Author: John L. Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190872454
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
The 2016 presidential election was unlike any other in recent memory, and Donald Trump was an entirely different kind of candidate than voters were used to seeing. He was the first true outsider to win the White House in over a century and the wealthiest populist in American history. Democrats and Republicans alike were left scratching their heads-how did this happen? In American Discontent, John L. Campbell contextualizes Donald Trump's success by focusing on the long-developing economic, racial, ideological, and political shifts that enabled Trump to win the White House. Campbell argues that Trump's rise to power was the culmination of a half-century of deep, slow-moving change in America, beginning with the decline of the Golden Age of prosperity that followed the Second World War. The worsening economic anxieties of many Americans reached a tipping point when the 2008 financial crisis and Barack Obama's election, as the first African American president, finally precipitated the worst political gridlock in generations. Americans were fed up and Trump rode a wave of discontent all the way to the White House. Campbell emphasizes the deep structural and historical factors that enabled Trump's rise to power. Since the 1970s and particularly since the mid-1990s, conflicts over how to restore American economic prosperity, how to cope with immigration and racial issues, and the failings of neoliberalism have been gradually dividing liberals from conservatives, whites from minorities, and Republicans from Democrats. Because of the general ideological polarization of politics, voters were increasingly inclined to believe alternative facts and fake news. Grounded in the underlying economic and political changes in America that stretch back decades, American Discontent provides a short, accessible, and nonpartisan explanation of Trump's rise to power.
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674287444
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674197459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
On American democracy
Author: Michael McGerr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439136033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent America's great political upheaval is brilliantly explored as the root cause of our modern political malaise. The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, with its first large-scale businesses, newly dominant cities, and an explosion of wealth, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. Everything was open to question -- family life, sex roles, race relations, morals, leisure pursuits, and politics. For a time, it seemed as if the middle-class utopians would cause a revolution. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs. From the 1890s to the 1910s, as American soldiers fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, reformers managed to outlaw alcohol, close down vice districts, win the right to vote for women, launch the income tax, take over the railroads, and raise feverish hopes of making new men and women for a new century. Yet the progressive movement collapsed even more spectacularly as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare. It is an astonishing and moving story. McGerr argues convincingly that the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America; and each has had dramatic impacts on policy and society. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.
Author: Anita L. Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198294964
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
In this timely and provocative volume, some of the world's leading political and constitutional theorists come together to debate Michael Sandel's celebrated thesis that the United States is in the the grip of a flawed public philosophy - "procedural liberalism". Beginning with an originalstage-setting introduction by Ronald Beiner, and ending with a reply by Michael Sandel, Sandel's liberal and feminist critics square off with his communitarian and civic republican sympathizers in a lively and wide-ranging discussion spanning constitutional law, culture, and political economy.Practical, topical issues of immigration, gay marriage, federalism, adoption, abortion, corporate speech, militias, and economic disparity are debated alongside theories of civic virtue, citizenship, identity, and community. Not only does this volume provide the most comprehensive and insightfulcritique of Sandel's Democracy's Discontent to date - it also makes a very significant, substantive contribution to contemporary political and legal philosophy in its own right. It will prove essential reading for all those interested in the future of American politics, law, and publicphilosophy.
Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0593230272
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Winner of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award • Dayton Literary Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Isabel Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Author: Steven E. Schier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136650571
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Popular distrust and the entrenchment of government by professionals lie at the root of America’s most pressing political problems. How did U.S. politics get to this point? Contemporary American politics got much of its shape from the transformations brought about from the 1950s to the 1980s. Presidential and congressional behavior, voting behavior, public opinion, public policy and federalism were all reconfigured during that time and many of those changes persist to this day and structure the political environment in the early twenty-first century. Throughout American history, parties have been a reliable instrument for translating majority preferences into public policy. From the 1950s to the 1980s, a gradual antiparty realignment, alongside the growth of professional government, produced a new American political system of remarkable durability – and remarkable dysfunction. It is a system that is paradoxically stable despite witnessing frequent shifts in party control of the institutions of government at the state and national level. Schier and Eberly's system-level view of American politics demonstrates the disconnect between an increasingly polarized and partisan elite and an increasingly disaffected mass public.
Author: Laura Elizabeth Hein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742518667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Exploring contemporary Okinawan culture, politics, and historical memory, this book argues that the long Japanese tradition of defining Okinawa as a subordinate and peripheral part of Japan means that all claims of Okinawan distinctiveness necessarily become part of the larger debate over contemporary identity. The contributors trace the renascence of the debate in the burst of cultural and political expression that has flowered in the past decade, with the rapid growth of local museums and memorials and the huge increase in popularity of distinctive Okinawan music and literature, as well as in political movements targeting both U.S. military bases and Japanese national policy on ecological, developmental, and equity grounds. A key strategy for claiming and shaping Okinawan identity is the mobilization of historical memory of the recent past, particularly of the violent subordination of Okinawan interests to those of the Japanese and American governments in war and occupation. Its intertwining themes of historical memory, nationality, ethnicity, and cultural conflict in contemporary society address central issues in anthropology, sociology, contemporary history, Asian Studies, international relations, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies. Contributions by: Matt Allen, Linda Isako Angst, Asato Eiko, Gerald Figal, Aaron Gerow, Laura Hein, Michael Molasky, Steve Rabson, James E. Roberson, Mark Selden, and Julia Yonetani.
Author: David Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313391076
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
The nuclear freeze movement grew more quickly than even the most optimistic activists thought possible, as large numbers of Americans became convinced that there was something wrong with United States defense policy and that they could do something about it. This analysis provides the first comprehensive history of the nuclear freeze movement, approaching it from three distinct perspectives. Changes in the politics and policy of nuclear weapons created an opportunity for a dissident movement. Intermediating forces in American politics influenced the situation. The efforts of activists and organizations to build a protest movement and their interaction with American political institutions provide the third perspective. A Winter of Discontent addresses both the broad spectrum of movement activity and the political context surrounding it. The text explores the challenge of the nuclear freeze movement to the content of United States national security policy and the policy making process. By analyzing the freeze, a theoretical framework for understanding the origins, development and potential political influence of other protest movements in the United States can be developed. The book also strives to integrate analysis of peace movements into an understanding of the policy context in which they emerge. This volume is essential for courses in social movements, strategic policy, American politics and political sociology. Antinuclear freeze activists and students of peace studies will also find this work invaluable.
Author: June Melby Benowitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Holding fast to traditional values in the face of unprecedented economic hardship, nearly a million American women joined right-wing organizations during the Great Depression and World War II. Days of Discontent provides a new perspective for understanding why the far right appealed to these women, whose political self-awareness grew with the tumultuous times. Influenced by the conventional image of women as mothers and nurturers, many women viewed the right-wing movement as a way to protect and maintain American morality. The radical right leaders, such as Elizabeth Dilling and Grace Wick, held ideas in common with European fascists but based their politics on a uniquely American mixture of nativism, anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Benowitz's insight into their motivations sheds new light on the interaction between women's daily lives and national politics.
