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party traces the changes in the political parties over the course of the 20th century, exploring the shifts of voters across parties, with specific attention to Black voters’ movement from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. Grant examines this shift in context of the movement of voters from one part of the United States to other parts of the United States, but also through the lens of how white Democratic elected officials in northern cities approached and engaged Black voters, and how both black and white citizens in these large urban centers participated in politics. Ultimately, Grant positions the Great Migration as a key dimension of some of the shifts and changes that have occurred in the parties over the past century. In tracing the political impact of the great migration, Grant also concludes her work with some analysis of the re-migration of African Americans back to the South, and how active citizens and voters may once again change the dynamics in American politics. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the Confederacy. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020) unpacks a variety of threads all connected to the Lost Cause ideology, and all based on falsehoods. These dimensions of the ideology include Domby’s examination of the history of dishonest claims to confederate pensions by white veterans, and also the accusations of fraud associated with claims made by former slaves and free people of color for much smaller pensions. The False Cause digs into the historical claims made about the heroics demonstrated on the battlefield during the Civil War. In this context, The False Cause unpacks the myth that the Confederate army was one of the best ever, and these heroic claims, many of which were made at least forty years after the war itself, are not the only heroic assertions made in context of the Lost Cause ideology. Domby also explores the “soldiers who weren’t” – the enslaved individuals who were compelled to accompany their masters to war, and were then transformed, within this constructed political memory, into Black Confederates, which is yet another myth within the ideology. The book begins with an extremely topical component of the Lost Cause ideology and political memory, the monuments to confederate soldiers that were built long after the war, and that have become contemporary political lightning rods. Through all of these cases, Domby weaves the thread of how each particular area was used to buttress white supremacy and to re-narrate or re-cast the Civil War itself and those who engaged in it. Issues of white masculinity and grievance are embedded within the mythology and are also unpacked in context of these heroic declarations. This is an important historical examination that leads the reader through the facts and the subsequently created mythologies, which continue to shape and impact American politics and historical understandings. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today Spiro Agnew is best known for his resignation from the vice presidency of the United States as part of a plea bargain deal related to a legal case involving bribes he took as a public official. In Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America (University of Virginia Press, 2019), however, Charles J. Holden, Zach Messitte, and Jerald Podair present Agnew as a progenitor of the conservative populism associated today with America’s 45th president. As Holden explains, Agnew enjoyed a rapid rise in politics, going from his first election to a county office to the vice presidency in little more than a decade. Impressing many conservatives with his response as Maryland governor to riots in Baltimore, as vice president Agnew burnished his standing with them with a series of speeches that further fueled his popularity within both the Republican Party and much of the country. Though Agnew’s plea deal brought his political career to an ignominious and premature end, much of his rhetoric would be echoed by others in the decades to come, fueling changes within the GOP and becoming Agnew’s greatest political legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist (University of Texas Press, 2020), Cynthia E. Orozco traces the life of Adela Sloss-Vento, a twentieth-century Mexican American woman civil rights activist in Texas. In this episode, Orozco discusses the way Sloss-Vento constructed a modern gendered self-hood, which allowed her to join various movements as a public intellectual relying on her writing and intellect to challenge electoral politics, patriarchal rule, and racial exclusion. By writing a biography of Sloss-Vento, Orozco eloquently gives readers an understanding into the everyday life of middle-class Mexican American women who have shaped community concerns into political issues. Adela Sloss-Vento’s biography is first of its kind, this book pushes the field of Latinx history to consider what women’s lives can tell about state and national debates, such as civic engagement, civil rights, and gendered expectations. Tiffany Jasmin González is an AAUW Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th-century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In their new book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020), political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird explore the political behavior of African American voters in the United States and examine extensive data to determine how this particular group of voters have operated as a fairly unified voting block over the course of many election cycles. The research is fascinating, delineating the ideological fissures within the African-American community while also analyzing the voting patterns of African Americans and their inclination to remain loyal Democratic voters. Steadfast Democrats spends time examining the historical roots of this unified voting behavior, noting the roles that slavery and segregation played in creating the tightly connected communities in which many African Americans live and work. White and Laird pay particular attention to how these connections operate in terms of norms in political behavior, building on linked fate theories, but distinguishing differences in terms of understanding how ideology and political behavior operate in context of partisan loyalty. White and Laird explain these dynamics through their theory of racialized social constraint and they build their research from survey data about voting patterns and behaviors, while adding in supplemental, experimental research to test these dynamics and norm enforcement. The research is not necessarily limited to black political behavior in the U.S., and the conclusion of Steadfast Democrats takes the theoretical framework of norm enforcement and community unity and examines other groups in the United States that operate along similar patterns and dynamics. Steadfast Democrats: is a window into understanding why and how African American voters in the United States remain a strongly unified voting bloc, even among many differences of opinion, a diversity of perspective, and a variety of lived experiences. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder have a new book that builds on their previous work exploring women and suffrage in the United States, Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), arriving as we mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, explores women as voters in the United States while examining the contexts and changes that surround women participating in politics. Wolbrecht and Corder weave together a variety of methodological frameworks to guide the reader through an understanding of both women and men as voters during the past hundred years, examining voter data that they have spent years compiling from a variety of sources. A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage also provides well-documented and important historical frameworks in which to consider this data, as the authors sketch out the legal, cultural, economic, and electoral shifts that transpire, at different speeds over the course of the century. These shifts in “orders” – the legal order, the gender order, electoral behavior, the family, the economic order, etc. – may move in the same direction, but they are often in tension with each other because the rate of change is not the same. Wolbrecht and Corder also parse out differences in ballot access for women—where racial and economic prohibitions also combined to preclude different groups of women (African American, immigrant, etc.) from fully exercising the franchise. This is a fascinating book, providing the reader with broad policy considerations, historical frameworks, and rich data to understand the integration of women as voters, but also the way in which we think about gender distinctions in context of politics. As part of our discussion, we also dive into the concept of republican motherhood and understandings of the social context of gender. Both of these parts of the broader conversation highlight ongoing complications within the narratives that surround any discussion of women in politics. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One of the most divisive international issues in American politics today is over Israel and Palestine. The close ties between Israel and the United States are very strong and see considerable cooperation between the two countries. However, that cooperation is also challenged because of the status of the Palestinian people and growing concern over their human rights. This has led to increasingly bitter criticisms of Israel, on the one hand, and denunciations of Israel’s critics in the United States for perceived and real anti-Semitism on the other. It threatens to split apart certain groups in the Democratic Party, for example. Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine told one part of this history by examining how the issue of Palestine created fissures among black power and civil rights activists from the 1960s onward. Fischbach has now written an additional book examining the effects of the Israel-Palestine issue on domestic American politics with The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford University Press, 2019). Fischbach examines the way that a host of groups on the American found themselves divided over which country they ought to support and how to fit that support into campaigns against imperialism or U.S. foreign policy. While most of the left ultimately shifted over to supporting Israel, today those same discussions are playing out in mainstream political parties. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book Muslim American Politics and the Future of US Democracy (New York University Press, 2019), Edward E. Curtis IV interrogates the limitations of American liberalism in light of the states’ and its various actor’s exclusionary politics and rhetoric around Muslim American citizens. Curtis argues that the place of Muslim Americans in the narrative and praxis of American law, politics, rights discourse, and much are, must be questioned. To do so, the book examines various case studies of Muslim American institutions, figures, soldiers, and women who have navigated and negotiated their place within American democracy as citizens. For instance, the Nation of Islam (NOI) is one such case study explored in the book. Curtis considers how the NOI maintained certain forms of American liberalism (i.e., use of law and incurring of capital) while challenging others (i.e., racial and religious logics) as the movement developed. While Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) quintessentially models political dissent against American imperialism precisely because of his Islamic ethics and revolutionary politics. Both in and beyond his involvement in the NOI, Malcolm X’s politics was defined by global pan-African movements, as well as by revolutionary Muslim state leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser. Using various other such examples, from the ways in which Muslim American women’s bodies were used by the nation state to justify foreign policies and military interventions to the memorialization of fallen Muslim American soldiers by American politicians, Curtis provocatively challenges his readers to content with the exclusionary, problematic, and complex rhetoric of American liberalism’s treatment of Muslim Americans as second-class citizens and Muslim Americans’ responses to this injustice. The book is a must read for scholars interested in American Islam and politics, while chapters of the book can also be accessibly used in courses on contemporary Islam, American Islam, and religion and politics. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Since 2008, the Tea Party and the Resistance have caused some major shake-ups for the Republican and Democratic parties. The changes fall outside the scope of traditional party politics, and outside the realm of traditional social science research. To better understand what’s going on Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Strategy at Harvard and Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, convened a group of researchers to study the people and organizations and at the heart of these grassroots movements. Skocpol joins us this week to discuss their findings and the new book (co-edited with Caroline Tervo) Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her work in particular focuses on the Tea Party and includes interviews with Tea Party members across the country. We also discuss the Resistance and whether these oppositional forces to the party in power are likely to continue after November’s election. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State, host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Burns’ new book The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) pulls together distinct threads in analyzing the theoretical framing of presidential power in the American constitutional system and then tracing that power through forty-five presidents. Burns begins by assessing Locke’s impact on the constitutional design of the presidency and then turning her attention to the more substantial contributions made by Montesquieu, since Montesquieu had an equally sizeable impact on the Founders and their thinking about this office. There were great tensions at the time of the Founding about the powers that the president has in pursuing war and military engagements. The Politics of War Powers pays close attention to the distinctions made in the Constitution between the role of the legislature in declaring war, and the role of the president in prosecuting war. This is the foundation for Burns’ analysis of presidential implementation of these powers over the course of more than 200 years, and she carefully examines these theoretical foundations, devoting the first third of The Politics of War Powers to unpacking and discussing the competing views of this important and, at times, suspect, power. Following from this theoretical basis, The Politics of War Powers dives into deeply researched explorations of not only the presidents themselves and how they thought about and used their war powers, but also how and where Congress acted and responded. This dimension of the analysis is particularly important to consider, and Burns sketches the ways in which the early Congress exerted its authority and constitutional role in regard to war and the war powers embedded in the Constitution. She then goes on to explore the tension between the executive and the legislature over the course of a number of military engagements that pressed on these competing capacities. The final section of the book outlines the ways in which presidential war powers have grown substantially and the legal reasoning that has grown up around these powers as Congress has stepped back from its own role in regard to war powers. In many ways, The Politics of War Powers is as much about congressional engagement or abdication in its constitutional role as it is about the expansion of presidential power. The delicate balance between the branches has shifted rather substantially, according to Burns’ analysis, and The Politics of War Powers draws out the ways in which this balance has shifted over the course of American history and political development. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives. In The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Rebecca E. Zietlow recounts the intellectual development of Ashley as an abolitionist and how he sought to turn freedom into a reality for millions of African Americans. As Zietlow explains, an important strain in Ashley’s thinking was his commitment to the free labor ideas prominent in the Democratic Party in the antebellum era. As a committed abolitionist, he played a prominent role in the emergence of the Republican Party in Ohio in the 1850s culminating in his election to Congress in 1858. As a representative during one of the critical period in the nation’s history, Ashley was at the forefront of Congress’ response to the issue of slavery during the Civil War, working not just to pass the amendment that ended the “peculiar institution” but to craft legislation designed to ensure that the freedom won by African Americans was real and not undermined by the unreconstructed Southern governments in power in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetoric of school choice, however, resemble those of segregationists who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (NewSouth Books, 2020), Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist practices and the modern school choice movement. He exposes the dangers lying behind the smoke and mirrors of the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparities have expanded rather than contracted in the years following Brown, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. Suitts deftly reveals the risk that America and its underprivileged youth face as school voucher programs funnel public funds into predominantly white and often wealthy private schools and charter schools Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eric Lomazoff has written a kind of detective novel about the national bank controversy during the early years of the new republic. Lomazoff poses, in the introduction, and at the start of each chapter, the general understanding that many scholars and citizens have about the bank controversy itself and the constitutional decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland. And Lomazoff notes that these contours are generally accurate but that they elide significant components of the controversy that is actually spread out over an extended period of time. Given this more extensive time frame, Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2018) does exactly what the title promises, in compiling different aspects of our understanding of the controversy, and integrating key shifts in the political and economic landscape that also changed parts of the actual controversy itself. Lomazoff takes the reader through the general understanding of the National Bank controversy, untangling different threads of the argument and the changing political and economic dynamics in the United States. Because the bank controversy is often collapsed into the debate over either a strict or broad interpretation of the Necessary and Proper clause of the Constitution, many aspects of American political development are generally pushed into the background—these ignored or obscured aspects of the controversy are the focus of Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic, and rightly so, since they trace a deeper and more complex understanding of changing monetary policy, banking regulation, and congressional and executive fiscal power in the new republic. This is an action-packed discussion of the general understanding of the early American Republic, and the real controversy around the establishment of the national bank. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not in My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There are quite a few authors writing about the problems facing American democracy and how best to solve those problems. Many of the problematic issues devolve to the question of representation – and how to shift or change the American political system so that it better represents the voters themselves and the plurality of perspectives and opinions across the country. Lee Drutman’s new book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (Oxford UP, 2020) dives into both the problems with the current political dynamic and the possible solutions. As the title indicates, Drutman’s analysis investigates the current binary “doom loop” of two internally consistent parties, and the elected officials who rarely have to compromise within the Madisonian system set up to compel compromise. Drutman’s examination takes the reader through the historical shifts in terms of the parties themselves and American political development, and how Americans have come to find themselves in this “doom loop.” Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop also explores contemporary “toxic politics” and the existential threat that every election seems to pose for parties, partisans, those in elected office, and ultimately for the country itself and public policies. Ultimately, Drutman proposes a number of reforms that, without amending the Constitution, could, as he says, break this doom loop and open up opportunities for more actual representation. Following the examples of a number of cities in the U.S. and the state of Maine, Drutman posits that electoral reform, especially options like ranked choice voting, would shift the dynamic during campaigns, and would lead to coalition building and compromise by lawmakers and elected officials in office. The final section of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America makes the case for how a multiparty system in the United States would work without amending the political institutions established by the Constitution. This is, ultimately, an optimistic book with a variety of proposals designed to untangle some of the persistent knots within the American political system. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Less and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn't mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility. The book I’m looking at today is Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others Are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life, by Jay Wexler. In it, he travels the country to engage the non-Christians who have called on us to maintain our ideals of inclusivity and diversity. With his characteristic sympathy and humor, he introduces us to the Summum and their Seven Aphorisms, a Wiccan priestess who would deck her City Hall with a pagan holiday wreath, and other determined champions of free religious expression. As Wexler reminds us, anyone who cares about pluralism, equality, and fairness should support a public square filled with a variety of religious and nonreligious voices. The stakes are nothing short of long-term social peace. A Professor at Boston University School of Law, Jay Wexler is also a humorist, short story writer, and novelist. A one-time clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former lawyer at the US Department of Justice, he has written for National Geographic, The Boston Globe, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Salon, and many other outlets. His non-fiction books include When God Isn't Green (2016) , The Odd Clauses (2011), and Holy Hullabaloos (2009). He joins me today, to talk about Our Non-Christian Nation. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Co-Authored podcast takes you behind the major academic collaborations in the study of politics. The first episode of the Co-Authored podcast focuses the multiple decade collaboration between Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones. This study initially focused on American politics and policy change, but it grew and grew to encompass new questions about information and new places stretched out across the world. Listen to the co-authors, collaborators, and former student share all the inside secrets. The Co-Authored podcast is supported by the American Political Science Association Centennial Center and the New Books Network. It is written and produced by Heath Brown and edited by Sam Anderson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Michael Bobelian has written a history of the nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. In Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court (Schaffner, 2019), he reminds us of the intense political battle over Lyndon Johnson’s legacy nomination of then-associate justice Abe Fortas to the chief justiceship. Bobelian’s account, relying upon a wealth of archival materials, including primary sources from presidential libraries, Senate hearings, and interviews, recreates the political world of Washington, D.C. in the 1960s, during the height of the Warren Court’s influence. Bobelian assesses the motives for various actors, such as segregationist Strom Thurmond, moderate Robert Griffin, and liberals Abe Fortas and Earl Warren, in their roles in the nomination process. He makes the argument that the politicization of the nomination process did not begin with Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987, but truly began with the nomination of Fortas. Bobelian also considers the political and popular responses to the then-novel consistently activist Warren Court and how the Fortas nomination and the opposition to it were motivated by combinations of jurisprudential ideology, institutional prerogatives, and the dynamics of personal relationships. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xenophobia. Among his first acts on taking office was to issue an executive order blocking Muslim immigrants from entering the United States. But although his actions may often seem unprecedented, they are not as unusual as many people believe. This story doesn’t begin with Trump. For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have employed xenophobic ideas and policies, declaring time and again that “illegal immigration” is a threat to the nation’s security, wellbeing, and future. The profound forces of all-American nativism have, in fact, been pushing politics so far to the right over the last forty years that, for many people, Trump began to look reasonable. As Daniel Denvir argues, issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism, which binds together assorted anxieties and concerns into a ruthless political project. All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It (Verso, 2020) provides a powerful and impressively researched account of the long but often forgotten history that gave us Donald Trump. Join us to hear Daniel Denvir lay out the grim history and current state of US immigration politics and policy. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What standard should be used to assess presidential misconduct during the Trump presidency? How should the public, press, Congress, and bureaucracy resist and punish executive misconduct? Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (The New Press, 2019) insists we must look back to look forward. The book provides a comprehensive study of American presidents' misconduct and their response to charges against them. The book provides a unique context by which to understand and evaluate the impeachment of Donald Trump. The origins of the book are unique. During the 1974 Nixon impeachment hearings, committee leaders ask a group of historians to catalogue presidential misconduct – in 8 weeks. This updated edition provides case studies through the presidency of Barack Obama as well as an excellent introduction by James M. Banner, Jr. (one of the original authors of the 1974 study who also provides chapters on Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe). Jeremi Suri’s analysis of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (EPA, HUD, illegal lobbying, Pentagon bribes and kickbacks, Savings and Loan, Iran-Contra) concludes that Reagan’s personal integrity contrasts with the managerial negligence and deregulation that “encouraged corruption and law-breaking.” Although Reagan did not profit personally, his penchant for deregulation and dislike of confrontation created an environment which made possible crimes committed by others. In her chapter on Bill Clinton, Kathryn Cramer Brownell highlights how changes in television and cable (the twenty-four hour news) impacted the presidency. Through an analysis of Travelgate, Whitewater, 1996 Campaign Finance Violations, and Monica Lewinsky, Brownell concludes that the “line between public and private life, as well as the public’s distinction between the two, disappeared during the Clinton administration.” During the podcast, Brownell expands on complex issues of gender and the separation of public and private. The podcast concludes with thoughts on how a historical review of presidential misconduct informs our understanding of the impeachment of President Trump and the impact of public vigilance in American politics. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration. The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America's postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Hong is an assistant professor of history at Occidental College where she specializes in 20th-century U.S. immigration and engagement with the world, with a focus on Asia. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state. In her book, Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), she tracks the emergence of the American advisory state -- a key analytic introduced and developed by the author in this book -- and draws attention to polyvalence of bodies as both instruments and objects of public policy. Presenting a series of “body projects” which were pursued both formally and informally by the US federal state, Moran makes a case for the persistent political uses of physique throughout more than a century. In this manner, the author manages to tell a story not only of state expansion and citizenship, but also of gender roles, heteronormativity, standards of normality, and weight. This book, therefore, will be of great interest not only to US historians but also scholars interested in the medicalization of the body, gender and sexuality, childhood development, public health, and fat studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Joseph Blocher and Darrell A.H. Miller insist that the Second Amendment is widely recognized but fundamentally misunderstood by the public and public officials. Misconceptions about what the amendment allows, forbids, and how it function as law distort American debates and public policy. Blocher and Miller provide a nuanced synthesis of politics, history, and legal arguments to recover a more balanced discourse – what they call a “positive” Second Amendment” – that accommodates both a right to bear arms and reasonable regulation. Blocher and Miller begin with a puzzle. After the Sandy Hook shootings, 90% of the public and 74% of NRA members supported background checks for guns purchased at gun shows and online – yet the Manchin-Toomey Amendment failed in the Senate. The power of interest groups, Blocher and Miller insist, does not fully explain the disconnect between public opinion and policy. Examining the powerful constitutional rhetoric around what is “allowed” by the Second Amendment provides a fuller picture of the political and legal landscape. The book systematically works through the legal history of the amendment to demonstrate how extremists on both sides fail to understand the Second Amendment. Written in clear terms (such that it can be read by citizens, students, and scholars), The Positive Second Amendment provides accessible and balanced scholarship on a polarizing topic in politics and law. The podcast concludes with thoughts on the firearms law case heard by the Supreme Court in December 2019. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University Carroll in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political Scientist and presidential expert Lori Cox Han has written an absorbing analysis of the many, many memos that Pat Buchanan wrote while working in Richard Nixon’s White House. Buchanan was in the Nixon White House from the very beginning until the very end, and many of his memos are now available to study at the official Richard M. Nixon Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Cox Han has had an interest in these memos and Buchanan’s particular role in the Nixon White House for quite some time, and this book fits into her long-standing research stream examining presidential administrations, especially their communications structures and strategies. As Cox Han notes, Buchanan had a unique position in the Nixon White House and this also helps to contextualize these many memos and Buchanan’s thinking while working for Nixon. In her analysis of these memos, Cox Han lays out the role that Buchanan played in the Nixon White House as a strategic thinker in terms of the shifting political dimensions, especially in the Republican Party at the time and the growing conservative movement. Advising Nixon: The White House Memos of Patrick J. Buchanan (UP of Kansas, 2019) brings together over a hundred of Buchanan’s memos, either written directly to President Nixon or to other close advisors to the president. These memos, chronologically arranged and annotated by Cox Han, provide readers and scholars with insight into not only the president himself, but the structure and processes of the Nixon Administration, from the campaign trail in 1968 through the last days of his presidency as Richard Nixon resigned amidst the Watergate scandal. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Around the McCourtney Institute, we like to say that we’re “partisans for democracy.” We can think of few people who better embody that notion today than David Frum. He was among the first people to talk about the Trump administration’s impact on democracy and remains one of the loudest voices defending democratic norms in the United States. David is a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (Harper, 2018) In many ways, this conversation speaks to the very idea of this podcast. Democracy, no matter where it’s happening in the world, is most successful when people come together to build something greater than the sum of its parts. As you’ll hear, David is a strong advocate for joining organizations that require deliberation and working with people who might hold different political beliefs than you do — in person and away from social media. The gradual shift away from those habits of democracy is one of the things that paved the way for the Trumpocracy that David writes about in his book. Rebuilding those habits, he says, is part of the cure for what ails democracy and must happen in tandem with voting to restore faith in democratic institutions and reduce polarization. Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
While media pundits continually speculate over the future leanings of the so-called “Latino vote,” Benjamin Francis-Fallon historicizes how Latinos were imagined into a national electoral constituency in his new book The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Harvard University Press, 2019). Francis-Fallon, Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University, examines the rhetorical construction of a national voting bloc by politicians, parties, and a national network of Latino political elites. This interview explores some of the major themes in the book, including the essential role of Latino congressmen, the ideological struggles between Latino elected officials and radical activists, and the ongoing appeals to a panethnic Latino voting bloc from presidential campaigns. Of course Democratic Party politics is only half of the story, with the efforts of the Republican Party featuring prominently in the text as well. By discussing the parallel Latino engagement strategies of both parties, Francis-Fallon underscores the fact that the “rise of the Latino vote was a multiparty phenomenon.” Building upon existing studies that detail how panethnic Latinidad was constructed in the twentieth-century United States, Francis-Fallon adds national and presidential politics to the list of forces that continue to define what it means to be Latino. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump broke not only from the Republican Party consensus but also from the bipartisan consensus on the direction of recent U.S. foreign policy. Calling the Iraq war a terrible mistake and lamenting America's nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Trump has shown little interest in maintaining the traditional form of American leadership of the liberal international order. He has threatened to pull the United States out of NATO, complained that the United States was being taken advantage of by its trading partners, and argued that uncontrolled third-world immigration was a terrible mistake and indeed a threat to the American heartland. Instead, Trump's “America First” vision called for a reassertion of American nationalism on the economic front as well as in foreign affairs. In short, President Trump’s foreign policy is more akin to that of the pre-Franklin Delano Roosevelt America. Fuel to the Fire: How Trump made America’s Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) (Cato Institute, 2019), co-authored by Christopher A. Preble, John Glaser, and A. Trevor Thrall, this book provides an assessment of Trump’s America First Doctrine, its performance to date and its implications for the future. Since Trump took office, it has become clear that “America First” was more campaign slogan than coherent vision of American grand strategy and foreign policy. As president Trump has steered a course that has maintained some of the worst aspects of foreign policy of the Bush and Obama era – namely the pursuit of primacy if not hegemony and frequent military intervention abroad – while managing to make a new set of mistakes all his own. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his book Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Matt Grossmann examines, first, the watershed event of Republican takeovers of governors’ offices and state houses over the past twenty or so years. He then, through a triangular model, explores what actually happened in terms of policy outcomes and directional changes based on this political shift. What Grossmann finds, which might be a bit surprising, is that, overall, the size of state governments was not reduced under conservative leadership. He also finds that state government spending was not substantially reduced either. Grossmann argues that the policy outcomes did not necessarily match the political rhetoric on which Republicans campaigned to achieve these statewide offices. Red State Blues provides a systematic examination of policies passed across statehouses during the course of the last twenty-five years and finds that there are some gains made in regard to passage of socially conservative policies, particularly around abortion and the deregulation of guns. Grossmann also observes that criminal justice reform, decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, and same-sex marriage have all seen state-level success in terms of liberalized policy outcomes. In some cases, there has been bi-partisan support for these more progressive policies even while the state house and governors’ mansions have been dominated by more conservative Republicans. Red State Blues concludes that even with substantial electoral successes, the conservative revolution to curtail the size, cost, and scope of state-level government has not necessarily brought the anticipated outcomes. The data and the analysis bolster this conclusion, noting that it is much more difficult to cut spending and fundamentally change the way that state-level government works. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his book Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Matt Grossmann examines, first, the watershed event of Republican takeovers of governors’ offices and state houses over the past twenty or so years. He then, through a triangular model, explores what actually happened in terms of policy outcomes and directional changes based on this political shift. What Grossmann finds, which might be a bit surprising, is that, overall, the size of state governments was not reduced under conservative leadership. He also finds that state government spending was not substantially reduced either. Grossmann argues that the policy outcomes did not necessarily match the political rhetoric on which Republicans campaigned to achieve these statewide offices. Red State Blues provides a systematic examination of policies passed across statehouses during the course of the last twenty-five years and finds that there are some gains made in regard to passage of socially conservative policies, particularly around abortion and the deregulation of guns. Grossmann also observes that criminal justice reform, decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, and same-sex marriage have all seen state-level success in terms of liberalized policy outcomes. In some cases, there has been bi-partisan support for these more progressive policies even while the state house and governors’ mansions have been dominated by more conservative Republicans. Red State Blues concludes that even with substantial electoral successes, the conservative revolution to curtail the size, cost, and scope of state-level government has not necessarily brought the anticipated outcomes. The data and the analysis bolster this conclusion, noting that it is much more difficult to cut spending and fundamentally change the way that state-level government works. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Creating the Law: State Supreme Court Opinions and The Effect of Audiences (Routledge, 2019), Michael Romano and Todd Curry examine whether judges tailor their language in order to avoid retribution during their retention elections. Using an extensive dataset that includes the text of all death penalty and education decisions issued by state supreme courts from 1995–2010, Romano and Curry examine the connection between retention incentives and legal language choices. In doing so, they find that judges write with their audience in mind, and emphasize dueling strategies of justification and persuasion in order to appeal to diverse audiences that may be paying attention. Michael Romano is an assistant professor of political science at Shenandoah University; Todd Curry is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dana Fisher has written a big new book on the movement to oppose Donald Trump, titled American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave (Columbia University Press, 2019). American Resistance follows activists from the streets back to their congressional districts around the country. Fisher analyzes how Resistance groups turned anger into activism and electoral action. Beginning with the first Women’s March in 2017 and following the movement through the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, Fisher shows how the work the Resistance paid off in a wave of Democratic victories. She reveals the lessons for turning grassroots passion into electoral gains, and what comes next. Fisher is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow decline of the family’s political legacy. In Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America (Basic Books, 2019), Douglas R. Egerton, Professor of History at Le Moyne College, depicts a family grown famous, wealthy — and aimless. After the Civil War, Republicans looked to the Adamses to steer their party back to its radical 1850s roots. Instead, Charles Francis Sr. and his children — Charles Francis Jr., John Quincy II, Henry and Clover Adams, and Louisa Adams Kuhn — largely quit the political arena and found refuge in an imagined past of aristocratic preeminence. An absorbing story of brilliant siblings and family strain, Heirs of an Honored Name shows how the burden of impossible expectations shaped the Adamses and, through them, American history. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools. Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools. Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Throughout much of his career as an actor in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan identified as a passionate New Deal Democrat, yet by the time he turned to a career in politics in the 1960s he was a conservative Republican. In Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon (Potomac Books, 2019), Robert Mann charts the course of his transition and explores the factors behind it. Growing up in Illinois, Reagan adopted the politics of his father Jack, an Irish Democrat who administered welfare programs during the Great Depression. As an actor Reagan became known among his peers for his passion for politics, and he often campaigned for Democrats in national elections. As Mann explains, while Reagan’s time as president of the Screen Actors Guild was an important stage in his shift rightward, the key was his work in the 1950s as a spokesperson for General Electric. During his time with the famously conservative company, Reagan embraced their views and gradually crafted his presentation of them in speeches he gave throughout the country. It was a refined version of these speeches which he gave in a nationally televised address during the 1964 presidential campaign which launched his career in elected politics, one that culminated in his election to the highest office in the land less than two decades later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Presidency scholars Bert A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige have compiled an excellent array of authors and essays in their edited volume, The Obama Legacy (University Press of Kansas, 2019). This book, with twelve chapters that explore multiple dimensions of Barack Obama’s Administration, provides readers with substantial analysis of policy, partisanship, historical and political context in considering both the administration itself and the legacy of Obama’s administration. This book is part of a series that has included retrospective evaluation and analysis of the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama. While this series on individual presidential legacies was initially published by other presses, it now resides at the University Press of Kansas as part of the book series on presidential appraisals and legacies. The Obama Legacy covers the domestic and foreign policy attempts, failures, and achievements in thoughtful chapters by Alyssa Julian, John D. Graham, and David Patrick Houghton, while also examining how Obama and his presidency contributed to shaping of the partisan landscape. Julia Azari’s chapter tracing the rise of even more acute partisanship and polarization and how the parties grappled with these dynamics is a key contribution to the presidential scholarship around party polarization. Each chapter of the book includes an assessment of partisanship and polarization because it is impossible to understand the Obama presidency and its legacy without this lens of analysis and interpretation. Alvin B. Tillery Jr. and Angela Gutierrez, Angela X. Ocampo, and Matt A. Barreto focus their respective chapters on Obama and his administration’s relationship with key demographic groups, particularly African Americans and Latino/Latina Americans. The book also pays specific attention to the Obama Administration’s relationship with the branches of government in chapters by Molly E. Reynolds, Sharice Thrower, and David A. Yalof. Rockman and Rudalevige have produced an accessible and important discussion of the Obama Administration, the impact of Obama’s two terms in the White House, and the historical context in which to consider Obama’s legacy as president. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Zoltan Hajnal examines the political impact of the two most significant demographic trends of last fifty years. Examining federal and local elections over many decades, as well as policy, Hajnal finds that race more than class or any other demographic factor shapes not only how Americans vote but also who wins and who loses. America has become a racial democracy, with non-Whites and especially African Americans regularly on the losing side. As worrisome, Hajnal shows that over time these divisions are worsening, yet also discovers that electing Democrats to office can make democracy more even and ultimately reduce inequality in well-being. Hajnal is professor of political science at UC-San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Samuel Goldman, who teaches political science at George Washington University, Washington DC, has written a powerfully impressive new book on the long history of the political theology that he describes as “Christian Zionism.” God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America takes some very unexpected routes through a subject that, in some respects, is well-known. Beginning his account with English puritans in the early seventeenth century, and tracing the impact of their expectation of the future restoration of Jewish people to the Promised Land, he shows how this discourse became increasingly and then distinctively American, and until some new religious movements, such as the Mormons, came to imagine the new world as itself the location within which end-times prophecies would be fulfilled. Only since the 1980s has the term “Christian Zionism” entered the political lexicon as a neologism that obscures as much as it reveals about the agendas of those it is used to describe. God’s Country is an expansive, often surprising and always insightful account of a political theology that continues to resonate in discussions of modern American politics and foreign policy. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Brandeis University Press, 2018), Professor Marc Dollinger who holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University, challenges widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance in American politics. Dollinger shows how black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda - including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism. This book breaks new ground and charts new directions for understanding the relationship between black and Jewish politics in the twentieth century and beyond. Dr Max Kaiser teaches at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. Gerald Leonard, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University, focus on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more 'democratic' vision premised on the exclusion of women and non-whites. It incorporates recent scholarship on topics ranging from judicial review to popular constitutionalism to place judicial initiatives like Marbury vs Madison in a broader, socio-legal context. The book recognizes the role of constitutional outsiders as agents in shaping the law, making figures such as the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten part of a cast of characters that has traditionally been limited to white, male elites such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall. Finally, it shows how the 'democratic' political party came to supplant the Supreme Court as the nation's pre-eminent constitutional institution. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, sheds new light on one of Chicano history’s most notorious figures in her new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Oropeza intervenes in the conventional historical scholarship on protest politics through her biography of Reies López Tijerina, a land grant activist and founder of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Tijerina was a living testament to the fact that individuals of Mexican descent were part and parcel of the monumental political changes in the United States during the 1960s and the challenge to the established racial order. But Tijerina was more than just another radical advocate of armed protest, he was also uniquely shaped by his extreme religious beliefs and his particular understanding of justice rooted in the restoration of land rights. As the author argues, Tijerina was the harbinger of an anti-colonial rhetoric that helped reframe Mexican American civil rights. Perhaps most importantly, Oropeza centers the experiences and treatment of women in Tijerina’s life as a lens with which to view his world and activism. Drawing from her experience as a former journalist and now academic historian, Oropeza investigates the lives of Tijerina’s wives and daughters through oral history in order to reveal that “the subordination of women was fundamental to his ideal community.” In the end, Reies López Tijerina was a man of intense conviction who sought to achieve his goals at any cost – often at the expense of those that once loved him most. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. In order to unpack these complexities and mine underutilized sources of public opinion data, Steven White had written World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). White is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University. White offers an extensive analysis of rarely used survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the White house response to civil rights. Intriguingly, he shows that the white public's racial policy opinions largely DID NOT liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany and Congress remained unwilling to act on a civil rights policy agenda. Painfully aware of this, civil rights advocates shifted venues to lobby for unilateral action by the president. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States Supreme Court operates to resolve disputes among lower courts and the other branches of government, allowing elected officials, citizens, and businesses to act without legal uncertainty. Yet a Court that prioritizes resolving many disputes sometimes will produce contradictory opinions or fail to provide a rationale for its decision at all. In either case, it produces an unreasoned judgment. When does the Court do this and is this on the rise? Matthew Hitt has written Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court (University of Michigan Press, 2019) to answer this question. Hitt is assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. In Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court, Hitt demonstrates that over time, institutional changes have substantially reduced unreasoned judgments in the Court’s output, coinciding with a reduction in the Court’s caseload. As such, though the Supreme Court historically emphasized dispute resolution, it has evolved into a Court that prioritizes the goal of logically consistent doctrine. Consequently, the Court today fails to resolve more underlying questions in law and society in order to minimize criticism of its output from other elites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
n Andrew Sidman, Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), offers a systematic explanation for how political polarization relates to the electoral influence of federal spending. He argues that the voters see the pork barrel as part of the larger issue of government spending, determined by partisanship and ideology. It is only when the political world becomes more divided over everything else that they pay attention to pork, linking it to their general preferences over government spending. Using data on pork barrel spending from 1986 through 2012 and public works spending since 1876 along with analyses of district-level election outcomes, Sidman demonstrates the rising power of polarization in United States elections. During periods of low polarization, pork barrel spending has little impact, but when polarization is high, it affects primary competition, campaign spending, and vote share in general elections. Sidman is associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, John Jay College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Alexander’s new book, Representation and the Electoral College (Oxford UP, 2019) is an important analysis of the Electoral College, from the debates about it at the constitutional convention and during the early days of the republic to contemporary controversies that surround this unique construction. Alexander frames the book with the theoretical conundrum of representation, unpacking different kinds of representation and how these competing interpretations of representation have contributed to the ways in which voters, parties, candidates, and electors approach the Electoral College and understand its function within the American constitutional system. By tracing the historical arguments for the Electoral College and the ways in which the electors themselves are chosen and are supposed to act, Alexander pays attention to the ways that the Electoral College has evolved over the course of more than 200 years. This book excellently explains the original competing demands that led to the creation of the Electoral College, and goes on to analyze how it has functioned in context of the rise of political parties, shifting ideological preferences, and geographic and national pressures. Alexander’s earlier research on the electors themselves helps inform the analysis here, integrating the perspectives of individuals who serve a constitutional function but are rarely surveyed or studied within that context. This book brings together historical, constitutional, theoretical, and contemporary perspectives in analyzing and exploring the Electoral College. It is also a very well-written book, making it accessible to a wide range of readers. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bryan Jones, Sean Theriault, and Michelle Whyman are out with a big book on with a provocative thesis. In The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019), the authors argue that there are dimensions to the broadening of the US federal government into new areas of public life largely overlooked by previous scholars. Rather than public opinion or changes in the party system, they claim that it is the social movement system that is an underappreciated driver of the broadening of government in the 1960s. They continue that polarization and the growth of interest groups are each a consequence of this transformation of government, not a primary cause. The Great Broadening is rooted in a massive exploration of data connected with the Policy Agendas Projects. Culling data across nearly a century of American politics and government, the book raises as many new questions as it conclusively answers. The authors are candid that they are expanding the conversation about American political development, not necessarily refuting previous claims. They do so with a heap of quantitative measures on agenda setting in congress, federal expenditures, and the size of the administrative state. This is a must read for students of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What happened to the Democratic Party after the 1960s? In many political histories, the McGovern defeat of 1972 announced the party’s decline—and the conservative movement’s ascent. What the conventional narrative neglects, Patrick Andelic submits, is the role of Congress in the party’s, and the nation’s, political fortunes. In Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974-1994(University Press of Kansas, 2019), Andelic looks at Congress from 1974 to 1994 as the Democratic Party’s stronghold and explores how this twenty-year tenure boosted and undermined the party’s response to the conservative challenge. If post-1960s America belongs to the conservative movement, Andelic asks, how do we account for the failure of so much of the conservative agenda—especially the shrinking of the federal government? Examining the Democratic Party’s unusual durability in Congress after 1974, Donkey Work disrupts the narrative of inexorable liberal decline since the 1970s and reveals the ways in which liberalism and conservatism actually developed in tandem. The book traces the evolution of ideologies within the Democratic Party, particularly the emergence of “neoliberalism,” suggesting that this political philosophy was as much an anticipation of America’s “right turn” as a reaction to it; as factions vied for control of the party, Congress itself both strengthened and weakened liberal resistance to the conservative movement. By putting the focus on Congress and legislative politics, in contrast to the “presidential synthesis” that dominates US political history, Andelic’s book offers a new, deeply informed perspective on two turbulent decades of American politics—a perspective that alters and expands our understanding of how we arrived at our present political moment. Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at stephencolbrook@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The New Deal left a host of political, institutional, and economic legacies. Among them was the restructuring of the government into an administrative state with a powerful executive leader and a large class of unelected officials. This "leviathan" state was championed by the political left, and its continued growth and dominance in American politics is seen as a product of liberal thought—to the extent that "Big Government" is now nearly synonymous with liberalism. Yet there were tensions among liberal statists even as the leviathan first arose. Born in crisis and raised by technocrats, the bureaucratic state always rested on shaky foundations, and the liberals who built and supported it disagreed about whether and how to temper the excesses of the state while retaining its basic structure and function. Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930-1970 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the encounter between liberal thought and the rise of the administrative state and the resulting legitimacy issues that arose for democracy, the rule of law, and individual autonomy. Anne M. Kornhauser examines a broad and unusual cast of characters, including American social scientists and legal academics, the philosopher John Rawls, and German refugee intellectuals who had witnessed the destruction of democracy in the face of a totalitarian administrative state. In particular, she uncovers the sympathetic but concerned voices—commonly drowned out in the increasingly partisan political discourse—of critics who struggled to reconcile the positive aspects of the administrative state with the negative pressure such a contrivance brought on other liberal values such as individual autonomy, popular sovereignty, and social justice. By showing that the leviathan state was never given a principled and scrupulous justification by its proponents, Debating the American State reveals why the liberal state today remains haunted by programmatic dysfunctions and relentless political attacks. Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at stephencolbrook@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just in time for the APSA annual meeting, Niambi Michele Carter has written an incredibly timely book on a central issue to American politics, American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2019). Carter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University. Her work focuses on racial and ethnic politics in the United States, specifically public opinion and political behavior of African Americans. In American While Black, Carter argues that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic. Carter draws on original interview material and empirical data on African American political opinion to offer the first theory of black public opinion toward immigration. Carter contends that blacks use the issue of immigration as a way to understand the nature and meaning of their American citizenship-specifically the way that white supremacy structures and constrains not just their place in the American political landscape, but their political opinions as well. But what may appear to be a conflict between blacks and other minorities is about self-preservation. Prof. Carter also makes a host of excellent recommendations for enjoying the District, including: Hazel, Haikan, Thai Xing, Dirty Goose, Compass Coffee, The Royal (coffee/bar/restaurant), Brookland’s Finest, Calabash, Menomale (didn’t mention but a great place for Neoplitan style pizza), Union Market ( esp. Neopol Savory Smokery), and St. Anselm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book, Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019), historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof seamlessly ties together various scholarly subfields into a truly transnational history of anticolonial politics and the Afro-Latino diaspora in the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof, Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, brings to life the migration stories of black Cubans and Puerto Ricans who founded an intellectual and political movement in nineteenth-century New York. Though exiles and migrants from the Spanish Caribbean were but a fraction of the growing immigrant population during the Gilded Age, this small community of color produced leaders in industry, journalism, and above all, revolutionary struggle. From a small apartment in the center of segregated New York City, a mutual aid organization called La Liga became the political hub for a vast network of exiles of color seeking to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish colonialism. The book provides “a migrants’-eye view” through a collection of microhistories that shed light on the worldviews of a select group of thought leaders and their increasingly intertwined lives. While most of the historical actors featured in this text were afro-descendants, their own racial subjectivities and racialization by external parties took on various forms. This interview delves further into the migrants’ articulations of race – among many other issues – a core theme and line of inquiry throughout the book. In the shadow of a complex and contested historiography centered on revolutionary leaders such as José Martí, Hoffnung-Garskof highlights the invaluable contributions of the Spanish Caribbean’s “class of color.” Black Cuban and Puerto Rican intellectuals did not passively participate in the movement led by Martí, but rather fought to manifest their own vision of what a new interracial democracy could be. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of the American Society for Legal History’s podcast Talking Legal History Siobhan talks with Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College, about his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court(Harvard University Press, 2018). Finkelman is a specialist on the history of slavery and the law. He is also the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books on a broad range of topics including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball. The three most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War―Chief Justices John Marshall and Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story―upheld the institution of slavery in ruling after ruling. These opinions cast a shadow over the Court and the legacies of these men, but historians have rarely delved deeply into the personal and political ideas and motivations they held. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life. Finkelman uses census data and other sources to reveal that Justice Marshall aggressively bought and sold slaves throughout his lifetime―a fact that biographers have ignored. Justice Story never owned slaves and condemned slavery while riding circuit, and yet on the high court he remained silent on slave trade cases and ruled against blacks who sued for freedom. Although Justice Taney freed many of his own slaves, he zealously and consistently opposed black freedom, arguing in Dred Scott that free blacks had no Constitutional rights and that slave owners could move slaves into the Western territories. Finkelman situates this infamous holding within a solid record of support for slavery and hostility to free blacks. Supreme Injustice boldly documents the entanglements that alienated three major justices from America’s founding ideals and embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reflecting on his fifty-year effort to steer the Grand Old Party toward black voters, Memphis power broker George W. Lee declared, "Somebody had to stay in the Republican Party and fight." As Joshua D. Farrington, Instructor in African & African-American Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, recounts in Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Lee was one of many black Republican leaders who remained loyal after the New Deal inspired black voters to switch their allegiance from the "party of Lincoln" to the Democrats. Ideologically and demographically diverse, the ranks of twentieth-century black Republicans included Southern patronage dispensers like Lee and Robert Church, Northern critics of corrupt Democratic urban machines like Jackie Robinson and Archibald Carey, civil rights agitators like Grant Reynolds and T. R. M. Howard, elected politicians like U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke and Kentucky state legislator Charles W. Anderson, black nationalists like Floyd McKissick and Nathan Wright, and scores of grassroots organizers from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Black Republicans believed that a two-party system in which both parties were forced to compete for the African American vote was the best way to obtain stronger civil rights legislation. Though they were often pushed to the sidelines by their party's white leadership, their continuous and vocal inner-party dissent helped moderate the GOP's message and platform through the 1970s. And though often excluded from traditional narratives of U.S. politics, black Republicans left an indelible mark on the history of their party, the civil rights movement, and twentieth-century political development. Farrington marshals an impressive amount of archival material at the national, state, and municipal levels in the South, Midwest, and West, as well as in the better-known Northeast, to open up new avenues in African American political history. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kevin Baron’s new book, Presidential Privilege and the Freedom of Information Act (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), is a fascinating analysis of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and how this act, passed in the 1960s and signed by President Lyndon Johnson, has changed the ways that both the Executive Branch and the Legislature operate and engage with each other. Baron dives into the history of information and the role that access to information plays in supporting democracy. He explains much of the debate over freedom of information from the time of the Founding to the contemporary disputes about executive privilege and Congress’s right to information. By tracing the evolution of presidential privilege through the post-World War II period, the Cold War, the Red Scare, and the Watergate scandal, Baron examines the ways in which presidents and administrations have protected information, often in the name of national security, and the ways in which the Legislative branch has pursued access to that same information. This book explores the ongoing debates about transparency and secrecy in the government, how FOIA has become a tool for Congress to get relevant information from the Executive, and how the understanding and use of presidential privilege has grown and expanded within this same context. Through deep research, Presidential Privilege and the Freedom of Information Act provides the reader with institutional understandings, policy shifts and reactions, the political dynamics of many of the post-WWII administrations and congresses, all ultimately focusing on the idea of governmental information and the health of democracy. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his book, De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Cyril Ghosh interrogates three arenas of debate over LGBT+ rights in the contemporary American landscape—debates over and critiques of pinkwashing, the recent US Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and Kenji Yoshino’s concept of gay covering. Ghosh is associate professor of political science at Wagner College and was the original host of the New Books in Political Science podcast. In each case, Ghosh identifies a tension in the promotion of LGBT+ rights, from both liberal and radical perspectives, demonstrating that these discourses often (re/)produce their own assimilationist logics. Drawing on queer theoretical frameworks, Ghosh ultimately argues for an approach to theorizing rights that takes seriously the project of resisting and dismantling assimilationist demands. The podcast is co-hosted by Heath Brown and Emily Crandall. Heath Brown is associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown Emily K. Crandall holds a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sam Erman is the author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Almost Citizens recounts the story of how Puerto Rico came to be part of the United States empire at the turn of the 20th Century. More specifically, Erman looks at how Puerto Ricans, U.S. legislators, presidents, judges, and a bevy of other people debated how Puerto Rico would be incorporated into the United States. The nexus for this debate centered on whether or not Puerto Ricans would be full citizens of the United States. Erman’s study illustrates the myriad of ways in which constitutional change occurs outside of the judiciary, showing how everyday people contributed to a radical shift in constitutional meanings of terms such as citizenship, alien, territory, and empire. The debates he shows within his book had a long lasting impact for the island and its people; an impact which is still felt today. Sam Erman is Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, where he studies constitutional law, legal history, and the Supreme Court. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of racial formation, Jones emphasizes its local nature, not simply based on preexisting racial hierarchies or phenotype but instead on personal experiences of discrimination, unique social pressures, and local political dynamics. Ultimately, this study of the newly triracial South has immense implications for the future of U.S. politics and our understanding of how race is made. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era(University of Texas Press, 2018), Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell have formulated a landmark anthology illustrating Chicana feminism and activism that spread in the Southwest, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest during the Chicana/o movement era. Contributors examine Chicana activism from different angles that are classified as either hallway movidas, home-making movidas, movidas of crossing, or memory movidas. This episode features Dr. Cotera, who is an Associate Professor of American Culture and the Director of the Latina/o Program at the University of Michigan. Cotera also talks about the creation of Chicana por mi Raza: Digital Memory Collective, a digital archive that has innovatively collected and maintained over 7000 documents on Chicana history. As a way to decolonize the institutional archive, Cotera and Linda García Merchant initiated this endeavor in the early 2000s. González also speaks with Martha P. Cotera about her essay contribution and civil rights activism in Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Focusing on six major Supreme Court cases during the 1960s and 1970s, Marc Stein's book Sexual Injustice (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) examines the generally liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, Loving, and Fanny Hill alongside a profoundly conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. In the same era in which the Court recognized special marital, reproductive, and heterosexual rights and privileges, it also upheld an immigration statute that classified homosexuals as "psychopathic personalities." Stein shows how a diverse set of influential journalists, judges, and scholars translated the Court's language about marital and reproductive rights into bold statements about sexual freedom and equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, 2018), Jonathan Gienapp revisits the Founding Era to retell the story of America’s favorite document. Looking at the Constitution’s creation, Gienapp makes a compelling case for why we should reconceptualize just what this document meant to early Americans. By examining the debates which gripped Congress immediately following the ratification of the Constitution, and throughout the 1790s, Gienapp illustrates how the very meaning of the Constitution, both as an idea and a text, was forged through partisan politics. If most Americans think of the Constitution as a fixed document, Gienapp shows how “fixing” the Constitution turned it into a “fixed” document. The Second gives us a new starting point for how to interpret the constitutional politics of the Early Republic, and the enduring image of the Constitution to our own day. Jonathan Gienapp is an assistant professor in History at Stanford University. He is a scholar of the Revolutionary Era and Early Republic. He’s principally interested in these period’s political culture, constitutionalism, and intellectual history. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With the US in the midst of on-going negotiations with Iran, North Korea, and China, how is Congress playing a part? How is the new generation of Congress advocating for and against US action? Jeffrey Lantis’ new book answers these questions. He is the author of Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress Is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World(University of Michigan Press, 2019). Lantis is professor of political science at the College of Wooster. Through several case studies, Lantis shows how some of the freshest faces on Capitol Hill are advocating for change. From Elizabeth Warren to Tom Cotton, Michelle Bachman to Carlos Curbelo, members of Congress are staking out bold foreign policy stances on everything from trade to climate change. Lantis’ book weaves these cases together into a meaningful account of the contemporary Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1956 Albert Gore, Sr. received national attention as one of only three senators from the states of the former Confederacy who refused to sign the infamous “Southern Manifesto” opposing the racial integration of public spaces. Lauded as Gore was by many for his decision, as Anthony J. Badger shows in his Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) it was a product of a nuanced approach on the issue of civil rights in a changing time. The son of a farmer, Gore demonstrated his father’s strenuous work ethic in his efforts to earn a college education. After a rapid rise in state politics, Gore won election to the House of Representatives in 1938, where he served for fourteen years before defeating a longtime incumbent senator in a Democratic primary. As Badger demonstrates, while Gore’s “TVA liberalism” led him to play a key role in passing some of the major infrastructure legislation in the 1950s, the issues of civil rights and the Vietnam War ultimately led Gore to adopt positions that alienated his constituents. Though defeated in his bid for reelection in 1970, though in retirement this was tempered by his son Al’s success in winning election, first to Congress and then to the vice presidency, in the 1990s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political parties. He ably integrates the early conservation movement into the discussion, providing foundational understandings of the distinction between the conservationists at the beginning of the 20th century and the growth and evolution of the environmental movement in the second half of the 20th century. Red, Green, and Blue also compares the U.S. engagement with “green” politics and how environmentalism and green social movements have operated in other developed, western democracies. The thrust of this book, which is part of the Element series at Cambridge University Press, is to focus on how, where, and why environmental policy became more acutely partisan. Karol also examines the functioning of party coalitions and interest groups as they wove together around environmental issues. Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is author of Not in My District: The Politics of Military Base Closures (Peter Lang, 2003). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The modern progressive movement is rising in influence, intensity and numbers. Just where did it come from and where is it going? Ryan Grim, D.C bureau chief for The Intercept digs into the movement’s origins in We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement (Strong Arm Press, 2019). He begins with the presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson, which laid the foundation for a cross-racial progressive populism, and prompted changes in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary process that later benefited Barack Obama. Grim also explores the Obama presidency which, while celebrated by many Democrats, has been criticized by some on the left as too wedded to corporations, centrism and insider deal-making. And those criticisms help to propel the 2016 presidential bid of Sen. Bernie Sanders and 2018’s upset House election victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rule-making may rarely make headlines, but the significance of this largely hidden process cannot be underestimated. Rachel Augustine Potter makes the case in Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) that rulemaking is incredibly important, but also political in ways that are misunderstood. Potter is assistant professor at the University of Virginia. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be, but rather is an intensely political activity. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often in conjunction with interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Expansion of federal power has typically come with the consent of states, often eager to receive the funding tied to new policy priorities. Not so any more, as some states have famously rejected funding for Medicaid expansion. Was the case of Medicaid and Obamacare an aberration or part of a larger strategy? Such is the focus of Conservative Innovators: How States Are Challenging Federal Power (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Ben Merriman’s new book explores what he calls uncooperative federalism. He finds a deliberate conservative strategy to use the courts and state executive power to resist federal influence in state affairs. He focuses especially on Kansas and the activity of far-right conservatives in the state who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid. Merriman — a sociologist by training — is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris Galdieri has written an engaging analysis of carpetbagging in American politics. Stranger in a Strange State: The Politics of Carpetbagging from Robert Kennedy to Scott Brown (SUNY Press, 2019), and its focus on individual case studies, highlight understandings of electoral politics in the United States and how individual ambition, party strengths and weaknesses, and electoral dynamics all fit into our thinking about candidates and their campaigns. While the thrust of Stranger in a Strange State is on this topic of carpetbagging—with high profile examples like Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, and somewhat less well known candidates like Alan Keyes and Bill Brock—our understanding of carpetbagging also brings forward considerations of representation, since the critique of the carpetbagger tends to be a disconnection from the citizens to be represented, especially for those running for the United States Senate. Galdieri forefronts this analysis of representation, framing the analysis of these individual cases within our thinking about how elected officials are supposed to represent their constituents. This is a fascinating book, compelling the reader to turn the page to learn more about political parties, politicians, campaigns, ambition, and how much of this might fit within our polarized political landscape. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
No, not the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Perhaps even more important than that Illinois contest of 1858 was the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830. Confused? Drawing a blank? Not really your fault. Would you be even more surprised to hear that these were debates held not out in front of voters, but in the Senate? And that debates in the Senate could change public opinion? Build and break coalitions? Redirect political energy? These days when the United States Senate is referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” it’s to both tell the windup and the punchline of a joke. If anyone regards the Senate as useful for much of anything, it’s to quickly pass legislation originating in the House or swiftly process presidential appointments. The Senate is now simply a hurdle in the legislative race. It was not always so. The curious case of the Senate is that the Senate now means so little. On his now famous journey through the United States, the eternally scribbling Tocqueville noted that the debates of the Senate were worthy of any legislature in the world. Tocqueville’s timing was impeccable. He had arrived in the Senate at the beginning of what is now regarded as the “Golden Age” of the Senate, lasting approximately from 1830 to 1860. One reason often given by political historians for this age of oratory and debate, and Senatorial consequence, was the controversy over slavery that was the focus of this rhetorically elevated contention. But as Christopher Childers demonstrates in his new book The Webster-Hayne Debate: Defining Nationhood in the Early American Republic(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), the “golden age” of the Senate was the result of political breakdown and upheaval, the end of the previous generation of political culture. That breakdown is the focus of our our conversation today–along with the confrontation of Hayne of South Carolina and Webster of Massachusetts, what happened afterwards, and how it was first remembered and then forgotten. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gwendoline M. Alphonso's new book Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the 20th century shaped, not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender, but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state. Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the three periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties provides a detailed analysis of how the ideal family became critical to party politics. By revealing the deep historical interconnections between family and the two parties' ideologies and policy preferences, Alphonso shows that American party development is more than a story of the state and its role in the economy but also, at its core, a debate over the political values of family and the social fabric it embodies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“You think I am crazy, and I know you are not” is what future-White House Chief of Staff and then-House Freedom Caucus leader Congressman Mick Mulvaney said to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The two members of Congress were playing a game of chicken that helps explain the tactics and strategies at the heard of Matthew Green’s new book Legislative Hardball: The House Freedom Caucus and the Power of Threat-Making in Congress (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Green is associate professor of politics at The Catholic University. He previously appeared on the podcast with his book Underdog Politics: The Minority Party in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is also the author of Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives (with Doug Harris) (Yale University Press, 2019). Assertive bargaining occurs from time to time in the US Congress. It became an important feature of legislative negotiations within the House Republican Party when, following the 2014 elections, a group of conservatives called the House Freedom Caucus regularly issued threats against its own party's leadership. Such behavior by an ideologically extreme bloc of lawmakers is not accounted for by existing theories of legislative politics. Green studies the successes and failures of the Freedom Caucus, in Legislative Hardball, as well as the larger topic of contentious leadership battles in the House in Choosing the Leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What do we mean when we say "The First Amendment"? It's obvious: we mean the most robust protection of speech rights, religious liberty, freedom of the press, and freedom of association in the world today. Correct, says Eugene Volokh, absolutely correct. But it could change! Listen to this illuminating conversation with a leading expert on freedom of speech and constitutional law at UCLA. Volokh clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and runs the Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Free speech is hotly debated around the world today -- and will it be saved by the U.S. Supreme Court? Professor Eric Segall is skeptical about putting our faith and our fate in the hands of nine black-robed justices placed for a lifetime on the Court. He questions the outsized role of judges to overturn laws, which should only happen, he says, when there is clear and convincing evidence of an "irreconcilable variance" between the law and my constitutional rights). Is there a better way? Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"I want to help the field of education realize its potential to help realize all Americans' potential." Dr. Liliana Garces was co-counsel in presenting amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Affiliate Faculty at the University of Texas School of Law. Her research is on access, diversity, and equity in higher education, and the use and influence of social science research in law. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ballot initiatives offer voters the chance to directly determine the outcome of state policy change. Do Americans who vote on initiatives grow in political efficacy and participate more in the future? Or is the initiative process ultimately undemocratic in the sense that those who participate grow less interested in participating over time? Ultimately, are there spillover effects of direct democracy? Joshua Dyck and Edward Lascher take on these questions in Initiatives without Engagement: A Realistic Appraisal of Direct Democracy’s Secondary Effects (University of Michigan Press 2019). Dyck is Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; Lascher, Jr is Professor of Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Sacramento. Initiatives without Engagement challenges what democratic reformers have thought about the initiative process since the Progressive Era. The findings suggest that ballot initiatives lead to higher voter turnout but not to higher political interest. There is also a partisan dimension to the findings. Independents are the least mobilized by ballot initiatives, while Republicans and Democrats are more likely to register to vote, possibly explained by the incentives of ideological political entrepreneurs who sponsor initiatives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The endlessly fascinating 1968 presidential race transformed American politics in ways that are still being felt. Aram Goudsouzian explores the characters who shaped that race in The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America (UNC Press, 2019). Goudsouzian argues the campaign marked the end of the “Old Politics” of party machines, and the rise of the “New Politics” in which candidates more robustly engaged voters. And it marked the decline of the Democratic coalition of white Southerners and northern urbanites, setting back progressivism and buoying conservatism. Goudsouzian gives readers in-depth portrayals of the motley collection of politicians who clashed that year, including Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller and George Wallace. As you read about the political and cultural divisions that rocked American in 1968, it won’t be hard to detect parallels in our politics today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Democratic political adviser Peter Daou has long toggled between the world of presidential campaigns and online activism. He worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and he has built a large social media presence with which he wages battles for progressive causes. Now he has channeled his experiences into Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace (Melville House, 2019), in which he analyzes the daily political skirmishing that rages online, urges progressives to engage on the “digital battlefield.” While acknowledging the deepening polarization of American politics, he argues that the polarization is “asymmetric,” with Republicans becoming more “extreme” than Democrats. And he warns against characterizing conservative “red America” as more reflective of the “real America” than the liberal “blue.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Erin M. Kempker is an associate professor of history at Mississippi University for Women and the author of Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism and Conspiracy in the Heartland (University of Illinois, 2018). The author examines how 1970s right-wing women activists in the state of Indiana combined earlier political conspiracy theories, Cold War anti-communism and anti-ERA sentiment to cast feminism as threat to American democracy, free enterprise, and the family. Conservative women’s groups in the mid-West, such as Minute Women and Pro America, rallied against the Equal Right Amendment at a critical moment for feminism. The strategy of the ERA Coordinating Committee, (HERA) a coalition of twelve liberal organizations, was of low-key bi-partisan lobbying of legislators that marginalizing radical feminists. The soft-sale approach of Hoosier feminists threatened to kill the ERA as it faced militant right-wing opposition. Kempker examines the motivations and organizational strategies of right-wing women and the problems feminist encountered in promoting ERA as a matter of simple justice and failing to directly counter the conservative critiques. Big Sister is a study of both conservative strategies that led to the rightward move of the Republican Party in the 1980s and the failings of feminists in delaying the ultimate passage of ERA in Indiana offering lessons for activist today. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019) It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case. The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts. We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision. The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States. It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor have written Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor in the Department of Politics and a senior fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Political Science and director of the Program on Democratic Engagement and Governance of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon. Rivalry and Reform explores the historical relationships between presidents and social movements. Through several cases, including Lincoln and abolitionism, Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Ronald Reagan and the New Christian Right, Milkis and Tichenor show that major political change happens through compromise between movement leaders and presidents negotiated over decades. The book concludes by focusing on Barack Obama’s approach to social movements such as Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and Marriage Equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With at least one new billionaire in the 2020 presidential race, the politics of the one percent are with us again. What do billionaires believe? And do they believe the same things as the average American? Answering these questions has until now been frustrated by the difficulty of fielding surveys of the very rich. Just finding where they live is hard enough. But a new book has solved part of this problem and answers many questions. Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe have written Billionaires and Stealth Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Page is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University; Seawright is professor of political science at the Northwestern University, and Matthew J. Lacombe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and is joining the faculty of Barnard College in the fall. In the book, we learn about the stealthy ways most billionaires participate in politics. They rarely utter a word about their beliefs in public, but do spend huge sums of money influencing politics. Unfortunately, only small amounts of that spending is publicly disclosed. Much of their spending is masked behind the non-transparent organizations that populate American politics. Stealthy politics, like the dark money groups that benefit, is a politics of secrecy and mystery, hardly the democratic politics of openness and transparency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (University of North Press, 2014), Margaret Peacock analyzes the various ways in which images of children were put to use, in Soviet and American Cold War propaganda. From the Boy Scouts to the Pioneers, ubiquitous images of children portrayed the superiority of communism/capitalism. Where children were used to showcase superiority, equally powerful were images of children as needing protection. In the United States, images of the child helped explain the need for nuclear testing and fallout shelters. From a Soviet point of view, children were likewise to be protected: from the evils of capitalist consumerism, from the rapacious nuclear warmongering of the West. Even as children were used to promote the officially sanctioned view of the American/Soviet state, those same images, Dr. Peacock shows, could be used to subvert that view. Post-Stalin Soviet films criticized the status quo using images of the child to do so. Suspect American mothers hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities managed to subvert the aims of that body by hauling their children right along with them. Utilizing archival and published evidence from a wide variety of Russian and American sources, Dr. Peacock has written an engaging history of the uses to which images of children have been put, in service of a conflict that spanned at least half the last century and whose consequences remain with us. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yahoo! News Senior Political Correspondent Jon Ward delves into to the oft-forgotten yet starkly dramatic 1980 Democratic presidential primary between President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy in Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight That Broke the Democratic Party (Twelve, 2019). Ward tracks the political origins of the southern moderate outsider and the northern liberal insider, and paints two complex and nuanced portraits. He explains how Carter had long eyed Kennedy as an obstacle to the presidency and how Kennedy eventually grew to view Carter as an obstacle to his policy agenda. The two deeply ambitious politicians would eventually clash on the biggest political stages and break apart the already weakening north-south coalition that had fueled Democratic Party dominance for decades. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Who’s in, and who’s out? Professor Martha Jones explains the history of birthright citizenship, how Black Americans claimed the rights of citizens long before the courts and Congress granted them such legal rights, and why this prehistory matters to understand today’s debates. Is it outrageous that senior officials question the right of birthright citizenship? You may think so, but you’d also be wrong to think that this right has not been and will remain contested as long as the Republic stands. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan are authors of Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2019). Herd is a Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University; Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. In Administrative Burden, Herd and Moynihan show that the administrative burdens citizens regularly encounter in their interactions with government are not accidental, but the result of deliberate policy choices. With detailed descriptions of federal programs, the authors show that administrative burdens are essential to policy design. Regarding salient issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Traditionally Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign is remembered mainly for being the first time a Catholic was nominated as the candidate for a major political party. As Robert Chiles demonstrates in his book The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal(Cornell University Press, 2018), this focus obscures Smith’s efforts to promote a progressive reform agenda during the election and the role this played in forming the “New Deal coalition” in the 1930s. Chiles traces the emergence of Smith’s progressivism to his association with the women of the settlement house movement in the 1910s, through whom he gained a greater understanding of the problems facing urban workers. As both a state legislator and as governor Smith sought to promote reforms designed to improve the lives of New Yorkers on a range of issues, from workplace safety to environmental conservation. As the nominee Smith promoted a strong progressive agenda, one that appealed to many ethnic working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest. These voters became an important source of electoral support for Smith’s successor as the Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would realize much of Smith’s proposals after winning the White House in 1932. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press, 2018), co-authors John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck explore the underlying question of American identity as a key component within the political landscape that was used during the 2016 primary and general election. Identity Crisis delves into the way that the Republican primary battle was shaped by this question of identity, specifically the ways in which candidate Donald Trump was able to leverage embedded tensions around social identity, especially in regard to issues like immigration. Through the use of substantial data sets that dive into voters’ choices over time, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck are able to parse policy and issue preferences, how those choices coordinate with partisan inclinations and candidate selection, and what shifted during the course of the election cycle in 2015 and 2016. This incredibly compelling book, accessible to academics and non-academics, examines the tensions around American identity and what it means to be an American today, while exploring how that very idea is contested and seen through partisan lenses. The book examines not only an understanding of individual identity, but also the ways that group identity continues to contribute to further partisan cleavage and polarization. The authors also find interesting backlashes within this political dynamic, as responses to antagonistic attacks on certain groups prompts a variety of responses among voters. Identity Crisis will help readers understand what happened in 2016—from a variety of perspectives and considerations of different dimensions of American politics. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
While the campaign to win for women the right to vote in America was waged on a national scale, this often obscures the fact that the most of battles took place at the state level, where local perspectives were key. Sara Egge’s book Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920 (University of Iowa Press, 2018) spotlights this by focusing on three counties in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, charting the development of the campaigns for women’s suffrage there. As Egge explains, though women in the Gilded Age were expected to confine their activities to the private sphere, their involvement in community activities served as the basis for the assertion of their voting rights by signaling their willingness to assume the basic responsibilities of citizenship. By participating in local organizations and temperance campaigning women claimed a space in the public sphere, one upon which their successive efforts to win the suffrage in those states were built. This assertion of citizenship proved vital to the eventual success of the movement once the United States entered the First World War in 1917, as this civic activism served as a demonstration of loyalty proving that women deserved to exercise the right to vote. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying website for educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state. James Morton Turner is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. His first book was the award-winning The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Washington Press, 2012). Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. His previous books includes Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013), Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wing, 2005), and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The expansion of democracy in 19th-century America transformed political campaigning in the country. As Mark R. Cheathem demonstrates in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), nowhere was the change more dramatically seen than in the quadrennial election of a president. Prior to the 1820s, presidential campaigning was a limited affair reflecting the low level of popular engagement with the presidential selection process. This changed with the candidacies of Andrew Jackson, as his managers relied on a diverse range of tools to appeal to an increasingly engaged popular electorate. Through such means as parades, songs, and public correspondence, campaigns increasingly sought to rally their supporters to turn out and vote for the candidates. Though the Democrats pioneered such campaigns in Jackson’s successive bids for the White House, Cheathem shows how it was the Whigs which refined them to best effect in the presidential campaign of 1840, using these new tools to win the election that year for their nominee, William Henry Harrison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Following a historic election, we return again to the question of turnout. Who turned out in large numbers to shift power in the House back to the Democrats? What we know about the past is that there are substantial gaps in turnout between different groups. White Americans have turned out in larger numbers that many other racial and ethnic groups. This much is well-know, but what explains these gaps? Is it political interest, barrier to voting, or something else? Such is the focus of Bernard Fraga’s new book The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Fraga is assistant professor of political science at Indiana University. Fraga finds that the common explanations don’t always hold up when you examine rigorous data and use advanced methods. He argues for a theory of electoral influence based on the relative size of the racial and ethnic population in a voting district. In districts where minority groups make up a relatively small portion of the electorate, turnout tends to be low. In other districts, where the group makes up a larger portion, turnout tends to be much higher. These findings, and others, explain a lot about the 2018 election and future elections and campaigns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It’s been an article of faith among scholars and activists alike that poor Americans are ignored in national politics. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong, and poor people, at least rhetorically, are in fact as commonly referred to by Presidents in their State of the Union addresses and in Party platforms as many other supposedly more favored groups? Kristina C. Miler’s Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018) simultaneously gives the lie to these claims while offering rich new evidence to describe how and why most members of Congress fail to follow through on such rhetoric, even if they represent poor districts, and what we might do to remedy this imbalance.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2016, despite only mixed support from evangelical leaders, Donald Trump won an enormous share of the white evangelical vote. How did Trump manage to overcome the seeming mix-match between his record on social and moral issues and the longstanding views of evangelical voters? The authors and editors of The Evangelical Crackup?: The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition (Temple University Press, 2018) offer a variety of answer. The book is edited by Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison University, and Ryan L. Claassen, a professor of political science at Kent State University. Paul joined the podcast to discuss the evolution of this interesting volume and what it says about the state of research on religion and politics, the Trump victory in 2016, and what the future holds for the relationship between religion, partisanship, and elections. Other contributors to the book include: Contributors include: Daniel Bennett, Mark Brockway, Ryan P. Burge, Brian R. Calfano, Jeremy Castle, Kimberly Conger, Daniel A. Cox, Kevin den Dulk, Sarah Allen Gershon, Tobin Grant, Robert P. Jones, Geoffrey Layman, Andrew R. Lewis, Ronald J. McGauvran, Joshua Mitchell, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Jacob R. Neiheisel, Elizabeth Oldmixon, Adrian D. Pantoja, David Searcy, Anand Edward Sokhey, J. Benjamin Taylor, Robert Wuthnow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With many Americas fearing that democracy itself is in trouble, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explores remedies to reserve the democratic decline in An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics (Custom House, 2018). Sargent first diagnoses the problem, arguing that democracy was in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Millenial generation, those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in US history. They also grew up during the birth of the digital revolution and two cataclysmic events: September 11th and the Great Recession. What they believe has remained largely speculation, until the publication of The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (U Michigan Press, 2018) by Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross. In the book, Rouse and Ross discover the political and policy beliefs of Millenials through extensive survey and focus group research. They discover a generation deeply concerned about social issues, such as LGBTQ rights and drug legalization. On other issues, the findings suggest a moderate view on economic issues and a preference for a middle-ground approach by government on spending and taxation. Rouse is associate professor of government and politics and director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland; Ross is assistant professor in the Department of Marine Sciences and a fellow with the Center for Texas Beaches & Shores at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How did American politics become so polarized? MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki points to clash of two larger-than-life characters in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, as the origin of our viciously tribal politics. In The Red and The Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism (Ecco, 2018), Kornacki traces... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Is it possible for a president’s political appointees to rein in a president with a penchant for abusing power? Yes. Michael Koncewicz, who listened to hundreds of hours of the Nixon tapes, digs deep into the Richard Nixon presidency and shows exactly how Republicans put loyalty to the Constitution over... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There must be no middle ground on speech. In this episode I speak with Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a Distinguished Professor of Law. He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014) and Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Where do these controversies start – a deep dive into American politics from the 1960s till today. Ian Haney López is Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent work engages the question of how racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States are connected. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Is "speech" the major underlying issue in recent Supreme Court decisions? Kate Shaw is Professor of Law at the Cardozo School of Law, a former Special Assistant to the President and Associate Counsel to the President in the White House Counsel’s Office. In this conversation, she speaks to Think About It about constitutional jurisprudence around speech, current developments in constitutional law, and the role of speech in recent SCOTUS rulings. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Interviewing one member of Congress is a feat for most researchers. Interviewing nearly 100 and almost every women member of Congress is remarkable. Even more remarkable is what we can learn from that data collection about the perceptions of women members of Congress, especially about the way they perceive recent partisan polarization and the changing role of gender, race, and ethnicity. Such is the exhaustive project of Kelly Dittmar, Kira Sanbonmatsu, and Susan J. Carroll, who are the authors of A Seat at the Table: Congresswomen’s Perspectives on Why Their Presence Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018). Dittmar is assistant professor of political science, Sanbonmatsu is professor of political science, and Carroll is professor of political science and gender studies, all at Rutgers University. If you want to know how members of Congress think and the ways that they view their work, you would be hard pressed to find a better book. Dittmar, Sanbonmatsu, and Carroll fill so many blanks in the study of the ways that women legislate and how they perceive that work. This book is a must read for scholars of women and politics, American politics, and representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dan Ponder’s new book, Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State (Stanford University Press, 2018), is an important and thoughtful exploration of the concept of presidential leverage, specifically how much capacity the president has to accomplish goals, particularly in terms of asserting power to produce outcomes from Congress. Ponder examines leverage in context, which makes this book very useful in thinking about not only the Executive, but also the Legislature, and the ways in which the branches and political bodies operate in our political system. Presidential Leverage explores not only the president’s role in many of the ways scholars generally assess the president, but also the presidency as part of the state itself. Ponder braids together this understanding of position of the president (and his/her general approval or disapproval by the citizens) and how the strength of that position is tied not just to the office and the person in it, but also to broader conceptualizations of citizen trust in government. Ponder interrogates this dynamic, unpacking and examining the different parts of it, and then integrates these pieces into a quantitative scoring of presidential leverage, giving the reader an understanding of when presidents may have more capacity or political capital and when they may have less influence or ability—but that these capacities, or lack thereof, are not just about the person in the White House, but very much connected to how we, the people, think about our government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doing working class jobs. They are unusual because Congressional candidates are almost always drawn from white collar professions. Why do so few working class candidates run for office? Are workers unfit to govern? Do workers care about politics less? In The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office and What We Can Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2018), Nicholas Carnes says “no”, the conventional wisdom is all wrong. Carnes is the Creed C. Black Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Carnes’ book shows the real barriers to more working-class people running for office are that they lack the time and are rarely asked. Synthesizing a variety of new sources of data, Carnes finds that political parties do not look to workers to run, preferring instead professionals drawn from a small array of fields. Carnes does not stop at diagnosing the problem. He offers practical solutions to increase the number of working-class candidates and likely working-class elected officials in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–explains, at least in part, why it is we have such a weak and limited public welfare state. But what if that very premise is false? What if, to the contrary, a majority of Americans have sympathy for poor people and disdain for the wealthy? And what if those feelings have demonstrable policy effects? Join us as we speak with Spencer Piston about a provocative new book Class Attitudes in American Politics: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a work that unsettles some long-held assumptions about American class attitudes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There’s been a lot written about the Tea Party, but nothing focused on members of Congress like the new book, Reactionary Republicans: How the Tea Party in the House Paved the Way for Trump’s Victory (Oxford University Press, 2018) by Bryan T. Gervais and Irwin L. Morris. Gervais is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio; Morris is professor and chair of the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. In the book, Gervais and Morris disentangle what it meant to be affiliated with the Tea Party in the 112th and 113th congresses. What they suggest is that members of Congress fall into several categories based on self-identification and endorsements by Tea Party interest groups. Using these categories, the authors show the ways that Tea Party members of Congress vote and communicate. They find that Tea Party members resemble other Republican members except when it comes to certain social issues. They also examine social media communications and find that Tea Party members shared messages that were less civil and angrier than other members. These patterns show some of the ways that the Tea Party paved the way for Donald Trump’s campaign and presidential victory in 2016.
This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown.
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Boston’s political culture is most known within the frame of antebellum political struggles over the institution of slavery. What about Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era Black Bostonian politics though? That story is made clear by the Dr. Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood’s newly published book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Centering Edwin Garrison Walker, political leader and son of antebellum era abolitionist and pamphleteer David Walker, Bergeson-Lockwood tells the story of how independent Black Bostonian politics was used as a mechanism to shield Black Bostonians from party loyalty. Party loyalty, especially to the Republican Party, could be used to promote a connection to the “Party of Lincoln,” or to retain Black voters despite not always being on the side of their best interest. Ultimately, Black citizenship and the protection of the Black rights were at the forefront of Black Bostonians’ political project, and Bergeson-Lockwood’s history of Black politics in the late nineteenth century dramatically highlights the successes and shortcomings of this era.
Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. Andy and I had the real pleasure to talk with Michele Margolis about her new book From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Margolis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. The central argument of From Politics to the Pews is that a solid partisan identity forms before a solid religious identity, thus partisanship can inform religious behavior in ways that we may not have fully understood in the past. Margolis argues that many Americans step away from religion in early adulthood, returning later at the point of decisions about marriage and children. This break in religious activity and practice – though not necessarily in faith or belief– happens as partisan identity and behaviors have already set in. She relies on a wide variety of data to show how this happens and the implications for the relationship between partisanship, religion, and political behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency, in Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017 (Little A, 2018). Based almost solely on the words of those who... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigation of an early period during the Roosevelt Administration that provides the reader with a broad and expansive understanding of different aspects of presidential politics, political rhetoric, communication between elected officials and constituents, and the shifting perceptions of the role of the executive in the American political system. This snapshot in time, in this case, 1935, provides a much bigger picture of power, political change, and the sense of the country as a whole. Stuckey integrates aspects of these letters into her analysis as she explores rhetorical authority and differing political vocabularies as seen while the power and structural dynamics in the United States shifted during this period. She also examines how these letters between clergy members and the president provide readers with an understanding of American politics, religious warrants, and political imaginaries. This is an important and complex analysis because it also gets at the heart of what Americans understand about themselves and the political world in which they engage and participate. This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars from political scientists and communication scholars to those in theology and religious studies as well as non-academics who will find Stuckey’s research and analysis fascinating in considering how the United States thinks about itself.
This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One of the paradoxes of US politics today is the widely dispersed benefits, but overall distrust, of government. Citizens enjoy many types of social policy, yet reject the process that provides for much aid to individual health, income, and education. What explains this paradox? In The Government-Citizen Disconnect (Russell Sage Foundation Press 2018), Suzanne Mettler finds several answers. Metter is the Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. Relying on original survey data, Mettler finds that nearly all Americans participate in some form of social policy, though many are largely unaware of it. This unawareness reflects the design of policies within the “submerged state” which hides several public benefits provided through intricacies of the tax code. In part a result, many Americans reject government programs in general as not directly beneficial to them, and support an anti-social policy agenda in Congress. In a period of increasing polarization, this long-standing pattern of American public opinion has been exacerbated and has the potential to undermine social equality and democracy.
This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Urban politics scholars have long studied what makes cities interesting. Rarely, however, have these unique qualities of cities been studied in the national context. How do representatives of cities advocate for urban interests in Washington? Do they work together for cities, as a whole, or individually, for district needs within each city? Thomas Ogorzalek’s new book, The Cities on the Hill: How Urban Institutions Transformed National Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) takes on these questions. Ogorzalek is assistant professor of political science and urban studies at Northwestern University. Studying the “long” New Deal, Ogorzalek finds that on certain issues, especially the provision of public goods and redistribution, city representatives stick together. Members of Congress who represent districts based in cities vote as one, even controlling for other factors, such as partisanship, and diversity of ideology. Supporting this consensus are institutions working to advocate for cities, including local political parties and newly formed interest groups, such as the US Conference of Mayors.
This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard University Press, 2018) describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement. Katherine Benton-Cohen is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University.
Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With the rise of President Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party, once a Democrat and liberal on many social issues, what does it mean to be a conservative today? What is the glue that connects Trump to other figures and ideas central to the conservative movement, both historical and contemporary? Jeffrey Dudas has an answer to this question: paternalism. Dudas has written Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism (Stanford University Press, 2018). He is Associate Professor of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty of American Studies at the University of Connecticut. For Dudas, what links corporate interests, small-government libertarians, social and racial traditionalists, and evangelical Christians together is a paternal rights discourse that centers around the importance of fatherhood and the family. Raised Right focuses on three conservative figures: National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., President Ronald Reagan, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Through extensive analysis of their writing and speeches, Dudas argues that conservatives have focused on paternal discipline as an organizing principle of their worldview since the post-World War II period. Though Trump is not the focus of the book, it is hard to read Raised Right without thinking about the President’s style, rhetoric, and current policy agenda as illustrative of Dudas’ thesis.
This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep divides between the parties have an obvious geographic dimension, but what is the cause? What has allowed people to sort themselves into cities, suburbs, and rural areas of the country? Clayton Nall has an answer to these questions: highways. Nall has written The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermine Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In the book, Nall connects the federal programs to expand highway construction through the country to differences in political attitudes. In short, highways have contributed to sorting and polarization, allowing people to live and work much farther away than in the past. Using a variety of interesting sources of data, Nall also shows how this sorting has had different impacts on attitudes about transportation spending, with Republicans and Democrats holding distinct views on how federal money should support the physical connections between communities.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America (Melville House, 2018) offers a roadmap to reeling progressives, delivers a searing critique of cynical pragmatism and defends identity politics as a galvanizing force for positive social change. Journalist Onnesha Roychoudhuri shares personal stories of how her identity shaped her... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writes Darren Frederick Speece in Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (University of Washington Press, 2017). The book is an exhaustive study of the California timber industry and the environmentalists who used a wide range of tactics, from sit ins and sabotage to courtroom battles, to protect redwood ecosystems. Speece takes a bottom up approach to this history, telling the story from the perspective of the myriad individuals on both sides of the battle who shaped Pacific Coast environmental politics in the mid to late twentieth century. Defending Giants argues that historians of environmentalism have focused too much on birds-eye, national-level politics and have missed the important front line work performed by rural activists, who often put their lives on the line in protection of forests at risk of disappearing forever. Defending Giants is also available as an audio book from University Press Audio Books.
Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Will voters this fall be voting for or against Donald Trump, even though he isn’t on the ballot? Will they be voting on national issues, such as immigration or relations with North Korea, even when the election is for city council or mayor? If all politics is ultimately local, then the answer should be no. Instead, most assume that national issues will dominate vote choice up and down the ballot in 2018. For Daniel Hopkins, this is not a new phenomenon: the United States has been nationalizing for a long time, and political behavior has long reflected it. Hopkins is the author of The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He is associate professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In his new book, Hopkins marshals an incredible amount of data, from reanalysis of existing data to newly collected surveys to original experiments. From this mound of data, he shows how US politics has nationalized and why. The increasingly national news media and party polarization has change the way voters consume political information and what they are consuming. The result is an orientation of parties to national issues and political behavior that reflects this shift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Several years on from the death of Antonin Scalia, what is his legacy? What did he leave the Supreme Court and jurisprudence? In The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption (Yale University Press, 2018), Rick Hasen takes up the large task of answering parts of this question. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Scalia was funny and rude and innovative. Scalia was disrupter on the court, as the book’s subtitle suggestions. Much of Hasen’s book wrestles with Scalia’s favored ways of interpreting the law, textualism and originalism. Hasen shows the impact of the turn to these approaches, both in specific court rulings, but also in the wider impact on other jurists. Hasen argues that Scalia’s legacy will be protected by the large numbers of lawyers and newly appointed judges who adopted his approaches, including the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division (Oxford University Press, 2016), Michael A. Cohen shows how the 1968 American presidential election proved to be an “inflection point” of history that shattered the long-standing “liberal consensus,” and unleashed a conservative populism that continues to reverberate today. Cohen delivers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronicles the movement and its impact on the political and legal struggle for civil rights for African Americans. As Schmidt explains, prior to the sit-ins the main civil rights organizations were fighting segregation primarily through the courts. The incremental pace of change frustrated younger activists, with four students at North Carolina A&T ultimately deciding to fight segregation through direct protest. Yet the lunch counter protests they inspired were viewed with considerable ambivalence by the civil rights leadership, who were doubtful that the counters could be compelled to accept black patrons under existing law. Their uncertainly was reflected on the Supreme Court, where the justices’ division on the legality of segregation in privately-run facilities ultimately left the matter to be resolved by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stories about the suburbs often focus on conservatism. But, as Lily Geismer shows in her fascinating book, called Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalism and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2014) suburbs can also be liberal spaces. The high-tech corridor of the Route 128 highway that circles Boston is one such example. The book tracks how new economic conditions—namely the rise of a knowledge-based economy and white-collar work—changed the ideological content and organizing strategies of liberalism. And, as suburbanites replaced urban working-class voters as the most significant constituency for the Democratic Party, suburbanites transformed the Democratic Party itself. Their support for environmental causes, reproductive rights, the high-tech economy, and market-based solutions became central to the Democratic Party in the 1980s and 1990s, embodied most clearly in men like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. Geismer’s book will be of interest to political historians, urban and suburban historians, and historians of science and technology.
Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Democrats need to stop their “monomania” over Donald Trump and reconnect with their party’s core ideals to reclaim political power, argues Thomas B. Reston in his book Soul of a Democrat: The Seven Core Ideals That Made Our Party and Our Country Great (All Points Books, 2018). He explores those ideals... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic Books, 2017) is a biography of the riveting life of Lucy Parsons. As an activist, writer and speaker, Parsons embodied the most radical expression of the battle for labor rights in American history, yet her life remains a mystery. Born an enslaved woman in 1851 of mixed lineage, the circumstances of her birth and early life are unknown. Exceedingly beautiful and articulate, she met and married Albert Parsons, a confederate army veteran, in Waco, Texas in 1872. Their politics shifted from loyal Republicans to socialism and finally to anarchism advocating for white labor in Chicago. As a dynamic and radical duo engaged in extensive writing, charismatic speaking and alliances across multiple labor organizations, they became symbols of unrelenting agitation against industrial capitalism. Their call for armed resistance and involvement with the Haymarket bombing and trial, led to the execution of Albert leaving Lucy Parsons to carry their mutual legacy alone. Jones has brought to life an enigmatic figure whose compelling presence left a mark on the history of the radical movement for labor rights.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in August, 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steven Kull is a Senior Research Associate and director of the Program for Public Consultation at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also the Founder and Director of the nonpartisan organization Voice of the People, which is working to create structures and institutions that would enrich the channels of communication between Congress and citizens. Steven is a political psychologist who studies a range of phenomena from public political ignorance and popular attitudes about climate change to congressional decision-making and international attitudes towards religion. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris counsels Democrats to disregard procedural precedents and niceties, and pugnaciously wield power in his book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics (Melville House, 2018). As Faris explains in this interview, he doesn’t mean Democrats should... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Several weeks ago, we had Professor Lilliana Mason on the podcast talking about her book about the process of social sorting that has deepened divides between citizens by aligning race, religion, and region. Mason argues that social sorting acts on a psychological-level, shaping how not just how people view policy but also political opponents. This week on the podcast, Matt Blackwell and Maya Sen extend this conversation back into history. In Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton University Press, 2018), the authors (with Avidit Acharya) argue that views on race have deeply historical roots, passed on across generations through cultural practices and other institutional mechanisms. They call this behavioral path dependence. Using sophisticated statistical analysis, they find that the long, disturbing legacy of slavery can be observed in the variation of attitudes of those living in different southern communities. In counties where slavery thrived in the 1860s (compared to similar counties in the south where slavery was less prevalent), white citizens hold significantly more hostile views of African Americans and express less support for race-related public policies. Interestingly, when they compare residents in those same two types of southern counties, their non-race views on other conservative issues, such as abortion, are essentially the same. Thus, the legacy of slavery is not in general conservative beliefs, but in specific and negative views on race. Avidit Acharya is assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Matthew Blackwell is assistant professor of government at Harvard University. Maya Sen is associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. In The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America. The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China. By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, Lew-Williams recasts the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today’s immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the “heathen Chinaman.”
Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press), out in paperback May 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present. In Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hart... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Donald Trump famously said “We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning.” Tell that to the losers of politics; those who have lost major elections or key political debates. We rarely focus on those who have lost, but Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow suggest we can learn a lot from the losers. In Legacies of Losing in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018), they demonstrate that in three key points in American political history, the losing side won a lot more than we typically acknowledge or understand. Focusing on the founding period, the Civil War era, and the time after the passage of the New Deal, they show how the direction of the country was greatly shaped by defeat. Tulis teaches American politics and political theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Mellow is professor of political science at Williams College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
During the 2016, journalist Salena Zito, who is based in Western Pennsylvania, sensed a brewing conservative populist in the white working-class when many thought the election would be determined by other demographic groups. Her dispatches from the back roads proved prescient when Donald Trump won the presidency. She teamed up... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Research has demonstrated that women legislators face tougher re-election campaigns, often confronting stiff general election and primary competition. They typically received less favorable media coverage and get less support from their parties. How do they respond to this very different electoral context? In Gendered Vulnerability: How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt say that they work harder. Lazarus is associate professor of political science at Georgia State University; Steigerwalt is professor of political science at Georgia State University. Lazarus and Steigerwalt show that in a number of areas, women members of Congress simply do more. They introduce more bills and bring more money back to their districts. They spend more time on constituent services than men and are more responsive to their constituents’ policy preferences. The authors attribute this in part to the disproportionate level of vulnerability that women legislators feel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
CNN commentator Amanda Carpenter was an early conservative critic of Donald Trump when she was targeted in a smear campaign falsely accusing her of an extramarital affair with Trump’s 2016 Republican primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz. In her words, she was “gaslit,” driven crazy by bald-faced lies. In Gaslighting America:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Those looking for deeper understanding of why the socially conservative, evangelical Christian community has been so loyal of Donald Trump will find answers in the book God and Donald Trump (Frontline, 2017). Author Stephen Strang provides an insider’s perspective on how evangelical leaders who initially backed Sen. Ted Cruz for Senate... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today we are joined by Jesse Berrett, author of Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Berrett is a high school history teacher at University High School in San Francisco. He earned a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley, and has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeanine Kraybill, assistant professor of political science at Cal State University, Bakersfield, has edited a timely book on the 2016 election. From all accounts, the 2016 election was unusual, and the role of political communication was no different. Using a variety of methods, the chapter authors examine how rhetoric and political communication shaped the tone of campaigns and ultimate outcomes of the election. They study how candidates primed voters for an anti-establishment candidate. They also examine how political communication influenced key campaign issues such as climate change, immigration, national security, religion, and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and whether it will continue to provide the voting rights protections it has in the past. In Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act (Stanford University Press, 2017), Jesse Rhodes, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, places the VRA into a political context. He aims to figure out the political puzzle of the VRA: Why, for fifty years, have both Democrats and Republicans in Congress consistently voted to expand the protections offered by the VRA, yet the act remains vulnerable? Why have Republicans consistently adopted administrative and judicial decisions that undermine legislation they repeatedly back? Rhodes argues that conservatives have pursued a paradoxical strategy which takes advantage of high and low salience. The conservative strategy, according to Rhodes, is to accept expansive voting rights protections in highly visible votes in Congress while simultaneously narrowing the scope of federal enforcement in low visibility administrative and judicial maneuvers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Political commentator Matt K. Lewis warns his fellow conservatives that their movement is going off the rails in Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump (Hachette, 2016). Lewis chafes at the populist, protectionist and nativist elements that have come... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Since it was published in 2016, Arlie Russell Hochschild‘s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016) has been many times heralded as necessary reading for our current political moment. For her perceptive and dramatic account of a Berkeley sociologist’s exploration of Tea Party enthusiasm in coastal Louisiana, Dr. Hochschild received honors and awards from many directions, including a spot as a finalist for the national book award. Now released in paperback in January 2018, Dr. Hochschild’s book includes a new afterword, and continues to stand as both a moving narrative portrait of a political community and a strong example of scholarly work at the crossroads of academic research and public discourse. Using environmental policy as her keyhole issue, Dr. Hochschild articulates the logic that structures a “great paradox”: states which receive the highest levels of financial support from the federal government are also home to the deepest wells of resentment against government intervention in private life. Dr. Hochschild’s work discloses an emotional “deep story” that shapes the political imagination of her Tea Party interlocutors, the feeling that deserving Americans are pushed to the back of the line for the American Dream. Tracing the open rhetoric and the social silences that reveal the shape of a community’s political imagination, Dr. Hochschild’s research speaks to the roles of race and religion in forming the foundation of American politics. Her interviewees were mostly white, and mostly Christian. In exploring the ways in which the Tea Party deep story manifests a resentment against government work to curb irresponsible private power and provide public support for disadvantaged Americans, Strangers in Their Own Land chronicles Dr. Hochschild’s attempts to climb the “empathy walls” that surround and isolate communities sharply defined by ideological allegiance and disavowed histories of misused power. Along the way, Strangers in Their Own Land recounts the intellectual, political, and economic history that lies behind the great paradox of our current political crisis, and profiles figures who may offer us a way out of the bind. For this interview, I asked Dr. Hochschild to speak to the process of writing a book for multiple audiences in a partisan climate. When researching and writing this book in the years leading up to the 2016 election, who did she imagine as her readers and what did she hope they would take away from her project? Our conversation covers the place of this book in the trajectory of her career, the difficulty of turning off the ethical “alarm system” while conducting interviews, structuring an academic book to capture the drama of a research question, and the principles that Dr. Hochschild believes activists can use to build momentum in the coming months.
Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progressive agenda to limit political corruption and democratize party politics. One hundred years later, party organizations remain powerful arbiters of candidate selection. Candidates who aren’t backed by the party rarely fare well. In his new book, The Party’s Primary: Control of Congressional Nominations (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hans Hassell shows the way that parties use their resources to influence primary elections. Through money, staffing, and information, parties retain control over who runs, both in the House and Senate and for Republicans and Democrats. He uses extensive interviews with party leaders and analysis of over 3,000 nomination contests for the House and senate. Hassell is assistant professor of American politics at Cornell College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts of American liberalism, presidential politics, our understandings of governors in the United States, and the geographic and political shifts that transpired during the latter half of the twentieth century. While Saladin Ambar‘s book focuses specifically on Cuomo’s life, his engagement with Democratic politics, his speeches, it is much broader in scope and in importance as an analysis of the changing dynamics in American politics as the sun set on the New Deal and, in its place, we observed the rise of the Reagan Revolution and the Conservative movement. Ambar examines Cuomo not just as a politician and elected official, but also as theorist about the role of government in the lives of modern Americans. This is why he is dubbed the American version of the Cicero. Ambar’s book would be of interest to those who study American political development and American history, American Political Thought, and, in particular, the connection between political parties, electoral politics, governors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact, especially within polarized political periods. Reflecting the way this book examines both of these branches of government and the exercise of their respective powers, Investigating the President garnered two impressive book awards, from the Presidents and Executive Politics Section (Richard E. Neustadt Book Award) and from the Legislative Studies Section (Richard F. Fenno Book Award) of the American Political Science Association. Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler explore the precedent for congressional investigations into the conduct of and within the Executive branch, while they also amassed over 100 years of data surrounding congressional investigations to discern the impact of these kinds of investigations, even when they do not result, necessarily, in articles of impeachment or indictments of presidential appointees. Investigating the President notes the patterns of impact, from curbing presidential military engagement abroad to shifting the media focus and grabbing the narrative away from the president. The fascinating conclusion points to this under-researched area of congressional power and oversight that may have a more significant impact on presidential conduct and power than has generally been anticipated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in the 1920s, she takes us through the twentieth century to the most recent battles over same-sex marriage dividing American Christians both politically and religiously. Moral Combat features pivotal figures including, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, the fundamentalist radio preacher Billy James Hargis and the first gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. She demonstrates how pro and con positions were not always clearly defined and adherents could change sides in a matter of a decade, finding surprising allies. In the new millennium two distinct religious visions for society and human sexuality had taken root unraveling any hope of consensus. Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis where she directs the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. This episode of New Books in Gender Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.
Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Do we live in a country of red and blue states or something more purple-ish? The red state/blue state meme of 2000 has really never gone away, and scholarly debate, as well as frequent media attention, has argued for its merits and demerits. Are we a sharply divided and polarized nation or simply one divided by electoral rules that exacerbate relatively small partisan differences? In David A. Hopkins‘ Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), he sets out to reconcile many aspects of this debate. He argues for the importance of geography in the context of constitutionally-established electoral procedures, especially the Electoral College. He shows the ways that changes in party coalitions and the rising importance of ideology and issues for the two parties, relate to the electoral map. Hopkins is associate professor of Political Science at Boston College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In our hyper polarized world, it is easy to assume that this is a natural state of being, the result of natural shifts in politics. In Sam Rosenfeld‘s new book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), he argues otherwise. Rosenfeld takes us back to the 1940s when another crisis of polarization dominated the headlines. Instead of too much, scholars worried about too little. No less than E. E. Schattschneider championed a debate on whether a move to more clearly identifiable parties would improve democracy through so-called “responsible parties.” Over time, informed by the ideas of political scientists, the two parties did in fact shift, taking on much clearer ideological agendas and issue positions. Unlike the 1940s, it is much clearer to voters what it means to vote for one party or the other. Rosenfeld tracks the people—the Architects in his subtitle—who initiated changes in party rules and institutions that facilitated the development of the parties. The book is rich in historical details and meaning for our current political moment. Rosenfeld is an assistant professor of political science at Colgate University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressional action hostile to immigrants. These protesters participated in one of the largest movements to defend immigrant and civil rights in US history. In Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Chris Zepeda-Millan surveys the strategies and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, focusing on the unique local, national, and demographic dynamics, as well as the role of the ethnic media. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important addition to contemporary debates regarding immigration policy, social movements, and immigrant rights activism in the US and elsewhere. Zepeda-Millan is assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considerations of liberty and justice within an analysis of American political thought and history, especially in the period following the Civil War. Laski’s complex and sophisticated text will have great appeal to political theorists and political philosophers as well as scholars of American political development and American letters and literature. Laski explores the idea of temporality in context of American democracy, and democracy generally, and the concept of progress as we often consider it in relation to post-slavery America. Untimely Democracy highlights an often-under-explored area of American politics, in the post-bellum writers and their discourse that examines a period of stasis as Reconstruction comes to an end and African-American liberty does not, in fact, expand. Laski approaches these theoretical considerations through post-Civil war writers like Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Callie House, W.E.B Dubois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and others. The thrust of this exploration is to reposition, in a sense, the concept of racial progress and the quest for liberty—providing a counter-discourse to the expected linear arc generally associated with racial progress. Laski’s examination is multilayered and examines these written and rhetorical works, especially within an analysis that explores our understanding of time, memory, recollection, and progress as an only-forward moving trajectory. This book takes the reader on a journey through concepts of temporal distinctions or horizons within a democratic quest, examining what Laski titles “untimely democracy”—neither clear progress, nor a forgetting of the past, but a consideration of democracy and the concept of expanded liberty from within a context that is bracketed in time and that explores this tension within time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), co-edited by Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Wilcox is professor of government at Georgetown University. For decades, Rozell and Wilcox have connected the study of religion and politics to elections. The latest iteration of this series, God at the Grassroots 2016, again brings together a distinguished group of political scientists to examine the 2016 elections. The chapter authors focus on changes in the religious right movement since the 1980s. They begin with the national context, then turn to state-specific chapters. They conclude with lessons learned from the studies of the religious right in the elections from 1994 through 2016 and address directions for continued research on the subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae, the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Gillespie McRae is an associate professor of history and director of the graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University. Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the local workers who promoted the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. In rural communities and cities, white women performed various duties that upheld segregation and racism: rejecting marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of neighbors, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. And the work of white women was not restricted to the South. McRae also shows how this politics of Massive Resistance to de-segregation and civil rights plays out in cities in the North. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is it about Black Republicans that makes them fodder for comedy? How do Black Republicans view their participation in their political group? Corey D. Fields answers these questions and more in his new book, Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans (University of California Press, 2016). Using interviews and ethnographic data, Fields investigates how identity, race, and politics work together and influence each other. He finds two different lenses through which respondents see their Republican values: color-blind or race-conscious. Those who have a color-blind approach to their politics try not to emphasize race at all. In contrast, the race-conscious approach brings race to the forefront of any political argument. This book presents a fascinating case study. In addition to his interviews, Fields also presents historical background on the participation of African Americans in the Republican party across time and current day Black Republican organizations. Fields encourages the reader to move past seeing Black Republicans as a monolith, and instead appreciate the ways in which they are a heterogeneous group. Fields also encourages the reader to understand the ways in which politics may influence racial identity and vice versa. This book will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, and race scholars. Given the concepts used and the ideas raised in the book, it would be especially useful in a sociology of race class or political sociology course.
Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ period of the US death penalty, resulting in the execution of over 1,400 inmates, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Each chapter of Frank Baumgartner‘s, Marty Davidson’s, Kaneesha Johnson’s, Arvind Krishnamurthy’s, and Colin Wilson’s Deadly Justice : A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2017) addresses a specific factual question and provides statistical evidence about how the modern death penalty has functioned. Baumgartner is Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina. Davidson, Johnson, Krishnamurthy, and Wilson were all students at North Carolina during the research for the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Catapulted into the Oval Office by an unusual set of circumstances, Gerald Ford remains a unique figure in American presidential history. In Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford (University Press of Kansas, 2017), Scott Kaufman recounts the life and career of this often misunderstood leader. He sees the roots of Ford’s political ideology in his Michigan youth, where his stepfather and namesake stressed the importance of hard work and individual achievement. After working as a lawyer and serving in the navy during World War II Ford won election to Congress, where he set his sights on becoming Speaker of the House of Representatives. Frustrated in his aspirations, Ford was in the seeming twilight of his career when he was nominated to replace Spiro Agnew as vice president after Agnew’s resignation in 1973. Within eight months Richard Nixon’s resignation brought Ford to the presidency itself, where he grappled with the consequences of numerous shifts taking place both nationally and throughout the world. Though Ford aspired to election in his own right, his decision to pardon Nixon defined him to an increasingly cynical populace in ways that ultimately proved too difficult to overcome, contributing to his defeat in the 1976 presidential election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (University of Missouri Press, 2017) , Forrest Nabors sets out to show that congressional Republicans regarded the work of Reconstruction in the same way they regarded the work of the Founders: as regime change, from monarchy in the one case and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. Nabors examines the writings and speeches of Republicans in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, and Fortieth Congress (1863-1869), recovering their political analysis of the antebellum South. While Reconstruction scholars have typically emphasized black citizenship as the central concern of congressional Republicans, Nabors demonstrates that they identified Southern oligarchy (tightly linked to slavery) as the problem of the age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew R. Lewis is the author of the new book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lewis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and is the book review editor at the journal of Politics & Religion. Following up on recent podcasts with Daniel Bennett and Christopher Baylor, The Rights Turn demonstrates a transformation of American politics with the waning of Christian America. As opposed to conservatives focusing on morality and liberals on rights, both sides now emphasize rights-based arguments to win policy battles and build support. Based on historical and quantitative data, Lewis analyzes evangelical advocacy and public opinion related to abortion, free speech, and the death penalty. He shows how rights claims have been used to protect evangelicals, whose cultural positions are increasingly in the minority.
Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher Baylor is the author of First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Transformations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Baylor is an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Based on substantial archival research, Baylor’s book positions interest groups at the center of what makes parties change. Using the case of civil rights organizations and the Democratic Party in the 1940s and cultural conservative organizations and the Republican Party in the 1980s and 90s, First to the Party shows how groups gain influence within existing political parties and foment transformation. He argues that parties respond less to public opinion and voters than to powerful groups, especially during the nomination process. Baylor deepens what we know about political parties, interest groups, and their interactions.
Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week on the podcast, Daniel Bennet joins us to talk about his new book, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (University Press of Kansas, 2017). Bennett is assistant professor of political science at John Brown University. From Hobby Lobby to Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court has ruled on controversial social policy issues. At the center of many of these cases are a set of legal organizations, what Bennett calls Christian Conservative Legal Organizations or CCLOs, including the American Center for Law and Justice and Alliance Defending Freedom. In his book, he explains how CCLOs advocate for issues central to Christian conservatives, highlights the influence of religious liberty on the CLM’s broader agenda, and reveals how the Christian Right has become accustomed to the courts as a field of battle in today’s culture wars. Bennett studies these groups as a type of interest group and legal advocacy the primary strategy to fulfill their interests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas are the authors of Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests (University Press of Kansas, 2017). LaPira is associate professor of political science at James Madison University; Thomas is assistant professor of political science at University of Texas, Arlington. What is the consequence of the rapid spin of the revolving door in Washington? Once a rarity, today nearly half of members of Congress join a lobbying firm after their time on the Hill ends. In Revolving Door Lobbying, the authors show that they are not alone. Former aides join the ranks of lobbyists and generate massive amounts of revenue for lobbying and law firms. These patterns have changed the political economy of Washington politics. LaPira and Thomas mine a decade of new Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) data to show the way the rise of revolving door lobbying has made representation less equal and enhanced private influence.
The host of this week’s podcast is Heath Brown, associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The New Americans? Immigration, Protest, and The Politics of Latino Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2017) by Heather Silber Mohamed weaves together a number of different strands within the discipline of Political Science in context of the diverse Latino community in the United States. Silber Mohamed integrates analysis of social identity and citizenship, social movements and protest politics, immigration policy, and the multiplicity of communities within the Latino-American population in the U.S. The research for The New Americans? is broad and complex, but the centerpiece of the book are the protests and demonstrations in 2006 in regard to the immigration reform bill that the George W. Bush Administration advocated, and that was debated in the House and the Senate. This piece of legislation and the national conversation that it engendered is the unique case study that Silber Mohamed delves into to expose and analyze the relationship between social movements and understandings of identity and identity-framing, especially within the contemporary Latino-American communities. Silber Mohamed integrated the results from the Latino National Survey in her analysis of political attitudes and shifts of attitudes during this public debate. She traces the history and experiences of distinct groups within the broad umbrella of the American Latino community, explaining the different approaches each group has towards immigration policy and their understanding of citizenship and political advocacy. Given the more recent high profile and polarizing discussion of immigration in the United States, Silber Mohamed’s book is important contribution to this complex policy arena and our understanding of the many dimensions and political actors within the immigration debate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Before Transgender actors entered popular culture, and before the “T” was included in LGBT, Transgender activism was a small and marginalized movement. However, though courage and perseverance, Transgender rights began to enter the public consciousness. Drawing on her own life story, Riki Wilchin’s newest book TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Congress…and Won! (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017) traces the origins of the Transgender movement. From the backwoods of rural Michigan to the nation’s capital, the movement challenged not only conservative politicians and worldviews but also challenged the boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality within more progressive movements. How do Trans issues and concerns intersect with notions of masculinity and femininity? What was the relationship between the Trans movement and the Gay movement? How do movements transcend the local and become national? Wilchins offers answers to these (and many more) questions within the pages of TRANS/gressive. In addition to TRANS/gressive, Wilchins is also author to three other books on topics of gender and sexuality: Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion & the End of Gender, Queer Theory/Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, and Voice from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Wilchins’ works has been featured in many periodicals, and Riki has held many trainings on gender norms and nonconformity for audiences that include the White House, Centers for Disease Control, and the office on Women’s Health. Continuing her activism as well as her authorship, Wilchins expects another forthcoming book in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nathan Kalmoe and Donald Kinder are the authors of Neither Liberal or Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Kalmoe is an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and Kinder is the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. Neither Liberal or Conservative looks straightly at what we have known in the past about ideology and the formation of ideology. Kalmoe and Kinder take up the seminal research of Phillip Converse on “ideological innocence.” What they find largely supports this historic finding that Americans are not that ideological. Several decades later, most of the country remains innocent of ideology. With the exception of some highly engaged and informed individuals, partisanship remains the central organizing feature of political life and identification for most Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how Americans in the early Republic viewed the sources of their rights, we need look no further than the mud at the bottom of Baltimore harbor. In the early nineteenth century, two men, John Barron, Jr. and John Craig, decided to buy a Baltimore wharf on credit. They were hoping to capitalize on rapidly-expanding commercial growth in city in the wake of the War of 1812. Instead, the city diverted water into the harbor, leaving Barron and Craig’s wharf silted up and the pair with a pile of debt. The men sued, and eventually their case was argued before the Supreme Court. The decision in Barron v. Baltimore, as William Davenport Mercer shows, marked a key development in the history of American constitutionalism. In arguing that the Bill of Rights (and thus, the Fifth Amendment) applied only at the Federal level, the court rejected a multi-sourced view of liberties. The contentious politics of the era, Dr. Mercer argues, precipitated our modern turn toward locating the sources of rights exclusively in documents. Dr. Mercer teaches history and law at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week on the podcast we have a true political science legend. David R. Mayhew is the author of such political science greats as Congress: The Electoral Connection, Divided We Govern, and Partisan Balance. He is the Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale University. In his recent book, Mayhew examines the job America’s most routinely disparaged branch of government has actually done? The Imprint of Congress (Yale University Press, 2017) gives a deep historical analysis of the U.S. Congress’s performance since the late eighteenth century. He tracks major policy challenges addressed by Congress. In the end, Mayhew argues that Congress has actually accomplished a lot and, in doing so, balanced the presidency in a surprising variety of ways. In the podcast, Mayhew also discusses our current debate on polarization and the early Trump administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Josh Chafetz‘s new book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers (Yale University Press, 2017), examines Congress as a branch and the powers of the legislature within the constitutional system. This book approaches the Legislative branch historically, constitutionally, politically, and structurally through the separation of powers. Chafetz situates Congress as one of three political branches of government, each deriving power from the public, the constitution, formal responsibilities (like the Senate’s role in confirmation, or Congress’s power of the purse), and also informal capacities. In analyzing Congress, Chafetz makes use of the schematic framework of hard and soft power, often used by scholars to analyze international relations, contextualizing the kinds of powers that Congress has and how those powers have been used over the history of the branch and continue to be used. Chafetz explains his thesis in regard to the separation of powers theories as a “multiplicity based” understanding of the claims made to authority not only by Congress, but also by the Executive and Judicial branches, noting that there are multiple and overlapping claims to authority. The book will be of interest to a range of scholars and readers, since Chafetz integrates American political development, constitutional history, contemporary American politics, and the complexity of the development of British legislative authority that preceded and contributed to the American constitutional system. This is an accessible, complex, and fascinating book about American politics, the constitutional system, and, especially legislative authority within the system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the history of the state’s constitutions since it was first incorporated into the United States in the 1840s. Yet, she concentrates on the reform efforts begun during World War II and culminating in a new constitution in 1968. Adkins reviews the political interests that pushed for a new constitution, from the League of Women Voters to the new residents in the emergent southern coasts of Florida in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the process of reforming a constitution that was rooted in the traditional rotten borough politics of 19th-century Florida. She analyzes the impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that forced states to reapportion their legislatures, contending that Florida’s districts were so malapportioned that without the Court’s decisions there might not have been any constitutional revision. Adkins also discusses today’s constitutional revision process, which is ongoing every 20 years and is occurring in 2017. Florida’s political context has always been an amalgam of traditional Southern politics and the emergent commercial and tourism-based economy of a coastal state. Adkin’s book illuminates how these conditions produced political conflict and constitutional change.
Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From the moment he entered politics as the manager of John F. Kennedy’s 1952 Senate campaign, Robert Kennedy’s political career was subsumed into that of his older brother. With President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 his grief-stricken younger brother suddenly found himself unmoored politically. In The Revolution of Robert Kennedy: From Power to Protest after JFK (Bloomsbury Press, 2017), John Bohrer describes how Robert Kennedy came into his own in the years that followed. Now bearing the weight of a nation’s expectations, Robert faced both the pressure to uphold his brother’s legacy and the hostility of the new president. With Lyndon Johnson forestalling any effort to make Robert his running mate in 1964, Kennedy focused his aspirations instead on the United States Senate, winning a seat in New York against a popular incumbent. As Bohrer demonstrates, once in the Senate Kennedy quickly emerged as a political leader in his own right, as he used his outsized prominence to address the issues that mattered most to him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One of the rising stars in American politics during the 1930s was Paul Vories McNutt. As governor of Indiana, McNutt refashioned the state government to address its citizens needs during the Great Depression, and was seen by many of his contemporaries as a future president of the United States. Yet McNutt never attained this goal, and his political career ended barely a decade and a half after it began. In Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Indiana University Press, 2015), Dean Kotlowski recounts McNutt’s life and career, explaining both his many achievements and how his ultimate ambitions were frustrated. The son of a small-town Indiana lawyer, as a young man McNutt distinguished himself academically and socially, and after serving in the army during World War I he assumed leadership positions at both Indiana University and in the American Legion. As a Democrat, he won the governorship in the 1932 election, and over the course of his term he won plaudits for his effectiveness in the office. Yet afterward his ascent stalled, as his potential rivals steered him towards service as high commissioner in the Philippines in order to sideline him. McNutt returned in time to pursue the Democratic Party’s 1940 presidential nomination, but Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to run for a third term ended both McNutt’s hopes for it and what proved his best chance to become president. Though McNutt continued to serve in key offices throughout World War II, these lower-profile posts led to his eclipse politically and his abandonment of politics soon after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John William McCormack served as Speaker of the House of Representatives throughout most of the 1960s, during which time he shepherded the legislation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program through the chamber. As Garrison Nelson demonstrates in John William McCormack: A Political Biography (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), this was the culmination of a long political career that stretched back over a half-century to the impoverished South Boston neighborhood where McCormack was raised. There, in an environment where ethnic and class identities defined ones political prospects, McCormack covered up his father’s Scots Canadian heritage to establish his Irish Catholic bona fides. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1928, he was well positioned to benefit from the dramatic transformation in the fortunes of the Democratic Party during the Great Depression, becoming the House Majority Leader. As Nelson demonstrates, it was McCormack’s personal relationships which shaped his career, most notably those with Sam Rayburn, the legendary Speaker alongside whom McCormack would serve in the House leadership for over two decades, and John F. Kennedy, the scion of two Boston political families and a man who often found himself at odds with the longtime Congressman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the gendered dynamics of America’s political climate. As part of the Presidential Gender Watch 2016 Syllabus, Professor Dolan’s two-wave survey methodology delves into the gendered psyche of elections by analysing the public attitudes and voter choice of over 3000 individuals. Finding that gender stereotypes in voter consciousness are present but not determinative, Dolan rewrites the conventional wisdom that stereotyped attitudes are detrimental to a woman’s electability. However, in forcing the reader to acknowledge the nexus between voter and candidate, Dolan’s data analysis extends to campaign strategy. Based on the 2010 races for Congress and Governor, When Does Gender Matter? builds on the work of other political scientists that have found evidence of candidate emergence being gendered (Lawless and Fox 2010), and analyses every televised campaign ad of the candidates for whom the 3000 survey participants voted. In the gendered terrain between attitude and action, for both voter and candidate, Dolan’s scholarship provides a roadmap for its multi-disciplinary readership into the gendered psyche of American elections.
Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonc’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Find her on twitter @TaylorFoxSmith3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With public debate about immigration law and policy at a peak, Anna Law is on the podcast this week to discuss her book The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which came out in paperback in 2014. Law is the Associate Professor and Herb Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights Political Science at Brooklyn College, CUNY. In the book, Law assesses the role of the federal courts in immigration going back to the late 18th century. She follows the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and the US Courts of Appeals through the early 2000s as new waves of immigrants arrive in the country. What she discovers is that by the turn of the 20th century, a division of labor developed between the two courts as the Courts of Appeals retained its original function as error-correction courts, and the Supreme Court was reserved for the most important policy and political questions. We ended our conversation about the book by reflecting on how the courts may treat the Trump administration executive order on immigration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Pinderhughes is University of Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow as well as Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Africana Studies, and chair of the department of Africana Studies. Based on comprehensive data from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership (GMCL) National Database and Survey, Contested Transformations provides a baseline portrait of Black, Latino, Asian American, and American Indian elected officials at national, state, and local levels of government. The book presents a complex picture of office holders across race and gender groups and the various backgrounds, paths to public office, leadership roles, and policy positions. The authors argue that the advances in political leadership by people of color are transforming American politics, but these gains have been hard fought and struggles for equality continue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the forty years between 1881 and 1921, the United States Navy went from a small force focused on coastal defense to one of the world’s largest fleets. In Congress Buys a Navy: Politics, Economics, and the Rise of American Naval Power, 1881-1921 (Naval Institute Press, 2016), Paul Pedisich describes the role that the legislative branch played in making this happen. At the start of the period, the Navy possessed a more decentralized organization than today, with the bureau chiefs who ran it more responsive to Congress than the executive branch. The legislators who played critical roles in shaping policy during this period were often driven more by local concerns than any overarching vision of what the Navy should become. Starting in the 1880s, however, successive presidential administrations gradually persuaded Congress to provide more funding to build modern ships. Over time, America’s growing engagement in global affairs led to the expansion of the navy, as the acquisition of an overseas empire brought the United States into competition with European powers, which required a naval force that could defend the increasing number of American interests abroad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With Republicans in control of Washington, many suspect that conservatism is on the ascent. Others are wondering what conservatism even means in 2016. In which version of conservatism does President-Elect Donald J. Trump believe? How would Trump answer the question that David Brooks posed to Barack Obama about Edmund Burke before he became president? Robert Lacey’s new book, Pragmatic Conservatism: Edmund Burke and His American Heirs (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), offers the start of an answer. Lacey is associate professor of political science at Iona College. He has previous written American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith. His new book argues for Burke as a pragmatist and more closely aligned with the current philosophy of many liberals than movement conservatives. In order to make this case, Lacey compares Burke to Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Peter Viereck, the American heirs. As Donald Trump ascends to the presidency, Lacey’s book should be read to understand whether business pragmatism of the new president resembles the conservative pragmatism of Burke or something altogether different. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On the eve of the 2016 election, it is worth reflecting on the history of women’s voting. Up to this weighty task is a new book by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht. They are the authors of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Corder is professor of political science at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and Wolbrecht is associate professor of political science and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. Textbooks have long given scant details of how the first women voters turned out at the polls. Corder and Wolbrecht compile new data and methods to provide nuance and detail to this issue. What they find is that women’s voting patterns varied greatly by political context. Where women lived, the parties they supported, and the competitiveness of elections related to strongly to turn out. Because context mattered so much, women intensified partisan differences in some parts of the country, while they introduced dramatic new dynamics in others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The millennial generation (those born from 1980 through the beginning of the 21st century) now comprises the largest voting bloc in the American electorate. In Media, Millennials, and Politics: The Coming of Age of the Next Political Generation (Lexington Books, 2016), Alison N. Novak argues that these 50 million young citizens are misunderstood, marginalized and sometimes overtly insulted by the news media. Writers, newscasters and pundits label them “apathetic, uninvolved and entitled,” while ignoring clear evidence that many millennials are deeply concerned about the course of the nation. Novak examines coverage of millennials in cable television and online news, finding that journalists often substitute stereotypes and rhetorical shortcuts for rigorous examination of how members of this generation think and act. She concludes by calling the media to task and demanding that it present a fuller, more nuanced picture of a group that will soon inherit the reins of power in the United States.
James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
NB: Because Amherst College Press is open-access, this book is available free for download here. Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways and means of American politics, Donald Trump “happened.” I watched with amazement as he insulted just about every establishment figure in the US–including the untouchable war-hero and senator John McCain!–and alienated large swathes of the American electorate–hispanics, women, people who think it’s important to be polite. And yet he rose; millions of right-thinking Americans continued to vote for him through the primaries and support him after he won them. Every time I said, “Well, that’s it, his run is over,” he trundled on, accompanied by a devoted, Trump-loving “base.” I don’t think I’m alone in my confusion about the Trump phenomenon, and I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to know how Trump did what he did. Happily, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams provides some answers in his excellent, short book The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring (Amherst College Press, 2016). What’s especially nice about MacWilliam’s work is that it’s based on evidence and logic, not partisanship and vitriol. What MacWilliams discovered is, well, surprising: there are, he shows, a goodly number of Americans who possess values that can only really be be called “Authoritarian,” and those Americans who have these values overwhelming support Trump. What’s most interesting is that these values were, in a sense, always there; they were, however, largely unrepresented among Americans’ political choices. Trump was, if not exactly the first (remember Pat Buchanan?), then the most expert at presenting them and “activating” the Authoritarian impulse in this reasonably large cohort of Americans. Trump uncovered or exposed Americans’ latent Authoritarianism. What the political parties will do with it now that it’s there for the taking is anybody’s guess. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Frances Lee is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Lee is professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. For much of the 20th century, Democrats were in the majority. Republicans had little chance to win back control, and Democrats had little fear of losing it. By the 1980s, things began to shift, and ever since, majority control has been on the line. The consequence of this changing political landscape is the subject of Lee’s new book. She shows how this new competition for control drives both parties to focus on undercutting the opposition. Rather than a strategy of bipartisan cooperation to win policy victories, Insecure Majorities reveals the rise of party messaging and strategic communications as the way of Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in American history. The Alien and Seditions Acts, which were actually four laws enacted in 1798, dramatically tested the principles of free speech in the young republic. Halperin explains the political origins of the controversy, which began in the earliest days the George Washington’s administration. Although the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams, and the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonians), led by Jefferson and James Madison, had already established their differences on the national stage regarding the Constitution, foreign affairs would create further cleavages between these groups. Halperin investigates and analyzes how the French Revolution was celebrated and feared in America. When France descended into civil war and instigated European wars, the United States feared being drawn into the conflicts. The Federalists developed an affinity for Britain’s rejection of the Terror and resistance to France, while the Democratic-Republicans celebrated the promise of the French Revolution, even though most deplored the violence of the Terror. French and Irish immigrants were welcomed by the Jeffersonians and feared by the Federalists. Halperin demonstrates how dissent against American foreign policy, usually through the many newspapers published in America, was viewed as subversive and threatening to America’s reputation and national security. The Federalists, who dominated the national government during the 1790s, conceived of federal criminal laws to quash dissent. Halperin explains how both sides had their dearly held beliefs: the Federalists thought Jeffersonian newspaper editors would encourage rebellions against federal power or foreign powers efforts to acquire land in the New World; the Jeffersonians claimed that dissent was legitimate and pointed to the First Amendment’s free speech clause as a right that allowed criticism of government. My conversation with Halperin covers all of these events and reveals the importance of the debate over free speech in the early Republic.
Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James E. Campbell has written Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2016). Campbell is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. Are we a polarized nation or polarizing? Are voters moving to the extremes or is this just party elites growing further from each other? Campbell takes on these very timely questions in his book. He argues that polarization is real, but explaining its causes is a little more difficult. In Polarized, Campbell argues that there has been staggered partisan realignment, first by Democrats and later by Republicans. This historical pattern makes it tricky to observe polarization as it has not occurred in a neat and linear fashion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. With trust in government at all-time lows, what is there to do? Kettl’s book places our current moment into a longer history of bi-partisan commitment to effective government. In Escaping Jurassic Government, he argues that we have lost our commitment to competency, and thus have pulled from the Right and the Left for more or less government, rather than better government. Kettl suggests that there are at least four ways forward; the most optimistic direction focused on a renewed commitment to people and effective government management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women, out of over two hundred women, who pursued the presidency. In the nineteenth century, when women were denied the vote, the self-made Victoria Woodhull, a political and religious outsider, ran on a platform of change and reform. In the 1940s, the pragmatic Republican Margaret Chase Smith entered politics as the result of the “widow’s mandate.” She stayed in Congress for over two decades and ran for president in 1964. The Democrat Shirley Chisholm took on the double jeopardy of running as the first black woman to seek the presidency in 1972. Her grassroots base included black community activists and feminists. All three women faced structural obstacles rather than lack of grit. Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2008 would again challenge the American resistance to breaking the highest glass ceiling and demonstrated how much and how little the prospects for a woman president had changed.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Why did it take more than 20 people to write a tweet for the Romney campaign? Why did dozens of new companies emerge from recent Democratic campaigns? Prototype Politics argues that each party has adopted digital technologies in some very different ways and that these differences have had major consequences. Democrats and Republicans have had varied approaches to investing in technology and in technology expertise. Once the technology leaders, Republicans have lagged behind Democrats in recent cycles, investing smaller amounts of money overall and placing much less organization emphasis on digital strategy. It remains to be seen how these differences will shape the 2016 election, but Prototype Politics offers a fascinating account of the changing role of technology has moved to the center of campaign politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joel K. Goldstein has written The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (University Press of Kansas, 2016). Goldstein is the Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law, Saint Louis University School of Law. Since the vice presidential choices have been made, it is time for a big book about the vice presidency. Goldstein has written that big, tracing 40 years of the evolution of this position. He focuses much of his attention on the innovative vice presidency of Walter Mondale. With the consent of President Carter, Mondale moved the office for the first time to the center of the White House, taking on a role in appointment decisions, policy, and on-going work of the president. Ever since, vice presidents have been following the Mondale model, growing the office in significance and potentially increasing the importance of who is nominated to how voters evaluate the ticket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political transformations of the second generation of American politicians. Born the year that America attained its independence, Barbour entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican, championing the principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Though out of step with the economic nationalism that predominated in the aftermath of the War of 1812, Barbour found an ally for his cause of a limited federal government in Andrew Jackson, and by the end of the 1820s he became a leader in the fight against the Bank of the United States. Though Jackson sought twice to appoint him as his attorney general, Barbour preferred a position on the federal bench, and was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in 1835. As Belko shows, Barbour’s service on the Court contributed to the advancement of the Jacksonian economic vision in American jurisprudence, though his premature death in 1841 came before he would have had to face as a justice the increasingly contentious issue of slavery that would shortly dominate the national discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016). Roth is a national reporter for MSNBC. Next, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is the author of Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State (Carolina Academic Press, 2016). She is an associate professor of law at Stetson University College of Law and a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The two books look at the state of the democracy, Roth from the perspective of a reporter covering voting rights issues in state and local government, and Torres-Spelliscy from the perspective of the constitution. Together, these two books address whether corporate power has grown too strong and whether reforms can shift the balance of power in U.S. politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Known as the Iron Man of politics, Alben Barkley enjoyed a career that took him from rural Kentucky to the vice-presidency of the United States of America. In his book Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), James K. Libbey draws upon his many years studying Barkley to provide readers with insight into this dynamic and popular figure. Growing up in poverty, Barkley nonetheless acquired an education and began a legal career before his first run for county office. From there he won election to Congress, first as a member of the House of Representatives, then in 1926 as a senator. Once in the Senate he soon emerged as a leader of the Democratic caucus and was elected Majority Leader in 1937, from which position he shepherded through some of the most important legislation of the century. Selected as Harry Truman’s running mate at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, as vice president he was a nationally popular figure and the first one known by the affectionate moniker “Veep.” Though frustrated in his efforts to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952, he capped his career by returning to the Senate two years later, providing a fitting coda to his lifetime of public service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Boatright, associate professor of political science at Clark University, is the editor of The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Campaign finance reform has been a salient topic during this year’s presidential campaign. Everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton has offered opinions on how the money in political campaigns might be better regulated. This attention can be tracked to the most recent unraveling of existing federal regulations by the Supreme Court in a series of decisions, most famously Citizens United. But how does this U.S. story fit into a larger comparative policy environment? Boatright has edited a collection of perspectives drawn from a variety of national contexts, including Canada, Germany, and Australia. The volume shows the extent to which outside of the U.S., we are living through a deregulatory moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As a trailblazing attorney, Bessie Margolin lived a life of exceptional achievement. At a time when the legal profession consisted almost entirely of men, she earned the esteem of her colleagues and rose to become one of the most successful Supreme Court advocates of her era. Doing so, as Marlene Trestman demonstrates in Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (Louisiana State University Press, 2016), required overcoming not just the ingrained assumptions that men had towards professional women during that time but also the poverty of her early childhood and the loss of her mother when Margolin was only three years old. As Trestman reveals, Margolin exploited to the full the opportunities she was given as a ward of the Jewish Orphans Home in New Orleans, which provided her with a comfortable upbringing and a good education. From Newcomb College and Tulane University, Margolin went on to a fellowship at Yale University and a career in the federal government, which she began by participating in the defense of some of the most important laws to come out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program and concluded by championing measures mandating equal pay and opposing age discrimination. And yet Trestman shows that for all of the sacrifices she made to establish a career for herself, Margolin did so on her own terms and in a way that many Americans can relate to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scott Meinke has just published Leadership Organizations in the House of Representatives: Party Participation and Partisan Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2016). He is associate professor of political science at Bucknell University. How have Congressional organizations changed over time? How have House leaders used policy organizations and committees over time? Meinke has answered these questions in his new book. Through extensive archival and quantitative research, he shows the way these organizations have changed since the 1970s. Increasingly, House leaders use party organizations to advance the party’s policy agenda and to exchange information with supporters outside of Congress. As such, Meinke’s book fits into the ongoing exploration of the Congressional polarization and points in the direction of possible Congressional reforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
George McGovern is largely remembered today for his dramatic loss to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign, yet he enjoyed a long career characterized by many remarkable achievements. In Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern (Princeton UP, 2016), the first in a projected two-volume biography of the senator and Democratic Party presidential nominee, Thomas Knock chronicles McGovern’s life and career from his Depression-era upbringing in South Dakota to his 1968 reelection campaign and emergence as a presidential contender. Knock describes McGovern’s transformation from a shy young boy into a confident debater who, after America went to war in 1941, volunteered for service in the Army Air Corps as a B-24 bomber pilot and flew 35 combat missions over Germany and Austria. Upon returning home, he embarked on a path that took him from the ministry to a Ph.D. in history and then the college classroom before he settled upon a career in politics. After serving two terms in the House of Representatives and as Director of Food for Peace in the Kennedy administration, in 1962 McGovern won a seat in the United States Senate, where he emerged as a prescient critic of America’s descent into the Vietnam War. In detailing his opposition to that expanding conflict, Knock not only shows how McGovern emerged as a national leader, but also demonstrates the relevance of his vision to the challenges our nation faces today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lester K. Spence is the author of Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (Punctum Books, 2016). Spence is associate professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. In Knocking the Hustle, Spence links the rising prominence of neoliberal ideas to the transformation of African American communities. The book, a combination of political history and policy analysis, argues that the Nixon and Reagan administrations advanced the neoliberal policy-making agenda and contributed to the associated rise in economic inequality, especially for African Americans. At the same time, African American communities and institutions are transformed by this neoliberal turn and its underlying, and surprising compatibility, with hustle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this podcast I talk with Mary Ziegler, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law about her book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2016). Ziegler’s work revolves around Roe v. Wade and uses this landmark American abortion rights case to explore broad questions such as litigation as a vessel for social change and the role the court plays in democracy. To explore these questions, in addition to archival research Ziegler also did over one hundred oral histories. This method has allowed her to go beyond caricatures of people in the pro-life and anti-abortion camps and to delve deeply into their motivations and look at the angles they approached the abortion issue with great precision. Roe is often seen as a cautionary tale for judicial intervention as described for example by both right leaning Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and left leaning Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg. Her research reveals, however, that much of the polarization that we’ve blamed on the Supreme Court had little to do with what the court said in Roe. She discusses how the bright line divide between the pro-life and pro-choice movements had not yet coalesced in the 1970s. Some other topics we discuss are: –Whether Roe prematurely ended debate about the meaning or scope of abortion rights –The forces that brought together the political right and the pro-life movement –Roe as a canvas onto which activists could project different strategic aims Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) interprets the New Deal as a massive but unstable experiment from the main of American political culture. Against arguments that the New Deal was the product of the American penchant for reform, Cowie asserts that it was a remarkable historical detour. The Great Depression and WWII were specific historical circumstances that wrought a short-lived effort for central government intervention in securing collective economic rights. Unions flourished, industrial workers gained job security and good wages, and the country enjoyed a relative amount of political cohesion. Multiple legislative measures and the growth of unions offered a countervailing power against corporate wealth accumulation and promised a bright economic future. Several enduring fissures in political culture would all but undo the New Deal after the 1970s. The long tensions over immigration, religious and racial hostility, the frailty of unions, and the ideology of Jeffersonian individualism remained and assured that the new interventionist role for the state would not last. By examining the birth of New Deal and its decline, Cowie locates a legacy of individual rights that stood against its long-term viability. As the central government has continued to expand under free market ideology, collective initiatives are being led at the local and state level by a cross-class neo-progressivism organizing labor and advocating for immigrants and other minorities. While the New Deal gave way to free market ideology, the future may lie in a new imaginary rising from below.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia. His book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers the origins of the pro-life movement not as reactionary and anti-feminist, but rather as a New Deal-inspired crusade for human rights and part of a progressive Catholic social agenda. Pro-lifers saw themselves as crusaders for the “right to life” appealing to natural law and the constitution of the United States. In the 1930s they stood against the utilitarian views of abortion liberalization promoted by secular doctors. After World War II Catholic doctors and lawyers were equating abortion with the holocaust and arguing for the fetus as protected by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In the early 1960s, the debate over abortion moved to legislative and constitutional battles. Restrictive state laws began to crumble and post-Vatican Catholic opposition to abortion continued to erode among the laity. The decade ended with a restructuring of the movement as it gained allies among young progressives, anti-war activists, Protestants and evangelicals. Pro-life women, expressing a feminism of difference, became visible in the leadership ranks in what had been a virtually an all-male public campaign. The pro-life movement’s legislative victories were short term. Roe v. Wade and change in public opinion interrupted the ascendancy of the pro-life movement and its bipartisan identity to become part of a larger cultural battle. Williams offers an important contribution by highlighting the progressive origins of the pro-life movement before it became a conservative evangelical cause and an issue that continues to divide the nation.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steve Phillips is the author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (The New Press, 2016). Phillips is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Several weeks ago, Matt Lewis came on the podcast to assess the state-of-affairs for conservatives. This week, Steve Phillips offers his new book on how progressives might reposition their electoral coalition in the future. Drawing on demographic data and the changing electoral map, Phillips argues for a shift from focusing on white swing voters to a new coalition of African American, Latino, and progressive white voters.
The podcast is hosted by Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, and Travis N. Ridout are the co-authors of Political Advertising in the United States (Westview Press 2016). Fowler is assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, Franz is associate professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College, and Ridout is Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. The authors, co-directors of the Wesleyan Media Project, draw from the latest data to analyze how campaign finance laws have affected the sponsorship and content of political advertising and how the Internet has changed the distribution of ads. With detailed analysis of presidential and congressional campaign ads and discussion questions in each chapter, Political Advertising provides an ideal explainer for students, scholars and practitioners who want to understand the ins and outs of political advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov are the authors of Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Klar is assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona; Krupnikov is assistant professor of political science at Stony Brook University. Independents voters number up into 40% range in some elections, but are largely misunderstood. Are they apathetic? Centrist? Or undecided voters? Klar and Krupnikov suggest something quite different. They argue that many independent voters are partisans in disguise, hiding partisan-leanings because of a perceived social stigma. Through a series of experiments and related studies, they show that the social desirability of independence prevents many from declaring a party affiliation, but also diminishes other forms of political participation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American politics over the last several months, it is that there are a lot of people who are angry about the present and fearful about the future. American Insecurity demonstrates why it is difficult to channel these sentiments into political action. Using a series of lab and field experiments, we learn in American Insecurity that those who feel economically insecure may be de-mobilized if reminded about their insecurity. There are numerous implications of Levine’s findings for how we understand the psychology of insecurity and the ways interest groups might hone mobilization strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Richard L. Hasen has written Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (Yale University Press, 2016). Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In the midst of the most expensive presidential contest in U.S. history, is money buying access and influence? Are super PACs corrupting the democratic process? Or are eager supporter simply exercising their First Amendment rights? In Plutocrats United, Hasen argues that these may be the wrong questions and the long-standing debate between corruption and free speech – so long a part of constitutional discussions of the issues – is in need of an overhaul. Instead, he suggests that a renewed focus on political equality could reshape the way the country and the Supreme Court considered the role of money in politics. Hasen makes specific policy recommendations for what a new campaign finance regime might look like, and why this new approach would advance the democracy as well as the principle of political equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After World War II, the newly formed United Nations and what might be called a global community of nations that included the United States, worked to create a more extensive code of international law. The urge stemmed from the events of World War II, including the atrocities of the war that resulted in war crimes trials and tribunals afterward. The new effort included a move to implement new enforcement mechanisms and insure that the agreed upon international standards were upheld and violators punished. During this same period, the United States military significantly expanded its global presence. Throughout the Cold War and after, U.S. troops were stationed at bases in more countries than ever before, which each required Status of Forces Agreements laying out, among other things, jurisdiction over U.S. troops. This increased global presence also meant more American soldiers, and in some cases civilians accompanying the military for various reasons, were in the position to violate these international standards. Yet, despite a prominent role in spreading universal standards of international law, U.S. policymakers strongly resisted any compromise to U.S sovereignty in upholding these laws. Patrick Hagopian, senior lecturer in History and American Studies at Lancaster University, has a new book, American Immunity: War Crime and the Limits of International Law (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) that looks at the relationship between the United States and war crimes jurisdictional questions. He discusses how not only did U.S. policymakers refuse to allow Americans to be prosecuted by international tribunals, but also U.S. courts failed to uphold international standards of justice. Policymakers felt that territorial and practical limitations placed acts committed abroad beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts, while the Supreme Court decided veterans and civilians could not be court-martialed. This left a jurisdictional gap that existed for much of the postwar period. Though the My Lai massacre brought the gap into particular focus, Congress still failed to close it. This new book explains jurisdictional issues and the failure of American policymakers to adequately remedy. In this episode, we discuss the legal problem, the book’s insights as to their cause, and some of the (often failed) attempts to close the gap. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mark A. Smith is the author of Secular Faith: Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Smith is professor of political science at the University of Washington. The provocative central thesis of this book is that religion is not the unchanging institution of tradition we might sometimes think. Smith argues that religion in the U.S., especially the Christian church, responds to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society–perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders may resist prevailing values and behaviors, yet those same leaders eventually change–often by reinterpreting the Bible–if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph have written the alliteratively titled Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is professor of political science at Vanderbilt University; Rudolph is professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Who do you trust? According to Why Washington Won’t Work, you definitely do not trust the government, especially if you are a Republican. Today, more than in the past, political trust divides the country. Hetherington and Rudolph argue that a profound, and historically high, lack of trust among the public reduces the likelihood of compromise in Congress. In an increasingly polarized political environment that is already pre-disposed to gridlock, this finding on public trust helps to further explain the inability of Washington to govern, effectively legislate, and work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eitan Hersh is the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hersh is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University. We’ve come to think of political campaigns as highly sophisticated data-processing machines, capable of precisely targeting voters based on the last item they bought on Amazon. Hacking the Electorate suggests something very different about how campaigns actually target voters. Hersh argues that political campaigns vary greatly in how detailed their data actually are, at the whim of whether the state collects detailed or more general information about voters. Campaigns typically use the best available public data to design targeting strategies. As a result, strategies vary across the country based on how campaigns perceive voters in different information environments. If you just haven’t had enough podcasting for the day, click over to my good friends at the Scholar Strategy Network and their new podcast, No Jargon. Listen to their first podcast featuring my new book, Tea Party Divided (Praeger, 2015) and learn about how the Tea Party is shaping the contentious politics of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Schlozman is the author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton University Press, 2015). Schlozman is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. With disarray in the Republican Party, Schlozman’s new book traces some of the movements that have shaped the current GOP. The book shows why certain social movements, such as organized labor and Christian Conservatives, became central to the Democrats and Republicans, whereas as others, such as the anti-war movement and populist movement, never gained traction in the two parties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Curry has written Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Curry is assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah. With Congress in the news, a new book about the House arrives in timely fashion. Not only is Curry’s book timely, it also helps explain part of what’s been going on in Washington. Curry argues that House leaders use special procedural tactics to restrict information about bills from rank-and-file members. By limiting information, leaders can efficiently push ahead an agenda with much less opposition. This is an effect strategy, but can lead to resentment and distrust, two of the factors that may have created the environment for the search for a new speaker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Sehat is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University. His book The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and the Our Politics Inflexible (Simon and Schuster, 2015) is part narrative history, part political analysis. Beginning with George Washington’s administration to the 2012 Congressional budgetary crisis, Sehat provides a long sweep of the continual conflicts over the meaning of the U.S. constitution and the intent of the founders. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton represented two different interpretations and set the course for subsequent debates over first principles that by Lincoln’s time escalated into civil war. The differences revolved largely on the role of the federal government, states rights and the limits of economic freedom. After the Civil War and as America faced becoming a modern nation the founders as a standard of ideals went into eclipse. The oppositional rhetoric of the American Liberty League to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and constitutional reinterpretation, once again turned to the founders. Modern political rivals have continued to call on the legacy of the founders to support their arguments and making them a test of political orthodoxy. Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign, the Reagan Revolution, and the Tea Party movement drew from the founders with radically different understandings of the past and the future. Liberals pointed to changing nature of constitutional governance arguing for context and adaptation. Conservatives held to a static and binding view of the constitution asserting original intent. Arguments that found their way to the Supreme Court. Sehat argues that conflict over the intent of the founders, and the meaning of the constitution, has kept the nation paralyzed in dealing with the present. By asking what the founder’s would do, we foreclose productive debate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
George H. Nash is an independent scholar, historian, and lecturer. As a scholar of American conservative thought and biographer of Herbert Hoover, Nash edited The Crusade Years, 1933-1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and its Aftermath (Hoover Institution Press, 2013). Hoover, the 31st president of the United States, lost his bid for re-election in 1932 reaching the lowest point of a long productive life. Rather than retreat to a quiet private life, he spent the next three decades writing and speaking, promoting humanitarian projects, addressing the problem of government efficiency, and as a vocal critic of American intervention abroad. He left a voluminous and detailed memoir, which remained unpublished until recently. The Hoover Institution published the first volume Freedom Betrayed, also edited by Nash, in 2011. Nash has provided a thorough introduction of Hoover’s life. The second volume of the memoir, The Crusade Years, covers some of Hoover’s private life and lays out his views on the threat of collectivism. Hoover was a relentless crusader against Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and a champion of a classic liberal philosophy of “properly regulated individualism”. He resisted the erosion of American liberty by an encroaching state. His political philosophy was not rooted in an unfettered laissez-faire but in his firm belief in American exceptionalism, ordered liberty, and the possibility of social progress. In contemporary American politics, as noted by Nash, Hoover is both too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals bringing out the American tension in striking a balance between free markets and government regulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“America is a nation of immigrants.” Either this common refrain, or its cousin the “melting pot” metaphor is repeated daily in conversations at various levels of U.S. society. Be it in the private or public realm, these notions promote a compelling image of national inclusivity that appears not to be limited to particular notions of race, religious affiliation, gender, or national origin. Indeed, generations of American writers–like J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Israel Zangwill, Emma Lazarus, and Oscar Handlin–have embedded America’s immigrant past into the collective psyche of its people and the epic telling of its history. Yet, as scholars of U.S. immigration history have asserted over the past few decades, the “nation of immigrants” narrative is blinded by both its singular focus on trans-Atlantic European migration and the presumption of immigrant assimilation and incorporation to Anglo American institutions and cultural norms. In her fascinating new study How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (University of California Press, 2014) Professor of History and Urban Studies at UC San Diego Natalia Molina advances the study of U.S. immigration history and race relations by connecting the themes of race and citizenship in the construction of American racial categories. Using archival records held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the U.S. Congress, local governments, and immigrant rights groups, Dr. Molina examines the period of Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1924-1965. Employing a relational lens to her study, Professor Molina advances the theory of racial scripts to describe how ideas about Mexicans and Mexican immigration have been fashioned out of preexisting racial projects that sought to exclude African Americans and Asian immigrants from acquiring the full benefits of American citizenship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Leah Wright Rigueur is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press, 2015) examines how the Grand Old Party of Lincoln lost its position as the home of the African American vote. Covering more than four decades beginning in Roosevelt’s New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential election, Rigueur examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians to build and remain within the Party’s shrinking tent. Marginalized within their own communities and party, black Republicans fought political battles on two fronts. They continually sought to include black needs and interest in the changing formulation of conservatism. Their stories reveal an alternative approach to economic and civil rights within a party increasingly hostile to racially progressive ideas as it wooed the white vote. Rigueur introduces us to republican views of many including the Senator Edward Brooks, Robert J. Brown, Jackie Robinson and black organizations such as National Black Republican Council and the National Negro Republican Assembly. Black republicans dealt with numerous issues including ensuring black political participation, individual rights, economic opportunity, and racial equality. Rigueur has given us a thought-provoking examination on the failure of the Republican Party to live up the legacy of Lincoln, and to respond to its black members who remained committed to the conservative ideals of free enterprise, individual initiative, and limited government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With over a dozen Republican candidates in the summer news, what will it take for one to emerge from the pack? Kristen Soltis Anderson‘s new book, The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up) (Broadside Books, 2015), has an answer. Anderson is the co-founder of Echelon Insights, a public opinion and data analytics firm that helps campaigns and companies design their messages and strategies. Anderson’s book draws on this experience as a campaign and polling expert to suggest that Republicans need to understand the changing values and behaviors of Millennials. She argues that successful candidates will move digital to the center of their campaigns and reach out to younger voters in new ways. Failing to do so, Anderson predicts, will lead to generations of new voters turned off to the GOP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David George Surdham is the author of The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Surdham is Associate Professor of Economics at Northern Iowa University. Just back from the Major League Baseball All-Star break, Surdham has written a book for sports lovers. Why do major league sports receive such preferential treatment from Congress? And what does this have to do with labor and economic development policy? Surdham examines Congressional hearings held over decades to figure out how Washington’s role in professional sports has changed over since the 1950s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julian E. Zelizer is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015). Zelizer is the Malcom Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at New America. In the Fierce Urgency of Now, Zelizer focuses on the heated period of 1963-1966, and President Lyndon Johnson’s effort to pass a civil rights bill. Johnson has been credited as the chief architect of the passage of the ultimate bill, but Zelizer shifts focus to Congress and the variety of interest groups lobbying for and against the bill. In doing so, Zelizer argues that credit for the civil rights acts must be more widely shared. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox are the authors of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics (Oxford UP,2015). Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Fox is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. The two conducted surveys of over 4,000 younger Americans. What they find is that their young Americans rarely think, talk or consider politics. While many seem to care about the world, this infrequently translates to running for office or aspirations to work in politics. They find: Just 11 percent of respondents said that they had thought about running office “many times” while 61 percent said they “never” considered it. Asked if various jobs paid the same, they find just 13 percent of respondents said they would want to be a member of Congress, versus 37 percent who chose business executive and 27 percent school principal; only 19 percent indicated that a future goal was to become a political leader. And less than 10% of respondents said that their parents would want them to pursue a job as a member of Congress, compared to around 50 percent for owning a business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kyle Mattes and David Redlawsk are the authors of The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Mattes is assistant professor of political science at Florida International University; Redlawsk is professor of political science at the Eagleton Institute’s Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University. Each campaign season, a near public consensus is reached that everybody hates negative campaign ads. But do we all agree with what actually constitutes a negative ad and does that matter? Mattes and Redlawsk investigate the paradox of nearly universal hatred of negative ads yet persistent use by candidates. How can these two be? In the book, Mattes and Redlawsk designed a series of experiments to figure out what is it about negativity that voters truly dislike. In doing so, they separate ads that merely refer to a campaign opponent from those that criticize family and personal characteristics. What they discover will help anyone interested in politics better understand the way campaign communications actually works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With a 2016 presidential election likely to cost several billions dollars, is there any way to prevent money from completely overwhelming US politics? Public financing of campaigns has offered one solution and is the focus of Michael G. Miller‘s new book, Subsidizing Democracy: How Public Funding Changes Elections and How it Can Work in the Future (Cornell UP, 2014). In several states – Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine – implemented full public funding plans in the early 2000s. These state-level efforts allow Miller to test several assumptions about public funding, including an argument that they could increase the quality of candidates in competitive races, free candidates to meet more registered voters, and possible increase turnout. The empirical findings from Miller’s research provide convincing evidence that many of these goals have been met. Miller is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Americans believe they have a number of protections on the job, which are common in other democracies (free speech and privacy, defense against capricious firing, etc.). They are wrong. And in her fascinating new book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the legal historian Sophia Z. Lee wants to understand why. She explores two major campaigns, stretching roughly from the 1920’s to the 1980’s, to establish constitutional safeguards in the workplace, uncovers their remarkable successes, and ultimate failures. It is a story of unlikely bedfellows: black, pro-union labor activists like C.W. Rice and Charles Houston fighting if not quite alongside then at least parallel to anti-union, right-to-work corporate leaders like Cecil B. DeMille and William T. Harrison for a similar goal to contrary ends. Lee finds that, contrary to what many think, civil rights groups like the NAACP were actively pursuing employment safeguards in the postwar era, using the “exclusive representation” granted by the New Deal to unions to make creative arguments for “state action” on the basis of the “duty of fair representation.” At the same time, conservatives sought to roll back the dramatic expansion of organized labor during the late 1930’s and especially World War II (to a third of the non-agricultural workforce) by arguing that “closed shop” rules forced men to join unions and to pay for such things as lobbying. Initially, the courts rejected these latter petitions, during a time when corporations suffered from its Great Depression reputation. But in the late 1950’s, as Congress uncovered corruption in select unions and the civil rights movement steadily grew, businessmen and liberal Republicans had far more success allying themselves with discrimination cases. The Supreme Court, for its part, was caught between not wanting to uphold segregation in labor, or to establish safeguards that would force integration on the entire private sector. Free marketers had nightmares about the racial and economic implications of a workplace Constitution, and unions did, too, for different reasons. With this deadlock, administrative agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission became fertile arenas for legal expansions. The result is a tale of absorbing complexity–thankfully, lucidly and beautifully written. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just a few weeks ago, we heard Matthew Green discuss the minority in the House. Green explained that the minority party may not be as powerless as we typically think. In Too Weak to Govern: Majority Party Power and Appropriations in the U.S. Senate (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Peter Hanson offers another side of a similar story. Hanson argues that the majority party in the Senate, more restrained by rule and convention than in the House, has an equally interesting story to tell. Hanson draws on his experience as a staffer for Senator Tom Daschle to explain the evolution of “regular order” and emergence of continuing resolutions as a tool of the majority. Hanson’s analysis may not convince you to love the Senate, but he sheds needed light on what’s behind the maddening procedures of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Hanson is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Conspiracy theories are neither the vile excrescence of puny minds nor the telltale symptom of a sick society. They are the ineradicable stuff of politics.”That’s a quotation from American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford UP, 2014), by Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, two professors of political science at the University of Miami.Their study of conspiracy theories concludes that nearly all Americans hold conspiracy beliefs and that “conspiracy theories bring to the surface people’s deepest political anxieties.”The book studies American conspiracy theories over 120 years from 1890 to 2010. It analyzes well-known conspiracy theories such as the many about the assassination of JFK and the events of 9/11 to more obscure ones such as the Congressional plot to kill pet dogs. In this interview with the New Books Network, co-author Joseph Uscinski suggests American conspiracy theories can teach us a lot about everyday politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Conventional wisdom among historians and the public says anticommunism and the Cold War were barriers to reform during their height in the 1950s. In this view, the strong hand of a conservative anticommunism and Cold War priorities thwarted liberal and leftist reforms, political dissent and dreams of social democracy. Jennifer Delton is a professor of history at Skidmore College, and her new book, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (Cambridge University Press, 2013) encourages us–as the title suggests–to rethink that conventional view. She argues that in fact the Cold War and anticommunism promoted and justified many liberal goals rather than stifling them. Her book demonstrates that supposed conservatives championed many liberal causes while many liberals genuinely supported the Cold War and anticommunism. For example, she discusses the liberal beliefs and actions of business leaders and politicians like Dwight Eisenhower, who are often thought of as conservative figures, to show the dominance of liberal political ideas during this period. On the other side, she also argues that liberals, such as many labor activists, were themselves strongly anticommunist because they saw communism as truly damaging to their cause, not simply because they aimed to avoid the taint of a communist label. These sentiments had important effects on policy as well. From high taxes to regulation, civil rights and the continuance of New Deal programs, liberal ideas held sway. They had a powerful effect on policy, not in spite of, but because of the larger Cold War context. In the interview, Delton discusses her book and its importance in reforming both historians’ views of the period and our broader thinking about partisan politics and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Green has just written Underdog Politics: The Minority Party in the U.S. House of Representatives (Yale University Press, 2015). Green is associate professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. Everyone roots for the underdog, yet nobody seems to like Congress. Green’s book offers to split the difference by offering an investigation about how Congressional underdog, the minority party, actually works. Rather than just a passive group, Green shows how over the last 40 years, the minority party has developed specific and often effective strategies to meet their aims. Green’s research uses extensive elite interviews to demonstrate how campaign and communication innovations in the 1970s and 1980s have shaped the role that the minority has played. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recently, historians have shown that the modern conservative movement is older and more complex than has often been assumed by either liberals or historians. Michelle Nickerson‘s book, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press, 2012) expands that literature even further, demonstrating not only the longer roots of conservative interest in family issues, such as education, but also the important role women played in shaping the early movement. Mothers of Conservatism does this by examining the role of women in the rise of grassroots conservatism during the 1950s. Nickerson explains how women in Southern California became politicized during the height of the Cold War, coming to see communist threats in numerous, mostly local, battles. These women, who were primarily homemakers, argued that they had a special political role as mothers and wives, translating their domestic identities into political activism. Nickerson traces their activism in battles over education and mental health issues among others. She further explains the ideology behind their activism and demonstrates how important these women were to shaping the coming conservative movement and in the long-term, the Republican Party. Mothers of Conservatism draws on rich archival material as well as on oral history interviews conducted by the author. With these archival sources and interviews, Nickerson brings the activists’ stories, politics, and humanity to life. In this interview, we discuss the ideology, activism, and legacy of the women as well as Nickerson’s experience interviewing her sources. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos are the authors of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2014). McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Kloos is a scholar of political sociology and social movements at Stanford University, where she is a PhD candidate. What has gotten us to this point of high political polarization and high income inequality? McAdam and Kloos offer a novel answer to what divides us as a country that focuses on the role social movements have in pulling parties to the extremes or pushing parties to the middle. They argue that the post-World War II period was unusual for its low levels of social movement activities and the resulting political centrism of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement that followed – and the related backlash politics of the Southern Democrats – pushed the parties away from the center and toward regional realignment. Along the way, activists re-wrote party voting procedures that reinforced the power of vocal minorities within each party, thereby entrenching political polarization for the decades to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a legal revolution with far-reaching cultural, political, and economic import. But as J. Douglas Smith argues in On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States (Hill and Wang, 2014),the early 1960s witnessed a comparable sea change in voting law that deserves far more attention. Indeed, when journalists asked Earl Warren what he regarded as the Supreme Court’s most important accomplishment under his tenure, the Chief Justice — who oversaw a series of landmark cases, from Brown to Miranda –– did not hesitate to answer: Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims. Few Americans today could identify and explain what these rulings did. But as Smith explains, they represented a dramatic break with a long-reigning electoral system that now feels almost unimaginable. America is exceptional among modern democracies for elevating the idea of unequal representation to a theory of”checks and balances;” the Senate being the most obvious example (California, with more people than the twenty-one least-populous states combined, has as tiny a fraction of the power in Congress). Yet the situation was far worse before the Court’s forgotten revolution, with state legislatures across the country effectively disfranchising voters on a mass scale. Los Angeles County, with more than 6 million residents in 1960, had just one state senator. Three nearby counties, with less than 15,000 voters, each had the same. Many have argued that these facts have been inconsequential to U.S. political history, a very counterintuitive notion if so. But the early twentieth century politicians who relied on the inflation of rural and small-town districts — some of whom numbered among the most powerful arbiters of legislation and debate in Washington — certainly did not share this view. In reaction to the Court’s decisions, Everett Dirksen, the Republican Minority Leader in the legendary 89th Congress, hired the consulting firm Whitaker and Baxter, widely thought to have pioneered modern campaigning, to repeal or roll back the rulings. Dozens of states lined up, with enormous funding from the nation’s biggest corporations. The group even considered a Constitutional Convention, what would have been the first since 1789. Those efforts failed. But in the wake of this half-realized democratization, legislatures underwent dramatic political change. Notably, they also turned to gerrymandering and increasing reliance on the filibuster. Dubbed by the Washington Post one of the notable works of the year, Smith’s book is well worth your read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Many Americans know about the military side of the Civil War, and the private, official diplomacy of the Civil War is also well documented. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic Books, 2015), though, focuses on public diplomacy — on the battle for public opinion in Europe (primarily) waged by Union and Confederate officials, private citizens, and their European supporters. White northerners were slower to realize what American blacks and European republicans recognized instinctively — that what was at stake in the American Civil War was not the political and territorial integrity of the United States, but the causes of progress and self-government. In The Cause of All Nations, Don H. Doyle has done the impossible — found a hitherto unappreciated feature of the American Civil War that forces us to reevaluate how we understand it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Deana A. Rohlinger has just written Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rohlinger is associate professor of sociology at Florida State University. In the last several weeks, the podcast has featured a variety of political scientists who study interest groups and social movements. This week, Deana Rohlinger brings her perspective as a sociologist to the subject. She examines the way four policy organizations with an interest in abortion policy (National Right to Life Committee, National Organization of Women, Planned Parenthood Federation, and Concerned Women for America) interact with the media. Rohlinger finds quite different strategies for how to court the media, but also in how each organization responds to crises. She uses interviews with organizational leaders to deepen what we know about how social movements and interest groups employ a media strategy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thomas F. Schaller is the author of The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House (Yale University Press, 2015). Schaller is professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. With a new Congress up and running, Republican control of Capitol Hill is back. But has the Republican Party sacrificed presidential aspirations as it pursues a strategy to control Congress? That’s the subject and thesis of Schaller’s new book. He traces the political history of the GOP from 1989 through the 2000s, as the party develops a new political strategy in Washington. Schaller’s original interviews with key Republican leaders shapes his narrative of retrenchment over the last 25 years, highlighting the two Bush presidencies, the Contract with America, and the emergence of a new cadre of conservative Republican leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill and Jones is the J. J. “Jake” Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The Politics of Information picks up where the authors’ last book, The Politics of Attention, leaves off. They explore how information enters into the policy process and how that has evolved over time, focusing on what they call the “paradox of search”. They make extensive use of the publicly available data that they have collected over the last decade called the Policy Agendas Project. They argue that: “Information determines priorities, and priorities determine action” (p. 40). They discover is that the policy process is replete with information – not all high quality – and that different policy problems integrate information in different ways. They also find that the government has “broadened” – addressing an ever growing array of issues – rather than just “thickening” – through growth in the overall size of government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas are the authors of Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press 2015). Heaney is assistant professor organizational studies and political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Rojas is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Heaney and Rojas take on the interdisciplinary challenge at the heart of studies of political parties and social movements, two related subjects that political scientists and sociologists have tended to examine separately from one another. What results is a needed effort to synthesize the two social science traditions and advance a common interest in studying how people come together to influence policy outcomes. The particular focus of this work is on how the antiwar movement that grew in the mid-2000s interacted with the Democratic Party. They ponder a paradox of activism that just as activists are most successful – in this case supporting a new Democrat controlled House and Senate in 2006 – the energy and dynamism of the movement often fades away. Heaney and Rojas look to the relationship between antiwar activists and the Democratic Party for answers. They find that in a highly polarized partisan environment, party affiliations come first and social movement affiliations second, thereby slowing the momentum movements generate in their ascendency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Prosterman‘s new book Defining Democracy:Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2013) investigates a neglected topic in U.S. history: the occasional efforts by reformers over the years to bring proportional representation to America. No democracy in the world today is less representative by the standard of “one person, one vote.” (In 2000, three states with more than a quarter of the population, had just six Senators, for example. The seventeen least populous states, with seven percent of the population, had thirty-four.) This is actually an improvement over the past, when various mal-apportionment schemes essentially disenfranchised huge numbers of voters in virtually every state. Prosterman’s book does not look at the national scene, but takes us instead through New York City’s brief experiment with a quirky form “STV” (single transferable vote), the standard in most democracies. Like so many imported European reforms in the early 1900’s, the American version had a fraught experience. But as Prosterman painstakingly details it also invigorated the electoral system in New York, opening the field to an unusually diverse set of candidates for the time: women, blacks, even Communists. To the horror of even formerly sympathetic reformers, like Al Smith. In the end, an equally strange pack of bedfellows conspired to destroy the practice, which locals had voted for overwhelmingly. Yet, for all its flaws and historical particularities, the experiment stands as a useful reminder that democracy is now just about who votes, but how that vote is counted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars interested in the history of the civil rights movement in the North will definitely be interested in Brian Purnell‘s new book, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings:The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Thiscase study of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Brooklyn joins one of the fastest-growing areas of research in the field: the roots and experience of the black freedom struggle above the Mason-Dixon. Challenging many of the nation’s persistent beliefs about the geographic timeline and ideological dynamics of that social movement, this literature has broadened our understanding of the past and given us a far more complicated view of the challenges facing grassroots organizations in the years before, during, and following the “classical period,” stretching from Rosa Parks’s arrest to Martin Luther King’s dream. Purnell looks at one of CORE’s most active, aggressive chapters in the North between 1960 and 1965. An exemplar of social history, the book explores the difficulties facing a small organization trying to upset the racial status quo in a city that prided itself on colorblindness–pioneering much of the legislation adopted by the federal government later–despite the fact that in education, housing, and labor segregation prevailed. Aggravating matters were a number of seismic changes in New York, as elsewhere: the flight of industry and middle class taxpayers to the suburbs and Sunbelt, and the influx of millions of laid-off southern sharecroppers to neighborhoods that, because of “de facto” Jim Crow, became increasingly poor,overcrowded, dilapidated, and ridden with trash, crime, and despair. Purnell gives us the story of a group valiantly attempting to avert and assuage these overwhelming developments. As he notes, their failures speak to the reality many still face today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban center, the result of a centuries-old, global trend that reflects not just industrialization but the role cities have played as engines of economic, social, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Yet two-thirds of this “metropolitan” demographic–half the nation–chooses to reside in the suburbs, and over the years a remarkably consistent and low number of people have said they would prefer to live in a city. This may just reflect circumstance, the outcome of policies that, historians know, were not smartly, and often undemocratically, imposed. But as Morton White recounted decades ago, the intellectuals of the past have been just as anti-urban as politicians. Despite the outsized importance of the seaboard port-cities to the War for Independence, the founders left a Constitution that divided power geographically, not numerically, ensuring that cities would be forever underrepresented. Jefferson expressed the feeling of many early republicans that we could only maintain our virtue and freedom by remaining a nation of small yeoman, even while doubling the country’s size and guaranteeing its commercial development. Henry David Thoreau, writing in a more democratic age, told readers to go to “the woods” to find individuality–from a cabin one mile outside Concord. This anti-urban tradition was briefly interrupted in the late 1800’s, when, as Conn writes, for the first time the problems of the city became the problems of the nation. Many Progressives advocated European-style planning to meet the challenges for which cities were infrastructurally unprepared and often governmentally powerless to resolve. But as Conn writes, many thinkers also continued to see the city itself as the problem, and saw the solution as decentralization: dispersing population and industry. During the interwar period, the car, and electricity, stepped in to meet their needs, and when the Great Depression hit, FDR and the New Dealers fell back on this generation of thought, coming forward with a battery of programs that would unravel the city–and the famous coalition he built. Indeed, while the anti-urban tradition has often been the vehicle for an illiberal free-market political agenda, Conn shows that it has covered the ideological spectrum. The postwar Right in the Sunbelt helped speed the decline of the industrial belt in the North by advertising its bourgeoning megalopolises as the antithesis of the urban: free of high-rises, zoning, civil rights protestors, unions, and government in general, even while it relied on billions in federal tax dollars, saw high rates in crime, and increasingly had to reverse itself and create basic municipal services. But the anti-urban sentiment cut across the aisle, from the enthusiasm of postwar liberals for “urban renewal” and highways to the hippies’ revival of the back-to-the-land fantasy and the flowering of 1990’s communitarianism. The nation’s anti-urban policies remain, as does the bipartisan impulse, which makes this book’s subject as relevant as ever. Perhaps, as Conn says, in this era of hip gentrification, when the children of the suburbs are returning to cities, the “new urbanists” will break internationally odd pattern. But they will have to grapple with the multidimensional legacy of the nation’s anti-urban past. And Conn’s intellectual and cultural history, the first of its kind, will be the place to start. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As campaign season ends, what can we make of all those ads? Brian Arbour is the author of Candidate-Centered Campaigns: Political Messages, Winning Personalities, and Personal Appeals (Palgrave-MacMillan 2014). Arbour is assistant professor of political science at John Jay College, City University of New York. Why do certain candidates focus on making campaign promises and extolling their legislative record, while others just talk about themselves? Arbour argues that scholars have underplayed the personal narratives that feature so prominently in much campaign advertising. As a result, candidate-centered appeals for votes have been largely ignored or misunderstood. Arbour aims to address this deficit with his new book that examines the way candidates talk about their own background and the background of opponents. He argues that candidate-centered campaigns build trust with voters as one would with neighbors or new co-workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For most Americans, Tammany Hall is a symbol of all that was dishonest, corrupt, illiberal, and venal about urban government and the political machines that ran it in the past, a shorthand for larceny on a grand scale. Not so, says Terry Golway. In his new book Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (Liveright, 2014) Golway argues that Tammany, a popular nickname for the Democratic organization of the County of New York (better known as Manhattan), introduced a “new politics” and a “new social contract” to America. Tammany, he shows, encouraged voters in an undemocratic republican era to look to accessible local figures for protection from the devastations of laissez-faire capitalism in a time before the safety net. Arguing that the Irish who escaped the potato famine brought with them lessons about the importance of power and the usefulness of “transactional” relationships between voters and elected officials, Golway believes that Tammany came to represent the modern way of practicing democracy: interest-based politics. While many of its flaws cannot not be denied, he writes, the popular narrative has also been shaped by the reformers of the past, who tended to mix their critiques with class-based fear and moralism, if not outright anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-urban sentiment. William “Boss” Tweed personifies the organization for most, although his reign lasted just two years. A better representative, Golway thinks, is Charles Murphy, the longest-running leader of the party chapter, and the man who nurtured the careers of two young legendary, nation-changing reformers, and proud Tammany men: Robert Wagner and Al Smith, forerunners and major architects of the New Deal. Sure to stir a little debate, Golway’s book is revisionism in a good spirit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in these new neighborhoods tended to forget this fact, and instead, saw their success in the suburbs as the outcome of private achievements. Over time, such places became the crucible for the growth of neoliberalism. Lifeblood demonstrates the role oil played not only in suburbanization, but in the rightward shift of American politics over the past four decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so. So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church and state had to be made so that both the church and state could do their important work. According to Hamilton, in recent decades radical religious reformers have mounted a successful campaign to throw the idea of a sensible accommodation out the window. They have expanded the scope of religious liberty and thereby limited the ability of the government to protect citizens generally. In this sense, she says, religion–a force for great social good, in her mind–has been made into an instrument of harm for many Americans. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dede Feldman is the author of Inside the New Mexico Senate: Boots, Suits, and Citizens (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Feldman retired from the New Mexico Senate in 2012 and is a former journalist and now is a political commentator in Albuquerque. Feldman provides a first-hand account of the state legislative process. Her colorful stories of many legends of New Mexico politics reveal the complexity of a part-time legislature. She ends the book with an array of ideas to reform the institution and limit some of the forces she sees as destructive and harmful. The book would make an excellent addition to an undergraduate course in State and Local Government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Do you remember the early search features on Yahoo! and those slow loading webpages of the late 1990s? Stromer-Galley pieces together the use of the internet from 1996 through 2012. We learn about some of the ways the promise of the internet to democratize the presidential campaign process has largely failed. Presidential websites have nearly always sent information out, but rarely invited information back in. And even when they have, that information has never been as central to the campaign as often promised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It seems that everyone in Hollywood is on the political Left. “Seems” is the operative word here, because there are actually Republicans in pictures, at least according to this website. (NB: I have no idea whether the folks who created this list know what they’re talking about, so beware.) Nonetheless, it’s pretty certain that most–the vast majority?– of Hollywood-types are on the Left. But it wasn’t always so, as Donald T. Critchlow shows in his fascinating book When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013). There was a time–the 1940s and 1950s–when Conservatives were an important and very vocal faction in Hollywood. This group emerged out of opposition to the New Deal and found their issue in anti-Communism. They were, truth be told, never terribly numerous. But they made up for their small numbers by their political savvy and, ultimately, their ability to produce skillful, viable political candidates. One of them, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who proved to be very skillful and very viable indeed. It’s a remarkable and largely forgotten story. Listen in. This interview is brought to you by Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nicholas Carnes is the author of White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. There is surprisingly little in the research literature on the link between social class and legislative behavior. For a topic that seems so ripe for investigation, Carnes’ data collection and analysis open new ground and answer pressing questions. He shows that formerly blue collar workers who serve in Congress behave differently than formerly white collar workers. Blue collar workers are in the extreme minority in numbers, meaning their efforts to pass legislation that tilts towards the working class are often stymied. Carnes offers fresh insight into why this matters for representation more generally and several recommendations for how to rectify this in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Anzia is the author of Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Anzia is assistant professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley. Why are some elections held in November and others in May, June, or July? Why are some elections timed to correspond with the congressional schedule, but others on odd years? When elections occur has long been known to strongly relate to voter turnout, but little research has pushed beyond this simple conclusion. Anzia’s book explores the motivations behind moving local elections from “on-cycle” – held to correspond with presidential or congressional elections in November — to “off-cycle”. She explores the history of the issue and the ways Progressive Era reformers saw advantages in holding municipal elections separate from national and state elections. She tracks that history up to today with excellent data on the relationship between when an election is held and certain policy outcomes. She finds that interest groups stand to benefit from off-cycle election. Teacher pay is substantially higher in school districts that hold elections off-cycle, rather than on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Lewis is the author of Direct Democracy and Minority Rights: A Critical Assessment of the Tyranny of the Majority in the American States (Routledge, 2013). Lewis is an assistant professor of Political Science at Siena College. The book is primarily about the intersection of various forms direct democracy (ballot initiatives, referendum, etc.) and minority rights. Much of the existing literature has been “agnostic” on the persistent concern among political scientists about the tyranny of the majority. Lewis makes a different argument that there is both a direct and an indirect effect of direct democracy. Using Event History Analysis of several policies to restrict minority rights (prohibitions on same-sex marriage, bans on affirmative action), he finds substantial evidence that states in which voters have strong powers of direct democracy have routinely passed limits on minority rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Goss challenges the conventional wisdom about women’s group with new congressional hearing data. Rather than ebbing-and-flowing like waves, Goss suggests that the women’s groups have not always diminished in influence following a major policy success. The Paradox of Gender Equality should have a wide audience among interest group, gender studies, and social movement scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). The two are so often paired in history and political science classes that they are sometimes published together. No wonder, really, because Paine’s Rights of Man was written in response to Burke’s Reflections. It’s easy to understand why these two book are standard fare in college: arguably, Burke’s and Paine’s books are the intellectual well-springs of what we call the republican (with a small “r”) “Right” and the “Left.” Much of what American Republicans think can be traced to Burke; much of what American Democrats think can be traced to Paine. For this reason, Burke and Paine are–with the possible exception of J.S. Mill–the most important political thinkers in the modern Western republican tradition. And for all these reasons, Yuval Levin‘s wonderful The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2013) is very relevant today. Levin masterfully explains not only why Burke and Paine thought what they thought (that is, he provides the historical context for their ideas), but he also makes clear how their ideas matter today. Listen in and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephen Medvic is the author of In Defense of Politicians: The Expectations Trap and Its Threat to Democracy (Routledge 2013). He is associate professor of government at Franklin and Marshall University. Medvic confronts the widespread dissatisfaction with Washington, Congress, and politicians from a new perspective. He argues that much of the antipathy towards politicians is based on faulty expectations, what he calls an “expectations trap”. The public wants often contradictory things from politicians: strongly held beliefs and the willingness to make deals; ambition and wisdom, but not so much of each that they are self-serving. Medvic calls for more realistic expectations of what function politicians play in a democracy to move beyond some of the current public frustrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski are the authors of The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Howell is professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Jackman is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Rogowski is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The book is a meaty and complex analysis of the presidency during war. They rely on formal modeling to develop a theory of Policy Priority. In other work, that has bogged down the prose, but here the writing is clear and the case studies presented toward the end of the book enrich their analysis. What we learn is that presidents benefit from war in their domestic agenda. As members of congress shift to focusing on national concerns, rather than local, they more closely adhere to the preferences of the president. This pattern isn’t without exceptions, and Howell et al. show the interesting cases (LBJ with Vietnam and GW Bush in 2005 with social security reform) where the model doesn’t predict outcomes as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of eight other books. Feldman’s book is a deeply provocative analysis of southern politics and political history. He explains the recurring themes in southern politics as an outgrowth of “Reconstruction Syndrome”. Themes of anti-government, anti-taxation, and deep suspicion of outsiders (African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants), run throughout the history of southern politics, and remain today. Feldman focuses much of his book on showing that the Democratic Party lost the south long before the passage of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. He tracks the shift in political allegiances back to the 1930s and even earlier. The book challenges conventional notions and is likely to stimulate debate and controversy. It is a worthwhile read for historians of the time period and political scientists, alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stella M. Rouse is the author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rouse is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland and a research fellow at the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. Commentators lauded Latino voters in 2012, but it is Latino elected-officials that increasingly hold power at the national and state-levels. In 2009, 242 Latino served in state legislatures and 27 Latinos were in the House of Representatives. While these numbers are not proportionate to the size of the Latino population, they are record highs. Rouse links together this descriptive representation to the ways those Latino officials make policy and vote on issues important to Latinos, what she labels substantive representation. She finds that education, healthcare, and jobs were the top priorities for Latino legislators – immigration was named by only 8% of respondents. She concludes that “Immigration is important, but it is not at the forefront of priorities for either the Latino public or for Latino elites.” Rouse extends this analysis to the agenda setting and voting behavior of Latinos. She finds that Latino legislators are more likely to introduce Latino-interest legislation when the percentage of Latinos in the party is smaller. At the roll call stage of the legislative process, though, Latino legislators behave no differently than others. Overall, Rouse’s new book has a lot to offer scholars of Congress, agenda setting, and ethnic studies. Her analysis is timely and advances what we know about Latinos and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vanessa Williamson is coauthor (with Theda Skocpol) of The Tea Party: Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), a New Yorker magazine “Ten Best Political Books of 2012”). Williamson is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University and Skocpol is professor of government and sociology at Harvard University. A lot has been written about the Tea Party, much from journalists and commentators. Williamson and Skocpol add a welcome scholarly vantage point, but don’t rest on the distance many academic prefer. They travel the country, interviewing Tea Party advocates, attending Tea Party gatherings in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Arizona. They also mine traditional social science sources of information as well. What results is a nuanced portrait of a very complex modern political phenomenon. The Tea Party, according to Williamson and Skocpol, is in part the result of grassroots activism, part top-down policy entrepreneurship, and part modern media promotion. This book unearths many of the institutional dimensions of the Tea Party movement that help explain how it grew so quickly – 1,000 Tea Party groups formed in just the initial period – and grew so powerful – millions of dollars coalesced to help fund, train, and mobilize supporters and candidates. The electoral successes in the 2010 elections and subsequent policy victories in state tax, budget, and voting policy are the most obvious legacy to date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
William G. Howell (with David Brent) is the author of the new book Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power (Princeton UP, 2013). Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds a joint appointment in the Harris School of Public Policy. Howell’s thesis is simple: “Power is every president’s North Star.” He argues in this succinct book that by focusing attention on the expansion of power, we can best understand the presidency and its evolution. Combining historical analysis of key documents and a synthesis of current scholarship, Howell offers a convincing and provocative case for power as the central feature of the presidency. Given the current attention to the Obama presidency’s treatment of secrets, privacy, and security, Howell’s book has much to add to these contemporary debates. The book builds a deep, scholarly argument, but one that could be read and appreciated by undergraduates and the public-at-large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon are authors of Women and Congressional Elections: A Century of Change (Lynne Rienner, 2012). Palmer is associate professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and Dixon is professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. They have combined to write a deeply informative book about the trajectory of women in congress. The book offers many great anecdotes from the trail blazers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the first woman to run for congress), Margaret Chase Smith (the first woman elected to the Senate), and Shirley Chisom (the first African American woman elected to Congress). The authors also put together a new dataset of the universe of women candidates for office. What they find about where women succeed and the challenges they face after winning reveals a lot about what it means for a woman to run for office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew J. Taylor is the author of Congress: A Performance Appraisal (Westview Press, 2013). Taylor is professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. His newest book examines the much maligned branch of government and offers some help. He takes the novel approach of establishing a series of benchmarks, as the federal government might about an intransigent agency, and then assesses the extent to which Congress meets those benchmarks. There are 37 benchmarks in total, some that Congress scores highly on – such as many elements of transparency and accessibility – while others – for example, effective policy making – Congress scores poorly. Taylor ends the book with offering recommendations about how to improve Congress through some familiar, but other novel changes. The book would make a great addition to an undergraduate survey of Congress or US political institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and the legacy he left for thinkers who attempted to leverage tradition in the face of political change. Maciag’s book is well-written and smartly conceived. His subject spans the entire history of the United States, from the Revolution to the present day, and introduces readers to American thinkers who continue deserve our attention. He also does an expert job addressing the conflict between liberalism and conservatism by demonstrating the roles historical contingency and personality play in shaping these complicated terms. Maciag’s book serves a diverse community of readers, from academics looking for smart arguments about political theory to general readers who are interested in origins and development of the poles of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University, and is also currently the editor of the American Association of School Administrators Journal of Scholarship and Practice and the Kappa Delta Pi Record. Dr. Orlich is professor emeritus of education and science instruction at Washington State University, Pullman. Their new book is an unabashed critique of nearly five decades of school reform and the questionable assertions and arguments made by many advocates for standardization, nationalization, and corporatization of public schools. They refer to the famed “Sputnik” moment of the 1950s as a manufactured crisis that Bon Jovi might call a “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. They call A Nation at Risk, the landmark study of educational performance in US schools, “an intellectually vapid and data challenged piece of propaganda” and the current federal law, No Child Left Behind, “Stalinist-inspired”. Deep down, this book is a critique of the neoliberal theory of government applied to education. Tienken and Orlich argue that standardization, testing, and charter schools have been foisted upon local school in deference to neoliberalism, rather than in service of students. They suggest that better policies can better improve education. A few highlights from the podcast interview. On Sputnik and Bon Jovi: “Bon Jovi and Sambora have a song off the album, These Days, and the song is called These Days, and in that song they use phrase “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. And I heard that phrase and it struck me: yes, that really sums up Sputnik in one phrase, Sputnik is the really the genesis of the school bashing and the current school reform movement. Everyone refers to it as if it was a meaningful event in terms of school reform.” On A Nation at Risk: “When you read A Nation at Risk, we challenge anyone to go ahead and find the actual data to support the claims and conclusions they draw.” On federal education policy: “Under Obama and the Republicans in terms of the Common Core State Standards and new national testing initiatives, so really for the first time in this country’s history, curriculum is being determined by a small group of elites far away from your kids’ and my kids’ schools. That is problematic culturally but also educationally.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel McCool, professor of political science at the University of Utah, is the editor of The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (Indiana University Press, 2012). The VRA was one of the center pieces of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s. The Act aimed to address great inequities in access to and participation in voting, particularly among African Americans. Perhaps most controversially, the law labeled a handful of states that were deemed the most egregious violators of voting rights, and required them to gain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice on any changes in state voting procedures. Nearly fifty years later, is the case for the VRA still so pressing or are modifications or a complete overhaul called for? This timely collection provides deep theoretical and empirical justifications for the VRA, and equally well-developed arguments in opposition. One finished the collection more informed and a little unsure of what is called, both signs of a well-edited volume. The timeliness of this book cannot be overstated. On Wednesday February 26, 2013, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Voting Rights case of Shelby County v Holder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel McCool, professor of political science at the University of Utah, is the editor of The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (Indiana University Press, 2012). The VRA was one of the center pieces of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s. The Act aimed to address great inequities in access to and participation in voting, particularly among African Americans. Perhaps most controversially, the law labeled a handful of states that were deemed the most egregious violators of voting rights, and required them to gain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice on any changes in state voting procedures. Nearly fifty years later, is the case for the VRA still so pressing or are modifications or a complete overhaul called for? This timely collection provides deep theoretical and empirical justifications for the VRA, and equally well-developed arguments in opposition. One finished the collection more informed and a little unsure of what is called, both signs of a well-edited volume. The timeliness of this book cannot be overstated. On Wednesday February 26, 2013, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Voting Rights case of Shelby County v Holder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mitt Romney must feel like Charlie Brown. Always facing an uphill climb against a popular incumbent, Romney truly believed he would kick the veritable football and take the White House. Unfortunately for the GOP, Lucy (Obama) jerked the football away leaving Romney to fall flat and conservatives to wander the political wilderness. Take heart Mitt Romney–Scott Farris has written the book for you. Scott Farris‘ Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation (Lyons Press, 2011) details how “losers” changed American politics. A journalist who has dabbled in the dark arts of politics, Farris has spent decades writing about state and national politicians. Understanding this rare species enabled him to pen a sprawling work that depicts nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century losers. This is a fine book and fun read. Listen to the interview, buy the book and tell a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scott Melzer is the author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press, 2012). Scott earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and now is an associate professor of Sociology at Albion College. His book adds to the growing list of scholarship on gun control and gun rights. Scott’s disciplinary background in Sociology contributes to a better understanding of the nature of the NRA’s members, the links between their views towards guns and other issues, and what lies ahead for the organization. Through in-depth interviews with NRA members, we learn more about what it means to be a part of this organization, something few scholars have addressed directly in the past. The book is both a great read about policy, about an influential interest group, but also about the sociology of an organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thomas Holyoke has recently published Competitive Interests: Competition and Compromise in American Interest Group Politics with Georgetown University Press (2011). Tom is an Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University – Fresno. His book advances political science knowledge of the political process through an in-depth analysis of the role of interest groups. The book is based on interviews with nearly 90 lobbyists who have advocated on issues as varied as environmental policy to banking reform. The book contributes a rich empirical analysis supported by statistical models, but also a careful development of theory. Holyoke speaks to both the interest group audience and the wider field of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Melissa Michelson are the co-authors of Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns (Yale University Press 2012). Lisa is associate professor of social and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Melissa Michelson is professor of political science at Menlo College. Their book takes up the challenge to better understand how effective voter mobilization efforts actually are. Using field experiments across California conducted in partnership with community organizations, they demonstrate what works and what doesn’t work to get ethnoracial voters out to the polls. The book can be read by scholars and practitioners alike who are interested in the civic engagement, political behavior, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012) traces the integration of new media into the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and then Barack Obama. Kreiss argues that by focusing on innovation, infrastructure, and organization, scholars can better understand how new media has become central to understanding political campaigns in the US. The book draws on dozens of interviews with most of the largely unknown, but integral members of the campaigns of Dean and Obama. The story Kreiss tells reveals much about the nature of modern political campaigns and how the Internet has shaped the last decade of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mitchel A. Sollenberger, assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Mark J. Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University, have co-authored the provocative The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution (University of Kansas Press, 2012). The book uses a public law methodology to study the evolving role so-called “czars” play in the presidency. Presidential czars, as they define them, are given policy making authority by the president, but are not confirmed by the Senate. Thus, they operate with little accountability to the legislative branch. Their existence, which increased in numbers and importance over the twentieth century, raises serious questions about their appropriateness and constitutionality. The book concludes with a set of recommendations to address these concerns and rebalance the relationship between the president and Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enid Logan‘s At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama: Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011) examines the campaign and politics around the election of Barack Obama from a sociological perspective. Drawing on a rich array of television, newspaper, and blogs, Logan challenges many of the conventional interpretations of the Obama victory. In trying to define the “new politics of race”, the book is a contribution to the field of political science, where scholars have also grappled with putting the first African American president into political, historical, and social context. One of the more compelling chapters of the book deals with the intersection of Hispanic and Asian Americans and the Obama campaign. The length, clear-writing, and salient topic should make this a considered adoption for many courses in American politics, race and politics, and campaigns/elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic (Broadside Books, 2012), Jay Cost, a political analyst and columnist for The Weekly Standard, traces the history of the Democratic party from its 1828 conception through to the modern day. Costa believes the party has strayed from its once noble goal of standing up for the “little guy” and become a political force ruled by the combined influences of a variety of special interest groups. In our interview, we talked about why he sees Woodrow Wilson, not FDR, as the founder of the modern Democratic party, the relationship between the Democrats and the press, and how American labor unions have changed over time. Read all about it, and more, in Cost’s tough new book. Please become a fan of New Books in Public Policy on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), Tim Groseclose, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA, discusses his quantitative measurements of political bias in the American news media. Based on years of in-depth studies, he concludes that nearly every mainstream media outlet is skewed to the left of the American electorate, and that this bias has helped push the American electorate to the left of where it would be otherwise. In our interview, we talked about different kinds of media bias, as well as bias in academia, and the effect it has had on Professor Groseclose’s career. Read all about it, and more, in Groseclose’s illuminating new book Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book, Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, 2011), Phil Kerpen, vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity and columnist at FoxNews.com, argues that President Obama’s is trying to bypass Congress with an activist regulatory agenda. In our interview, we talked about the regulatory process, the Obama health care law, and what net neutrality means for the future of the Internet. Read all about it, and more, in Kerpen’s alarming new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marriage is at the center of some of our fiercest political debates. Here are some recent developments regarding marriage in the United States. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). A few weeks ago, New York became the largest state to allow same-sex marriage, joining five other states, the District of Columbia, and the Coquille and Suquamish Indian tribes in Oregon. The Senate Judiciary Committee has recently started to consider a bill that would grant federal benefits to same-sex married couples. But to what extent should the state be involved at all in regulating or recognizing marriage? In her recent book, Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton University Press, 2010), Tamara Metz argues for the “disestablishment” of marriage. Marriage, Metz argues, like religion, should be separated from the state. She further claims that the liberal state should only be in the business of legally recognizing a wide variety of intimate caregiving unions among consenting, able-minded, able-bodied, adult intimates. In this interview, she clarifies her position further. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals, otherwise known as African American “academostars,” are self-serving individuals who distort the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and belie the overall aims of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. He calls out five main figures: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. Betrayal has been described both as a “brave and funny vernacular broadside” and “an important and absorbing meditation” on contemporary discussions of American politics. This book is immensely important not only for the way it clarifies the often misconstrued and misapplied rhetoric of Dr. King, but also the way in which it takes pains to historicize the plight of African Americans. I am personally persuaded by this book, and I highly recommend it. While Betrayal was published in the same year as the election of America’s first president of African descent, it offers us a framework for understanding our “now”: the upcoming 2012 election season, much of the Tea Party rhetoric, and even the political challenges that Barack Obama faces in relation to contemporary racial conflict. Baker is a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and he is a well-known literary and cultural critic, focusing on African American arts and politics. He is also a creative writer, with a recently published volume of poetry entitled Passing Over. I hope to have him on the show again to discuss that book. Till then, I’m certain you’ll be thoroughly engaged in this lively interchange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to replace Ted Kennedy. Filibustering has become the norm in the Senate, so much so that it is taken for granted that the Senate minority party will threaten filibustering more often than not. This has led Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to issue calls for reforming the filibuster process in order to make it more difficult for any minority party in the Senate to be obstructionist. In a timely new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Gregory Koger explains the American filibuster, catalogs its use in the House and Senate, measures its impact, and finally theorizes why and how obstruction has been institutionalized in the Senate, particularly in the last 50 years. In this interview he explains, among other things, the long pedigree of obstruction in the Senate, how and why filibustering became routinized, and why reform will not be easy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I think that many smart people, particularly on the Left, make a really ill-considered assumption, to wit, that “Republican” means “Conservative.” I don’t mean lower case “c” conservative, as in wanting to maintain the status quo. Nearly all (there are important exceptions) twentieth-century Republicans were conservatives in that generic sense. Rather, I mean capital “c” conservative, that is, pro-religion, traditional family centered, militarily hawkish, arch-patriotic, Constitution protecting, States rights shielding, free enterprise loving, individual responsibility promoting, values matter Conservative. It was only in the 1980s that a goodly number of Republicans endorsed this set of beliefs. They were believers, it’s just that they believed things that most members of the East Coast commentariat (at least before the rise of Limbaugh, et al.) did not. From the results of the recent mid-term elections in the United States, I think it’s fair to say they still don’t. In his wonderfully written, witty, and engaging book The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2010), David Farber tells the story of how Conservatives took over the Republican Party and reshaped American politics. He does so using a devise that I find particularly appropriate for any story of political change, namely, through the lives of the people who founded, grew, and led the movement. Farber, who clearly believes that leadership matters a great deal in democratic politics (I couldn’t agree more), has a talent for linking biography to political history. Farber’s sketches of Robert Taft, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush show us the degree to which their personalities shaped the rise (and fall) of American Conservatism. Each vignette is a pleasure to read and full of enlightening and entertaining observations. And though Farber pulls no punches (he does not shrink, for example, from calling a liar a liar), it’s clear that he respects his subjects and suggests that we should respect them too. In his estimation (and mine as well), they were not the collection of benighted, fearful, blinkered, country-bumpkin bigots that you can read about in The Nation. They were believers, it’s just that they believed things that most members of the East Coast commentariat (at least before the rise of Limbaugh, et al.) did not. From the results of the recent mid-term elections in the United States, I think it’s fair to say they still don’t. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But now I know different thanks to Tony Michels’ terrific Fire in their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). As Tony explains, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who arrived in New York were apolitical, or rather feared politics having come from a regime that punished open political activity (Tsarist Russia). These immigrants, then, learned socialism on American shores. Their teachers were Jewish members of the Russian intelligentsia who themselves had fled Tsarist oppression in the 1880s. These Russian Jews were radicals, but not necessarily socialists. So, interestingly, they learned socialism–or at least a new brand of socialism–on American shores as well. But who taught the Russian Jews socialism? Tony has the answer: German socialists who had immigrated to the Lower East Side (a.k.a Kleindeutschland) in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. So the chain of transmission begins in Germany with the rise of the German Socialist Democratic Party (1860s), moves to New York with the immigration of German socialists to the Lower East Side (1870s), picks up after the arrival and conversion of the Russian Jewish radicals to German-style populist socialism (1880s), and ends with the flowing of the Yiddish labor movement in New York (1890s-1900s). What a story! Along the way Tony introduces us to a huge cast of colorful characters, explains the origin of the modern Yiddish literary language, gives us a peek at the lively Yiddish periodical press, and shows us Jewish socialists fighting for the rights of workers along side their gentile brothers and sisters. Misconceptions are destroyed, myths exploded, and stereotypes dashed. Read all about it! Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In just a few days, the United States will inaugurate its first black president, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. And though it’s a momentous day for the cause of equality, Mr. Obama is hardly the first African American to come to DC to serve the people of the United States. His way was paved by well over one hundred black legislators who served over the past 140 years in the House and Senate. Happily, you can read all about them in wonderful Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 (U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Clerk, Office of History and Preservation, 2008). This is book has three cardinal virtues. First, it’s timely, as we’ve said. The editors and authors deserve praise for seeing it into print at exactly the right moment. Second, it’s well researched and written. The entries–one for each black legislator–are at once informative, rich in detail, and full of humor and pathos. Finally, it’s a beautifully designed and produced work. This book is, like its companion Women in Congress 1917-2006, a work of great craftsmanship, and should be acknowledged as such. Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 is the sort of book you buy to keep and hand down to your children. So buy it, hand it down, and preserve the memory of those who came before President Obama. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Did you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on film could be censored (the Progressive Era) to the moment in which nothing on film could be censored (today)? From the Nickelodeon to Deep Throat? The answer is provided by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski in their wonderful new book The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University of Kansas Press, 2008). You’ve probably never heard of “The Miracle” or the case it launched in 1949. It’s a short film by Roberto Rossellini about a deranged women who, having slept with a man she believes is St. Joseph, gives birth to a child in a deserted mountain church. Fellini has a bit part (as “Joseph”). Critics generally liked it; Catholics in New York generally didn’t. The Church mounted a campaign against the film and the authorities relented: “The Miracle” was banned on the grounds that it was “sacrilegious.” In 1949, those were fine grounds. Not for long. The film’s distributor–the feisty Joseph Burstyn–fought for the right to exhibit it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1952. And he won. Between 1952 and 1965, the states got out of the film-censorship business and we entered a new era of free-speech absolutism when it comes to film. One wonders if that’s a good thing. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week on New Books in History we interviewed Donald Ritchie about his new book Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (University Press of Kansas, 2007). Ritchie is an associate historian at the U.S. Senate Historical Office and is also the author of seven other books, including the Richard W. Leopold prize-winning Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents. In Electing FDR, Ritchie argues that, contrary to popular belief, it was not inevitable that FDR would become president in 1932. There were multiple factors standing in the way of FDR’s election, and it was only through successful campaign strategies that FDR was able to overcome those obstacles. Patrick J. Maney, author of The Roosevelt Presence: The Life and Legacy of FDR, calls Electing FDR “The best account of the most important presidential campaign of the twentieth century. Holds some surprising lessons for today’s presidential candidates.” Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we talk to Matt Wasniewski. Matt is the historian and publications manager in the Office of History & Preservation, U.S. House of Representatives. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2004. In this interview we talk to Matt about Women in Congress, 1917-2006. He led the team (including Kathleen Johnson, Erin M. Lloyd, and Laura K. Turner) that produced the book. It’s a remarkable piece of work, thoroughly researched, lavishly illustrated, and beautifully executed. By the way, the picture above is of Matt and his team, plus some special guests. From left to right: Erin Hromada, Laura Turner, former Congresswoman Lindy Boggs of Louisiana, Matt, and Kathleen Johnson. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices